Moise Anilus, Ethno Ivy League Academy

  Leveraging Higher Education to Impact Haiti:  A Conversation with Haitians at Harvard and Beyond by Moise Anilus 04/24/2024 The Team On April 19, 2024, a group of Haitian students at Harvard, including alums and Harvard affiliates, launched an inspired initiative to begin a conversation to invoke a renewed sense of intellectual and practical patriotism on the campus of Harvard University.  With a deep sense of national pride, this group of Haitians endeavored to synergize their collective strength to articulate a shared purpose and a future of possibility for Haiti.  There is an urgency to elevate the conversation about Haiti beyond imaginative hope to a sense of practical patriotism intended to meet our most significant challenges at home. Thus, in the spirit of collaboration, coordinating committee members invested extraordinary time and effort in reaching out to Haitian activists, current Harvard students and alumni, accomplished professionals, and community le...

 by Moise Anilus Kreole or French? Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian professor of linguistics, creolist, and founder of the Haitian Creole Academy at MIT, and the director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, whose latest project has been revolutionizing education in Haiti by using Creole in the classroom instead of French. "The The basic premise of our initiative," DeGraff explains, "is that using Kreyòl for Haitian education is  essential to improving quality and access to education for all."  While I applaud Professor DeGraff's scholarship and his ongoing efforts to formalize the Creole language for linguistic coherence and autonomy, Creole is far from an autonomous language with adequate grammatical morphemes consistent with global languages like English and Spanish. It is primarily a dialect of French fundamentally intertwined with its syntax and pragmatics. Consequently, in its current state, Kreole needs to have the linguistic verbiage to correspond appropriat...