Nick Erickson

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ISU scholars show how kids of underrepresented communities have unequal access and opportunities in school

As a young child growing up in northwest Detroit, Dr. Charles Bell rode his bike past Wayne State University on his way to school. But as far as he was concerned, the institution may as well have been on a remote island.

It’s not that Bell, an assistant professor of criminal justice sciences at Illinois State University, didn’t have dreams of attending college. It was just that school where he grew up was more a matter of survival than about education.

As American children go through school an
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Belief in baseball: Illinois State pitcher never lost sight of end goal while fighting cancer

Kids have pitched thousands of Game 7s at their local parks. They’ve stepped up to a makeshift plate at home with their walkup music blaring on the family speakers. Baseball is the ultimate sport for dreamers and believers. Its romanticized history has connected generations and made it withstand the test of time.

Facing the World Series of his own life challenges, Illinois State pitcher Trey Krause needed to dream. With some of his most basic life functions suddenly taken from him, he envisione
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All in on democracy: ISU makes major effort to get students engaged in 2020 election and beyond

On February 14, 2018, grief overshadowed a day annually set aside to celebrate love when Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Illinois State junior Dylan Toth watched in horror as images from the carnage began flashing on television screens nationwide. A senior in high school at the time, he couldn’t help but see himself in each of the faces of the innocent teens who thought they were attending a normal day of class on Valentine’s
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Healing on a high note

Late on a Tuesday night in downtown Bloomington, a man in his mid-20s who seemed to have everything—stability with a well-paying job, his own home, and friends and family close by—paced the city streets.

His ears were ringing from a show at the Lizard Lounge, put on by a local band he knew. The 6-foot-5 former Illinois State basketball player slumped down on a curb across from Fat Jack’s on North Main Street. A breeze brushed across the face of the Java programmer for State Farm Insurance Compa
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Capturing a soul: Alum creates sculpture of civil rights icon John Lewis for Atlanta park

On March 7, 1965, a 25-year-old Black man born in Atlanta walked down the left side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets as he stared down the road leading east toward Montgomery.

John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died on July 17 at the age of 80, was leading a large contingent of people intending to march to Alabama’s capitol city demanding voting rights when state troopers stopped them just off the foot of the bridge and inhumanely beat th
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Doctoral alum’s monument is at the center of the movement for racial equality in NYC

As modern-day foot soldiers march in the largest city of a nation they believe has not always delivered the same promises to certain groups of people, they often gather at a granite monument created by an Illinois State doctoral alum.

New York City’s Thomas Paine Park at Foley Square, the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement in Lower Manhattan, has been home since 2000 to the “Triumph of the Human Spirit,” which took Dr. Lorenzo Pace, Ed.D ’78, nearly a decade to complete. The 65-foot b
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Game development students find unique way to reach people with epilepsy

Epilepsy and video games would seem to go as well together as a broken air conditioner and 100-degree heat. The stimulation and rapid motion on the screen can trigger seizures. Perhaps that’s why John Mallaney hadn’t the foggiest of ideas of how to pair the two unlikely sources together.

The executive director of Streator Unlimited, a nonprofit organization serving adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in nearby Streator, was in a focus group centered on developing basic life
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Leading a call: Recent grad creates memorial altar for women of color killed by law enforcement

In summer 2016, a group called Black Feminist Future began a movement across the country building altars in response to police killings of black women and girls. Twenty-six of these memorials popped up nationwide with goals of honoring the dead while fighting for the living. At that time, Radiance Campbell, who graduated in May, was just about to begin her studies at Illinois State, where she majored in sociology with minors in women’s and gender studies and Latin American/Latinx studies.

That
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Journalism alums share experiences covering civil unrest in Minnesota

Even though Ray Richardson ’77 formally retired in 2013 from a long career in sports writing, he felt a need to put on his reporter’s hat again once he found out police had killed George Floyd in plain sight of onlookers on Memorial Day night in Minneapolis.

Richardson, the first-ever African-American sports reporter at The Vidette who went on to have a long tenure as an NBA writer at St. Paul’s Pioneer Press, had dabbled in some projects postretirement. He’s an on-air personality at KMOJ-FM ra
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Fulfilling a dream: Broadcast Hall of Famer, who didn’t speak English until her teenage years, is now a bilingual reporter in Chicago market

The thought of moving away—again—was a bit unnerving for Sandra Torres ’06.

When she was 13 and spoke no English, her family packed up their life in their native Colombia and immigrated to the Chicago area for new opportunities.

Torres spent the rest of her adolescent years maturing in the Windy City and developing an interest in television news. After graduating from Buffalo Grove High School and attending Harper College in nearby Palatine, Torres wanted to turn her self-proclaimed TV nerdine