Happy New Year!
In this Issue:
- New football coach!
- President Carter and his WFU connections
- Spring residence hall opening email
- Weather-related info re sorority recruitment
- A couple of articles of interest re: parenting and/or students
Today is the first day back to work following the long Winter Break. I hope you have had a great holiday and have enjoyed having your Deacs home with you! Mine left yesterday (NC State’s first day of classes is today) and I am already missing my ’27.
We had a bit of snow yesterday. It came down steadily mid-afternoon, sometimes as snow, sometimes as sleet, but the ground was warm enough that it only gave us a dusting of snow. It has been quite cold though, and this morning we woke up to freezing rain. As I type this from my home office this morning, I can see drops of ice on tree branches and power lines (UPDATE: by midafternoon the ice had melted). If your Deacs are driving in or around the city, I would urge them to exercise caution while traveling.
Today’s Daily Deac is a bit of catching up on things that happened while we were all on break. It may be a bit of a slow news cycle until all our students move back in this coming weekend, but I will bring you all the info I can 🙂
New football coach!
Right after we shut down for the break, Dave Clawson announced that he was stepping down as head football coach, and Jake Dickert was announced as our new head football coach.
Coach Clawson has had a transformative impact on Wake Forest and on our football program. We are grateful for all the ways he has made this a better place, and are so glad he will remain here as Special Advisor to Vice President and Director of Athletics Currie. Thank you, Coach Clawson!
And we offer a warm welcome to Coach Dickert! He is a veteran of 17 years in football, and becomes the 33rd head coach in Wake Forest history after leading the Washington State University football program since the middle of the 2021 season. We look forward to all the ways he will continue to advance excellence here at Wake Forest!
President Carter and his WFU connections
I suspect everyone saw the sad news that former president Jimmy Carter passed away at the age of 100. But did you know that President Carter had a longtime connection with Wake Forest, visiting us four times?
“Carter made four visits to Wake Forest: a campaign speech in 1976, a foreign policy address in 1978 while he was president, a speech on human rights and diplomacy in 1985, and an address to the New Baptist Covenant in 2009.
Faculty, staff and alumni shared their memories of Carter and his visits to campus.” Read the full story.
We offer our condolences to the Carter family, as well as our gratitude for his contributions to our campus through his visits.
Spring residence hall opening email
The Office of Residence Life and Housing sent this email to resident students today about move-in for the spring semester, which varies based on student status (e.g., student moving in for the first time this year, sorority recruitment participants, and all other students).
Your students should be well aware of their move-in date, but if they aren’t, refer them to their email for instructions.
Weather-related info re sorority recruitment
Women will be starting to arrive tomorrow for sorority recruitment. There is a sizeable storm that may impact a swath of our country, so I reached out to our Fraternity and Sorority Engagement office to see if they had any information they wanted me to share with families.
This is what I have heard from the FSE office:
- For PNMs (Potential New Members, i.e., women going through recruitment): If your travel is delayed due to weather-related concerns, please take the following steps: notify your recruitment counselor (GRC) and complete the excuse form, providing as much detail as possible.
- For current members, we’ve advised them to notify their chapter leadership if they experience any travel delays due to weather.
Please know that the Fraternity and Sorority Engagement office is closely monitoring weather conditions and will continue to do so throughout the week.
A couple of articles of interest re: parenting and/or students
Longtime Daily Deac-ers know I like to share interesting articles when I find them. This one seems especially apropos at the start of the semester: No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort. Here is a taste:
“After 20 years of teaching, I thought I’d heard every argument in the book from students who wanted a better grade. But recently, at the end of a weeklong course with a light workload, multiple students had a new complaint: ‘My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.’
High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge.”
I also read Giving Kids Autonomy Has Some Surprising Results. Here is an excerpt:
“In a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. Employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.
There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and Covid. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks — because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.”
This article is a little more geared towards K-12 schooling and parenting, but for those in the Daily Deacdom with younger kids, it might be helpful (and a good reminder for those of us just with college students that agency helps them too!)
As always, these opinion articles are things on which reasonable people can disagree, but I share them for those who may be interested in chewing on these kinds of topics.
That’s all I have for you today, Deac families. Wishing you a gentle re-entry into work if, like me, this is your first day back 🙂