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FEATURES A conversation with Neil Kerwin |
Your college days are long over—the late nights spent reading in the library and studying in your dorm room now just memories as faded as your favorite pair of jeans. But what if you could return to AU for a semester on a sort of academic fantasy camp, in which you could sample any combination of the university’s vibrant course offerings and engaging professors? American set out to find some savory selections for our perfect semester. Our picks for AU experiences you’d really not want to miss were culled from chats with deans, faculty, students, and academic advisers. What follows is a small sampling of the entrées offered on AU’s intellectual menu, but we’re sure that any student who indulges in one of the classes, professors, or internships detailed on these pages will walk away immensely satisfied. Your college days may be through, but for thousands of young Eagles preparing to experience the AU ideals of hands-on teaching and service learning, the feast is just beginning. Enjoy. Insider’s View of Justice School of Public Affairs (SPA)
Sometimes, a textbook just doesn’t cut it. The course Insider’s View of Justice offers graduate students an intensive, behind-the-scenes look at the American criminal justice system, from the courts to the correctional centers. Students observe and interact with the justice practitioners, in whose chairs they hope to sit one day. “This summer, students visited death row and were walked through a mock execution,” says Professor Richard Bennett, of the two-week summer class. “They get to feel what it’s like to be in that environment, to see the actual gurney. “That’s the difference between this class and black print on white pages.” The students toured sites across the Washington area, from the Public Defenders Service to the Montgomery County Jail to the Metropolitan Police Department. In her courtroom at U.S. District Court, Judge Leonie Brinkema, who has presided over such high-profile cases as the 2006 trial of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, asked all the participants—except the defendants—to stay after the court sessions to answer the students’ questions. “They’re very frank with the students,” says Bennett. “They’re willing to discuss all the warts and blemishes. “My hope is that students leave the class with a better understanding that criminal justice agencies are run by people, with people’s expectations and failings,” he continues. “If students want to change the system, they first have to understand how it operates.” —AF Cross-Cultural Cinema School of Communication (SOC) In your first film course, you’d expect to learn the principles of cinematography, but what about cross-cultural communication? Different class, right? Not if you were a student in Professor Sarah Menke-Fish’s Film and Video I class. “The first day she said, ‘You’re going to be making a cross-cultural documentary with kids at Tec de Monterrey [in Mexico],’” says Drew Rosensweig, who took the course his sophomore year. Menke-Fish then split her students into three production teams, and each hashed out their ideas for a documentary on the differences between Mexican and U.S. culture. During multiple video conferences, the teams discussed those ideas with students nearly 2,000 miles away. “I wanted to bring that cross-cultural challenge into the classroom,” says Menke-Fish. “From the very beginning I said, ‘You’re going to be working with another group from another country, in another language, and you’re going to have to find ways to make it work.’” Which was difficult, but rewarding, says junior Paola Tapia. “There were so many different ideas, it was hard to agree.” Over spring break, representatives from each production team flew to Mexico to meet with their colleagues from Tec de Monterrey and to shoot. After shipping footage back and forth, each team produced their final films—one from an American perspective and one from a Mexican perspective. At the end of the course, now named Cross-Cultural Cinema, Menke-Fish screened the six films for her students and a handful of Monterrey students who made the trip to AU. Rosensweig was surprised to see “two totally different views from the same material. It’s one thing to read about a subject, but it’s another thing to live it . . . This is why you go to college.” —MG Strategic Decision Making in a Global Environment Kogod School of Business (Kogod) When the fall cohort of MBA students start their business education in a few weeks they’ll be taking a unique path. Throughout their first year they’ll encounter accounting, economics, finance, and marketing in the new business signature course. Five professors will teach the two-semester course, and topics will be integrated with students’ other course work. It’s part of the “new Kogod flavor,” says Kathleen Getz, Kogod senior associate dean for academic affairs. “We’ve built it from the bottom, starting with econ and accounting; we expect it to be challenging. When you’re working in the business world, these things really aren’t standalone, and we want students to understand that right from the start. “Doing all of that in one course,” at the start of the MBA program, “is quite different,” Getz says. Most MBA programs offer it as a capstone at the end of the program; “we’ve [moved] it to the beginning so students are exposed right away. “It’s a whole new approach,” says Getz. “The lines between the different things will be blurred, because they’re blurred in the real world. That’s how we want students to learn.” —MU Social- Science-Fiction University Honors Program When Professor Patrick Jackson, director of the General Education Program, interviewed for a faculty position at the School of International Service, he was asked, Jackson described a course he knew would fall outside the box. Now he’s teaching that course to wide acclaim, steering students in vigorous discussions that range from political theory to fractal geometry to anthropology to the nature of imagination. Jackson’s honors seminar is a multidisciplinary look at strategies used to predict the future. Among its thought-provoking questions: What, if anything, distinguishes imaginative constructions from scientific constructions? Scholars of international relations, economists, and other social scientists—people whose work impacts policy makers—construct their scenarios in part by studying historical situations and isolating key factors in various outcomes. The best science fiction writers, Jackson says, engage in a process with striking similarities. “Good science fiction is concerned not with technology, but with the human response to technology,” he says. “So it’s all about human relations and how we process various kinds of technology and biological diversity.” Students read sociologist Max Weber and anthropologist Clifford Geertz alongside sci-fi classics and influential novels such as Dune and Snow Crash, which not only predicted elements of the online world but influenced it. The class, he makes clear in the syllabus, is not “a science fiction appreciation class” or a chance to read science fiction for credit. It models the sort of wide-ranging discussion a student should be able to engage in by the end of a liberal arts education—the ability to synthesize a rich variety of texts, from many disciplines, into a thoughtful and informed conversation. —SA The Family College of Arts and Sciences Professor Andrea Brenner loves “aha moments”—moments when a student suddenly looks back at her with a spark in his eye or a look of revelation on her face. And in Brenner’s popular sociology of the family course, there are plenty of “aha moments.” “The class is based on the premise that the American family is undergoing dramatic changes, and diversity is the norm,” says Brenner, herself an adoptive parent. Brenner brings in a host of guest speakers, from pregnant mothers to gay fathers, and tasks her students with unconventional assignments. During the unit on childbirth students wear 25 lbs. of flour for a day, giving them a taste of the third trimester. The course culminates with students creating an imaginary family of four living at the poverty line—and attempting to keep them afloat. Students find jobs, make living arrangements, and budget both time and money to understand what life at the poverty line means. “A lot of my students haven’t had to worry about finances, so this is really eye-opening for them,” says Brenner. “They’ll start out giggling at what I’m asking them to do, but by the end of the semester, they’ve fallen in love with their families and are doing everything they can to keep them going.” —AF Advocacy Project • Caitlin Burnett, SIS
Caitlin Burnett got used to the sights and smells of the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. What she didn’t get used to was the fate of women like Monju, who was blinded by typhoid fever as a toddler. Burnett was working with a disability rights organization, BERDO, that had supported Monju through college. But, in spite of her degree, Monju’s job hunt was proving fruitless.
Devin Greenleaf worked in Nepal with a center advocating for the rights of dalits—the hereditary blacksmiths, tanners, sweepers, and others who once were dubbed “untouchables” and remain a deeply disadvantaged group. On her first day of work in rural Guatemala, Abby Weil saw the newly unearthed coffins of indigenous Mayans who had been killed by the army. She was there to work with ADIVIMA, a human rights advocacy group. The three AU graduate students served as Peace Fellows this summer through the Advocacy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Peace Fellows work to help their host organizations become self-sufficient in the use of information, says Advocacy Project deputy director Stacy Kosko. “Most of these organizations are very effective within their communities, but they hit a certain wall when it comes to access to international media.” Greenleaf planned to help the Jagaran Media Center, founded by dalit journalists, incorporate video and photo essays on its Web page. Burnett’s goals included developing English language material for BERDO, getting it online, and networking with other organizations. The Advocacy Project’s Heather Ratcliff, SIS/MA ’05, trains the fellows in blogging and writing press releases, while others prepare them to use specialized software and adapt to the security issues and logistics of working in conflict ridden countries. Their blogs can be read at http://advocacynet.org/ —SA Seventeen Magazine • Ashley Bernstein, Kogod ‘08 Ashley Bernstein spent the summer of 2007 working in New York at iconic teen magazine Seventeen, the first magazine she ever purchased. For 12 weeks, Bernstein reported to her desk on the 18th floor of the Hearst Building on Columbus. As promotions intern she went on sales calls, wrote letters to potential advertisers, and notified readers by phone that they’d won a Seventeen contest or a sweepstakes. After the call, it was up to her to plan the details of the winner’s prize package, be it a total makeover or a manicure. It was one of her most exhilarating assignments. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be out here in the middle of all the action,” says the Houston native. Before arriving at Seventeen, Bernstein couldn’t decide whether to pursue accounting or marketing. “This cleared up a lot of things for me,” she says. “Interacting with people, working with people every day, it fits my personality.” —MU XM Satellite Radio •Stacy Picking, CAS ‘07 Most D.C. interns would love to stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to work, but Stacy Picking was happier to find herself on “Abbey Road.” Working as a music programming intern at XM Satellite Radio’s D.C. headquarters, the AU music major tuned in to a piece of history about one of her favorite bands. “Just to hear some of these interviews was a real thrill,” she says, describing how she edited archival interviews for the Deep Tracks radio show. “One was [Beatles recording engineer] Geoff Emerick talking about the guitar solo at the end of “Abbey Road,” and how George, Paul, and John each recorded their parts of the solo separately . . . because they weren’t getting along at the time. It was just amazing to hear about that kind of stuff—I’m a huge Beatles fan.” Add to that the opportunity to network with music production and marketing professionals and catch a live concert on your lunch hour, and you get one of Washington’s new top internships. “There’s always something going on, and when you have some free time, you can go into any studio and see it,” says Picking. “A few weeks ago, Ben Harper came to perform and I got to see that. You have things like that going on pretty much every day.” —MG USA Today • Mary Specht, SOC ‘06 A few months before Mary Specht walked by Sandra Day O’Connor in a hallway at USA Today, she never thought the newspaper’s coveted reporting internship was in her future. “It’s one of those internships that gets a million résumés,” she explains. Then she talked to SOC professor and former USA Today cover story editor Amy Eisman. Eisman promised to call a USA Today contact and support Specht’s application. An interview later, the Eagle reporter had captured one of the country’s most sought-after reporting internships. In her nearly three months writing for the “Life” section, Specht wrote eight articles on everything from competitive hot-dog eating to college tuition. “When the first one came out, I grabbed about a bajillion copies,” she recalls. “Actually, I did that for all the articles.” In some ways those stories were easier to write than the dozens she’d written for the Eagle. “When you say you’re from USA Today,” says Specht, “everyone calls you back.” But in other ways the internship stretched the young journalist. In particular, she notes, the fact-checking process was more rigorous than any she’d encountered “If you make a mistake in USA Today, 2 million people will see it,” says Specht. And it was USA Today that brought her shoulder to shoulder with Sandra Day O’Connor. On site for an interview, the retired Supreme Court justice noticed Specht’s early morning work ethic. “I was one of the only people there because I tend to like to get an early start,” Specht recalls. “She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Are you the only one doing any work around here?’” —MG Senate Judiciary Committee • Thomas Leahy, Washington College of Law (WCL) When the eyes and ears of political Washington focused on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys earlier this year, Thomas Leahy watched the drama unfold from an insider’s point-of-view. As an extern with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the third-year Washington College of Law student helped research the data provided to the committee by the Justice Department and assisted with preparing questions for witnesses. Leahy, a Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Corps helicopter pilot who served in the Iraq war, spent the spring semester as an extern on Sen. Arlen Specter’s committee staff. He’s intent on pursuing a career in government, and he said his experience on Capitol Hill will be invaluable in helping him achieve his goal. “I’m interested in practicing law here in D.C., and it’s important to understand how the legislative process works,” said Leahy, a North Carolina native. “Anytime you can sit at that top tier of power and see the way the system works, I think it’s beneficial.” One of three interns on the staff, Leahy wrote memos, researched legal issues, and helped with administrative tasks for 20 hours each week. During the semester, he learned some of the nuances and intricacies of how the legislative process works. “Inefficiencies in the system are sometimes a good thing,” he said. “A lot of people complain that Congress does nothing, but I think it’s not supposed to be a blank check and a system whereby things get passed quickly. What I learned through our system is that it’s well thought out so all views can be heard, and it demands compromise. That principle doesn’t make it the most efficient system, but oftentimes you do get a good product in terms of legislation.” —MU Michelle Egan, SIS
At a family wedding, years ago in the south of Ireland, Michelle Egan was introduced to a stranger. She can’t recall the man’s name anymore, but she remembers his political party. “This is so-and-so,” she was told, and then, in the same breath, “he’s Fine Gael.” The way politics permeated everyday life among her Irish relatives made a lasting impression on the half-Irish, half-British Egan. She’s now a leading expert on comparative European politics and political economy. Her classroom discussions of trade barriers, passport issues, and the mathematical questions of economics bubble with life. Since 1996 she’s taught some 15 different courses to undergraduate, graduate, and honors students. “Even the courses I’ve taught before always change,” she says. “I’ve gone from offering a class on Western Europe to offering one on Pan-Europe. When I started teaching at AU there were 12 members of the EU, now there are 27. There’s a common currency and foreign policy. I love the sheer range of the courses I’m able to teach.” Her goal in each class is admetam contendo. “In Latin it means to strive to do well,” Egan says. “It applies to both me and my students.” Sidney Olinyk, who took her course Overview of the European Union before spending a semester in Rome, says “It was the perfect class to take before I went to Europe. Egan is the most knowledgeable professor in her curriculum that I have ever had. [Her] class was an intense learning experience. She was passionate about her teachings . . . you can see her mind at work. She’s brilliant and still tries to learn more every day.” Angela Davis, WCL
Students in Angela Davis’s Criminal Law course know that they’re not just learning theory. Davis draws heavily from her extensive experience in Washington’s Public Defender’s Service, where she spent a dozen years representing the city’s most underprivileged citizens. “It was a life-changing experience for me,” says Davis, who also served as executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition. “I was representing poor people, but more importantly for me, these were people who all of society had turned their back on. I loved freeing people from the system, loved it when my clients were found not guilty, loved being able to keep them out of the awful prison system, which only made their It was during this time, largely in the 1980s, that Davis became fascinated—and disturbed—by prosecutorial power run amok. As her intellectual curiosity began pulling her from the courtroom toward the classroom, she delved deeper into the subject. It became the backbone of her research when she entered the academy in the 1990s, and it is the focus of her 2007 book, Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. The topic often bubbles to the forefront of American culture, as it did during the notorious Duke lacrosse case. Earlier this year, charges against three players on Duke University’s lacrosse team for allegedly raping an exotic dancer at a team party were dismissed by North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper, who described prosecutor Michael Nifong as a “rogue.” Nifong was later disbarred. “This happens to people every day, but because they’re these fancy kids at Duke everyone was outraged,” she says. “He got referred because of the publicity that case got, and those kids had high-powered lawyers. Most people who suffer the same mistreatment do not get that. I’m glad for them, and [I hope] that case will have some trickle-down effect.” The effect did not need to trickle down to Davis’s classroom, where she’s been examining these issues for years. “When people are involved in the criminal justice system, they start seeing and they become outraged. We’ve got to start paying attention because with all the wrongful convictions we’re learning about every day, you just never know. Could be you, could be your family member. So we need to all care very much about how our criminal justice system works.” Daniel Dreisbach and Alan Levine, SPA
Daniel Dreisbach and Alan Levine, linchpins in the School of Public Affairs, spent last year reinvigorating their scholarship some 185 miles from Washington, D.C. The scholars spent the 2006–07 academic year as visiting fellows at the James Madison Program in Princeton University’s Department of Politics. From offices on the New Jersey campus, the two worked on separate book projects. “I spent my year reading and writing, two things I love to do,” Dreisbach says. “It’s a very lively community [with] ample opportunities to attend lectures and participate.” The son of missionaries, Dreisbach was born and raised in West Africa. He went to law school and worked in the federal court system before arriving at AU in 1991. His research at Princeton on the place of religion in the American founding period fits into his passion for the study of the relationship between church and state. “We live in a very secular culture today, and I think we tend not to appreciate the extent to which faith and religion influenced the culture in which they lived,” says Dreisbach. “These were people who were very well informed on matters of theology, and I think religion played a vital role in the way they thought about democracy.” In a few weeks he’ll be back at the Ward Circle Building, sharing his new insights with his colleagues and students. Alan Levine was drawn to AU by its Washington location and the vibrancy of its students. “Our students are alive,” he says. “They all have a notion of what they think is a good society, and my challenge is to take what they think and introduce them to what the great minds of the West would have thought on this topic.” Levine spent his year at Princeton working on a book that examines the ideas of America in European political thought from 1492 to 9/11. “The theme is, generally—why do they hate us?” he says. “People say the Europeans hate us because of the Iraq war or the Kyoto Treaty, but all the arguments Europeans make these days can be traced back 200 years,” he says. “In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and first half of the eighteenth centuries, when Europeans thought of America, they thought of the Indians—Native Americans were naive, simplistic, lacking higher spirituality. That’s what they said about the Indians then, and it’s more or less what they say about the United States today.” A Philadelphia native who discovered his passion for political philosophy while studying at the University of Chicago, Levine relished the opportunity to interact with other fellows at Princeton. “No one had the exact same kind of background,” he says. “Very shortly after I got there, a couple of people made suggestions to me and made me realize that I had more research to do.” He now knows how his students often feel. “I want them to question their presuppositions,” he says. “They all come in thinking they know everything, and I want to show them that they don’t. In the end, I don’t care if they change their opinions or not, but they have to be able to defend them from different points of view.” Pat Aufderheide, SOC
Pat Aufderheide’s documentary film students don’t stop relying on her after they leave her classroom. As they begin producing films in the “real world,” they’ll probably consult the acclaimed Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. The publication she spearheaded boils down the legal jargon of fair use and copyright law for documentarians. Last year Aufderheide received a career achievement award from the International Documentary Association (IDA) for both her work on fair use and her scholarship. “Pat Aufderheide’s work as a journalist, policy analyst, author, and professor has demonstrated her deep commitment to social justice through creative use of the media,” says Sandra Rush, executive director of IDA, which represents nearly 3,000 film professionals in 50 countries. “Our members, as well as the public at large, benefit from her work in many direct and indirect ways.” Add AU students to that list of beneficiaries. “The core of our task here is to be perpetual learners,” says Aufderheide, who is now crafting a code of best practices for educators and students to consult when confronted with questions about the use of copyrighted materials. “That’s what makes us university professors. We don’t just know a lot, we know how to find things out. “We’re not just intellectual FedEx. Our goal is to communicate what we know, [and] the vocation we’re feeling . . . I work hard at teaching, and I see that they [students] work hard at learning.” Victoria Connaughton, CAS
Board games. Jump ropes. Boxes filled with sand and buried bones. Victoria Connaughton will use almost anything to ensure that biology comes alive for her students. “I try to keep it interactive and hands-on,” says Connaughton, who came to AU in 1999. “When you do science, it’s a lot of facts, and the facts can be boring. I try to present things in a different way.” Which brings us to Mouse Trap. Connaughton uses the board game intended for children ages 6 to 12 to teach cellular respiration to her mostly 18- to 22-year-old undergraduates. The object of the game is to build an intricate trap with levers, catapults, and gears to capture the opposition’s mice. In Connaughton’s Hurst Hall lab, the rules are a little different. Each lever and pulley represents a step in the cellular respiration process. The goal is to put the steps together in the correct order and make energy by capturing
a mouse. “Cellular respiration, how cells make energy, is a complicated process,” she says. “Keeping all the steps organized can be difficult. The complexity of the biological process is mimicked in the game. The students can see that one step leads to another. They get it.” Connaughton uses the jump ropes for the unit on muscles and simulates an archaeological dig to get her Structure and Function students excited about the skeletal system. “Bones are really important, but they’re also really boring,” she says. To spice things up, she has her students “excavate” bones from a box of sand, label and assemble the skeleton, and determine what animal it came from. “When I was a biology major, things were much different,” says Connaughton, who earned her BA in biology from Bucknell University and her PhD in marine studies from the University of Delaware. “Everything was lecture based; you took notes, and then you were tested. When I first came to AU, that was my teaching style because that’s all I knew. Granted, some material just has to be presented that way, but I could sense I wasn’t engaging students as much as I thought I could. I wanted them to get involved in what we were talking about, so I started looking at material from other perspectives. “Science isn’t just sitting in your chair, taking notes, and memorizing facts,” she says. “Science can also be so much fun.” Nicole Melander, Kogod
During her nearly two-decade career at Microsoft and Oracle, Nicole Melander rarely participated in a meeting that didn’t include a conference call or Web component. Now, as an executive in residence at Kogod, Melander has enthusiastically embraced the new concept of hybrid learning, in which the face-to-face classroom experience is taken online. “So much of what’s happening now in the world is being done virtually,” she says. “You’re really lucky at this point if you’re in an office and the people you work with on a regular basis are also there. You might be working with people in China or India or Europe. If we don’t get our students ready for this reality, we’re doing them a disservice.” In Melander’s hybrid course, students listen to her lecture via phone while they view her visual aides online. They can also submit questions, post comments, and talk to one another. “The students are all logged on at the same time,” Melander explains. “They’re on a phone call for the voice component. There’s technology that enables them to see whatever Web site or Power Point the teacher is showing. The advantage for me of course is I can deliver it from anywhere. If I need to go to Germany to participate in a conference, I don’t have to interrupt my class. You can deal with things like snow days. For the students, there’s the same benefit; they can be sitting in their pajamas in class. Companies use these products on a regular basis, and it is expected that students be comfortable with this sort of meeting technology. Even if it doesn’t come up in an interview, the first time they participate in a conference call with the boss, they know what they’re doing.” |
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