From Greg Schneider, a Closing Note to ‘Stand with PUC’ followers-- This FB group formed in a few days following a couple of messages I wrote and posted on January 14 and 15 of this year and a message or two posted in response by my colleague Dr. Aubyn Fulton. I am deeply grateful to those who started and followed the news and conversation on this page--grateful for the expressions of support and affirmation offered me, and grateful especially for the support you offered to my colleagues in the PUC Psychology and Social Work Department and in the larger PUC community. So, first, as the incoming Chair of the Psychology and Social Work Department, but more as its longest-serving member (so far), I offer you all my thanks. Second, I want to introduce our new colleague, Dr. Esperanza Sanchez. Dr. Sanchez will be full-time Assistant Professor of Social Work and step into the position of Field Coordinator for the Social Work Program as Prof Fiona Bullock moves into the Program Director position. Dr. Sanchez holds M.S.W. (2002) and Ph.D. (2011) degrees from the School of Social Welfare, UC, Berkeley. Her B.A. is in Psychology from UC, Davis, but she also studied at PUC and at Colegio Adventista de Sagunto in Spain. As Graduate Student Instructor at Berkeley she has taught Social Welfare Policy and Research Methods and has also served as guest lecturer in other UC Berkeley courses. All of us who worked with Dr. Monte Butler know he is irreplaceable, of course, but we feel that in Esperanza we have a colleague well-prepared and well-disposed to help sustain what Monte, Fiona, and Alisa have built here and to continue to build up the Social Work program and the department as a whole. Finally, a word about academic freedom. Some of you who have suffered through the Issues in Religion, Ethics, and Human Sciences course with me may remember the distinction we stressed between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to.’ The academic freedom we seek at PUC is not principally a freedom from anything so much as it is, in the words of a letter our department offered to fellow faculty earlier this year, freedom “to challenge assumptions, explore ideas and implications, pursue data where it leads, imagine alternative worlds, and critically appreciate the contributions and gifts of all.” We survived a direct threat to this kind of academic freedom last year thanks in no small part to the support of many who followed this page. We made no compromises or concessions to the demands that threatened this freedom, and we remain as committed to pursuing quality and integrity in our faith and learning in this new year as we have always been in the past. While it seems to me that we now face a climate more wary of academic freedom than we have experienced over the last few decades, I look forward to further campus conversations about academic freedom. I hope such conversations will make me and my colleagues in and beyond our department more self-aware and intentional in building practices and traditions of academic freedom across the college community, for as we have learned, such freedom is not to be taken for granted. We won’t be posting anymore immediate updates on the progress of the conversation, but if you have further questions or observations about the department, its mission, and our efforts to serve students, PUC, and the church I invite you to communicate individually with me or other members of the department. As always, I’m at [email protected].
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 00:06:18 +0000
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