Every year, Furman Engaged! offers students a unique opportunity to present research, read papers, and showcase artistic and musical accomplishments in a setting similar to a major academic conference. This annual event showcases the best Furman has to offer, but that positive reality should not prevent us from critically analyzing what we can do to make it better and clarify a vision for the role Furman Engaged! plays in the university’s educational mission. The greatest danger for Furman Engaged! is that the event is merely a perfunctory requirement and a platform for presentation, not an opportunity for continued learning, discussion, and engagement.
This potential danger manifests itself in a number of ways. First and perhaps most clearly, students who receive certain scholarships or grants like Furman Advantage are required to present on their research and internships. Either academic departments are responsible for organizing events and panels in which majors discuss their experiences, or students are responsible for presenting a poster summarizing their internship.
The presentation requirement makes sense for students who receive the grant to do original research, but in other cases, the work that a student does over the summer may not lend itself to a presentation format — for example, students cannot easily present or make a poster about internships during which they worked extensively with private or classified information. Additionally, this can place an undue burden on departments to organize internship panels and events instead of working to organize other, more focused events that allow for the in-depth exploration of a topic or idea. Students who receive Furman Advantage grants or participate in internships should have the opportunity to publicly discuss their experiences, but the current requirement that everyone who receives Furman Advantage should present at Furman Engaged! causes the event to be overscheduled with posters and presentations that many not fit well within the model of Furman Engaged!
For too many students, Furman Engaged! is just a Friday without class, and many attend only events and sessions within their own areas of study or that they are required to attend as part of a class. So many events are scheduled simultaneously that students must choose to attend certain programs or sessions over many others, decisions often made based on one’s commitment to a department or area of study. This reality embodies the danger of Furman Engaged! becoming a collage of perfunctory requirements, stifling the interdisciplinary dialogues that Furman Engaged! exists to foster by not providing opportunities for students to consider the work of their peers in other departments.
Furman Engaged! is an essential part of the university’s commitment to engaged learning, an education experience that teaches students by forcing them to confront the realities of the world and act to respond. As an event, Furman Engaged! is not fundamentally flawed. In fact, many of these issues might be addressed by expanding the format over multiple days, or over a weekend. An extended time period would give students more opportunities to present their work and reduce the number of overlapping sessions, a move which might facilitate greater interdisciplinary discussion. This would make Furman Engaged! feel less like an obligation or showcase and more like an occasion for the kind of intellectual debate and discussion that it is Furman’s mission to encourage.