Heard Around Campus

Johnson Center Visiting Lecturer

“The key to good teaching is … that I’m learning with and alongside my students, and they know that their participation matters greatly. That relationship has to be developed and nurtured—it requires trust; it requires learning how to read not just the book in front of you but reading other persons in a conversational format, reading the three-dimensional interpersonal body-language  cues, the table pounding, the quizzical finger thumping, the rolled eyes, the pregnant pauses, the wry grins, the nervous laughter, with spontaneous interjections and sentence fragments and outbursts and light bulb poppings that so often characterize a revealing seminar session. You don’t cultivate that trust and develop those reading skills by taking an online course.”

—John Seery, professor of politics at Pomona College,
“The Moral Center of a Small Liberal Arts College”

2012 Williams Executive-in-Residence

“No matter what field you go into, most likely you will be closing (a business deal). So, a lot of critical thinking must go into closing, and of course it does. The important thing is to be ethical, truthful, and straightforward in your dealings with people. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s how you will succeed for a lifetime—and you’ll sleep better along the way.”

—Greg Rohan, president and owner of Heritage Auctions

2012 Austin College Allen-Head Lecturer

“It would have been unfathomable to see this 30 years ago, or in the ’70s or the ’80s. This was really a line that an American politician, especially an American politician seeking national office, would never have crossed.”

—Jacques Berlinerblau, author and Georgetown University professor,
on the use of religion in politics, particularly the prayer rally organized by Texas Governor Rick