Last week, the Daily sat down with Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and Senior Associate Vice President Luke Figora to discuss Northwestern’s COVID-19 response, vaccination plans and student testing. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Daily: Does the University have a threshold for implementing a Wildcat Wellness quarantine in the middle of a quarter?
Figora: I don’t think there’s a hard metric in terms of number of positive cases or a specific positivity threshold that we’ve hit that we can flip that trigger. We’ve tried to think about it more as, “Is what we’re experiencing on campus kind of sustainable from a campus environment perspective? Does the kind of transmission seem to be increasing or stable or decreasing?” If we got a sense that there were multiple large, uncontrolled clusters spread on campus, that would be more likely to push towards a Wildcat Wellness period than the number of total cases.
In July of 1993, Nelson Mandela visited Chicago three years after he was released from prison and one year before he was elected as South Africa’s first Black president.
“Mandela in Chicago,” the new documentary by Medill Prof. Ava Thompson Greenwell (Medill B.S. ’84, M.S. ’85, Weinberg Ph.D.’14), explores the monumental role Chicago activists played in the movement by putting pressure on the governments of South Africa, Illinois and Chicago to halt their support of South Africa’s oppressive systems. The film was broadcast on Feb. 18 and Feb. 21 on Chicago’s WTTW Channel 11.
“(Mandela) came to thank the people for all the work they had been doing, and I wanted Chicago to get some credit for that,” Greenwell said. “So much of history would have been lost had it not been for the film, so I’m hoping that the film itself will be a catalyst to really reignite interest in what happened in South Africa, but also what is still happening in South Africa.”
Following a national search, Amy Falls has been appointed as Northwestern’s vice president and chief investment officer, University President Morton Schapiro announced in a Friday email. After transitioning into her new role this spring, Falls will become the first female CIO in NU history.
As CIO, Falls will oversee NU’s $12.2 billion investment portfolio, making her responsible for nearly a quarter of the University’s annual revenue. According to Northwestern Now, these funds support a “wide range of University operations including undergraduate and graduate financial aid, University institutes and centers, faculty positions and department chairs, research and athletics.”
Falls’ predecessor, William H. McLean, stepped down in October 2020 to become the CIO of the University of Richmond.
A professor at Northwestern University in Qatar has withdrawn from a $700,000 research project after members of the NU-Q community voiced concerns about a racist and sexist article she reposted online.
NU-Q announced in January that political science Prof. Jocelyn Mitchell and two of her colleagues had received a grant from the Qatar National Research Fund to study women entrepreneurs in Qatar. In 2008, two years before she began teaching at NU-Q, Mitchell reposted an email on her blog which said “the ratio of ugly women to not so ugly women (in Qatar) is 9:1.”
Screenshots of the post circulated online in November 2019, and Mitchell apologized in a community town hall and subsequently took part in anti-racism training under supervision of the University. After the post resurfaced online this month, NU-Q released a statement on Feb. 5 acknowledging that the incident “continues to cause pain in our community both within NU-Q and the wider Qatari community.”
Kenyans, while congratulating Lady Justice Mumbi Ngugi expressed their fervent desire to see the veteran judge as their next Chief Justice and leader of the Supreme Court. She recently won the prestigious Global Jurist of the Year Award from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Center for International Human Rights (CIHR). According to Northwestern Now, the Global Jurist of the Year Award is designed to honour a sitting judge, whether in an international or national court, who has demonstrated in his or her career courage in the face of adversity to uphold and defend fundamental human rights or the principles of international criminal justice.