3 Questions for ...
Frank Kirkpatrick ’64
Interim Dean of Faculty
What about being
dean of the faculty have you found most surprising?
“I knew at a
theoretical level what the job involved because I’ve been here a
long time and I had talked to previous deans. What I didn’t
appreciate is the volume of issues that people have and that they
want the dean to help them deal with. I also didn’t grasp the
intensity of those concerns. That intensity made it very difficult
at first to determine what should be my top priorities. There’s a
concept in medicine known as triage—stop the bleeding for those
people most likely to survive and put off those things that can be
put off. I had to learn the principles of triage pretty quickly.
“I also didn’t fully
appreciate that suddenly my relationships would change with people
who I had been friends with for 30-plus years. I was no longer
‘just’ Frank; all of a sudden I was the dean. And, as the dean, you
can’t avoid making decisions—sometimes hard, unpopular decisions.”
What lessons from
your undergraduate experience at Trinity do you still benefit from
today?
“I came of age, grew
up, really, in this small liberal arts college environment during
the most formative years of my life. From 1960 to 1964 I was
immersed in that atmosphere. The sense of that community, the
commitment to honest academic investigation and learning, has
remained with me and helped to shape my vision of what Trinity has
been and should continue to be.
“Although the
College has essentially doubled in size since my days as a student
and we’ve become a much more diverse community, the fundamental
principles of the institution have remained constant even in the
wake of enormous changes. We have a faculty of true
scholar-teachers; we stress close interaction and collaboration
among students and faculty. I have tried to hold on to those
principles as a member of the faculty and in my time as dean.”
As a professor of
religion, and given the state of the world today, is religion a
positive force?
“Religion is
everything you can possibly say about it. It takes multiple forms in
the world today, as it always has. As we have seen recently, it can
be divisive and it can be radical. But it is also an agent for
justice and for transformation, and it’s something that gives people
deep personal meaning in their lives. It provides comfort and
consolation for people in times of crisis. It is all of those
things.
“Of
course, because it is so central to what it means to be human,
religion can be abused in a hundred different ways. Just as love,
which is also central to human existence, can be abusive when it
gets out of control and beyond appropriate boundaries. One thing
that I’ve always tried to stress to my students is that when we talk
about religion, we have to look at specific religions, in specific
forms, at specific times in history. Religion is defined by how it
is played out, and it is played out in a variety of very different
ways around the world. A particular religion can be both good and
bad, divisive and beneficial. It can be virtually anything people
want it to be.”
What they’re reading …
What they’re reading…
Robin Sheppard,
Associate Director of Athletics and
Assistant Director of the First-Year Program
"Had I been asked
what I was reading a month or so ago, I would have had to pass on
this opportunity. My reading patterns range from feast to famine,
but my preference is always the same: fiction.
"My summer months are
flooded with a smorgasbord of books that I overdose on right up
until the first day of fall classes when the drought begins. So as
soon as grades were posted in December, I dusted off the jacket of a
book that’s been on my shelf for three months patiently awaiting my
return. Until I Find You, by John Irving (one of my favorite
authors), is intimidating in its size (a couple inches thick) but
with Irving’s traditional style of quirkiness and sadness blended
with comedy, the first 100 pages have me captivated.
"So far a young boy,
Jack, and his mother are searching for his absent father. They have
traveled through several North Sea ports seeking this
church-organist deadbeat dad, but always arrive within hours of
tracking him down. Jack’s mother is a tattoo artist and they exist
on money that she makes soliciting potential clients in fancy hotel
lobbies. The missing dad is an “ink addict” a “collector” of tattoos
and in every port he gets tattoos of lyrics from songs and won’t
stop until his body is a sheet of music and every inch of skin
covered with a note. Young Jack’s relationships and education are
created from his memories of churches and tattoo parlors.
"Like I said—sad,
funny, and definitely quirky! I hope to crack the next 725 pages
before
classes start, because then the spring drought begins."
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