by Sharon Liu, NY6 Think Tank Fellow

I thought it would be best to look more at Hamilton alumni, to see what they have done after graduation and where they have gone. One article sent towards my direction was written by A.G. Lafley ’69, a Hamilton alum who also majored in History. One thing that stood out in particular for me was Lafley’s analogy of the liberal arts as “cross training for the brain.” In short, Lafley’s experience as the former CEO of Procter & Gamble led him to find that the liberal arts allows people to develop their mental dexterity by studying the arts, sciences, humanities, social sciences and languages. While he contends that there is a need for specialization, Lafley says that an education that is too specialized can be limiting in other ways a person can contribute.

I found that this article was very thought provoking, as I believe many students forget the importance of the humanities within a liberal arts college. In trying to do specialize in a specific major or career path, students fail to take advantage of the liberal arts institution and curriculum. Rather than come into Hamilton or any liberal arts institutions with a plan of the exact classes and major you intend to follow, come in with an open mind. Instead, one should take the humanities class that may not have been enjoyable in high school or seem challenging. Students should take advantage of the open curriculum, a unique opportunity that Hamilton offers.

For more writings by Sharon, please go here.

Maddie Lares is a current freshman at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. An art-enthusiast since birth, Maddie is currently working with various sources to help the community recognize the various benefits of coloring and, in the process, come to realize the importance of the arts in their daily lives.  

Her blog entries engage with ideas, such as the coloring craze at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Coloring in Jail, and interviews with coloring enthusiasts.

Curious? Check out her website!

by Artist-in-Residence / Director Holly L. Derr
Skidmore College

In the Fall of 2015, I was teaching a First-Year Experience seminar called Speculative Fiction in New Plays. As a first-year seminar, the course had to be interdisciplinary, so for each genre play we studied, the students also read academic articles and book chapters about that genre, ranging from literary criticism to pop culture studies, to gender studies. To set the tone for the course, we first read Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and Ann Radcliffe. In preparation for reading Romeo & Juliet & Zombies, by Melody Bates, we read Romeo and Juliet as well as essays on death and the plague in Elizabethan England.  In preparation for studying Universal Robots, by Mac Rogers, we read about the implications in Asimov’s Three Principles in the fields of engineering and robotics.
 
Thanks to the NY6 Consortium, we were able to bring several of playwrights featured in the course to campus for a demonstration and panel discussion about what has variously been called geek theater, genre theater, and speculative theater. In addition to Bates and Rogers, Adam Szymkowicz, Stephanie Cox-Williams, Joan Jubett, and Andrea Hairston participated in Staging the Supernatural.
 
The evening began with a scene from Romeo & Juliet & Zombies, staged by Jubett and acted by Skidmore students Ziggy Schulting, Kate Glowatsky, Woodrow Proctor, and Madison Caan. Then Andrea Hairston’s collaborator, Pan Morigan, showed us a mask she made for one of Andrea’s shows and performed a “conjure song” on the banjo. A fascinating discussion followed on the business of new plays, the challenges of using special effects on stage, and the necessity of making theater that does not aim to stand-in for television or film but is purely, theatrically theater.
 
Yet, the connection of genre plays to genre films and TV is undeniable. The popularity of movies and shows about alien invasions, vampires, superheroes, and monsters means that plays that use those myths get a boost in audience appeal and, hopefully ticket sales. But it also means that these plays haves the chance to take these deeply ingrained archetypes and archetypal stories and tell them, not just for the fun of special effects, but also for their potential to reveal and reflect upon contemporary social, political, and economic, issues.
 
The syllabus for Speculative Fiction in New Plays gave students the options of writing, at the end of each unit of study, either a short expository paper or a short play using the genre we studied in that unit to deal with a larger social problem. The assignment yielded a play about a zombie invasion on campus that addressed overcrowding in campus housing and mistrust of the administration; one set in the midst of the economic crisis in Greece; and one in which a college student time travels back to the beginning of a party every time he has eight beers, eventually learning that successfully picking up a girl is not the key to breaking the loop, but rather listening to her when she says she’s not interested and leaving her alone is.
 
On writing speculative fiction, writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and it’s obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and can even imagine some real grounds of hope.“
 
Hopefully, the Staging the Supernatural event at Skidmore College planted such a seed in the minds of attendees, because imagining better ways to live is, in my opinion, what theater is for.

Amelia NY6 Student Fellow Amelia Poole launches her new blog post:

"When I walked into my poetry workshop on the first day of the fall semester, I was not surrounded by people who had been writing poetry for their entire lives. I was not even surrounded by a room full of English majors. At the time, I was not an English major either—I was considering sociology. That’s the beauty of a liberal arts education: you may find yourself in a poetry class while pursuing a degree in something as different as astrophysics...."

For more, please go to Amelia's Blog titled Well Versed.