After that, attendees will be directed to the courtyard where the featured speaker will be Peter Abbott, who on Sept. 11, 2001, was executive officer in the Office of the First Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department.

Abbott, who later was Sarasota’s police chief for eight years and received a master’s degree from USF, responded to the World Trade Center from his office at nearby police headquarters after the first hijacked airliner was flown into the North Tower.

Abbott, who has vivid memories of what he witnessed that day and the weeks afterwards, said he will pay tribute to the police officers, firefighters and other first responders. He said they were heroes "just trying to save people,” regardless of who they were or their backgrounds.

After Abbott retired from NYPD, in November 2002 he was named chief of the Sarasota Police Department, a position he held until 2010. In 2011, Abbott earned a master’s degree from USF and joined Edward Jones as a financial planner.

The ceremony will also include remarks from USF President Rhea Law and USF Sarasota-Manatee campus Regional Chancellor Karen A. Holbrook, patriotic performances by the Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School children’s choir, a moment of silence, a 21-gun-salute and a bugler playing "Taps." 

In closing, each new student received a small white stone as a tangible reminder of their purpose. Students will trade their stones for bronze honors medallions at commencement.

Located on each of USF’s three campuses, the Judy Genshaft Honors College represents over 2,500 students who pursue every academic major offered at USF. They have an average GPA of 3.75 on a 4.0 scale and an average SAT score of 1375.

The 32 honors students enrolled on the Sarasota-Manatee campus have an average GPA of 3.82 and an average SAT score of 1380.

Students in the Honors College complete a series of interdisciplinary honors courses alongside the curriculum required for their individual majors and engage in meaningful experiential learning activities designed to complement their coursework. Graduates frequently go on to pursue advanced degrees prior to pursuing their careers. 

McBrien, who returned to the United States in July, said the humanitarian challenge facing all of Europe, and the world, is evident in the numbers. As of early August, the United Nations had counted 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees and another 7.5 million people displaced from their homes but still in Ukraine.

“In Poland alone there are 3 million Ukrainian refugees just since February,” McBrien said. “It is not a particularly wealthy country and sustaining that number in a matter of months is shocking.”

The United States, which has more stringent requirements for refugees seeking to resettle here, has taken in about 10,000 Ukrainian refugees.

“I think we can do more,” McBrien said.

After Russia attacked Ukraine, McBrien wrote policy briefs and a blog post on how to help Ukrainian refugees for the OECD and participated in several panels and discussions on the needs of refugee students. She also spoke about the humanitarian crisis created by the war as part of “Ukraine: What’s Next,” a virtual speaker series presented in the spring by the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus and other organizations.

Her research, McBrien said, has linked USF with a somewhat unique field of study. She hopes to return to Europe later this year for more in-depth research on the Ukrainian refugee crisis, which could create opportunities for USF students to study more closely the issue overseas.

When teaching courses on global migration and international human rights, McBrien assigns her students to conduct hour-long interviews with refugees about their experiences, providing them with insights they never before imagined.

"Ninety-eight percent of them say, ‘I had no idea this is what a refugee is like. I didn’t know they may be as educated as I am. I didn’t know how difficult their life situation was.’ They say it’s changed their perspective entirely,” McBrien said.

McBrien talks intently, and with empathy, about the challenges that refugee children face. Their plight has been a passion of hers since, as doctoral student, she volunteered as part of a class assignment with an Atlanta agency that helped refugees from Bosnia, Iraq and several African countries adjust to their new lives in the United States.

McBrien said she “fell in love with the kids. I just loved how much they cared about going to school. I was used to American kids, some of whom didn’t want to be bothered or think it’s a pain in the butt. These kids knew education was their future. 

“They were trying so hard to learn. They just won me over,” she said.

Ukrainian refugees have been well-received in Europe, able to obtain housing and other services — albeit at times at the expense of earlier refugees from Afghanistan and Syria who have been displaced by the attention given the new arrivals, McBrien said.

“We have white Christian Europeans vs dark-skinned Muslims. It’s sad because everyone is equally in need and deserving and grateful for opportunities to start again and to be safe,” McBrien said.

Refugee children often suffer the biggest losses — everything from their family members to their toys — when forced to flee their homes and their homeland for a new place, McBrien said.

Ukrainian children have been welcomed at their new schools. but McBrien said teachers need to be prepared to deal with all of the challenges facing those kids, many of them more profound than having to read and write in a new language.

“If you are suffering from the trauma of watching your grandfather be killed in the street, it’s very difficult to put your mind to learning a new language. And if you are hungry or you don’t have a place where you can sleep at night, you can’t concentrate on your math problems,” McBrien said. “The academics are critically important to these kids’ future but they are not going to be able to concentrate on it without their other needs being met, in terms of psychological, social, physical.”

Regardless of the outcome of the war on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, the Ukrainian refugee crisis will take longer to resolve, McBrien said. Most refugees will be not be able to turn around and return home once the fighting stops.

“Sometimes people think that when there is a ceasefire, everything’s OK,” McBrien said. “It is going to take years because so many schools, hospitals and homes have been wiped out by bombs. Even if today there was a truce, these families just can’t return. There are no schools to go to, there are no businesses to work at, their homes have been destroyed. It will take years.”

Those are challenges Ukraine and the rest of the world, including the United States, will have to grapple with. In the meantime, McBrien said there are simple things Americans can do to help. They can contribute financially to aid agencies like Save the Children, and do whatever they can to break through the fear and stereotypes often attached unjustly to refugees.

Study and learn, McBrien said, like her students do.

“One thing is to keep an open mind and an open heart and not expect the worst,” McBrien said. “When you hear people saying they’re out to take our jobs, they’re out to hurt us, etc., disrupt that conversation by gaining some knowledge about what the refugee journey is really all about.” 

Teaching the often-painful, but also inspiring history present throughout the Montgomery area in ways that connect with today’s students is vital, said USF professor Dana Thompson Dorsey, because the struggle for fuller liberty in the United States is ongoing.

“For me, it was a matter of being reminded of how far we’ve come but how far we still need to go,” said Thompson Dorsey, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies, on what she learned during a visit to the The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery.

“We are living in a country … where a lot of the rights we think we have are quite fragile, that we don’t necessarily have all the rights that we think we have,” Thompson Dorsey said.

During their time in Montgomery in late July, the participants visited several museums, monuments and historical sites that commemorate the civil rights movement, including Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., began his career.

The hotel where the educators stayed while in Montgomery was near a building where enslaved Africans were warehoused before they were taken to market. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, an associate professor of sociology, said she had not been familiar with the full extent of Montgomery’s importance to the civil rights movement.

“The road that we walked in Montgomery was the road that our enslaved ancestors walked to be sold,” said Hordge-Freeman, who is also USF’s interim associate vice provost for faculty recruitment, retention and engagement. “That experience was so powerful in ways I didn’t expect.”

Hordge-Freeman said she was particularly impressed with how The Legacy Museum went beyond what students might learn about the civil rights movement from a textbook and told stories in different, more engaging, more complete ways. For instance, the simulation of the slave ship voyage across the Atlantic and historic advertisements offering enslaved people for sale, among other features, highlighted the severity of this experience.

“Part of the motivation for the trip was to guide teachers on how to critically process content related to the civil rights movement and related historical events,” Hordge-Freeman said. “In addition to the content, the style in which information is presented can be equally transformative. The museum offered a model for engaging different mediums, even art forms, as a way to help people connect to and understand the horrors of slavery, while capturing the humanity of those enslaved.” 

Hordge-Freeman said the trip led her to want to know more about the life of Rosa Parks after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

“To be inspired by a story and then be so inspired that you begin to research to learn more independently, that’s what we want students to be able do when they leave our classrooms,” she said. “I felt like that’s what I did, and I think that’s a testament to the powerful impact of this trip."

In addition to Davis-Cotton, Sears, Thompson Dorsey and Hordge-Freeman, other USF researchers who went to Montgomery were: 

• Sandra Stone, assistant dean of graduate studies at the Sarasota-Manatee campus. 
• Fenda Akiwumi, a professor of geography and director of the USF Institute on Black Life. 
• Kyaien Conner, an associate professor in the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy and special assistant to the dean of the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences on diversity and inclusion. 
• Brenda Walker, a professor in the Exceptional Student Education Program and director of the CAROUSEL Center. 
• Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, a professor in the Department of Educational and Psychological Studies and coordinator of the Social Foundations in Education Program.

“Words are inadequate to describe this experience,” Cobb-Roberts said. “I've been teaching about and researching issues related to history, culture and social justice for over 25 years. However, my time in Montgomery for the REACH civil rights tour reminded me there's more to learn and work to be done. I'm grateful for this opportunity and the space to collaborate with educators committed to educational change.

Participants said Davis-Cotton, who was honored for her work by the Alabama House of Representatives in July, was very intentional with how she organized the program by giving them several opportunities to engage with Montgomery residents who had been part of the civil rights movement.

“Going there was surreal because you are meeting people who are related to people we have read about,” said Thompson Dorsey. “It put you in this place of history. It did make me feel a real sense of responsibility for carrying on a legacy just by being in a place that holds so much bad history, but also a place that is like the home of where civil rights was born.”

While in Montgomery, Thompson Dorsey said she reflected on what she was learning in the context of her work on racial equity and how laws and policies can be used to inhibit Americans’ rights. She said she was particularly moved by an exhibit at The Legacy Museum that showed that Alabama did not strike down its ban on interracial marriage until 2000, 33 years after the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia declared such bans as unconstitutional.

“All of these rights that we take for granted, that we think we have, we really don’t,” Thompson Dorsey said. “They are quite tenuous. We don’t know how easily they can just be taken away. I was reminded of that as we walked through these museums.”

Other sites in the Montgomery area that participants visited included the Civil Rights Memorial Center at the Southern Poverty Law Center; the National Memorial for Peace and Justice; the Rosa Parks Museum; the Mothers of Gynecology monument; and the Freedom Rides Museum.

Davis-Cotton said the same participants will visit the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for a program focused on religion next year. 

The visit to Montgomery was a resounding success, she said, in presenting to participants a more complete, richer history of the civil rights movement.

“The whole story needs to be told through different settings, through curriculum, through different experiences,” Davis-Cotton said. “We have been victorious in our efforts to bring awareness in an insightful way to others across the country, outside of USF, who are looking to forge a new direction in education.” 

“The magazine highlights the impact of the research being performed by members of our campus faculty, which is a crucial part of our mission as a preeminent global research university,” said Karen Holbrook, chancellor of the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus. “As a campus and university committed to an inclusive culture and student success, we deeply value the essential research conducted now and, in the future, to address the topics we have featured in this issue.”

The magazine explores research by hospitality and tourism experts Cihan Cobanoglu, Faizan Ali and Sir Adam Carmer that examines the devastating effects of the pandemic on various sectors of the industry and its workers — which their research predicted at the start of the crisis in March 2020 — and possible solutions going forward.

“We wanted to give people hope and help them find their way, because the industry was lost,” said Cobanoglu, dean of the USF School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, McKibbon Endowed Chair and director of the M3 Center for Hospitality Technology and Innovation. “They didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. We wanted to provide a light so they could see around.”

An example of that resilience detailed in the story is the online certificate program spearheaded by Cobanoglu to prepare displaced hospitality workers to pivot their skills to new careers, if needed. About 6,000 students from more than 100 countries registered for the free seven-week course.

Also featured is the incredible trajectory in business at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, by most measures the fastest-growing airport in the world. The magazine features an interview with airport CEO Rick Piccolo, who also is the chairman of the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus board, who shares both the airport’s success story and how the mutually beneficial partnership with the campus can contribute to the community’s economic success while providing a glide path for new career pathways.

The George Floyd murder, examined through the lens of social justice research, spurred thought leaders into action to discuss and address various challenges. Research examined how politics, risk perceptions, and social interaction influence COVID-19 safety practices, such as wearing masks; and disparities in opportunities for Black Americans in the hospitality industry.

Other stories in the magazine highlight research exposing the ongoing racial divide in K-12 curriculum and in the advertising industry. 

Real-world assignments help prepare the next generation of culturally aware marketers. Kelly Cowart, an associate professor of marketing at the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus, said companies have become more sensitive to possible racial undertones in their messaging to consumers, especially when their pitches misstep.

“What we’re seeing are companies bending over backwards to show how sensitive they are to race,” Cowart said. “They’re in a hurry to show images of Black people or interracial couples using their products or services so they can give the impression that they’re a culturally and racially inclusive company. Whether that’s the case remains to be seen.”

The magazine also examines the role of interdisciplinary research at the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus and the Trailblazers program, which matches graduate and doctoral students with mentors at all USF campuses.