Liberal Arts Voices

Read the perspectives of our current students

Reflections on a Year as Associate Dean

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Today marks the first day of my second year as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. Such moments invite reflection, and since I have been encouraging students to reflect upon their undergraduate experience here on the blog, I thought I would pause to consider my own experience.

It begins and ends with students. The most rewarding aspect of my experience as Associate Dean has been the opportunity to get to know our remarkable undergraduate students.

Whether it was engaging in a Dialogue on Drinking with LAUC President Geoff Halberstadt and former President Sam Loewner, or talking poetry with PSU Laureate Robin Becker and her students Natalie Kovak and William Woolfit on the Liberal Arts Voices Podcast, or experiencing vicariously the transformative study abroad experiences of students like Nicole Zinni and Justin Ogden, I have been struck and encouraged by the integrity, passion, thoughtfulness and maturity of our students in the College of the Liberal Arts.

The rich LAUS website, with its student bloggers, pictures, videos and podcasts, has been the medium through which the undergraduate student experience has been articulated and, I hope, amplified. My commitment to the strategy with which I began my tenure as Associate Dean – to use social media technologies to deepen and enrich our community of education – has strengthened as students have embraced the opportunity to reflect on their experiences in public.

Justin Ogden, who blogged for us as he spent the summer of 2010 as an intern at a shoe factory in China, gives eloquent voice to the power of blogging to focus our thoughts, slow us down and deepen our appreciation of the experiences we are having:

What Justin says here about the once in a lifetime experience he was having at the factory and the importance of pausing to reflect upon just how life changing that experience was is more broadly applicable; for we all too readily become caught up in the daily busy-ness of our lives and experiences to pause to reflect on just how remarkable and indeed beautiful this time we have together is.  
Plato had Socrates put it poignantly in the Apology: “a life not inquired into is not a life for human-beings” (38a2-6). What makes a life a human life is this capacity to reflect and put words to our experience, to make meaning of things and to strive to live a fulfilling life in community with others. I tried to put something of how this relates to a liberal arts education into words as I spoke to prospective students and their parents last summer:
So as I pause here after a year to reflect upon what we have experienced together and to look forward to what is to come, I am reminded of how the values of a liberal arts education enrich our lives.  And I am grateful for the opportunity to continue my own education in the liberal arts with the faculty, administrators, staff, and students here in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State.
Oh, and we had some fun too … 

Join Our Digital Community

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Hello Liberal Arts Undergraduates:

Over the past year, our Undergraduate Studies Office has developed an extensive online and social media presence dedicated to building community around the undergraduate experience in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. Our goal is to use social media technologies as an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to engage one another and to reflect in public about the liberal arts experience at Penn State. As we begin this new academic year, I want to invite you to participate in our online community.

Our newly redesigned website serves as a HUB for all the activities in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies office. I hope you will visit it frequently and make it a favorite bookmark.

Our main LAUSatPSU blog is co-authored by liberal arts faculty, students, and staff. This blog focuses on the undergraduate experience in the College of the Liberal Arts. Here you will find posts from students writing about recent internship experiences; tips about advising from CLA advisers; episodes of Liberal Arts Voices, a bi-weekly podcast produced by the LAUS Office which highlights undergraduate life in the College; and much more.

Our LAUS Announcements blog draws attention to news, updates, and announcements that are important for CLA undergraduates. You should subscribe to LAUS Announcements to get the most recent internship postings, study abroad application deadlines, dates for a variety of College events, and other information related to life in the College.

The Education Abroad Experience blog is generated by the stories and experiences of Liberal Arts undergraduates as they study abroad and travel around the world. If you are interested in studying abroad this is a great opportunity to hear directly from your fellow students and to start thinking about the type of program that is right for you.

If you are an admitted or aspiring Paterno Fellow, make sure to check out the Paterno Fellows Program blog. You will receive direct messages from the PFP Director Jack Selzer and read posts written by students involved in the program when you subscribe to this blog.

I invite you to follow me and the LAUS office on Twitter, to become our fan on Facebook, to subscribe to all of our blogs, to listen to the Liberal Arts Voices podcast and, most importantly, to join the ongoing conversation about the Liberal Arts undergraduate experience.

Sincerely,

Dean Long

LAUS Dwight

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A few years ago, I received the Dwight bobble head pictured here looking out of my office window as I work. This picture was taken by Heather Summerlin, IT Consultant in the College of Liberal Arts, and posted on our LAUSatPSU Flickr page.

Dwight has become a mascot of sorts for the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies (LAUS) office. He has recently returned from a trip to his hometown of Scranton, PA, where he joined a dedicated group of students from the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council (LAUC) as they raised money for THON, the student-run philanthropy effort to fight pediatric cancer.

The students seem to have had a good time with LAUSDwight and I have embedded a slideshow of the pictures they posted to the LAUC Flickr account.

It is great to see the dedication of these students as they participate in the largest student-run philanthropy effort in the world. LAUSDwight looks good working the phones, playing Wii and bathing in some of the over $1200 the LAUC students raised last weekend.

I encourage everyone to follow the adventures of LAUSDwight as he attends various events, official and unofficial, participating in and observing the undergraduate experience in the College of the Liberal Arts.

We will be tweeting about him using the #LAUSDwight hash tag in the weeks and months to come.

Liberal Arts at 200

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CLA Centennial Sign
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU

One of the highlights of the Fall 2009 semester was the celebration of 100 years of Liberal Arts education at Penn State.

Edwin Erle Sparks, the 8th President of Penn State, established the College of the Liberal Arts in 1909 by bringing art and mathematics together with the School of Language and Literature and the School of History and Political Science. (For more on our history, see the CLA website.)

A sense for the distance we have traveled since those early days can be felt in the video the College produced for our Centennial Celebration.  Take a look:

The world of politics, culture and technology may change, but the values of a liberal arts education endure. 

Who in 1909 would have imagined that their work and the values they embodied would be written about in media that, with the click of a button, makes their words and deeds instantly accessible to an infinite number of people, each of whom is empowered to respond directly to what they have done?

As we begin our second century, it is perhaps fitting to pause a moment to consider: how will liberal arts students, faculty, staff, and alums commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the College; what will have changed; and what will endure?

In considering this, I am confident of only two things:

  1. Education in the liberal arts will have been transformed by the digital media revolution through which we are living; and
  2. The values and abilities taught by the liberal arts – respect for diversity, ethical leadership, excellence in communication, and creative, critical thinking – will remain of decisive importance for a successful and meaningful life in 2109.

Let me end by inviting you to respond to any or all of the following questions:

  • How has the liberal arts experience at Penn State changed over the past 100 years?
  • What are the values, skills, and ideas that endure?
  • How will an education in the liberal arts change in the next 5, 10, 50, 100 years?
  • What forms of communication will the College community use to commemorate our bicentennial?

Welcome Back for Spring 2010

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I hope everyone has had an excellent break and is ready for the spring semester. Although it doesn’t feel much like spring at the moment here in State College, we in the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies (LAUS) office are very excited about the new semester.

There have been a number of changes in our office over the break.  The first change I should probably mention is that I have officially started as the new Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies.  I look forward to working with the students, faculty, staff and alums in my new role.  Rather than spend much time introducing myself here, I invite you to learn more about my teaching and scholarly work by visiting my blog: The Long Road.

Our office itself is also undergoing a renovation. We are still in the process of moving back into the office suite. When we are done, however, we look forward to welcoming you all to our revitalized space in the Sparks Building. Thanks to OPP for all the hard work they have put into making this space look excellent.

To learn a little more about my vision of how we in LAUS intend to use social media technologies in the next months and years, take a look at this short video. It is taken from part of a larger project on which the innovative educators at Teaching and Learning with Technology are working. Jaime Oberdick from TLT, asked how I intend to use social media in my new role as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies.

As we move into the Spring 2010 semester, we invite you to join us by participating in the digital community we hope to create together:

Finally, we are particularly excited to have the excellent student leaders of the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council (LAUC) already beginning to take advantage of digital media to get out the good word about their activities:

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