Raising a flag
Speaking of tell tale signs (I’m refering to Debbie’s post below – that’s how it works in this blog world. The new rises to the top!), did you get a peak at the flags circling the Schmidt pond this morning? Bright, brilliantly colored and softly waving. All the characteristics common to the brand new. This too is a sign that the new year is upon us.
Being still something of a newbie on campus, I had to fact check this flag raising act with a campus expert to verify my hunch that this was, in fact, an annual occurence. Turns out, it happens more regularly than I thought. While the raising of the crisp new flags is an annual, year-starting tradition, it also occurs every February. This news comes from someone who should know – Matt Chaloux. I wondered, as you might, why February? Matt’s response (via email): “Doesn’t everyone know that February is International Flag Month?” writ Matt, our director of aux services. “Not really it is just every six months give or take a few weeks.”
Of course, the timing for this face lift couldn’t have been better. In its annual rankings issue out last week, US News & World Reports again had Lynn atop the South-Master’s rankings of the universities with the highest percentage of international students. With all those flags fresh out of their boxes, we were ready for our close up!
The U.S. News rankings did have one surprise, for me at least, this year – Lynn was also shown to be one of the most generous institutions in our category when doling out need- and merit-based aid. SAS confirmed the numbers, proving that we’ve been quietly making a private education a reality for not just international students – but for all kinds of students. Check out the details in our press release (www.lynn.edu/news).
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Interesting note I discovered in a two-week-old edition of the Writer’s Almanac – the radio program hosted by Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegon and Prairie Home Companion fame, who obviously has a crack team of historians working for him up there in the land of lakes. I’m always impressed with the historical tidbits they pick up, though I have noticed some annual poem repeats.
Anywho, this (below) I’ve lifted from the Tuesday, Aug. 14, Almanac email (distributed for those of us whose local NPR station doesn’t carry the 3-minute morning broadcast each day):
“Today is the anniversary of the day on which President Harry Truman announced that the Second World War had come to an end. You might argue that more human beings were happy on this day in 1945 than on any other day in history. It was the worst war in history. An estimated 60 million people died; about two-thirds of them were civilians…
“And one thing that commentators noticed at the time was that nobody shouted, “We’ve won the war!” or anything about triumph. They simply shouted, “The war is over!”
For my generation, the idea of such a humbling and terrifying time – not to mention a day of such widespread elation and relief – is hard to fathom. I’d be interested to hear what some of you remember from that time.
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Speaking of Truman, my wife and I had our first trip to Key West a few weeks back and stopped by the Little White House. The exhibit behind the gift shop has a glass case containing a golf shirt worn by Truman. It was much smaller than I would have expected. I’ll have to ask our resident Truman expert (that would be Robert Watson, our new American Studies coordinator) about that… the former pres looked quite the imposing figure in that fabled photo of him hoisting the “Dewey Defeats Truman†headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune.
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Here with no fanfare and almost no thought, I’ve gone and completed my first post on our new Lynn community blog, “Knight Writer.†Don’t be a stranger. Let us know what you think!