Friends Programme, June 2007For the Friend’s meeting on Wednesday 13th June we were very pleased to welcome John Kennedy, a New Zealander, who has now become a Friend - we hope to see you again soon John, and his talk was entitled “Touring New Zealand in a Vintage Car”. Although I was on holiday and could not attend this meeting/talk I understand the quality of the slides was outstanding and the talk extremely interesting. For the Friend’s meeting on Wednesday 11th July we are very privileged to welcome Glen Davis, a Foreign Service Officer, from the US Embassy in London. In Glen’s own words: "My talk will focus on some recent trends in US education, including the movement away from traditional disciplines such as history to physics to new “disciplines “such as communications, ethnic studies, gender studies, leadership studies and the like; the emphasis on aptitude rather than achievement; the triumph of the seminar over the lecture; and the branding of American colleges and universities. Throughout I will present the advantages and disadvantages of each trend and will highlight them by contrast with traditional British modes of instruction. Since many of these changes have already begun to occur in the UK, your audience might find it useful to see the consequences of and reasons for them in the United States. Despite the rather formal sound of this abstract, the talk includes its share of humor and stories. I promise to keep your audience awake even after a good dinner and some wine. "I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts (an old New England town 20 miles northeast of Boston known for being the “birthplace of the American navy”), attended a boy’s Catholic prep school, and then went to Harvard University where I double-majored in history and literature. Upon graduation, I returned to St. John’s Prep where I served as an English teacher for 7 years and department chairman for 1. Having hit the ceiling at the age of 27, I moved on to earn a master’s degree in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then did my doctoral work at the University of California at Irvine, where I specialized in comparative medieval literature with a dissertation on epic poetry. I then taught for three years in the English Department of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, where I met and married my wife, Lisa Directo. We relocated to San Diego where I taught at the University of San Diego and directed the Oscar Romero Center for Social Justice. In a rather abrupt career shift, I joined the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer in January 2006." A very interesting meeting I believe. Format for the evening
Peter Short |