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Tracy Adler, director of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, spoke with WAMC host Joe Donahue on the station’s daily Roundtable morning show about the museum’s opening and current exhibition. The Oct. 25 interview can be heard on the WAMC site.

A feature story appearing on the Forbes website titled “What's Better Than College Art History 101? A Campus Museum,” features the college’s new Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. The Oct. 22 article penned by Hamilton alumna Lynn Matthews Douglass ’81 addresses “a new trend on liberal arts campuses to build museums to teach art.”

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Vanderbilt University have established a committee to examine emerging national-scale digital projects and their potential to help transform higher education in terms of scholarly productivity, teaching, cost-efficiency and sustainability.  President Joan Hinde Stewart has been appointed to this group, the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education, which comprises college and university presidents and provosts, deans, university librarians and association heads.

With total payroll exceeding $23.1 billion for 373,800 direct, indirect and induced jobs, New York’s independent colleges and universities are major source of jobs in New York State, according to a Center for Governmental Research (CGR) analysis released today by the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU). The announcement came during an Independent Higher Education Forum on Oct. 16 in Utica.

Hamilton students are now pursuing their studies on all seven continents. On Oct. 10, Chief Scientist Eugene Domack, the J. W. Johnson Family Professorship of Environmental Studies, began an 18-day cruise to Antarctica along with two Hamilton students and two alumni. Students are writing blog updates about their trip each day.

Using examples from today’s political landscape, Professor of Government P. Gary Wyckoff examined elements of critical thinking in an essay titled “What Exactly Is Critical Thinking,” published by InsideHigherEd in its Oct. 11 edition. “As I prepared for the start of classes this fall, I tried to pinpoint the critical thinking skills I really want my students to learn,” wrote Wyckoff.  “And as I listened to public debates on everything from tax policy to Obamacare, five essential thinking skills seemed to be missing, again and again.”

In a Religious Dispatches essay, “‘Cult’ Cinema Comes of Age,” Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate examined recent films that focus on cults including The Master, the latest in the group. In the Oct. 7 article, Plate described The Master as “emblematic of a new, more nuanced treatment of cults in the movies,” and “more or less … the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the birth of Scientology.”

Tonight Hamilton students will participate with students from six universities across the country in a live, pilot polling project during the presidential debate. Via a new smart phone application, more than a hundred students will be able to “register their in-the-moment reactions to what candidates are saying during a debate, using button taps (e.g. Agree and Disagree), and answering pre- and post-debate survey questions (e.g. partisanship, issue priorities, demographics),” according to the developer’s website.

Director Tracy Adler and her staff are in the process of putting the finishing touches on The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art in preparation for the official opening celebration. On Thursday, Oct. 4, the festivities will begin.

The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art will be featured on the locally produced, weekly television show Mohawk Valley Living on Sunday, Sept. 30, at 7:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. on WFXV (Channel 6 on Time Warner Cable) and will be rebroadcast next Sunday at 8:00 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. The segment can be viewed on the show's site at approximately 10:10.