Happy Friday! It is the end of the first week of class. I always thinking of the first week or two of class in the fall like I do the first couple of games of basketball after being away for a couple of weeks: I am so out of shape! So these first couple of weeks we work ourselves back into teaching shape. The next weeks are the expression of our new fitness. And the last weeks demonstrate our perseverance. That’s what I think anyway.
Hey, what an amazing week it has been though, right? Our undergraduate curriculum is enrolled at more than 96% of capacity, with 3,170 students registered for our courses, which turns into almost 9,500 student credit hours! Amazing! What is more, when I sent a welcome email to all of our primary and secondary majors, my sent box added 717 total emails. That’s a lot of majors. Of course we need to wait until census date (a couple of weeks from now) to learn the official numbers in enrollment, but we are filled to the brim with eager undergrads. That’s exciting.
In spite of all of this teaching, we continue to be extraordinarily productive as scholars. Take for instance, Ziyu’s most recent publication: Long, Z. (2016). Managing legitimacy crisis for state-owned non-profit organization: A case study of the Red Cross Society of China. Public Relations Review, 42, 372-374. doi: 10.1016/j.pubrev.2015.09.011
And then there is Ziyu’s recent award as well: the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG) Anita Taylor Outstanding Published Article Award. Here is the citation: Buzzanell, P.M., Long, Z., Anderson, L.B., Kokini, K., & Batra, J.C. (2015). Mentoring in academe: A feminist poststructural lens on stories of women engineering faculty of color. Management Communication Quarterly, 29, 440-457. doi:10.1177/08933189155
And then there is the recent work of Eric and an M.A. alum Kyle Jonas. Their co-authored essay is just now out in the special issue on Memory, Culture, and Difference in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Aoki, E. and Jonas, K. M. (August 2016). Collective memory and sacred space in post-genocide Rwanda: Reconciliation and rehumanization processes in Mureithi’s ICYIZERE. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9, 3, 240-258.
The piece was co-authored with M.A. -alumnus, Kyle M. Jonas, who is now a graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School and currently on staff in media production on the Vanderbilt University campus. Additionally, an interview write-up of the article is featured online in NCA’s Communication Currents.
Finally, the ice cream social! Wee hoo! We’ll be knee deep in ice cream this afternoon from 5-6 p.m.. Make your own sundae, hang with friends, and have a good time. We will be on the southeast corner of the Monfort Quad—that is to say just a few steps north of BSB A wing. Hope to see all of you there.
As some of you know I am teaching one of the new capstone classes. I am calling it Rhetoric and the Good Life. I have bored many of you with my plans for the course. The students read the introduction to Michael Hyde’s edited collection The Ethos of Rhetoric for this morning. Drawing on Isocrates, Aristotle, and Heidegger, Hyde writes “We are the openness of a dwelling place [ethos, ethea] of a dwelling place where the truth of what is—be it a stone, tree, eagle, ourselves, or whatever—can be taken to heart, appreciated, and cared for.” Don’t get too worked up about Hyde’s use of truth for he is far more sophistic than Platonic. But reminding ourselves of the central, ontological fact of our presence with others including the others of our environment can be a cool we to start this school year.
I hope you all have a good weekend. I think a box of peaches and a nice large peach crisp are in my future this weekend. As is a few hours in the office writing a QJS review. That too.