Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Faculty Highlights: Prof. Andrea Scarpino

With the start of 2014, I am proud to be serving our students with such outstanding faculty as Professor Andrea Scarpino in the Ph.D. program. Professor Scarpino demonstrates purposeful, intentional commitment to the calling of a scholar-practitioner. She embraces social responsibility in the work she does within the academy and in her service to the community outside the university, and I am honored to feature her for this month’s newsletter. 

Professor Andrea Scarpino has been among the teaching faculty at UI&U since 2008. She is a prolific writer, poet, and presenter, and continues to be a vital leader of the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program. She teaches courses in creative writing in addition to serving on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Studies Committee and on the Admissions Committee. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Creative Inquiry, and serves as a coordinator for the Residency Planning Committee.  

Although Scarpino has published for years and has received many honors and awards for her poetry, this year marks the release of her first, full-length poetry collection, Once, Then.  Red Hen Press is scheduled to release the volume in March of this year. For this book-length publication, Scarpino covers themes of personal and political loss and the tensions between science, myth, and spirituality.  

“My new poetry book, Once, Then, being released March 1 is a collection of elegies built around the deaths of my father and of a young friend named Gracie, as well as poems of witness for larger global atrocities like the American bombing of Hiroshima.” 

By blending and contrasting scientific models with references to classical mythology, Scarpino presents her readers with meditations of how loss shapes us and our understanding of the world. 

She is currently working on two other poetry projects—a book-length poem having to do with water and her father's work in water disinfection and a book-length poem having to do with the body in pain.  

She said of her work, “All of my poetry, really, connects elegy and poetry of witness, and my current scholarship seeks to identify the ways in which elegy and witness connect in writing about the body, particularly in the poetry and prose of Paul Monette and Audre Lorde.”  

See more of what Professor Scarpino is doing at her website! 

Scarpino believes in the value of the scholar-practitioner model and desires to integrate the principle of social responsibility inside and outside of the academy. “At its most basic, I see social responsibility as paying attention to the world around me and trying my best to act in a way that demonstrates my commitment to just and equitable treatment for all,” Scarpino said. “One of my heroes, Carolyn Forche, writes, ‘The time, however, to determine what those politics will be is not the moment of taking pen to paper, but during the whole of one's life. We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shaping of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work.’ Dr. Nancy Boxill instructs, ‘We are the culture keepers.’ And Terry Tempest Williams writes, ‘We cannot do it alone. We do it alone.’” 

Scarpino acknowledged that social responsibility is not only about theory or artistic production. She tries to integrate the principle into her daily decisions: “When I choose a plant-based diet and refuse bottled water, I act out social responsibility. When I spend money on brands that support living wages for their workers and use sustainable materials, I act out social responsibility. When I carbon offset my travel, when I refuse to participate in the inequality of marriage as it is currently constructed, when I pay attention to the many privileges my white skin allows me, I act out social responsibility. Which is not to say I am perfect! But it is to recognize that social responsibility cannot just appear when I sit down to write a poem about war, or when I construct a syllabus. It must be present ‘in the many thousand daily choices’ I make. It must be part of how I live my life each moment of each day.” 

 

 

 

Faculty Highlights: Professor Jim Babcock


With the start of 2014, I am proud to be serving our students with such outstanding faculty as Professor Jim Babcock in the Bachelor of Science program. Professor Babcock demonstrates purposeful, intentional commitment to the calling of a scholar-practitioner. He embraces social responsibility in the work he does within the academy and in his service to the community outside the university, and I am honored to feature him for this month’s newsletter. 

Professor Jim Babcock is in his ninth year with UI&U, teaching in the Criminal Justice Management, Emergency Services Management, and Public Administration Programs. Prior to UI&U, Professor Jim Babcock served in law enforcement for 40+ years. Jim retired from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department as a Chief Deputy and retired from the Santa Clara County Department of Correction as its Chief.  He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from California State University in Sacramento and a Master’s of Public Administration degree from Golden Gate University. He is a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy and California POST Command College.

Chief Babcock has been a long standing member of the Large Jail Network of the US National Institute of Corrections in Longmont, Colorado, and Special Committee member and trainer for the California Board of Corrections. Chief Babcock also served as a member of and presenter for the California State Sheriffs’ Association, California Peace Officers’ Association, the American Jail Association, and the American Correctional Association. 

Over the course of his career, Professor Babcock acted as a private consultant in long-range strategic and technology planning, and he contracted with the Sacramento County District attorney to facilitate the County’s Technology Master Plan.  

Professor Babcock is a full-time Professor and mentor in the Master of Science in Organizational Leadership program for Union Institute & University and serves as a member of the university’s Faculty Council. In addition, he served as a member of the BS Steering Committee and as Chair of the Academic Review Committee.

Jim is also a student in the University’s Ph. D. program, Cohort 14, and is in the Public Policy and Social Change concentration.

Social responsibility is a high priority to Jim. Not only does he teach this as a college professor, but also lives by example as a member of his communities.

Jim resides in Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento, California, with his wife Maryl Lee. They raised four children and now have four granddaughters. They are very active in their grandchildren’s lives.

Jim and Maryl Lee have hosted three foreign exchange students, two from France, and one from Brazil. One of their “French kids” has been back several times for visits and is currently here for a few months doing an internship with an Architectural firm.

Jim is very involved with community groups and has served on the Board of Directors for Volunteers of America and other non-profits. Jim is President-elect of his local Rotary Club and a Paul Harris Fellow. One of the club’s many special projects is to assist sister city, Conception de Ataco, El Salvador by building homes (41+, so far) and assisting with school and water treatment/delivery services.

When asked what he felt were important concepts for his students, he said, “Considering my background and academic interests, the major concern and research interest I have is the state of our penal system in the United States. We have the highest ratio of prisoners to population than any other country in the world. There is no pride in this number one distinction.”

Addressing issues such as high prisoner-to-population ratios is, for Professor Babcock, ultimately a question about how we treat other people. Much of Jim’s extensive experience in law enforcement and corrections consisted of being a manager-executive officer. He understands that successful leadership grows out of knowing how to respect others.

Professor Babcock asked rhetorically, “Most budgets of organizations are over 85% for human beings (wages, salaries, and benefits). Doesn’t it make sense to devote most of our efforts to learn people skills and ways to fairly address the needs of our fellow human beings?”

 
 

From the Desk of the VPAA: January Ph.D. and Ed.D. Residencies


As we begin the new year, I am happy to report that we kicked off 2014 with successful residencies for the Ph.D. and EdD programs. The residencies took place at the METS Center in Erlanger, Kentucky, from January 2 through January 10.
Doctoral students and faculty presented several papers addressing the theme of “Boundaries.” In addition, the faculty hosted a presentation on the topic of “Visualizing Structure & Agency Through Social Network Analysis.”

The Ninth semi-annual MLK Legacy speaker, Dr. Stewart Burns, presented “Way Out of No Way: How King’s Teachings Might Help Us Overcome Our Quadruple Peril.” Dr. Burns is a distinguished historian of the civil rights movement, and he wrote the Wilbur-Award-winning biography of Martin Luther King, To the Mountain, in 2004. A former editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers at Stanford University, he produced the Montgomery bus boycott volume, Daybreak of Freedom, later made into the HBO feature film Boycott (on which he consulted). His new book We will Stand Here Till We Die: Freedom Movement Shakes America, Shapes Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013) covers the epic story of the American freedom struggle of 1963 to the March on Washington. Dr. Burns currently shares leadership of the Center for Learning in Action at Williams College. His work absolutely parallels what we are trying to support at Union Institute & University, by merging theory and practice through the development of the scholar-practitioner.
On another note, this residency provided the ongoing opportunity for the Ed.D. and Ph.D. students to work  together through the ongoing effort to cross faculty between the programs, merge courses that have the same focus, and bring UI&U doctoral students together through collaborative academic experiences. This began in July 2013 through the merging of two research seminars and continued in this January 2014 residency by merging two more foundational type experiences, Ethical Leadership and The Art of Social Justice. This collaboration will continue in the July 2014 residency as we progress with this approach. When asked, the faculty teaching these cooperative endeavors believe the seminar experience is richer with the diversity of student experience.