(09/24/03)
Miami Middletown Cultural Programs Supported By
Generous Donation From Bever FamilyThe Bever family of Oxford has made a $10,000 donation to Miami University Middletown in support of its arts programs. The gift was made in honor of Rod Nimtz, Assistant Executive Director and former Coordinator of the Artist & Lecture Series for the campus.
"This very generous support is greatly appreciated," said Michael Governanti, Executive Director of the campus. "An important part of the campus' mission is serving as a cultural resource for the region, and the Bever's gift will enable us to explore some new cultural programming directions, particularly with multicultural programming."
Part of the funds will be used to support the Fantastic Free Fridays programs which Nimtz created three years ago. Since then more than 15,000 young people have had the opportunity to experience a wide array of live arts performances, including international music, jazz, opera, theatre and even Miami University's Marching Band. Now entering its fourth year, Fantastic Free Fridays performances are offered free to schools in a five county area, and the performances are open to the public. Miami Middletown music faculty member Susan Joyce now coordinates this program
New campus multicultural programming will be supported with the funds as well. These will be coordinated by Darius Prier, recently appointed to the new position of Coordinator of Multicultural Affairs at Miami Middletown.
Nimtz began coordinating the Artist & Lecture Series in 1986, assuming those responsibilities from Clare Easton who founded the series at the campus in 1966. His work with campus cultural programming was passed to Joyce and Prier as he took up a new work assignment focusing on the development of the Voice of America Learning Center for Miami.
The Bever family was honored together with other campus supporters at a special reception prior to the campus' annual scholarship benefit concert on Saturday, September 20.
The concert, titled "With A Little Help From Our Friends," marked the fourth time that Miami alumni pianists Julius "Juice" Davis, Nimtz, Jimmy Rogers, and Jeff Smith joined musical forces in support of scholarship endowments for the campus.
This year's concert helped to endow the Malcom Sedam Scholarship Fund, named in honor of the late Miami Middletown professor of creative writing.
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(09/18/03)
Dr. Kelly Cowan's Convocation AddressSeptember 8, 2003
Thank you, Dr. Governanti, and Wendy and Dave Ballard. Thank you, Rod, for the beautiful music. And thank you Dr. Ewers, for giving us a convocation, and for inviting me to speak today.
First, briefly, to my colleagues among the faculty and staff. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the support and encouragement you have shown me over the past few months. I can not tell you that it will be repaid with perfect results, but I will promise you it will be repaid with my total dedication and sincerity.
I want to address my remarks, today, to the students. Thank you for coming today. Thank you for coming to Miami University Middletown. We - all of us in this room - are excited to be your partners in learning. I am humbled to be talking to you about our Partnership in Learning. Truly, despite my years in the classroom, I really have very little standing to lecture you about learning. Because a few nights ago as I was looking in my own son's back-pack, I found this little card. Written on it in his 11-yr old handwriting is the following:
"Whenever I get the urge to learn, I go watch TV until it goes away."
Clearly, I've got some work to do with him. Some partnering.
I want to start by making a sharp distinction between learning and information. It is by now trite to remind you that we live in an "Information Age". This is not just a media sound bite but a true revolution on the scale of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, in the history of humankind. Access to information has exploded, in much the same way it did when the printing press was invented. We have information, or "content" delivered to absolutely every portal imaginable: our doorsteps, our email accounts, our cell phones, our pagers. You might suspect that the prospect of having all this information available to you at a finger's touch for the rest of your life, might eliminate the need for sitting in classrooms, might eliminate the need for the kind of broad-based formal education in the Miami Plan. Why, you ask, do I need to sit through a Miami Plan elective if I am getting a 2 yr engineering degree and moving straight on to a job? And I have the internet for any other information I might need?
I will answer this question with a question, though it is not my own. A well-known author has asked "Where is the knowledge that is lost in information?"1 Now, this was not a 21st century writer - it was T.S. Eliot, the great American poet who died in 1965, before the advent of msn.com. He understood, even then, at the very earliest stirrings of the Information Age, the difference between learning and accessing information.
What distinguishes knowledge, or learning, from the acquisition of information is what is required of you. A university education (1-y or 2-yr or 4-yr) is not a commodity, a static entity that can be deposited in your inbox as a finished product. It is a process - it may begin with some information input, but you will find that in your college classroom a piece of information will turn into a question. The questions multiply. In the words of Ingrid Bengis, a contemporary Russian-American author, "The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will."2 What is required of you is a tolerance for uncertainty, discomfort, change.
Turning information into knowledge and knowledge into an education requires something else: learning outside of your major. If all you needed was information that could get you a job, you could get that at a technical school. But you came to Miami. You expect more of us. And you will get it. Perhaps it is only one or two courses - but they will make all the difference.
Please don't mistake me. I know what your realities are - I know that you need decent employment and decent salaries, and sooner rather than later. National statistics for students enrolled on two-year campuses tell us that 64% of you are financially independent - which is different than independently wealthy - you are on your own financially or supporting a family and you do not have the luxury of time to meander around in the ivory tower of liberal education. I know. WE know.
That is why we would never waste your time. We will never waste your time. We At Miami University Middletown believe that merely delivering information to you or merely training you would be wasting your time. If present trends continue you will change careers at least 3 times in your life - not jobs, careers. We believe that you need a preparation for your life as much as you need a preparation for any single career.
So at this school your program will give you the opportunity to learn about people like T.S. Eliot, or maybe Lao Tzu, or Toni Morrison. You may also learn about animal diversity, or social conflict theory, or descriptive statistics. There are realities of the world we live in that require you to know about these things.
Permit me some time to outline a couple of these realities. The first I will call "There is Nothing New Under the Sun", and the second, paradoxically, is "There is Something New Under the Sun."
There is Nothing New Under the Sun refers to the human condition. Despite societal revolutions and shifts, we humans are fundamentally the same as we have been for tens of thousands of years. We are born, we live, we die. We have children we love. We put food on the table. We grieve when we experience loss. The point of studying the humanities and the social sciences is to benefit from the human experience, to know, in the words of Matthew Arnold, "the best which has been thought and said in the world".3 But how do you find "the best" in the glut of information to which we are constantly exposed? May I propose that you find it in your Foundation courses?
Why should you, a human -- living thousands of generations after the first of your kind - struggle as if you were the first? To take just one example, on Thursday we will have a memorial for the events of September 11, 2001. Why should you struggle alone with comprehending the acts of that day when you could share in Walt Whitman's reaction to shocking loss of American lives during a horrible war in his time? Or with Lithuanian/Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who writes of the horrors the mid 20th century inflicted on Europe
"Alas," he says, "my memory
does not want to leave me."4
Find company for your experiences; there is nothing new under the sun.
There is one thing here, you will have noticed, that is a prerequisite for a person who will be educated rather than simply trained: it is what physicist Richard Feynman called "a humility of intellect" - to realize that there is a great record of human experience from which we can profit by knowing. That no matter how technically advanced we feel, or how many revolutions we undergo, there is something the past can teach us. For example, did you know that the Terminator is actually a modern day reincarnation of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which was in fact a treatise on the rise of science and technology in the 1800's? Useful information - if you are a voter in California.
Now I can tell you that I did not give you the whole story before. T.S. Eliot did not simply ask "where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" In the same poem he asked "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?" and most importantly, "Where is the Life we have lost in living?"1
At Miami University Middletown we strike a very special balance with our emphasis on school-to-work coupled with our emphasis on school-to-life (otherwise known as the Miami Plan). We prepare you for the living and we prepare you for life.
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So far I have not called upon the only subject area with which I have any real acquaintance. So I will now briefly call on the natural sciences in defense of my second statement: "There is Something New Under the Sun". This "Something New" makes it imperative that thinking citizens of this planet - educated citizens of this planet -- have more than a surface understanding of the natural sciences. This Something New Under the Sun is the ability of one species (humans) to intentionally design the next generation of organisms - whether it is a virus, or a sheep, or a human, we have entered an era of what Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls volitional evolution.5 - most of us know it as Genetic Engineering.
The scientific record shows that hundreds of millions of years life on this planet has been subject to the natural evolutionary pressures which moved so slowly, taking thousands of years, as to be almost unnoticed. Now humans, and humans only, can in the blink of an eye effect genetic changes in any species on this planet - including our own - that for the whole history of the planet have taken thousands of years. We have no idea what the ramifications of this will be. Historians tell us, in fact, that most of the consequences of any major societal revolution are unintended consequences - which also means we can't predict what they will be. But we can be assured they will be enormous.
We are the generation that is directing the initial usage of this power. Reflect for a moment on the historical record of how humans have used new powers they have found, and you will understand the responsibility we shoulder now. And look, I have come back to the humanities, and the social sciences, though I meant to talk about natural science - because this power - and deciding how to use it, and what rules should govern it, and who writes the rules, requires citizens --- you -- to have a good understanding of science tempered by deep ethical underpinnings afforded by a study of the humanities and the social sciences.
What I ask of you today is not to assume that someone else will do it, someone else will prepare him or herself to handle these tough issues. We have seen the wisdom and ethics of some of our top business leaders, and our top politicians. What kind of damage could a group of Enron executives inflict if their business was the power to change the genetic makeup of species? As is the business of many companies, today. Will our leaders have the intellectual humility to use their new power wisely?
The Genetic Revolution is not the only huge scientific or technological issue on the national agenda. Fully half of the legislation that comes before the US Congress contains important scientific and technological components. Edward O. Wilson again: "Most of the issues that vex humanity daily - ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, care for the aging, the environment, endemic poverty, to cite several - cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities."5 Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are themselves narrowly trained (and seldom in the sciences). ) Will you trust their decisions? Will you accept what they decide about your health or your offspring? How will you vote? Will you vote?
All these questions! My questions, T.S. Eliot's questions. And besides that there are my contradictions. First I say "There is Nothing New Under the Sun" then I say "There is Something New Under the Sun". Which is it? A deep immersion in your courses this year will have succeeded if you can live with questions and contradictions like this. In the words of German poet Rainer Marie Rilke, "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answers."6
Live the questions now. Love the contradictions here. Learn inside and outside of your specialty. We will be your partners.
I now declare the 2003-2004 academic year officially in session.
Thank you.
1. T.S. Eliot, The Rock, Faber and Faber, London, England. 1934.
2. Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone, Alfred Knopf, New York, NY, 1972.
3. Matthew Arnold, "Literature and Science" in Discourses in America, 1885.
4. Csezlaw Milosz, "A Poem for the End of the Century", http://www.ibiblio.org/dykki/poetry/milosz/milcov.html
5. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Random House, New York, NY, 1998.
6. Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, W.W. Norton & Co., (reissue) 1989.
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(09/05/03)
Trick Words Hurt Affirmative ActionThis article by Miami Middletown's Dr. Jim Ewers was recently published in the magazine "Black Issues in Higher Education."
The minority community in America is paying close attention to two cities these days. One city is Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan and the other is Washington, D.C., home of the United States Supreme Court. The University of Michigan has come under attack because it uses race in its admissions criteria. Their rationale is that by using race as one of several criteria, it increases their chances of achieving a racially diverse student body. Of course, the naysayers are in a boil about the use of race. Never mind that legacy, geography and special abilities are other factors that are used.
With regards to legacy, if a student's mom or dad went to Michigan then chances are that he/she stands a good chance of gaining admission. Legacy advantages are used at a number of colleges and universities across our land. If you follow the legacy trend, you will see that grades and test scores don't count as much. What counts more, is that mom or dad is an alumnus. Why isn't there much uproar about this admissions advantage? Isn't this affirmative action for moms and dads? I am just posing the question. Don't be upset.
Many schools, like Michigan, use geography as another way of recruiting a diverse mix of students. Simply put, colleges and universities recruit from regions of the state that are under represented with students on their campus. So, if you are a talented student from Butter Pecan, Michigan, and all things being equal, you will probably become a Wolverine. I don't hear many people debating the merits of admitting those students. Where are the moaners and complainers when you really need them? Let's simply call this geographical affirmative action.
Another admissions advantage that is being overlooked is in the area of special talents/abilities. I would say athletics, band and cheerleading, just to mention a few examples, would fall under this category. Once again, there is not much rancor when it comes to admitting these students. I have not read many articles about students bringing lawsuits against universities that bring in students with these special gifts. My personal view is that if students possess special skills and colleges want to give them an opportunity, then good for them. After all, one of the broad goals of affirmative action is to give more students an opportunity to get an education.
Opponents of affirmative action try to muddy the waters by using misleading words and phrases. One phrase that I hear a lot these days is preferential treatment. Affirmative action and preferential treatment, to my mind, don't go together. Quite honestly, you can give anyone preferential treatment. Pretty much, this term must be defined thru the eyes of the giver. For example, if you give a person who is a friend a heads-up about a job, is that preferential treatment? If a woman helps another woman to get a job, is that preferential treatment? I am always struck when I hear someone say, "Our company only wants qualified minorities." Of course, too many people link affirmative action to lower standards and qualifications. I don't know of any organization that wants unqualified people. The issue is competence, not color.
Quota is also another word found in the lexicon of those who oppose affirmative action. My response to the quota folks is that I want to see both quality and quantity. I hope that we have come farther along than being satisfied with only one person of color or woman on a board, commission or committee. I may get some upset with this statement, yet it is my view that minority leaders have a responsibility to bring other minorities into the circle of influence. The days of being happy to have just one of us at the table are gone. Visionary leaders understand the importance of diversity in its broadest terms. When leaders create environments where people are valued and made to feel that their contributions count, then the talk of inclusion becomes the daily practice of inclusion.
Those against affirmative action are opposed because they are seeing their monopoly on opportunity being shared with people who don't look like them. America's credo still is if you gain credentials and qualifications, work hard then opportunities will open up for you. The "you" is a collective you, and not a selective you. Opportunity is much like a pie. Those opposed to affirmative action have always had all of the pie. Now the pie is being sliced a different way and being shared by more people.
For those of you who say, "I am for affirmative action as long as it doesn't affect the status quo"; my answer to you is in the form of a question. "Who is the status quo?" The newest census data says that America's minority will become America's majority in the not too distant future. Affirmative action is nothing to be feared. It simply gives all of us the opportunity to conceive, believe and achieve. It also gives people of color a chance to have a slice of the pie.
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(09/03/03)
Enrollment Nearly 3,000 on First Day
Preliminary enrollment on the first day of classes for fall semester at Miami University Middletown reached 2,945, short of last year's record of 3,035. However, a five percent increase in full-time enrollment has resulted in a new record for undergraduate student credit hours, exceeding last year's by two percent.
"We are pleased at the very positive response from new and continuing students to our programs and services, which we continually improve in keeping with the needs and interests of our region's diverse population," said Michael P. Governanti, Miami Middletown executive director.
Multicultural student enrollment, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian/Pacific Islanders, now represents 9.9 percent of the total student body.
First time student enrollment increased to 573, compared to 519 last August. Total undergraduate enrollment at Miami Middletown includes 1,270 full-time and 1,646 part-time students.
Twenty-three percent of Miami Middletown's students are enrolled in one of the campus' associate degree programs, including business, chemical, computer and information, and engineering technologies, nursing and prekindergarten education. Seventy-one percent intend to pursue a bachelor's degree, and five percent are designated as non-degree students.
Fifty-seven percent of Miami Middletown's students are Butler County residents; 18 percent are Warren County residents; and the remainder is largely from Montgomery, Preble, and Hamilton counties.
Fall semester classes began at the Middletown campus on August 26. Miami University Middletown is located at 4200 E. University Blvd. in Middletown and is one of Miami University's two regional campuses located in southwest Ohio.
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