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| Hays and Margaret Crimmel Colloquium: "The Aims of Liberal Education" |
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| Start Date: | 11/19/2009 | Start Time: | 4:00 PM |
| End Date: | 11/19/2009 | End Time: | 6:00 PM |
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Event Description
The University of Richmond will host the Hays and Margaret Crimmel Colloquium on Thursday, November 19 from 4 to 6 p.m. in Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room. The topic of the colloquium will be “The Aims of Liberal Education.”
The Colloquium will feature guest speaker and president emerita of Wellesley College, Dr. Diana Chapman Walsh. Dr. Sydney Watts, University of Richmond history professor, will then moderate a panel of Richmond faculty who will discuss liberal education in the twenty-first century. The panel will include Dr. Michael Kerckhove, Dr. MariLee Mifsud, Dr. Jennifer Glancy and Dr. Rick Mayes.
Diana Chapman Walsh was president of Wellesley College from 1993 to 2007. During her tenure, the college revised its curriculum and expanded its programs in global education, internships and service learning, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The faculty established new majors, new languages were added to the curriculum and a new department was launched. Other innovations included the opening of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, the establishment of the Religious and Spiritual Life Program, the creation of a media and technology center, a social science center, a center for the humanities, annual day-long conferences to showcase student learning, and other initiatives designed to strengthen the quality of campus intellectual life. The college raised over $700 million in new gifts during her tenure and increased the college’s endowment four-fold, to over $1.6 billion.
Sydney Watts is an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond. She earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University and studies early modern Europe, particularly eighteenth-century France. Her recent research on the history of Lent in early modern French cities examines Lenten practices and beliefs and how they changed with the development of the Enlightenment. She is the author of Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
Jennifer A. Glancy is the George & Sallie Cutchin Camp Professor of Bible in the University of Richmond’s Department of Religion. She is the author of the forthcoming Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies and Slavery in Early Christianity, a History Book Club alternate selection. Glancy joined the University of Richmond faculty in fall 2008, after 18 years teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. where she was the director of the college’s interdisciplinary Honors program. She holds a Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University and a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
Rick Mayes is an associate professor in the University of Richmond’s Department of Political Science, and a faculty research fellow at the Petris Center on Healthcare Markets and Consumer Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2000 and a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral traineeship at the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health from 2000 to 2002. In the early 1990s, he worked on Medicaid policy in the White House for George Bush, Sr., and thereafter on health insurance and Medicare policy at the AARP during the Clinton administration. He is a 1991 graduate of the University of Richmond. He is the author of Universal Coverage: The Elusive Quest for National Health Insurance, co-author of Medicare Prospective Payment and the Shaping of U.S. Health Care with Robert Berenson, M.D., and co-author of Medicating Children: ADHD and Pediatric Mental Health with fellow University of Richmond professors Catherine Bagwell and Jennifer Erkulwater.
Michael Kerckhove, associate professor of mathematics, earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and French at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He pursued graduate study in differential geometry at Brown University under the direction of Dr. Katsumi Nomizu. Kerckhove has been at the University of Richmond since 1988 and has enjoyed teaching the CORE course, a course out of Godel, Escher, Bach with Dr Jeff Elhai, and now the Integrated Quantitative Science course being offered for the first time in 2009-10. He has pursued research with undergraduates in knot theory, image processing, geometry of cell division, geometric optimization, and economic decision-making.
Mari Lee Mifsud, associate professor of rhetoric, is the chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies. Her scholarly focus on histories and theories of rhetoric inquires into the rhetorical dynamics of power in the shaping of personal and public deliberation and judgment. Her most recent essay, "Rhetoric as Gift/Giving" appeared in the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric. Other essays have appeared in journals such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Informal Logic, and the Journal for International Women's Studies, and volumes including Ancient Greek Philosophy of Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue, and Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics. She holds a Ph.D. in speech communication, with emphases in rhetoric, philosophy, and classics from Penn State University.
Some of the questions that this year’s colloquium will address include: How do we provide a broad introduction to higher learning that incorporates the vocational interests and practical applications that student seek while building the requisite thinking skills and modes of inquiry to pursue a discipline at the college level? Conversely, how do we design courses that look to seminal works of scholarship and foundational theories as a basis for engaging intellectual tools of reading, writing and speaking without overlooking the personal reflection and community life that help students make connections between course content and the world in which they live? These questions demand a closer look at liberal education as we strive to make the world of the mind applicable to the world outside academe without forsaking the clarity of ideas and the integrity of higher education.
Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. and the keynote presentation will begin promptly at 4 p.m. The keynote will be followed by the panel discussion. |
Location Information:
University of Richmond - Weinstein Hall
Room: Brown-Alley Room
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Admission Information:
This event is free and open to the general public. |
Other Details:
The Crimmel Colloquium is sponsored by the Hays and Margaret Crimmel Endowment and the Office of the Provost. |
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