Tag: education

Getting it done – Sanford University is a testament to their son❤️

A strange visit to the house

A woman in modest dress, accompanied by her husband, dressed in a comfortable but cheap suit, got off a train at Boston Station and went to the Harvard University principal’s office.

They did not make an appointment. At first glance, the secretary decided that those people at Harvard had nothing to look for.

“We’d like to meet with the school principal,” the man said in a silenced voice.

“He’ll be busy all day,” the drought secretary answered.

“We’ll wait,” the woman said.

The secretary ignored the visitors for several hours hoping that at some point they would be disappointed and leave on their own. However, when she made sure that they wouldn’t go anywhere themselves, she decided to harass the director and inform about their visit.

“Maybe if you accept them for a minute and wake them up, then they’d rather leave? ” she asked the director

The director sighed angrily and agreed. As important as he is, he certainly does not have time to accept people dressed so modestly.

When the visitors entered, the director immediately measured them with his stern and arrogant gaze. The woman turned to him:

– We had a son, he studied at your university for a year. He loved this place and was very happy here but sadly passed away a year ago unexpectedly. My husband and I would therefore like to leave some memory of him on the territory of this university.

The director was not happy about it at all, but on the contrary he was very irritated.

– Lady! – he replied impudently, – we can’t build monuments to everyone who studied at Harvard and died. If we did, it would soon be a cemetery.

– No, I didn’t mean so – the woman quickly objected, – we don’t want to build a monument, nor a statue, we want to build a new building for Harvard.

The director looked at the faded checkered dress and a cheap suit and exclaimed, “God, do you people have any idea how much such a building costs? All Harvard buildings are worth over seven million dollars together!

The wife hasn’t said anything in a minute. The director had an ominous smile of joy. So they will see her out of here after all!

The woman turned to her husband and said quietly:

– Is it so cheap to build a new university? So why don’t we build our own university?

The man gave a nod in agreement. Harvard director faded and looked confused.

The Stanford spouses got up and left the office without further ado.

In Palo Alto, California, they established a university that bears his name – Stanford University in memory of their beloved son.

(Wikipedia: “Stanford University was founded by a train tycoon, US Senator Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford. The university is named after their only late son, Leland. Leland Stanford, Sr. told his wife, “From now on, all the children in California will be like our own children”… )

Credits goes to the respective owner

Unsettling Psychology: Embracing Indigenous Insights to Challenge Colonial Legacies

This critical analysis urges psychology to radically incorporate Indigenous methodologies to heal not just individuals but the discipline itself.
— Read on www.madinamerica.com/2024/05/unsettling-psychology-embracing-indigenous-insights-to-challenge-colonial-legacies/

Broke the glass ceiling -Cecillia Payne

I did not know that!

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”

—

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because at that time there’s not much exposure for woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

Photograph: Schlesinger Library.

Nothing true can be lost

“I do not say goodbye,

for in truth, there is no such thing.

Instead, I say,

‘May love find you

and may joy return to you,

until we meet again.’

For nothing that is truly real can ever be lost,

and for those I am still to return to,

I choose to remember them

through smiles rather than tears,

and honour them

by becoming everything I love most about them.”

~ Tahlia Hunter

Art | by Oscar Zwincher “Grief”, 1898