Provost Thomas Burns took part in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., Tuesday in which Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander was honored with the “Twenty-First Annual NAICU Award for Advocacy of Independent Higher Education.” The ceremony took place  during the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) Annual Meeting. The Senator provided a compelling speech on the need to simplify the Higher Education Act. He also stressed the need to make it easier for students to apply and learn about available student financial aid long before selecting a college or university to attend. Accompanying Dr. Burns at the presentation ceremony were Claude Presnell (TICUA), Ted Brown (Martin Methodist College), Jim Dawson (Lincoln Memorial University), John Smarrelli (Christian Brothers University), Marjorie Glick (Vanderbilt University), Randy Lowry (Lipscomb University) and John McCardell (Sewanee).

In addition, the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities (TICUA) hosted a delegation from member institutions to meet with Tennessee Congressmen Jim Cooper and Phil Roe. Staff from the offices of Congressmen Diane Black and Jimmy Duncan, as well as Senators Bob Corker and Alexander, also welcomed the delegation to discuss key higher education issues such as student aid, tax benefits and President Obama’s higher education proposals.

Vice President of Spiritual Development Todd Lake visited Colombia last week with Samaritan’s Purse to deliver Operation Christmas Child boxes and learn about the nonprofit organization’s mission work abroad.

Through a University-wide service project last fall, faculty, staff and students  filled 518 Operation Christmas Child boxes with toys, personal hygiene items, socks and school supplies and raised some $300 to ship them to help demonstrate God’s love to orphans around the world.

“It’s so much more than poor children getting a Christmas box,” Lake said. Samaritan’s Purse uses the boxes as an entry way to recruit youth for discipleship programs through local churches.

Dr. Sybril Bennett, professor of journalism, was the keynote speaker at the Sixth Annual Walter Murray Jr. Commons Lecture on Feb. 3 at Vanderbilt University. This lecture commemorates Walter Murray Jr., the first African-American member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, and annually honors the contributions and lives of African-Americans in the Vanderbilt University community. The Walter Murray Lecture is sponsored Vanderbilt’s Martha Rivers Ingram Commons, the Black Student Alliance and the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. 

Dr. Pete Kuryla, associate professor of history, has published a chapter in a book about the transatlantic dimensions of the thought and life of the American philosopher William James. The book, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Philosophy of Religion, published by Oxford University Press, is edited by Martin Halliwell and Joel Rasmussen. It features chapters authored by a transatlantic group of philosophers and intellectual historians. Kuryla’s chapter is entitled “Vastations and Prosthetics: Henry James Sr. and the Transatlantic Education of William and Henry James.” In the chapter, Kuryla explores the ways that William James, in his philosophy and in his psychological research, recapitulated, in poetic terms, the trauma that followed his father Henry’s loss of a leg at the age of thirteen. In other words, the father and his famous sons explored dimensions of reality by means of poetic mediations designed to reveal the inability of human beings to fully represent that reality. All three men used literary devices or tricks—prostheses of a sort—to explore hidden or often unobserved corners of reality and, in doing so, hid or falsified features of their autobiographies, thereby fracturing the self in order to explore the complexities of selfhood.