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College of Liberal Arts
cla@umn.edu
612-624-9839
cla@umn.edu
612-624-9839
Meet Amy Pason
She rethinks higher education
The Old Buffalo Award gave aspiring professor Amy Pason time to organize a conference on academic integrity.
It might be hard to find someone more dedicated to academic integrity than Amy Pason.
A doctoral student in communications studies, she was an organizer of “Rethinking the University,” a three-day on-campus conference that focused on higher education in the 21st century. It addressed the relationship between research and corporate support, academic labor, and the value of the liberal arts, drawing faculty and students from the University of Minnesota and across the nation.
She expanded that inquiry in her master's thesis, examining tensions between industrial and democratic aims, pressures to market education as vocational training, and what happens when students become individual consumers rather than members of a collective body with shared interests. “The conference was a product of my research interests, and it was in part an effort to create in the real world what I envision the idea of education to be.”
Her current dissertation work, on the peace movement, explores how society might reward action that works for collective good rather than individual gain.
Old Buffalo Award
Receiving the Old Buffalo Award, which is given to students who show evidence of becoming independent scholars, meant she did not have to take outside work to pay for living expenses. “It was like being funded for a 9-to-5 job to think,” Pason says. “That's necessary to be able to do these projects, to push and come up with new ideas.”
She plans to be a professor and, of course, motivate her students to “see how it all fits together in the larger picture.”
The Old Buffalo Award honors retired faculty. How fitting.
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Phone: 612-625-5031
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