Peals of laughter rang throughout the auditorium of the Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts in New Albany from the students gathered there May 20.
The arts center, a multi-purpose facility that serves as both an auditorium for the New Albany-Plain Local School District and a performing arts venue, has hosted comedians in the past, but the punchlines on this particular day were coming from an unlikely source: a historian.
Focused and interested, the students – who came from Columbus Academy, as well as New Albany, Gahanna Lincoln, Granville and Licking Heights high schools – listened to a half-hour lecture full of amusing and educational anecdotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian.
Goodwin spoke on the unique leadership qualities of presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During the second half of the program, she took questions from the audience regarding her participation in a few Ken Burns documentaries, the making of Steven
Spielberg’s film Lincoln and her abiding love for baseball, especially the Boston Red Sox.
The event was part of the New Albany Community Foundation’s new lecture series: the Jefferson Series, created to feature “some of the world’s most compelling and esteemed thinkers of our time,” according to the foundation.
This year, the series’ inaugural season, speakers included entrepreneurs T. Boone Pickens and Les Wexner Feb. 5, and an unfortunate cancellation of the June 12 event featuring former U.S. Senator and astronaut John Glenn, due to health concerns. Goodwin’s engagement was the only one to feature a student-specific lecture, though many students attended the other two lectures as well, says foundation President Craig Mohre.
Education is one of the four major areas of impact the New Albany Foundation focuses on, Mohre says.
“We believe that lifelong learning is a really important part of a full life, and so the vision – not just behind the arts center, but the endowments that support the arts center – was to have (those) opportunities, and the student lectures are a big part of that,” he says. “From the very first time we brought in a speaker, which was (historian) David McCullough (in 2002 and 2003), we could see the impact he had on the students. … From the moment when that magic happened between McCullough and the students, we decided we would keep doing that every year.”
Eight other student lectures over the last 12 years were arranged in association with the foundation’s annual fundraiser, A Remarkable Evening, which also brings in renowned speakers from all over the world – including biographer Walter Isaacson in 2008, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2011 and, most recently, Dr. Paul Farmer in 2012.
“We literally had to pull Isaacson away from the students, who had rushed to the stage to speak with him. He didn’t want to leave the students, but he had a flight to catch,” Mohre says.
Farmer, in particular, made a big impact on the students as he discussed his nonprofit Partners in Health, which provides free health care to people in need around the world, including in Haiti. New Albany High School students raised $25,000 to support a tilapia-fishing operation at an orphanage in Haiti after hearing Farmer speak.
“We believe that genuine learning is rooted in curiosity, not rote memorization,” Mohre says. “The speakers the foundation brings to interact with the students … inspire a curiosity in the students to want to learn more about figures in history or current events.”
Count New Albany High School junior Camilla Suarez among those inspired by Goodwin at the May 20 lecture.
“I have always possessed a great love of history, and I am greatly interested in pursuing a career in politics,” Suarez says. “Ms. Goodwin’s lecture truly amplified my desire to increase my knowledg
e of the American government and to delve further into my interest in the political sphere.”
The speakers, too, enjoy their time with the students.
“It’s fun to have both the school setting like this and then the setting tonight with the community,” Goodwin says after the student lecture, adding that she doesn’t often speak to high school students. “I love this when this happens because I loved teaching when I was teaching at Harvard. You forget the fun of the enthusiasm and the rowdiness. It’s all great.”
Lisa Aurand is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
