Valuing our Past and Building Our Future
R. Barbara Gitenstein, President
I am pleased to welcome you to The College of New Jersey community. Your participation in our Summer Reading Program is a first step in your career at the College and should help prepare you for our challenging and engaging academic environment.
The College is a values-based institution that seeks to provide a context in which you will learn and grow. As an institution, we value our past and encourage you to do the same; we also honor our responsibilities to the state and nation and we insist that you do so as well. These responsibilities cannot be met by only looking backward; we must also look around and look ahead. I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities that will present themselves throughout your time on the campus. In the short time you will spend with us you will further develop your passions and will have the chance to develop new ones. Now is the time to discover the impact you can make on the world. Like the institution that you have joined, your experience at The College of New Jersey is contextual. You will learn from others and they from you; you will learn from their pasts and they from yours.
As a consequence of this contextual learning, you will come to understand your past better. This greater understanding will result in great changes for you and for the larger community in which you live, changes that continue to position us to thrive in the twenty-first century. As a community dedicated to free inquiry and open exchange, we seek to help nourish the development of our students to become leaders in our complex and diverse world by providing a supportive environment in which to challenge each other and ourselves intellectually.
Wael Ghonim’s Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power has been selected as this year’s Summer Reading. The Summer Reading is a part of the College’s annual series of intellectual and cultural programs designed to engage our community in discussion around a selected theme. The theme for this year is “Liberty and Tyranny” As part of Welcome Week, you and your peers will have an opportunity to examine Ghonim’s book in a discussion led by a faculty/staff facilitator on August 27, 2012. You will receive complete Summer Reading instructions at the time of Summer Orientation in July. We will also have them posted at this site.
Again, welcome to the community of The College of New Jersey. I hope you will take full advantage of what the College has to offer you, and what you have to offer our community.
Essay Assignment
This academic year the College is sponsoring a series of programs based on the theme “Freedom and Tyranny.” The theme will be inaugurated at the Summer Reading discussions on August 27 and celebrated at the campus-wide Community Learning Day on October 3.
This year’s Summer Reading is Wael Ghonim’s Revolution 2:0, written in 2012 by a central participant in the uprising in Egypt in 2010. It is a memoir from a person who ‘journeyed’ from passive opposition to the existing regime to full blown participant who used his computing skills and his FaceBook page to energize millions of people.
With the theme of “Freedom and Tyranny” in mind, please be prepared to share your responses to Revolution 2.0 with your fellow students and your faculty/staff facilitator in your Summer Reading discussion group on August 27. You will also be expected to prepare a written response. Instructions to that will be available at your July Orientation sessions and will be posted below.
Please submit your essay electronically by August 22 as instructed under your FSP course number. Please also bring a hard copy of the essay to your discussion session on August 27.