Spring is a time to slow down, smell the flowers, and get free art. At least that is what you can do in Murphy Park on Thursday, Apr. 21 from noon to 3 p.m.
Painting and book students invite the campus and community to celebrate “Instructions for a Slower World” in honor of Earth Day 2011. The collaborative artwork sprouting in the garden and trees at the center of the park is a combination of painted totems and handmade paper created by Tara Sweeney’s beginning painting class and Regula Russelle’s paper and book class.
As part of the Earth Day 2011 challenge to create a billion acts of green, students will be giving away the handmade paper artwork.
You can’t be sure what senior English majors would do when given the choice between writing a paper or reading James Joyce’s 265,000-word novel Ulysses at the end of one the last classes of their academic career. English majors presumably love reading, but they are also the people who say they’d rather write a paper than take a test.
It’s Undergraduate Research Week, as resolved by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. Across the nation, colleges and universities will be highlighting student research projects and hosting events this week to discuss the importance of research in undergraduate education.
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2011 Distinguished Teaching and Learning Awards. These awards, the result of nominations by full-time faculty and staff members, recognize individuals who have made exemplary contributions to creating an engaging academic learning environment through teaching, scholarship, and mentoring and advising. This year’s recipients of the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Learning Awards are:
Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Augsburg College has been selected for a second major gift by The Travelers Companies, Inc., for its Travelers EDGE program: Empowering Dreams for Graduation and Employment. This innovative partnership between Travelers and 10 colleges, universities, and college-readiness programs in St. Paul, Hartford (Conn.), and Baltimore targets areas where Travelers has significant operations and where public schools show low retention and graduation rates for low-income and first-generation students. 
The Strommen Executive Speakers Series brings top executive leaders to campus to share their experience with alumni and students. Join us on Thursday, April 7 at 5 p.m. to hear Doug Baker, chairman, president and CEO of Ecolab, Inc.
Cynthia Jones ’81, PhD, physics graduate and Augsburg regent, is a senior staff member in the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Since the Japan earthquake and tsunami, she has been working long hours in their Operations Center to help U.S. officials and the public understand what is happening at the nuclear reactor sites in Japan so that the U.S. can make informed decisions of the situation.