Friday, August 29, 2014

White House "Correspondence" in Summer US Gov't Class

Two students from Dr. Sheng Ding's summer US Government class recently received letters from the White House in response to a writing assignment. Says Dr. Ding: "I have always encouraged my students to apply their classroom learning to real-world politics and develop their independent thinking and communication skills. In my US Gov’t class, I require my students to complete an essay 'Letter to President Obama.'"

The assignment asks students to "Write a letter to President Obama telling him what he has done right and what he has done wrong in his five-and-a-half-year presidency." Students are encouraged to mail their completed essays to the White House.

English major Mary Heffner wrote to the president about the conditions of Veterans Administration Hospitals, based on the experiences of her brother, a Vietnam-era veteran. President Obama's response reads in part as follows: "Where we find misconduct, it will be punished. Those responsible for manipulating or falsifying records at the VA-and those who tolerated it-are being held accountable, and some have been relieved of their duties. At the same time, we are working to get every one of our veterans off wait lists so they receive the care they have earned."

Ashley Rivera, a student in the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology program, wrote to the president expressing her concerns about the Affordable Care Act "Obamacare," welfare reform, and the NSA scandal, writing in part, "... my own government doesn't trust its own citizens enough to let them have their own privacy to the luxury of the Internet and social media. In my eyes, this is in direct violation of the fourth amendment ..."

Thanks to Mary Heffner, Ashley Rivera, and Dr. Sheng Ding for providing the above.




Tuesday, August 19, 2014

"Why do I need to take this class?"

In her "From the Editor" column in the Summer 2014 issue of Diversity & Democracy, Kathryn Peltier Campbell writes the following:
The idea that components of one’s education are boxes to be checked seems most fitting if higher education is simply a series of training modules preparing students for the workforce. But higher education must be so much more than this. As Michael S. Roth recently recounted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2014), American luminaries from Thomas Jefferson to Martha Nussbaum have conceived of liberal learning in college as necessary to prepare students for the messy unknown that is life, not simply the specific requirements of a job. As Roth argues, a narrowly practical approach to higher education will do nothing less than “impoverish us.”
 Last Saturday a colleague and I were discussing how society has lost sight of education as a public good. In higher education, so-called "general education" has been the chief casualty, its erosion hastened by budgetary challenges and--more importantly--by the hesitation of its professed proponents to accept the challenge of asserting its relevance.

We in the humanities, arts, and social sciences need to accept that challenge. We may not see ourselves as agents of "workforce preparation" as such, and we are certainly not just that. But let's not shy away from it either. We know that in the "messy unknown that is life" our future leaders--including those sitting in our classrooms next week--will need to make decisions drawing not only on their own experiences but on an unpredictable collection of facts, ideas, and dreams to which we introduce them, the experiences of historical figures and of those who never existed outside the pages of a novel. In response to challenges we cannot even imagine, they will need to exercise the creativity that was nurtured and challenged on our stages and in our classrooms and studios. They will need to apply the intellectual rigor they sharpened against scientific and abstract philosophical concepts as well as the compassion that comes from understanding the plights of others.

The future depends on it.