Fall 2017 | Issue #9

From the Dean

I trust everyone has had a restful, productive summer. As many of you know, the University is in the process of selecting a dean for the newly created School of Liberal Education. I was a member of the committee tasked by the Provost with the revitalization of Liberal Education. Liberal Education will move out from under the purview of Arts and Science and become a possession of the whole University. The goal, as I saw it, was to embed Liberal Education more deeply and more widely across the institution until it becomes part of our DNA, something that defines us as distinct and unique among comprehensive universities. We have taken steps in that direction already by broadening the Liberal Education Requirements (LER) beyond Arts and Science and Fine Arts, to include from all faculties courses that satisfy the four pillars of Liberal Education: breadth, connections, critical thinking and civic engagement. The big question is whether all Arts and Science courses, which by default are LERs, in fact, satisfy Liberation Education as it is defined, and are not more properly foundation courses for a specific discipline. No doubt, some courses in some disciplines serve both purposes. But I think it is worth asking the question. Discussion has begun to add more interdisciplinary minors that span the faculty, across all three areas, and perhaps even span across faculties, around a particular theme that enable students to approach the topic from a multitude of perspectives. In that regard, within Arts and Science we have developed the Global Citizenship Cohort, whereby students take courses across the Humanities, Social Science, Sciences, and Liberal Education around the theme of Water, Sustainability and Social Justice. Last academic year the program attracted 40 students and we are seeing a similar uptake for the upcoming year. More refinement of the program is needed, but I think the program has potential to grow and expand. It will remain within Arts and Science, and I would like to see us add a second cohort under the Global Citizenship banner. Such programs have potential to provide a rich undergraduate experience for our students. So, preliminary steps have already been taken to embed Liberal Education more completely into the framework of the University and make it part of our DNA.

In Issue #6 (Spring 2016) I referred to C.M Christensen and H.J Eyring, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (San Francisco, 2011). A couple faculty borrowed the book from me, and if others would like to read it, I can make it available. As I noted then, I had become fascinated with Harvard and how it has shaped our vision of higher education, particularly its drive to become bigger and better, “everything at its best”, as President Eliot envisioned Harvard. Many of the things, which we have come to associate with modern universities, have either been innovations or practices adopted by Harvard. The Innovative University traces the history of Harvard and Rick’s College, which later became BYU- Idaho, and what shaped their respective DNAs. The last section of the book, “Genetic Reengineering”, speaks among other things about the dangers of imitating the “bigger-and-better” schools and the need to make firm choices as to what an institution will and will not do. Unlike a Harvard, we do not have the resources to be best at everything. But we can certainly be best at some things, and possibly many things, but it will require choices. Sadly, I would love to have a Classics Program, but that is not likely to happen in my time. I guess History is stuck with me.

As the authors of The Innovative University note, “competitive success requires being different, making unique choices about what an organization will and will not do” (345). It means adopting “a strategy that transcends Harvard imitation”, not necessarily by “forgo[ing] “graduate programs and discovery research”, but by “step[ping] off the traditional ladder in defining themselves” and by “thinking about what they do, not solely in terms of the course taken by Harvard” and other bigger-and-better universities (345). So, how do we step off that traditional ladder in defining ourselves? As the authors note under the heading, Suicide by Imitation, institutions are often “engaged in genetically driven, destructive rivalry with their own kind -other institutions trying to be world’s best according to a single, narrow definition of excellence” as Conant had defined it for Harvard. We know who our own kind are in the province of Alberta, and personally I am not interested in being a smaller version of that. That’s to no one’s benefit.

The authors (332-336) highlight three things that face-to-face universities uniquely do best: discovery, intellectual grounding (or memory) and mentorship. The first speaks to excellence in research; the second to excellence in teaching and the third to the excellence of the student experience. All three are important and one should not come at the expense of the other: teaching excellence, in my mind, is as important as research excellence, and at the centre of both activities is mentorship, both of graduate and undergraduate students. These are three things which we already do well, but which we can always improve upon. How do we improve our research excellence? How do we improve the intellectual grounding we provide our students, and how do we improve our mentorship? These are questions we need to ask.

In the fall the Associate Deans will begin circulating three reports, one on research, one on teaching and one on outreach; they will serve as discussion papers to inform our strategic plan as a faculty. We welcome your feedback. What I hope will come of this exercise are a number of clear objectives that we can all work toward. I want us to become a faculty that is always striving and straining to improve our teaching, our research, and our community engagement, and in all that, we are guided by the principles of liberal education. And through that process of reflection and benchmarking, we find a path forward that allows us to step off that traditional ladder in defining what makes us unique among comprehensive universities.

I wish everyone a successful term.
 

We have begun the planning process for Open House 2017 which will take place on Saturday September 30th.  This event is designed to welcome prospective new students to campus and give them a chance to find out about us, and hopefully offer them Early Admission.

This is the largest prospective student event we host on campus and this is our time to shine! Open House is designed for current high school students, prospective graduate students and transfer students considering uLethbridge for Fall 2018.

Catharine Reader is connecting with departments and programs to finalize Faculty of Arts & Science activities, which will include:

11:00am & 12:00pm | B650, uHall

• 2, 30-minute interest sessions that will include 3 mini-lectures from faculty members and presentations from Academic Advising and Co-operative Education

11:00am-2:00pm | Atrium & uHall

• Faculty Hub (department booths/meet your professor/Shining Students
• Guided tours (e.g. of chem/bio/kines labs, CCBN, WESB, other locations?)

For more information, contact catharine.reader@uleth.ca

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Public Professor

The PUBlic Professor Series is back for another season! The upcoming lectures are sure to be thought-provoking and encourage open conversation. No matter what, there will be something for everyone. Each talk takes place from 7:00pm - 9:00pm at our new location: Lethbridge Lodge, 320 Scenic Dr S, Lethbridge, AB. See the lineup below.

• The Modern Languages Film Series will be running as usual, with a film almost every week. Watch the screens and notice boards for information on individual films in the series.
• The Modern Languages Speaker Series will present once per month for the
  2018-2019 Academic Year. Information will be posted on the notice boards
  at a later date.

The Faculty of Arts & Science is on Facebook!

Please like and follow our new page (@uLethbridgeArtSci) to stay up to date on the latest news and events in our community. If you have content that you would like shared on our social media network, please submit your suggestions to: alix.redmond@uleth.ca

We want to again showcase shining students at our 2017 Open House and need your help to identify who they are. It is our hope that we will have at least one student at each table as they were a very popular addition to this event last year.

We are looking for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels who can participate at our Open House event on September 30th to engage with prospective students about their U of L experiences. 

If you would like to nominate a shining student (or several), let us know by filling out the sections below, by September 15th, 2017 and emailing your list to catharine.reader@uleth.ca . We will contact students directly to find out if they can participate in Open House and arrange a time to photograph them.

Name : 
Email: (If you know it)
Connection to student (e.g. worked in your lab or on a project with you): 
What is it about the nominee that makes them shine?:

EMS Microbiome Project

Congratulations

Annual Meeting of the Institute of Biological Engineering (Salt Lake City, Utah)

• Outstanding Presentation in Synthetic Biology (Taylor Sheahan, PhD student, Wieden) - NanoResponder: A rapid, portable tool for pathogen detection in emergency medical services (EMS)

13th Annual RiboWest Conference Prizes

• Luc Roberts (Wieden Group) - 1st Place Graduate Poster
• Sarah Schultz (Kothe Group) - 2nd Place Graduate Poster
• Keiran Vanden Dungen (Thakor Group) - 1st Place Undergraduate Poster
• Elijah Dueck (Kothe Group) - 2nd Place Undergraduate Poster
• Dora Capatos (Wieden Group) - Travel Award
• Jeremy Quiroga (Patel Group) - Travel Award

Publications

Dubé, S., Orr, D., Dempsey, B., and Wieden, H.-J.* (2017) A synthetic biology approach to integrative high school STEM training. Nature Biotechnology 35, 591–595. doi:10.1038/nbt.3896 (Impact Factor: 41.667)

N-steps closer towards testing the theory of everything

Unifying quantum mechanics and gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics. Igor Pikovski (Harvard) and Michael Vanner (Oxford) and Pasquale Bosso, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Lethbridge and Saurya Das of the Department of Physics and Astronomy show that these "quantum gravity signals" can be amplified significantly, by letting the interferometer laser circulate N (a large number of) times, while keeping noise levels to a minimum.

Thanks for reading! We wish everyone an excellent Fall semester. If you have suggestions regarding content to include in future newsletters, or to submit to the Spring 2018 issue, please send an email to: alix.redmond@uleth.ca