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Class of 2008 graduates on May 17
The academic year is wrapping up for Macalester students, but for the Class of 2008, crossing the stage at Macalester's 119th Commencement will be the conclusion of the class's experience as Mac students. Commencement takes place Saturday, May 17, at 1:30 p.m. on the lawn outside Old Main. Hollywood director, writer, producer and actor Peter Berg '84 will deliver the commencement address and Zachary Devlin-Foltz '08, an economics and political science major from Silver Spring, Md., will deliver the senior speech. Philosophy Professor Henry Robison West, who has taught at Macalester for 40 years, will receive an Honorary Degree during the ceremony. Twin Cities corporate leader and philanthropist Bruce B. Dayton will receive an honorary degree from the college at a special ceremony on Thursday, May 15.
·More about Commencement 2008
Adrienne Christiansen to deliver Senior Send-off Lecture
Political Science Professor Adrienne Christiansen will deliver the Senior Send-off Lecture at 1:30 p.m. Monday, May 12, in the Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel. Her talk is titled "In tonight's news, a Macalester graduate..." The talk is a new Senior Week tradition sponsored by the Student Support Committee of the Alumni Board. Christiansen was elected to give the send-off lecture by the Class of 2008. A reception will follow her talk.
Christiansen was honored with the Macalester Excellence in Teaching Award for 2008 on April 23 and will take on a new role as the next director of Macalester's Center for Scholarship and Teaching at the end of this academic year.
Community invited to Institute for Global Citizenship groundbreaking
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| Rendering of the new IGC building. The groundbreaking ceremony is 11:45 a.m. Friday, May 16. |
President Brian Rosenberg invites the Macalester community -- including students, faculty, staff and alumni -- to the groundbreaking ceremony for the Institute for Global Citizenship (IGC) happening 11:45 a.m. Friday, May 16.
The new IGC building will be located at the corner of Snelling and Grand, just south of the Kagin Commons, and house the college's Civic Engagement Center, the International Center and Internship Program. Macalester is seeking LEED Platinum Certification for the building, which would make it the first LEED Platinum building on a college campus in Minnesota and only one of a handful on a campus in the United States.
"From their founding, American liberal arts colleges have recognized that education should be, among other things, preparation for responsible citizenship in local, national, and international communities," said Macalester President Brian Rosenberg. "Macalester's creation of the Institute for Global Citizenship signals our recognition that as the nature of those communities evolves, so too must the nature of the education we provide to the women and men who will assume positions of leadership."
The approximately 17,000-sq.-ft. IGC building is scheduled to open in summer 2009.
· Read more about the groundbreaking
· View renderings and floor plans of the IGC
· Visit the IGC website
Sixteen student athletes recognized at awards banquet
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| Grace King '08 and Tom Conboy '08 are M Club's 2008 Athletes of the Year. |
Scots soccer player Grace King '09 and basketball player Tom Conboy '08 won M Club Athlete of the Year awards at the Athletics Banquet held on Sunday, May 4. King was also honored with a Scholar-Athlete of the Year award, along with tennis player Aaron Heerboth '08, softball player Katie Grudnowski '08, and soccer player Carson Gorecki '09. Female and male student athletes from every class year were also recognized with The Athletic Director's Award.
Read bios of the 2008 award winning athletes
Macalester completes its first inventory of carbon emissions
Four months ahead of schedule, and weeks after Macalester received the Sustainable St. Paul Award for Energy Efficiency, the college completed its first comprehensive carbon emissions inventory. The audit was conducted by 15 students in the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar and was presented to more than 40 students, faculty and staff at the May 1 EnviroThursday gathering in Olin-Rice by seniors Anna Goldberg and
Justin Lee.
In 2007, President Brian Rosenberg signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment (website), pledging that Macalester will actively pursue climate neutrality. Completing a carbon emissions inventory by September 2008 is one of the first objectives for all of the commitment's signatories.
The audit's authors said they factored in many emissions sources for the report -- gathering data from offices including facilities management, the budget, registrar, provost and human resources. The report estimates Macalester's yearly carbon emissions since 1990. According to the report, Macalester produced 27 thousand metric tons of CO2-equivalents (eCO2) in 2006 -- of which 11.9 thousand metric tons came from electricity; 9 thousand came from the campus steam plant used for heating; and 5.2 thousand came from work-related air travel of faculty and staff.
The report authors outlined short-term and long-term recommendations for reducing the college's emissions. In the short term, the report suggests increasing incentives for biking, walking, car-pooling or taking public transit to work; speeding up the switch to energy efficient light bulbs in campus buildings; and encouraging faculty and staff to choose ground transit or more direct flights when traveling for work. In the long term, they recommend continuing to uphold sustainability standards in new construction projects; expanding the Clean Energy Revolving Fund; transitioning from the fuel currently used for heating to natural gas, eventually moving to a renewable fuel source; and investing in off-campus wind power.
Davis Projects For Peace funds two Macalester student projects
 Two Davis Projects for Peace proposed by Macalester students Leah Roth-Howe '08, Zainab Mansaray '09 and Arthur Sillah '10 were selected by the program, now in its second year, for funding.
Philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis launched the initiative on the occasion of her 100th birthday in February 2007. Designed to encourage and support motivated youth to create and implement their ideas for building peace throughout the world in the 21st century, each of 100 projects chosen annually receive $10,000 in funding.
This summer, Mansaray and Sillah will work together to rebuild and furnish a rural primary school and motivate students to become engaged in community service in their home country of Sierra Leone, which ended a 10-year civil war in 2002. Observing the need for restored educational infrastructure to usher in peace, they wrote in their proposal, "After attending the United World Colleges and Macalester, we identified this deficiency in our society and we feel that it is our responsibility to at least try to change this to the best of our abilities."
Roth-Howe will work to build intergenerational dialogue and education about the Khmer Rouge genocide that took place in Cambodia. She wrote in her proposal, "Cases of persecution and mass injustice have not faded; it is our obligation to address and remember these histories in the hope that their legacies can lead to future tolerance and peace." Roth-Howe will begin in Chicago, where she will work with the Cambodian Association of Illinois (CAI - website) to create programming geared toward building trust and confidence between Cambodian young people and their elders in preparation for their first intergenerational dialogue about the genocide. Then, she will go to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she will create similar programming for Khmer youth through the Youth for Peace organization. She plans to publish a cross-cultural book that incorporates perspectives from both Cambodian American and Cambodian teens.
· Read Mansaray and Sillah's project proposal (.pdf)
· Read Leah Roth-Howe's project proposal (.pdf)
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