West Hall renamed the Timothy J. Nelson Innovation Center

Jul 27, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

Innovation Center entrance (download a high-resolution version here)TRAVERSE CITY — The West Hall Innovation Center on Northwestern Michigan College’s main campus has been renamed the Timothy J. Nelson Innovation Center to honor President Nelson’s decades of service to NMC students, the college and the community.

The NMC Board of Trustees voted unanimously to rename the building at its regular meeting on July 26. They credited President Nelson’s drive, vision and commitment to innovation in making NMC a world class institution.

“The work Tim Nelson has done throughout his career to make NMC a point of pride in our community, and a leader around the world, will have a positive impact for generations to come,” said NMC Board of Trustees Chair Chris Bott. “We want to honor his dedication to this college with a public recognition that will also have lasting impact.”

The Innovation Center project combined state and NMC-funded investments for renovations and modernizations of the West Hall building to create a 54,000-square-foot, multi-story library and flexible 21st-century learning space with classrooms, conference rooms, student-centered workspaces and simulation labs. The building also houses NMC’s Hawk Owl Café, the college’s WNMC 90.7 FM radio station and other NMC departments. Learn more at nmc.edu/innovation.

Innovation Center atrium (download a high-resolution version here)NMC broke ground on the project in September 2018 and celebrated the building’s opening with a livestreamed ribbon cutting ceremony in September 2020. The project recently won a Michigan American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Award for Design Excellence.

President Nelson, NMC’s longest-serving president, retired from the college in 2019 after leading the institution for over 18 years. He helped champion the Innovation Center project, including working to win state legislative approval of $7.4 million in capital outlay dollars to cover about half of its $14.4 million cost. Other highlights of President Nelson’s tenure include overseeing NMC’s launch of Michigan’s first community college baccalaureate degree , supporting the creation of NMC’s Experiential Learning Institute and Great Lakes Water Studies Institute, and creating the Global Opportunities Scholarship Fund with his wife Nancy.

Release Date: July 27, 2021

For more information:

Diana Fairbanks
Associate Vice President of Public Relations, Marketing and Communications
dfairbanks@nmc.edu
(231) 995-1019

Recognizing Disability Independence Day

Jul 26, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

July 26 is National Disability Independence Day, a federally recognized day to celebrate the 1990 signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). View a sample of books in the library, films on Kanopy and podcasts that recognize Disability Independence Day below.

Books in the Library

Born at the Right Timeby Ron McCallum
Ron McCallum has been blind from birth. When he was a child, many blind people spent their lives sheltered, but Ron’s mother had other ideas for her son. She insisted on treating him as normally as possible. Ron recounts his social awkwardness and physical mishaps and shares his early fears that he might never manage to have a proper career, find love or become a parent. He has achieved all this and more, becoming a professor of law at a prestigious university and committee chair at the UN.

If at Birth You Don’t Succeedby Zach Anner
Comedian Zach Anner entered the world with cerebral palsy and an uncertain future. But he lives by the mantra: when life gives you a wheelchair, make lemonade. Whether recounting a valiant childhood attempt to woo Cindy Crawford, encounters with zealous faith healers, or the time he crapped his pants mere feet from Dr. Phil, Zach shares his fumbles with unflinching honesty and characteristic charm. If at Birth is a hilarious memoir about finding your passion and your path even when it’s paved with epic misadventure.

The Trouble with Illnessby Julia Segal
This book explores the effects a challenging disability or illness can have on the mind and personal relationships, and how friends, family and professionals can help. Illness or disability can isolate people. Friends and family can find themselves saying the wrong thing or awkwardly avoiding topics as a result. The insights and advice offered in this book can help children and adolescents overcome anxiousness caused by a parent’s condition, improve communication between partners and family members, and increase friends’ awareness of how their disabled friend feels about their situation.

T elling Deaf Lives: Agents of Changeby Kristen Snoddon
Deaf community historians share diverse stories of deaf individuals in this collection. Melissa and Breda describe the Cosmopolitan Correspondence Club, a group of deaf individuals who corresponded in the early 20th century from Australia to Western Europe to the United States; Ulla-Bell recounts first-hand growing up deaf in Sweden and her process in authoring six memoirs; Tatiana writes about her deaf family’s experience during the World War II siege of Leningrad; others look at the evolution of ASL poetry by analyzing works of prominent ASL poets Valli, Cook, and Lerner.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Educationby Thomas J. Tobin
Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built-world “just part of what we do.” For example, captioned instructional videos benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night. This book is aimed at faculty, disability support providers, student-service staff and campus leaders who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students.

HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earthby Elizabeth Wheeler
A look at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses — for instance, Harry Potter’s headaches or Hazel Lancaster’s oxygen tank — and redefine them as part of the hero’s journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements. HandiLand moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities.

Golem Girlby Riva Lehrer
In 1958, Riva is one of the first children born with spina bifida to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to “fix” her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured. Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. 

eQuality: the Struggle for Web Accessibility by People with Cognitive Disabilities by Peter Blanck
Never before have the rights of people with disabilities aligned so well with information and communication technologies. This book is about the lived struggle for disability rights, with a focus on the web, for people with cognitive disabilities, like intellectual disabilities, autism or print-related disabilities. The principles derived from the right to the web – freedom of speech and individual dignity – are bound to lead towards full and meaningful involvement in society for persons with cognitive disabilities.

Films in Kanopy

Explore movies in Kanopy for free. Go to nmc.kanopy.com and login using your NMC ID and password.

Beyond the Library: Podcasts

This is life from a disabled lens. Hosted by San Francisco night owl, Alice Wong, featuring conversations on politics, culture, and media with disabled people. If you’re interested in disability rights, social justice, and intersectionality, this show is for you.
Disability Visibility is a production of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.

This is a podcast that looks at disability stories. It’s like sitting down with a really close friend to have real conversations about disability, sexuality and everything else about the disability experience that we don’t talk about; the things about being disabled that we keep in the dark.
The show is hosted by disability awareness consultant Andrew Gurza.

The Accessible Stall is a disability podcast hosted by Kyle Khachadurian and Emily Ladau that keeps it real about issues within the disability community. Because they each have different disabilities and mobility levels, they approach everything from two unique viewpoints, offering a fresh insight into how differences in disability can color your experiences and perspectives. They never shy away from offering our honest opinion. Even if they go against the grain of the disability community at large, they always speak our minds.

Strategic Planning Update for July

Jul 20, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

Dear NMC community — Thank you for continuing to be such active and engaged participants in our ongoing strategic planning process.

Since our last update, we held our signature Future Summit event on June 23, where more than 120 NMC employees, students and community partners listened to EdTalks on topics key to NMC’s continued vitality and then broke into groups to discuss each talk and develop impact statements outlining future NMC opportunities. These impact statements will help inform and guide the college’s Strategic Plan. (A link to the Future Summit presentations and closing session can be found on employees.nmc.edu)

The next step is for the Strategic Planning Steering Committee and Work Team to break into Scan Team work groups and research the major themes from the Future Summit impact statements, a process that is now under way following a July 14 orientation session.

Other recent and upcoming strategic planning activities include the following:

• The Board of Trustees held a Strategic Planning Vision and Values Workshop during a special meeting June 9. Trustees continue to be updated at their monthly meeting with reports available in each monthly agenda packet and the latest report is available here.
• A Scan Team Preference Survey was conducted in early July to help match Scan Team members to their preferred topics.
• The Steering Committee met to review the strategic planning process, steering committee role, and upcoming activities and the Steering Committee and Work Team met to review impact statements and make Scan Team assignments July 14.
• Scan Teams will conduct research into the key topics from the Future Summit in a series of meetings through July and early August, and use their research to develop recommendations for the Steering Committee and Work Team.
• On August 10, the Steering Committee will hold a Mission/Vision Workshop.
• On August 17, the Steering Committee and Work Team will review and present findings and recommendations from the various Scan Teams.
• NMC employees will take part in an Employee Values Workshop during Opening Conference August 23.

We will continue to provide regular updates on the strategic planning process as we work toward final plan approval by the board in December 2021. You can get updates any time at nmc.edu/strategic-planning and email any questions to strategic-planning@nmc.edu.

Release Date: July 19, 2021

For more information:

Diana Fairbanks
Executive Director of Public Relations, Marketing and Communications
dfairbanks@nmc.edu
(231) 995-1019

Library Book Recommendations – July, 2021

Jul 20, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.

Non-Fiction

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan, University of Chicago professor, former IMF chief economist, head of India’s central bank, and author of Fault Lines, has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalization and their ultimate effect on our politics. In The Third Pillar he offers up a big-picture framework for understanding how these three forces–the state, markets, and our communities–interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

Homie: Poems by Danez Smith

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family–blood and chosen–arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Wisdom Engaged: Traditional Knowledge for Northern Community Well-being edited by Leslie Main Johnson

Wisdom Engaged demonstrates how traditional knowledge, Indigenous approaches to healing, and the insights of Western bio-medicine can complement each other when all voices are heard in a collaborative effort to address changes to Indigenous communities’ well-being. In this collection, voices of Elders, healers, physicians, and scholars are gathered to provide a critical conversation about the nature of medicine; a demonstration of ethical commitment; and an example of successful community relationship building.

Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit by Alisa Perkins

Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents.

Fiction

The Other Black Girl: a Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing. Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. A whip-smart and dynamic thriller and sly social commentary that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace, The Other Black Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last twist.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their uncle in Missoula, Montana. There, Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance over the South Pacific. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two womens’ fates collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train. They seem to be the only people onboard, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts. A spellbinding tale from a star author, Peaces is about what it means to be seen by another person–whether it’s your lover or a stranger on a train–and what happens when things you thought were firmly in the past turn out to be right beside you.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ has been hailed as one of the twentieth century’s finest novels.

Shuttled from one residence to another after the death of his father, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous-and endless-struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

Summaries adapted from publishers.

COVID-19: NMC moves to Stage 4 of reopening plan July 19

Jul 20, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

TRAVERSE CITY — As our region continues to see an increase in COVID-19 vaccination rates, and updates to state and federal health guidelines, starting Monday, July 19, NMC is moving to Stage 4 of its 4-Stage Reopening Plan.

More activity is allowed on campus including:

• Reopening of the NMC fitness center for students and employees
• Summer course delivery will continue as planned
• Fall course delivery will continue to be offered as listed. More in-person sections may be added if demand increases
• In-person meetings and gatherings are allowed
• On-campus work is allowed
• Employees no longer need to use the Campus Clear app
• Employees who can work from home may continue
• Some activities may not yet be available yet for a variety of reasons, including staffing levels.

NMC Human Resources is finalizing updates to the remote work policy. The “Reimagining Work” committee will collaborate with Leadership Council on addressing the needs and opportunities to support flexible work while continuing to meet the needs of our students.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 is spreading quickly throughout the country and may pose a greater risk for unvaccinated people, including young people. Some symptoms are similar to the original strain including:

• Headache
• Fever
• Sore throat

Cough and loss of smell may be less common symptoms of the Delta variant. Vaccines are effective and widely available for those 12 and older. To schedule an appointment near you please visit vaccines.gov.

We will continue to communicate with you on the evolving COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our campus community. You can find more information and resources at nmc.edu/covid-19. Thank you to everyone who helped keep our NMC community safe during the pandemic, and your continued support.

Release Date: July 19, 2021

For more information:

Diana Fairbanks
Executive Director of Public Relations, Marketing and Communications
dfairbanks@nmc.edu
(231) 995-1019

Disability Pride Month

Jul 6, 2021 | Intercom, Student News

July is Disability Pride Month. You can mark the occasion by creating accessible events, using inclusive language, and realizing that disability is simply part of human diversity.

For information about NMC’s Disability Support office, go to nmc.edu/disability-support.