Today a group of over fifty faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts gathered to deliberate about how best to respond to the students we will encounter next week in our classrooms as we begin a new academic year in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal that has impacted our community.
Since the news of the scandal broke last November, we in the Dean's Office have thought a great deal about how to respond to staff, faculty, alums and students in ways that push us toward a vision of Penn State as an academic community of integrity and rigorous inquiry.
Organizing and modering a faculty panel discussion entitled Teaching into the Crisis is the latest in our attempts to engage faculty in ways that open new opportunities to deliberate about how best to reaffirm the values we have always sought to embody: excellent scholarship, innovative teaching and conscientious service.
Here I have gathered information about the panelists and resources to facilitate further deliberation with one another and our students:
The Panel in the order in which they spoke:
- Debbie Hawhee, Professor of English, Co-Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation
- Lorraine Dowler, Associate Professor of Geography and Women's Studies
- Eric Silver, Professor of Sociology and Crime, Law and Justice
- Kyle King, PhD Student in English; Laura Brown, 2nd year Master's student, English
- Brian Redmond, Lecturer in Psychology, Advisor of the World Campus Psychology Club
- Moderated by Christopher Long, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies
Resources
Ongoing Online Deliberation
- Christopher Reed's We Are NOT ...
- Sophia McClennen's Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?
- Debbie Hawhee's Redirecting the Penn State Way
- Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies Dialogue on the Freeh Report
- Juliana Viau's What the Freeh Report Means to One Paterno Fellow
- Rock Ethics Institute's Speak Up Blog
Articles of Interest
- Sophia McClennen's "Teaching the Kite Runner at Penn State" in the Chronicle of Higher Education
- Matt Jordan's "Jerry Sandusky, the Underprivileged and Relying on the Kindness of Strangers" in the Huffington Post
- Matt Jordan's Separate and Unequal: Changing Campus Culture Beyond Penn State" in the Huffington Post
Diigo Shared Links
Diigo is a service that allows groups to share bookmarks associated with a particular issue of common interest. We invite you to follow our Diigo Group where we will post links to resources to facilitate deliberation on the Penn State crisis.
I recall someone at the panel mentioning a resource for students to access... something that would tell them how to handle feeling stigmatized or even how to answer tough questions from family and friends outside Penn State. I am not sure where to look now that I have perused this site. Could I get some direction?
Amie, thanks for this. Could you say a bit more about where this came up? I remember being intrigued at the point in Eric Silver's talk when he mentioned how we have all become part of a stigmatized group, but I don't recall the mention of a specific resource. (And if such a thing does exist, I would love to add it to the site.) Debra Hawhee