For those of you who weren’t able to join me for the Fall 2017 LAHC convocation, here’s a brief overview.
I am honored to have been appointed dean of our newly realigned division, Liberal Arts: Humanities and Communications, a position I assumed officially on August 1. Unofficially, I was occupied (until well into September) with my two-year process of moving fine and performing arts out of Rio Grande and into newly renovated space in Highland East. My thanks to Lyman Grant for keeping things moving and helping me catch up while I dealt with Arts and Humanities loose ends. I’m sad that Lyman can’t be here with us this evening, but we can certainly offer a little tribute to his many years of service to ACC.
I’d like to welcome Gaye Lynn Scott, our new AVP, to share some of the highlights of the ACC landscape this year. (Gaye Lynn’s bullets)
Now, a few updates and priorities from my office. First of all, concerning communication, there is the LAHC dean’s blog (subscribe!) and I’ll be working on a new LAHC landing page.
Our Vision+Voice poetry competition is open! Check us out at visionandvoice.org. You can find out more about this project on the website.
Many of you have heard that Roy Ruane has decided to leave the honors program, and I want to thank Roy for his years of dedication to honors at ACC. Building on the foundation laid by Roy, most recently, but also by a long list of people who believed in the honors program (including Anne Marie Thomas, Mark Butland, Judy Sanders, and others), we will be moving honors in a new direction this year. We will adopt civic leadership and citizenship as an integrating theme, and create programming and opportunities that will appeal to students across the whole college. Concerning this theme, I will say that never in my career has reflection on civic leadership been more relevant and more important in our college community and in the larger communities we serve. Exploring important facets of this theme, we will offer more enrichment opportunities to honors students in any area of study. We’ll build a robust administrative infrastructure around, first, an advisory committee of faculty from all the areas of study. The major tasks of this committee will be to envision an honors curriculum and program, and to select a leader for the honors program.
Let me introduce our departments and their chairs:
- Business, Government, and Technical Communication, David McMurray
- Communications Studies, Theresa Glenn
- English and Journalism, Judy Sanders
- English for Speakers of Other Languages, Shannon Bailey
- Philosophy, Religion, Humanities, Grant Potts
I will invite the department chairs to post about their department’s activities once the dean’s blog gets underway.
I’d also like to introduce the dean’s office team:
- Katie Lessley, Senior Administrative Assistant
- Tyshun Robinson, Administrative Assistant
- Ysella Fulton Slavin, Outreach Coordinator
Thanks for all you do — especially for ordering the food!
Now let me unveil our division logo, which you see featured in this post. The golden spiral is a representation of the Fibonacci sequence, a historical symbol of the interface between the humanities and the world of science and nature.
But it’s also a great diagram for ACC Policy-Making: Start with a question at the center, go round and around, getting further and further from the actual question you were trying to answer in the first place. (That got a terrific laugh in person.)
Seriously, I’d like to offer you a word about my philosophy:
First, I’m an Aristotelian, and I’m not even going to apologize. I believe that the meaningfulness of our lives arises from the pursuit of excellence. I and my office are here to support you in the pursuit of the excellences of your disciplines. I ask that you partner with us, so we can use the traces and results of your efforts to raise visibility, to recruit, to find you an audience, using social media, blogging, community outreach, and other forms of media.
Now let’s talk about why we are here — that is, “here” existentially. We are maintainers and purveyors of the Great Conversation — I actually believe this — the Great Conversation, this ever-widening human dialogue, expansive and reflective, exuberant but self-critical.
But doesn’t that sound like a eulogy? Here’s lies the Great Conversation. . . . That’s premature. Let me offer you a thought experiment:
Suppose you’re twenty-something, working in your cubicle. You look at guy in the next cubicle: he’s from Nigeria. You reflect on the morning’s meeting, during which your team leader punctuated a point with a Bengali aphorism from her childhood in Bangladesh. Then you remember what she said next: Collectively, your project team speaks nine languages.
Now let’s add this: You want a life that’s not just about making money, not just about work and “being productive.” No, you want a meaningful life; you want to thrive.
All set? Now here’s a little quiz for you: What is a better preparation for thriving in that environment we just imagined? Another PHP certificate? Or a close, sensitive reading of Melville?
If you smirk or laugh, then you recognize that what Melville teaches us is important. I’m not dissing PHP; some of my best friends code in PHP. It’s good, Python is better, but PHP is ok.
What I am saying is that reading Melville is valuable for navigating this actual world — the world in which our students want to thrive. For those of you who don’t know:
Melville wrote these fantastic novels that begin as sailor stories, tales of travel to exotic places, with the grimy expectation of a sea shanty from the corner of a moldy bar, but then — then he entices you, and you follow and he takes you into dark hinterlands where cultures rub against each other, and that constant rubbing grinds off the cultural teflon that gave you a peculiar provincial identity euphoria —you know what I mean — and you wake up the next day and you look in the mirror and you can’t quite see yourself the way you want any more because for some inexplicable reason, Omoo or Typee or even Moby Dick — just won’t close completely.
Our problem, colleagues, is not that the liberal arts aren’t relevant to the world that twenty-something must navigate; it’s that people forget why.
So, let’s remind them.
Don’t let people say the liberal arts are about “soft skills”! If those skills were all that soft, everyone would have them,. and CEOs wouldn’t be asking where they went.
We need new ways to articulate why Melville is relevant, we need to translate what the liberal arts knows about being human into new media and new social conditions, and we need to talk about those hermeneutic skills not like they’re occult, but in human terms. I mean, let’s teach them, explicitly.
Don’t apologize for what you teach. Or rather, stop offering apologies and offer an apology, you know what I mean? That other sense of apology, in which we articulate what is compelling about what we do, and why it matters.
Thank you for being here — here for the food, and here, existentially. Thank you for bringing your best to what you do — it matters, now, and for the future. And it matters to our students.
