Interview Days 2012

Over the past two Saturdays, we have interviewed some 150 prospective HTC students. It’s an exhausting process for the HTC staff and our Directors of Studies, but it’s also one that is absolutely crucial to our success.

While there are many highly intelligent students who apply to HTC, the uniqueness of what we do necessitates that we have face-to-face interviews to make sure that we are the right fit for our top applicants. Additionally, we provide a lot of information about HTC and Ohio University over the course of these days. Our current students provide tours of the Scholars Housing, The Post, and various labs and other facilities on campus. We also have some of our current students eat lunch with our applicants and their families so that they can answer any questions applicants might have.

Although the number of applicants to HTC grew this year, we interviewed fewer than usual. As we transition to semesters we are being a little more cautious about the size of our freshman class, but we are also being more selective this year. The quality of our applicants was higher this year, which gave us the confidence to increase our standards even further.

By the end of the month, offers letters will go in the mail. This is an exciting time of year: all of here in the HTC office look forward to seeing who will be joining us as the HTC Class of 2016!

Soulcraft and Social Justice by Elliot Ratzman

On Monday we hosted 1992 HTC Philosophy alum Elliot A. Ratzman, who delivered the latest HTC Ellery Golos Lecture, which he titled “Soulcraft and Social Justice, Or How to be Better while Doing Good: Lessons from Philosophy, Religion, and Politics.”

Elliot’s talk focused on how varying religious and philosophical traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, cultivate virtues like humility, equanimity, and temperance. These traditions teach their practitioners to serve others and do good, but modern life often seems to get in the way of such efforts. His lecture talked about how these traditions can still teach us to balance these sometimes contradictory impulses even if we choose not to live as “believers” in any one particular tradition.

Elliot’s talk was well attended and fit nicely with many of the ideals we teach in HTC. The audience was so excited by his ideas that students wanted to stick around and talk about them afterward. I definitely think the next step in organizing this series will be to find ways to follow-up on the ideas our speakers present. Perhaps we could organize a book club or watch a movie recommended in a lecturer’s talk. Another way to follow-up might be to ask our lecturers to serve as guest tutors, allowing students to have a one-off tutorial with our experts.

I’m extremely pleased with how this series is going. Adam Hochberg will be visiting us in April. And I’m starting to plan next school’s lectures, which I hope will feature a range of scientists, business people, and academics.

You can listen to WOUB Executive Director Tom Hodson’s interview with Elliot here.

New Issue of Ampersand is Out!

Check out the new issue of Ampersand, our alumni and friends magazine!

Pictures from the first meeting of the Board of Visitors

As the HTC staff and I have been going through the college’s old documents and scrapbooks, we found a small stack of photos from the first Board of Visitors meeting in 1988:

Mark Shotwell, the first BOV President

Mark Shotwell talks with Philip Zecher

Randy Grossman makes a presentation

Teaching The Examined Life

One of the requirements for HTC students is to take a seminar in the college in the first year as an HTC student (i.e., during the freshman year for new students or during the first year that a student transfers into the college). Here’s how we describe it on our syllabus:

The Honors Tutorial College’s official motto is Aenigma Colatur, which means “Respect the Conundrum.” This phrase reminds us that being a scholar or an artist is not just about finding the right solution to a problem or completing an assignment or creative work. Often, we have to step back and think about the nature of the problem itself before we can even begin to come to terms with it. Furthermore, the best scholars and artists understand that the process of unraveling a conundrum is just as valuable as getting the “right answer.” Respecting the conundrum also reminds us that the process of understanding yourself as a participant in the realm of ideas is not simply a matter of amassing knowledge; it requires an ability to grapple with ideas and pursuits that require mental curiosity, energy, creativity and openness. A mature mind always asks questions and is open to the unconventional; it is also able to accept ambiguity, contingency, and paradox.

This seminar, a word that refers to a meeting in which participants exchange information and discuss ideas, requires you to begin modeling the scholarly process of exchanging information, pursuing knowledge, and exercising your intellectual curiosity, energy, creativity, and openness in a variety of ways—through Tuesday night conversations, on our Blackboard discussion board, in your Friday discussion sections, and in various papers. Our goal is to give you practice in using the kinds of discourse intellectuals and scholars use to think about, discuss, analyze, and potentially solve various kinds of conundrums.

We began the class by having our students read Betty Hollow’s Ohio University 1804-2004: The Spirit of a Unique Place over the summer. New HTCers then wrote a paper (due on the first day of class) about their expectations for being at Ohio University and in Athens based on this reading and watching several videos on the Soul of Athens website.

After spending three weeks on Athens and Ohio University, we watched The Examined Life, a film that shows a series of interviews with major philosophers. Each philosopher talks about a major issue, such as Justice, Equality, or Truth. We also read the longer transcripts of each interview, which are available in book format. Here are some samples from the film:

Cornel West:

Kwame Anthony Appiah:

Slavoj Zizek:

Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor:

After watching the film and reading the book, students had to create a dialog among three of the philosophers about an issue raised in The Examined Life while setting their conversation in Athens. Our students were really nervous about the assignment before they did it, but the papers turned out great! Jan and I were really pleased with how well they did.

I think adding this unit to the class has been a really good thing. It allows us to model academic discourse and talk about big issues. The paper assignment also allowed students to be a little more creative. I’m looking forward to trying it out again next year!

Women’s Experimental Cinema by Robin Blaetz

Alumna Robin Blaetz visited campus last week to deliver the second HTC Ellery Golos Lecture. Her talk, “Women’s Experimental Cinema: Saving the Past and Engaging the Future,” went really well — Robin’s topic was fascinating, and we had a good crowd for an audience. We even had a group of international students who were attending the lecture in order to practice understanding their English!

Robin Blaetz, '79 HTC Alumna

Robin talked about the history of experimental film in the U.S. with a particular eye on women filmmakers. She also discussed the difficulties of preserving these films, which are in danger of being lost forever unless concerted efforts are made to digitize and/or preserve the original film.

One of the highlights of her talk was her use of Marie Menken‘s “Glimpse of the Garden” (1957) as an example of this genre:

I think audience members enjoyed Robin’s analysis of the film — I certainly appreciated her guidance on how to watch this kind of movie, which is not a genre with which I was previously familiar.

As part of her discussion of the history of experimental film, Robin also mentioned another film, “Rose Hobart” (1936), by Joseph Cornell. Her description of the film — Cornell took all of the scenes that featured actress Rose Hobart from a Hollywood film, East of Borneo, and re-edited them into a 19-minute experimental film — was so fascinating that I rushed to my office after the lecture so that I could watch it on YouTube. It just sounded so creepy to me! It’s definitely an interesting film:

It was a great visit, and the students, staff, and faculty that had the chance to meet Robin learned a lot about women’s experimental cinema, Athens in the 1970′s, and the early days of the Honors Tutorial College.

You can also hear Robin’s interview with WOUB Executive Director Tom Hodson here.

Save the Date: HTC’s 40th Anniversary Reunion is April 13-14, 2012

Planning for the Honors Tutorial College’s 2012 40th Anniversary Reunion, which will take place on April 13 and 14, 2012, is in full swing! The Board of Visitors has approved the general outline of events, we’re forming a local alumni committee to fill in some of the details, and the HTC staff is working to make sure this is a fun and enjoyable event.

This will be our first reunion in ten years. On the plus side, I hope this means that our alumni are ready to return to Athens and catch up with one another and the college. On the slightly less positive side, this means that it feels like we’re starting from scratch in planning this event.

So to get us started in filling the details I’ve been reading through files and sorting through pictures of previous HTC reunions. Today I found and scanned the program for the 2002 30th Anniversary Reunion dinner: