News and Events

Servant Leadership-Running to a Great Purpose

Leaders will gain an understanding of the principles of servant leadership and the positive impact they can have on individuals and on organizational success. They will learn some actionable practices on how to start implementing a culture of servant leadership within their personal lives and their areas of responsibility. They will be exposed to the importance of having their own personal Leadership Portrait and how they could start developing one for themselves.

Presenter: Mark Deterding, Founder and Principal, Triune Leadership Services, LLC, Alexandria, MN

Mark Deterding is the founder and principal of Triune Leadership Services, LLC. In 2011 he formed Triune Leadership Services to follow his passion of working with leaders to help them develop core servant leadership capabilities that allow them to lead at a higher level and enable them to achieve their God-given potential. 

It Happened There: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

How did Germany go from the progressive democracy of the Weimar Republic to the fascist dictatorship of the Nazi era? How could the German people have followed Adolf Hitler into totalitarianism, world war, and genocide? In this presentation, we’ll consider the causes of two related events: the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Presenter: Chris Gehrz, Professor of History, Bethel University, St. Paul, MN

PhD, Yale and is a professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN, where he teaches courses on modern European, military/diplomatic, religious, and sports history. He is the author or editor of five books, including Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot (Eerdmans, 2021) and regularly writes about history, religion, and higher education on Substack.

The Future of Higher Education in the age of AI

What does the rise of generative AI mean for the future of higher education—and for the liberal arts in particular?  This talk introduces custom-made AI tools that allow students to converse with historical philosophers, engage in debate games, and reflect within immersive VR environments. Alongside these creative advances, the talk also addresses serious risks posed by AI—such as academic dishonesty, cognitive offloading, and misinformation—and proposes concrete strategies for preserving the critical, reflective habits of mind that define a liberal arts education.

Presenter: Mark Collier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota Morris and affiliate faculty member at the University of Minnesota Center for the Cognitive Sciences

Mark Collier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Morris and Affiliate Faculty Member at the University of Minnesota Center for the Cognitive Sciences. His areas of interest include History of Modern Philosophy (especially Hume), Philosophy of Mind/Artificial Intelligence, and Moral Psychology. Mark received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He has served as a visiting faculty member at Stanford University, University of Pittsburgh, Peking University, and Pomona College.

Making Meaning: Memory to Memoir

This presentation will be part lecture, part workshop. Participants will explore how to mine their memories and make meaning from what they find, for themselves and others. The lecture will address writers’ techniques for generating ideas and practical ways writers generate material. In the workshop, participants will engage in various prewriting exercises which will help them turn personal information into more organized memoirs. Participants should bring writing materials and prepare to write. This presentation is open to all writing levels.

Presenter: Anne Clark, English Instructor, Alexandria Technical and Community College, Alexandria, MN

Annie Clark is an English instructor at Alexandria Technical and Community College (ATCC). This year will be her 21st year teaching at ATCC, and her 24th year teaching college-level writing. Before teaching, Annie wrote for the Pope County Tribune and owned her own company where she wrote, edited, and did document design for various businesses. Annie grew up in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her family lived for 17 years. She attended boarding school for high school at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Faribault, MN. Annie completed her B.A. in English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and her M.A. in English (Rhetoric and Applied Writing) at St. Cloud State University. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the desert.

Locked In: How the First American Prisons Still Shape Incarceration Today

To understand why the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, we must go back to the 1790s. That’s when New York and Pennsylvania built the nation’s first state prisons—institutions that shaped how Americans would punish, confine, and attempt to “reform” people for centuries to come. This talk traces the emergence of two competing prison systems. New York developed the congregate model—forced silence, labor by day, solitary cells by night—at Auburn and Sing Sing, both still operating today. Pennsylvania built the Eastern State Penitentiary, which followed the separate system: total isolation in a single cell, all day, every day, for the length of the sentence. These systems didn’t just punish; they claimed to reform. But both relied on surveillance, control, and coerced labor. What can we learn from these early prisons now? By exploring how they worked—and how incarcerated people pushed back—we can better understand how punishment became such a central part of American life. This history helps explain why our modern prison system looks the way it does and why it has proven so hard to change.

Presenter: Jonathan Merritt Nash, Associate Professor of History, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, Collegeville, MN

Jonathan Nash is an associate professor of history at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. He teaches courses on early America, the American Revolution, and slavery in the Atlantic World, with a focus on how ideas of freedom, punishment, and power collided in the making of the modern United States. His research centers on the first state prisons in New York and Pennsylvania, built in the 1790s, and how these institutions shaped the rise of incarceration across the U.S. He foregrounds the voices and resistance of incarcerated people to examine how prison systems developed and how they have endured. His scholarship has been published in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography, New York History, and Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies.

Beyond Recognition: What We Have Learned from People Who Can't Recognize Faces

We know fall is here when piles of pumpkins and squash appear, and “pumpkin spice” flavorings and aromas are added to everything from candles to lattes to ice cream. About 10,000 years ago, pumpkins and squash became the first domesticated crops in the Americas. In this talk we will learn how crop evolution, domestication and plant breeding transformed wild gourds with bitter, inedible fruits into the huge variety of squashes and pumpkins we enjoy today, including the 2,749-pound world record pumpkin grown in Minnesota last year. We will also learn what distinguishes a pumpkin from a squash, how pumpkins and squash are used in the Americas and around the world and hear some interesting history about Jack-o-lanterns and pumpkin pie. 

Presenter:Dr. Sherryse Corrow is a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience with a Ph.D. in Child Psychology and a specialization in cognitive neuroscience. She received her PhD from the University of MN and completed her post-doctoral training in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. As a vision scientist, her research explores how the brain interprets the world through the senses, especially how we see and make sense of what we see. In particular, Dr. Corrow is an expert in face recognition and prosopagnosia, a disorder that affects one’s ability to recognize familiar faces. Dr. (SHERRYSE CORROW, cont.) Corrow teaches courses in brain science and how we conduct psychological research. She is passionate about helping people—especially students—understand the brain in fun, hands-on ways and make evidence-based decisions in everyday life.

Message about the Medium: A Short History of How We Talk About Television

Depending on who you ask, we are either at the tail end of the third “Golden Age” of television, just past the cultural heights of “Peak TV,” or mired in a new period of “Mid TV.” These relatively recent moments come after nearly fifty years in which TV was regularly described as something at best trivial, distracting, and cheap and at worst something socially, morally, and politically degrading and dangerous: an “idiot box” or a “vast wasteland” of “lowest common denominator” trash. This presentation will not try to figure out if television really is any better for you now than in the past. Instead, we will consider what these oft-repeated ways of talking mean and how they have changed (and not) over the last 70 years or so. By engaging with a few key moments and examples, we will identify some patterns and consider their stakes, looking carefully at the unspoken assumptions about class, gender, race, and sexuality that sit behind the way that mainstream commentators, academics, and everyday audiences talk about TV as the quintessential medium of mass culture.

Presenter:Brad Stiffler, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, Macalester College and the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN

Brad Stiffler teaches courses on media and cultural studies at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota, focusing on the history of film and television. Brad Stiffler has a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota and currently teaches courses on media and cultural studies at his alma mater and at Macalester College in Saint Paul. Building off his dissertation project that looked at the intersection between cable access television and 1980s subcultures, his research and teaching more broadly examines media history, focusing on alternative practices and non-traditional archives in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Epigenetics

Epigenetics is the study of chemical modifications to DNA that result in changes to how DNA is used by cells. Epigenetic modifications can change over time and are influenced by life experiences such as stress and trauma as well as by environmental factors such as exposure to pollution. The development of chronic diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, and cardiovascular diseases have been demonstrated to be influenced by epigenetics. Additionally, recent research has demonstrated that epigenetic changes are heritable and can be passed on from one generation to the next. This presentation will provide a general background to the study of epigenetics in relation to health, disease, and inheritance.

Presenter: Rachel Johnson, Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota Morris

Rachel Johnson is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. She teaches classes on Molecular Biology and Immunology. She is originally from Maple Grove, MN and earned her Ph.D. in Immunology from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Rachel lives in Morris, MN with her husband and daughter.

From Farmers and Laborers to Professionals and Service Workers: Tracing Minnesota’s Occupations since 1850

Occupations characterize the type of work performed by a person, such as carpenter, professor, or laborer. In this presentation, we will examine how the distribution of occupations evolved in Minnesota since 1850 using data from the US Census and use this information to think about how this reflected and influenced the lives of Minnesotans.

Presenter: Louis Johnston, William E. and Virginia Clemens Professor of Economics and the Liberal Arts, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, Collegeville, MN

Louis Johnston is the William E. and Virginia Clemens Professor of Economics and the Liberal Arts at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, where he has taught since 1997. Johnston specializes in macroeconomics, economic history, and the connections between economic policy and economic history. His most recent projects focus on analyzing the evolution of Minnesota’s economy and how Minnesota became “above average” since World War II. Johnston writes columns on economics and economic history for MinnPost and is a guest on Minnesota Public Radio, WCCO Radio, and Twin Cities Public Television.