About the blogger
I'm Victor Luftig, academic dean for the Spring 2016 voyage of Semester
at Sea. At home at the University of Virginia I serve two main roles: I
teach in the English Department, mainly 20th century English and Irish
literature, and I report to the Provost as Director of the Center for
the Liberal Arts (www.virginia.edu/cla), which provides programs for
K-12 teachers. For ten years my wife and I have taught UVA students in
Ireland during the January term, and last summer I served as a term as Director of UVa's program in Oxford.
I served as academic dean on the Spring 2012 voyage, and in the years since I have served as the academic coordinator for the program at UVa.
When we sailed last time, it occurred to me that if I were a parent whose child was sailing as a student I would be grateful to hear occasionally from an adult on board who was describing what it was like to be on the ship. Semester at Sea does a great job of posting on Facebook and elsewhere as a voyage goes on: I don't mean to compete with that, and if you are a parent, I hope you'll check in on those kinds of postings too. But it's not really their job to say, 'Well, the seas were choppy for a while, but now they're smooth," or "A lot of students are relaxing in the sun on the deck right now," or "People really seemed to go for the ice cream sundaes in the dining room tonight," and I won't mind sharing those kinds of profundities--as well as accounts of what things re like from my side (the academic side). If you want to have that kind of record of the voyage, do check in here now and then. (To get a sense of how this will go, you can glance at my blog from the Spring 2012 voyage at http://s12sasacdean.blogspot.com)
Back to me:
Until now, my chief responsibilities for the Spring 2016 voyage have been selecting the
faculty and the "inter-port" visitors. It's a great faculty: I only get to take a couple from UVa, but many of the faculty come from comparable institutions--UT-Austin, Rice, Vassar, Georgetown, etc--and each is genuinely distinguished. I take the hiring of the faculty very seriously: a lot more people apply, as you can imagine, than I can take, but I still approach a lot of ideal faculty via 'cold calls.' I'm very aware of how much the program costs and of what a commitment it represents for students and parents, and I take pride in assembling a faculty worthy of it. It's a faculty with some remarkable strengths--we are especially good in Media Studies, for instance, having a couple of really distinguished scholars in the subject plus a journalist you've heard often if you listen to NPR--and a great deal of range. If you haven't already looked over the short biographies of the faculty members your son or daughter is studying with, I think you may find those interesting, and even a little inspiring. I'll say more in the future about our inter-port visitors, some of whom I'm still in the processing of arranging, but I can say for now that they're likely to include a range of State Department personnel and fascinating people from the ports we're visiting.
The students will be looking forward to the voyage in a variety of different ways. But what I hope we can get them focused on a bit during the quite detailed and thoroughly planned orientation process is the idea of learning together, steadily, and with the faculty and visitors they'll be engaging with: there are astonishing opportunities here to combine study and travel, and the key to the program, it seems to me, is for them to see these as pleasurably intertwined rather than in competition. Each student is enrolled in a course called a Global Comparative Lens course--more on those later, but i mention them here because the key will be for them to see the voyage through the lens of their courses, and conversations and events that happen on board that give them a perspective that combines depth, breadth, and curiosity.
I write this in a hotel in Hagerstown, MD: we're en route north to see family. The view from the hotel is of one of those depressing commercial vistas, and it's a grey, wet day. But there are a few stubborn and lovely evergreens in the middle distance, and bright flashes of color from the trucks passing back on I-81: that, I think right away (because this is what I do for a living), is the combination of colors that Claude Monet spotted in London and made something lovely from. Everyone on the voyage would have some association to bring to this combination, and every port and every day at sea will give us an opportunity to see this sort of place differently. The key, as the novelist Henry James put it in Monet's time, is to "try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."
PS By the way, I can post to this page via email (though I don't remember right now how to do that): that's why I'll be able to post here at times when students won't have access to Facebook and the like.
at Sea. At home at the University of Virginia I serve two main roles: I
teach in the English Department, mainly 20th century English and Irish
literature, and I report to the Provost as Director of the Center for
the Liberal Arts (www.virginia.edu/cla), which provides programs for
K-12 teachers. For ten years my wife and I have taught UVA students in
Ireland during the January term, and last summer I served as a term as Director of UVa's program in Oxford.
I served as academic dean on the Spring 2012 voyage, and in the years since I have served as the academic coordinator for the program at UVa.
When we sailed last time, it occurred to me that if I were a parent whose child was sailing as a student I would be grateful to hear occasionally from an adult on board who was describing what it was like to be on the ship. Semester at Sea does a great job of posting on Facebook and elsewhere as a voyage goes on: I don't mean to compete with that, and if you are a parent, I hope you'll check in on those kinds of postings too. But it's not really their job to say, 'Well, the seas were choppy for a while, but now they're smooth," or "A lot of students are relaxing in the sun on the deck right now," or "People really seemed to go for the ice cream sundaes in the dining room tonight," and I won't mind sharing those kinds of profundities--as well as accounts of what things re like from my side (the academic side). If you want to have that kind of record of the voyage, do check in here now and then. (To get a sense of how this will go, you can glance at my blog from the Spring 2012 voyage at http://s12sasacdean.blogspot.com)
Back to me:
Until now, my chief responsibilities for the Spring 2016 voyage have been selecting the
faculty and the "inter-port" visitors. It's a great faculty: I only get to take a couple from UVa, but many of the faculty come from comparable institutions--UT-Austin, Rice, Vassar, Georgetown, etc--and each is genuinely distinguished. I take the hiring of the faculty very seriously: a lot more people apply, as you can imagine, than I can take, but I still approach a lot of ideal faculty via 'cold calls.' I'm very aware of how much the program costs and of what a commitment it represents for students and parents, and I take pride in assembling a faculty worthy of it. It's a faculty with some remarkable strengths--we are especially good in Media Studies, for instance, having a couple of really distinguished scholars in the subject plus a journalist you've heard often if you listen to NPR--and a great deal of range. If you haven't already looked over the short biographies of the faculty members your son or daughter is studying with, I think you may find those interesting, and even a little inspiring. I'll say more in the future about our inter-port visitors, some of whom I'm still in the processing of arranging, but I can say for now that they're likely to include a range of State Department personnel and fascinating people from the ports we're visiting.
The students will be looking forward to the voyage in a variety of different ways. But what I hope we can get them focused on a bit during the quite detailed and thoroughly planned orientation process is the idea of learning together, steadily, and with the faculty and visitors they'll be engaging with: there are astonishing opportunities here to combine study and travel, and the key to the program, it seems to me, is for them to see these as pleasurably intertwined rather than in competition. Each student is enrolled in a course called a Global Comparative Lens course--more on those later, but i mention them here because the key will be for them to see the voyage through the lens of their courses, and conversations and events that happen on board that give them a perspective that combines depth, breadth, and curiosity.
I write this in a hotel in Hagerstown, MD: we're en route north to see family. The view from the hotel is of one of those depressing commercial vistas, and it's a grey, wet day. But there are a few stubborn and lovely evergreens in the middle distance, and bright flashes of color from the trucks passing back on I-81: that, I think right away (because this is what I do for a living), is the combination of colors that Claude Monet spotted in London and made something lovely from. Everyone on the voyage would have some association to bring to this combination, and every port and every day at sea will give us an opportunity to see this sort of place differently. The key, as the novelist Henry James put it in Monet's time, is to "try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."
PS By the way, I can post to this page via email (though I don't remember right now how to do that): that's why I'll be able to post here at times when students won't have access to Facebook and the like.
