Sober week, global insights, minority reunion
Next month an alcohol education program will hit college students right where they live - in campus residence halls.The Association of College and University Housing Officers (ACUHO) has designated Oct. 9-15 as Alcohol Awareness Week.
The programs are designed by student/staff committees to suit their campus and may include workshops, alternative parties, speakers, films, and discussions.
Leadership can be learned. That is the assumption of quite a few independent high schools that have made room in their curriculum for leadership training. The courses teach decisionmaking, management, communication, and how to organize a group to execute a project.
''Those who feel confident about leading and working with other people are students who tend to be significantly more productive both in and out of the classroom,'' said Richard Perry and Anita Schmid, staff members, respectively, of the University School of Nashville, Tenn., and of Harpeth Hall School, Nashville, writing in a recent issue of Independent School, a journal of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., is embarking on a unique experiment to enhance global awareness among its faculty. Feeling that US educators are ''dangerously undereducated'' about non-Western peoples and cultures, the small New England women's college plans to send a dozen or more faculty members each year on internships to Asian and African countries.
The first two professors have just returned from spending six weeks in Korea, teaching, taking classes, going to markets with rural people, walking the back streets and alleys, visiting shops, riding buses, talking and listening.
''Theoretically, I understood the value of this program before I went. Now I really understand. . . . My whole orientation had been white, traditional, American/European curriculum. With the world shrinking, this experience has got to be valuable,'' said Sheila Shaw, who teaches 18th-century English prose and literature. She adds that she responds differently to Asians since the trip. ''Now whenever I see an oriental face, I want to go talk to them.''
Paul Sprosty, who teaches psychology, found that ''one of the profound experiences was being different. . . . It was strange to hear the word 'race' used to refer to me.'' He feels the trip has made him more sensitive to the non-Western world. ''Now when I read about Korea and Japan, I read it, I don't pass over it.''
Of the program he says, ''It isn't a vacation, it's hard work. We got our scars. But I look back now in my journal, where I had scrawled in the middle of the night one night, 'I love Korea!' It got to me.''
This fall librarians are going to battle thieves bent on emptying the nation's best libraries of millions of dollars in books and manuscripts, reports Oberlin College News. The Oberlin Conference on Theft, Sept. 19-20, will bring together top library personnel from 18 leading research libraries, law enforcement officials from the FBI and the Smithsonian Institution, rare book dealers, and US and Canadian government officials. They'll share ideas of how to combat the recent international outbreak of book thefts.
''Theft is a problem which has long existed in the art world, but which has become acute in the library world only during the past decade with the marked appreciation in the value of older books. There is a not a major library in the country that hasn't experienced theft to some extent . . . ,'' says William A. Moffett, Oberlin College director of libraries.
Conference goals include drafting federal and state legislation to provide safeguards for books and manuscripts, working out a protocol setting forth what is expected of libraries, archives, and dealers in the event of theft, and proposing a national registry of ownership marks.
Syracuse University will conduct a ground-breaking ''Coming Back Together'' reunion for minority alumni Sept. 23 to 25. This unprecedented gathering will bring together several decades of SU minority alumni.
''Minority alumni have not attended traditional reunion weekends in significant numbers,'' says SU Chancellor Melvin A. Eggers. ''We want them to come back to their alma mater to see the changes that have occurred over the years. Many of these changes are due to their influence. We hope this important weekend, and those to come in subsequent years, will assure these men and women that we value their contribution to Syracuse University.''
