Summer Reading Book Announced for 2008
By Melyssa Allen
Meredith College’s Summer Reading Program selection for 2008 is Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It.”
Meredith’s Summer Reading Program was created to further enhance the academic climate on campus. The Summer Reading Program book is chosen to fit Meredith’s annual campus-wide theme.
For 2008-09, the College will focus on environmental awareness, with a theme of “Sustaining Our Environment: Developing Our Greenprint.”
Members of the Summer Reading Committee “felt that [“An Inconvenient Truth”] is a pivotal work for this generation of students [that] combines concrete scientific data on climate change with personal accounts of the impact environmental change has had on people around the world.”
Former Vice President Al Gore is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm that is focused on a new approach to sustainable investing. Gore is also co-founder and chairman of Current TV, an independently owned cable and satellite television network for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism.
Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a best-selling book on the threat of and solutions to global warming, and the subject of the movie of the same title.
In 2007, Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Visit
www.meredith.edu/summer-reading this summer for updates on the Summer Reading Program.
Meredith MBAs Outperform 90% of MBA Students Nationwide
Submitted By Page Midyette, MBA Program Director
Meredith MBAs recently scored higher than 90 percent of other MBA students from colleges and universities across the nation who took the ETS Field Test of Business, MBA. The nationally-normed test is used to assess mastery of business concepts, critical thinking and reasoning ability for MBA students.
Meredith gives the ETS Field Test of Business, MBA to its graduating MBA students, and the results from 2007 were outstanding. As a whole, Meredith MBAs scored at the 90th percentile, meaning they performed better than 90 percent of all other test-takers from other institutions.
In addition to the exceptional overall score, Meredith students demonstrated superior performance in specific assessment areas, including outcomes in the 90th percentile in the fields of Marketing, Management, Managerial Accounting, and Strategic Integration, with scores in the 85th percentile in Finance.
ETS provides data for evaluation and comparison among colleges and universities nationwide. Scores are benchmarked against the performance of more than 5,400 MBA students representing over 130 different institutions. The performance of Meredith MBAs has never been below the 60th percentile, with an average at the 75th percentile. The trend upward reflects the continuous improvements in the MBA program as Meredith approaches its goal to achieve business accreditation by AACSB, International.
The Meredith MBA is a part-time evening program for working professionals. Small classes and dedicated faculty ensure that MBA students not only acquire the essential business knowledge, but can apply that knowledge to situations and problems in the workplace. For more information on Meredith’s MBA program, visit http://www.meredith.edu/mba.
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Climate Change Panel Discussion, Teach-In Held
By Melyssa Allen
As part of a week focused on environmental awareness, 13 Meredith faculty members participated in a teach-in on climate change. Disciplines represented ranged from biology and chemistry to business, psychology and general education.
Some faculty featured topics not normally covered in their classes, while other faculty covered topics that are a regular part of their courses.
For example, Professor of Chemistry Reg Shifflet’s Chemistry 111/112 courses discussed how much CO2 is in a gallon of gas.
His students “found the material to be very interesting,” Shifflet said. “They were completely surprised to discover that burning one gallon of gasoline releases about 19 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
The teach-in sessions were held during the two days following the “Focus Our Solution: Global Climate Change” Panel Discussion on February 13.
Congressman David Price (D-N.C.) provided a taped introduction for the panel discussion, in which he thanked Meredith for being proactive in energy efficiency/climate change issues, and offered comments on energy bills in Congress. Panel members included John King, of NC State’s department of forestry and environmental resources, and Kris Coracini of Environmental Defense.
King discussed greenhouse effect, climate cycle, and forests’ role in carbon cycle, and Coracini talked about Green Power in North Carolina, the state’s low standard of energy efficiency per capita (compared to other states), and simple ways business and individuals can be more energy efficient.
Graham Kuzia, a Greenpeace Climate Change Field Organizer from UNC Charlotte, talked about that university’s Green Power initiative. Meredith student Brittni Walker, ’08, who is an environmental studies major, discussed energy solutions and decisions for students. Walker suggested students encourage Meredith to be on 100% green power, and encourage Meredith’s administration to commit to green power by supporting a $2 or $4 increase in student activity fees to initially split the cost with administration.
More than 100 people attended the climate change panel discussion.
Assistant Professor of Biology Erin Lindquist, who helped organize environmental awareness week, participated in the teach-in by discussing the carbon cycle in her Biology 102 courses. While this is a topic that she always covers in the course, Lindquist felt students’ attendance at the climate change panel helped to spur more discussion during class.
“Our discussion took the entire class period, and was full of student questions on the use of fossil fuels, alternative energy sources, and how we can use plants, algae and other photosynthesizers to sequester our carbon.”
Shannon Grimes, assistant professor of religion and philosophy, also found that students responded well to the teach-in.
“I planned on spending 20 minutes of class time on this, but the students were so engaged in the discussions that we ended up spending most of the class period,” Grimes said. “I've never seen them so eager to talk, and I was very impressed by the fact that many of the students were passionate about environmental issues and taking action to help slow down climate change, conserve water during the drought, and reduce waste by recycling.”
The teach-in provided Grimes with an opportunity to discuss topics that would not normally be covered in her courses. In her Jesus and the Gospels class, Grimes focused on the recent declaration by the National Association of Evangelical Christians that humans’ contribution to global warming is a profound moral issue to which all Christians must respond. Her Women and the Bible class focused on the topic of gender, nature and religion.
According to Lindquist, the panel discussion, teach-in and other environmental awareness events were opportunities to get students, faculty and staff “involved in environmental conversations, and hopefully get them excited about their own individual solutions as well as possibilities for future Meredith environmental programs. It was a great warm-up to the full-year environmental theme next year.”
Click here for a full list of teach-in participants.
