December 19, 2012 – 11:51 am
Dr. Kimberly Schmidt, long-time director of EMU’s Washington Community Scholars’ Center, has often expressed the thought that WCSC is one of EMU’s best-kept secrets. As I perused the photographs and stories in this issue of Crossroads prior to press time, I couldn’t help but feel that Kim might be right. WCSC students garner a wealth […]
December 19, 2012 – 11:44 am
Washington Community Scholars’ Center In the fall of 1976, Phil Baker-Shenk arrived in Washington D.C., intending to advance the causes of international human rights and nuclear disarmament through an internship with the Friends Committee on National Legislation. However, as an 18-year-old college undergrad at the bottom of the organization’s rungs, he found himself shuffled to its […]
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Tagged Amy Smith Mumbauer, Dawn Longenecker, Doug Hertzler, Dwight Gingerich, Fikir Tilahun Sanders, John Stahl-Wert, Kimberly Schmidt, Mark Fenton, Nelson Good, Phil Baker-Shenk, Rolando Santiago, Trent Wagler
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December 19, 2012 – 10:48 am
Photos by Jon Styer. Shoulder–to-Shoulder, a Washington D.C.-based interfaith coalition that works to end anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, has its work cut out for it. Political campaigns throughout the 2012 election season made use of xenophobic language, and vandalism of mosques made headlines repeatedly over the past year, including an incident at a mosque […]
December 18, 2012 – 4:04 pm
“This program is for any EMU student,” says former WCSC associate director Doug Hertzler ’88. “You can position yourself to do anything you want after college through this program.” Hertzler himself is a case in point: he interned with Washington Inner City Self-Help while a student in the then-named WSSY program during the 1986-87 school year, […]
Tim Swartzendruber ’95, one of Pat’s and my four children, recently recalled his cross-cultural with these words: When I compare my seven semesters on EMU’s campus to my cross-cultural semester in France and Ivory Coast, it’s like comparing coffee to espresso – both are fantastic, but the latter is doubly intense and stimulating. The intellectual, […]
Cross-cultural study. It began as a professor’s dream for undergraduates 30 years ago and has become one of the best parts about being an EMU alumnus. “It seems pretty odd to me to think that you could prepare someone to serve and lead in a global context without having some kind of international or other […]
EMU began sending groups of students on study-semesters in the Middle East in 1984 and has never stopped sending groups on a near-annual basis, regardless of the prevailing socio-political situation. We know of no university in North America that rivals EMU for sustained number of years in the Middle East and number of students dispatched […]
David Landis ’04 grew up hearing stories about the Middle East. His dad, Steve Landis ’77, had gone on EMU’s very first cross-cultural to the region in 1975, and from the time David arrived on campus as a student himself, he knew he wanted to go too. The wish came true in the fall of […]
A 1983 talk by Professor Calvin E. Shenk ’59 Twenty-two years ago, Marie and I were on our way to Ethiopia by freighter. It took us a month to cross the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. We soon learned that the geographical distance we crossed was small compared to the […]
The weeks that Nathan Musselman ’00 spent in Palestine in 1998 during his cross-cultural to the Middle East, observing, experiencing and learning from people living under Israeli military occupation, made a tremendous impression on him. “It was an extremely emotional time,” recalled Musselman in a 2012 interview. He was a sophomore at the time of […]
