“The world owes you nothing, and equally you owe it nothing.”

― Florence Given, Women Don't Owe You Pretty

The use of the term “give back” is not appropriate when asking colleagues to make donations. Especially when the request is from the dean. It’s simply not accurate: those of you who work on behalf of our students in the college obviously work hard and the energy and emotional labor and intellectual wattage you expend on students’ behalf more than earns your paychecks. You don’t owe the institution any money.

Like most folks, my partner and I make donations to things we care about. Things we’re moved to support and things that we think are important. A partial list of things we’ve financially supported in past or current years include faith communities, public broadcasting stations, and more recently, political representatives who advance good public policy. But our most significant donations in the past two decades have been to students. Our students. We have not and do not donate to the institution—our employer. We give to our students because we are inspired by these students: past, present, and future.

Seeing our students get the support they need and deserve, and then see them go on to do great things, makes us happy. Fulfilled. Grateful.

When we make a donation of any size to a student scholarship endowment fund, we prompt our employer—GVSU—to match our contribution. We are leveraging double the impact. Here in the Brooks College, we have several funds that directly support our students in our programs. And we have room for more funds that could support some of our newer programs that have no dedicated endowments (yet).

Throughout the month of February, you can show students you care in one more way. By participating in the annual Faculty & Staff Campaign, you can support scholarships, internships, study abroad experiences, and other parts of Grand Valley that inspire you. Please consider a pledge or gift today.

Mark Schaub, Dean of Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies

The second annual Reach Higher Showcase will be held on Friday, April 12, in the Richard M. DeVos Center on the GVSU Robert C. Pew Grand Rapids campus. The DeVos Center will once again be transformed into a hub of creativity and collaboration as we showcase the innovative work that is happening across campus and fueling GVSU’s vision.

The festivities will begin at 4:00 p.m. with the President's Kickoff Remarks in Loosemore Auditorium. The showcase opens at 4:30 p.m. A complimentary dinner buffet with beer, wine, and more will be served during the showcase. Please register to attend by April 5. We hope to see you there!

GVSU has announced the first annual Day of Giving for Thursday, March 21. This day of giving will be the first of its kind and will be held annually going forward. Various academic units will have featured funds, meaning our community can support the fund that means the most to them. 

This year's theme is "Lakers Give Back." The giving site will open in February for early giving. On Thursday, March 21, stop by the Kirkhof Center lobby from 10:00 a.m. through 1:00 p.m. for a celebration that will include a variety of fun activities. More details will become available in February, so keep an eye on your email and the Brooks College website. We hope you will consider being a part of this inspiring event!

Join us in honoring the outstanding contributions of our faculty at the Faculty Awards Convocation scheduled February 15, 4:00 p.m., Loosemore Auditorium, DeVos Center, Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

University awards recognize outstanding achievements in teaching excellence, scholarly contributions that advance the professions and benefit society, mentorship that guides students successfully on their academic journey, and dedication to service to our University and the broader community.

Brooks College is proud to announce that our very own Peter Wampler, Professor of Geology in the Frederik Meijer Honors College, will be honored with the Glenn A. Niemeyer Award. He will be among an elite group of faculty receiving a University Award for Excellence during the ceremony. Congratulations, Peter! 

The COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey will launch during the first full week of February. This initiative came as a recommendation from the GVSU Network of Advisors. All tenure-line and affiliate faculty will receive emails, inviting them to complete the survey. Provost Mili released a statement in late November encouraging faculty to participate. The findings from COACHE will be received this summer, and in Fall 2024, GVSU faculty will be engaged to review the findings and to start to make changes.  Details can be found on the GVSU COACHE website. Dean Mark Schaub hopes to have a high rate of participation among Brooks College faculty. Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete the survey. Your feedback will contribute to implementing positive changes.

Liberty Mason is a recent graduate of our Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ENS) program. ENS Internship Coordinator and affiliate professor Crystal Scott-Tunstall helped connect Liberty to an internship with the West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC).

On January 24, WMEAC presented Liberty with the Intern of the Year Award! Our Brooks College flowers continue to bloom, and we are looking forward to seeing the amazing things Liberty does in the future.

Beginning as a single-day research symposium almost 30 years ago, Student Scholars Day (SSD) has evolved into a multi-day event that celebrates scholarship, research, and creative work performed by GVSU students and showcases faculty-mentored student work.

Events for the 28th Annual SSD will begin on Tuesday, April 9, at 4:00 pm, in the Cook-DeWitt Center Auditorium, with a keynote address by Dr. Imani Perry, author of the National Book Award-winning South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.

Born just nine years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and professor of studies of women, gender and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. 

Registration to present at SSD opens on February 5. We hope you will share with your students this opportunity to present their work or attend SSD to celebrate the work of their peers. Additional SSD events will include an art exhibition from April 10 - 28 at the Calder Art Center, and the 2024 SSD Live Presentation and Performances on April 10. Check out the 2024 SSD website for full details and further information.

 Please take a moment to learn more about the SSD Keynote Speaker, Dr. Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner. We hope you'll consider encouraging your students to attend her talk on April 9, 2024, and if you'd like to discuss ways to incorporate her work into your classes, please reach out to the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship (OURS). 

Photo Credit: Sameer Khan

CECI's Kang Awarded Community Collaboration Grant

The Kutsche Office of Local History has awarded Prof. Leanne Kang (CECI) the Community Collaboration Grant for Winter 2024. Kang and her community partners will receive nearly $10,000 to support GRPS Uncovered: Oral History as Podcasts. Professor Kang, the Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives, and the Grand Rapids People's History Project will conduct and share original interviews from Grand Rapids Public Schools' staff, faculty, and students, from 1968 to the present. They are especially interested in first-hand accounts of the controversial closure of South High School, which was the city's most minority-serving institution and the only school closed when the entire GRPS system was forcibly integrated. Stay tuned for regular project updates, podcast releases, and community events!

Life Stories

Prof. Ramya Swayamprakash collaborated with the Kutsche Office of Local History to offer students in her INT 314 (Life Journeys) class a unique writing opportunity. While learning about the process and composition of museum object labels, students curated a digital gallery  showcasing key moments in their own identity formation. By combining Prof. Swayamprakash's expertise with the Kutsche Office's commitment to sharing our local stories, students gained greater insight into themselves alongside some helpful editorial experience.

Monday, February 26 & Tuesday, February 27 - 12:00 - 2:30 p.m. in the Honors College Chamberlain Multipurpose Room

It's back and it's hearty! Soup's On: Stew Edition will feature delicious stew choices to warm you up as we all rally for this winter semester. From 1:30 - 2:30 p.m. on Monday, while enjoying your stew you can also check out the Sabbatical Showcase, featuring the work of Brooks College faculty.

Tuesday, February 27 - 5:00 p.m. in Kirkhof Center Room 2250

Flex your Black history and culture knowledge, snag some amazing prizes, and enjoy food from around the world!

Ways you can support this event:

Sign up for a team! 

Study guides will be provided upon registration, and if you don't have a team, you can be added to an existing team.

Show up as a spectator!

Cheer on the teams as they compete for prizes while you enjoy free food.

Check out what has been happening around Brooks College since the last newsletter!

Patrick Johnson (Director) and Meredith Fedewa (Assistant Director) hard at work on the schedule for the writing consultants in the Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors.

The Sustainable Agriculture Project (SAP) farm may have been covered in snow in January, but food is still being grown inside the hoop houses.

Bees are safely hibernating inside of the hives at the SAP Farm.

The School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) gave a warm welcome to our newest professional support staff (PSS) colleagues, Leslye Allen and Arnie VandeBrake! 

Azfar Hussain—Associate Professor in SIS, Director of the Graduate Program in Social Innovation, and a committed bilingual writer—had his third book in Bengali titled Chinho Bhasey Oboseshe (Signs Drift At last) published from Poondra Publications, Dhaka, in December, 2023.

This book is an experimental, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and mixed-genre work in which the elements of travelogue, docufiction, and critifiction are interspliced to make theoretical and critical points about time and space, music and dance, and, of course, about politics and philosophy and poetry. Link: চিহ্ন ভাসে অবশেষে  (Signs Drift At Last), 2023.

Congratulations, Azfar!

Krista Benson—Associate Professor in SIS, has co-authored a new book, being released in February 2024.

Reproductive Justice. Adoption, and Foster Care (Routledge), co-written by Krista Benson (School of Interdisciplinary Studies, GVSU) and Tanya Saroj Bahkru (San José State University) will be released on 2/26/24. In this book, the authors situate the colonial legacies of family separation, what it means to center the right parent, and Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks in conversation with one another in order to elucidate a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to recognizing the significance of contemporary examples of family separation.

In doing so, the book showcases the connections between adoption and foster care within the intellectual and activist frameworks of human rights, Critical Adoption Studies, Reproductive Justice, and transnational feminisms. 

Dr. Benson encourages ordering the book from Routledge or asking your favorite local bookstore to order it.

Congratulations, Krista!

Leslye Allen is the new Office Assistant for the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS). Leslye will be supporting Jack Mangala and Justin Pettibone in the SIS main office.

Welcome aboard, Leslye! 

Leslye returns to Brooks College where she previously supported Area and Global Studies before working in the College of Health Professions Dean’s Office. Living south of Grand Haven, she is happy to be back on the Allendale campus and closer to home with her old (and new) Brooks colleagues. She received her B.A. in Lib Studies with an emphasis on creative writing in 2018. She lives with her husband John, kitty (Charlie), rescue pup (Bacon) and daughter, Peyton (21) who just transferred to GVSU to finish her undergraduate degree. 

Leslye and her husband love Red Wings hockey and get to a few games each season. She is an artist and writer and wrote, illustrated, and self-published a chapter book for young readers (hoping to finish her second one soon). When she’s not working her day job, she loves spending time at her small hobby farm rental in Nunica where she keeps two horses (Mustang Sam and Painted Sophie), four sheep (Jett, Maeve, Bridget, and Julia), and a few chickens. She has a passion for gardening and learning about composting and growing for our pollinators. Hmm…might she keep bees someday?

Arnie VandeBrake is the new Academic Coordinator for the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS). Arnie will be supporting the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program as well as SIS generally.

Welcome aboard, Arnie! 

Arnie comes to GVSU with a professional background in ticketing and live entertainment administration, most notably with Broadway Across America at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland and the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at Long Island University in Brookville, New York. In 2017, she was lucky enough to be on the general management team for multiple Broadway tours, including the Tony Award winning revival of The Color Purple, which is based on her favorite book. More recently, after returning home to West Michigan in 2018, she has worked as a library clerk in the Village of Saranac and learned to identify hundreds of crystals while providing customer service at Spirit Dreams in Eastown, Grand Rapids.

Residing in her hometown of Grand Rapids with her husband, three teen-aged stepchildren, and two very strange cats, Arnie enjoys listening to podcasts, walking in the woods, and finding perfect storage solutions. 

Jerry Stinnett has ended his two terms as the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum/Supplemental Writing Skills program. With Lindsay Ellis stepping into the role, Jerry will now be serving as the Director of First Year Writing.

Jerry provided steady leadership during his tenure as SWS Director. He handled the birth of the AI writing tool age with grace and thoughtful attention, holding a virtual town hall to hear from many different perspectives within GVSU as we determined best policies and practices, and his leadership has led to GVSU being on the leading edge of thinking about all angles of the impact of AI writing tools on writing education. Thank you, Jerry!

February 15: Faculty Awards Convocation (Pew campus) 4:00 p.m.

February 15: Unnatural Causes (INT 100/201 Approved) 6:00 p.m.

February 15: Sacred Site Visit - Masjid Al-Tawheed (Off Campus) 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

February 22: Chinese Culture: The Year of the Dragon & Lantern Festival 12:00 p.m.

February 26: Soup's On: Stew Edition 12:00 - 2:30 p.m.

February 26: Sabbatical Showcase 1:30 - 2:30 p.m.

February 27: Soup's On: Stew Edition 12:00 - 2:30 p.m.

February 27: For The Culture Quiz Bowl (INT 100/201 Approved) 5:00 p.m.

*New events are posted regularly.
Stay up to date on Brooks College Events by checking the event calendar on our website.

February 7 - 12: Faculty Governance: Voting

February 12: Leadership Council Meeting (Virtual) 9:00 a.m.

February 15: Faculty Awards Convocation (Pew campus) 4:00 p.m.

February 16: Big Picture Curriculum Workshop Series (hyflex) 9:00 - 10:30 a.m.

February 19: Academic Programs Meeting (Virtual) 9:00 a.m.

February 19 - 23: Mid-Term Evaluations

February 26: Sabbatical Showcase 1:30 - 2:30 p.m.

February 27: Mid-Term Grades due from faculty by 12:00 p.m. 

March 3-10: Spring Break

March 11: Leadership Council Meeting (Virtual) 9:00 a.m.

March 11: Big Picture Curriculum Workshop Series (hyflex) 9:00 - 10:30 a.m.

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