News from Transy

LEXINGTON, Ky.—Three members of Transylvania University’s class of 2012 have received prestigious Fulbright grants. Viktoria Safarian, Ben Costigan and Ruth Kloha will spend the next nine to 12 months teaching, creating independent projects and engaging in community service projects in diverse international locations. Viktoria Safarian Safarian, a philosophy major from Lexington, has enrolled in Harvard Law School but will first spend a year in South Korea teaching English to secondary students as part of her Fulbright award. Safarian, who is native Armenian, hopes the fellowship will make her more marketable when she earns her law degree. “I knew I wanted to do some kind of fellowship, and the Fulbright is very well known,” she said. “I want to learn to speak Korean, and I want to learn how to cook Korean food. I’ll also be traveling to Japan and China.” Part of the fellowship includes an independent project in conjunction with her time teaching. Safarian is working with Bryan Station High School in Lexington to develop collaborative art projects that students from Bryan Station and her school in South Korea can do at the same time. She’ll start an afterschool art program where students will work from similar prompts as the ones in Lexington. Safarian is interested in public interest law, particularly immigration and refugee status. She has previously traveled to India and the Philippines on research projects through Transylvania Kenan Grants and to Yale University’s summer bioethics internship. South

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania will launch an ambitious three-week academic and co-curricular program designed to introduce first-year students to what a liberal education means when it debuts August term as part of the 2012–13 school year. During August term, students will take one course, an intensive seminar titled First Engagements, which will focus on a theme selected by a faculty committee each year. This year’s theme is “Making Sense,” a nod to the new students’ efforts to make sense of their transition from high school to college. Emphasis will be on learning how to be a critical reader and thinker, core skills needed to successfully pursue a liberal education. Each section of the course, numbering about 16 students, will study common texts, which may be supplemented by material chosen by the individual professors. This year’s selections are “Come and Go Molly Snow” by Kentucky author Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester. Nearly two dozen faculty members from a variety of academic areas worked over the last year to develop the course. “The First Engagements seminar is meant to be a microcosm of a liberal education,” said Kathleen Jagger, interim vice president and dean of the college. “In these three weeks, first-year students will begin to appreciate the challenge of a college level seminar, strengthen their academic skills and fortify their self-confidence in ways that leave them better prepared to begin the fall term.” According to John

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—Faculty representatives from 15 liberal arts colleges across the country are on campus through Sunday, July 29, for Transylvania’s “Twenty-first Century Liberal Education: A Contested Concept” seminar. The participants were selected after completing a formal application including a statement of their views of liberal education and how they would benefit from the seminar. Candidates have to be nominated by their school’s president or chief academic officer to be considered. The program, funded by Transylvania University’s Bingham Program for Excellence in Teaching, allows recipients to attend for free. Accommodations and a stipend for travel are also provided. This year’s participants include faculty from Bates, Carleton, Hampden-Sydney, Kenyon, Middlebury and Reed colleges. Transylvania political science professor Jeffrey B. Freyman is the seminar coordinator. For the first time, a Transylvania graduate is among the participants. Bridget Trogden, associate professor of chemistry and director of the First-year Integrative Foundational Program at Mercer University, is happy to be back on campus. “This is like coming home—I get to sit around a small seminar with a group of people and discuss important ideas very passionately,” said Trogden. “I want to be able to take this back to my university. We talk about liberal arts at Mercer, but I don’t get to talk to people at other institutions about what it means to them, both in a theoretical sense and a practical sense in the classroom. We’ll get to discuss different reform movements in education and

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