Diversity and Global Engagement

An organization that helps universities across North Carolina develop an ethos of volunteerism and service among students has awarded Mary Morrison, director of the Kernodle Center for Service Learning and Community Engagement at Elon University, its 2011 Civic Engagement Professional of the Year Award.

Elon University students started a fundraising drive this week to aid victims of the March earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan. The same students are gathering messages of support from the community that will be translated into Japanese and delivered abroad to survivors whose lives have been upended by the natural disasters.

Assistant professor Jean Rattigan-Rohr made a trip this month to Portland, Ore., to observe Concordia University’s replication of a research project she developed at Elon University.

A New York-based nonprofit has awarded a $200,000 grant to Elon University and Wofford College for a joint project to assist departments at both schools in better measuring how students learn and to help assess efforts by both institutions to strengthen diversity and global engagement.

Sometimes, for some people, it’s not clinging to a job or an idea that requires strength - it’s knowing when to let go. For former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts, that meant knowing when to leave Washington. In a Wednesday morning question-and-answer event, Watts reflected on his political life and shared with students the things he learned about himself through a career of public service.

America has “squandered” opportunities afforded it by the World War II generation, a prominent former congressman said Tuesday, and current lawmakers on both sides of the political divide need to put aside partisanship to solve national problems. J.C. Watts, the 2010-2011 Isabella Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership, offered those observations in an evening lecture attended by hundreds of people inside McCrary Theatre.