PLEASE NOTE

Lunch Colloquium programing concludes for the summer with our August 1 talk. Lunch Colloquiums will resume in September.

The newsletter will also take a brief respite and will officially resume in early September.

Lunch Colloquium -- Monday, August 1, 2022

“Screening and Discussion of Common Good Atlanta:

Breaking Down the Walls of Mass Incarceration”

Hal Jacobs

Independent Documentary Filmmaker

Sarah Higinbotham

Assistant Professor of English, Oxford College,

and co-founder, Common Good Atlanta

In 2008, Sarah Higinbotham, while a PhD student at Georgia State University, wanted to teach a literature class in a Georgia prison. But she soon discovered that no college programs existed in Georgia prisons at the time. So, she started one. Today, an all-volunteer group of over 70 faculty from six universities has reached over 700 incarcerated students in four prisons, plus a downtown course for prison-impacted people. At the heart of the program’s mission is the belief that broad, democratic access to higher education for people affected by incarceration strengthens the common good of our communities.

Common Good Atlanta: Breaking Down the Walls of Mass Incarceration (2022, 57 min.), directed by Hal Jacobs, looks at the evolution of the program and its impact on both students and instructors. Incarcerated students find an intellectual freedom that encourages growth and dignity, while instructors find a stimulating and transformative environment for the liberal arts. This upbeat, uplifting film conveys the excitement and creativity of the program while also serving as a call to action to community and policy leaders.

Given improvements in the pandemic situation, it has been possible for Hal to schedule public screenings of the film (like that at the Plaza Theater on May 18). Some emeriti may have been able to attend one of those. But now Hal has arranged a virtual screening for Emeritus College members. Here are links associated with the film that will go live on July 26 and stay live through August 3:

DIRECT LINK

https://www.hjacobscreative.com/cgaemeritus

LINK FROM FILM’S HOMEPAGE

http://www.hjacobscreative.com/cga

The August 1 Lunch Colloquium will take the form of a “Zoom talkback” with Hal himself, Sarah Higinbotham, and both alumni and instructors from the Common Good Atlanta program.

About Hal Jacobs:

Hal Jacobs has an MS in Communications from Georgia State University. He worked at Georgia State for 16 years, managing publications and also the website for the Decision Sciences Institute, a professional association of business school professors at the university. In 2002, he began 12-plus years of work at Emory, first as a freelance editor working on several university-wide commission reports and then as a writer/content producer in Emory College. In 2014, he left Emory to become an independent documentary filmmaker, forming the company HJacobs Creative with his son, Henry, whose skills in film/photography, music, and editing complement his father’s skills in writing and developing written/video resources for higher education.

Their work focuses on arts, social justice, and the environment, and telling the stories of people whose voices [in those areas] need to be heard. The Lillian Smith documentary, Breaking the Silence, was their first full-length project. And many members of the Emeritus College will remember the Lunch Colloquium from the summer of 2020 when Hal (and Brenda Bynum, who was integral to the project) discussed this film that he had made available to EC members via a virtual screening. The film has since received the 2021 Jack Spadero Documentary Award from the Appalachian Studies Association.

As noted above, this summer Hal is offering us another virtual screening and follow-up discussion, this time of his newest film, Common Good Atlanta: Breaking Down the Walls of Mass Incarceration. In our Colloquium, he and Sarah Higinbotham will talk about the program and the film. She is the assistant professor of English on the Oxford College campus of Emory who launched the amazing prison education program that brings an accredited liberal arts curriculum to students behind bars.

We might finally mention that Hal and his team at HJacobs Creative are now working on a full-length documentary about Atlanta’s Northside Tavern and blues matriarch Ellyn Webb. As he says, “It’s a great story — a slice of Atlanta history — about how she transformed her family’s little Westside neighborhood working-class bar in the early 1990s to one of the Southeast’s premiere blues dives before her death in 2017.” You may learn more about this project (and opportunities to support it) at https://tinyurl.com/2p95b474. The film will debut in 2023.

About Sarah Higinbotham:

Sarah Higinbotham received her BA from the University of Richmond, her MA from the University of Hawaii, and her PhD (in English) from Georgia State University. While earning her PhD, she taught college courses inside a Georgia State Prison. Soon, with colleague Bill Taft, she co-founded a nonprofit (Common Good Atlanta) that connects universities with prisons, work that is rooted in the belief that human dignity flourishes, and communities become stronger, when access to higher education is equitable. Common Good Atlanta now offers accredited college courses in four Georgia prisons, plus a downtown course for prison-impacted people. To date, an all-volunteer group of over 70 faculty from six universities has reached over 700 incarcerated students.

Sarah has collaborated with Hal Jacobs in making the documentary about the program that premiered this past fall: Common Good Atlanta: Breaking Down the Walls of Mass Incarceration. The two of them (and others involved, including CGA alums) will be discussing the program and the film in the Lunch Colloquium described just above.

Before joining the Oxford College faculty in 2017, Sarah taught Shakespeare and Milton at Georgia Tech for three years as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow. She also was a Folger Shakespeare Library Residential Fellow in 2017 researching early modern juries, assize sermons, sentencing rubrics, judges’ notebooks, and legal records. She studied paleography at the Folger in 2018 and rare book bindings at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School in 2019.

At Oxford, Sarah continues to study and teach Shakespeare and Milton and early modern literature, focusing when she can on the intersections of literature and law. Besides writing about the violence of the law in early modern England and critical prison theory, she also writes about human rights in literature, as in her 2015 book from Oxford University Press, co-authored with Jonathan Todres, Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law.  And it won’t surprise you to learn that Sarah works with students who are interested in criminal justice reform, facilitates undergraduate peer tutoring in Georgia’s prisons, and oversees summer internships involving prison work, as well.



Additional Information from the July 18 Lunch Colloquium

Our lunch colloquium on Monday, July 18, was extremely interesting and eye-opening thanks to our dynamic speaker, Terri Montague, McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow and Senior Lecturer,

School of Law, The Center for the Study of Law and Religion, who talked about “Demystifying and Meeting the Affordable Housing Challenge."

Many in attendance were interested in viewing her power point presentation again and she has graciously agreed to share it with us. To view it please click here. She also shared a short video about housing inequities created by Richard Rothstein in 2018, Segregated by Design.  You can view it by clicking here.

News of Interest

YOU’RE INVITED TO ATTEND TWO 2OTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

The history of AROHE, the Association for Retirement Organizations in Higher Education, began in 2002, a year after the founding of the Emory University Emeritus College in 2001. Thanks to the problems posed by the COVID epidemic, we of the Emeritus College chose to postpone our 20^th anniversary celebration from last fall till this fall, in hopes that we’d be able to hold our celebration in person this year, as it now seems probable we will be able to do. As Ann Rogers announced above in her Message from the Director, we have chosen a date for this sure-to-be-gala occasion, Friday, November 4. And of course, we would ask all of you (and yours) to save the date for the splendid programming we’re in the process of planning now. (Stay tuned for further details.)

AROHE has been making plans to celebrate its 20^th anniversary this fall, as well. And in case you haven’t seen the announcement of that gala occasion in the AROHE newsletter and/or on the AROHE website, we are hereby passing it on so that you can save that date, as well. Given our long history with AROHE—helping to found it in 2002 and helping to sustain it ever since—we hope you’ll attend if you possibly can. And as you’ll see in the information below, that will be easy to do since it’ll be happening online and not in person.

Here is the invitation to attend:

AROHE Virtual Summit and 20^th Anniversary Celebration

“Celebrating 20 Years of Innovation in Retirement Organizations”

Thursday, September 22, 2022, 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT

As we celebrate AROHE’s 20th anniversary and recognize its founders and milestones, the AROHE Virtual Summit 2022 will explore innovative ways that retirement organizations can promote the wisdom and experience of retired faculty and staff. The summit will kick off with an engaging fireside chat to inform us about successful models of engagement and encourage us to create the future we envision for academic retirees.

The discussion will be led by Paul Irving, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, founding chair of its Center for the Future of Aging and distinguished scholar-in-residence at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. The conversation will be moderated by Helen Dennis, nationally recognized columnist, author, and speaker on issues of aging and the new retirement.

Both Mr. Irving and Ms. Dennis are highly respected experts in the field of positive aging and are recognized for their innovative leadership and contributions. Join them as they discuss the upside of aging, purpose and possibilities as we age, ideas for dispelling ageism, the merits of intergenerational engagement, and more.

This interactive conversation will engage the audience in stretching our imaginations and challenging us to generate ideas and solutions to bring back to our organizations and colleges/universities. You will receive cutting edge, up-to-the-minute information and resources to promote and improve our service to retired faculty and staff.

To further engage our attendees, Mr. Irving will provide links to a range of "must read" articles in the fields of aging, encore contributions, and intergenerational opportunities. Ms. Dennis will offer her latest “top 10” list of recommended books. 

Do you have questions you would like our speaker and moderator to address? If yes, email info@arohe.org to submit your questions or comments by July 29.

Note, please, that registration for AROHE’s 2022 Virtual Summit and 20th Anniversary Celebration is now open. Register by September 2, 2022 to receive an information packet by mail.

Registration fees:

• AROHE members: $30 per person*
• Canadian AROHE members: $25 per person*
• Non-Members: $50 per person

*Anyone affiliated with an AROHE member organization is eligible for the member price.

Any member of Emory’s Emeritus College can register for the $30 fee. And we would like to encourage you to consider doing so. (Just go to the website at arohe.org.) As mentioned earlier, our Emeritus College has long been a leader among the ever-increasing number of organizations that comprise AROHE, and a good-sized (and participatory) Emory contingent at this Virtual Summit will help us to  continue offering other retirement organizations the benefit of our experience with many kinds of successful programming. Not to mention learning from their experience in our turn.

Congratulations to our Director, Ann E. Rogers!

Emeritus College Director Honored at International Conference

Ann E. Rogers PhD, RN, Emeritus College Director and Professor of Nursing, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, was inducted into Sigma Theta Tau’s International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame on Monday, July 25 at the 33^rd Annual International Research Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is one of 270 nurse researchers who have ever received this honor that recognizes nurses whose research has achieved significant and sustained national or international recognition and whose research has improved the profession of nursing and the people it serves. 

As most of us know, Ann’s research focuses on sleep, and she is credited with conducting the Staff Nurse Fatigue and Patient Safety Study, a groundbreaking investigation that documented the long hours frequently worked by nurses and the effect of these hours on patient safety. Her study led to sweeping changes in nursing policies in clinical settings across the country.

Program of Interest

Emeritus member Patrick Noonan, Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Information Systems and Operations Management from the Goizueta Business School, has shared some information about what he's been up and it's something many of you may be interested in.

In his words:

On the evening of August 18, I will be performing at our beautiful Performing Arts Studio with my group “Outer Park.” We’re an intergenerational, intercontinental lot -- three of us in our late 60s, with a vocalist in her 30s; three of us in the US, with a keyboard player from France.

The shortest description of our music is “the spirit of underground radio, reinvented, remixed, reimagined.” We’re all veteran performers, and we’re about to release our third album, but due to our geography (and that pesky global pandemic) this will be our first public performance as Outer Park!

The event details can be found in this ticketing link. https://outerpark3.brownpapertickets.com/

Our albums can be found on Spotify, Apple, Pandora etc., and on our YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/OuterPark/featured

Topic of Interest

Professor Emerit?

Earlier this year, I read about attempts at the University of Oregon to eliminate the gendered terms for retired faculty of "emeritus/emerita"; a second resolution proposed the title "Professor Emerit." You can read about these proposals by clicking here and the adoption of both by the University of Oregon Senate by clicking here.

When I first became Director of the Emeritus College, I had several discussions concerning the title of our organization “Emeritus College” as that title was clearly gendered. The only solution offered was “Emeriti College.” I was assured by a Latin scholar that “emeriti” included both men and women but given that the plural of emeritus is "emeriti" and of "emerita" is "emeritae", “emeriti” seemed to be inclusive in the same way that “men” is inclusive of both men and women, although perhaps it sounded somewhat less gendered than emeritus.

In the intervening years, this discussion has become more important. To my knowledge, the only gendered titles for faculty in English are emeritus and emerita. It is thus somewhat peculiar that only at retirement does one acquire a gendered title. The particular problem that is much more salient now than when I became Director is that we are becoming increasingly aware that gender identity for a significant number of people is not binary.

For some of us the idea that human gender is not strictly binary is a relatively new concept. However, many physicians are undoubtedly aware of intersex individuals, and those individuals represent just a fraction of people who do not identify as either strictly male or female. Other cultures have long recognized three or more genders. Emory now explicitly recognizes the right of individuals to identify the pronouns they wish to be used for themselves (for example, she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, Xie/Hir/Hirs, and Ze/Zir/Zirs). One might ask whether or to what extent this could be an issue for faculty retiring at Emory. I don’t know the statistics for Emory faculty, but there was a recent editorial in one of the most prestigious journals in the biological and biomedical sciences, Cell, that had data on gender identity of submitting authors (click here to read the editorial). The primary purpose of the data analysis was to examine gender disparities affecting women, but the data also showed that 0.6% of submitting authors identified as non-binary. (The database consisted of almost 13,000 submitting authors, covering the years 2017-2021). Submitting authors are those who are already senior authors or those most likely to advance in the field.

I think it is safe to conclude that at some point, perhaps relatively soon, there will be faculty who identify as non-binary and will retire deserving of a faculty title but who would not want to be forced into choosing either emeritus or emerita as part of their title. In line with other kinds of faculty titles, it seems most reasonable that the additional title should be non-gendered so that it could apply to everyone. 

The problem is that there is no easy choice of a new title. At the University of Oregon, there was more discussion about a new title than about the concept of changing the title. Professor Emerit was ultimately chosen, both for its relation to the older title, and because it references some related practices such as referring to alumni/alumnae as “alums.” If our titles, and thus the name of our organization, are to change, I would hope we would be proactive about that decision rather than reactants.

--Gray Crouse



Roberd (Robin) M. Bostick

Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology

Dr. Bostick received his MD degree in 1976 from the Medical University of South Carolina where he also completed a Family Medicine residency in 1979. After nine years in private medical practice, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Academic Medicine and Clinical Investigation at the University of Minnesota where he also received his MPH degree in epidemiology in 1990 and then began his academic career. He was appointed to the Emory faculty in 2003 as Professor of Epidemiology. Dr. Bostick’s research is on the causes and primary prevention of colorectal cancer and premature mortality risk, and includes special emphases on the roles of diet and lifestyle (especially calcium, vitamin D, antioxidant micronutrients, and dietary and lifestyle patterns) and modifiable biomarkers of risk.



All that wonderful food from our last walk can be found throughout campus in the numerous Educational Gardens which are part of the Emory Sustainability Food Initiative Project. The gardens provide communal spaces to work and grow food for the Emory community.  There are eight small garden plots throughout the main campus. The photos I shared earlier focused on two – one located near Cox Hall and the other next door to the Rita Ann Rollins Building (Theology) near the track/soccer field.  The other six are located near the Depot, WoodPEC (by the tennis courts), Rollins School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and on the Clairmont Campus. 

For more information on the Educational Gardens please click here and here.



Since the newsletter will be taking a little break until September, I will not post a photo with a question about it’s location, but rather an addition to our Educational Garden photos.  Not only do the gardens supply the Emory campus with delicious vegetables, but they also treat our eyes to some beautiful flowers.  Enjoy the photos below.  See you again in September.