Anonymous UMw faculty comment:
I felt so up lifted when I walked to lunch last week (or the week before) and saw students with signs about loving their French classes, about wanting the liberal arts, etc. Faculty feel like the school is adrift, like the admin has no idea what Mary Wash is about (hence the stupid banners and slogans and increasingly corporate feel of the school and its obsession with marketing itself without doing the work to define itself. But seeing students with those signs, I realized that students might actually have a clearer idea of who we are as an institution or what the value of a liberal arts education is than we do.
So how about an action or installation of art/posters/something about what you don't want to lose or what you do want to see or something. Maybe students could do it as a study break (or maybe when everyone comes back).
You could replace (or cover) the stupid banners with better slogans.
You could put up posters with liberal arts questions/slogans on them (some lame-ish thoughts: Beauty (eternal or changing?); Truth (oh! the impossibility of of a singular Truth); Cultural relativity/Absolute values; Social change is possible; The canon (no! Black Lesbian Poets!); What questions can I ask?)
You could take the best questions from classes you've taken; book titles; I don't know what. But I do think that faculty would swoon over the gift of thinking that students thought about the liberal arts.
So how about an action or installation of art/posters/something about what you don't want to lose or what you do want to see or something. Maybe students could do it as a study break (or maybe when everyone comes back).
You could replace (or cover) the stupid banners with better slogans.
You could put up posters with liberal arts questions/slogans on them (some lame-ish thoughts: Beauty (eternal or changing?); Truth (oh! the impossibility of of a singular Truth); Cultural relativity/Absolute values; Social change is possible; The canon (no! Black Lesbian Poets!); What questions can I ask?)
You could take the best questions from classes you've taken; book titles; I don't know what. But I do think that faculty would swoon over the gift of thinking that students thought about the liberal arts.