The work of Associate Director Dr. Amalia Pérez-Juez at our Menorca Field School in Archaeology & Heritage Management in Spain, and her team of colleagues and students, is currently being exhibited near their former excavation site, Torre d’en Galmès. Their dig, lasting almost 10 years, resulted in the discovery of rare final traces of the last Muslim-medieval family’s home thought to be left since the Christian conquest in 1287. Students in the BU Program helped uncover these priceless artifacts while also completing courses in Archaeological Field Methods and Archaeological Heritage Management.
The program, which supports both children and their parents, is designed to teach English and equip families with the skills and information needed to adapt to everyday life in the United States. It serves anywhere from 75 to 90 families at a time, and over the course of approximately 20 years has helped more than 2,400 families. In addition to English, the program teaches things like understanding job applications, newspaper articles, citizenship materials, and financial forms. Classroom discussions also cover fire safety, crime prevention, lead paint, and even trash day.
Today in BU Today's "Reaching Out" series, we learn more about a School of Law program, the Asylum & Human Rights Clinic (AHR), which assigns second and third year law students to help people seeking asylum and fighting deportation. Launched in 1985 by School of Law (LAW) Professor Susan Akram, the program has helped hundreds of people obtain asylum. The students in the four-course cluster program also handle Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) cases, temporary restraining orders in Probate and Family Court, and other immigration and humanitarian cases.
The series also looks at the interpreter certificate program at Metropolitan College’s Center for Professional Education, which has been teaching interpreters for more than 15 years and preparing them for careers in the court system, hospitals and other community services. The 12-to-18 month program prepares interpreters in three languages—Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Part three of BU Today's "Reaching Out" series that looks at how BU programs are helping immigrants and refugess in Boston highlights the School of Social Work's (SSE) BRIDGE (Building Refugee and Immigrant Degrees for Graduate Education) progam. An outgrowth of SSW’s Refugee and Immigrant Training Program, which began in the early 1990s to recruit immigrants for careers in social work, BRIDGE is a Master of Social Work (MSW) program designed to help recent immigrants serve their communities here. The program shepherds applicants from orientation to preadmission to study for an MSW and beyond to career development.
The series continues tomorrow with two parts. One will examine the School of Law’s (LAW) Asylum & Human Rights Clinic (AHR), where law students represent asylum seekers and others involved in immigration and humanitarian cases; the other will look at the interpreter certificate program at the University’s Center for Professional Education, which trains multilingual students in community, legal and medical interpreting.
Part two in BU Today's"Reaching Out" series takes a look at the Haitian Earthquake Long-term Pediatric Support (HELPS) team, an effort by the School of Medicine (MED) and Boston Medical Center that brings social and legal services to Haitians who fled following last year’s devastating earthquake. According to the story, the program includes a 24-hour paging system that helps doctors direct patients to necessary resources like food, shelter and clothing.
Stay tuned to the series as tomorrow's piece will feature the School of Social Work’s (SSW) BRIDGE (Building Refugee and Immigrant Degrees for Graduate Education) program, which offers a master’s in social work for immigrants who then go on to work with their own communities.
Today, BU Today kicks off a six-part series called "Reaching Out" that takes an in-depth look at the many ways the Boston University community is working to improve the lives of immigrants and refugees living in Boston.
The first installment features the work being done at the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Refugee Health Clinic (CAM). Staffed by acupuncturist Ellen Silver Highfield and Michael Grodin, a professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights at the School of Public Health (SPH), the clinic offers non-Western therapies to help treat torture survivors. Through the use of traditional healing methods, botanicals, mind-body techniques and traditional Chinese medicine, Highfield and Grodin are helping refugees who have lived through or witnessed unspeakable horrors.
A record 41,734 applications, - up 9 percent from last year - have been submitted to BU’s undergraduate programs from prospective students vying for one of 4,000 slots in next year’s freshman class. Extremely well prepared and more diverse than last year’s group, the applicants have a higher grade point average and SAT score averages (1,896) - up 22 points higher than last year’s. Forty-eight percent of those hoping for admission to the class of 2015 are in the top 10 percent of their high school class. In terms of diversity, the pool shows a 19 percent increase in applications from international students, mainly from China, Korea, and Taiwan, an 8 percent increase in the number of African American students and a 22 percent increase in Hispanic/Latino students.
Laurie Pohl, vice president for enrollment and student affairs, believes the record number of applications is due to the fact that high school seniors are responding to real changes at BU.
Those changes? As BU President Dr. Robert A. Brown outlined in his 2010 State of the University letter to the BU community, over the past five years, the University has put more money into growing the faculty and increasing financial aid. BU has also made significant investments in programs to support student life and student services, dormitories, concerts, and clubs.
Rudolf Elmer, a former Swiss banker, is set to hand over files to WikiLeaks that show offshore bank accounts of high net worth individuals and corporations to evade tax payments. Law professor Cornelius Hurley, director of the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law, offers the following comment:
"Rudolf Elmer has demonstrated that the 'shadow banking system' is not just about complex financial instruments that hide risk and the casino in which those instruments are traded. It is also about a dark corner of the banking system that hides personal and corporate wealth for a host of purposes, especially tax evasion.
As Elmer does his WikiLeaks dump in London, one issue for federal prosecutors to focus on is whether the banks and their officers filed suspicious activity reports, so-called 'SARS', as is required by the Bank Secrecy Act whenever an institution or its employees know or have reason to suspect illegal activity."
