Mon, 02/01/2021
LAWRENCE — Officials at Haskell Indian Nations University are partnering with students from the University of Kansas School of Engineering to develop a justice center on the Haskell campus.
The Hiawatha Center for Justice is the brainchild of Dan Wildcat, a longtime Haskell professor. The project is to redevelop historic Hiawatha Hall — an 1898 stone building on the campus that has fallen into disuse and disrepair after being shuttered in 2005 — into an interdisciplinary center for work on systemic justice issues.
Members of IHAWKe (Indigenous, Hispanic, African-American KU engineers) — KU’s association of minority and women engineers — held an “IHAWKe-a-thon” in October 2020 to generate ideas on how to rehabilitate the building and best use it for its new mission. Their proposals will be presented this week at the American Society of Engineering Education’s Engineering Deans Council Public Policy Colloquium.