Dean's Message

The new academic year is well underway, and there is much to celebrate:

• Enrollments are strong—up 40% in St. Louis undergraduate A&S programs alone.
• Our innovative Global MA in International Relations has enrolled 26 students, requiring two separate cohorts—one starting in London, the other in Leiden, each spending a term at all five campuses before completing the MA.
• Counseling is now almost 2,000 students strong in 30 locations.
• We have three new full-time faculty members in St. Louis, to be featured in these pages, beginning with Dean Eckhoff in this issue.
• We have a new Associate Dean, Dr. Sarita Cargas. You may recognize the name—her father, Dr. Harry Cargas, was for 35 years one of the most popular and renowned professors at Webster.
• Homecoming brought many alums back to campus—most notably, it featured the 60th year reunion for the class of 1947, starring Mag Herman Seaman, winner of the 2007 Loretto Award for humanitarian service. Mag has done inspiring work for decades to promote peace and social justice, most recently as a leader of Women to Women for Peace.

In addition, we proudly welcome a new member of our Global Thinking family, the Global Thinking TV show. Created by the College of Arts & Sciences to highlight the international aspects of people and institutions in the St. Louis area, local station HEC-TV has already shown two episodes—one on the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the other on Monsanto.

In early November a third episode, featuring the International Institute, will be unveiled. If you have no access to HEC-TV, you can easily view them at our Web site at www.webster.edu/depts/artsci.

This issue of Global Thinking, the e-zine, leads with a profile of Nancy Edmonds Paull and Tim Noelker, college friends who received our Outstanding Alum Awards in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Nancy and Tim personify the traits that are easily associated with a Webster education: They’re dedicated and caring, and they use their gifts for positive change in the world.

These same qualities describe renowned psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, who was the 2007 recipient of the Dr. Elizabeth Ortner-Chopin Visiting Professorship at our Vienna campus. You may be familiar with Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which grimly showed the world how extreme social situations can lead people to commit acts they previously thought unthinkable. Zimbardo recently has espoused what he calls a “psychology of liberation.” Our article discusses his efforts to free society from psychological prisons like shyness and shame.

We also profile a remarkable international relations student—Jackie Stewart, who recently interned with the U.S. State Department in Bern, Switzerland—as well as our new physicist, Dean Eckhoff.

Welcome to a new year of Global Thinking.

David Carl Wilson