Piggybacking on a Michigan Works! career fair, Albion citizens gathered in Washington Gardner School for a public announcement of the City/College recent AmeriCorps VISTA grant. This summer, 11 VISTA members will arrive in Albion to work with City and College departments to boost economic development, education and health initiatives in 2016-17.
Dr. Robert H. Bartlett, ’60, professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan and whose groundbreaking surgical treatment has saved the lives of thousands of babies over the years, returns to campus Saturday, May 7 to deliver the Commencement address to Albion College’s Class of 2016 from the steps of Kresge Gymnasium on the College Quadrangle. The ceremony begins at 1 p.m, with the Processional starting at 12:45 p.m.
Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint pediatrician, never thought her job would entail convincing parents and their kids that the water they drink won’t kill them. “Parents tell me they turn on the water and their kids cry. Kids now fear water,” said Dr. Hanna-Attisha, the guest speaker Wednesday night for Albion College’s Anna Howard Shaw Lecture inside Towsley Lecture Hall. Speaking out, and educating, has become the new normal for Hanna-Attisha, who for nearly a year has been at the center of the Flint water crisis.
Albion College and the City of Albion will get a national boost for local community building when 11 full-time AmeriCorps VISTA service members arrive this summer. A public presentation of this award is scheduled for Tuesday, April 5, at 4:30 p.m. at Washington Gardner School, 401 E. Michigan Ave., in conjunction with a Michigan Works-sponsored career and internship fair.
Patrick McLean has long been fascinated with our neighbors to the north. “In 1985, I did my undergraduate honors thesis on Nova Scotian provincial politics,” says the Ford Institute director. From there he was hooked on a country whose culture and people are in so many ways similar to the U.S. but, in other key ways, are so different. This semester, he has taken his love of all things Canada to the classroom, teaching an honors class for first-year and sophomore students called Canada: More than Snow, Hockey and Maple Syrup.
One of Albion’s own, Keena Williams, will become the director and president’s special advisor for global diversity at Albion College. Williams, a 2009 Albion College alumna and a graduate of Albion High School, is currently the College’s interim director for intercultural affairs and has been a part of the Office of Intercultural Affairs staff for nearly four years. The promotion is effective April 1.
Albion College and five other Great Lakes Colleges Association institutions are coming together to design and teach hybrid courses, with an emphasis on digital teaching, thanks to last year’s $335,000 grant from the New York-based Teagle Foundation. This semester, history professor Marcy Sacks (left) is collaborating with a counterpart from Hope College; in the fall, exercise science professor Heather Betz will team up with a faculty peer from DePauw University.
On a snowy Super Tuesday, Mark Schauer found a ray of sunshine. “Empathy in politics is alive,” said the former U.S. congressman and 2014 Democratic Michigan gubernatorial candidate. “But with a faint pulse.” Schauer, ’84, who developed his love of public service in Albion’s Ford Institute, spoke to about 40 people Tuesday in Bobbitt Auditorium, offering a sober look at politics in perhaps one of the strangest election years America has ever seen.
Craig Streu, ’04, won’t say the words. No one can say the words. Not now. Not yet—that maybe, possibly, a cure for cancer awaits somewhere just around the corner. And while Streu—in his first year as an assistant professor of biochemistry at his alma mater—won’t say those words, he will allow himself the next best thing. “It could be one of the tools of the arsenal to cure cancer,” he says with all of the diplomacy he can muster.
