1780 – The Official Blog of Transylvania University

1780 | The Official Blog of Transylvania University

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The Crossroads of Ideas

Posted on by Office of Marketing and Communications

Speech and Debate To the average person in 2017, the word “debate” may conjure up groans and eye rolls. Whether it’s politicians hurling insults back and forth, or sports analysts on TV yelling over top of each other, it’s no secret the state of debate in popular culture doesn’t quite harken back to the days of Lincoln and Douglas. But if you want to see debate in its purest form, a group of Transylvania students has been making a splash on the national scene for years. The Transylvania speech and debate team is coached by writing, rhetoric and communication professor Gary Deaton and is in the midst of a remarkable run of success in regional, state and national tournaments. Transy participates in seven or eight speech and debate competitions per year. Speech events include prepared speeches, limited preparation speeches and interpretation. On the debate side, Transy competes in National Parliamentary Debate Association (two-on-two) and International Parliamentary Debate Association (one-on-one). While the team has had success in just about every event you could imagine, it’s the limited preparation events where the students really shine. During the draw, they are assigned a topic, and after 15 or 30 minutes of preparation, they give a presentation or debate another team. They are judged in preliminary rounds, and then the top teams are seeded and move on to the elimination rounds. Transy has had a team in the top 10 or elimination rounds just

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Morlan Gallery, The Parachute Factory to start new year with New Domesticity: Women’s Work in Women’s Art

Posted on by Office of Marketing and Communications

LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University’s Morlan Gallery and The Parachute Factory will kick off 2018 with New Domesticity: Women’s Work in Women’s Art, a single exhibition that will span two downtown art galleries from Jan. 16 to Feb. 16. The exhibition, curated by art history professor Emily Elizabeth Goodman, examines how Kentucky women artists incorporate elements of domestic work and life into their art practices. In particular, New Domesticity explores how different artists engage with the idea of women’s “traditional roles” in our contemporary culture. To prepare for the exhibition, Goodman and Morlan Gallery Director Andrea Fisher traveled across Kentucky this past summer to meet women artists where they live and work—which in many cases are one in the same place. A Transylvania Kenan Fund for Faculty and Student Enrichment grant funded the research. The artists in the exhibition are Stacey Chinn, Jane Burch Cochran, Rae Goodwin, Judith Pointer-Jia, Diane Kahlo, Helen LaFrance, Lori Larusso, Colleen Merrill, Stacey Reason, Jennifer A. Reis, Kristin Richards, Justine Riley, Bianca Lynne Spriggs, Bentley Utgaard and L.A. Watson. Morlan Gallery is open weekdays, noon to 5 p.m., and by special appointment. For an appointment, call Fisher at (859) 233-8142, 24 hours prior to viewing. The Parachute Factory is open Wednesdays through Fridays from 5-8 p.m. and on Saturdays from noon to 3 p.m. Located in Lexington’s Northside, this women-led gallery is run by Sarah Brown and Transylvania alumna Stevie Morrison ’15. This exhibition has a catalog available

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Recalibrating

Posted on by Office of Marketing and Communications

Lives of Generosity What do you do when the person seeking help in your hospital is the one who maimed your cousin? What if you live next door to a woman whose husband is incarcerated for taking part in the genocide that killed your husband? What if you grew up in a family devoted to one political value system and find yourself studying next to someone whose beliefs seem inexplicably, even offensively, the opposite? You treat him. You form a women’s co-op. You listen respectfully. “You meet them where they are,” says Riley Bresnahan ’18, a religion major and Transy’s first national debate champion. A recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, Bresnahan studied the reconciliation process in post-genocide Rwanda, listening to the stories of survivors and marveling at the human capacity for forgiveness in the midst of the most grievous atrocities perpetrated by neighbors, friends and family members. These stories represent lives of generosity, capable of recognizing a greater good, setting the self aside, trawling the soul to find a way forward. How much easier would it be to lash out with self-righteous fervor? Last spring, in the midst of deepening political discord and fractured civility in our nation, Transylvania’s faculty members came together to consider a way to help the campus community “move beyond this moral impasse,” as Spanish professor Jeremy Paden describes it. Taking inspiration from French philosopher Simone Weil—“Attention is the

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Our Mascot

Posted on by Office of Marketing and Communications

In 2017, Transylvania announced a new Pioneer athletic mascot, Raf, who pays homage to the university’s legendary professor, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a charismatic naturalist whose tomb is on the first floor of Transylvania’s main administrative building, Old Morrison. The campus also boasts a café bearing his name.  For nearly two decades, Transy was without a Pioneer mascot. Raf was developed through a combination of two years of interviews with current and prospective student-athletes and extensive marketing research. Rafinesque’s passion for bats is the stuff of legend. John James Audubon described hearing a loud commotion one night while Rafinesque was staying at his cottage. Apparently, some bats had fluttered into Rafinesque’s candlelit room through an open window to feed on moths. Raf attacked the bats with the famous ornithologist’s favorite violin, destroying the instrument in the process. While Rafinesque was overjoyed at what he thought was the discovery of a new species, Audubon didn’t share his excitement—both because he doubted it was even a new species, and obviously because of the violin. Today, Transylvania’s mascot is a Rafinesque’s big-eared bat. These Kentucky forest dwellers with freakishly large listeners play an important ecological role by keeping insect populations in check—just as Raf plays an important role at Transy by firing up crowds at Pioneer sporting events and helping recruit new students.

Transylvania receives $800,000 to help combine liberal arts, digital technology

Posted on by Office of Marketing and Communications

LEXINGTON, Ky.— Transylvania University is working to build a national reputation for applying digital technology to a liberal arts curriculum. The Bingham Fund for Excellence in Teaching at Transylvania University has awarded two grants totaling $800,000 as part of the Transylvania Initiative for Digital Technology, Research, and Creativity (DTRC). The Bingham Fund was established to promote excellence and dedication among the school’s faculty who demonstrate exceptional teaching qualities. The grants will fund the expansion of digital tools in classrooms and laboratories and will help train faculty and students to incorporate digital pedagogies into their courses and scholarly activities. In addition to financing travel to conferences and on-campus speakers, the funds will allow the university to hire a full-time digital content specialist with expertise in instructional technology. This initiative comes at an opportune time, as Transylvania prepares to open its Carpenter Academic Center. The classroom building will integrate cutting-edge technologies, such as Mondopad collaborative touchscreens. Professors Kerri Hauman and Tim Polashek (pictured) serve as co-directors of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative, which received the DTRC grants. They are experts in digital education and extensively apply digital technology in their research and creative work. “Like any medium that has such a pervasive role in human affairs, modern technology needs to be understood from many different perspectives,” said Transylvania President Seamus Carey. “Providing such perspective is one of the great benefits of liberal education.”