As some of you know, I’ve been away from Stonehill for about 10 days—on three different work-related projects. On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a meeting sponsored by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), the accrediting body that reviews Stonehill and other New England schools and colleges every ten years. This workshop was intended to prepare colleges coming up for review in 2009 for the self-study and campus visit that are important elements of the accreditation process.
On Sunday I joined four academics from other institutions (three faculty members and a librarian) as part of a team named by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education to undertake an intensive review of a college seeking to add new programs that would change the nature of its charter. It was an exhausting four days of working late into the night—indeed into the early morning!—to understand that college’s unique culture and to evaluate the quality of the programs they were proposing.
Both the NEASC workshop and the off-site curriculum review reminded me that our profession depends in so many ways on peer review. We think about it most with our scholarship, but in fact, all kinds of institutional accreditations and program approvals rely on peer evaluation to hold colleges to the professional standards we have agreed on as institutions of higher learning. We may sometimes take this for granted, but among the interesting things about being at a young college is that we actually have colleagues among us who remember when the College was first accredited! And it was an enormous accomplishment.
After finishing up the review on Wednesday, I flew to Washington D.C. on Thursday to join a Stonehill team that included Louis Liotta, Sue Mooney, and Karen Talentino for a conference called “Promoting the Liberal Sciences: Science as Liberal Education,” sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Conference of Academic Deans. We made a 90-minute presentation on two curricular developments at Stonehill that we argued promote the sciences as liberated from narrow specialization and liberating in developing the broad and deep scientific literacy required for engaged citizenship.
As all of you know, there’s nothing like getting away to make one feel that there’s something about Stonehill. Something good. Something to appreciate.
In fact, the most powerful aspect of all three of my own experiences over the last ten days was an informal kind of "peer review"--hearing about Stonehill’s reputation and profile among the other academics I met. I found people who knew and admired a faculty member or knew and respected a faculty member’s work. Or they had been on our campus and were stunned by the physical beauty of the place. Or they identified Stonehill as being a “hot” school that was doing innovative things.
As the other Stonehill folks at the PBK/ACAD meeting can attest, many people we met who did not know of Stonehill before today were impressed with our spirit of engagement and with the curricular efforts we described. In fact, one conference speaker began his own presentation by commenting on the “inspirational” Stonehill session he had just attended!
We met junior faculty members from colleges with far more resources than Stonehill who said that they could not ever team-teach at their own institutions, so the idea of Learning Communities with a third course that counts fully in each faculty member’s course load was mind-boggling to them. Between sessions, one such junior faculty member confided wistfully that he’d like to be “one of us.”
Sometimes, when we get bogged down with our campus responsibilities and the day-to-day minutiae of our jobs, we lose sight of the great community we really are—a community where I know there’s a good deal of faculty collegiality and where I think there’s relatively little tension between faculty and administration. Getting away can offer some perspective about what really matters, and this week it offered me insights into just how much we have to celebrate.
Best regards,
Katie
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007--Back to the Future
On Wednesday night, I attended the James J. Kenneally lecture, an annual event at the Martin Institute. Jim Kenneally was—indeed still is, even in retirement!—faculty member and colleague extraordinaire, beloved teacher and author and editor of books on American Catholicism, women’s suffrage, and House Speaker Joseph Martin. His significant scholarly and teaching contributions now span almost a half-century.
Any event that honors Jim and Louise Kenneally’s contributions to Stonehill is, in my mind, a no-miss occasion—I think of it as “back to the future.” Jim already looked like the future of Stonehill when he arrived in 1958, and reflections on his career offer us previews of the future we now inhabit—a college that invites faculty members committed to teaching simultaneously to pursue their research passions. Today Stonehill supports faculty members quite vigorously to help them reach their scholarly goals; Jim managed to publish articles and books under very different conditions. The lecture bearing his name is a major event in the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue—a dialogue that Jim founded and that he and and Louise have ardently supported.
This year’s lecture featured Prof. Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Chair in Jewish Stuudies at Dartmouth College, who spoke eloquently about her current research on a Protestant Christian group whose project was to “de-Judaize” Christianity in 20th-century Germany —to remove references to Jesus being a Jew, to move his ancestry north to Galilee and thereby to make him seem more Assyrian, and to strip any references to the Hebrew Bible in Christian worship.
I was struck not only by the brilliance of Prof. Heschel’s arguments and by her ability to answer every kind of question about her research but also by her generosity of spirit. In some informal words spoken at the dinner which preceded the event, she spoke of the deep sense of welcome she felt at Stonehill. She honored Jim Kenneally and his work, and then also honored the memory of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, a major scholar and Jewish thinker who also promoted civil rights and interfaith dialogue and instilled a passion for such issues in his daughter.
It was our privilege to host this eminent scholar, and I’m proud that Stonehill works in so many ways to promote understanding of world religions and to encourage the critical and historical study of religion. Some of that work—such as the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, other campus lectures, the film series on Religion and Film begun last year by the Religious Studies Department, and a significant number of courses in our curriculum—are substantive engagements with the study of religion. Others, such as the Buddhist Retreat that takes place on campus every second summer, are symbolic events that demonstrate Stonehill’s openness to and respect for all religious beliefs, practices, and cultures.
As I looked around the room at the Kenneally lecture, I noted the number of faculty members present there who encourage our students–and each other—toward such encounters. Kevin Spicer C.S.C. of the History Department came back from his year at Notre Dame to host the event. But Kevin is also the co-creator, with Shari Lowin of the Religious Studies Department (who was also present), of a Learning Community that pairs a History course on Nazi Germany with a Religious Studies course on Jewish Religion and Culture—and it culminates with a travel course to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Berlin. Sitting with Shari was Prof. Erica Tucker (Sociology), who agreed to help keep that enormously popular LC going this year in Kevin’s absence by pairing “Anthropology of the Holocaust” with Shari’s Religion course and team-teaching the travel course with Shari.
I saw Pete Beisheim (Religious Studies) and thought about how his Learning Community with Jose Luis Martinez (Foreign Languages) challenges students to look at the contemporary Catholic Church in Latin American and involves a Spring Break trip to Peru that partners with the HOPE trips sponsored by the Mission Division. Mary Joan Leith (Religious Studies) was also there, and her Learning Community with Allyson Sheckler (Fine Arts), "Pagans and Christians, Roots of Christian Worship" uses the study of religion and art to help students understand the world of early Christianity, and takes the students to Paestum, Pompeii, and Rome as part of that engagement.
Other faculty members attended the lecture too, like Daniel Itzkovitz (English), whose scholarship focuses on Jewish identity in American culture. I single out these faculty members only to suggest that—while Jim Kenneally probably couldn’t have imagined that the small, 10-year old College he joined in 1958 would someday be in a position to support educational endeavors such as our Learning Communities or to support such a breadth of scholarly effort—his work, and the work of others in his generation, built our foundations. For that, and for the creativity so evident in the faculty’s ongoing work, I am grateful.
Any event that honors Jim and Louise Kenneally’s contributions to Stonehill is, in my mind, a no-miss occasion—I think of it as “back to the future.” Jim already looked like the future of Stonehill when he arrived in 1958, and reflections on his career offer us previews of the future we now inhabit—a college that invites faculty members committed to teaching simultaneously to pursue their research passions. Today Stonehill supports faculty members quite vigorously to help them reach their scholarly goals; Jim managed to publish articles and books under very different conditions. The lecture bearing his name is a major event in the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue—a dialogue that Jim founded and that he and and Louise have ardently supported.
This year’s lecture featured Prof. Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Chair in Jewish Stuudies at Dartmouth College, who spoke eloquently about her current research on a Protestant Christian group whose project was to “de-Judaize” Christianity in 20th-century Germany —to remove references to Jesus being a Jew, to move his ancestry north to Galilee and thereby to make him seem more Assyrian, and to strip any references to the Hebrew Bible in Christian worship.
I was struck not only by the brilliance of Prof. Heschel’s arguments and by her ability to answer every kind of question about her research but also by her generosity of spirit. In some informal words spoken at the dinner which preceded the event, she spoke of the deep sense of welcome she felt at Stonehill. She honored Jim Kenneally and his work, and then also honored the memory of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, a major scholar and Jewish thinker who also promoted civil rights and interfaith dialogue and instilled a passion for such issues in his daughter.
It was our privilege to host this eminent scholar, and I’m proud that Stonehill works in so many ways to promote understanding of world religions and to encourage the critical and historical study of religion. Some of that work—such as the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, other campus lectures, the film series on Religion and Film begun last year by the Religious Studies Department, and a significant number of courses in our curriculum—are substantive engagements with the study of religion. Others, such as the Buddhist Retreat that takes place on campus every second summer, are symbolic events that demonstrate Stonehill’s openness to and respect for all religious beliefs, practices, and cultures.
As I looked around the room at the Kenneally lecture, I noted the number of faculty members present there who encourage our students–and each other—toward such encounters. Kevin Spicer C.S.C. of the History Department came back from his year at Notre Dame to host the event. But Kevin is also the co-creator, with Shari Lowin of the Religious Studies Department (who was also present), of a Learning Community that pairs a History course on Nazi Germany with a Religious Studies course on Jewish Religion and Culture—and it culminates with a travel course to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Berlin. Sitting with Shari was Prof. Erica Tucker (Sociology), who agreed to help keep that enormously popular LC going this year in Kevin’s absence by pairing “Anthropology of the Holocaust” with Shari’s Religion course and team-teaching the travel course with Shari.
I saw Pete Beisheim (Religious Studies) and thought about how his Learning Community with Jose Luis Martinez (Foreign Languages) challenges students to look at the contemporary Catholic Church in Latin American and involves a Spring Break trip to Peru that partners with the HOPE trips sponsored by the Mission Division. Mary Joan Leith (Religious Studies) was also there, and her Learning Community with Allyson Sheckler (Fine Arts), "Pagans and Christians, Roots of Christian Worship" uses the study of religion and art to help students understand the world of early Christianity, and takes the students to Paestum, Pompeii, and Rome as part of that engagement.
Other faculty members attended the lecture too, like Daniel Itzkovitz (English), whose scholarship focuses on Jewish identity in American culture. I single out these faculty members only to suggest that—while Jim Kenneally probably couldn’t have imagined that the small, 10-year old College he joined in 1958 would someday be in a position to support educational endeavors such as our Learning Communities or to support such a breadth of scholarly effort—his work, and the work of others in his generation, built our foundations. For that, and for the creativity so evident in the faculty’s ongoing work, I am grateful.
Best regards,
Katie
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007—Endurance
When about 115 members of the Stonehill faculty met on Tuesday to spend the morning discussing how to support a culture of academic integrity, then ate lunch together and spent the afternoon reviewing the work of a faculty committee on course and credit models, I found myself thinking: “How have we created this faculty culture of self-evaluation, dialogue, and trust?”
I remembered a day back in early 2001 when Registrar Linda Sullivan, hard at work on the 2001-02 academic calendar, asked if I would like to use an "extra" Monday in the calendar for any kind of academic purpose. Out of that conversation Academic Development Day was born—a day now set aside each semester for faculty conversation about topics related to teaching and learning. This semester’s meeting was our thirteenth, and the record attendance, the spirited discussion, and the obvious good will in Alumni Hall made me certain that thirteen is a lucky number.
Back on our first Academic Development Day, Prof. Sue Mooney, who had just become our inaugural Dean of General Education, offered reflections on what was needed to move our Gen Ed agenda forward. Fifty-five current full-time faculty members and a significant number of academic administrators have been hired since that time, so let me take a moment to anchor you in 2001—and to remind those who were here for the discussion that day about the theme Sue chose.
Sue spoke of seeing a new film about Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition involving 28 men, 69 dogs, two pigs and one cat on a ship that would endure nine months trapped in the frozen seas before being crushed by shifting ice. You know the ending was happy—for the human travelers at least—but Sue focused on how the adventure on the ship called “Endurance” might offer lessons to the Stonehill faculty.
My favorite of her observations: “The men on the Endurance were an unlikely crew, a mix of professional, educated men and uneducated seamen. Men from the aristocracy and men from the slums. A moody artist, a fractious carpenter, a ground-breaking photographer, a nerdy scientist, a captain enamored of the ship and rather indifferent to the crew, even a young stowaway. Somehow, this group of very different men became a true community, trusting one another and cooperating under the most challenging of circumstances.”
She didn’t imply that we were quite such a motley crew, but she did suggest that we would need to work harder at working together to achieve our goals—that we must reach out “to colleagues all across this campus, beyond the smaller communities we form so naturally with those in our discipline or allied disciplines. . . . [T]he only way for us to achieve our goals, in general education and in other issues of concern to the faculty here at Stonehill, is to become a trusting, caring community.”
I believe that’s the community that was in place in 2001—and the community that showed up on Tuesday (with many new members aboard) for Academic Development Day #13. Led and inspired by Dr. Donald McCabe, Professor of Management and Global Business, Rutgers University and Founding President of the Center for Academic Integrity, our morning conversations pushed us all to think about the ways we can build and sustain a culture that encourages student responsibility, that responds to academic dishonesty consistently when it occurs, and that uses (and shares) campus resources, such as the new Center for Teaching and Learning, to bring faculty members together around clarifying expectations for student work and continually developing creative and fair forms of learning assessment.
I’d like to thank the Honor Code Task Force, led by Dr. Marylou Jackson, for all the substantive research and work that brought us to this point. Members include: Roger Denome (Biology), Beth Devonshire (Director of Community Standards), Pauline Dobrowski (Associate VP for Student Affairs), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education and Interdisciplinary Studies), Denise Gannon (Campus Minister), Kathleen Joint (Associate Director of Academic Services), and George Piggford, C.S.C. (English).
The afternoon discussions about proposals to move to a graduation requirement based on credits rather than courses also brought out great collegial discussion among faculty members and academic administrators. Many thanks to the course and credit committee, which completed its own feat of endurance over Summer 2007 to bring us this proposal: Karen Anderson (Education), Scott Cohen (English), Roger Denome (Biology), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education), Glen Ilacqua (Business Administration), Daniel Itzkovitz, (English), John Pestana (Registrar), Allyson Sheckler (Fine Arts), and Karen Talentino (Dean of Faculty).
We won’t always come to complete agreement on the significant matters that Academic Development Day invites us to confront. But I think we’ve come a long way together. We continue to build a faculty ethos of respect, curiosity, responsibility, inquiry, affirmation—and even endurance—that must surely rub off on our students as they rig out their own vessels and explore their own uncharted waters.
Best regards,
Katie
I remembered a day back in early 2001 when Registrar Linda Sullivan, hard at work on the 2001-02 academic calendar, asked if I would like to use an "extra" Monday in the calendar for any kind of academic purpose. Out of that conversation Academic Development Day was born—a day now set aside each semester for faculty conversation about topics related to teaching and learning. This semester’s meeting was our thirteenth, and the record attendance, the spirited discussion, and the obvious good will in Alumni Hall made me certain that thirteen is a lucky number.
Back on our first Academic Development Day, Prof. Sue Mooney, who had just become our inaugural Dean of General Education, offered reflections on what was needed to move our Gen Ed agenda forward. Fifty-five current full-time faculty members and a significant number of academic administrators have been hired since that time, so let me take a moment to anchor you in 2001—and to remind those who were here for the discussion that day about the theme Sue chose.
Sue spoke of seeing a new film about Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition involving 28 men, 69 dogs, two pigs and one cat on a ship that would endure nine months trapped in the frozen seas before being crushed by shifting ice. You know the ending was happy—for the human travelers at least—but Sue focused on how the adventure on the ship called “Endurance” might offer lessons to the Stonehill faculty.
My favorite of her observations: “The men on the Endurance were an unlikely crew, a mix of professional, educated men and uneducated seamen. Men from the aristocracy and men from the slums. A moody artist, a fractious carpenter, a ground-breaking photographer, a nerdy scientist, a captain enamored of the ship and rather indifferent to the crew, even a young stowaway. Somehow, this group of very different men became a true community, trusting one another and cooperating under the most challenging of circumstances.”
She didn’t imply that we were quite such a motley crew, but she did suggest that we would need to work harder at working together to achieve our goals—that we must reach out “to colleagues all across this campus, beyond the smaller communities we form so naturally with those in our discipline or allied disciplines. . . . [T]he only way for us to achieve our goals, in general education and in other issues of concern to the faculty here at Stonehill, is to become a trusting, caring community.”
I believe that’s the community that was in place in 2001—and the community that showed up on Tuesday (with many new members aboard) for Academic Development Day #13. Led and inspired by Dr. Donald McCabe, Professor of Management and Global Business, Rutgers University and Founding President of the Center for Academic Integrity, our morning conversations pushed us all to think about the ways we can build and sustain a culture that encourages student responsibility, that responds to academic dishonesty consistently when it occurs, and that uses (and shares) campus resources, such as the new Center for Teaching and Learning, to bring faculty members together around clarifying expectations for student work and continually developing creative and fair forms of learning assessment.
I’d like to thank the Honor Code Task Force, led by Dr. Marylou Jackson, for all the substantive research and work that brought us to this point. Members include: Roger Denome (Biology), Beth Devonshire (Director of Community Standards), Pauline Dobrowski (Associate VP for Student Affairs), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education and Interdisciplinary Studies), Denise Gannon (Campus Minister), Kathleen Joint (Associate Director of Academic Services), and George Piggford, C.S.C. (English).
The afternoon discussions about proposals to move to a graduation requirement based on credits rather than courses also brought out great collegial discussion among faculty members and academic administrators. Many thanks to the course and credit committee, which completed its own feat of endurance over Summer 2007 to bring us this proposal: Karen Anderson (Education), Scott Cohen (English), Roger Denome (Biology), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education), Glen Ilacqua (Business Administration), Daniel Itzkovitz, (English), John Pestana (Registrar), Allyson Sheckler (Fine Arts), and Karen Talentino (Dean of Faculty).
We won’t always come to complete agreement on the significant matters that Academic Development Day invites us to confront. But I think we’ve come a long way together. We continue to build a faculty ethos of respect, curiosity, responsibility, inquiry, affirmation—and even endurance—that must surely rub off on our students as they rig out their own vessels and explore their own uncharted waters.
Best regards,
Katie
Friday, October 5, 2007
Friday, October 5: The Academic Enterprise
Last week, a new Trustee—who happens to have worked at Stonehill in an earlier decade—made an interesting comment after he spent two days on campus reconnecting with faculty members he had known and meeting many new faculty members.
He said, “I always knew that Stonehill faculty members were passionate about their courses and generous in their interactions with students, but I am struck by something different on this visit: a commitment to the larger academic enterprise.”
Now I’m not sure that the Trustee and I would define “the academic enterprise” identically, but I am very sure that he was onto something. Stonehill faculty members do show a remarkable commitment to the broad academic enterprise, and they do so through their courses, their advising, their attendance at Academic Development Day and other opportunities to discuss our common work—as well as through programming that augments the curriculum and faculty-led events that promote collegial conversation about scholarly work.
What’s my evidence that the academic enterprise is alive and well? Well, one major event of the past week offers a good example. Now in its seventh year, the Chet Raymo Literary Series honors our well-loved physicist and creative writer emeritus with a literary event in his name. This year’s guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, inspired Monday’s audience with a presentation that was part reading, part personal journey, and part writerly advice. It was also pure enjoyment!
We have several such “signature” events on campus each year, but I am most impressed with the level of ingenuity shown by the faculty in weaving these events into the fabric of their courses or into the enrichment of their students. For example, the English Department undertook a number of initiatives to prepare students to get the most out of this event--from teaching specific individual plays by Parks to teaching selections from Parks’s current project, 365 Days, 365 Plays to working with the English Society to create campus interest in the event. The Honors Program also challenged students to read Parks’s work and to attend the event, and theatre students were likewise urged to attend.
In a stroke of creativity, photography professor Maryjean Viano Crowe invited students to do photographic interpretations of one of Parks’s short plays from the 365 project. These assignments were due on Monday, and after her reading (and about 90 minutes of book signing), Suzan-Lori Parks walked into Cushing-Martin Hall and generously gave time to those photography students as they reviewed the task and explained their individual “translations” of her words into visual medium. This and so many other imaginative projects invented by faculty members--and even the presence of so many faculty members at the Raymo event--are surely signs of a very healthy commitment to “the academic enterprise.”
Obviously, the Raymo event brings an important outside speaker to campus each year, but this year I am also pleased to see such a robust number of events on the calendar that feature Stonehill faculty members speaking on their areas of expertise. The Social Justice and Public Policy Research Series, for example, kicked off on September 21st, with Prof. Rick Gribble, C.S.C. (Religious Studies) speaking about his most recent book on the life of Archbishop Edward Hanna.
The Common Sense Lecture Series--a collaboration of Student Affairs and Academic Affairs--featured Prof. Celeste Lay (Political Science) in the opening lecture on the presidential primaries: how they work and why they are important. These are moments for faculty to share expertise with students--but also for faculty to join each other n collegial conversation about topics that matter to faculty work and to the intellectual life of our campus. Another such important moment will be our discussions at Academic Development Day next week--discussions focused on the critical topic of academic integrity.
The Trustee’s comment made me wonder about how much the campus intellectual culture has truly changed and grown richer in the last decade. And I was reminded of a colleague--dear to many of us--who left Stonehill early in his career, and whose life was brutally cut short in a still-unsolved murder in Chicago on June 22, 2005. Those faculty members who knew Peter D’Agostino will remember that he had uncompromising expectations for how faculty colleagues should sustain each other’s intellectual passions. He was truly committed to “the academic enterprise.” I know we fell short of Peter’s expectations, but I think about him regularly, and I believe that he would find Stonehill today the kind of enriching and supportive intellectual community he hoped for.
For your parts in making Stonehill that kind of community, thank you.
Best regards,
Katie
photo credit: Nicki Pardo
He said, “I always knew that Stonehill faculty members were passionate about their courses and generous in their interactions with students, but I am struck by something different on this visit: a commitment to the larger academic enterprise.”
Now I’m not sure that the Trustee and I would define “the academic enterprise” identically, but I am very sure that he was onto something. Stonehill faculty members do show a remarkable commitment to the broad academic enterprise, and they do so through their courses, their advising, their attendance at Academic Development Day and other opportunities to discuss our common work—as well as through programming that augments the curriculum and faculty-led events that promote collegial conversation about scholarly work.
What’s my evidence that the academic enterprise is alive and well? Well, one major event of the past week offers a good example. Now in its seventh year, the Chet Raymo Literary Series honors our well-loved physicist and creative writer emeritus with a literary event in his name. This year’s guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, inspired Monday’s audience with a presentation that was part reading, part personal journey, and part writerly advice. It was also pure enjoyment!
We have several such “signature” events on campus each year, but I am most impressed with the level of ingenuity shown by the faculty in weaving these events into the fabric of their courses or into the enrichment of their students. For example, the English Department undertook a number of initiatives to prepare students to get the most out of this event--from teaching specific individual plays by Parks to teaching selections from Parks’s current project, 365 Days, 365 Plays to working with the English Society to create campus interest in the event. The Honors Program also challenged students to read Parks’s work and to attend the event, and theatre students were likewise urged to attend.
In a stroke of creativity, photography professor Maryjean Viano Crowe invited students to do photographic interpretations of one of Parks’s short plays from the 365 project. These assignments were due on Monday, and after her reading (and about 90 minutes of book signing), Suzan-Lori Parks walked into Cushing-Martin Hall and generously gave time to those photography students as they reviewed the task and explained their individual “translations” of her words into visual medium. This and so many other imaginative projects invented by faculty members--and even the presence of so many faculty members at the Raymo event--are surely signs of a very healthy commitment to “the academic enterprise.”
Obviously, the Raymo event brings an important outside speaker to campus each year, but this year I am also pleased to see such a robust number of events on the calendar that feature Stonehill faculty members speaking on their areas of expertise. The Social Justice and Public Policy Research Series, for example, kicked off on September 21st, with Prof. Rick Gribble, C.S.C. (Religious Studies) speaking about his most recent book on the life of Archbishop Edward Hanna.
The Common Sense Lecture Series--a collaboration of Student Affairs and Academic Affairs--featured Prof. Celeste Lay (Political Science) in the opening lecture on the presidential primaries: how they work and why they are important. These are moments for faculty to share expertise with students--but also for faculty to join each other n collegial conversation about topics that matter to faculty work and to the intellectual life of our campus. Another such important moment will be our discussions at Academic Development Day next week--discussions focused on the critical topic of academic integrity.
The Trustee’s comment made me wonder about how much the campus intellectual culture has truly changed and grown richer in the last decade. And I was reminded of a colleague--dear to many of us--who left Stonehill early in his career, and whose life was brutally cut short in a still-unsolved murder in Chicago on June 22, 2005. Those faculty members who knew Peter D’Agostino will remember that he had uncompromising expectations for how faculty colleagues should sustain each other’s intellectual passions. He was truly committed to “the academic enterprise.” I know we fell short of Peter’s expectations, but I think about him regularly, and I believe that he would find Stonehill today the kind of enriching and supportive intellectual community he hoped for.
For your parts in making Stonehill that kind of community, thank you.
Best regards,
Katie
photo credit: Nicki Pardo
Friday, September 28: The Art of Science
So much happened on campus this past week that I will have to pass over several possible topics to focus on one whose importance is impossible to overstate: we broke ground on Thursday for a new $34 million science center that will transform our campus in manifold ways!
As anyone who attended the event can attest, it was truly a “ceremonial” groundbreaking. We all knew that shiny shovels hitting an oversized sandbox was only a signifier of the earth-moving efforts ahead. But I’d like to reflect a little on how this event was also a sign of much past work. Indeed, I daresay that science faculty at Stonehill have been groundbreakers since the College opened its doors, and that this new building is the culmination of their efforts.
Many of the names in Stonehill’s lore involve scientists: Fr. Frank Hurley C.S.C., the “Father of Biology”; Mary Alice Moore, the chemist who dared--according to the stories--to destroy her lab furnishings in order to get students what they needed to do science; Chet Raymo, whose love for physics and astronomy drew generations of students to his classes, where he raised their sights to the night skies and beyond in the Merkert-Tracy observatory.
The new Science Center will house four academic departments: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Psychology. These departments sponsor majors in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, environmental studies, neuroscience, and psychology--and soon a full-fledged physics major. The current faculty is simply outstanding, and the College has recognized this: these departments boast five faculty recipients of the Louise Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching and two recipients of the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award. (That’s one quarter of the teaching award recipients and one third of the distinguished faculty scholars!)
They have brought millions of dollars in external grant funding to support their research--and this has been happening in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to attract federal dollars for research. National Science Foundation (NSF) funding supports the honey-mushroom research of Diane Peabody. Robert Peabody, Maura Tyrell, and Jane DeLuca; NSF also supports Louis Liotta’s ongoing research on Polyhydroxylated pyrrolidines.
Marilena Hall and Cheryl Schnitzer have received substantial funding from Research Corporation to support their basic research. Mike Horne and Alessandro Massarotti enjoy remarkable collaborations with scholars at institutions including MIT and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to these salient examples of specific research projects, these departments have also brought in matching funds for new instrumentation, such as a high-speed nuclear-magnetic resonator and a DNA sequencer. In the case of Chemistry, a whole department collaborated to acquire funding that fosters pedagogical change: we are in the second year of an NSF grant in excess of $860,000 that supports a substantial revision to the way we deliver General Chemistry. These are just a few examples of such work.
Even more importantly, these faculty members have shaped the lives of countless students by leading the rest of us in many of the most important academic directions we have taken in the last two decades: experiential learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and undergraduate research. Each of these departments has consistently been a “hands-on” department, where students learn science by doing science. Their labs and research facilities are hubs of activity--as are many corners of the physical campus--where students take pride in the record numbers of hours they log on their laboratory or environmental work. Three of the nine interdisciplinary majors at Stonehill are offered through these departments. And undergraduate research, which we are now proud to offer in every discipline, began with the sciences. Some of that research is course based; for example, 100% of Psychology students design their own research projects through the Research Methods class. And much of the research also involves the direct collaboration of a student and a faculty member. Indeed, it was Louis Liotta who brought the idea of the SURE program to Stonehill, and since 1996, the number and variety of projects has grown each year, as today’s SURE Poster Presentation demonstrated.
To call these steps in Stonehill’s remarkable progress would be an understatement; to call them quantum leaps would be a cliché. The truth is, our science faculty have broken new ground at Stonehill, and they’ve done it in spades. This week, they also did it with spades, and the Science Center that will open in Summer 2009 represents an another acknowledgement of their work--one that we will all have the opportunity to enjoy.
Best regards,
Katie
Friday, September 28, 2007
Friday, September 21: It's About More than Film
When I recently read the September 17th issue of The New Yorker, I was struck by
Lane’s final sentence concludes: “. . . [M]aybe, however many movies we see, there’s something about the Apollo experience that should remain indescribable--drifting away from our imagination, as if out of radio contact, on the dark side of the moon.”
What a beautiful sentence--and an interesting starting point for considering the remarkable emphasis on film that’s taking place on our own campus this fall. The Global Film Series launched its season last week, and the Political Science Film Series begins tonight with “All the President’s Men.” We can look ahead in the campus calendar to find a series of Italian films and another of Postmodern Film Screenings.
Coordinated by faculty members and involving faculty-led introductions, screenings, and discussions, all these film series model for students the kinds of engaged lives adults can lead--lives where watching movies and talking about them, reading books and discussing them, learning languages and using them, reading newspapers and arguing about them, exploring other cultures and struggling with how they are always still “drifting away from our imaginations” are all part of being an educated person (even on Friday nights). So I thank the faculty members who have put so much energy into this semester’s film offerings: Scott Cohen (Global Film Series), George Piggford, C.S. C. (Postmodern Film Series), Antonio Barbagallo (Italian Film Series), and the Political Science Faculty (Political Science Film Series--with Richard Finnegan, Celeste Lay, and Jim Millikan leading the discussions this semester).
As I mentioned last week, the Martin Institute--in collaboration with the Honors Program--kicked off its programming this year with a film: Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Why We Fight.” Jared Green’s erudite introduction to that film set a standard for how faculty can welcome students into critical engagement with such texts.
Friday, September 14: A Week that Affirmed Community
As we arrive at Friday, I find myself thinking about two events of the past week that I believe herald the kind of community we continually create together.
The first was the overwhelming response of the entire College community to the Easton gas explosion that seriously affected six of our off-campus students. While behind the scenes we were trying to verify information, so many people stepped in to provide clear and accurate communications and to determine the actions that needed to be taken. We had timely updates posted on the web; creative residence solutions for offering the students on-campus housing; generous donations of College funds for clothing, food, and necessities; relocation of computers to the residences; and a swift gathering of books and materials to prepare the students for as smooth a transition back to the classroom as they can manage. In talking with friends and colleagues from other institutions, I’m discovering that what’s “normal” at Stonehill would not necessarily be the course of action elsewhere.
But I was also struck by the large and small gestures of generosity that came from so many of you. More than one faculty member offered to house students if they needed temporary or longer residence. Calls poured in to inquire about a campus fundraiser for those affected. And late yesterday, I was on the phone with the Residence Director at Notre Dame du Lac to ask if he could open the door for a faculty member who had baked brownies for the students! Thanks to all of you for nurturing and sustaining this kind of community response. It makes me, for one, want to get up and go to work in the morning.
Also inspiring as a community-building occasion was the first event in the “re-founding” year of the Martin Institute for Law and Society. As I mentioned in my letter last week, many college students expect to attend campus events, and many at colleges an universities around the country report that they have not been encouraged to do so. Well, the 300+ students, faculty and others at the screening of Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight entered into lively conversation with the director and each other after watching the 90-minute film. This event, which kicked off a year dedicated to the theme of “War” in the Martin Institute, was just one of many examples of the kind of meaningful co-curricular programming Stonehill has become so good at. The Martin Institute has long been a place where such programming occurs, but under the leadership of Prof. Peter Ubertaccio, some new directions will also be pursued.
As many of you will remember, for the last two years, significant attention has been given to the mission and focus of the Martin Institute. Led by former Trustee Paul Kirk, a past Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and current Chairman of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Martin Institute Task Force (2005-06) and the Martin Institute Steering Committee (2006-07) created a new “Mission and Philosophy” to guide the Institute and to provide a mandate to its director. Emphasizing a dual focus on public policy and social justice, the Martin Institute philosophy states that:
“The Institute advances the mission of Stonehill College by critically exploring the concepts of ‘law’ and ‘society’ through a focus on public policy and social justice. Public policy encompasses local, state, national and international constituencies, and is concerned with all of the engagements people have with public life. It crosses the boundaries of an exclusively disciplinary focus and involves theories and data from every discipline and examines the initiation of policy through its development, execution and evaluation. Social justice takes as its starting point that ‘every citizen…has the responsibility to work to secure justice and human rights through an organized social response…The guaranteeing of basic justice for all is not an optional expression of largesse but an inescapable duty for the whole of society.’ (Economic Justice for All, No. 120) It includes empirical study and applied analysis of political structures, policies and practices, civil society, culture, and events that occur outside of the dominant political and social structure.”
Working with a faculty steering committee, Peter Ubertaccio has developed bold plans for this year that include ongoing co-curricular activities around the “War” theme, student and faculty research grants, the week-long visit of our first Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and two academic conferences (one called “The State of New England: People, Politics, and Policies” and the other “The Music of War: An Interdisciplinary Conference”). I encourage you to visit the Martin Institute website for more information. I’m sure Peter would appreciate any feedback or any ideas for the future.
The Martin Steering Committee will announce its first two-year theme in November, at which point all faculty will be invited into the most ambitious of the goals for the Institute: to develop curriculum that links to the overarching theme: first-year seminars, sophomore learning communities, ideas for interdisciplinary concentrations--these will all be encouraged.
Both retrospectively and prospectively, I want to thank all of you for your ongoing efforts to make this a community that cares about people and cares about ideas--as was so evident in your level of engagement with both these events this week.
Best regards,
Katie
The first was the overwhelming response of the entire College community to the Easton gas explosion that seriously affected six of our off-campus students. While behind the scenes we were trying to verify information, so many people stepped in to provide clear and accurate communications and to determine the actions that needed to be taken. We had timely updates posted on the web; creative residence solutions for offering the students on-campus housing; generous donations of College funds for clothing, food, and necessities; relocation of computers to the residences; and a swift gathering of books and materials to prepare the students for as smooth a transition back to the classroom as they can manage. In talking with friends and colleagues from other institutions, I’m discovering that what’s “normal” at Stonehill would not necessarily be the course of action elsewhere.
But I was also struck by the large and small gestures of generosity that came from so many of you. More than one faculty member offered to house students if they needed temporary or longer residence. Calls poured in to inquire about a campus fundraiser for those affected. And late yesterday, I was on the phone with the Residence Director at Notre Dame du Lac to ask if he could open the door for a faculty member who had baked brownies for the students! Thanks to all of you for nurturing and sustaining this kind of community response. It makes me, for one, want to get up and go to work in the morning.
Also inspiring as a community-building occasion was the first event in the “re-founding” year of the Martin Institute for Law and Society. As I mentioned in my letter last week, many college students expect to attend campus events, and many at colleges an universities around the country report that they have not been encouraged to do so. Well, the 300+ students, faculty and others at the screening of Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight entered into lively conversation with the director and each other after watching the 90-minute film. This event, which kicked off a year dedicated to the theme of “War” in the Martin Institute, was just one of many examples of the kind of meaningful co-curricular programming Stonehill has become so good at. The Martin Institute has long been a place where such programming occurs, but under the leadership of Prof. Peter Ubertaccio, some new directions will also be pursued.
As many of you will remember, for the last two years, significant attention has been given to the mission and focus of the Martin Institute. Led by former Trustee Paul Kirk, a past Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and current Chairman of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Martin Institute Task Force (2005-06) and the Martin Institute Steering Committee (2006-07) created a new “Mission and Philosophy” to guide the Institute and to provide a mandate to its director. Emphasizing a dual focus on public policy and social justice, the Martin Institute philosophy states that:
“The Institute advances the mission of Stonehill College by critically exploring the concepts of ‘law’ and ‘society’ through a focus on public policy and social justice. Public policy encompasses local, state, national and international constituencies, and is concerned with all of the engagements people have with public life. It crosses the boundaries of an exclusively disciplinary focus and involves theories and data from every discipline and examines the initiation of policy through its development, execution and evaluation. Social justice takes as its starting point that ‘every citizen…has the responsibility to work to secure justice and human rights through an organized social response…The guaranteeing of basic justice for all is not an optional expression of largesse but an inescapable duty for the whole of society.’ (Economic Justice for All, No. 120) It includes empirical study and applied analysis of political structures, policies and practices, civil society, culture, and events that occur outside of the dominant political and social structure.”
Working with a faculty steering committee, Peter Ubertaccio has developed bold plans for this year that include ongoing co-curricular activities around the “War” theme, student and faculty research grants, the week-long visit of our first Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and two academic conferences (one called “The State of New England: People, Politics, and Policies” and the other “The Music of War: An Interdisciplinary Conference”). I encourage you to visit the Martin Institute website for more information. I’m sure Peter would appreciate any feedback or any ideas for the future.
The Martin Steering Committee will announce its first two-year theme in November, at which point all faculty will be invited into the most ambitious of the goals for the Institute: to develop curriculum that links to the overarching theme: first-year seminars, sophomore learning communities, ideas for interdisciplinary concentrations--these will all be encouraged.
Both retrospectively and prospectively, I want to thank all of you for your ongoing efforts to make this a community that cares about people and cares about ideas--as was so evident in your level of engagement with both these events this week.
Best regards,
Katie
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