Campus Events

How did American public education begin? How has it been used or denied? Why does any of this matter in a democracy? This presentation highlights how public education was started and how it has changed in the United States, why some motives and strategies undermine public education, and why teachers today face challenges unlike anything they have experienced before. Desegregation, anti-intellectualism, unique religious forces, the Red Scare, and gun culture all have created challenges in public schools. A 1983 alumna of VWU, Clair Berube, Ph.D., earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in urban studies and education at Old Dominion University before returning to VWU as a faculty member in 2020. She is co-author of The End of School Reform (2006), The Moral University (2010), and the recently published The Investments: An American Conspiracy (2020).

For more information, contact the Robert Nusbaum Center at 757.455.3129 or NusbaumCenter@vwu.edu.

Many Americans have expressed concerns about the U.S. election system, albeit for different reasons. Is the process of voting too hard? Is the system too easy to manipulate? Do our rules make voting fair and accessible to all? Are we doing enough to ensure accuracy and credibility? In this moderated deliberation, participants explore options for addressing voting concerns, consider diverse viewpoints, and weigh the advantages, drawbacks, and trade-offs of different approaches. Public deliberation has been shown to improve mutual understanding of differing viewpoints and offers a constructive alternative to shouting past one another across political divides. Participation is limited. REGISTER now.

For more information, contact the Robert Nusbaum Center at 757.455.3129 or NusbaumCenter@vwu.edu.

In the course of their education, early Virginians like Thomas Jefferson encountered Greek and Latin texts, monuments, and constitutional ideas. So, it’s no surprise that those texts and ideas would end up shaping and influencing the cultural history of Virginia’s Tidewater region. Haller’s most recent book looks at how Jefferson’s readings in Greek and Roman texts led him to articulate ideals of religious freedom and a conviction that all human beings are created equal.  Learn how the rediscovery of a lost palimpsest may have inspired a plan for a planetarium—never completed—in the Rotunda at UVA, how a paint chip prised from a metope at UVA sheds light on Jefferson's engagement in the question of whether the Greeks painted their statues, and how a tiny inaccuracy in John Trumbull's famous painting of Independence Hall sheds  light on Jefferson's ideas about Greek democracy. Benjamin Haller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Classics at VWU.

For more information, contact the Robert Nusbaum Center at 757.455.3129 or NusbaumCenter@vwu.edu.

In the nearly 250 years of America's existence, only 45 men have held its highest office, a strange assortment of politicians, citizens, generals, businessmen, schemers, dreamers, heroes, and failures. Convinced he might find something new to say about the Chief Executives, essayist Colin Rafferty wrote short creative works that took on each president. In his book Execute the Office, George Washington's teeth dance the Virginia Reel while Ronald Reagan meets John Wayne in a film script. Franklin Pierce gets diagnosed, Rutherford B. Hayes sends postcards from home, George W. Bush watches the hurricane index rise, and we consider what the notion that anyone can become president really means to us. Colin Rafferty received an MFA from the University of Alabama and teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington. He writes about monuments and memorials (Hallow This Ground, Break Away Books, published in 2016), presidents (Execute the Office, Baobab Press, published in 2021), and Vietnam (book in-process).

For more information, contact the Robert Nusbaum Center at 757.455.3129 or NusbaumCenter@vwu.edu.

Buttons supporting William Jennings Bryan endorsed him—in Yiddish. Fans of Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, demanded “A Christian in the White House,” even though he was running against a Catholic. Bahais proudly declared their support for Barack Obama on their lapels, as did Buddhists, Catholics, Confucians, Druze, and many others. As former New York Mayor Ed Koch declared, “Buttons, stickers, and songs . . . are the sparkle and glitter of which our campaigns are made.”  This exploration of presidential campaign buttons examines the diversity of religious terms, images, and symbols and how they have been used to communicate both positive and negative messages to potential voters. Eric M. Mazur, Ph.D., is the Gloria and David Furman Professor of Judaic Studies at VWU and serves as the Fellow for Religion, Law, and Politics for the Robert Nusbaum Center.

For more information, contact the Robert Nusbaum Center at 757.455.3129 or NusbaumCenter@vwu.edu.