Heads Will Roll
2/23/2007
Recently we brought some prospective students to campus. Some of our terrific current students gave them insights into their own experiences. For instance, Martha Leverenz, said this:
Sr. Clemente Davlin gave an inspiring reading and analysis of trust and deception in Shakespeare's Othello, done with the set for that play as backdrop. She's such a brilliant teacher, and Othello is this weekend's student production in Dominican's Performing Arts Series. I'm going Saturday night and then coming back for Lund-Gill Chair David Bevington's pre-performance lecture about the play on Sunday afternoon.
Brent Friesen gave a fascinating presentation on the remediation of coffee grounds, exploring the commercial and scientific potential of used coffee grounds in such applications as drug development, fuel, herbicides, soap and cosmetics, etc. So interesting! He was inviting these prospective students to join him in this research in Parmer Hall—our new academic building—this coming fall. Brent noted proudly that he'll soon have an organic chem lab with a bay window and spectacular view of Thatcher Woods.
Peter Taylor led us through a dizzyingly complex and tantalizing analysis of authorship, fiction as evidence and narrative framing in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov that left students' heads spinning. I even thought I spotted a few heads rolling down the aisles in the Martin Recital Hall that morning, which is always a plus. This in part is why some of our buildings have such long corridors—so that we can glimpse the students' heads rolling by. For newer faculty we're usually satisfied if they can simply get the students' heads to spin—at least a quarter turn at first but by the end of year three we need full revolutions. Still for our more seasoned professors, once they've earned tenure, we believe that having the heads come off completely and roll around for a bit is an even higher pedagogical calling. You see, we are part of a nationwide assessment of essential student learning outcomes and I'm hoping we can use this as a scoring rubric. In fact, we almost made that our tagline here at Dominican University™. I was pitching "lose your head in order to find it," but somehow, inexplicably, that lost out.
Anyway, at lunch that day we heard from the Honors Program director Chris Colmo. After referencing Dominican's long tradition of offering stimulating study abroad programs, currently taking students to such places as London, Nantes, Florence, Salamanca, Beijing, Stellenbosch, Paris, El Salvador, Venezuela and Rome, he made this interesting observation:
Recently we brought some prospective students to campus. Some of our terrific current students gave them insights into their own experiences. For instance, Martha Leverenz, said this:
I can think of instances within my seminars where a friend and I have eagerly and animatedly gotten into debates. At times these debates have been fairly heated, but no matter what, when we walked out of class we were still friends despite differences in opinion. My seminar classes have provided me a safe environment to express my own opinions, hear others, and in the end come to a more educated decision on the topic matter.I asked three of our outstanding faculty to present "mini lessons"—a glimpse of what teaching and learning feels like inside Dominican's classrooms.
Sr. Clemente Davlin gave an inspiring reading and analysis of trust and deception in Shakespeare's Othello, done with the set for that play as backdrop. She's such a brilliant teacher, and Othello is this weekend's student production in Dominican's Performing Arts Series. I'm going Saturday night and then coming back for Lund-Gill Chair David Bevington's pre-performance lecture about the play on Sunday afternoon.
Brent Friesen gave a fascinating presentation on the remediation of coffee grounds, exploring the commercial and scientific potential of used coffee grounds in such applications as drug development, fuel, herbicides, soap and cosmetics, etc. So interesting! He was inviting these prospective students to join him in this research in Parmer Hall—our new academic building—this coming fall. Brent noted proudly that he'll soon have an organic chem lab with a bay window and spectacular view of Thatcher Woods.
Peter Taylor led us through a dizzyingly complex and tantalizing analysis of authorship, fiction as evidence and narrative framing in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov that left students' heads spinning. I even thought I spotted a few heads rolling down the aisles in the Martin Recital Hall that morning, which is always a plus. This in part is why some of our buildings have such long corridors—so that we can glimpse the students' heads rolling by. For newer faculty we're usually satisfied if they can simply get the students' heads to spin—at least a quarter turn at first but by the end of year three we need full revolutions. Still for our more seasoned professors, once they've earned tenure, we believe that having the heads come off completely and roll around for a bit is an even higher pedagogical calling. You see, we are part of a nationwide assessment of essential student learning outcomes and I'm hoping we can use this as a scoring rubric. In fact, we almost made that our tagline here at Dominican University™. I was pitching "lose your head in order to find it," but somehow, inexplicably, that lost out.
Anyway, at lunch that day we heard from the Honors Program director Chris Colmo. After referencing Dominican's long tradition of offering stimulating study abroad programs, currently taking students to such places as London, Nantes, Florence, Salamanca, Beijing, Stellenbosch, Paris, El Salvador, Venezuela and Rome, he made this interesting observation:
There is a second kind of study abroad that you can do at Dominican without ever leaving campus, and this is, I think, what the Dominican University Honors program is all about. There is a fireplace behind me, and when this podium is not here, I sometimes set on a comfortable sofa that is here and read. I have been to Cape Town and Beijing, but far and away the greatest distances I have ever traveled have been alone with my thoughts. It is this second kind of study abroad that Melville is thinking of when he compares the life of the mind to riding in a whale-boat. He writes, "And if you be a philosopher though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of excitement or adventure, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."I'd read that. Even if it makes my head spin.
This excitement and adventure is what the Dominican University Honors Program is all about. The Honors Seminars—Thoughts and Passions, Human Being and Citizen, Human Being and Natural Being, Wisdom and Power—will take you on a journey through the minds of Dostoevsky and Plato, Darwin and Shakespeare. Those journeys, with teachers who are as eager to learn as you are, will take you at least as far as Cape Town or Beijing. Outstanding faculty who hold the Lund-Gill Chair teach in this seminar program. I think that if I were ever asked to write a book about what a liberal arts education should be, I would simply write about the ground we cover in the sequence of Honors Seminars at Dominican University.
