Into Summer
6/1/2007
Our students just returned from a study abroad experience, Indigenous Identity, Culture, and Ecology in Venezuela. The course was an opportunity to learn in depth about the identity, culture and ecology of the indigenous peoples living in Venezuela, their ecological and medicinal practices and strategies, and the struggles and challenges to ensure the implementation of their rights. I'm told it was a life-changing experience for the students and hope to have more to report on that later. Meanwhile here are a few images:
Also this week I was delighted to be able to announce that Stephen Kinzer, an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents, has agreed to be the third Lund-Gill Chair in the Rosary College of Arts and Sciences. Kinzer's most recent book is Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In 2003 Kinzer published All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events. He's also written books on the coups and wars in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Columbia University awarded Kinzer its Maria Moors Cabot prize for outstanding coverage of Latin America. Most recently, Kinzer has just become a columnist for The Guardian.
Kinzer will serve as Lund-Gill chair for the calendar year 2008. He'll help us plan lectures/events/special programs in March and April, and he will teach an honors section of a political science course on the history of American intervention abroad in the fall.
We're right in the middle of summer I classes (still time to register for summer II) because, [drum roll please, tagline approaching]
There you go. I love the smell of taglines in the morning. Smells like… matriculation.
Well my staff has been phenomenal as have so many other offices as we get ready, on Monday, to welcome the first group of New Freshmen! Egad they're here for summer orientation and registration for next fall already. I've decided to issue a series of demands when they walk in the front door, and here they are:
What We Expect of You
Our students just returned from a study abroad experience, Indigenous Identity, Culture, and Ecology in Venezuela. The course was an opportunity to learn in depth about the identity, culture and ecology of the indigenous peoples living in Venezuela, their ecological and medicinal practices and strategies, and the struggles and challenges to ensure the implementation of their rights. I'm told it was a life-changing experience for the students and hope to have more to report on that later. Meanwhile here are a few images:
Also this week I was delighted to be able to announce that Stephen Kinzer, an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents, has agreed to be the third Lund-Gill Chair in the Rosary College of Arts and Sciences. Kinzer's most recent book is Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In 2003 Kinzer published All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events. He's also written books on the coups and wars in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Columbia University awarded Kinzer its Maria Moors Cabot prize for outstanding coverage of Latin America. Most recently, Kinzer has just become a columnist for The Guardian.
Kinzer will serve as Lund-Gill chair for the calendar year 2008. He'll help us plan lectures/events/special programs in March and April, and he will teach an honors section of a political science course on the history of American intervention abroad in the fall.
We're right in the middle of summer I classes (still time to register for summer II) because, [drum roll please, tagline approaching]
There you go. I love the smell of taglines in the morning. Smells like… matriculation.
Well my staff has been phenomenal as have so many other offices as we get ready, on Monday, to welcome the first group of New Freshmen! Egad they're here for summer orientation and registration for next fall already. I've decided to issue a series of demands when they walk in the front door, and here they are:
What We Expect of You
- Caritas et Veritas
- Read
- Have a conversation with possibilities
- Don't be afraid to ask big questions—big enough to last four years—or a lifetime
- Learn to break the big questions into little ones that can be tackled one at a time
- Seek multiple perspectives in your search for truth
- Make connections between multiple classes, and between school and your life, job, and significant current/past events
- College is a full-time job! Don't take shortcuts
- Spend an average of two hours per week outside of class for every hour in class or about 40 total hours per week (in and out of classes combined)
- Develop relationships with faculty mentors
- Cultivate active not passive behaviors—take your classes (and run with them)
- Read
- Seek to engage the Catholic and Dominican intellectual traditions
- Develop strategies to balance work hours with study time
- Unplug and practice screening out the distractions ("Silence is the soil from which insight grows"—Hugh Page)
- Come to class on time
- Bring the book or other appropriate materials to class
- Overcome timidity and talk in class—find your voice!
- Participate in a range of co-curricular events and activities
- Attend an on-campus lecture for which no extra credit is given
- Read
- Develop independent thinking within a comprehensive intellectual framework
- Listen to the other students and not just the professor
- Sample the "31 flavors"
- Build a personal library of books that move you (Hugh Page)
- Make a four-year educational plan based on your intellectual passions and vocational objectives, and write a review of your progress at the end of each semester. Share that review with your advisor—or anybody else who will listen (Hugh Page).
- Pursue your "wish list" of 10 courses you'd love to take at some point
- Read
- Put liberal education in dialogue with professional education
- Find the joy in study
- Contemplate, and share the fruits of contemplation with others
- Be attentive! Be intelligent! Be reasonable! Be responsible!
- Perform the truth
- Live a life to be proud of
- If not now, when?
- Caritas et Veritas
