Some 150 years after the first shots were fired, the Civil War still raises questions and strong emotions.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Tiffiny Tung perches on the edge of her office chair, mulling how to explain the importance of successfully melding research, teaching and service into her life’s work at the College of Arts and Science. Each inform and elevate the other, she begins.

She needn’t answer the question, although she has many fine thoughts on the subject. The conversation is punctuated by visits from students turning in research papers or coming to work in the osteology lab. A book Tung is consulting for a research project lies open on her desk. Emails and research permits come in as she plans a summer field project in Peru that will include undergraduate research participants. A grant application for plastic skeletons has just gone into the mail.

Nancy Farese was once again on foreign soil, reflecting on differences. This time it was a Ugandan village on the banks of the Nile, watching a woman in a “teeny, tiny hut” without electricity use a new solar-powered flashlight.

The battle erupts every time the economy nosedives: skills training versus education. With unemployment high and the future uncertain, should students focus on a trade or a broad-based education? Employers, corporate recruiters and education experts say short-term thinking will cost you in job growth and lifetime income potential. Their preference? The liberal arts education.

Their preference? The liberal arts education.

Long on critical thinking, writing, communication, problem solving, and development of analysis and synthesis of data, a liberal arts education fosters a capacity for lifelong professional success.

Having a conversation with Shirley Ogletree Corriher, BA’56, is like taking a ride on a verbal roller coaster. Her voice swoops and swirls, plunges downward and then rises to a crescendo.

Tony N. Brown’s office is in Garland Hall, exactly where one might expect to find a scholar in the College of Arts and Science. But the associate professor of sociology might not be in, as his teaching, research projects and secondary appointments take him all over campus. It’s a good thing he has no real commute. All of campus is accessible by foot or bike from his apartment on the second floor of a first-year residence hall.

Imagine learning history, politics and international law from the very people who made it.

That’s what students enrolled in Humanities 161–The Iraq War experienced in a very tangible way.

Over the course of the 2009 fall semester, class speakers ranged from former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to the retired Army officer and West Point professor who literally wrote the book on the counterinsurgency strategy. Students were captivated by details of efforts to keep detention facilities from becoming breeding grounds for insurgency and of a soldier’s fight to stay alive. They heard of new military strategies and major mistakes that provided future lessons.

But not all of the firsthand experience came via guest speakers.

From the Peabody esplanade, Cohen Memorial Hall looks as it has for more than 80 years: a beautiful, classic structure in keeping with the Jeffersonian-inspired mall design.

The seeds of his career started when Tom Dillehay was a child living on the same street as a professor of archeology at Southern Methodist University.

Some locations just seem to nurture and foster artists of all types. The heat and history of Mississippi gave us William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.