By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
NTCC’s Gladys Winkle Scholar, Courtney Baldwin has set a new college first. Baldwin placed first in the Arts and Humanities division among student presenters at the recent meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council in New Orleans, 6-10 November 2019.
“This is an unprecedented honor that alludes again to the remarkable academic attainments of our scholars in recent years,” noted NTCC honors director, Dr. Andrew Yox. “Top university juniors and seniors in honors usually generate impressive projects—that in some cases, are developed over the course of their 3rd and 4th years. By the time the very best of these student projects from around the nation survive the cut of entering the meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council, they are generally exhaustively researched, and their authors highly articulate and poised. Baldwin’s victory thus involved a remarkable display of scholarship, and showed again how competitive the best students at NTCC have become.”
Baldwin, who recently emerged ahead of two upperclassmen to become student representative of the Great Plains Honors Council, presented her Boe-Award winning work on African American music. She argued that major African-American genres catalyzed successful liberation initiatives with abolitionism, emancipation, and integration.
For the twelfth year in a row, students of Honors Northeast now have presented scholarly work at the annual meeting of the NCHC. Other Presidential Scholars who maintained their points of view before NCHC judges in New Orleans included Eckman winner, Karla Fuentes, NTCC’s 2019-20 Wesson Scholar, Verania Leyva, and Leaders of Promise winner, Daniel Landaverde. Fuentes presented work on Mary Kay’s “Pink Pathway,” the unique culture of feminized structures, and ethos created by perhaps the nation’s all-time foremost, female entrepreneur. Leyva presented her Caldwell-Award winning work on Barbara Conrad, and how the singer found uncanny ways to optimize career developments to her advantage. Landaverde presented his Caldwell-Award, pioneering work on Mount Pleasant’s Hispanics, arguing that the dominant motif of their history has been one of “Creative Accommodation.” Mount Pleasant greeted immigrants as in Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, with a meat-packing experience, but in the case of Hispanics, this proved a stepping stone rather than an obstacle.
The competition simply to appear in the 54nd annual NCHC meeting was pronounced. Only about thirty community college students in the nation made the final NCHC program.
In addition to the formal presentations, NTCC Honors Professor Dr. Melissa Fulgham served as a NCHC poster judge, and Dr Yox served as an NCHC consultant for honors directors attempting to develop new or better programs. As Student Representative, Courtney Baldwin participated in both the meetings of the Great Plains Honors Council Executive Comittee, and the council’s plenary session Friday afternoon.
Two anonymous donors and long-term friends of Honors Northeast buoyed the out-of-the-ordinary dimensions of the New Orleans trip by giving each honors student, an extra $100 in spending money. The NTCC group had dinner Friday night at the exclusive Pelican Club in the French Quarter with Matthew Jordan, former NTCC Presidential Scholar, who is also a recent major winner of a $138,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, and was the representative of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation at the NCHC conference.
