Tuesday, June 20, 2023
7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. (EDT)
After the Bell: Governing Wabash with Dr. Shamira Gelbman
Wabash "rings-out" a new class to our alumni ranks each year. After the Bell offers opportunities to come back to the Wabash classroom and attend virtual liberal arts sessions with current and former faculty and staff members. Join us for this live virtual event being offered for Wabash alumni, spouses, partners, parents, and friends.
We often refer to Wabash College as a community – that is, as a social group whose members live, work, and play in close proximity and share a sense of place-based connection.
Thinking about Wabash in this way raises many questions; among them: how is the College governed? That is, how are decisions made on behalf of the community? For any given decision, who are the stakeholders, who participates, who ultimately calls the shots, and how does it all go down? How do the outcomes of the College’s decision-making processes affect different community members’ experiences and sense of belonging? How has this all changed over time, and are there ways in which Wabash governance might be improved as we approach the College’s third century?
Last spring, Dr. Shamira Gelbman taught a new course called Governing Wabash, in which students grappled with these and other questions as they learned about the College’s founding, historical development, and current governance practices. In this After the Bell session, Dr. Gelbman will talk about why she taught Governing Wabash, how it went, what she learned from the experience, and her initial plans for the next time it is offered.
Dr. Shamira Gelbman
Dr. Gelbman has been on the Wabash faculty since 2012 and is an Associate Professor and Department Chair in Political Science. In addition to a wide range of courses on American politics, she has taught a freshman tutorial on bodybuilding and interdisciplinary courses on the civil rights movement, immigration policy, social movements, and health. She is the author of The Civil Rights Lobby, a book about how nearly a hundred civil rights, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to advocate for federal civil rights laws in the 1950s and ’60s.