Campus & Community

Provost Message About SU Showcase

Friday, October 23, 2009, By News Staff

Dear SU Community Member,

SU Showcase, our annual, spring celebration of discovery, creativity and community engagement, has become a broadly embraced academic tradition at Syracuse University. From its inception just five years ago, it has been a vital means through which our faculty, students and staff share their sense of wonder and foster enthusiasm for intellectual inquiry both across our campus and with the greater community. While the sixth annual SU Showcase is still months away, I want you to know now about some of the important ways in which it will continue to mature as an academically focused event for 2010.

Foremost for planning purposes: SU Showcase 2010 will be held Monday, April 19th. To emphasize its purpose, that will be a regular instructional day on which classes are held, and the University Academic Calendar is being updated to reflect this. To support this logistically, SU Showcase events will be concentrated on the Quad, where a “Teach-In Tent” will house featured presentations and serve as a hub for nearby activities. Consequently, plans are not being made for large-scale entertainment acts.

Thematically, SU Showcase 2010 will center on sustainability in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which falls that week, and to underline the pervasive significance of sustainability across the disciplines. We also anticipate that this theme will help build momentum behind SU’s Climate Action Plan, through which our campus will achieve carbon neutrality by 2040—a timeframe that we understand to be ambitious in relation to similar institutions nationwide.

Steve Parks, associate professor in the Writing Program and director of New City Community Press, will be working with the Soling Program, an all-University academic program administered by The College of Arts and Sciences, and with faculty and student leaders campus-wide in the coming months to fully articulate and implement these plans. I look forward to working with him and with the SU Showcase team to celebrate our academic community’s spirit of inquiry and engagement.

Sincerely,

Eric F. Spina
Vice Chancellor and Provost