Department of Languages & Literatures name in the news! Jian Guo, faculty member in the English program is one of two translators who have worked extensively on the recently published book _Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-62_ written by Yang Jisheng whose uncle was among those who died.  Thirty-six million people starved to death during the Maoist revolution while the government was exporting grain; cannabalism may have resulted.  The book is banned in China, but was published in Hong Kong, Japan, and the West and has been getting attention here.  Already it has been reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books.  Yesterday, a brief summary appeared on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, also translated by Jian Guo.  Recovering historical documents, correcting “historical amnesia,” insuring that events such as this remain a part of the historical record, and making that history known requires great courage.  As more parts of the past are uncovered, history becomes more complex. I’m reminded of what George Santayana said:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The Op Ed piece ends this way: “I intended my book to be a memorial to the thirty-six million victims, but also a literal tombstone, anticipiating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian political system that caused the Great Famine.  I was mindful of the risks in this endeavor:  if something happens to me because I tried to preserve a truthful memory, then let the book stand as my tombstone, too.”

Just an update on our whereabouts. Since Monday, October 22, the Dean’s Office, L&S Advising, our Graduation Examiner, as well as the departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Women’s Studies, History, and Political Science have moved to the fourth and fifth floor of Laurentide Hall (formerly Carlson).  Sociology and Languages and Literatures  moved the following week, and finally one week later Psychology and Math joined us. Come and check out our beautiful new building! Students have been wandering in, but we don’t have all of our signs in place, so you have to be a bit resourceful. We hope to have an open house for the campus once we are “out of boxes” and a little settled. Advising and Graduation are on the fourth floor (north end).  And we are hoping to have the cafe on the second floor up and running by the end of the semester.  You will find comfortable places to study and to meet with faculty and other students over here!  We have also had the Dean’s Advisory Board and the Foundation Board tour the building.  Those who remember the “old Carlson” are totally amazed.

We are approaching the busy end of the semester, with many projects and tests coming due before Thanksgiving.  Nonetheless, our new Science Outreach Coordinator organized “Discover Science” day last Friday, drawing hundreds of middle school and high school students to Upham Hall for an afternoon of excitement and scientific “discovery.”  Faculty and students were involved in explaining plant taxonomy, doing flashy chemistry experiments, and making science engaging and fun.  Thanks to Alissa Hass for her hard work on this.  The students on campus for Premiere Day were invited and all attended!  This week, we have Geography Awareness Week with programming every afternoon and a major lecture on Friday morning.

Moving day will be upon us soon! This Friday  (October 20) the faculty and staff who will be moving to the fourth and fifth floor of Laurentide will begin “the move.” Then on successive Friday/Saturdays, third, second, and first floor will fill in. This week, we are all weeding our libraries, sending books to the library book sale, papers and files to archives, and unearthing some surprsing objects. The building looks great and will provide a wonderful place for collaboration, involving faculty and students. Please stop by and visit us! But we may need a day or so to get organized.

Also, I want to thank Baocheng Han and Steve Anderson for organizing a very productive meeting of Chemistry faculty within the UW System that was hosted on campus this last Friday and Saturday. John Warner gave an inspiring keynote on green chemistry and challenged those present to approach chemistry and the teaching of chemistry in more creative ways; the analogy he used was jazz improvization, in contrast to the cook book approach of classical music. (We do have some new green chemistry courses in the works.)   Mary Tilton, 1974 alumna and member of the Dean’s Advisory Board, gave the final keynote in which she described her work with Virent Technologies LLD where they are exploring alternative forms of energy and biofuel.

Also on Friday, collaborators from Biological Sciences, Chemistry, and Physics sponsored the third annual Nanoscience Symposium, held in Upham Hall. I’m delighted that we are so involved in these emerging technologies! Thanks to everyone involved!  Busy week!

The semester is launched!  We started the academic year with our college retreat at which we welcomed over twenty five dynamic new faculty and staff. Our discussions that day focused especially on three parts of our LEAP work:  advising, critical thinking, and improving student writing. LEAP has given us a shared framework that has guided work in the classroom as well as assessment efforts, and we continue to make progress.

This fall  we also look forward with eager anticipation to moving to our elegant new home:  Laurentide Hall.  Construction is on schedule, with the third, fourth, and fifth floors complete and the first and second floors almost finished.  Furniture has been arriving, and the move will occur in waves on successive Fridays/Saturdays in October although two weeks behind schedule. 

We have record enrollment and a record first year class, and our many adjustments over the summer opened sufficient seats for all incoming students.  We are especially looking forward to working with the multicultural students, many of whom attended the multicultural reception two weeks ago, and particularly the students who participated in “Bio Bootcamp”. There was lots of positive energy in the Ballroom that day!  Dean Mark McPhail reminded everyone of the Diversity Forum, coming up on September 27 and 28, with many nationally recognized speakers some of whom were directly involved in the civil rights activity of the 1960′s. And let’s not forget the Contemporary Lectures Series that begins on October 1st with Josh Fox, the documentary filmaker honored for his documentary Gasland that investigates the effects of hydraulic “fracking.”

And as we move forward, we also want to build on our past successes– acceptances in law school, employment secured, advancement to grad school, medical school, etc.  We are especially proud of our undergraduate researchers, and our first (ever) recipient of the Barry Goldwater scholarship.  May this year be even more exciting and productive!  As the landscape of higher education re-defines itself with MOOCS, flexible degrees, hybrids, and on-line courses and programs, let’s hold onto our commitment to quality and the impact of faculty-student engagement.  As Ovid wrote in the Metamorphoses, “Everything changes, nothing is lost.”  As we clean out our offices in preparation for the move and look forward to the new year, we can willingly abandon the flotsam and jetsam, but hang onto the essentials.

The title of our new college blog actually was inspired by the work I did on my dissertation. “Only Connect” is the epigraph of the novel Howards End, written by E. M. Forster and published in 1910, a time of uncertainty and rapid social ,pollitical, and economic change. Read one way, it sounds easy: “Only connect,” that’s all we need to do. Read another way, skepticism creeps in. “Only connect” is a hypothetical goal: “if only we could connect.” Forster was concerned with divisions of all types: rich/poor, nature/culture, male/female, classic/contemporary, the inner life versus the outer life, the country versus the city, prose and passion..  I hope that this spot will provide a place to explore some of those oppositions and forge some connections.  To quote Bill Cronon from an essay  (also titled “Only connect”) that he wrote for the American Scholar, “More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways.”   My hope is that this blogspot will be a place where we can move across disciplines, think about helping our students to integrate the sometimes disparate elements of their education, report on our future move to greater physical connection in fewer buildings, and reach out to those in our community.  As Margaret Schlegel says in Howards End–  “Live in fragments no longer!”

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