Saturday, December 15, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007--Time for a Break
Friday Notes will take a break for the next few weeks and will resume with the Spring 2008 semester. Happy New Year!
Friday, December 7, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007--Finals and Works in Progress
As we get ready for the last push of final exams and grading, I’ve enjoyed the swirl of activities that mark the end of the semester: the music concerts, the dance recitals, the Learning Community presentations. Those that I’ve been able to attend have been wonderful testimony to our students’ abilities and to the growth and change that are accomplished in their work with you over a single semester. These culminating events continue into next week, and I encourage people to support them. I’m especially pleased to see the remarkable number of musical events: we are just beginning to grow a Music Program at Stonehill, and already we are seeing the results of that undertaking.
I was thinking about the whole idea of “finals”—about how part of the pleasure of academic life involves regular opportunities for endings and for beginnings. In fact, that may be the key to the passion for life-long learning that generally characterizes faculty: we can close chapter after chapter, but we always re-open the book.
Sometimes it’s the book of ourselves that we re-open—after all, life-long learning can also be about self-knowledge. Lately, that’s been the case for me.
Recently, I asked our wonderful archivist, Nicole Tourangeau, if she could dig up a talk I gave in 1993. The occasion was the sesquicentennial of Holy Cross Education in the United States, and Fr. James Lackenmier—then the President of our sister school King’s College—gave a formal address at Stonehill. Richard Capobianco (Philosophy) and I were the faculty respondents, and we were both relatively junior faculty members at that time!
Amazingly, Nicole found my remarks—composed, I am certain, in Wordstar 3.3 and printed on a daisy-wheel printer! But while the typeface shouted that fifteen years had passed, the themes of my talk whispered that we have not made enough progress on some of the topics that remain pertinent today. I was saddened to bear some responsibility for an under-realized goal that was a central focus of my 1993 talk: diversity.
That particular speech responded to Fr. Lackenmier’s observation that while other religious congregations found their “charism” in the texts of a saint or in other central founding documents, the Congregation of Holy Cross—in spite of having the writings of its founder, Fr. Basil Moreau—was less rooted in foundational texts and enjoyed more of a tradition of “adaptability” in each of the environments where it flourished. And way back then, I suggested that some challenges we were facing at Stonehill would “require the strength of adaptability.”
I talked about the need for diversity at Stonehill, both among persons and in the curriculum. And I pointed out that it was hard to accomplish that diversity if we were always already looking at ourselves as alike. I used my own ethnic heritage as an example to suggest that someone seen as an “Irish Catholic” can come from more than one place: “My own parents . . . in their well-intentioned desire to give me a coherent cultural identity, celebrated my father’s Irish-American Catholic background, never really giving me access to the traditions embodied in my maternal grandfather—a Jewish emigrant from Russia.” Indeed, I didn’t need to look far to propose that diversity is a condition of (not a threat to) knowing who we are and where we come from.
So why did I go hunting in the archives for this speech? Well, that’s where we get back to life-long learning. This semester, pushing myself to learn more about my family, I’ve been able to connect with relatives I didn’t even know existed. I’ve had lunch with a cousin in New York who connected me with a missing branch of the family. I’ve shared a Shabbat meal with distant cousins in Chestnut Hill and a Chanukah candle-lighting and dinner with near cousins in Washington D.C. I’m in possession of the family histories of the Vendrovsky family (my great-grandmother’s line) back to the 1730s and of the Rems family (my great-grandfather’s line) back to the 1760s—complete with photographs of the many rabbis and others from whom I am descended. I have photographs of the gravestones of two great-great grandparents and three great-grandparents in Queens, and I will visit them on my next trip in that direction. I’m embracing everything I’ve learned, and I’m also understanding more about my grandfather’s choices, my parents’ choices, and myself than I could have understood fifteen years ago. And fifteen years ago, the people I have discovered would have remained hidden—with no accessible email or world-wide web to reveal them.
I’m understanding more about Stonehill, too—what makes it work as a community and where we still fall short; which problems inhere in its structures and which in the uses people make of its structures; where the curriculum can grow and where we have limitations. In 1993, I argued vigorously for diversifying the curriculum, suggesting that an emphasis on canonical materials in any discipline implicitly told students “not only who and what is important, but, by exclusion, who and what is not important.” And while I’d still argue for even further diversifying, I would also have more concern today that students learn fully the histories of the disciplines that they interrogate.
So, in this time of finals, I invite all of you to celebrate some of the things that are always still works in progress: our students, the college we participate in shaping, and—most of all—ourselves.
Best regards,
Katie
I was thinking about the whole idea of “finals”—about how part of the pleasure of academic life involves regular opportunities for endings and for beginnings. In fact, that may be the key to the passion for life-long learning that generally characterizes faculty: we can close chapter after chapter, but we always re-open the book.
Sometimes it’s the book of ourselves that we re-open—after all, life-long learning can also be about self-knowledge. Lately, that’s been the case for me.
Recently, I asked our wonderful archivist, Nicole Tourangeau, if she could dig up a talk I gave in 1993. The occasion was the sesquicentennial of Holy Cross Education in the United States, and Fr. James Lackenmier—then the President of our sister school King’s College—gave a formal address at Stonehill. Richard Capobianco (Philosophy) and I were the faculty respondents, and we were both relatively junior faculty members at that time!
Amazingly, Nicole found my remarks—composed, I am certain, in Wordstar 3.3 and printed on a daisy-wheel printer! But while the typeface shouted that fifteen years had passed, the themes of my talk whispered that we have not made enough progress on some of the topics that remain pertinent today. I was saddened to bear some responsibility for an under-realized goal that was a central focus of my 1993 talk: diversity.
That particular speech responded to Fr. Lackenmier’s observation that while other religious congregations found their “charism” in the texts of a saint or in other central founding documents, the Congregation of Holy Cross—in spite of having the writings of its founder, Fr. Basil Moreau—was less rooted in foundational texts and enjoyed more of a tradition of “adaptability” in each of the environments where it flourished. And way back then, I suggested that some challenges we were facing at Stonehill would “require the strength of adaptability.”
I talked about the need for diversity at Stonehill, both among persons and in the curriculum. And I pointed out that it was hard to accomplish that diversity if we were always already looking at ourselves as alike. I used my own ethnic heritage as an example to suggest that someone seen as an “Irish Catholic” can come from more than one place: “My own parents . . . in their well-intentioned desire to give me a coherent cultural identity, celebrated my father’s Irish-American Catholic background, never really giving me access to the traditions embodied in my maternal grandfather—a Jewish emigrant from Russia.” Indeed, I didn’t need to look far to propose that diversity is a condition of (not a threat to) knowing who we are and where we come from.
So why did I go hunting in the archives for this speech? Well, that’s where we get back to life-long learning. This semester, pushing myself to learn more about my family, I’ve been able to connect with relatives I didn’t even know existed. I’ve had lunch with a cousin in New York who connected me with a missing branch of the family. I’ve shared a Shabbat meal with distant cousins in Chestnut Hill and a Chanukah candle-lighting and dinner with near cousins in Washington D.C. I’m in possession of the family histories of the Vendrovsky family (my great-grandmother’s line) back to the 1730s and of the Rems family (my great-grandfather’s line) back to the 1760s—complete with photographs of the many rabbis and others from whom I am descended. I have photographs of the gravestones of two great-great grandparents and three great-grandparents in Queens, and I will visit them on my next trip in that direction. I’m embracing everything I’ve learned, and I’m also understanding more about my grandfather’s choices, my parents’ choices, and myself than I could have understood fifteen years ago. And fifteen years ago, the people I have discovered would have remained hidden—with no accessible email or world-wide web to reveal them.
I’m understanding more about Stonehill, too—what makes it work as a community and where we still fall short; which problems inhere in its structures and which in the uses people make of its structures; where the curriculum can grow and where we have limitations. In 1993, I argued vigorously for diversifying the curriculum, suggesting that an emphasis on canonical materials in any discipline implicitly told students “not only who and what is important, but, by exclusion, who and what is not important.” And while I’d still argue for even further diversifying, I would also have more concern today that students learn fully the histories of the disciplines that they interrogate.
So, in this time of finals, I invite all of you to celebrate some of the things that are always still works in progress: our students, the college we participate in shaping, and—most of all—ourselves.
Best regards,
Katie
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