“I say more,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame.”
And “more” is at the heart of Creighton University’s latest endeavor yoking the liberal arts and humanities with the wider University curriculum and the professions to which Creighton students aspire. The Kingfisher Institute for the Liberal Arts and Professions will have its formal opening in January, but it’s already launched its mission with a pair of interdisciplinary themes aimed at crucial debates breaking in the world today: Narratives of Health and Illness and Race in America: 1919-2019.
In October, Nicole Piemonte, PhD, a professor in medical humanities at Creighton’s Phoenix campus and the author of a book on the importance of the humanities in healing, performed grand rounds with Creighton medical students and delivered two lectures on the centrality of contemplation and vulnerability in the practice of health care.
Tuesday morning, as part of the ongoing campus forums on the strategic plan, the Leading with the Liberal Arts goal stewards talked about the Kingfisher Institute’s potential and the wider impact of promoting the liberal arts across Creighton’s nine schools and colleges.
“We think the timing on this is really good and we want to be out in front,” said Tracy Leavelle, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of History who was named the Institute’s inaugural director in October. “We’re preparing students for 21st century careers and professions, careers that might be multiple in scope, careers that, more than likely, we don’t even know about yet. But we’ve seen that students are going to need something more. We need to prepare people to be reflective, to develop, to adapt and be flexible.”
Faculty and staff reading groups are currently looking into Piemonte’s book Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice as part of the health care theme, and, in the race relations theme, Creighton MFA alumnus Ted Wheeler’s novel, The Kings of Broken Things, which uses the backdrop of a lynching that touched off a race riot in Omaha in 1919, is also being read.
In 2019, the Institute will welcome Richard Rothstein, a historian and fellow at the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
A mission, accreditation and curriculum audit is taking place to better understand how to implement themes and programs across the Creighton curriculum, and the Institute is poised to name its first faculty scholars and fellows.
Gintaras Duda, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and co-goal steward in Leading with the Liberal Arts, spoke on the resources for liberal arts research and teaching, much of which has come out of a generous $10 million gift from alumnus George Haddix, PhD, MA’66, and his wife, Susan.
A portion of the Haddix fund has helped renovate Rigge Science Building’s chemistry, biology, astronomy and physics laboratories and has provided sabbaticals for tenured and pre-tenure faculty to dig deeper into research.
“The gift, for us, has been transformational,” Duda said. “Students are always there now. They want to hang out in Rigge and be a part of what’s happening.”
