Professor Jennifer Daryl Slack (HU) has co-authored a book, Culture and Technology: A Primer, whose second edition has just been published. Peter Lang, 2015.
Front row: Jackie Ellenich, Christina Sarazin, Andrea Ruotsala, and Mary Muncil
At the MUB on Wednesday night, January 7th, a select group of staff members were honored with Michigan Tech Staff Council Making a Difference Awards.
Humanities’ own Jackie Ellenich received the Creative Solutions Award for her vision and her successful work at funding an international professional training in technical and scientific French to be hosted by MTU. The event also has the support of the French Embassy in Washington DC and the Chamber of Commerce of Paris. It’s the first event its kind in the US.
Congratulations, Jackie!
Abraham Romney, assistant professor of rhetoric and composition in the Department of Humanities, was awarded a research fellowship for $5,000 from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. The fellowship will support archival research to be conducted in South America.
The collection of essays, Bad Feminist, by RTC alumna Roxane Gay (PhD 2010) has just been named to The Atlantic’s “The Best Book I Read this Year” list. Here’s an excerpt from Tanvi Misra’s review:
The essays jump from her childhood obsession with Sweet Valley High to why she hates Django Unchained. (“My slavery revenge fantasy would probably involve being able to read and write without fear of punishment or persecution coupled with a long vacation in Paris.”) She’s hilarious. But she also confronts more difficult issues of race, sexual assault, body image, and the immigrant experience. She makes herself vulnerable and it’s refreshing.
Here’s the link to the full article.
The Center for Science and Environmental Outreach, along with the Michigan Tech Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers student chapter, conducted a Family Engineering Night at Escuela Avancemos Academy in Southwest Detroit (Mexicantown) on Nov. 24. John Deere provided support for the event, which featured activities in both English and Spanish and offered a free dinner in the school’s cafeteria. Approximately 180 participated, including students in grades K-5 and their family members.
The following members of the Michigan Tech community presented at the event:
- Uzi Mendez ’13 (Bio Med)
- Michael Briseno (Bio Med/ECE), undergraduate student
- Zoe Miller (CEE), master’s student
- Gabriella Shirkey ’13 (HU)
- Joan Chadde, director of the Center for Science and Environmental Outreach
After her husband disappeared, Estelle Thornton was doubly determined to do right by their seven children. Now her firstborn wants America to do right by all its sons and daughters.
Photo: Quantrell Colbert
He is tall, well over six feet, powerfully built, at ease in both pinstripes and army fatigues. His smile draws humans like stadium lights draw bugs. And he is the face of the National Parent Teachers Association.
Anna King will never forget the first time she met Otha Thornton ’01.
“It was 2008, my first National PTA convention,” she recalls. King was by herself in a place she’d never been, surrounded by people she didn’t know who all seemed to be each other’s best friends. Then out of the blue, Thornton walked up. “He said, ‘You look lost.’ I told him I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and he showed me around,” King says. “He asked me if anyone had spoken to me, and I said no. Then he looked right at me and said something I have never forgotten: ‘If they don’t speak to you, you speak to them. We are all in this together.'”
Six years later, King is a National PTA board member, and Thornton is president of the four-million-member, century-old association. He made national headlines—and Ebony magazine’s Power 100 list—a year ago when he became the first African American man to head an organization emerging from its white, female, suburban chrysalis. And if Thornton has a mantra, it may be the one he shared with Anna King: “We are all in this together.”
That attitude—that each person is somehow his special guest at a really great party—is hard to resist. “He’s captivating,” says Heidi May, National PTA’s media relations manager. “People get very excited to be in his presence. We have to have someone walking with him to make sure he gets from one point to the other.”
It’s the first day of the 2014 National PTA Convention in Austin, and the job of keeping Thornton on schedule falls to PTA Executive Director Joanne Dunne. He is making his way through the cavernous exhibit area in a flawless blue suit, blue shirt, and yellow tie, cutting a wide, button-down swath through a roomful of business casual. Every few yards, someone catches his eye; he stops, powers up his megawatt smile, shares a big hug, poses for a selfie, and settles down for a nice chat.
Dunne peers down an aisle lined by about twenty booths, each featuring services and products for kids and educators, and sighs. How long will Thornton have to introduce himself to these exhibitors, learn about their wares, maybe build some relationships, before he has to get to the next item on his agenda? “We have fifteen minutes to get through here, and I’m not sure we can do it,” she says as another fan pulls him aside. “In the PTA, Otha is Brad Pitt.”
This is the last place Thornton expected to find himself.
Childhood Interrupted
Thornton grew up in Georgia, in a working class family, and when he was thirteen, his father abandoned them. “He just left my mom with seven kids, including a six-month-old, a two-year-old, and a four-year-old,” he says.
As the oldest, Thornton did his best to help support the family. He worked in restaurants, supermarkets, and in the woods, stacking cut timber and loading it on trucks. They received some public assistance, and neighbors would bring garden vegetables, but it was a meager, uncertain existence.
“I was a skinny kid,” Thornton remembers. “Although our mother did her very best, it was a challenge feeding and caring for seven children. When school was out, we worried, because we knew were not going to get that meal.”
Estelle Thornton, however, was not the type to let hard times beat her children down. She insisted that they study and succeed in school, and Thornton listened. He enrolled in nearby Morehouse College and dreamed of becoming a city planner. Then, when he was a junior, he learned his father was in town. “I drove about ten miles up the road, and we sat down for a couple hours,” he remembers. “I said, ‘How could you leave a woman with seven kids?”
They talked for two hours. Thornton’s father tried to explain how unemployment and hopelessness had driven him to desert a family he could no longer support. “And at that point we finished our conversation, and I walked out with a big burden lifted,” said Thornton. “That’s when I turned the page on that chapter of my life.
“I said to myself, ‘I never want to be in that position. I’m going to get my education.’
“My dad passed away in 2002, and on his deathbed he tried to call all of us and asked, ‘Do you forgive me?’ And I said, ‘I forgave you a long time ago.'”
About Face
Thornton did not originally plan a career in the military. He wanted to uphold a family tradition and serve his country, then, after the requisite four years in the US Army, try his hand at city government. But four years came and went, and Thornton advanced quickly through the ranks, gaining expertise in intelligence, communications technology, and, ultimately, combat.
“I didn’t understand the wisdom at that time,” he grins. “With two years of Russian [language instruction], they’re making me a grunt? But as an infantry officer, they gave me 35 soldiers, 18 to 21 years old, and their lives were in my hands. The leadership experience was invaluable.”
His time in the infantry earned him unexpected benefits. “When I went into the military intelligence community, the combat leaders saw my background and performance and realized that I knew what I was talking about.”
Thornton went on to a classified special assignment out of the country. When he returned to the US, his intelligence and communications savvy launched him into positions of more and more responsibility. Then, when he was stationed at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, he discovered that the Army was not quite the bias-free organization it’s been cracked up to be. He had been excelling at his job when an aviation commander recruited Thornton for an important post. “He had never met me in person; he just saw my work and witnessed the support being provided to his unit.
“When I went to meet him, I walked in the door, and he turned red,” Thornton says. “I just ignored the color change and said it was great to meet him. We talked about ten minutes, and he said, ‘I’ll give you a call.’ I didn’t meet with him after that.”
Thornton says he couldn’t prove the slight was racial, but it sure felt that way. Nevertheless, he let it pass, noting, “I believe that all things happen for a reason.” Soon after, the senior aviation commander appointed him to a post with even greater responsibility.
Then Thornton was called to Michigan Technological University to be a recruiter and professor of military science. As with the infantry training, coming to the Snow Belt was not his first choice.
“I hate cold weather,” he says. “I said I’d go anywhere but the UP—I’d go to Saudi Arabia!—but they had me in the queue to go to a university. My advisors recommended that I go and earn a master’s while I was there to advance my career.”
So he came north, enrolled in a master’s program, and still hated the weather. “My first winter was… interesting. I was listening to the radio, and I heard them say so-and-so died today and a spring burial is planned. I had a neighbor, Don Smith, and I said, Mr. Don, what’s a spring burial? He said, ‘Otha, look at the ground.'”
Winter and summer, Thornton cut the same wide swath at Tech that he has at the PTA. “He was so active in the community, just because that’s what Otha does,” said his advisor, humanities professor Patricia Sotirin, whom Thornton has since appointed to the National PTA Board. “He’s so outgoing and forthcoming, he makes everyone feel specially included. I see him doing that with everybody. He’s very passionate about that, very genuine.”
He was also unafraid to shine a light on shortcomings in the military, even if doing so might put his career in jeopardy.
“He did a very brave master’s thesis, on the structured bias in the Army’s evaluation system,” Sotirin says. “I even asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this, and he said he did. It was courageous, but quite like Otha.”
Thornton was not penalized for his thesis. Instead, he was invited to present his study on the Army’s Officer Evaluation System to new senior human resource officers and senior Army leaders. And the Army used his research as part of professional development sessions.
Armed with an MS in Rhetoric and Technical Communication, he was promoted to major and left Michigan Tech for the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, the largest counterintelligence unit in the Department of Defense. There he held a key post managing and supporting counterintelligence agents stationed around the world.
Thornton then moved to the White House Communications Agency, where he served as the human resources director and presidential communications officer. Lastly, he received orders to deploy to Iraq and served as the chief of personnel operations for the Iraqi Theater.
“It was very stressful,” he recalls. “I was responsible for the planning of people coming into and leaving Iraq, postal planning, casualty management. We had to work under fire, and I probably got mortared at least a couple dozen times. Thank God I wasn’t hurt and all my troops came back.” For his service in Iraq, Thornton received the Bronze Star for exceptional performance in combat.
“Out of the decade of war, there was only one person that I knew personally that we lost,” he said. Benjamin Hall ’05 had been an ROTC cadet at Michigan Tech. “He was killed by a sniper in Afghanistan. I visited his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Ben was a great kid.”
Speaking up for Kids
Now retired as a lieutenant colonel, Thornton is applying his talents, some innate, others forged in the crucible of military service, to a different type of organization.
Thornton has been involved with his kids’ education since his Michigan Tech days, when they were in grade school in South Range and Houghton. “I just basically moved tables around, whatever my wife told me to do,” he says. Then he found himself assigned to Fort Meade, in Maryland, where the post commander “volun-told” him to serve as a leader of the local PTA chapter. “We moved from about twenty members to about two hundred the first year,” Thornton says.
His energy, enthusiasm, and leadership did not go unnoticed. Thornton went on to serve at the state level and was appointed to the Maryland Education Task Force by the governor.
After retiring from the Army, he settled in his home state of Georgia working as a senior operations analyst for General Dynamics in Atlanta. There, he again threw himself into the PTA, where, before advancing to the National PTA Board of Directors, he served as state legislative chair.
That position involved him in matters well beyond the purview of the typical local PTA district. “We had a problem with sex trafficking of teenagers,” he remembers. “These guys would come out of the suburbs into the cities and prostitute these thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girls. We got a bill passed that didn’t criminalize the young ladies; it put stiffer penalties on the men and got the young ladies treatment and support. I mean, they were arresting thirteen-year-old prostitutes! We alerted people, got them to contact their state representatives and state senators, and the bill passed.”
He brings that same passion for justice to the national organization, where his aim is to make the PTA bigger, better, and more powerful on behalf of all America’s children.
“It’s been challenging and rewarding,” he says. “We’re fighting for things like early childhood education, so students don’t start kindergarten at a disadvantage. And as the country goes through the next round of educational reform, we want to ensure that we get all the elements of that right.”
For Thornton, one of those right elements is the Common Core. This set of minimum standards in math and English language arts for K-12 education got its start in 2009 as a bipartisan effort among the nation’s governors “to try to get our education system on track.”
It has since become politicized. “You hear arguments from some in the Republican Party that Common Core is the federal government attempting to reach into our local schools and tell us how to teach our kids,” says Thornton. “That’s blatantly false.”
When the governor of Oklahoma was on the verge of approving legislation to overturn Common Core in her state, Thornton tried to talk her out of it, arguing that the system benefits the thousands of military kids in Oklahoma who transfer from one school system to another with no assurance that they will have comparable academic standards from one grade to another and from state to state. “She didn’t buy it,” he sighs. “She still signed the bill.”
In Thornton’s ideal world, the governor would have paid more attention. He envisions a PTA with more members and more political clout. He repeats the lesson over and over throughout the National PTA Convention: your congressman and your governor are much more likely to listen if you have a thousand members in your chapter instead of a hundred. More pointedly: “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.”
Thus, a big worry has been a longtime downward slide in PTA membership, which has ticked up in recent months by about 7 percent. And the fastest-growing demographic is men. “We’ve seen male membership move, thanks to Otha and others before him,” said Eric Snow, a PTA member and executive director of Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads Of Great Students), a group that encourages fathers to volunteer in schools. “He is such a champion for children. It’s just who he is. He has that in his heart and soul.”
Ray Leone has known Thornton since his days in Maryland and credits his emphasis on diversity for building membership. “I’m impressed with what he’s done, putting the harder conversations on the table, like diversity,” said Leone, president of the Maryland PTA. “There are groups that haven’t been at the PTA table, and he wants to get them there.”
Reaching out to bring others into PTA isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing, Thornton believes. “This fall, minority students will be in the majority in America’s schools,” he says more than once, as he hustles from breakfast meeting to workshop to keynote address in the sprawling Austin Convention Center. To serve those school kids, the PTA needs more members who look like them and their parents.
Early in his presidency, Thornton knew that PTA needed to extend its reach, but he was made pointedly aware of that when he was traveling around the country. “People would say, ‘What about our kids?’ And I would say, ‘We are for all kids.'” So he went back to the PTA and spearheaded a program called Every Child in Focus, which highlights different children every month, from Hispanic and African American to military and suburban. “Did you know the poorest children in the country are located in suburbia?” he asks. “This month, it’s the rural child. Every child fits in at least one of these categories.”
Diversifying PTA also means expanding access. If you want working moms, single parents, and fathers, notes Rita Erves, you can’t hold your meetings at ten o’clock on a weekday morning.
Erves, president of the Georgia PTA, got to know Thornton during the years they bounced around the state in crowded vans firing up the local districts. “He’s very strategic, a very critical thinker, but what’s even more important is his integrity and character,” she says. “When he was running for president, one of our past National PTA presidents said, ‘He has to win the election. He’s the perfect person for the job. He’s a noble man.’
“Otha is not really concerned about doing the popular thing,” Erves says, by way of explanation. “His interest is doing the right thing.”
Sometimes, the right thing is rescheduling your PTA meetings to a convenient time for working people. “He said we were going to have it in the evening,” she said. “It may not seem like a big deal, but it was; it was very uncomfortable, because people said, ‘That’s how we’ve always done it.’ But he did it anyway. We wanted everyone, including working people, involved in PTA for the sake of all the children.”
Everywhere he went, Thornton shook things up. He got people thinking about the importance of advocating for all children, about legislation. “He made it so simple. There was one council we frequented that grew from seven thousand to eleven thousand members overnight. It was incredible.”
That’s the power of diversity, Erves says. “We need everyone to be involved for the children’s sake. It’s not just about color: it’s about single parents and grandparents, people that do not even have children, and of course, males. If a child’s father is involved, the chances are much greater they’ll be successful.”
“Treat people right, and we’ll be OK”
Thornton did not have the benefit of his father’s involvement. He credits his success to his mother, his faith, and one remarkable American.
“A week or so after my dad left, I asked my mom, ‘What are we going to do?’ She said, ‘Son, we are going to keep God first, make sure we take care of this family, and make sure you get your education. Treat people right, and we’ll be OK.”
As moms often are, she was right. “Our mother’s love and commitment to her faith and family has paid off tenfold,” said Thornton. “All of her kids are proud of her and the struggle that she led the family through.”
As for the “treating people right” part, that came to Thornton easily, especially when, as a teenager, he embraced the message of the gospels. “At the end of the day, the essence of my faith is, you love people. In PTA, my way of showing love is helping kids and helping families.” Paraphrasing Luke, he adds, “To whom much is given, much is required.”
Sometimes more is required of Thornton than might be expected.
“When I go to places that have old ideas or are not as accepting, I remember Jackie Robinson and what a great role model he was,” Thornton says. “I feel that I have to be a great role model too, because of the people who will follow me, just as others followed him. And what really keeps me going when I run into . . . situations . . . is that I don’t want someone else’s prejudice to prevent me from helping others.”
Fundamentally, that’s why he is sacrificing so much time and effort to be the face of the PTA.
“I feel blessed to be in this job,” he says, “because it lets me speak for all the kids.”
This article originally appeared in Michigan Tech Magazine
Don’t be alarmed if you see zombies roaming the Michigan Technological University campus on Thursday night. They’re not looking for tricks or treats; they’re probably attending Undead U: A Zombie Symposium.
Michigan Tech hosted the first Undead U symposium last year, and Undead U returns to campus on Thursday, Oct. 30, at 7:30 p.m. in Fisher Hall 139, featuring a lineup of actual zombie scholars from across the nation. Talks will touch on the history of zombie epidemics, why zombies in popular culture look the way they do and what it might be like to be a zombie.
The Meaning of Zombies
“We’re not just talking about pop-culture zombies,” says Syd Johnson, assistant professor of philosophy and bioethics and Undead U coordinator. “Zombies are everywhere these days for entertainment, but they’re also a really interesting way of contextualizing real-world concerns.”
Looking at zombies provides a new way to think about current events—like the recent Ebola outbreak, Johnson says.
“These things happen from time to time. Disease is frightening, but something people like, like zombies, makes for an interesting way to approach these topics. We’re bringing an infectious disease specialist as one of the guest speakers . . . a fascinating way to look at real-world issues.”
Each of the symposium’s four speakers will present for 20–30 minutes, with a question-and-answer session between each speaker.
“This event is really an informal, educational and fun way to learn more about ourselves,” says Johnson. “There are lots of important questions that come from thinking about the undead.”
Philosophical, ethical and scientific questions run amok when considering a world where the dead spring back to life.
Fear of the Undead
“Zombies are an example of a worst-case scenario,” says Johnson. “It taps into our fear of death, disease and contagion. Parts of it are make-believe, but other parts are very real.”
The lore and story of zombies make us think about our place in the world, our social connections, our own actions, she says.
“Confronting the undead reminds us that life is good. We’re okay because we’re not like that. Whatever else could happen to you in the course of your day, at least no one is trying to eat you.”
Undead U: A Zombie Symposium is free and open to the public. Participants are welcome to come in zombie garb; “just don’t bite anyone,” says Johnson.
Article by Danny Messinger first appeared in Michigan Tech News
The Humanities Department’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture 2014 Colloquium series is pleased to welcome John Russon, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph (Canada). Professor Russon’s talk is entitled “The Limits of Money: Phenomenological Reflections on Selfhood and Value.” It’s being held Friday, November 7, at 5 pm, in the Great Lakes Research Centre, Room 201 (refreshments will be available). All are welcome!
Professor Russon is the author of two books on Hegel: The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2004). He is also the author of Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and the Elements of Everyday Life (State University of New York Press, 2003), which was awarded the 2005 Broadview Press/Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize. His most recent work is entitled Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things and the Nature of Erotic Life (State University of New York Press, 2009).
Below is is the abstract for Professor Russon’s talk.
The Limits of Money: Phenomenological Reflections on Selfhood and Value
We are constitutively split between two different experiences. In the experience of “intimacy,” the differentiation that we typically presume of self from other and of fact from value is not operative; such intimacy is distinctive of the formative experience of children. This formative experience, however, precisely gives rise to the experience of “economy,” the experience, that is, of discrete subjects who work upon an alien world. Our challenge is to live in a way that acknowledges both forms of experience without resorting to the authoritative terms of either. Overall, I will argue that money, which is roughly the collectively recognized medium for recognizing the universality of exchange value, in principle misrepresents the lived nature of value. Hence, the more money defines our frame of reference (“economy”), the more the non-universalizable values that are essential to our existence (“intimacy”) are effaced.
Leyre Alegre-Figuero, Lecturer in Spanish Language and Culture
Leyre holds a Master’s degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from the Universidad Central de Barcelona. She has worked as a translator in French, English, Catalan and Russian as well as Spanish.
Carlos Amador, Assistant Professor of Spanish Language and Culture
Carlos earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas. His research focuses on Latin American literature, cultural theory and criticism.
Sara Amani, Lecturer in English as Second Language
Sara earned her PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on Metacognitive Strategy Instruction in Second Language Pedagogy.
Maria Bergstrom, Instructor of American Literature, Undergraduate Adviser
Maria earned her PhD in American Literature from the University of Michigan.
Andrew Fiss, Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication
Andrew earned his PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. His research focuses on the history of Mathematics Education in nineteenth-century America.
Laura Kasson Fiss, Instructor of English
Laura earned her PhD in English Literature from Indiana University, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic of Victorian humor.
Anne Stander, Instructor of English as Second Language
Ann holds a Master’s degree in English with a specialization in ESL from Purdue University. She has experience teaching in the United Arab Emirates and in Moldova, as well as in the US.
Dana Van Kooy, Assistant Professor of British Literature
Dana earned her PhD from the University of Colorado. Her research focuses on British and Global Romanticism. She has also published on Black Atlantic, Trans-Atlantic and Circum-Atlantic Studies.
Marcelino Viera-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Spanish Language and Culture
Marcelino earned his PhD from the University of Michigan. He specializes in 19th and 20th Century Latin American Literature and Culture.
Audrey Viguier, Lecturer in French Language and Culture
Audrey earned her PhD in French Literature from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on radical writings of the French revolution.
The 41 North Film Festival (formerly Northern Lights Film Festival) celebrates its 10th anniversary with a name change and an outstanding slate of recent award-winning films and special guests. It will be held from October 23-26 in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts on the Michigan Tech campus.
10/23, 7:00 p.m.
Kicking off the festival this year will be director Mark Levinson and his documentary Particle Fever. Particle Fever follows six scientists involved in the launch of the Large Hadron Collider — the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet. The film provides an unprecedented window into this major scientific breakthrough as it happened. Edited by Academy-Award winner Walter Murch, the film celebrates human discovery and raises important questions about the limits of human knowledge.
Mark Levinson, has worked closely with directors such as Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and on films including Se7en, Cold Mountain, and The Pledge. He also has a PhD in Physics from UC-Berkeley. He will be on hand for a Q&A following the film. Thursday, 10/23, 7 p.m.
On Friday, 10/24, at 7:30 p.m., director/actor Ravi Patel and his father, Michigan Tech alum Vasant Patel (Mechanical Engineering, class of 70), will present the new documetary, Meet the Patels. When Ravi, the son of Indian immigrants, finds himself at a romantic crossroads in his late 20s, love becomes a family affair and an adventure in cross-cultural understanding. The film recently won the Founders Grand Prize for best film at the Traverse City Film Festival.
10/24, 7:30 p.m.
As an actor, Ravi is most recognized for his work on SCRUBS, IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, TRANSFORMERS, POWDER BLUE, and THE NEW NORMAL. In 2013, he co-founded THIS BAR SAVES LIVES – with actors Ryan Devlin, Todd Grinnell, and Kristen Bell – which gives a meal to a starving child for every granola bar they sell. Ravi also co-manages an investment group which focuses primarily on health, wellness, and social enterprise startups. Prior to joining the entertainment industry, Ravi was an investment banker and later founded the popular poker magazine ALL IN. He graduated from The University of North Carolina with double majors in Economics and International Studies.
In addition to these featured events, the festival will offer a great selection of independent films including the critically acclaimed Boyhood (Linklater, 2014), The Overnighters (Moss, 2014), which won the 2014 Sundance Jury Prize for Intuitive Filmmaking, Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (Gund, 2014), Alive Inside (Michael Rossato-Bennett), and the indie sci-fi film, Coherence (2014). There will also be shorts programs and other great events for festival goers.
The event is sponsored by the Humanities Department, the Visual and Performing Arts Department, the Office of Institutional Equity, the College of Sciences and Arts, CinOptic Enterprise Team, and the Visiting Women & Minority Lecturer/Scholar Series (VWMLS) which is funded by a grant to the Office of Institutional Equity from the State of Michigan’s King-Chavez-Parks Initiative. It is free and open to the community. For the full line-up, visit the festival website at http://41northfilmfest.org. Contact Erin Smith at 906-487-3263 or ersmith@mtu.edu for more information.