Caravel Autism Health will be in the Warch Campus Center on Tuesday, Sept. 27, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Stop by to learn about flexible, paid part-time opportunities for students who want to work in autism behavioral therapy roles in the Fox Cities. Caravel uses Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) in its work and provides paid training for students who are filling its roles.
Category: Students
University of Wisconsin Law School on campus Sept. 29
Discover why Wisconsin will make you a different—and better—kind of lawyer.
Sir Williams, director of admissions at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, will be at the Warch Campus Center Sept. 29 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to answer questions and talk about the application process.
Lawrence Scholars in Business Award Application due Oct. 3
Thanks to the generosity of our alumni who have funded the Lawrence Scholars in Business (LSB) Program, we invite students to apply for a Lawrence Scholars in Business Award Application to help cover expenses for your internship next summer. This is open to any student who, through an excellent academic record and extracurricular activities, has shown the right aptitude and aspirations to succeed in the highly competitive world of business. Applications and materials are due to sherri.immel@lawrence.edu in the Office of Alumni and Constituency Engagement no later than Monday, Oct. 3 at 5 p.m. Click on the link above for a direct link to the application.
Applications being accepted for KIPP Academy internships
Students interested in a career in education should consider applying for the KIPP Academy internship over D-Term.
Spending time at KIPP Academy in Boston provides Lawrence students interested in education careers with several important takeaways, including exposure to an innovative system of education, experience with education of inner-city children from diverse minority backgrounds and observation of various teaching styles and techniques.
Hours would be the same as faculty hours: 7 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday–Friday and evening work as needed. Students are expected to do any and all work supportive of the teachers, including work with individual and small groups of students, but also copying class materials and grading classwork.
Deadline to apply is Oct. 24. Visit LUworks for more information and application instructions.
What about those spiders?
You may have heard that brown recluse spiders were discovered in the Facilities Services building in early August. These spiders are not native to Wisconsin, and they can deliver a nasty bite that should not be treated lightly. This was so unusual that local media (the Appleton Post Crescent and Green Bay TV stations) all reported the story.
To put everyone’s mind at ease, here’s the current situation:
- When the spiders were first seen, LU worked with a pest control company to trap and then confirm that these were, in fact, brown recluse spiders.
- The building was treated and additional traps were set.
- As a precaution, staff, faculty and summer residents were notified and traps were set in all campus buildings.
- The Facilities Services building was treated a second time to ensure that the problem was addressed.
- No other campus buildings were affected, and no other brown recluse spiders have been confirmed on campus.
Since most of us have never seen a brown recluse spider, descriptions can be found on bulletin boards around campus. If you think you’ve seen a brown recluse spider, leave it alone and contact Facility Services at x6602.
LU art students to be featured at Appleton’s Trout Museum
Glenn McMahon ’17
The photographic talents of 10 Lawrence students will be featured in the exhibition Out of the Darkroom from Sept. 16 to Dec. 31 at the Trout Museum of Art in downtown Appleton.
Nearly two dozen images will be shown in the museum’s Regional Artist Gallery. The featured students are: Natalie Cash ’18, Michael Hubbard ’17, Cherise John ’17, Regan Martin ’17, Glenn McMahon ’17, Nick Nootenboom ’17, Penn Ryan ’18, Torrey Smith ’17, Chloe Stella ’16 and Sadie Tenpas ’17. All are students of Associate Professor of Art John Shimon.
How to “read the robes” at Matriculation Convocation
Students: Are you curious about the academic garb faculty and administrators wear for special occasions such as Matriculation Convocation, Honors Convocation and Commencement?
Here is an explanation ahead of today’s Matriculation Convocation:
Academic attire worn during Commencement ceremonies and on other formal occasions is based on common styles of the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe. In a time when both men and women wore gowns or robes, it became common practice to adopt distinctive gowns for various professions, trades and religious orders. The ceremonial garb of a modern academic procession, therefore, is descended from the working clothes of a medieval scholar, who was often at least a lower-order cleric. Long gowns were desirable in unheated medieval universities, and the hood may have been developed to cover the tonsured (shaved typically for religious reasons) head.
This tradition of academic dress, particularly as known at Oxford and Cambridge, passed to the American colonies and was standardized by an Intercollegiate Code in 1895. The code sets forth rules governing the color, shape and materials of the three primary items of academic apparel: the gown, the hood and the cap.
Gowns differ according to the level of degree earned by the wearer. The baccalaureate (bachelor’s degree) gown has pointed sleeves and is worn closed. The gown for the master’s degree has an oblong sleeve, open at the wrist, that hangs down. The rear part of the oblong shape is square-cut, and the front part has an arc cut away. The doctoral gown is the most ornate, with a velvet facing and three velvet chevrons on each bell-shaped sleeve. Both master’s and doctor’s gowns are designed to be worn either open or closed. While most doctoral gowns are black, some universities—e.g., Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford—provide gowns in their institutional colors.
For one who knows how to “read” them, academic hoods signal both the wearer’s field of study (the velvet border) and the institution by which it was conferred (the silk lining). Among the hood linings that might be seen in a Lawrence academic procession are those of Brown University (seal brown, cardinal chevron), City University of New York (lavender), Columbia University (light blue, white chevron), Cornell University (carnelian red, two white chevrons), Harvard University (black hood, crimson-lined), Johns Hopkins University (black, gold chevron), Princeton University (orange, black chevron), Stanford University (cardinal red, no chevron), the University of California (gold, Yale blue chevron), the University of Chicago (maroon, no chevron), the University of Virginia (navy blue, orange chevron), University of Wisconsin–Madison (cardinal, no chevron) and Yale University (Yale blue, no chevron). The Lawrence hood is lined in Yale blue, with two white chevrons.
In addition to the institutional colors, colors associated with specific academic disciplines are used for the trim on doctors’ gowns, the edging of hoods and the tassels of caps. The most frequently worn colors in the Lawrence academic procession are: dark blue (philosophy, including Ph.D.s), pink (music) and lemon (library science). Other discipline-related colors include white (arts, letters, humanities), golden yellow (science), purple (law), copper (economics), drab (business), light blue (education) and brown (fine arts).
The cap was the last item to be added to the academic ensemble and is most often hard and square, although variations in softer materials and in shape have been adopted by some institutions and for women. At Commencement, degree candidates wear the tassel on the right front of the cap and shift it to the left front immediately after degrees are conferred.
The ceremonial mace carried at the head of the academic processions by the college marshal (a senior member of the faculty) and the usher batons carried by faculty deputies were crafted by silversmith E. Dane Purdo, late professor emeritus of art, in 1972. On the occasion of his retirement in 1991, Professor Purdo presented to the university the presidential badge of office, a sterling and gold pendant worn on ceremonial occasions by President Mark Burstein, which depicts the Lawrence seal suspended by a chair of silver hawthorn leaves representing Milwaukee-Downer College.
Honors roundtable set for Sept. 22
The Fall Term honors roundtable will take place Thursday, Sept. 22 at 5 p.m. in room 401 of Mudd Library.
At this meeting, Honors Committee Chair and Associate Professor Antoinette Powell will go over the guidelines for completing an honors project. Reference librarian Gretchen Revie will discuss how the library can be of assistance in the honors process, while Andrew McSorley, interlibrary loan coordinator, will talk about interlibrary loan. Students will be asked to say a few words about their potential topics. All students currently working on honors projects or who hope to complete honors projects are strongly encouraged to attend.
For information on honors, please consult the Committee on Honors website.
An additional roundtable will take place at the beginning of the Winter and Spring Terms. Please consult the summary of deadlines on the honors website for the dates.
Creating a more inclusive Lawrence—A welcome letter from Kimberly Barrett
Dear Lawrence faculty, students and staff,
I am writing to introduce myself, welcome you to a new academic year and begin a conversation about how we will work together to create a more inclusive Lawrence. I am extremely excited to be engaged in the work of fostering diversity and inclusion at this time, both in our country and at Lawrence.
The past year was a turbulent one that exposed the lingering pain of some while causing new anguish for others. But, as is the case in many periods of disruption, we have the opportunity to come together with new awareness to create a stronger institution and community. As author and activist bell hooks once wrote, “We cannot despair when there is conflict. Our solidarity must be affirmed by shared belief in a spirit of intellectual openness that celebrates diversity, welcomes dissent and rejoices in collective dedication to the truth.”
The evidence based on research is clear: Diversity improves the curriculum, pedagogy and co-curricular programs. Taking an inclusive approach to our work in higher education benefits everyone. It increases the cognitive complexity of students’ thinking, helping them to approach the tasks of living an engaged life both critically and with compassion. It helps us teach all students more effectively, better achieving the desired learning outcomes. And finally, it strengthens our democracy by helping create and expand an educated citizenry, including those historically underserved by higher education, who are capable of contributing fully to our shared political and economic success.
In President Burstein’s recent letter about the new academic year, he urged us to create a new path together that welcomes and supports us all and fosters civil discourse. I am developing a framework to facilitate creation of this new path, as well as a theme for our work. The framework is tactical, while the theme conveys the philosophy behind the work. Initial activities related to the framework will build upon the many critical strategies people across campus implemented prior to my arrival. I am grateful to those who have been and continue to be committed to and engaged in this important work at Lawrence. Their work laid a strong foundation upon which to build. Ultimately, conversations with faculty, students and staff over the next few months will determine specific strategies and priorities for the framework.
In order to institutionalize inclusion, the framework will focus on developing and supporting three areas:
- Strengthening relationships, both within and between various groups on campus. This includes relationships between supervisors and employees, students and faculty members, and Lawrence and Appleton, as well as among and within various cultural affiliation groups.
- Capacity-building—facilitating programs to ensure all members of our community have the skills, knowledge and resources they need to take an equity-minded approach to their work.
- Accountability. This will focus on assessment across the organization (institutional, departmental and individual) in order to track and celebrate progress while identifying areas still in need of improvement and additional support.
Finally, in this time when there appears to be so much animosity, mutual hostility and hate, how can we, as our university’s motto urges, bring more light? To me, love is the light. So my theme for our diversity work will be, “Loving Large at Lawrence.” It refers to ideas related to loving learning, loving ourselves and loving community.
Loving learning is about the predisposition Lawrentians have to enthusiastically seek out opportunities to encounter and create new knowledge while bringing all of who they are to the educational enterprise. It also speaks to our understanding that optimal intellectual development occurs when significant challenge is accompanied by sufficient academic and emotional support. Loving ourselves is about becoming strong self-advocates and working to find harmony between the demands of rigorous, engaged liberal learning and self-care. It’s also about accepting ourselves so we can do the same for others. Loving community is based on the idea of Ubuntu, commonly translated, “I am because you are.” It is about acknowledging and supporting our interdependence as we strive to create a just, equitable and inclusive learning community.
So I hope you will join me in working to make sure we are indeed, “Loving Large at Lawrence.” As we embark on this journey together, keep in mind what celebrated scholar Noam Chomsky once said: “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” I look forward to getting to know you and welcome invitations from departments or organizations to discuss strategies for achieving a more inclusive Lawrence.
Wishing you much success in the coming academic year!
Kimberly Barrett
Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion and Associate Dean of the Faculty
Sampson House
920-832-7451
kimberly.a.barrett@lawrence.edu
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The Offices of Communications and Technology Services have created LU Insider to keep the Lawrence campus community better informed while also reducing the number of emails that fill up our inboxes.
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