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A day after launching 91�鶹��Ʒ’s new fundraising campaign with a festive celebratory dinner, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and students settled down to business. They convened on Saturday, March 3, for “Liberal Arts in the 21st Century: An Interdisciplinary Symposium with 91�鶹��Ʒ Faculty and Staff.”

Charlotte Johnson (left), vice president and dean of the college, leads a session at the interdisciplinary symposium held in Manhattan. (Photo by Timothy Sofranko)

The capacity crowd of about 250 attendees spent four hours at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan discussing what master of ceremonies Howard Ellins ’73 called “the big ideas emanating from a small village in central New York.”

The symposium featured some of 91�鶹��Ʒ’s leading educators, administrators, and learners; it illustrated the importance of each campaign priority — from faculty support to campus life — by showcasing the very individuals who stand to benefit from the  $400 million campaign.

In true 91�鶹��Ʒ style, biologist Damhnait McHugh spoke of worm gut formation before Lynn Staley discussed life as a Medievalist; poet Peter Balakian talked of a writer’s web of friendships before economist Jill Tiefenthaler and geography professor Ellen Kraly outlined Upstate Institute demographic and tax program research.

The symposium’s 35 diverse faculty and student presenters were seamlessly integrated by a consistent theme: generous gifts that endow faculty chairs, build campus infrastructure, and generate innovative educational experiences for the widest variety of undergraduates, elicit better scholarship from top-notch teachers, and create a rich, fulfilling intellectual environment for 21st century leaders-in-training.

Case in point: Senior Rebecca Brereton ’07 will curate the Picker Art Gallery’s exhibition of Australian aboriginal Noongar art this April. The biology major told her audience that, while taking an elective in geography, she decided that she would like to apply her passion for photography to an independent research project on aboriginal dispossession and dislocation and resulting shifts in cultural perceptions of local environs.

Brereton went to the Picker to review recently discovered Noongar artwork, purely as background for her trip Down Under. By the time she left the building, she had been recruited by gallery director Elizabeth Barker to coordinate the April 2007 show.

Brereton’s path took her from biology, to photography, to geography, to public art exhibitions. “If that isn’t liberal arts education,” she said with a laugh, “I don’t know what is.”

Top-ranked liberal arts institutions must promote such intellectual linkages between the sciences and the humanities because they “will be judged by what they contribute to the understanding of the human mind,” said Gerald Fischbach ’60, P’87 during his symposium keynote address. That understanding will have to go beyond basic gray matter to the formation of conceptual connections.

Many of Brereton’s interdisciplinary opportunities, and those of her peers across campus, are the direct result of past gifts made by individuals and foundations. Research and travel funds come in part from endowed chair resources. Faculty salaries and research stipends are paid in the same way.

Each of the symposium’s four sessions demonstrated ways in which campaign funds would hard-wire similar connections into the 91�鶹��Ʒ experience, enhancing the university’s ability to educate tomorrow’s leaders.

“Ultimately,” said President Rebecca Chopp, “‘Passion for the Climb’ is about preparing people to take on the challenges of the 21st century.”