I attended the Lambeth Conference at Canterbury (UK) from July 29 to August 8, 2022, to help staff the CUAC Stand in the Resource Centre, along with Julia DeLashmutt, Jamie and Mary Chilton Callaway, and Jeremy Law. Six hundred and fifty bishops from around the world participated in this Conference, many with their spouses. I represented the Colleges and Universities of Anglican Communion; I also met several bishops from Asia and discussed United Board and its vision and mission. It was a wonderful experience. The Conference offered daily prayers, Bible study, group discussions, and plenary and keynote addresses. The conference theme was “God’s Church for God’s People.”
I had the great opportunity to be part of the opening Eucharist at the Cathedral and listened to the powerful message from Bishop Vicentia Kgabe, from Lesotho, the first woman to preach at a Lambeth Conference. I also attended the closing service at the Cathedral when Archbishop Justin Welby preached. The singing was fabulous in both. It was a joy to meet several bishops from India, and I had discussions with them on different issues. Several bishops visited our CUAC Stand, and it was a rich experience. The meeting and discussion with the following two bishops were especially enriching and fruitful.
I had a long conversation with the Bishop of Pakistan and explained our work to him. He is very much interested in being associated with United Board. Recently the Pakistan Supreme Court has allowed the Churches to take back the Colleges from the government on the condition that they have to be managed by a Church and the head of the institution has to be a Christian. He feels that getting qualified Christian principals and presidents will be very difficult. They have Edwardes College in Peshawar, and the bishop is looking for a new president for that College and hopes CUAC can help him.
I also met the bishop of Colombo and had a long conversation. Like Rama Thirunamachandran, Vice Chancellor of Canterbury University, the Bishop is an old St. John’s Jaffna student. The Colleges and Universities of Anglican Communion will have its triennial Conference next July in Australia. I have invited him to attend so that we can connect him with the leaders in the UK who are old students of St. John’s. It was a fruitful meeting.
It was a great experience for me. I thank all the members of the CUAC Board and the General Secretary for giving me this opportunity.
The Revd Dr Spurgeon Maher is Director of South Asia Programs at the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and is a CUAC Distinguished Fellow.
Mark your Calendars Now!
Why Travel to Melbourne for the 2023 Triennial?
In the words of organizer Dr Jeremy T. Law, “Triennials are the life-blood of CUAC: this is when our fellowship truly comes alive. They are a marvelous opportunity to connect with colleagues from around the globe and find encouragement and vision for the way ahead.”
Dr Law, who is Dean of Chapel at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK), notes that while keynote speakers provide new insights, it is through the experience of reflecting together on what we have heard from them that we grow and learn in a community of Christian educators.
“Chaplains will have the opportunity for their own gathering just ahead of the main conference,” he adds. “It will take the form of a retreat, focusing on chaplains as guardians of sacred space -- for worship, for pastoral support, for prophetic challenge, and for building community.”
In addition to the plenary sessions, the Triennial will feature:
Sessions of participant presentations on a range of topics proposed by delegates;
Delegates will gather by their Chapters to discuss regional concerns and then to develop plans for addressing them;
A Marketplace space where members can display resources to share as well as declare their needs;
An excursion day to the Yarra Valley, to visit the Healesville Sanctuary of Australian flora and fauna and a local wine district tour;
A pre-conference Chaplains’ Retreat, led by a team of global CUAC chaplains.
As this Triennial is co-sponsored by Trinity College and Janet Clarke Hall, delegates will become familiar with both campuses and their distinctive missions and resources. Coming out of Covid and cancellation of the 2020 London conference, Rediscovering Community will be just that, offering our first opportunity to gather in-person after a six-year hiatus.
~ Registration Opens in October ~
WCC Helps India's Innovation Drive
When India’s Ministry of Education launched an “Innovation Cell” in 2018, Women’s Christian College (WCC) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, quickly got on board with a program to tap the creative energies of its students and encourage start-ups and other entrepreneurial projects.
WWC now has an Innovation Club, an Entrepreneur Cell, and a Rural Entrepreneur Development Cell, according to Dr Lisa Sheba Rani (right), the Librarian and Convenor of WCC’s Innovation Council.
The Council, she says, “focuses on generating ideas, creating prototypes, creating awareness, and showcasing the entrepreneurship ability of students,” while serving the country by setting up innovation councils in rural institutions. Over the past three years, 12 faculty members have been trained and certified as Innovation Ambassadors in such areas as design thinking, technology transfer, incubation and pre-incubation of new ideas management, and entrepreneurship development.
For example, WCC visual communication students won a national-level Toycathon 2022 competition by developing a working prototype of a board game for children to learn about India’s unsung patriot heroes. In the Internal Smart India Hackathon 2022, students from the psychology department proposed “how to automate and compute the detection of possible vulnerability to depression before its onset” and were shortlisted in the national grand finale.
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Help Is Just A Phone Call Away
What are the most common problems for which students seek help? According to Dr M.Kanchana, Head of the Department of Psychology at Women’s Christian College (WCC) in Chennai, they are: --Loneliness, stress, anxiety, lack of motivation --Relationship issues involving family and friends --Family distress and loss of loved ones --Self esteem --Educational and career choices
Those are familiar problems everywhere and at any time, but they proved especially debilitating when the COVID pandemic struck in 2020. WCC quickly responded by recruiting two faculty members and two alumnae who are trained counselors to offer counseling services to the public, free of charge, over the telephone. When it became clear the pandemic would not be short-lived, WCC took steps to regularize these services for its students.
“Maintaining professionalism at all steps of this service was its hallmark,” reports Dr Kanchana. “An online discussion session was held with a Consultant Counselling Psychologist from Bangalore who was well versed in ethics, limits, and boundaries of counseling services in online mode. Based on her inputs, an informed consent form was formulated, keeping in mind emergency situations such as suicide risk. A confidential data base was created, and the necessary spade work was thus completed leading to the launch.” Key components included an online awareness program for students facilitated by faculty, formation of a nine-member team of counsellors, setting up a procedure for requesting appointments and obtaining digital signatures on the informed consent form, and compiling referral information for psychiatrists.
“The students were spread across India and some of them were outside the country,” said Dr Kanchana. “Suggesting a suitable hospital to visit in case psychiatric service was required was a challenge.”
CUAC Climate Crisis Working Party
Convener Stephan Scoffham, a Visiting Reader in Sustainability and Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK reports: The CUAC Climate Crisis Action Group has held two meetings over the summer months involving around 20 participants. We are now keen to build on these discussions so that we will be in a position to make a constructive and considered input to the CUAC Triennial Conference due to be held in Melbourne next July. The potential to extend what has already been achieved and to share good practice through a report/website offers an attractive and realistic way forward.
We would like to explore this further at our next meeting and start planning the details of what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. The meeting is timetabled for 12th October at 11:00 GMT. Please join if you can and invite one or two colleagues from other CUAC institutions if possible. We would like to include as many different voices as we can.
Dr Joyce P. Jacobsen, the first woman to serve as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., has announced that, after three years, she is stepping down as president and will continue as professor of economics.
An expert on labor economics, particularly the economics of gender, Jacobsen is the author of scores of journal articles and book chapters, as well as several books.
She is the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award, given to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, having graduated from Harvard University, magna cum laude, as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
As president, Jacobsen oversaw the three largest fundraising years in the Colleges’ history, developed a strategic vision and a plan to make that vision a reality, and successfully navigated the pandemic, allowing the Colleges to remain open for in-person instruction. She was active in the Association of Episcopal Colleges, where she was vice president.
“People didn’t always used to think about gender as being subjected to economic theorizing or data,” she has pointed out. "But, as more women enter the field, and as feminist economics gains ground, women are being studied more closely as economic beings." The labor that goes into raising children and maintaining a home is being examined more carefully, she notes.
The current supply chain crisis and labor shortage have recently brought that issue to bear. What we’re going through now “has a huge gender aspect,” she says, noting that the disruption of childcare and in-person schooling forced many women to leave paid jobs to cover work at home.
“National income accounting doesn’t account for unpaid labor, which is one of the big issues for feminist economists: the ignoring of half the work that’s actually going on in the world,” she says. “Maybe if there had been more women in the field, these topics would have come up more often.”
PASSAGES
News from Around the CUAC World
In July, Voorhees University in Denmark, South Carolina (USA), welcomed Corey V. Smith as its new Dean of Chapel and Spiritual Engagement. He is a recent graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and serves as a member of its Justice and Reconciliation Alumni Stewardship Board. He has worked in various capacities in faith-based organizations for more than 25 years. He is also the new Lay Vicar of St Philip’s Chapel.
“Dean Smith is the ideal servant leader for our spiritual engagement program at Voohees,” said University President Ronnie Hopkins. “He brings a wealth of knowledge, talent, compassion, and creativity to this new role.”
A University of Georgia alumnus, Smith has also studied at Morehouse College and Emory University. He is a recipient of an ecology and theology certificate from the Washington Theological Consortium, a member of the inaugural cohort of the Faith + Justice Academy at Georgetown University, and a member of a 20-time Telly Award-winning team, The Hope TV.
Dr Kim Kyung-moon is the new President of Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, South Korea. From 2008 to this year, he was managing director of Time Education C&P. He has been an honorary priest of the Korean Anglican Church in the Seoul Diocese since 2013 and has represented the publishing house of the Anglican Society of Korea since 2021. Dr Kim is a 1994 graduate of Yonsei University’s Department of Theology and in 2009 received his doctorate from Sungkonghoe University Graduate School.
In July, President Emeritus Mark D. Gearan was named the 30th president of Hobart and the 19th president of William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Gearan was president of the linked colleges from 1999-2017, during which time endowment doubled as he oversaw a capital campaign that raised $205 million.
After leaving Hobart and William Smith in 2017, Gearan served as President in Residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and in 2018 was appointed Director of the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Gearan has served in a variety of roles in American politics and government including White House Communications Director, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Vice Presidential Campaign Manager for Clinton/Gore ’92, and Executive Director of the Democratic Governors’ Association. In 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed Gearan as the 14th Director of the Peace Corps, where he oversaw expansion into South Africa, Jordan, and Haiti as well as the establishment of the Crisis Corps, which sent former Peace Corps volunteers into crisis areas for six months or less to help during emergencies.
A cum laude graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, he holds 13 honorary degrees.
- IN MEMORIAM -
Dr Michael Wright, CBE, DL died on Saturday 28 May 2022 at age seventy-three after a fall while out walking in Berwick, UK, where he lived. Dr Wright was the first Vice Chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University and chaired the CUAC Board from 2008 to 2011. In his retirement, among other pursuits, he became the Chair of the Lambeth Conference Company. In recognition of his significant achievements to Canterbury Christ Church University, Professor Wright had recently accepted an invitation from the university to have the ground floor Lecture Theatre within the new Verna Holmes STEM building named after him.
Dr Wright was a thought leader in Anglican higher education, coediting Leadership in Christian Higher Education in 2010. Perhaps a few of his own words from an essay in that volume can best help us reflect on his legacy that endures in these times: In the past ten or fifteen years the challenge has been to enable the former colleges to take their place in the university sector whilst at the same time responding to changing expectations on the part of a range of stakeholders, among them the Church. The conclusion which can be drawn from this is perhaps quite simply that the obligation of the Vice Chancellor or Principal is to ensure that the continuing ‘threads’ of the Church colleges or universities are sufficiently strong that they can be pulled through by his or her successor.
HORIZONS
From the General Secretary’s Desk
After ten years as General Secretary of this educational network, I have been reflecting on what a network is, what value it offers, and what it takes to sustain it. Networks such as CUAC are formed slowly as the fruit of deepening collaboration. In many ways it is like learning to dance. While building on instinctual capacities and desires, dancing is a skill that has to be learned not only in community, but in social settings with music in the background.
Despite childhood socialization, networking for independent adults is a learned skill, only developed over countless repetitions. While there may be gender differences favoring women, the basic human instinct is to go it alone, until either threatened by danger or stymied by sustained frustration.
As networking is not innate for individuals, working in concert requires building community as its basis. Networking requires significant time and resources to achieve common purpose, which has to overcome the deep pressures of existing inertia and that human proclivity to act alone.
A formidable hurdle in collaboration is learning the value of teamwork. While for many of us team sports have been be a catalyst for such experience, the conviction that teamwork surpasses individual accomplishment is itself a learned skill, as we can see in the persistence of powerful one-man dictatorships. While they can control and command, their leadership lacks a feedback loop from the eyes and ears of others. Networking is an expansion of teamwork, reaching far afield in both giving and receiving.
CUAC’s beginnings go back to 1962, when conversations among ten Episcopal colleges led to forming the Association of Episcopal Colleges (AEC) to strengthen their common fundraising and resource sharing. As two were HBCUs and two were overseas, it had the further benefit of building ties between the more and the less established Episcopal institutions.
Over the years, however, a provocative insight developed that a signal strength of Episcopal colleges was their potential for global association with peer colleges. Thus, in 1993 the AEC helped found CUAC, serving as the Episcopal chapter. Since then, the weeklong Triennial Conferences held every three years until 2020 provided the meeting ground for establishing and maintaining a global family. At its heart, CUAC is a place where members learn in community with global peers facing similar challenges. These friendships sow seeds for collaboration between individuals and institutions that frequently lead to exchanges of many kinds, including faculty, students and even shared online classes. Like dancing, networking brings mutual enhancement. The difference between being a wallflower and being a dancer is often just an invitation.
The Triennials provide the music and place where the more experienced dancers can get newcomers onto the floor. The beat goes on in Melbourne in July 2023, and you are invited.
Jamie Callaway
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Pomp and Circumstance
In the small New England seaside town in which I live, I expect I’m the only person who has had a conversation with King Charles III. Okay, it was a long time ago – June 1970, to be exact – and it lasted at most 10 minutes. Will I be able to dine out on that for years to come?
Actually, a friend of mine on the staff of the University of Virginia admired Sir Winston Churchill so fervently that, when the great man died, he borrowed some money and hopped on the next plane to London (not a routine thing to do in 1965). He stood all night in the queue, given endless cups of hot tea by Brits astonished by his devotion – and he did indeed dine out on that story for years. Well into his 50s, he was known among Charlottesville’s many Anglophiles as “that young man who went to Churchill’s funeral”!
My own association with the Royal Family goes back to 1953, when on a shaky little television set in Monroe, Louisiana, I watched in real time the Coronation of Elizabeth II. It seemed to go on forever, but I was tremendously impressed that among those present was someone named Prince Charles. It probably ruined me for life.
I did not meet the real Prince until the eve of his first trip to America. He and his sister had been invited to the Nixon White House – their first venture into personal international diplomacy. Rumor had it that the Nixons thought he might be persuaded to marry one of their daughters. The American ambassador, Walter Annenberg, had had a rough start in the job and was seeking to burnish his own reputation. So he summoned half a dozen young Americans studying at Oxford and rounded up some diplomats’ college-age daughters and had us all to a grand dinner party at his residence in Regents Park.
It was a rather stiff occasion – none of us could figure out what we were doing there – and we had to try to dance with the royals after dinner to the singing of an embarrassingly clean-cut American group called “Up with People,” under the scornful gaze of the Annenbergs’ Post-Impressionist masterpieces that you can now see at the Met.
Never in a thousand years would I have guessed that half a century later I would be happily associated with a network of Anglican colleges that is part of a global Anglican Communion tracing its origins to a royal prerogative to be “Defender of the Faith” – or “Faiths,” as we may soon be saying.
That night, the Prince and Princess looked like anxious teenagers, nervously feeling their way into a strange new world. So I was all the more moved to see them this week on a rather improved television, both of their faces etched by half a century of life, with all its disasters and triumphs. Today she is the most admired member of her family. And he looks every inch a King.
Charles Calhoun
Compass Points is published by GENERAL SECRETARY: The Revd Canon James G. Callaway, D.D. PUBLISHER: Julia DeLashmutt EDITOR: Charles C. Calhoun PRODUCER: Francis Rivera
