Heard
On Campus: Excerpts from Faculty Lectures During Reunion
As
part of this year’s
reunion programming, several Smith faculty members presented
lectures on a wide range of topics, open to visiting alumnae,
as well as students and their parents on campus for Ivy Day
and Commencement. Several more lectures will be offered during
the second reunion weekend on May 24-25.
Meanwhile, below is
a sampling of comments by faculty during lectures on May
17.
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Rosetta Cohen |
Rosetta Cohen, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor
of Education and Child Study
“American notions about teacher status and prestige, like fast food and reality
TV, seem to have been exported worldwide, infecting the field on a global scale.”
“As I see it, to truly rehabilitate the profession we need to dismantle the insistent
expectation that teaching is service, and replace it with the notion that teaching
is brain-work of the most creative and appealing sort. That it affords a kind
of prestige not based on asceticism, sacrifice and service, but on talent, expertise
and skill.”
“How do we generate prestige
for teaching that is not based solely on self-abnegation
and sacrifice while acknowledging the inevitable limitations
of salary that will always exist in a profession funded
largely by tax dollars? We do it, I would argue, by reinventing
the notion of what the work of teaching should be. Institutions
like our own need to articulate a vision of teaching as ‘prestige
brain work’—both
to our own students and to the country at large.”
“It really takes so little
to change the environment for a teacher and a school. It
doesn’t take a lot of money; it’s about changing the attitudes
toward the values of the teacher in the school. When
you ask teachers what they want...they want to be valued.
They want their best work to be acknowledged. It’s so obvious.”
Alice Hearst,
professor of government
“When I was researching my book on adoption, which came out
last September, I was struck by how often those adoptions ‘disrupted,’ a
nice word for failed, and the children were sent into the
foster care system.”
“I don’t believe that all children under all circumstances
need a nuclear family. It may depend upon the age of the
child, it may depend on the connections a child has to a
prior family. Nor do I think that all forms of institutional
care are bad. It really does depend on the child and the
structure of that institution.”
“Through the years, the courts have idealized a particular
kind of family, which gets reiterated again and again in
the court’s jurisprudence over the family.
Eventually, an ideology was constructed that says good families
do two things: they take care of their own children, meaning
they privatize dependency; and they socialize children to
be good citizens.”
“As I’ve begun to explore
foster care, I’ve been increasingly
struck by how the design of this system actually increases
the vulnerability of those the system is designed to help,
and it’s not just because the system is overcrowded and
underfunded. Children in foster care are far more likely
to remain disadvantaged than those children who have not
spent time in the system."
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Jessica Nicoll '83 |
Jessica
Nicoll ‘83, director and Louise Ines Doyle '34 Chief
Curator, Museum of Art
"The vision for the Asian
art collection has been tied to the exponential growth
of instruction in subjects related to Asian culture here
at Smith.
"Chinese language was
introduced as a topic of instruction in the 1960s; Japanese
came in the 1970s. Today we also have instruction in Korean.
Specialists joined the faculty and taught topics related
to Asian culture in philosophy, history, government and
religion.
"By the
1980s, an East Asian studies program was created and that
was shortly followed by the establishment of a major and
minor in the department of East Asian languages and literature.
Today Smith has the largest faculty in East Asian studies
at an undergraduate college."
Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla
Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art History
"If you're collecting art in Mexico (particularly if you're
a woman), the expectation is that it's going to have a political
edge."
"It's hard to look at a work of art outside of its political
and cultural context, unless the artist is a European male."
"When does a work of art stop being ‘Mexican’ (or ‘LGBT’ or ‘Black’)
art, and become simply art?"
"Most critics say if you ignore the influence of colonialism
in contemporary Mexican art, you' re missing out on its meaning."
Drew
Guswa, professor of engineering and director of CEEDS
“1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water.
2.4 billion people do not have access to appropriate sanitation.”
“Do you know where your own water comes from? Do you know
where your wastewater goes?”
“For too long, we, as engineers, have done too good a job
of keeping it hidden.”
“Most of the water produced in the United States is used
for cooling power plants.”
“If a 6.5 [Richter scale] earthquake hit the San Francisco
delta, it would flood the delta, taking water from two-thirds
of state residents for two years.” |
