Joseph Prud’homme, Director of Washington College’s Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture (IRPC), will discuss religious liberty in the United States at a presentation March 21 at the Talbot Country Club in Easton.

Prud’homme will present “The Foundations of Religious Freedom” at the event, which is open to the public for a fee of $15 and includes a reception that begins at 5:30 p.m. He will explore how religious freedom is characterized in the media and in policy and legal debates; whether this central liberty is under threat; what challenges individuals and organizations of faith face in contemporary society; and whether current laws adequately defend the freedom of religious belief and practice. Prud’homme will examine these issues from a political, legal and philosophical perspective.

Prud’homme is associate professor of political science at Washington College and The Burton Family Chair in Religion, Politics and Culture. He has been director of the IRPC since its founding. Prud’homme received his doctoral degree from Princeton University and two bachelor’s degrees—majoring in political science, history, and philosophy and minoring in religious studies—from Texas A&M University. He was awarded a fellowship at Harvard University, where he studied at the Harvard Law School and served as a member of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Prud’homme’s expertise is in the areas of political philosophy, legal theory, intellectual history, and conceptual and historical approaches to the study of religion and political and cultural affairs.

Washington College and Talbot Country Club are co-sponsoring the presentation at 6142 Country Club Drive, Easton, Maryland. The $15 fee pays for the reception and admittance, and is payable by credit card or check to Talbot Country Club at the event. Washington College is not accepting payments. Please RSVP by March 14 to Victoria Corcoran at 410-778-7805 or vcorcoran2@washcoll.edu.

Washington College has joined forces with FESCO Energy to help the College reduce carbon emissions while improving energy efficiency and resilience, a major step toward implementing a vigorous and sustainable College-wide energy policy. The College has signed a Master Energy Services Agreement with the Frederick, Maryland company to develop and implement methods that will help the College reduce its energy demand, costs, and carbon footprint. By analyzing and implementing low- and no-emissions energy generation, storage technologies, and energy conservation solutions, the partnership will provide the College increased energy security and limit its dependence on the power grid.

“The agreement secures a long-term approach to reduce our energy consumption and expenses by upgrading our infrastructure and our processes, and we plan to proceed using a shared-savings approach wherever possible,” says Greg Farley, the College’s Director of Sustainability. “All of this will result in a robust energy strategy and policy, which we will use to drive innovation and enact energy security. I think institutions generally in the higher-ed sector haven’t had to think about comprehensive energy strategy from anything but a price perspective, and this gives us a chance to take at strategic look at energy use, procurement, security,and waste in a strategic way.”

FESCO, which in its first six months of operation earned a 2018 Innovator of the Year award from the Maryland Clean Energy Center, was formed to change the way customers manage and optimize their energy use, maximize energy efficiency, and employ the latest technology to manage and produce clean, secure, and grid-independent energy. In the process, FESCO’s customers will become more resilient to volatility in electricity supply and pricing, reduce their energy expenses, and minimize their site-specific impact to climate change. The company’s work with Washington College will pursue all of these goals.

“We are thrilled to help Washington College revolutionize the energy value stream,” says John Dukes, FESCO’s president. “This commitment is a revolutionary leap forward in securing energy resiliency and budget control by implementing energy-related projects that are sustainable, durable, and cost effective. By fully leveraging its annual energy expenses and committing those dollars to acquiring the energy services to meet their clearly defined goals, the College has set the template for others to follow. These services will ensure the College can withstand long-term power outages without additional expense, replace inefficient equipment with the newest equipment to enhance student and faculty comfort and controllability, and reduce overall site air emissions simply by changing what they expect from an energy provider.”

FESCO and Washington College are performing energy and infrastructure audits to identify opportunities for demand reduction and energy security. This work has already begun with examination of the electrical and thermal infrastructure, HVAC, and building control systems in several target buildings.

Early projects being examined include a combined heat and power energy generation plant; privatizating electrical and thermal infrastructure; modernizing HVAC systems and campus wide controls; adding motion-activated set back controls to ensure that demand consumption like HVAC and lights go off when no one is present in an area; and repairing and improving building automation systems so that energy use can be automatically adjusted for more efficient use.

Over the long term, Washington College aspires to cut its energy use significantly by upgrading infrastructure and building a culture of conservation, so that faculty, staff, and students make a conscious effort to turn off lights when they leave a room, unplug computer chargers that are not in use, or adjust the thermostat to use less energy when no one is occupying a room or building—to name just a few examples. Significant reduction in energy use, and the potential installation of cyber-secure, grid-independent electricity generation on campus, will work towards a goal of campus carbon neutrality and greater resilience for the campus and the surrounding community.

These goals coincide with the College’s new emphasis on environmental practices, and with improvements to waste-stream management, water efficiency, and remediation of stormwater runoff for the Chestertown campus. Improvements and upgrades will also serve to make the campus into a “learning laboratory” for students who are focusing on the study of the environment, and will help prepare all Washington College graduates for success in the climate-changed future they will inherit upon graduation.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

About FESCO Energy

FESCO Energy provides complete turnkey energy supply, demand and resiliency projects managed by an executive team with over 80 combined years of proven experience. Based in Frederick, Maryland, FESCO develops and implements energy efficiency, distributed generation, renewable energy, water conservation, operations and maintenance, and provides electricity and natural gas commodity contracts nationally for educational, public sector, commercial, and industrial customers. It helps customers develop electricity and natural gas cost-of-service analysis and advises on rate designs using a cloud-based analytics platform that ensures the right rate based on customer usage patterns.

Washington College’s Communication and Media Studies (CMS) Speaker Series resumes this semester with Allison Page, Assistant Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University, and Stephanie Brown, visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at St. Louis University, speaking on the issues of race and gender, respectively.

Page’s talk, “ ‘Meet, Help, Become a Slave…to Better Understand History’: Race and Agency in Educational Videogames” is set for Feb. 4, and Brown’s presentation “Open Mic?: Gender, Labor, and Gatekeeping in Stand-up Comedy,” will be March 25. Both events, held at Litrenta Lecture Hall in the Toll Science Center, are free and open to the public. Page’s talk begins at 4:30 p.m. and Brown’s begins at 5:30.

Page, who holds a joint appointment in Old Dominion’s Humanities Institute, focuses on critical cultural studies of race and mediated technologies. Her presentation will examine the educational role-playing videogame Flight to Freedom, part of the Mission U.S. series of games designed to teach middle school students about the history of slavery in the United States. Through an analysis of the game as well as the broader educational agenda and policy discourse in which Flight to Freedom is situated, Page argues that the game is a technology of racialized citizenship, part of a longer legacy of public media works that govern race.

Allison Page and Stephanie Brown

Brown, whose research looks at the intersections of gender, comedy, and popular culture, will discuss how stand-up comedy tends to produce and exacerbate gendered and racial inequality, especially at the local, least formalized levels. Like other cultural industries, stand-up is marked by short-term precarious employment, informal networks of entry, and a lack of managerial structure or formal policies on diversity and inclusion. Brown’s presentation will also touch on the ways in which women, especially queer women and women of color, are treated within the stand-up industry—locally, nationally, and in digital spaces—as outsiders who must constantly prove their worth through a shifting and slippery set of aesthetic and cultural norms that reinforce masculine dominance both on and offstage.

The CMS Speaker Series is dedicated to advancing discourse and learning around contemporary issues in communication and media studies across disciplines.For more information on the CMS program, please visit https://www.washcoll.edu/departments/communication-and-media-studies/ or contact Prof. Alicia Kozma at akozma2@washcoll.edu

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations.With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Washington College students who want to pursue a degree in nursing have a new option thanks to a strategic partnership with Johns Hopkins University’s Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) Entry into Nursing Program. With an emphasis on emerging areas of need and health care leadership, the program offers students an accelerated path to a wide array of patient-care careers.

“This Johns Hopkins program is designed for students who have majored in a non-nursing discipline as an undergraduate and decide to pursue nursing after they complete their undergraduate degree,” says Patrice DiQuinzio, Dean and Provost of the College. “Given that this program focuses on leadership and is inclusive of the humanities and public health, it’s a wonderful fit for Washington College and our students.”

The five-semester Entry Into Nursing Program“prepares students to be top patient-care nurses who have unlimited choices after graduation by emphasizing leadership, global impact, quality and safety, evidence-based practice, and inter-professional education,” says Cathy Wilson, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Director of Admissions. Students “will learn from a framework that integrates the humanities, public health, and physical and organizational sciences into nursing practice.” Students graduate with a master of science in nursing and are prepared to take the nursing licensing exam to become an RN, or to continue studies toward an advanced degree.

The new partnership complements Washington College’s current nursing program, which offers a dual-degree option with the University of Maryland School of Nursing, through which students spend three years at WC, then two years at UMD, earning a bachelor’s degree from WC and a BS in nursing from UMD in five years. Students may also complete a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree in a major of their choice while completing their pre-nursing prerequisite courses.

For the Johns Hopkins MSN Entry Into Nursing program, WC students don’t need to major in biology or psychology as they do in the dual-degree bachelor’s program with UMD, but they must have a cumulative GPA of 3.2 and have completed several specific courses with a B or better to be considered for admission. Johns Hopkins will provide the College with an advisor to meet with interested WC students to help them during the admissions process, and scholarships and financial aid are available.

“Not everybody knows they want to get into nursing until later in their undergraduate career,” says Jodi Olson, Director of Pre-Health Professions Programs, who helped shepherd the new partnership. “This program gives those students an excellent post-graduate option.”

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations.With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Washington College has won a $1 million grant from the Department of Commerce’s Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative Fund (MEIF) to establish an endowed directorship for the College’s GIS Program, broadening student avenues for study and professional experience in the growing geographic information systems field, as well as expanding economic development opportunities and encouraging investment in business development and pilot projects.

Matched by a $1 million grant from The Hodson Trust, this grant marks the third time in three years the College has earned funding through MEIF, a program designed to spur basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields. Washington College is the only undergraduate private liberal arts college to receive an award three years in a row, joining Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland at College Park and at Baltimore.

“I’m thrilled and proud that for the third year running, Washington College has earned the support of the Maryland Department of Commerce for this terrific grant. Our outstanding GIS program is among our strongest for offering students real-world experience within the liberal arts framework, and this will only enhance that to create more opportunities,” said College President Kurt Landgraf. “I especially want to thank The Hodson Trust for providing the necessary match to make this possible. Once again, the Trust’s support and confidence have made a critical difference in the education that we provide to students.”

Since 2003, the College’s GIS Lab, overseen by the Center for Environment & Society (CES), has been training student interns in GIS technologies and analyses while executing funded projects across the country, preparing a new generation of GIS specialists who manage projects and work with clients in a professional setting.

The new grant will enable the College to grow the GIS program and extend it more widely throughout the liberal arts curriculum, as well as broaden collaborations with faculty research and teaching, says CES Director John Seidel, who helped inaugurate the GIS program. It will also allow the College to consider an academic program in geospatial technologies in conjunction with the GIS Lab.

“This will expand our ability to engage in interdisciplinary research in our fields of study, as well as provide community level and business support in incorporating geospatial analysis and technology to solve problems,” Seidel says.

The endowed position will enable the program to move beyond its dependence on funded projects, giving it greater flexibility to work with non-profits and encouraging investment in business development opportunities and pilot projects. “We are very excited about the strong economic development potential that the expansion of our GIS program will bring to Maryland,” Seidel says, “as well as the hands-on, collaborative experiences that it will provide for Washington College students and faculty.”

The other grant winners were Maryland Institute College of Art, Towson University, and UMD College Park. In 2017, the state awarded Washington College $944,000, matched by $1 million from private donors, to create an endowed chair for the College’s new Eastern Shore Food Lab. And, in 2016, the state granted $1 million to match private funds to create an endowed position in the Center for Environment & Society (CES) aimed at creating entrepreneurial opportunities for students in the sciences.

Learn more about GIS at WC here: https://www.washcoll.edu/centers/ces/gis/

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations.With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.