News
New Campion President
Campion College has named Dr Ryan Messmore as its new President to succeed Dr David Daintree when he finishes his term in December. Following a local and international search, Dr Messmore, from the American State of Maryland, will arrive in Australia with his wife Karin and three children in October to take over from Dr Daintree at the end of the year.
Dr Messmore is currently a Research Fellow in Religion and a Free Society with the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC. Prior to the Heritage Foundation he was the Founder and Executive Director of the Trinity Forum Academy, Royal Oak, Maryland. Dr Messmore has degrees from universities in the United States and England. He received his bachelor’s degree in public policy and religion from Duke University, North Carolina and a doctorate in political theology from Oxford. He also holds a master’s degree in theology and Christian ethics from Duke Divinity School and Cambridge University.
Speaking about his appointment, Dr Messmore said, “I am thrilled to be invited to succeed Dr Daintree as the President of Campion College. This is an exciting young community of learning that takes the ancient liberal arts tradition seriously. I believe that the students graduating from Campion will become influential leaders of the future – in their families, workplaces, and larger communities. I look forward to continuing to build on the great foundation that has been laid there over the past several years.”
Outgoing President, Dr Daintree said, “I very much welcome the announcement of Dr Messmore’s appointment and I look forward to his arrival later this year. It is a mark of the College’s maturity that a gradual process of leadership has been arranged. It augurs well for the future of this unique Australian institution of higher learning.”
Campion College is the only Tertiary Liberal Arts College in Australia. The Liberal Arts at Campion are: Philosophy, Theology, Literature, Science, History and Latin.
Frank Sheed Competition 2011
Frank Sheed Competition Winner Announced by Paul O’Donovan
Many tertiary education institutions and businesses have bemoaned the lack of articulation skills amongst today’s emerging workforce. Without the ability to express ourselves well, we will be unable to “be the change we wish to see in the world”, in the words of Ghandi. At Campion College, students like me are privileged to have various opportunities for fine-tuning our public speaking skills.
This year the theme of the competition was “to challenge, inspire, or call to arms”. Yet again the calibre of the student speakers was very impressive, not least because I was included amongst their number. Over a wonderful dinner, the student body and various guests and staff members were held enthralled by students calling upon us to have courage in our convictions, embark upon the journey of seeking the truth, and most importantly, to “be not afraid!” After deliberation, the judges themselves admitted it was difficult to choose amongst the different speakers, but as it had to be, three students were placed. Keziah Doherty won first place, the first female student to do so since the competitions inauguration in 2009. I was delighted to come third.
Certainly one of the factors that attracted me to Campion was their emphasis on developing each and every student holistically. This includes the development of the art of speaking well, so crucial to the liberal arts education. I have certainly learnt much about the use of my fine voice, and I hope that what I have learnt I will be able to put to good use in a society sadly bereft of fine speakers.
The President's Plate
The 2011 President's Plate was again another success with an extraordinarily complex set of play-offs between 62 players in ten teams played on Friday 2 September. The five-a-side version of soccer, with men and women, academics and students, playing together in mixed teams, took off on the College's own soccer pitch. The atmosphere was delightful and the sportsmanship was strikingly good-humoured. Many thanks to the organisers (especially Ryan Barlow) and to all participants.
Steve Jobs on the Liberal Arts
"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices,"
In a down economy Apple somehow keeps beating Wall Street's expectations. How do they do it? According to Steve Jobs, the liberal arts play a big role. For example, concerning their new breakthrough iPad, Jobs says: "The reason that Apple is able to create products like iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both." http://humanitiesplus.byu.edu/2010/01/steve-jobs-touts-liberal-arts.html
Jobs credits Apple's success to working at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, and he sees the iPad as a continuation of that tradition. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/27/live-steve-jobs-presents-the-tablet/
Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities
Below are exerts taken from the blog - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/want_innovative_thinking_hire.html
Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities
12:34 PM Thursday March 31, 2011
by Tony Golsby-Smith | Harvard Business Review Blog Network
"How many people in your organization are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to assure that employees are engaged at work?
"If the answer is "not many," welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems — or even get their heads around them. It's not that firms don't have smart people working with them. There are plenty of MBAs and even Ph.Ds in economics, chemistry, or computer science, in the corporate ranks. Intellectual wattage is not lacking. It's the right intellectual wattage that's hard to find. They simply don't have enough people with the right backgrounds.
This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. It doesn't teach how to navigate "what if" questions or unknown futures. As Amos Shapira, the CEO of Cellcom, the leading cell phone provider in Israel, put it: 'The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks...The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy.'"
"Complexity and ambiguity. Too many companies lack the scope of understanding to stop problems before they start, because their people are too focused on immediate tasks, or buried under so much data that they can't see warning signs. The BP oil disaster, the manufacturing problems at Johnson & Johnson and Genzyme and many others might have been avoided if they had learned to identify ambiguous threats."
"Innovation. If you want out-of-the-box thinking, you need to free up people's inherent creativity. Humanists are trained to be creative and are uniquely adapted to leading creative teams. (A case in point: Steve Jobs, who openly acknowledges how studying the beautiful art of calligraphy led him to design the Macintosh interface.)"
"Communication and presentation. Liberal arts graduates are well-trained in writing and presenting, making them natural fits for marketing, training, and research. A focus on writing (which you need for degrees in history, literature, philosophy, and rhetoric) helps people develop persuasive arguments, and a background in performance (such as theater or music) gives people great presentation skills. And an understanding of history is indispensable if you want to understand the broader competitive arena and global markets."
"If you want another good reason to hire from the humanities, consider this: consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain like to hire them for all the reasons I've described above. You can hire liberal arts graduates yourself, or you can pay through the nose for a big consulting firms to hire them to do the thinking for you."
Tony Golsby-Smith is the founder and CEO of Second Road, a business design and transformation firm headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Full article on - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/want_innovative_thinking_hire.html