January, 2022
Dear Faculty, Staff and Students in the Klingler College of Arts & Sciences,
Happy New Year!
The start of this calendar year and a new academic semester while we continue to deal
with the COVID-19 pandemic certainly poses a host of challenges—some unique, and some
that we’ve been living with for about two years now. I’d like to take a moment to
acknowledge the difficulties that many in our community have been navigating, whether
it has been the illness or loss of loved ones or dealing with the stresses of social
isolation and different modes of teaching and learning. The situation for parents
of young children has been particularly stressful. Please reach out if you need help.
Marquette provides resource sites for faculty and staff wellness and for student counseling services and tips for coping with social distancing. We are all here to support one another as a community.
That mutual support has been much in evidence as I have continued to meet with many
of you and with our broader community of alumni and friends. Recent weeks have included
travel to New York City and to Washington, D.C. During the latter trip, I had the
great pleasure of meeting with colleagues at our Les Aspin Center for Government and
watching the men’s basketball team beat Georgetown. I spent time with a member of
Marquette’s Board of Trustees who extolled the virtues of the liberal arts and the
importance of our Catholic, Jesuit mission.
In keeping with those themes, on January 14 over 50 faculty and staff members from
Arts & Sciences gathered, as we did last year, for a half-day virtual New Year Workshop.
Aiming to foster community and a strong start to the New Year, the workshop was designed
to enhance awareness of the wonderful things happening across the College and to generate
ideas about how to deepen our strengths and further our aims. Central to the whole-group
and breakout group conversations was the topic of integration.
Integration is an essential aspect of a liberal arts and sciences education, particularly
in a Catholic, Jesuit context. It refers to educating the whole person in light of
the community and its needs. In his Encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis articulates a vision for integral ecology, or an integrated and holistic
approach to the most pressing challenges of our era, spanning political, social, economic
and environmental issues. (Here is a link to a ten-minute video introduction to the concept.) Of course, integration
is crucial not just for Arts & Sciences but for the entire Marquette community. To
that end, when I had the opportunity this month to help set the agenda for a Deans
Council meeting, I invited as presenters our co-directors of the Race, Ethnic and
Indigenous Studies (REIS) program, Tara Daly and Stephanie Rivera Berruz, as well
as Marquette’s Sustainability & Energy Management Coordinator, Chelsea Malacara. They
shared ways for all faculty, staff and students to become more involved with promoting
diversity, equity, inclusion and a sense of belonging as well as strategies for leveraging
our collective strengths in sustainability and integral ecology.
Which brings me back to this month’s A&S workshop. Keeping in mind the five University-level priorities, we focused on seven strengths and aims of the College that we have identified over
the past year in light of our January 2021 workshop, meetings with departments, our
Virtual Coffee meetings, and numerous conversations with Department Chairs, Associate
Deans and College staff. They are:
- Prepare students to flourish in work, life and civic engagement
- Conduct research and create new knowledge
- Engage communities locally and globally
- Foster interdisciplinary integration and connections across areas of human understanding
- Provide leadership in Marquette’s Catholic, Jesuit mission
- Promote diversity, equity and inclusion
- Ask big questions, address challenges and seek solutions
At the workshop, seven faculty and staff colleagues each provided introductory comments
about one of the seven themes. We then worked in breakout groups to answer two questions:
What will success in this aim look like 5 years from now? What are some concrete actions
we could take to further this aim? Each group reported back key points from their
robust conversations to the full group, and shared with facilitators a written copy
of their notes. The next steps will include distilling these notes into a concise
summary. Department Chairs are working with their departments to devise an action
step for each of the University’s five priorities.
Working with the Office of Marketing and Communication—particularly Monica MacKay
(Arts ‘07)—we will endeavor in the coming months to more succinctly articulate our
vision for the College. The result will be a shared vision of where we are going and
the strengths we bring to our work. This vision will guide and enhance our shared
work in a number of ways, from recruiting students to setting priorities to inspiring
benefactors.
Like last year, our New Year Workshop ended with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt
by way of Arthur Ashe: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
Mindful of this statement, I invited participants to reflect: What are some goals
you have for yourself during the coming semester? Whether or not you attended the
workshop, you may be interested in writing a short email message to yourself with
a response to this question. Flag it to read again at mid-semester. Let’s continue
to explore together how we might foster excellence and integration in all that we
do.
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
|