Dear College of Arts & Letters Class of 2021,
Welcome to Michigan State University!
As you embark on the adventure of discovery and growth that is a liberal arts education in the College of Arts & Letters here at Michigan State University, I invite you to consider for a moment what we might learn from a peculiar tree you will encounter on campus.
Dear College of Arts & Letters Class of 2020,
Welcome to Michigan State University!
As you begin your journey in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, let me tell you a secret.
Scratched into the corner of a 135-year old window in Linton Hall is the name of a student who graduated in 1891 from what was then referred to as the Michigan Agricultural College. His name is C.F. Baker; and he is but one of the thousands of graduates who precede you.
Like the man himself, whose scholarly contributions, it was said after his death, “were all too obscured by his indifference to public recognition,” the name etched in glass goes largely unnoticed. Yet, once it is called to your attention, you can’t enter the room without some awareness of the presence of C.F. Baker.
He was a scientist and an educator, the embodiment of an idea that has long stood at the heart of the Michigan State University land-grant mission to “advance knowledge and transform lives.”
After graduating, he received a master’s degree from Stanford, and his desire to advance human knowledge of entomology and fungi led him to the Philippines where the specimens he gathered significantly enriched the collection of the Smithsonian, to whom they passed upon his death in 1927.
During his time in the Philippines, he helped found the Philippine College of Agriculture, fought tirelessly for appropriations and, in his role as Dean, “sought eagerly for a faculty fired by a kindred zeal to his own.”
The tenacity, humility, and diligent commitment to excellence we’ve come to associate with what it means to be a Spartan were handed down to us from predecessors like C.F. Baker, who wrote that one of his most cherished principles was not to give up, who inspired his students — he “could capture their imaginations and stir their hopes as no other member of the faculty could” — who followed his research wherever it led him, and who left a mark, not only here on campus, but on the lives of those he met and on the world he loved.
As you begin your time here on campus, I encourage you to take full advantage of all that Michigan State University has to offer. Explore different majors, embrace the research endeavor, pursue an internship, and study abroad (more than once).
And as you chart a path of your own, pursue excellence in your chosen field of study, and seek to make the world into which you will graduate a better, more beautiful, and more just place, keep the spirit of predecessors like C.F. Baker close to you as a model of what a Spartan’s Will can do.
Welcome home, Spartan Class of 2020.
Sincerely,
Christopher P. Long, Dean
College of Arts & Letters
The liberal arts have always given us powerful ways to study and understand the world we inhabit. The events in Ferguson call for a liberal arts approach because they are multidimensional. They require us to think critically, understand historically, analyze soberly, and respond ethically. This is what the liberal arts do, and it is what we hope to empower our students to do in this course.
Fifty-nine years ago today, on June 9, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower addressed the centennial graduating class of Penn State, where his brother, Milton, was president of the university. Two things were on the President’s mind that afternoon, nuclear energy and general education.
The Information Technology unit at Penn State holds IT Matters breakfasts a few times a year. This semester I joined colleagues on stage to talk about my work and how it intersects with IT at Penn State.
Because we have partnered with Brad Koslek and the TLT Studio to create a dynamic online space of dialogue and conversation about General Education reform at Penn State, they asked me about the PSUGenEd reform process. My 4 minute riff on GenEd, its importance, and how we are trying to change it at Penn State is embedded below.
Our partnership with the TLT Studio has gone some distance in modeling a way of using digital media to cultivate community around an important education reform issue. Because Penn State is a single university geographically dispersed, the GenEd Matters site has become a kind of marketplace of ideas and information about the GenEd reform process. We have sought to include a wide public in these conversations and, as a result, we have received an enormous amount of very helpful feedback on the process and suggestions for the emerging curriculum.
The site is continually being updated, its functionality improved even as we use it to engage in conversation. It’s a little like rebuilding the ship of Theseus as we sail it. Still, it is an intensely collaborative endeavor as we think about how design impacts discussion and how transformative reform can be undertaken in and with a thoughtful public.
You are invited to watch the video and join the conversation.
We at Penn State are engaged in an intense, ongoing and, in my view, very healthy dialogue about General Education reform.
In order to integrate the research endeavor into the undergraduate experience, we ought to more intentionally engage leaders of our university institutes and college centers as we develop coordinated clusters of courses around specific research themes.
The rhythm of the academic year returns us again to the beginning.
State College is charged with energy as parents drop off their children, some for the first time, and students turn and return to a course of study that will transform their lives.
This year, as in past years, I find myself thinking about how to address over 700 incoming freshman in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. I hope to encourage them to take an active role in their own education.
University budgeting and strategic planning was the focus of the final Academic Leadership Program (ALP) sponsored by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) held at Penn State, April 12-14, 2012. No two topics have more impact on the life and direction of an institution than these.
In reflecting on this final ALP seminar (the other two were at Indiana University and the University of Chicago), I began to imagine what it might look like for Penn State to pursue a bold strategic vision of the new public research university in the 21st century. The vision would need to be grounded in the history of Penn State as a public institution, even if it would likely involve greatly diminished support from a Commonwealth intent on systematically starving the University of the resources that first made it possible over a century and a half ago.
At the center of the vision would be an unwavering commitment to the excellences of rigorous public research. The rigor would be rooted in a curriculum designed to cultivate in each student, undergraduate and graduate alike, a sense for the transformative power of inquiry and the imaginative intellectual abilities to discover new knowledge. The university would be “public” less because it receives public funding, and more because it is oriented toward public concerns and intent on pursuing the public good. Its research endeavor would be integrated into undergraduate and graduate teaching at all levels of the university. The historical commitment to ensuring that education remains accessible would be pursued on a global scale through the reach of the World Campus, and new technologies would be used to create new opportunities for innovative collaborative research and teaching. The new public research university would be smaller, more nimble, bolder and unwaveringly focused on initiatives that strengthen its core mission to pursue rigorous public research.
Today in the Foster Auditorium of the Pattee/Paterno Library, my undergraduate research assistant, Lisa Lotito, and I gave a presentation about the workflow we use in doing philosophical research.
I have written in some detail about my basic research cycle, but this presentation allowed us to articulate more fully how we use the collaborative power of digital media to do scholarly research in philosophy.
The process begins with a discussion about my current book project on Socratic and Platonic politics. Once Lisa had a sense of the project, we were able to delineate a basic set of sources on Plato’s Phaedo for a chapter on that dialogue I was also going to present at the 2011 Hermeneutisches Kolloquium in Freiburg.
The presentation, the recording for which I embed below, articulated how we created a shared collection on Mendeley to manage pdf resources, how Lisa added notes to Mendeley summarizing some of the main points of those articles and how they related to my thesis. We discuss how I use Dropbox to collect all the documents and Evernote and GoodReader to annotate the pdf files.
We used direct messaging in Twitter to communicate in a dynamic and asynchronous way that allowed me to request more resources or ask Lisa to look for specific issues in the secondary literature. This was particularly helpful during the two week period when I returned to the primary text to develop the details of my interpretation. I was able to rely on Lisa to help me recall the terms of the debate in the secondary literature on an issue or theme in the dialogue.
I used Word and Scrivener to write the chapter and, because of the ongoing limitations of Mendeley with citations, we returned to Zotero to add citations. Obviously, the constellation of technological tools we used to do this research is varied and perhaps complex; but what stands out, it seems to me, is the way Lisa and I were able to work in a collaborative way to do serious philosophical research. The asynchronous nature of our communication and the digital medium of many of the texts to which we referred allowed us to work in a collaborative way even when we were often at opposite ends of the Commonwealth.
My hope is that this might serve as one model for collaborative research in the humanities; for we have not historically cultivated the models of scholarly apprenticeship in the humanities that the sciences and social sciences have when they undertake research with students in their labs and research groups.
The Research Circle from Christopher Long on Vimeo.
On Digital Dialogue episode 39, I am joined by the co-directors of the World in Conversation Project, Sam Richards and Laurie Mulvey.
Their work explores the multifaceted relationship between people from different cultural and ancestral groups. More specifically, they use a Socratic method of dialogue to facilitate genuine, honest exchanges between people of differing perspectives, histories and background.
And they do this in ways that have a profound effect on all involved.
Our discussion focuses on the transformative power of dialogue and the difficult work required to engage in genuine dialogue. Laurie and Sam have had years of experience in preparing students to have honest, open and difficult conversations with people, and our exchange on the Digital Dialogue touches upon some of their most profound lessons.
To subscribe to the Digital
Dialogue through iTunesU, click here.
Take a look at Sam’s SOC 119 Course:
Cole Camplese is the Director of Education Technology Services, Allan Gyorke, Assistant Director of Education Technology Services, and Sam Richards, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Crime, Law and Justice and co-director of World in Conversation join me for episode 38 of the Digital Dialogue.
These three guests are all actively involved in the innovative use of technology for teaching here at Penn State. Our wide ranging discussion focuses primarily on using technology to engage students. We speak in particular about moving from a pedagogy of engagement to one of genuine cooperation.
This podcast is also a contribution to the Hacking Pedagogy project we have initiated at Penn State. To read more about how you can participate in that project, please visit the Hacking Pedagogy blog and tweet related articles using the #psuhack hashtag.
Digital Dialogue 38: Camplese, Gyorke and Richards on Teaching with Technology
To subscribe to the Digital
Dialogue through iTunesU, click here.
A group of students from my Philosophy 200, Ancient Greek Philosophy, course join me for episode 22 of the Digital Dialogue.
Drew Bullard, Jordan Sanford, Cody Yashinsky, Anthony Zirpoli, Tony Arnold, Pam Doran and Joni Noggle discuss some of the themes that have emerged over the course of this semester as we investigated the nature of Socratic Politics by reading four Platonic dialogues: Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedrus and Symposium.
Digital Dialogue 22 with Students from PHIL200: Transformative Dialogue
This episode of the digital dialogue is particularly important to me because it grew organically out of the work the students and I did together this semester. It was initiated by Cody Yashinsky who thought it would be nice to do a semester round-up podcast as way to highlight a number of themes that have emerged on the blog and in the course of our weekly round-up podcasts.
What we have done together this semester in the classroom, on the blog and through podcast is a testimony to the transformative power of digital dialogue.
Michael Shaw, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Utah Valley University, and Marina McCoy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College join me for episode 20 of the Digital Dialogue.
This podcast was recorded at Sundance, UT, where we gathered at the invitation of Mike Shaw just after Marina and I participated in a symposium on Sophocles for the Honors program at UVU.
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