Dear readers,
Welcome to our newest edition of The Comenian! With the windchill and freezing temperatures, I hope you’re all keeping yourselves warm and safe. And Happy Valentine’s Day! We have some amazing articles about love for you in this edition, so be sure to check them all out!
I also wanted to take the time to address some feedback The Comenian received in response to one of my recent articles, “No Cool Speakers at Moravian.” While I stand by my point that I wish Moravian would bring more speakers of all discipline levels to the institution, I also want to acknowledge where I could have been clearer. Moravian does host speakers and events.
Departments regularly invite scholars, professionals, and artists to campus for lectures, panels, workshops, and conferences; the Political Science Department, for example, does that during its Constitution Day. I appreciate the work that goes into organizing these events. My critique did not mean to dismiss that work.
Rather, the point was to lament the decline in the number of notable and well-known public figures who once regularly visited Moravian and spoke to capacity crowds in Johnston Field House, Foy Hall and Prosser Auditorium.
The Cohen Arts & Lecture Series, for example, brought President Jimmy Carter, paleontologist Richard Leakey, and Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, among others.
The first-year common reading program brought bestselling authors Jeannette Walls (“The Glass Castle”) and Tim O’Brien (“The Things They Carried”) to speak to all first-year students who had read the author’s books before arriving on campus to start their Moravian journey. And In-Focus, an interdisciplinatory sequence of programs that led the campus community to consider the great issues of our time – poverty and inequality, sustainability, health care, war and peace – hosted scores of prominent figures, including Emiko Okada, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
All those programs were compelling, community-wide, and intellectually- and culturally-stimulating. Sadly, they no longer exist. And this student, at least, feels the loss.
Critical feedback is part of a healthy campus discourse, and I appreciate those who reached out. The Comenian exists to ask difficult questions, even when they are uncomfortable. I hope this conversation continues as a collective push toward the kind of intellectually vibrant institution Moravian aspires to be.
I would also like to take the time to point out something one of our editors recently has brought to attention – Megan Smith wrote an article about how Moravian is using AI-generated voices to announce names at our graduation ceremony. This is a little blurb from her:
Moravian is using an A.I. speaker at commencement to announce graduates’ names, in an effort to correct mispronunciations and streamline the process. However, the A.I. program has consistently mispronounced names and made the ceremony impersonal. After four years of grueling work to earn our degrees, we deserve human speakers who can relate to our experiences as students. If you want to see a change, sign the petition here.
As always, thank you for reading The Comenian. Our readers make our work worth it, and your readership and response make our work perceptible.
Your editor,
Liz
