April 2022
Dear Faculty, Staff and Students in the Klingler College of Arts & Sciences,
To foster greater awareness of the extraordinary work happening across the college,
I have been featuring some of our outstanding A&S Centers. This month’s focus is the
Center for Peacemaking (CfP). The Center engages in both theory and practice. It fosters research on peacemaking,
formation of students as peacemakers and collaboration with community partners to
promote the values of peacemaking. The Center defines peacemaking as both the absence
of violence and the presence of conditions that promote healthy, thriving persons
and communities.
When asked about recent points of pride, Center director Pat Kennelly points to three
accomplishments: education and Peace Studies, nimble response to community needs and
the team approach that enables the Center to carry out its work. For the first accomplishment,
Kennelly points to how CfP educates students through programming as well as the Peace
Studies curriculum, which has attracted over 50 majors and minors. As he puts it,
these curricular programs prepare students to address critical issues that align with
today’s top headlines: “They get the values and the skills to work on real-world issues.”
For the second accomplishment, he emphasizes the Center for Peacemaking’s response
to the escalating need for mental health resources among young people in our community
as well as heightened attention to addressing the root causes of violence in our city
and beyond. This work has been carried out in large part through the Near West Side Partners, with which the CfP is deeply involved.
The third accomplishment echoes a feature that all of our Center directors have emphasized:
the power of teamwork. As Kennelly notes: “We have a team of people who roll up their
sleeves and ask, how might we advance peacemaking across campus and around the world?”
What began as a team of one full-time and one part-time staff person has blossomed
into a model of how faculty, staff, students and community members can come together
and serve as a force for positive change in the community.
Pat Kennelly and his team have known extraordinary success in securing philanthropic
and other external support for the Center. He explains that gifts to the Center result
in “a threefold win.” Namely, they foster the formation of the next generation of
peacemakers. Thanks to the Center’s applied, engaged research, the whole community
benefits from gifts to CfP. And donors appreciate the opportunity to support our Catholic,
Jesuit mission and its manifestation in the world.
That mission has been much in evidence across Arts & Sciences. With the end of the
academic year soon upon us, April has been an action-packed month of accomplishment
and celebration. We marked the launch of the Center for Data, Ethics and Society,
directed by Dr. Michael Zimmer, on April 4. The launch event featured a keynote address
by Marquette alumnus Dr. Andy Gustafson on the ways in which Ignatian principles sit
in tension with habits instilled through overuse of social media. A panel of experts
from across the college and the university illustrated how our newest Center will
convene colleagues from a variety of disciplines.
This month we also celebrated our award-winning researchers at Marquette’s Distinguished Scholars Reception on April 5. Of the 10 awardees, 8 were from Arts & Sciences. This was my first in-person
experience with this event, and it was truly joyful and informative, as we learned
about the research of this year’s awardees as well as the research of those honored
in 2020 and 2021. Other highlights of the month included the end of semester E-Lead
Banquet, where Arts & Sciences students and alumni were honored for their completion
of this transformational leadership program, as well as an Earth Day event on Integral
Ecology sponsored by the Office of Mission and Ministry in which A&S faculty gave
presentations. The end of April saw our first large-scale public-facing event in the
Civic Dialogues program, on the topic of economic prosperity. Directed by Dr. Amber Wichowsky of the Department of Political Science, Civic Dialogues
is a donor-funded initiative to enable students and the broader community to have
productive conversations across differences.
College of Arts & Sciences faculty and staff came together for an all-College meeting
on April 26. This was an opportunity to honor our retirees and faculty award winners
and to celebrate our many accomplishments over the past year across teaching, research
and service. It was also a time for us to look ahead to plans for the coming year.
I’d like to thank everyone who has helped to welcome prospective Marquette students
and their families during numerous campus visits over the past month and beyond. I
wish all of you success in navigating end-of-semester projects and deadlines.
As always, please feel free to contact me with questions, concerns or suggestions. I appreciate hearing from you and exploring
ways we can all work together for the common good.
Dr. Heidi Bostic Dean, Klingler College of Arts and Sciences
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