march 2006 newsletter

The Periclean Progress E-Newsletter
Volume 2, Issue 8 - March 2006

Project Pericles ® Announcements

Congratulations: Chatham College's contributions to increase the civic and political engagement of women of all ages throughout Pennsylvania have been recognized by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The AAUW granted its first Gateway to Equity Award, which honors the promotion of equity for women and girls, to Chatham's Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy (PCWPPP). Chatham Project Pericles Program Director and PCWPPP Director Dr. Allyson M. Lowe will accept the award on April 1 at AAUW's Pennsylvania state convention.

For Your Calendar: Pace University, Swarthmore College, and Wagner College are sending students to Washington, D.C. for the Rally to Stop Genocide in Darfur on April 30. Contact us at [email protected], and we will share information on your school's delegation to the Rally with other Pericleans. More.

Student Opportunity: "Building Democracy: Lessons in Responsible and Engaged Citizenship," is an academic internship experience offered by The Washington Internship Institute (WII) for Pericleans. The program combines a D.C. internship with course work, special tours, briefings, civil discourse on salient issues, and service opportunities. The application deadline for Fall 2006 is June 1. For more information, contact Mary Ryan at [email protected], or see the WII website.

Periclean Connections

Governance: Civic engagement expert Dr. Harry C. Boyte has joined Project Pericles' distinguished National Board of Advisors. Dr. Boyte is the Co-Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and author of seven books on civic engagement.

Presidents: The Occidental College Board of Trustees has named Ms. Susan Westerberg Prager the thirteenth president of Occidental College, effective July 1. Ms. Prager comes to Occidental from UCLA Law School, where she is the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Professor of Law. She has served as Dean of UCLA Law School, Provost of Dartmouth College, and Vice President of the Stanford College Board of Trustees. She will succeed Occidental President Dr. Theodore R. Mitchell and Interim President Dr. Kenyon S. Chan.

Periclean Initiative: Debating for Democracy (D4D), a signature program of Project Pericles, is being developed for the 2006-2007 academic year. The D4D Steering Committee, which is chaired by Dr. Richard Guarasci, President of Wagner College, and is composed of representatives from the pilot D4D schools (Bates College, Bethune-Cookman College, Pace University, Wagner College, and Widener University), set the goals, mission, and timeline of D4D at its March 9 and March 23 meetings. The committee will meet again on April 5.

Periclean Visits: During his March visit to New York, President Richard J. Cook of Allegheny College met with Project Pericles Founder Eugene M. Lang and Executive Director Jan R. Liss to discuss Allegheny's participation in Project Pericles.

Jan R. Liss visited the downtown and Pleasantville campuses of Pace University in February and March and met with President David A. Caputo, Dean of the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences Nira Herrmann, Pace Project Pericles Program Director Dr. Mary Ann Murphy, and Assistant Directors of the Center for Community Outreach Heather Novak and Sangeeta Rao. She also attended the class "Community Applied Legislative Advocacy" taught by Pete Sikora.

Jan R. Liss and Heather C. Ohaneson visited The New School in March, where they met with Dean of Eugene Lang College Jonathan Veitch, Assistant Dean of Eugene Lang College Amos Himmelstein, Director of the Institute for Urban Education Daphne Farganis, and faculty members. Program and collaboration opportunities were discussed.

Student Profiles: The New York Times has covered the participation of Swarthmore College student activist Stephanie Nyombayire '08 in the MTV documentary "Translating Genocide: Three Students Journey to Sudan." Nyombayire, who is originally from Rwanda, urges increased media coverage of the genocide in Darfur. The documentary, which aired on March 12, may be viewed online. Click here to read the New York Times article. Click here for more information on Nyombayire.

A junior at Rhodes College, Sini Nwaobi embodies the Periclean value of applying academic knowledge to the needs of local and global communities. Nwaobi has combined her study of biology with her passion for serving others by organizing and completing a medical mission trip to Nigeria in the summer of 2005. She visited clinics, hospitals, and universities throughout the country and helped build a water system for a village there. She is planning a similar service trip to India for the summer of 2007. In the meantime, she will draw on her minor in Spanish in her travels with Rhodes's Tex-Mex Border Ministry to build two new homes in Reynosa, Mexico over spring break. Nwaobi hopes to make a difference -- whether in a local hospital or a third world country -- by one day obtaining an M.D.-Ph.D. More.

Advocates in ActionProject Pericles at Macalester College collaborated with the Minnesota Participation Project (MPP) to educate members of the St. Paul community about precinct caucuses and to train them to use the caucuses to bring about community solutions to public problems. Macalester and MPP held nonpartisan workshops on March 2 in which participants learned how they could be voices for change in areas such as immigration, housing, and access to health care. Precinct caucus trainings occurred throughout Minnesota in English and Somali. For more information on these educational exercises in advocacy and participatory democracy, contact Macalester Project Pericles Co-Program Director Karin Trail-Johnson, Assistant Dean of Students, at [email protected]. More information is also available from MPP's website.
Do you have examples of Periclean-initiated actions that address issues of local, national, or international concern? Email Heather Ohaneson at [email protected].

Notable Program Activities: Campus, Classroom, Community

Campus: Former President Bill Clinton spoke at Pace University on March 5 to launch the school's Centennial Celebration. He addressed a crowd of 2500 people on the direction the United States should take in an increasingly interdependent world. Clinton said the country was confronted with the same two great questions it faced 100 years ago under President Theodore Roosevelt: How can we undergo economic change while remaining a decent place to live? and What role should we play in the world? "You need to have an opinion on these things," Clinton told the students in the audience. "You need to know where you think America is, and where you want it to go. And what you think should be done. What the role of government is, and what you can do as a private citizen." During the Question and Answer period that followed Clinton's talk, Pace University President David A. Caputo asked President Clinton about his views on student citizenship, citing Pace's commitment to educating for citizenship through Project Pericles and the University's core curriculum. To read the transcript of President Clinton's speech, click here.

"Redeeming America's Promise: Preaching and Practicing Democracy Abroad" was the theme of Macalester College's twenty-fifth annual G. Theodore Mitau Endowed Lecture on February 22. The lecture was given by Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Bert G. Kerstetter University Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

The themes of genocide prevention and remembrance have emerged from Pace University's Political Action for Human Rights series. In addition to its work to combat the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Project Pericles at Pace has sponsored events on the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. The 25 year old human rights activist Yvette Rugasaguhunga gave a moving account of her experience as a survivor of the atrocities in Rwanda, on March 6. Margot Dilmaghani will discuss women's use of poetry and the piano in responding to genocide as part of the March 27 event "Genocide and the Artist's Response: Tracing the Women's Perspective."

Classroom: The activist and advocate for nonviolent social change Dr. George Lakey has been selected as Swarthmore College's Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change in 2006-2007. Lakey, the founder and executive director of Training for Change, has published extensively for activist and academic communities. He has worked with civil rights leaders in the United States, as well as internationally. His teaching will include a new course, "Peace Studies and Action," which he is developing with Lee Smithey, assistant professor of sociology and coordinator of Swarthmore's Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Regarding coursework with Dr. Herbert Kohl, the 2005-2006 Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change, a Swarthmore student said: "[These classes are] a release from feeling academically irrelevant while remaining intellectually challenging. [They offer] a wealth of experience, which is impossible to gain from only reading books." More.

This semester, seventeen Occidental College seniors majoring in Diplomacy and World Affairs have taken advantage of a new opportunity to connect their research interests with the local community through internships at non-profit organizations in Los Angeles. Students keep observational journals and, at the end of the semester, present analytical papers to the campus community. For more information, email the Director of Occidental's Center for Community Based Learning, Occidental Project Pericles Program Director Maria Avila at [email protected].

A Project Pericles Civic Engagement Course project created by Elon University communications professor George E. Padgett has been selected as a second place winner in the national Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications' Teaching Standards Best Practices competition. The winning entry was for a project conducted by his General Studies course, Five Freedoms: First Amendment Under Attack, which was offered last fall. Students in the class presented a First Amendment education program, including a skit about the five freedoms, to fifth grade students. Dr. Padgett will present his teaching ideas as part of a Best Teaching Practices panel at the AEJMC national conference in San Francisco in August. For more information, email him at [email protected].

The 2006 International Conference on Civic Education featured two papers by Dr. Melissa Comber, Allegheny College visiting assistant professor in political science and research fellow at the college's Center for Political Participation. In addition to the papers "Equalizing Political Participation Abilities: Civic Education and Cognitive Civic Skills" and "Group Discussion Skills and Civic Education Content," Dr. Comber has published a fact sheet on civic education with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

Community: A project to stimulate thoughtful, passionate, and civil discussion about hot topics has been created by the Hendrix College Project Pericles Advisory Committee. The weekly lunch discussion series, called the Hendrix Forum, begins on March 23 with a conversation between members of the campus community and the broader local community on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Dr. Alex Vernon, an English professor at Hendrix who is an award-winning author of numerous books on war, will facilitate the meeting. Committee members will select future topics shortly before the weekly forums in order to keep the discussions fresh and fluid. For more information, email Hendrix Project Pericles Program Director Dr. Jay Barth at [email protected].

The website One World TV is featuring "A Measure of Our Humanity," one of four documentaries produced by Elon University's Periclean Scholars. Produced and directed by Katrina Taylor '05, "A Measure of Our Humanity" examines the problem of HIV/AIDS in Namibia. The other Periclean Scholars-produced documentaries will also be featured on the website.

Hosted by the Common Ground Collective, whose motto is "Solidarity Not Charity," twenty Swarthmore College students spent spring break doing hurricane relief work in New Orleans. Their trip was part of Swarthmore's second alternative break project working with Common Ground, an organization that works directly with residents and community-based organizations in and around the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.

Twenty-one students and six staff members from Macalester College traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi in January and worked with the organization Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to help with Hurricane Katrina clean-up, recovery, and rebuilding efforts. Students and staff were part of small-learning groups, which facilitated learning and reflection on topics related to the relief efforts. Several students also pursued independent study credit and worked with professors to design topics around the effect of disaster fatigue and the ethics of service in areas of natural disaster. The group also spent a day in New Orleans meeting with alumni and learning more about the complex issues the city faces in rebuilding. Visit the trip website to view the team's slideshow, read student reflections, and find resources about working in the area.

Innovative InitiativesAs a way of inspiring students to build lives of political engagement, Widener University has created "Project Pericles Presents Perspectives on Public Service," a program that brings individuals with professional experience in civic life to campus. The series has included presentations by Widener alumni representing public service work at the local, government, and state levels, as well as visits by FBI Special Agent Jerri Williams and Jolene Smith, the co-founder of Free the Slaves, a non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating modern slavery around the world. Interested in instituting a similar series on your campus? Contact Widener Project Pericles Program Director Dr. Marcine Pickron-Davis, Special Assistant to the President for Community Engagement, at [email protected] for more information.

Pace University's innovative course "Congress and the Presidency in the Television Age" utilizes television cameras and the internet to connect Professor Chris Malone's classroom at Pace with Steve Scully at The C-Span Center in Washington, D.C. and his classroom at the University of Denver. A part of the Amos B. Hostetter Distance Learning Program, the course provides an engaging, interactive learning format for students so they may experience live discussions via television screens in three locations. Dr. Harry C. Boyte spoke to the joint-class as part of his visit to Pace in February. For more information, contact Dr. Malone at [email protected].

Grants and Resources

Call for Proposals: The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is accepting proposals on "Faculty Work and the New Academy: Emerging Challenges and Evolving Roles" for its Network for Academic Renewal Conference, which will take place November 9-11 in Chicago. Deadline: April 7. More.

Fellowship Opportunity: The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) have announced a fellowship for scholars from the U.S. and Canada to collaborate with members of ESRC-supported projects in Britain between June 2006 and September 2007. ESRC and SSRC have a common mission of disseminating important and socially useful knowledge in the social sciences. Areas of key interest are democracy and the public sphere, global security and cooperation, international migration, and knowledge institutions. Approximately ten research fellowships of up to $8,500 will be awarded. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in one of the social sciences, including history. Deadline: April 20. More.

Grant Opportunities: The Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University invites applications from social entrepreneurs who seek to develop technology-based solutions in the interest of humanitarian, educational, and sustainable development goals. Deadline: April 3. More.

The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, which supports media activism and grassroots organizing, is accepting proposals for projects in all genres that address critical social and political issues, combine intellectual clarity with creative use of the medium, and demonstrate understanding of how the production will be used for progressive social justice organizing. Most grants range between $5,000-$15,000. Deadline: May 15. More.

Do Something invites young people to apply for $500 community project grants. Ten grants will be awarded for proposals to solve local problems in the areas of community building, health, and the environment. Applicants may apply individually or in groups, and must name a mentor who will be involved in the project's implementation. Deadline: May 15. More.

Planning for the fifth anniversary of September 11: Our Voices Together, a non-partisan, non-profit group formed by September 11th family and friends, including Lynne Steuerle Schofield, Swarthmore College '99, invites colleges and universities to organize "Build a Safer, More Compassionate World" forums on their campuses on or around September 11, 2006. The forums will foster discussion of a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter terrorism that, as the 9/11 Commission Report recommended, "includes economic policies that encourage development [and] more open societies." Events may include town hall meetings or panel discussions with scholars and family members of 9/11 victims, special voluntary service opportunities, as well as fairs showcasing study and travel abroad opportunities in the developing world and courses on international issues. If your campus is interested in collaborating with Our Voices Together, contact us at Project Pericles at [email protected]. More.

Recommended Website: Presidents Richard J. Cook of Allegheny College and John Strassburger of Ursinus College inform us that a group of Wesleyan University students founded an online forum for thoughtful discussion of crucial policy matters. Beyondpartisan.org uses the potential of the internet to foster egalitarian "town hall" discussions that explore issues in foreign affairs, economics, science, and other areas. More.

Articles:
Concerned about service incentives for professors? Read Scott Jaschik's article "Changing the Incentives" on Inside Higher Ed for alternative and innovative rewards.

Do you see a connection between participation in sports and democracy? You're not alone. New research finds that young people who are involved in sports report higher levels of voting, volunteering, and engagement in their community than those who do not participate. To read the CIRCLE Fact Sheet "Participation in Sports and Civic Engagement" and Working Paper "Sports, Youth and Character: A Critical Survey," click here.

The Periclean Progress is issued each month during the academic year and is posted on the Project Pericles Forum, www.projectpericles.org/forum.
To subscribe, email us at [email protected].
To submit Periclean-related information for publication, email Heather Ohaneson at [email protected].
"CLAIMING THE LEGACY OF PERICLES"®
Periclean Colleges & Universities
Allegheny College * Bates College * Berea College * Bethune-Cookman College *
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Ursinus College * Wagner College * Widener University
National Office
Executive Director: Jan R. Liss,
[email protected]
Board of Directors
Chair: Eugene M. Lang
Presidents' Council
Chair: David A. Caputo, Pace University
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Co-Chairs: Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker & Hon. Kurt L. Schmoke
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