SummEr/FAll 2011 - Nazareth College

n college of arts and sciences
The email signature of Dr. Monica
Weis ’65, S.S.J., concludes with
a quote from Socrates: “Education
is not the filling of a vessel,
but the kindling of a flame.” Weis
is clearly a flame-kindler herself. As
director of the Master of Arts in Liberal
Studies (MALS) program in the College
of Arts and Sciences, she is passionate
about the transformative experience a
liberal arts education can be.
“Ideas colliding can be exciting and a
little bit scary,” she says. “Some students
find it challenging to push beyond their
disciplinary lines and become comfortable
in a world of different cultures. But
when they reflect back, they realize how
much they’ve changed.”
Graduates of the program agree. “The
MALS program has empowered me to
have the courage to ask and respond
to the questions: Who are you? Where
does your heart lie? What do you stand
for?” says Kathleen Hansen ’09G.
Adds Grady S. Bailey III ’10G, “I do not
feel so much as if I have completed a
process, as I have opened many avenues
for intellectual and personal growth.”
Opening those avenues is what the MALS
program excels at, believes Alec Sutherland,
Ph.D. Sutherland, who retired from the Nazareth
English department after 26 years and
has since taught MALS courses, calls the program
“a time to take a measure of ourselves
against the world, a last opportunity to take a
long view of the horizon.”
The luxury of that leisurely viewpoint may
be compelling in a strong economy, but what
value do liberal studies offer to a struggling
job market? Weis contends the interdisciplinary
nature of the MALS program makes
it both unique and uniquely valuable in its
outcomes. “Students gain transferrable skills,”
she says, explaining that in a world where
“people change jobs multiple times during
their lives, you cannot train them for a job
Read Great Books, Think Big Thoughts
Dr. Monica Weis ’65, S.S.J., director of the Master
of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program.
and expect it to be there.” MALS educates
students in what she calls “constant skills—
creative problem solving, critical thinking,
and clear writing, all of which are goals of
the program.”
The MALS program has three required
courses and a rotating schedule of electives,
culminating in a capstone project of the student’s
creation. Each project, like the program
itself, must be interdisciplinary, scholarly, and
combine the student’s academic study, professional
skills, and personal interests. As one
might expect, capstone projects vary widely.
Margaret Zanghi ’10G recently produced
a thesis on women activists in the civil rights
movement, pulling together both her feminist
and human rights leanings. Other recent
by Robyn Rime
capstone projects have included “Air,
Water and Sacred Earth: Constructing Interdisciplinary
Narratives in Clay,” “Sixteen
and Stoned: Alternative Drug Therapies for
Addicted Teens,” and “Thought Consumption:
How the Evolution of Writing has
Strong-armed Us into the Social Media
Milieu of Today.”
The program has proved attractive to
a variety of students: young high school
teachers seeking professional certification
and finding the humanities a better preparation;
those with technical and professional
degrees who recognize a gap in
their knowledge; parents whose children
are out of the home; and retirees with
the leisure to “read great books and think
big thoughts,” as Weis puts it. Zanghi,
an adult learner, found the program a
perfect match.
“I needed something I could really dig
into, something that would require attention
and work and that was official,”
she says. Taking courses one at a time,
she completed her studies in four years,
graduating from Nazareth in May 2010
together with her granddaughter, Rachel
Trunfio ’10.
The interdisciplinary nature of MALS
appeals to the faculty, too, who also find
themselves kindling flames. “We don’t ‘teach’
in the traditional sense of the word,” says Virginia
Skinner-Linnenberg, Ph.D., professor
of English. “We facilitate discussion among
colleagues. Many of our students are teachers
themselves, or they are older and have had
life experiences to draw from, thus making
our discussions robust and meaningful.”
“The MALS program raises graduates to
a higher pitch of literacy—they write better,
speak better, and listen better,” concludes
Sutherland. And surely those skills are valuable
in any market.
Find the MALS program on Facebook and at
www.naz.edu/MALS.
www.naz.edu CONNECTIONS | Summer/Fall 2011 13