Fall 2018

The 'liberal arts': what that really means

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 19:15:04 +0000

The 'liberal arts': what that really means Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/01/2018 - 13:15

James W.C. White

The ancient Greeks had many good ideas. One of them was democracy, the foundation of our government. Another was that education—one that prepared citizens to steer the ship of state—was a foundation of democracy.

James W.C. White

The Romans formalized this notion into the artes liberales (“liberal arts”), a set of skills and practices in which all citizens should be educated. Cicero lists these as geometry, music, literature, natural science, ethics, politics, and, above all, the rhetorical skills required to communicate effectively and persuasively.

The fields we number among the liberal arts have grown in the 2,000 years since Cicero defined the notion, but the basic conception—the idea that the full range of these skills are needed to equip the citizens of free societies for full participation in democracy and in a life fulfilled on individual terms—remains the same.

Today in the College of Arts and Sciences, the liberal arts—updated to include a broader range of subjects—remain central to the education of all students.

You see our commitment to the liberal arts in our newly revised general-education curriculum, which became effective this fall. The gen-ed curriculum, a requirement for every student in the college, obliges students to take and pass courses in a broad and diverse range of disciplines.

Under the curriculum, students must pass a minimum of 12 credits in each of the three divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences: the arts and humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences. They must also pass 3 credits of classes in quantitative reasoning and math plus 6 credits of writing. Finally, they take 6 credits to meet the diversity requirement, which exists to prepare students to function and lead in our multicultural, multiethnic, transnational and global society.

Our gen-ed curriculum reflects the old idea of artes liberales as applied to the challenges of the future. College graduates today are expected to change jobs more frequently than in the past and adapt to a rapidly changing employment landscape. The liberal arts are designed to train students to adapt, think critically, step out of their comfort zone and work well in trans-disciplinary teams. But perhaps most importantly, artes liberales ignite an enduring passion to learn.

George Norlin, the “kindly professor of Greek” who was among CU’s most influential presidents, publicly fretted that universities in the 1920s were emphasizing professional study at the expense of the liberal arts. He said such training might yield many tightly focused specialists, “mere bolts and rivets in a vastly complicated machine.”

He heralded “a curriculum of training in the fundamentals of a common, cultivated life.” Such an education helps people think critically, write well and adapt comfortably in swiftly changing times. This kind of education, Norlin said, helps “keep civilization alive.”

Today, we echo great thinkers of yesterday as we champion a superior education for tomorrow.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

From the interim dean: Cicero called these disciplines artes liberales, the liberal arts. The term is widely wielded and occasionally misunderstood.

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Stalking the dirt vaccine

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 23:10:47 +0000

Stalking the dirt vaccine Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/28/2018 - 17:10

Lisa Marshall

Can good bacteria make the brain more stress-resilient? Christopher Lowry has dedicated his career to finding out

Christopher Lowry was a precocious 6-year-old, fond of playing in the dirt near his home in rural Wyoming, when researchers 8,000 miles away made a discovery that would end up shaping his career.

The year was 1971. British scientists had noticed that people living near Lake Kyoga in Uganda responded much better to certain vaccines than those elsewhere did. They suspected something in the environment was at play, and when they investigated, they discovered an intriguing orange slime—later identified as Mycobacterium vaccae—stretching across the shoreline.

Christopher Lowry in his lab. CU Photo by Glenn Asakawa. Photo at top of the page by Xan Griffin, Unsplash.

“It appeared that this microorganism living in the soil had powerful immune-regulating properties that were somehow making the vaccines work better,” says Lowry, now an integrative physiology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and pioneer in the study of how bacteria impact mental health.

In the 18 years since he first heard the story of M. vaccae, Lowry has published a series of ground-breaking papers suggesting that exposure to it, and other beneficial bugs in our midst, may have a profound impact on not only our physical health, but also our mental wellbeing.

The more we depart from the rural environments in which we evolved and the more sterile we make our surroundings, the more we risk missing out on the gifts of these microbial “old friends,” he warns. In the meantime, he’s forging ahead with studies aimed at someday harnessing those gifts, in the form of probiotic treatments for mental illness—or even a “stress immunization.”

“As human societies have migrated to urban environments, we have lost touch with a host of bacterial species that have the capacity for immunoregulation, and we believe this is helping to fuel an epidemic of inflammatory disease,” says Lowry. “I want to know: What are the impacts on mental health? And, more importantly, what new interventions can we present to prevent things like anxiety disorders, PTSD and depression?”

How do bugs talk to the brain?

Lowry was a research fellow at the University of Bristol in the UK in the early 2000s when he began to hear stories about M. vaccae. In the decades since that discovery at the lake, researchers have tried using it as an immune-boosting adjunct to various vaccines, with limited success.

But one trial testing it in lung cancer patients yielded a curious result:

While those injected with the bacterium didn’t live longer, they reported improved quality of life, including mental health.

“This suggested that there was some mechanism through which these injections of M. vaccae were affecting the brain,” explains Lowry, who quickly set out to find an answer.

Headlines about the 'dirt antidepressant' abounded. But many of his peers were skeptical. Now, they're not so skeptical.

In April 2007, he published a study in the journal Neuroscience showing that a heat-killed preparation of M. vaccae,when injected into mice, activated neurons in the brain that produce the feel-good chemical serotonin and altered their behavior in a way similar to that of antidepressants.

Headlines about the “dirt antidepressant” abounded.

But many of his peers were skeptical.

“Some people commented that it must have been an April Fool’s joke,” he recalls.

It would be another nine years of toiling away in the lab before Lowry published the follow-up paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), showing that injections of M. vaccae prior to a stressful event could actually help mice become more stress-resilient, fending off conditions like stress-induced colitis and making them act less anxious and fearful when later stressed.

In short, Lowry says, M. vaccae could prevent a “PTSD-like” syndrome in mice.

Since then, he’s published a flurry of studies with collaborators around the globe, adding weight to the notion that good bacteria can be good for the mood.

One study of 40 healthy men, published in the April 2018 issue of PNAS with researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany, showed that children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and may be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers.

Another paper, published with Dr. Matt Frank, a senior research associate in the department of psychology and neuroscience, found that in animal models, M. vaccae has a long-lasting anti-inflammatory effect on the brain. That’s important, explains Frank, because stress-induced brain inflammation has been shown to boost risk of anxiety and mood disorders, in part by impacting mood-influencing neurotransmitters like norepinephrine or dopamine.

“If you could reduce brain inflammation in people, it could have broad implications for a number of neuroinflammatory diseases,” explains Frank.

In 2016, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation named Lowry’s research among the “Top 10” advancements in mental health research—an illustration that the scientific community is coming around.

“There is a growing recognition that the microbiome can impact health in general and, more specifically, mental health,” said Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, president of the foundation. “Dr. Lowry’s work can potentially be a game-changer in our understanding of this and could ultimately lead to new treatments.”

Lowry notes that, while more research is needed, some evidence already suggests that probiotic supplements can have an anti-inflammatory effect, boost cognitive function and possibly alleviate anxiety.

While M. vaccae has been the focus of his research, other microorganisms also hold promise.

He’s collaborating with the Department of Veterans Affairs on a clinical trial looking at whether Lactobacillus reuteri can improve physiological and psychological responses to stressful situations in veterans with PTSD.

Someday, he imagines an M. vaccae-based “stress immunization” could be given to soldiers, nurses, first responders or people in other high-stress jobs to make their brains and bodies more resilient.

“I do not want to promote this as a panacea,” he emphasizes, noting that many other factors influence whether someone develops a mental illness. “But I do think this could play an important role.”

In the meantime, he makes a point of exposing his two children, 6 and 8, to a healthy dose of dirt, via a front yard vegetable garden and frequent camping trips, like he was exposed to as a child. He encourages his friends and colleagues to do the same.

Only now, they’re not so skeptical.

“It went from being this novel, turn-your-world upside down concept to something that doesn’t even surprise people anymore,” he says. “It’s exciting to see so many people interested in our relationship with the microbial world.”

Can good bacteria make the brain more stress-resilient? Christopher Lowry has dedicated his career to finding out.

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Alumnus finds generational synchronicities in geology

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 21:58:32 +0000

Alumnus finds generational synchronicities in geology Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/28/2018 - 15:58

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Grandson following footsteps of legendary CU Boulder geologist Mary Oswald Griffitts

Daniel Griffitts (Geo’11) had been quietly volunteering with the paleontology collection at the University of Colorado Boulder for a long time before anyone realized he was the grandson of a legend, the late geologist Mary Oswald Griffitts.

The late Mary Oswald Griffitts, a notable geologist, quizzes her grandson, Daniel Griffitts, on mineral identification while he was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder. Photo courtesy of Daniel Griffitts.

“I didn’t bring it up, but (Emeritus Curator of Geology and Professor Emeritus of Natural History) Peter Robinson eventually figured it out. He knew my grandmother pretty well and recognized my name,” says Griffitts, who now works as a seasonal employee with the CU Museum of Natural History.

Mary Oswald Griffitts’ legacy extends beyond CU to the larger Boulder community and literally the farthest corner of the state. In 1944 she became the first woman to receive a PhD in geology at CU Boulder and two years later joined the faculty to teach historical geology and invertebrate paleontology.

She later helped found the Boulder Junior Natural Sciences School — a descendant of which continues today as the Thorne Nature Experience — and in 1981 began work on her detailed collection and cataloguing of the extensive fossil collection at Mesa Verde National Park. She retired at age 83, and following her death in 2010, the family established the Mary Oswald Griffitts Memorial Fund at CU.

“I remember she took me out when I was in kindergarten or first grade to look for fossils on land north of (Boulder),” Griffitts recalls. “I picked something up that didn’t look like anything, but there was a little fossil in it. She took it back to CU, where it was positively ID’d and put in the collection.”

Griffitts also vividly remembers the painting of Mesa Verde ruins that hung in his grandparents’ house, painted by his grandmother. Inspired by both his grandmother and grandfather, geologist Wallace R. Griffitts, Griffitts studied geology at CU Boulder. After graduating in 2011, he began working as a volunteer in the museum’s paleontology collection.

Toni Culver, former collections manager at the museum, soon recommended that the museum hire Griffitts to work on its innovative Fossils in the Classroom program, which produces a geology “unit in a box,” including 18 fossil specimens, lesson plans and support material, that is now being used in 580 Colorado public schools.

“Daniel, with his paleontology background, has been instrumental in quality control of the fossils and making sure the lessons are accurate. He’s a very important cog in the wheel, behind the scenes,” says Jim Hakala, senior educator at the CU museum.

Unbeknownst to Daniel, Hakala had his own memories of Mary Oswald Griffitts: As a young seasonal ranger at Mesa Verde in 1989, he endured her grueling, but informative, geology hikes at the park.

“It was part of our training, but those were the hardest days—long and hot, and the lectures were dry as toast,” he says. “Needless to say, she stuck in my mind!”

The late Mary Oswald Griffitts surveys the interior of a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde National Park in 1986. Photo courtesy of Daniel Griffitts.

He didn’t realize, however, that his desert tutor was Mary Oswald Griffitts, the pioneering CU student and faculty member, until just last fall. That’s when he and several of his colleagues visited Mesa Verde as part of an ongoing collaborative research project between the park and museum. While walking through the ceramic and lithic collection, he came upon a color picture of the woman he remembered from those hot, dry lectures nearly three decades before.

“(Park staff) said, ‘Yeah, this collection is here because of what she did. We wouldn’t have any fossils if it weren’t for her,’” Hakala recalls.

And Hakala didn’t connect the dots between his former taskmaster and his young museum colleague until they’d been working together for five years. The big reveal came when Hakala mentioned he’d worked at the park as the two were driving to Longmont.

“I said, ‘Oh, my grandmother used to work at Mesa Verde,’” Griffitts says. “He said, ‘Oh, who was that?’ When I told him, it was, ‘Wow! Really?’”

Griffitts relishes coming across reminders of his grandmother in the course of his work, whether it’s a document she signed or a specimen she collected.

“I’m not even close to her level, but I do think it’s really cool that she used to work in the same place,” he says. “It’s always amazing when I come across any of her legacy at the museum.”

Grandson following footsteps of legendary CU Boulder geologist Mary Oswald Griffitts.

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Alum blends literary prowess, political commentary

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 20:26:30 +0000

Alum blends literary prowess, political commentary Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/28/2018 - 14:26

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder helped launch Luis Alberto Urrea’s award-winning writing career

Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel, The House of Broken Angels, has a political edge that was honed on the current American political landscape.

The University of Colorado Boulder alumnus’ novel tells the story of Big Angel de la Cruz, who hopes to bring his family together for a final fiesta as he faces death from cancer. Some family members are legal immigrants, while others are undocumented, including children born in the United States to undocumented parents, aka dreamers.

Luis Alberto Urrea. Photo by Joe Mazza, Brave-Lux.

The de la Cruz family, says Urrea (MFA Engl’97), author of award-winning fiction, poetry and nonfiction, “is an American family that just happens to speak Spanish and worship the Virgin of Guadalupe.” The novel, he says, is his way of protesting the immigration policies of the Trump administration.

Having grown up with a Mexican father and Irish-American mother in Tijuana, Mexico, Urrea, 63, has long been drawn to “border” issues. But he says he is shocked by what he sees as the rise of “thuggish white power” of contemporary politics.

“I know people on the right get angry at me for complaining, but this isn’t conservatism,” he says, referring in part to the Trump administration’s “assaults on families and ethnicities.” “My parents were both fierce conservatives. I’m not, but I can understand their kind of conservatism. But not this. This is a perversion.”

Urrea was inspired to write the novel by the 2016 cancer death of his half-brother Juan. In the novel, Little Angel, Big Angel’s half-brother, is a university professor and author, and he made a point of making Big Angel a Republican, he says.

“This is what it feels like to be a family trying to bury their grandmother while people are holding up ‘Build the Wall’ signs,” he says. The de la Cruz family “are Americans who have been here 70 years, but when they buy a birthday cake at Target someone comes up to tell them that the president is going to throw them out of the country.”

Urrea notes that with a name like his, he can’t avoid being seen as a political writer, despite looking more stereotypically “Irish” than “Mexican.” His blue eyes and light hair, he says, are also a product of his father’s Basque ancestors, who came to North America during the Spanish conquest.

He was born in Tijuana but is officially designated by the U.S. government as an “American born abroad.” The family moved to San Diego seeking better treatment for Urrea’s childhood tuberculosis and he grew up in Barrio Logan, long known as a hub for the city’s Mexican art and culture.

“I’m constantly meeting folks who come up to me and say, ‘Hey, my family are immigrants too, but they came here legally,’” Urrea says. “I always say, ‘Really? Who checked their papers? Crazy Horse or Geronimo?’”

His father was killed in a car accident in Mexico in 1977 while Urrea was studying English at the University of California, San Diego. He wrote an essay about having to pay $750 to corrupt Mexican police to bring his father’s body home for burial, which his professor showed to the late National Book Award-winning writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who was at UCSD teaching a workshop. Le Guin invited Urrea to join the workshop and ended up publishing the essay in an anthology she was editing.

“Ursula discovered me. She started my writing career. She published that essay, then flogged me savagely for years trying to get me in writing shape. She was a great mentor for me,” he says.

I had three of my heroes in one place—and in Boulder, Colorado. Come on! I applied, and they were kind enough to take me.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, Urrea continued to write, take coursework and teach all over the country. After enduring 10 years of publishers’ rejections for his nonfiction book about Tijuana, “Under the Wire,” he ruefully concluded that his dream might not come to pass.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m never going to be a writer. That’s folly,’” he says. “I thought I’d better get a terminal degree so I could start teaching for real.”

In 1991, he applied to CU Boulder’s MFA writing program, drawn by such big-name faculty as Vine Deloria, Jr., Linda Hogan and Lorna DeCervantes.

“I had three of my heroes in one place—and in Boulder, Colorado. Come on!” he says. “I applied, and they were kind enough to take me.”

While Urrea was at CU Boulder, Deloria mentored him on a “lifelong project” that would later become The Hummingbird’s Daughter, a novel based on the life of a medicine woman ancestor of Urrea’s, introducing him to “holy people from all traditions all over the world.” He lived next door to poet Marilyn Krysl and hobnobbed with fellow students, including such now-respected writers as David Gessner, Karen Auvinen, Mark Spitzer and May Lee Chai. Hogan and DeCervantes arranged for him to pick up a young Sherman Alexie at Stapleton International Airport, and the two have been friends ever since.

“A lot of us in that golden age have gone on to be very successful writers,” he says. “I loved everything about Boulder, living in that environment. Hiking every day completely changed my relationship to the earth.”

Anchor Books bought Under the Wirewhile he was in Boulder. Between the twin pressures of promoting the book and a pending divorce, Urrea decided to leave school in 1992 without finishing his degree.

His best-selling writing career took off following his first stint in Boulder. He won the Colorado Book Award and Western States Book Award for poetry for The Fever of Beingin 1994 and the American Book Award for his 1998 memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life. He also has won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his short story “Amapola” and in 2000 was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. The House of Broken Angelsis his 18^thbook.

Despite all his success, Urrea did eventually return to Boulder to finish his master’s degree, in 1997; he is now professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Despite his “outrage” at the Trump administration, and his fear that the United States may be teetering on the brink of “fascism,” he says it’s a time for “action, not hopelessness.”

“People need to vote their consciences, but they need to vote,” he says. “It’s scary, having vitriol coming at you for saying things that I think are common-sense, patriotic things to say, but it’s time for people of good conscience to step up and be brave.”

David Gessner, his old CU compatriot, thinks Urrea is being plenty brave himself.

“While (Luis’) books are of the highest literary quality, they also speak pressingly to the time we live in—to issues of race, nationalism, and intolerance among others,” says Gessner, chair of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of 10 books. “They are big-hearted, open, and magnanimous in a time that is so often ingrown, petty, and bitter. In this small age, Luis Urrea has consistently been big. In this shallow age he goes deep.”

While Luis Alberto Urrea was at CU Boulder, Vine Deloria mentored him on a “lifelong project” that would later become The Hummingbird’s Daughter.

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‘What does this art mean?’ students muse. You tell me, prof replies

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 19:54:35 +0000

‘What does this art mean?’ students muse. You tell me, prof replies Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/28/2018 - 13:54

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder art history students deepen learning through ‘object-based learning’

Teaching her first course in her first semester at the University of Colorado Boulder, art historian Stephanie Su decided to make use of literally hundreds of unusual teaching “assistants”: 238 objects of Burmese and Chinese art that make up the King Collection at the CU Art Museum.

Stephanie Su, assistant professor of Asian art history

Students in Su’s first course, Art and Architecture in East Asia, visited the collection, which was donated in 2012 by Warren and Shirley King, who live in Hong Kong.

The students are asked to spend no less than 10 minutes in “close looking” — silently observing objects from the collection and taking notes.

“The close-looking exercise is sort of a guide to give students access to really start looking at the materials,” says Hope Saska, curator of collections and exhibitions at the museum, who designed the exercise based on elements used at other institutions. “It’s based on a teaching technique fundamental to museum education, using visual-thinking strategies. … The students can have immediate relationships with materials that are a little more informal and a little more impromptu than what you’d find in a curated exhibition.”

“They get a sense of the shapes, colors, functions, materials and textures of the objects and try to construct meanings by themselves—When was it made? What is it for? What does it mean? What does (the object) tell us about the culture in that historical period?—rather than having to rely on someone else’s interpretation,” Su says.

Under Saska’s model, once students have closely examined the requisite pieces from the collection, they form small groups to exchange observations and ideas about the meaning of the pieces.

“In the small group, they come up with three to five elements that they think are the key elements they have observed about the piece. The exercise helps guide conversations to develop students’ understanding of the content,” says Saska, who previously has worked as a lecturer in art history and with museum collections at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Yale University.

Once the close-looking exercise is complete, the groups make presentations to the rest of the class. Finally, they are asked to write analytic papers incorporating both the class’s observations and secondary sources to refine their arguments.

“It is a student-centered learning approach that uses objects to facilitate deep learning,” Su says. “It uses objects as multi-sensory thinking tools to stimulate students’ imaginations. They learn to observe the objects and construct meanings.”

One student’s research paper on the technology of glass during the Han dynasty explored the emergence of new objects and colors, particularly purple, within Taoism. That’s something I had never thought about.”

For this semester’s course, Su has asked students to focus their papers on “the shifting notion of the afterlife in ancient China,” comparing, for example, the famous, full-sized terra cotta army created by China’s First Emperor to the miniature figurines in the King Collection—chickens, horses, stoves, attendants, theaters, houses—from the Han dynasty, which immediately followed the First Emperor era.

“For the First Emperor, the afterlife was a continuation of current life, so everything was life-sized, emulating the palace aboveground,” Su says. “But in the Han dynasty, the notion changed. The miniature figurines, vessels and architecture not only substituted for the real human world, but also constituted a world operating in its own logic, free from the natural laws of the human world. In this way, life could be extended in perpetuity. This notion of the afterlife had enduring impact, even on contemporary Chinese society.”

Although she’s just begun teaching at CU, Su has seen the benefits of object-based learning on other institutions’ graduate students, whose observations and ideas have opened her eyes to new interpretations and understandings.

“One student’s research paper on the technology of glass during the Han dynasty explored the emergence of new objects and colors, particularly purple, within Taoism,” she says. “That’s something I had never thought about, so I can learn things from my students’ interests, too.”

Alice Kain, academic initiatives coordinator at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, notes that object-based learning can give students confidence in the classroom.

“It can encourage students to begin to look in depth at the artwork together; I believe that there are benefits of students communicating to each other rather than being told what to look at,” Kain writes in the online journal Art History Teaching Resources.

“I have noticed that some students new to art history can be intimidated by making observations; that they may be looking at something ‘in the wrong way’ or that they are missing language to deal with what they are seeing. Certainly, teachers are able to provide insight into the vocabulary, but small group work allows for students to deal with some of these other larger insecurities together.”

“This indeed is something new in the field of art history” Su agrees. “In the post-war period, study was focused on iconography, looking at images and being told what they mean, but not really looking at the objects themselves.”

“This object-based learning approach allows students to apply what they have learned to new situations and solve the problems by themselves. This process enhances students’ close looking, critical thinking and writing, which are invaluable skills for their future careers. They will become more culturally sensitive, being more aware of how images and objects convey meanings in different contexts.”

But close-looking exercises aren’t just for art history. This semester, two to three undergraduate classes a week, in disciplines ranging from history to English to classics, have been visiting the CU Art Museum to engage with objects from the collection.

To boot, the museum has been busily evangelizing the gospel of close-looking and object-based learning.

“We have the resources in both materials and objects, and also staff expertise,” Saska says. “So we’re working with colleagues across the states. We are deeply invested in creating exercises in the museum field and how museums can help develop education.”

CU Boulder art history students deepen learning through ‘object-based learning.’

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In the College of Arts and Sciences, one constant is change

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 21:15:11 +0000

In the College of Arts and Sciences, one constant is change Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/26/2018 - 15:15

James W.C. White, interim dean of the college, sat down for a Q&A session about where the college has been, how it’s adapted to a rapidly evolving world, and how it’s preparing to help students meet the challenges of tomorrow, which will involve finding solutions to problems not yet known.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmqMabr1_8I&feature=youtu.be]

James W.C. White, interim dean, sat down for a Q&A session about where the college has been, how it’s adapted to a rapidly evolving world, and how it’s preparing to help students meet the challenges of tomorrow, which will involve finding solutions to problems not yet known.

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Five professors honored by peers for significant achievements

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 17:18:31 +0000

Five professors honored by peers for significant achievements Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/18/2018 - 11:18

Cay Leytham-Powell

Five professors in the College of Arts and Sciences have won the 2018 Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award.

The award, which is presented to up to six selected faculty members annually, recognizes professors who have made recent advances in their respective fields, whether that be publications or creative contributions. This year’s awardees from the College of Arts and Sciences include:

Xiaodong Liu, an associate professor in economics, was recognized for his work exploring peer network effects, which have both methodological and practical implications for the field and general public.
Jennifer Kay, an assistant professor in atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, was selected for her work creating a model for distinguishing between “normal” climate change and variations caused by external factors such as carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.
David Pyrooz, an assistant professor in sociology, was recognized for his research on gang membership and domestic terrorism, which has clear policy implications for the justice department, which helped fund the research.
Heather Lewandowski, an associate professor in physics, was selected for her extensive science education research over the previous five years, which has affected more than 50,000 students at 158 universities.
Antje Richter, an associate professor of Chinese, was recognized for the impact of her two recent books—Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China and A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture—on opening up new areas of research within Chinese culture

There are two different sets of awards offered by the Provost’s Faculty Achievement Awards: one aimed at the work and promise of junior faculty and one to the accomplishments of recently tenured associate professors.

Winners of both sets of awards are determined through an extensive nomination process, beginning with the Office of Faculty Affairs generating a list of eligible faculty from nominees. The associate vice chancellor then convenes a campus-level convocation awards committee, composed of tenured faculty members from across the University of Colorado Boulder campus, which reviews the list and makes final decisions.

Winners receive a $1,000 research or creative work grant and a plaque recognizing their achievement. This year, those plaques will be presented by the provost at the fall convocation event on Oct. 5 at 1:30 p.m. in the Center for British and Irish Studies in Norlin Library.

Five professors in the College of Arts and Sciences have won the 2018 Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award.

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CU Boulder students give A&S Academic Advising Center high marks

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:04:05 +0000

CU Boulder students give A&S Academic Advising Center high marks Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 18:04

Clay Bonnyman Evans

It’s a fair bet that most students would be happy with, say, a 95 or 97 percent on a test, or professors with a 95 percent approval in student evaluations.

This is the case for the College of Arts and Sciences Academic Advising Center (AAC) at the University of Colorado Boulder, who found, through an ongoing survey,that 95 to 98 percent of students served are positive about their experiences.

Kathryn Tisdale

The advising center scheduled 23,677 appointments with 15,004 unique students between August 2017 and April 2018. Just 640 students at the college, about 3.5 percent, did not see an advisor in that time, and there was a 9 percent no-show rate for student-initiated appointments.

The survey finds that:

97 percent of students served feel positive about their advising experience
98 percent feel welcome
97 percent feel their advisors answered their questions
95 percent feel their advisors went above and beyond
96 percent feel their advisor helped them organize their goals

But the AAC has no plans to rest on these stratospheric laurels.

“As good as those numbers are, at end of the day we’re still speaking to students and parents who were not satisfied or didn’t get what they needed,” says Kathryn Tisdale, director of advising quality at the AAC. “We can always improve, and feedback from this survey helps us identify where we need to improve.”

First-year students are often surprised, according to Tisdale, by the difference between the interactions with their academic advisor versus their high school counselors. Academic advisors also play a distinct role from faculty as advisors work with students on a much broader range of issues and concerns.

“The power dynamic is different than with faculty; this isn’t someone who is grading you,” Tisdale says. “This is an adult on campus students can trust and who is focused entirely on providing student support.”

The AAC has 40 full-time professional advisors, from field-specific PhD or master’s-level specialists to experts in student-development theory.

“We engage each student as a whole person, academically, socially, with an individual path toward success,” Tisdale says. “We focus on having transformational discussions every time we meet with students, as much as possible.”

Several new efforts are underway to help the AAC meet every student’s needs, including academic coaching for individual students, more attention on students who are neither excelling nor failing, but just getting by, hiring more advisors to reduce caseloads and working with the School of Education to implement a new graduate-student internship program.

“We are helping students navigate not only the curricular side of college life at CU Boulder, but also co-curricular life,” Tisdale says. “This is a huge and resource-rich institution, and academic advisors help students find their place.”

It’s a fair bet that most students would be happy with, say, a 95 or 97 percent on a test, or professors with a 95 percent approval in student evaluations. Academic advisors certainly are.

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Alum will support students of the (far) distant future

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:54:30 +0000

Alum will support students of the (far) distant future Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 11:54

Jeff Thomas

Legacy endowments for both music and international-affairs students reflect Courtney Rowe’s values and her work

After spending considerable effort trying to stay in Boulder for the long term, Courtney Rowe has also found a way to leave a little bit of herself behind when she’s gone—long gone.

“Well, hopefully I’m not going anywhere soon,” said Rowe, 36, who was recently promoted to assistant dean for the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Music advancement team. “I spent my entire life being here, seeking a way to get here or trying to get back here.”

But when she’s no longer here—literally, figuratively and existentially—there will still be some of Rowe left behind, as she has set up legacy endowments benefitting both the College of Music and the International Affairs Program Global Grants program. Rowe studied and graduated with a degree in international affairs, and her family already has an endowment at the College of Music. She said the reason she pursued a legacy endowment was simple.

“Being in my line of work, in advancement, I know the importance of sharing your gift expectations,” said Rowe, who used her university life-insurance policy to set up the two $25,000, grants.

Courtney Rowe and her mother, Peg Rowe.

“It’s super easy if you are an employee here, which is awesome. You can do it yourself or with an advancement professional,” she said. “I can tell potential donors, ‘See, if I can do it, you can do it. It’s easy.’”

Rowe, who originally hailed from the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, first came to CU Boulder at the age of 15, visiting a friend who lived in Sewall Hall. Returning home and meeting with her mother at the airport, Rowe proclaimed that Boulder was the one and only place for her university studies. Her mother, Peg Rowe, who completed some of her graduate studies at Colorado State University, was sympathetic.

Courtney Rowe, however, did defer her enrollment here to study at Richmond, the American International University in London. Perceiving that she would probably be more focused on her course work in Boulder, she returned to her original plan to study international affairs at CU Boulder, where she attended from 2002 to 2006.

She took advantage of the global affairs program to work in Ghana, where she developed a profound respect for what a “boots-on-the-ground” experience can mean for students of international affairs. Her legacy gift will enable such experiences for students who come after her.

“It was eye-opening in a brutally real way for me—I was going to make a huge impact as young idealist going there,” she said. “But there is so much that is so much bigger than you are. You see the colossal scale of some of these crises and how big the solutions have to be, and what isn’t working.”

“It’s a real-world experience you really need to see. You see how to be part of the solution.”

After her international experience, Rowe returned to the Chicago area, where she held similar fundraising posts, but her eye was still on Boulder. In 2014, she was part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s (MCA) development team that raised support for “David Bowie Is,” the international exhibition celebrating five decades of music, art, and fashion from the pop icon’s personal archives.

Her rise in the Office of Advancement has been a bit meteoric, working the Music+campaign, the $50 million fundraising effort for the College of Music’s 100th annual celebration in 2020. She was originally hired as an assistant director of development in 2015, promoted to director, and then served as the interim assistant dean before taking the office officially in June of this year.

“This is my dream job,” said Rowe, “I have no intention of going anywhere (literally or figuratively) soon.”

Taking control of a $50 million fundraising effort is a fairly tall order, but Rowe already has a great deal of experience working with donors for the College of Music and Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Her mother, Peg, also set up a legacy gift for her own mother, Margaret Steed, a gifted and avid violinist who was never offered the opportunity to further her music education.

“My grandmother was the musician in the family, but she wasn’t able to pursue it as a career while raising a family,” said Rowe, noting her own legacy gift will also honor her grandmother. “She played in a string quartet until she was too sick to continue. The quartet played at her funeral with an empty chair and her violin sitting on it.”

After spending considerable effort trying to stay in Boulder for the long term, Courtney Rowe has also found a way to leave a little bit of herself behind when she’s gone—long gone.

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Unveiling success one dress at a time

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:58:45 +0000

Unveiling success one dress at a time Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 10:58

CU Boulder graduate’s business career selling wedding apparel draws on an arts and sciences foundation

Politics doesn’t necessarily draw a lot of pink-bow types, but Jillian Howison (PolSci’10), an unabashed “girly girl,” was mesmerized.

Growing up in the Cleveland area, Howison loved fashion, shopping and horses—she rode dressage on a Lipizzaner gelding, Brenna, who still lives with her mom. Even when she played basketball, she made a point to tie a pink bow in her hair. But when she saw the character of C.J. Cregg, press secretary to President Josiah Bartlet on NBC’s immensely popular “West Wing,” played by Alison Janney, she couldn’t look away.

Cousins Jillian Howison (left) and Laura Seitz are shown on the swingset, above, and as business partners at the top of the page.

“I wanted to be C.J. Cregg so badly,” she says. That interest led her to study political science, but she eventually channeled her considerable energy into launching a successful wedding-apparel business.

Howison, now 30, matriculated at St. Anselm, a small New Hampshire Benedictine liberal-arts college with an outsized political reputation, thanks to its quadrennial hosting of presidential debates.

But after a couple of years, Howison realized she wasn’t cut out for the political world and decided she wanted a broader, deeper college experience. Her father had recently moved to Golden, and when she visited Boulder, she knew immediately she wanted to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Academically, I have always appreciated the huge university feel, coming from a small school with 2,000 people. Anything you wanted to do at CU or get involved with was right at your fingertips,” she says. “Whatever you are interested in, a club, a class or a speaker, and Boulder gets great speakers.”

At St. Anselm, Howison says, she was required to take just one science class, but even as a political science major, at CU she was required to enroll in a broad swath of courses across numerous disciplines. She counts a 500-level philosophy class as the most challenging, and most rewarding, class she’s ever taken.

She worked at Nordstrom department store while in school, and was a sales and marketing intern at Meritech, her father’s firm in Golden. Graduating into the weak job market that followed the 2008 economic crash, Howison was grateful to land a job with Meritech selling hand-washing equipment to food-processing plants, restaurants and hospitals, though it didn’t appeal to her girly-girl side.

“I learned a lot, selling something I really didn’t care about that much,” she says. “But going into food-processing plants in high heels and a dress was not exactly what I’d pictured myself doing!”

She later took over health and beauty and travel accounts for shopathome.com. After that, was hired by Search Monitor, where she continues as account strategy director, specializing in data analytics, search-engine optimization and other areas, with clients ranging from major retailers to large advertising agencies.

“I wanted more flexibility, and it’s been great,” she says. “I’m working from home with major retailers and ad agencies.”

Then, in 2015, her cousin Laura Seitz called with an intriguing idea. Seitz had been working as a manager for Bella Bridesmaids, a national wedding apparel company with dozens of franchises across the United States, and wanted to know if Howison would be interested in opening a franchise of the company with her.

“We’d always talked as kids about opening our own boutique,” Howison says. “We asked ourselves where isn’t there a Bella where there are lots of weddings, and where we thought we’d like to live, and came up with Scottsdale (Arizona).”

They visited the upscale Phoenix suburb in July 2015, wrote a business plan and won financing from the Small Business Administration. They bought their franchise in November, and opened in December.

“We definitely had to learn on the fly,” Howison says. “We don’t have a bookkeeper; I taught myself Quickbooks. I had marketing experience, Laura had retail.”

But neither had experience owning and operating a business, and Howison says her broad liberal arts education has served her well when it comes to adaptability and picking up new skills, whether it’s negotiating a lease, renovating commercial space or dealing with air-conditioning on the blink in the heat of a desert summer.

“The first year, we were not making any money,” she says. “But last year, we were up 28 percent over the previous year, and this year we’re up 30 percent on average.”

Owning their own business means being constantly “on call,” but Howison and her husband have found time to travel to such places as Croatia, Prague, London, the wine country of France, Oktoberfest in Munich and, most recently, Cuba.

Howison has many former St. Anselm classmates working in or around the political world, but she’s never looked back.

“If I’d stayed where I was, I would never have opened this business. The school I went to before was kind of like high school; you never left campus,” she says. “Going to CU has made me a proponent of bigger schools. I was able to schedule my classes so I could work internships. And there was just so much opportunity to do more than just sitting in a classroom.”

Politics doesn’t necessarily draw a lot of pink-bow types, but Jillian Howison (PolSci’10), an unabashed “girly girl,” was mesmerized by a "West Wing" character.

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