TV-10 and the School of Communication will host a retirement reception for Rick Kempf on Monday, September 14 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Fell Hall basement. Everyone is welcome to attend. Kempf was a broadcast engineer at ISU for nearly 32 years, officially retiring on July 1. He began his career at ISU in Media Services Television but was soon assigned duties at TV-10, fixing and maintaining equipment and making sure the daily newscast made it onto the local cable system. He is an ISU graduate with a BS in Industrial Technology, and he is a veteran of the United States Navy. In addition, he is a trained weather spotter for the Lincoln Weather Service and is an avid ham radio operator.

Interim Dean Payne

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Friends of the College,

I’d like to welcome our new faculty and staff, as well as our continuing faculty and staff, to the start of the new academic year. You will have an opportunity to meet our new faculty at the Fall Address on Thursday, September 3 at 3:30 p.m. in the Old Main Room in the Bone Student Center. Please plan to attend.

Due to the expansion of the Stevenson Hall renovation project, the College office will remain located in 315 Williams Hall. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we may be of service to you. I look forward to seeing you at the many events and activities scheduled throughout the next four months. Meanwhile, best wishes for a productive fall semester.

Homecoming 2009

The College of Arts and Sciences encourages all faculty, staff, students, and alumni to mark their calendars and plan to participate in ISU’s 2009 Homecoming celebration, “Rock the Red,” scheduled for October 12-18. A new addition to this year’s activities is the Great Urban Race, an event founded by ISU alumnus Joseph Reynolds ’03. Inspired by The Amazing Race television show, teams have to race to checkpoints and complete various tasks as they try to win the first-place cash prize. The first 25 teams to cross the finish line of this cross-campus race will qualify for an annual national race in which the winner receives $10,000. ISU’s race begins at the Alumni Center at 11 a.m. on Friday, October 16. Friday evening’s activities include a torchlight parade, hoopfest, and a bonfire and pep rally for all to enjoy.

Noha Shawki and Michaelene Cox, assistant professors in the Department of Politics and Government, recently co-edited Negotiating Sovereignty and Human Rights: Actors and Issues in Contemporary Human Rights Politics. The book explores the relationship between sovereignty and human rights in the post-Cold War era. Its publisher (Ashgate, UK) notes that it offers “a direct challenge to entrenched notions of state sovereignty and represents a departure from established ways of policy making.” Both Shawki and Cox are the authors of chapters in the book. Shawki’s chapter is titled, “A New Actor in Human Rights Politics? Transgovernmental Networks of National Human Rights Institutions,” and Cox’s chapter is titled “Viewing the Millennium Development Goals through Prisms of IR Theory: An Intersection of Human Rights and State Interests.” Other chapters in the volume explore a variety of human rights issues, including truth commissions, the small arms crisis, humanitarian intervention, and the International Criminal Court.

Jamal Nassar, Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, observed that the book is “…a superb contribution to the scant literature on this very important subject. Its insightful chapters represent a challenge to the usual discourse on the subject.”