Mount Aloysius Speaker Series—2011-2015
Description and themes by year
Mount Aloysius College stands out in the ranks of higher education institutions in that we choose a theme each year and coordinate our Orientation Program, the Connections first-year student seminar, our Speakers Series, and other events around that single idea. In the past four years the college community has explored the following themes: Civil Discourse (2011-12), Hospitality (2011-12), Citizenship (2012-13), and The Good Life (2014-15). With each passing year, programing around the yearlong theme has expanded and participation has increased. The original concept of a campus speaker series has transformed into a community-wide exploration of ideas central to the intellectual, formational, social, and service dimensions of campus life.
Nearly half of all speakers visiting the campus have come for extended stays. During these visits of two or three days, speakers have multiple contacts with the community, during meals with students and faculty, in classroom lectures, and through interviews taped in the College’s Digital Grotto studio and shared on the Mount Aloysius College web site and on You Tube.
Below are brief descriptions of each of our yearlong campus themes. These descriptions are followed by a roster of the speakers, and a brief synopsis of each speaker’s lecture and related initiatives of different campusentities.
2011-12: Civil Discourse
In response to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, President Tom Foley selected the theme of Civil Discourse for his inauguration year. As he noted, “Many of us aredeeply concernedabout thestateof public,private,andeveninternetdiscourseinour country, andare convinced that higher education hasan essentialroletoplay in encouragingcivility, citizenship and community.”
Civil discourse is the lifeblood of democracy. Good governance requires good decisions and good decisions flow from: informative debate, the free exchange of ideas and the earnest consideration of other points of view. A civil debate provides a safe environment for the sharingideas. This climate benefits society by promoting the fullest exploration and best solutions to social issues. In selecting the Civil Discourse theme, President Foley wanted to highlight, “the signature role that higher education can play as an incubator for democracy, a place where students are exposed to theskillsand behaviors needed to successfully engage as citizens and to makedemocracy work.“
Along with numerous individual speakers and campus-sponsored initiatives, the Inauguration Symposium was dedicated to the theme of Civil Discourse. Symposium panelists included David Shribman, Executive Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pulitzer Prize winner; Dr. John Murray, Duquesne University Chancellor and former law school dean; federal judge D. Brooks Smith of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and Sondra Meyers, Senior Fellow for International Civic and Cultural Projects at the University of Scranton.
A monograph of the symposium was later distributed to over 400 College presidents and higher education leaders. This monograph was also accepted into the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. In addition, the symposium was broadcast statewide on the Pennsylvania Cable Network. The Mount Aloysius College civility initiative received national recognition from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities which named it oneof its Top Ten Initiatives for 2011.
2012-13: Hospitality: Finding Home in a Changing World
As an institution and a community, Mount Aloysius College is inspired by the four core principles of its founders, the Sisters of Mercy: service, justice, mercy and hospitality. These first three virtues receive much attention—given the principled and often heroic acts they inspire—while hospitality, a virtue associated withhumble, even prosaic acts, is often overlooked. Yet, hospitality’s pedigree as a vital social virtue is ancient, one enshrined in the laws and myths of antiquity. In choosing the yearlong theme: “Hospitality: Finding Home in a Changing World,”theCollege set about to explore the idea of hospitality and to rediscover its power for a modern world.
In announcing the theme, President Foley placed it in the context of a 24/7 culture, whose “sheer pace of change can cause us to lose our place in the world, even in our own world—our haven, our sanctuary, our personal or safe place, our home.” Disorientating change is also the product of a world characterized by highly mobile societies and by the mass movements of refugees that result from war and economic hardship. President Foley quoted Henri Nouwen, to suggest how hospitality might help us navigate, even humanize our modern world:
“Hospitality,” means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and
become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them
space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side,
but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.”
Over a dozen speakers explored the theme of hospitality, and did so from multiple perspectives: the concept of community, representations in popular literature, and the contexts of diplomacy, business, and church. A panel of political leaders also presented on the theme in terms of political involvement. The hospitality theme was incorporated into the New Student Orientation program and the curricula of the Connections first-year student seminar and the Little Peoples’ Place, our workplace daycare center. Five outstanding lectures from this series were collected in a monograph that was then shared with fellow Mercy institutions, with leaders in higher education, and with thought-leaders in the wider community.
2013-14: 21st Century Citizenship: The Common Good
In his inauguration address of 2011, President Foley announced the Mount Aloysius Compact—the promise that graduating students would be “job ready, technology ready and community ready.” Focusing on the last element of the Compact, the College dedicated the 2013-14 campus-wide theme to an exploration of the nature of citizenship in the 21stcentury and its role in promoting the common good.
President Foley introduced the theme at Convocation by quoting Justice Louis Brandeis’ remark that “the most important office in our democracy is that of private citizen” and notedthat education plays an essential role in preparing citizens for the exercise of that office. Thomas Jefferson made clear that full citizenship required all our citizens to be educated; he believed that moral education and academic training were essential to developing the critical reasoning needed for the effective exercise of democracy. In that spirit, President Foley challenged the campus community to embrace the potential of the university “to be an incubator for democracy– a place where all the skills are taught and all the behaviors are modeled that are essential to a democracy, so that when students engage fully as citizens, they will have all the tools they need to make democracy work.”
The citizenship theme was again the subject of an interdisciplinary faculty panel discussion and incorporated into the New Student Orientation program and the curriculum of the Connections first-year seminar. It drew 10 speakers to campus including a judge of the Court of Common Pleas for Somerset County, Pa; a long-time aide to Vice President Joseph Biden; an Irish ambassador and past Chair of the Human Rights committee of the Council of Europe; the CEO of the nation’s largest non-profit employment and training program; a former college president; and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Thesespeakers addressed the topic in relation to the ideas of: public service, faith, individual rights versus communal responsibility, economic opportunity and full citizenship, global citizenship, and educating for democracy. Seven of these lectures were published in monograph form and shared with the higher education community, local government representatives, and community leaders.
2014-15: The Good Life
The College’s Speaker Series Committee chose as the theme for the 2014-15 academic year an exploration of a “good life”—its qualities and components, its values and practices—with an eye to covering a variety of features and experiences that define human existence. The approach to the theme is eclectic, covering the worlds of philosophy, art, career, spirituality, relationships, health, community engagement, finance and more.
The goal of the exploration is to provide students with a mature, balanced and deeply human vision for a fulfilling life. Introducing the theme, President Foley addressed the history of intellectual and moral thought going back to the Greek notion of eudaimonia saying, “that while it is commonly interpreted as “happiness,” its root words are significant—“eu” for “good” and “daimon” for “spirit.” When Aristotle, Epictetus and the Stoics began parsing this notion of eudaimonia they aligned it with Greek words for character (“ethike arête”), and argued that eudaimonia signified not just “happiness” but the “highest human good.” President Foley urged students to engage the topic throughout the year in the hope that they would, “ultimately decide that finding meaning in what you do is the highest goal—a life full of meaning—rather than a search for a life full of happiness per se.
Among the speakers invited to address the topic were: economist, ethicist and past president of The Catholic University of America, William Bryan, S.J.; NYU philosopher, Dr. Larry Jackson; chairperson of the McAuley Ministries Board of Directors and Carlow University’s Special Assistant to the President for Mercy Heritage, Sr. Sheila Carney, RSM; Senior Federal Appeals Court Judge and past Dean of the Yale Law School, the Honorable Guido Calabresi; and Dr. Timothy Shriver, Chairman of the Board of the Special Olympics.
The tradition continues of integrating the theme into the Student Orientation program and the curricula of both the Connections first-year student seminar and the workplace daycare center, and of having a multidisciplinary faculty panel explore the theme. In addition, aninitiative by student-support officeswas launched called the “Live Well Series,” designed to offer practical workshops on key life dimensions including career and relationship choices, healthy lifestyles, the purpose-driven life, financial planning, and the personal benefits of community engagement. The initiative includes Career Development, Student Activities, Counseling & Disabilities Services, Campus Ministry, Graduate Counseling, Financial Aid, and the Library.