On The Road Again — This Time With Students

More than a month since I last posted — OK, I've been a bad blogger, but the excuse is that I've been deep in advising and registration and helping students at Simpson reach their goals.

I have been out of town again a couple of times: First, in late October to the annual POD faculty development conference in Pittsburgh, my first trip to the City of Steel. I'm in no hurry to go back. Never been a Steelers or Pirates fan, and the weather was cold, rainy and blustery pretty much the whole time.

More intriguing was an 18-hour (each way) road trip Nov. 16-18 to Fort Benning, Ga., with four Simpson students on one alumna to join a 25,000-strong rally against the U.S.-run Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — better known as the School of the Americas. The Simpson crew is in the photo here: From left to right: Liz, Tom and Caitlyn Finn of Des Moines (Caitlyn graduated from Simpson this past May); Tracy Robson, the pride of Scranton, Iowa; and Courtney Lezanic of Omaha.

Lots of important folks were at the rally: Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; Cynthia McKinney, a congresswoman from Georgia and Green Party presidential candidate; Father Roy Bourgeois, who is founder of the School of the Americas Watch and who visited Simpson a couple of years back. And there was a musical performance from the Indigo Girls, the video of which is here.