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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — By the time the students arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were prepared — they had read texts about the Holocaust, spoken with a survivor, viewed Berlin’s memorials and toured the halls where the Nazi regime planned its “euthanasia” and Final Solution campaigns to murder millions. But for Hyunwoo June Choo and Alexa Kanbergs, standing on the grounds of the Nazi killing center transformed merely knowing of these historical events into feeling them, vividly and palpably.

Monday, June 26, was a lovely summer day in Poland, Kanbergs recalled. She was struck by how the buildings of Birkenau, where Nazis gassed as many as 6,000 Jews a day to death, stood in juxtaposition with the beautiful surrounding landscape and the ubiquitous sounds of chirping birds.

“I viscerally felt something when I went to that site,” said Kanbergs, a third-year Warren Alpert Medical School student from Portland, Ore. “We had been reading about it, but you are removed from it because you are just learning about it. Then when you actually visit, it makes it a lot more real.”

Choo, a fourth-year medical school student from Los Angeles, was similarly struck. Organizers of the two-week program that had brought them to Germany and then Poland, the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, had told them that “place has power.” In a huge camp built for the sole purpose of genocide, the meaning was clear.

“The entire week, we had been building up to this point,” Choo said. “We went to where the leaders had planned and strategized how to exterminate large masses of people. When I was actually there, I was just standing aghast at the expanse and the sheer vastness of this institution. Everything was deliberate. Everything was calculated.”

The Fellowships at Auschwitz program teaches medical, legal, business, journalism and divinity students to consider the ethics of their future professions in the context of the Holocaust’s catastrophic moral failings. Choo and Kanbergs had applied to the competitive fellowships out of a desire to transcend and therefore contemplate the day-to-day experience of their medical training.

“In medical school as students, we’re sort of thrown into wards and hospital systems and we see things — a lot of injustices play out on individual bodies,” Choo said. “We don’t really have the time or space to think through the systems behind a lot of the social circumstances that bring a patient in front of us. What this program allowed us to do was to think about ethics not as this lofty, abstract idea, but as something grounded in history.”

The point is not that inequities and injustices in the U.S. health care system have equivalence with the Nazi regime’s meticulously planned policies of mass murder, Kanbergs said. Instead, the point is to learn how to recognize and sustain clear moral vigilance in systems that produce injustice, regardless of its scale or whether it was intended.

“I don’t ever want to take away from the events that happened in the Holocaust and say that this is the same situation,”  Kanbergs said, “but I think about prisoners a lot, and I think about how we incarcerate individuals of color. I see these parallels with how we strip the rights of individuals and target certain classes of individuals. As physicians, we are put into these systems that allow for that to happen.”

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It’s a common concern among parents and college-bound students: Will students successfully manage the responsibilities and challenges they face when living away from home for the first time? Will the healthy habits they have acquired withstand the stressors that are sure to arise?

Richard Leto ’73 and his wife, Bonnie, first became aware of the prevalence of eating disorders when their daughters were undergraduates at universities in Florida and North Carolina. “As we researched it and learned more, we saw that many more people than you want to image are affected by this,” explains Richard.

The Letos felt this was a health issue that needed to be elevated in importance and considered what campus programs could be developed to address it. Believing that a positive, preventative approach to health and nutrition can make a real difference for vulnerable students, they made a $200,000 gift to Bryant University to establish the Richard and Bonnie Leto Nutrition and Health Education Endowed Fund.

An additional gift of $25,000 ensures that the initiative will begin immediately. A part-time health and nutrition educator will begin overseeing a range of holistic educational and awareness programs beginning in the fall 2017 semester. The goal is to create and sustain an environment at Bryant that promotes healthy lifestyles in which students maintain a wise and balanced relationship with food.

The Letos’ gifts were made in support of Expanding the World of Opportunity: The Campaign for Bryant’s Bold Future.They worked thoughtfully with Bryant leaders, including John R. Saddlemire, Ed.D., Bryant’s Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students, to develop a meaningful initiative that would complement the student-centered objectives of the campaign.

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Six local men and their editor, all over 70 years of age and members of Salve Regina’s Circle of Scholars program, have published a collection of their memoirs documenting “500 Years of Living,” which they will officially launch at 2 p.m. Thursday, July 6 in the McKillop Library.

“500 Years of Living: Memoir Essays by the Men of WriteLife” follows these men as they present vignettes from memorable moments in their lives. The memoirs emanate from “WriteLife,” a Circle of Scholars writing course taught by Jack Galvin.

Three years ago, Galvin challenged six men who had taken his class a number of times to take on the project, prompting them with questions such as “How did you learn about hard work?” “What fight/argument did you win?” and “At a crossroads, what did you lose in your choice?”

The group met once a month to work on the project, ultimately creating 24 essays ranging from 3-5 pages each. Their stories appear in three sections: The Early Years, The Family Years and The Work Years.

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BRISTOL, R.I. – One of the fastest growing areas of law enforcement today is happening on the campus of the nation’s K-12 schools, reflecting the steadily increased presence and expanding roles of school-based law enforcement programs in recent decades. Although police have been present in schools since the 1950s, researchers are just now beginning to uncover issues ranging from undefined, changing roles to the lack of adequate training for school-based officers. Among those researchers is Roger Williams University alumnus Joseph McKenna ’11, who is helping to frame a first-of-its-kind national model on how to best implement school-based law enforcement programs to aid school communities.

As associate director of research and evaluation for the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University – where he earned his master’s and doctorate in criminal Justice – McKenna is part of a team conducting research examining the use of law enforcement in K-12 schools in order to put together a nationwide framework for educators and school-based officers to use.

The study and framework is being funded by a four-year $4.3 million grant by the National Institute of Justice. Taking other research as well as their own, the researchers at the center created the framework as a flexible template schools around the nation can adopt based on their own community. To determine if the framework is effective, McKenna and the researchers at Texas School Safety Center are conducting a randomized controlled trial with over two dozen Texas K-12 schools. Half of the participating schools are being guided by the research-based framework for implementing their school-based law enforcement program that McKenna and the team of researchers helped developed.

“It’s really become a specialized type of policing” which requires specialized training, said McKenna, who was a criminal justice and psychology double major at RWU.

In his research, he’s seen the predominant role of school-based officers change since they were first introduced in the 1950s. He has seen focus shift from safety and security during the school day to include educating students on a variety of topics related to crime and law and then to officers serving as mentors and role models. Today, officers play hybrid roles that very much depends on the school campus they are on, McKenna said. They act as mentors, counselors, surrogate parents – giving advice, emotional support and even material items like clothes – along with serving as educators and, when necessary, law enforcers.

What McKenna and many researchers are trying to do is define a shared set of roles and training that communities nationwide can adopt for their school-based law enforcement program to encompass and define the various roles officers play now. The framework involves setting custom goals that are agreed upon by all stakeholders, training for officers and school staff, and using data-driven decision making to make program adjustments and solve problems.

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