Articles on Peace by AU Faculty

Two members of the Department have essays in this new book on The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).  Professor Sikkenga's article is called "John Locke's Liberal Path to Peace," while that by Professor Paddags is "In Search for Laws Above Nations: Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Perpetual Peace."  The book also has essays on Martin Luther, Spinoza, Hobbes, Vattel, Kant, Hegel, Thoreau, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, and Habermas.

History & Political Science Students Win Awards @ Model Arab League

Pictured from left: Kelly Ranttila, Joey Barretta, James Coyne and Andrew Dailey

 

 Last week, nine students from Ashland University, most of them History & Political Science majors, participated in this year's Ohio Model Arab League at Miami University. In this simulation of an Arab League summit meeting students represent an Arab country and seek to further their country's interests by passing suitable council resolutions.
This year, Andrew Dailey and James Coyne, representing Lebanon in the Joint Defense Council, won an outstanding delegation award while Kelly Ranttila and Joey Barretta won an honorable mention for their representation of Lebanon in the Palestinian Affairs council.
This was the third time an Ashland University delegation participated in the Model Arab League and the most successful so far.

Liberal Arts Training Improves STEM Majors?

Skeptics wouldn't take it seriously if we were to suggest that Leonardo da Vinci is evidence that STEM majors can benefit from liberal arts training, but how about Steve Jobs: 

When introducing the iPad 2, Jobs, who dropped out of college but continued to audit calligraphy classes, declared: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” (Indeed, one of Apple’s scientists, Steve Perlman, was inspired to invent the QuickTime multimedia program by an episode of “Star Trek.”)

Or Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who 

credits her degree in philosophy and medieval history in helping her be the first woman to lead a high-tech Fortune 20 corporation. “If you go into a setting and everybody thinks alike, it’s easy,” she has said. “But you will probably get the wrong answer.”

Those quotes come from this article in the Washington Post by Loretta Jackson-Hayes.  See also "V is for Victorious," a story about Bing Chen in the UPenn Arts & Sciences Magazine, Fall/Winter 2014 (page 36).

College’s Priceless Value

In College's Priceless Value (NYT, February 11, 2015), Frank Bruni beautifully explains what higher education has to do with liberal arts and Shakespeare, by showing how three simple words, “Stay a little," from King Lear transformed his way of perceiving the world. Along the way, he makes these nice observations, which are pertinent to the debate over the liberal arts:

But it’s impossible to put a dollar value on a nimble, adaptable intellect, which isn’t the fruit of any specific course of study and may be the best tool for an economy and a job market that change unpredictably.

And it’s dangerous to forget that in a democracy, college isn’t just about making better engineers but about making better citizens, ones whose eyes have been opened to the sweep of history and the spectrum of civilizations.

Here's the whole article:

What’s the most transformative educational experience you’ve had?

I was asked this question recently, and for a few seconds it stumped me, mainly because I’ve never viewed learning as a collection of eureka moments. It’s a continuum, a lifelong awakening to the complexity of the world.

But then something did come to mind, not a discrete lesson but a moving image, complete with soundtrack. I saw a woman named Anne Hall swooning and swaying as she stood at the front of a classroom in Chapel Hill, N.C., and explained the rawness and majesty of emotion in “King Lear.”

I heard three words: “Stay a little.” They’re Lear’s plea to Cordelia, the truest of his three daughters, as she slips away. When Hall recited them aloud, it wasn’t just her voice that trembled. It was all of her.

She taught a course on Shakespeare’s tragedies: “Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Othello.” It was by far my favorite class at the University of North Carolina, which I attended in the mid-1980s, though I couldn’t and can’t think of any bluntly practical application for it, not unless you’re bound for a career on the stage or in academia.

More Evidence for the Value of a Liberal Education

This story by Paul Fain at "Inside Higher Ed" reports on several studies of unemployment and job-training.  Fain finds that people with bachelor's degrees now have "a rock-bottom unemployment rate of 2.8 percent" as compared to an "overall unemployment rate [of] 5.7 percent."  The bachelor's degree remains a good investment. Fain also found that College graduates receive a lot more on the job training, not because they have much more to learn than high school or community college graduates, but because "four-year-college graduates tend to get jobs that are specialized, complex and change over time ... particularly in STEM fields. Wherever the earnings are the strongest, that's where the training occurs... The more educated the workforce, the more training in the job."  In other words, employers in our knowledge economy need people who can learn new things all the time, and the people who can do that advance the quickest in their careers. Fain mentions the STEM fields, but learning how to learn and learning to love of learning are central parts of a liberal education rightly pursued.  Because of the knowledge-economy, the liberal arts are more practical today than they have ever been.

Dr. Moser Wins Fashion Contest!

Has anyone else noticed that Dr. Moser hath become a nattier dresser of late?   Here he is in his finest threads, as the winner of the January 2015 “Civilized Fashion” photo contest.  For the details of his attire, see here. Who is this gentleman’s haberdasher? 

Congratulations to Professor Michael Schwarz

Ashland University announced today that Professor Schwarz was granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. That is great news for him, for the Department, and for the University.  Congratulations Dr. Schwarz!