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Visiting Assistant Professor of History John Ragosta pondered the question of whether President Thomas Jefferson would have opposed the official Thanksgiving holiday in an invited column on the University of Virginia Thoughts from the Lawn blog that appeared on Nov. 5. Ragosta is the author of the forthcoming book Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed.

Hamilton students won the first round of the College Fed Challenge competition  on Friday, Nov. 9. The team of presenters - seniors Eric Boole, Danny Kaufman, Aislinn Shea and Amanda Thorman - advance to the semi-final round of the challenge to be held at the New York Federal Reserve on Wednesday, November 14. The first round was hosted by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.

Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Professor of Government, was quoted extensively in a National Public Radio website article that addressed how the GOP might react going forward in light of Governor Mitt Romney’s defeat. Posted hours after President Obama delivered his victory speech, “Republican Response Likely To Be Tactical, Not Transformative” appeared in NPR’s It’s all politics column.

Tracy Adler, director of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, spoke with WAMC host Joe Donahue on the station’s daily Roundtable morning show about the museum’s opening and current exhibition. The Oct. 25 interview can be heard on the WAMC site.

A feature story appearing on the Forbes website titled “What's Better Than College Art History 101? A Campus Museum,” features the college’s new Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. The Oct. 22 article penned by Hamilton alumna Lynn Matthews Douglass ’81 addresses “a new trend on liberal arts campuses to build museums to teach art.”

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Vanderbilt University have established a committee to examine emerging national-scale digital projects and their potential to help transform higher education in terms of scholarly productivity, teaching, cost-efficiency and sustainability.  President Joan Hinde Stewart has been appointed to this group, the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education, which comprises college and university presidents and provosts, deans, university librarians and association heads.

With total payroll exceeding $23.1 billion for 373,800 direct, indirect and induced jobs, New York’s independent colleges and universities are major source of jobs in New York State, according to a Center for Governmental Research (CGR) analysis released today by the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU). The announcement came during an Independent Higher Education Forum on Oct. 16 in Utica.

Hamilton students are now pursuing their studies on all seven continents. On Oct. 10, Chief Scientist Eugene Domack, the J. W. Johnson Family Professorship of Environmental Studies, began an 18-day cruise to Antarctica along with two Hamilton students and two alumni. Students are writing blog updates about their trip each day.

Using examples from today’s political landscape, Professor of Government P. Gary Wyckoff examined elements of critical thinking in an essay titled “What Exactly Is Critical Thinking,” published by InsideHigherEd in its Oct. 11 edition. “As I prepared for the start of classes this fall, I tried to pinpoint the critical thinking skills I really want my students to learn,” wrote Wyckoff.  “And as I listened to public debates on everything from tax policy to Obamacare, five essential thinking skills seemed to be missing, again and again.”

In a Religious Dispatches essay, “‘Cult’ Cinema Comes of Age,” Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate examined recent films that focus on cults including The Master, the latest in the group. In the Oct. 7 article, Plate described The Master as “emblematic of a new, more nuanced treatment of cults in the movies,” and “more or less … the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the birth of Scientology.”