One more weekend of Football is out of the way. I thought Patriots played a sloppy game and thanks to their defense and a missed field goal by the Ravens, they will be playing in Superbowl. The hype of the Patriots/Giants Superbowl rematch is on full swing and the whole Tom Coughlin/Bill Belichick relationship while they were both assistant coaches with the Giants is back in the limelight. Bill Belichick is a Wesleyan Alum, class of ’75, and has explained how he applies what he learned in College in NFL. I am really looking forward to an exciting Superbowl a couple of weeks from now. We have a big party planned in our house and the Giants fans amongst our visitors have back row seats with heat turned down and will be served warm beer while we in the front row seat will enjoy the warmth, better food and nice cold beer. For that one day, I don’t mind being called a bad host by a few!

As we begin the Spring semester, I am happy to talk about something that has been in the works for quite some time. It is a fact that technologies are coming at us at a rapid pace and they are changing the landscape in Higher Ed in ways that no one every anticipated. On the one hand, Higher Ed institutions have been the most influential in terms of research and development and through those, have affected tremendous changes in the world. On the other hand, they have also been very resistent to changes when it comes to teaching, learning and research, all for good reasons. As Larry Summers wrote in his NY Times piece recently “My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery.”  I believe that we need a strategy and an ongoing plan that  prepares the College for the changes in technologies and how it affects the Library and the College’s core academic mission. And we want to do develop this plan not in isolation, but in collaboration with the faculty, students, staff and the alumnae.

We have planned a symposium series for the Spring titled “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” to facilitate these conversations.

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