Professor Is Honored for Bringing Philosophy to His Community-College Students

Philosophy for All

When Scott H. Samuelson found philosophy as a teenager, he didn’t understand a word of it. But he wanted to spend his life trying. There was magic in a study that pondered questions of how to live and what to make of death and suffering, those “intense moments of wondering” that humans have, he says.

In his job as a professor of philosophy at Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa, he tries to share that wonder with his students.

Mr. Samuelson won this year’s Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. J. Larry Allums, the institute’s executive director, says it honored Mr. Samuelson with the $50,000 prize for fully embodying its mission to “bring humanities into the city.”

Mr. Samuelson’s book, The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, explains his quest to make philosophy connect with the concerns of real life.

In the book he describes how the aspiring plumbers, nurses, and technicians in his classes connect the lessons of Plato to their hardships. “The best way to defend the humanities is just to show them in all their glory: stories about real students who’ve been ignited by the study,” he says.

Mr. Samuelson is the first community-college professor to win the Hiett Prize since it was established, in 2005. The recognition is important for community-college professors as a whole, who teach “out of love for our subject and love for democratic education,” he says.

The award will allow him time to finish a second book, on lessons derived from another of his classrooms: a prison in Coralville, Iowa, where he began teaching last year.

Philosophy is felt “first in your bones before you have it explained to your brain,” he says. “I wanted to open doors to the philosophical tradition as widely as possible.” — Kate Stoltzfus

A Job Out of the Blue

It surprised Reed N. Wilcox to be asked to head a university.

Last year, while he was chief development officer at Clene Nanomedicine, members of the Board of Trustees of Southern Virginia University got in touch to ask if he would take over for its seriously ill president, Paul K. Sybrowsky.

Southern Virginia’s pitch to students is that it offers a “faith-supportive environment” for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The institution is not owned or run by the Mormon Church, but it is heavily Mormon-identified; for example, more than 90 percent of its approximately 700 students are adherents of the faith.

That’s about as much as Mr. Wilcox, now more than a year into the job, knew about the university before being asked to lead it. “It really came out of the blue,” he says from the campus in Buena Vista, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, “and there was no time to prepare for it.”

New to academic administration, he would have to draw on his experience of cofounding Clene and its parent company; working as a director of the Boston Consulting Group; leading a medical-research project in West Africa; and serving as president of the Toulouse and Marseilles Missions of the Mormon Church, in France.

In particular, his eight years in pharmaceuticals proved “a useful schooling,” he says. “That business is highly regulated, as is higher education,” and both industries steer by a “moral compass,” he says. In higher education, he says, “we always have to ask what’s best for the student, and that doesn’t always mean what they want at the moment.”

A student-body president at Brigham Young University before going on to Harvard’s schools of law and business, Mr. Wilcox invokes that moral compass when he explains Southern Virginia’s campus culture. Its students pledge to abstain from cheating and other dishonesty as well as from alcohol, coffee or tea, tobacco, tattoos, and unchaste behavior — even from a scruffy appearance.

Mr. Wilcox says that framework of comportment, as well as the institution’s favoring “a high degree of motivation” over prior academic accomplishment, attracts plenty of students, and he is confident of raising enrollment through preprofessional programs and other efforts.

Inventing whatever is lacking is a longtime practice of his. Mr. Wilcox holds 23 patents, in such areas as home-care equipment and dolls customized to resemble the children who buy them.— Peter Monaghan

Digital Dilemma

It’s not breaking news: Newspapers are suffering economically, none more than those that serve small-to-midsize cities and ethnic communities. Penny Muse Abernathy, a longtime journalist and news-media executive who holds a chair in journalism and digital-media economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is working with other academics to find a solution.

Ms. Abernathy, author of a book on saving community newspapers, has helped the university establish a research center focused on sustaining those publications and making them more innovative.

To have a vibrant democracy, she says, “we needed to find a business model for these newspapers in the digital age.”

The center — supported by $3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and $1 million from the university provost’s office — will expand faculty research focused on finding strategies to strengthen traditional news organizations and digital start-ups. Ms. Abernathy and several of her colleagues in the School of Media and Journalism, where the center is housed, plan to identify areas that are at risk of becoming “news deserts” if publications there shut down, and to help them create new models for profitability.

The center will also support the development and testing of newsroom tools, like data-mining software that can, for instance, scan speeches and highlight the most-relevant information, as well as business tools for subscriptions and other customer services.

Chapel Hill plans to add some staff jobs at the center to support research and technical development. Students will also be involved in various aspects of the effort.

The school will share its research findings and resources with news organizations and industry leaders across the country, Ms. Abernathy says. And she expects news organizations to respond.

“We are in danger of losing newspapers,” she says, “if they can’t make enough money to pay the people who work for them.” — Sydni Dunn

Cross-Border Partnership

Claudio Estrada, a solar-energy specialist who earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from New Mexico State University, is back in the Southwest. Mr. Estrada is directing a new Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Arizona.

The center is a branch of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City, where he is on the faculty. The largest university in Latin America, National Autonomous, known as UNAM, already has offices and branches around the world, including in Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We are an office that will help facilitate the exchange of students and researchers,” says Mr. Estrada, “but not necessarily be a place where the research is being done.” Staff members at the center hope to collaborate with other universities in the area, including ones in New Mexico and Colorado, he says.

Michael Proctor, vice president for global initiatives at Arizona, says the two universities have a long history of scientific collaboration, most notably on the construction of the San Pedro Martir Telescope. The new center is meant to streamline such collaboration, particularly in arid-lands research. It also aims to foster the teaching of Spanish, sponsor Mexican cultural activities, and help migrants.

Administrators are exploring the possibility of having shared research facilities and dual-degree programs between the two institutions, Mr. Proctor says.— Angela Chen

Obituary: The Merriest Mind’

Lisa Jardine, a professor of Renaissance studies at University College London, died on October 25. She was 71.

Known as a public intellectual, Ms. Jardine crossed the boundary between the humanities and science. She was the author or co-author of 17 books, among them studies of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and William the Silent. She also wrote for major British newspapers and appeared regularly on television and radio programs.

From 2008 to 2014, she was chair of an independent panel that regulates assisted human reproduction in Britain. At University College London, which she joined in 2012, she was director of the Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and founding director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, which develops archival research projects covering the years 1500 to 1800.

In an obituary in The Financial Times, the historian Simon Schama described Ms. Jardine as having had “the merriest mind, the least cloistered scholarship, and the most warmly expansive intellect that many of us will ever know.”— Ruth Hammond

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