Wendell Berry Reading on Thursday :: Participates in First Year Program for New Students

Distinguished author Wendell Berry will offer a public reading at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 20, in Guerry Auditorium on the Sewanee campus. Berry’s award-winning publications include more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and essays.

Berry’s visit to Sewanee takes place in conjunction with the College’s Finding Your Place (FYP) program and the associated freshman course to which he is contributing. FYP students, faculty and visiting contributors will be reflecting together on the theme  “Imaginative Education: Learning to Know a Place, Care for a Place.” Other participants in these FYP sessions include Mary Berry, executive director of the Berry Center in New Castle, Ky.; Leah Bayens, director of the Berry Farming Program at St. Catharine College; and Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke University.

The seed of this visit was planted two years ago on Berry’s front porch during a visit there by Michael Thompson, a fellow at the Center for Religion and Environment at Sewanee. During this first conversation, Berry and his wife, Tanya, introduced Thompson to the Berry Center’s efforts, which is directed by their daughter, Mary. 

Mary Berry and Bayens came to Sewanee more than a year ago, when discussions of the potential of a deeper relationship between Sewanee and the Berry Center began. Robin Gottfried, Director of the Center for Religion and Environment at Sewanee, English professor John Gatta and Thompson visited St. Catharine College to learn how they integrated the work of the Berry Center into their program.

The Berry Center is working to transform America’s food and farm system into one that is healthy and sustainable for all people and the planet. The center is  putting Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies. It focuses on issues confronting small farming families in Kentucky and around the country. By collecting and archiving the papers of the Berry family, the center gives people the opportunity to study and work to learn from the past in order to shape the future. Issues of land use, farm policy and local food infrastructure are central to the center’s mission.

“We are hopeful that this symposium is the beginning of a consortium of sorts, linking us with the Berry’s work and other institutions who share in this ethos and contemplation of place by learning to listen to the land,” Thompson said. “Sewanee’s natural beauty and surroundings, along with the long and rich literary history on the mountain, provides a meaningful place to cultivate this effort and way of life which Wendell, Tanya, and now Mary and the Berry Center puts forth.”

Campus sponsors of these events include the Center for Religion and Environment, which has also played the leading role in planning and arrangements; the Collaborative for Southern Appalachian and Place-Based Studies; the University Lectures Committee; Rivendell Writers Colony; and Vice-Chancellor John McCardell and Bonnie McCardell.

New Sewanee Students Arrive on Campus

About 495 new college students are arriving on the University of the South campus for the start of this semester—almost 480 first-year students and 17 transfer students.

More than 140 first-year students who are participating in the Finding Your Place program arrived and moved into their dorms on Aug. 12. During this year’s program and its associated first-year course, students, faculty and visiting contributors will be reflecting together on the theme of “Imaginative Education: Learning to Know a Place, Care for a Place.” The 10-day interdisciplinary immersion ends the afternoon of Aug. 21.

Sewanee Outing Program’s PRE-Orientation (PRE) will offer about 200 incoming Sewanee freshmen the opportunity to get to know Sewanee in a unique and exciting atmosphere. Students arrive at Elliott Hall on Wednesday, Aug. 19. While familiarizing themselves with the 13,000-acre Domain during the three-day experience, new students meet other freshmen and upperclassmen in an environment that creates trust and establishes new friendships. Whether rock climbing for the first time, crawling through winding passages in a local cave, or building a house with Sewanee Outreach, PRE provides memories and friendships that will last a lifetime.

The University welcomes the entire Class of 2019 and other new students with orientation beginning Saturday, Aug. 22, following Finding Your Place and PRE. In addition to residence hall meetings and numerous information sessions, the week includes meetings with academic advisors, a class photo, a welcome address by Vice-Chancellor John McCardell and the solemn signing of the Honor Code. All students will be back on campus by Wednesday, Aug. 26, the first day of classes in the College.

Williamson Hosted by Library Friends & Finding Your Place

Friends of the Library of Sewanee and the Finding Your Place program are hosting a public lecture by historian and former Vice-Chancellor Samuel R. Williamson, at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 17, in Convocation Hall. Williamson will talk about “The Start of the First World War: What Happened and Why It Still Matters.” A reception will follow the lecture.

Williamson, the 14th vice-chancellor of the University of the South (1998–2000) and professor of history emeritus, has written extensively on the origins of the First World War. His books include “The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914,” “Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War” and “July 1914—Soldiers, Statesmen and the Coming of the Great War: A Brief Documentary History.” He has lectured often on the topic at Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna, Harvard and most recently as a keynote lecturer at Queen Mary University in London at an international conference on the start of the First World War. 

Williamson is also the author of “Sewanee Sesquicentennial History: The Making of the University of the South,” the first comprehensive history of the institution. Making full use of the University’s rich archival resources and of many interviews, the book examines and re-examines Sewanee’s past: from the original concepts underlying its creation to the desperate struggle after the Civil War to become a distinctive and effective Episcopal university in the South.

For more information about the event or Friends of the Library, contact Judy Rollins at 598-1265 or email <jrollins@sewanee.edu>.

University Welcomes College Class of 2018

All of the approximately 467 members of the Class of 2018 will be on the Sewanee campus by Saturday, Aug. 23, for the start of orientation in the College. The program will acquaint all new students with the school’s programs, services, and faculty and staff, and make the transition to Sewanee easier. It will conclude with an Aug. 26 event in All Saints’ Chapel for the campus community to “launch the new year,” with remarks from Vice-Chancellor John McCardell and from student leaders. College classes begin Aug. 27.

About 120 new Sewanee students arrived on campus on Aug. 13 to participate in “Finding Your Place.” The program, now in its second year, comprises both a full-credit course, Discovering a Sense of Place—Upon and Beyond the Domain, and co-curricular activities led by student life. 

More than 150 students who are participating in field hockey, volleyball, football, and men’s and women’s soccer also arrived in Sewanee early to begin practicing for their fall sports. A third group of students began PRE-Orientation on Aug. 20. “PRE,” as it is more commonly known, offers new students the opportunity to get to know Sewanee through trips run by the Sewanee Outing Program and student leaders.

The incoming class includes 16 international students, 10 students with dual citizenship and four U.S. citizens who reside abroad.

There are 79 first-generation college students among this year’s new students. Twenty-four percent of the class hails from Tennessee, with the rest of the class coming from 39 other states, including Maine, Hawaii and Washington state. Fourteen of the incoming students participated in the Sewanee Environmental Institute, the Bridge Program or the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

New College Students Finding Their Place

“Finding Your Place,” a new program offered to incoming freshmen, is in full swing on campus and in the surrounding areas. The program comprises both a full-credit course, “Discovering a Sense of Place—Upon and Beyond the Domain” and co-curricular activities led by the Office of Student Life. With goals of enhancing the first-year experience and helping students feel at home at Sewanee more quickly, it is a rigorous program of academic, social and geographical exploration led by seven faculty members.

The course offers 106 new students the opportunity for amazing Sewanee experiences earlier in their college careers than usual. In their first week on campus, these students might walk a cemetery with religion professor Gerald Smith, visit the Highlander Folk School with philosophy professor Jim Peterman, walk the Mountain Goat trail with biologist Deb McGrath or hike Shakerag Hollow with geologist Bran Potter. They have met the merchants of downtown Sewanee and will engage in community service with MountainTOP Ministries.

In a story about the program on its website, Inside Higher Ed described Sewanee’s Finding Your Place program as “the next generation” of first-year programs. “While some colleges are trying to integrate their various seminars, orientations and bridge programs, Sewanee’s seems to be an ‘intentional evolution’ of the first-year experience,” said Jennifer R. Keup, director of the University of South Carolina’s National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Sewanee admissions counselor Josh King said, “This is not about college readiness, at least not in the traditional sense. It is piecemeal of what you would find at other first-year programs, but when you combine that with the sense of place, you can really understand how community works.”

The coursework in Discovering a Sense of Place will require the skills of reflective writing, close reading and synthetic thinking. The sections are “Your Place, or Mine? The Tension of Place in Narrative and Storytelling” taught by English professor Virginia Craighill; “Here and There, Now and Then” with classics professor Chris McDonough; “The Mountain Goat Trail: A Journey in Community Health,” Deb McGrath; “Honor and Justice,” Peterman; “Walking in Place,” Potter; “The Seen and the Unseen: Maps, Memory, and Our Common Life in Sewanee,” Smith; and “A Landscape for Memory,” historian John Willis.

Craighill described it this way:“They’re both understanding their landscape—where they are— but also understanding where they are in the world, what their place is here in the community of Sewanee and then understanding at a deeper level what this place has been in history.

 “We’re hoping that they get to see a subject matter—such as a place—through all of those lenses so that they understand there is more than one way of looking at that place, and through that broad perspective that they’ll approach their academics,” she said. All of these experiences will help students find their own places as well as their places in the community of Sewanee and of other communities in the future.