The words ‘Scholarship in Action: Insights, Incite, Change,’ have been seen on posters throughout the Syracuse University campus, the SU website and even promotional lanyards and water bottles since last fall.

Still, some students and faculty have remained unsure of their meaning.

Tuesday afternoon, Chancellor Nancy Cantor revealed the current state of the initiative in what serves as a sort of State of the Union in regard to SU accomplishments on campus and around the globe.

Speaking to a packed Hendricks Chapel, Cantor had 40 minutes worth of faculty and student accomplishments to back up and further explain the broad plans of ‘engaging the world’ that she first laid out for the campus in 2005.

In Cantor’s inaugural year in 2005, she explained it was her “vision…for building the creative campus.” It was her goal to shape the faculty, students and programs.

Cantor initially described the program as “reinforcing engagement with the world by sustaining a presence in the community, across the nation and around the globe.” Since then, she has attempted to bring the world to the SU campus and to send its students off the Hill, out into the world. This idea – sharing culture and knowledge – was the focus of her speech Tuesday, titled ‘The Two-Way Street of Scholarship in Action.”

Within the first 10 minutes of the afternoon’s address, two students were honored with having achieved both academic excellence and real world experience in their fields -with getting off the SU campus and succeeding. Cantor said she has even spent the last month outside Syracuse – in Los Angeles and New York City – spreading her vision of global engagement of Scholarship in Action.

“We’ve had the chance to highlight the remarkable work our faculty and students are doing,” Cantor said, of sharing her Scholarship in Action program with others.

She listed a broad range of projects and campus additions that will live up to her idea of a global collaboration. Included is the arrival of eight Michelangelo works never seen in the United States, scheduled to be brought to the SU campus in August.

The effort to bring the works to campus displays the vision of “engaging with the world through the lens of history and with a telescope on the future,” Cantor said.

“That integration is as important today as it was for Michelangelo in the tumultuous times of the Medici,” she said.

The chancellor discussed further integration between the real world and the classroom – a main feature of the Scholarship in Action vision – in regard to the Cold Case Initiative that will investigate and conduct research on unsolved court cases for academic credit. This year saw the addition of the course “Investigating and Reopening Unsolved Civil Rights Era Murders,” which was developed from a group of law students researching an unsolved Ku Klux Klan killing in 1964 in Louisiana.

“Scholarship in Action combines knowing and doing, teaching and discovery, as well as engagement,” Cantor said, further helping to define the all-encompassing term. “Because the university’s work is embedded in the work of the world, we must think about local-global resonances and take seriously the specificity of the local and the generality of the global.”

During her April 2005 address, Cantor said she hoped that because of Scholarship in Action, in five and ten years, SU would be celebrated as an entire university – not only by individual schools’ success, but also as a place “where excellence is tested in the marketplace.”

And after Tuesday’s discussion, the SU community may have a better idea of what exactly it means to be a part of Scholarship in Action.

Ellen Beck, SU regional director of development for the West Coast, said Cantor has energized the entire university.

“There exists increased engagement with the larger world, and this global expansion has enabled the student body to do so much more,” Beck said.

David Farby, a freshman broadcast journalism major, finds the concept of Scholarship in Action powerful.

‘It’s taking current activities and what we learn here and implementing them off campus and in the world.’

Published on March 18, 2008 at 12:00 pm