For everyone else:
in the Main Menu block on the Front Page they only see a link to Site News where as I a site admin. see both the glossary and the Site News link in the block.
In courses they still get auto-linked to glossary items, if they hover over a link it pops up with the glossary name and item name but clicking on the link only produces a continuously rotating icon showing the browser is trying to go to a link but not getting there.
If they type in the URL of the glossary in their browser they go to a message that the page is hidden and are redirected to the Front Page.
We found a work around and that was to assign everyone as a Student to the glossary.
One thing I found interesting while working this was with Editing Turned On for the Front Page, in the Main Menu block where the links to the Glossary and Site News are, clicking the Assign Roles icon for the Glossary takes you to an assign roles page that has at the top of it "Front page roles". It is here where we assigned all the students the Student role which allowed them access to the glossary. Going back to the Main Menu block this time to the Assign Roles icon for the Site News link, it to takes you to an assign roles page which also has the title "Front page roles" just like the similar one for the glossary did but this one does not have the students listed so it is not the same as the glossary assign roles page but both had the same "Front page roles" title. I would think one would say "Glossary page roles" and the other "Site News page roles" instead of both saying the same thing but being different. Something strange is going on in these role assignments.