Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series

This semester, I've organized a little "intellectual conversation" on our campus. I've called it the "Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series" after two fierce, crotchety faculty colleagues who died in 2009.

Both Stefanie and Mark cared a lot about maintaining the academic integrity of the college; both cared a lot about ideas and their clear expression; both insisted on making intellectual inquiry accessible to students, not as watered-down worksheets but as a serious enterprise.

I'd talked with Stefanie many times over the years about having some kind of faculty sessions where we could share our research interests. In fact, the first time I met Stefanie was when she discussed her dissertation research on Jane Austen at a faculty brown bag session back in about 1992.

Stef wasn't the only one who wanted to share more than teaching techniques with her colleagues. As my colleague Judith Roy wrote, "Mark Davis pursued his research and scholarly activities right to the end, submitting another article for publication just a few months before he died."

Many of us do this academic work, work that is so often hidden or overwhelmed by the demands of teaching at an open-admission community college. But we have few venues for sharing that work. So I organized these sessions -- just did it. We have a Center for Teaching and Learning at our college, but it focuses on teaching tips and techniques.

Anyway, the sessions have been terrific: today was the last one, a lecture about Russian intelligensia after Stalin. We've heard about disability rights in Korea, theories of comics, and just war theory. Every session has had at least four participants, with the largest session drawing nine. Sure, these numbers might be small, but I look forward to increasing them next semester. (I've switched the day/time to every other TUESDAY, noon-1:00 p.m.)

So I guess you could say I'm feeling proud about what I've been able to accomplish . . . work that's not rewarded or even recognized by the institution. But work that's central to the mission of the college and to creating a healthy climate.

However, I still miss my two friends. These brown bag talks will never replace the cranky hallway conversations, the delightful and exasperated critiques both Stefanie and Mark shared with the rest of us.