Proseminar

Joining the new students at orientation reinvigorated my learning spirit. Since I've stayed in the MSU community for so long and had already completed three courses I volunteered to help answer questions for the other incoming students. I found out we had a great deal of diversity in our cohort. We had a few international students, a couple of people that already had more then one degree, and a couple that were switching careers. Many of us already had substantial experience working in higher education and were building on that with the degree program. It was apparent even during the orientation that there would be a variety of professional experience and scholarly interests in our group.

A significant focus of our cohort's seminar was diversity. We used diversity as a lens to explore the historical foundation of higher education, teaching and learning, as well as contemporary issues. The timing of our proseminar coincided with the passing of Michigan's Proposition 2 which underlined some fundamental differences between the broad citizenry and the core values of many institutions of higher learning. We observed the University of Michigan take a very public stance about this, while MSU took a quieter approach. There were big differences in voting patterns between urban and rural areas and between college towns and outlying communities. Ultimately as we watched the effect of Proposition 2 take effect, minority enrollments were down, but institutions maintained affirmative action hiring policies and redefined domestic partner benefits to be more broadly applicable.

This semester was also an opportunity to explore our scholarly interests and tie them to our professional development. I ripped a hot story from the headlines and tied the information technology breaches that had occured at Ohio University as inspiration to explore IT security and governance of security. A copy of my report is attached at the bottom of this page.