Drake Professor of Sociology Nancy Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, shared her expertise around grief and the pressure to “move on” and find “closure” in a recent Yahoo Life article.

In the article, titled, “How those who grieve feel pressured to ‘move on’ — and why that makes the loss hurt even more,” Professor Berns said,

“Closure grew in popularity particularly in the ’90s, but has roots in the ’60s and ’70s, with the rise of pop psychology and victim survivor movements.” The “made-up concept” has been exploited by groups including politicians pushing the death penalty and those in the funeral industry, she said.

“It carries a lot of baggage and can create more harm than help for those who are grieving. We grieve because we love. Even as it changes over time and people learn how to carry it, it’s still going to be part of our lives in many ways.”

But when people receive messages about closure, she adds, “What it sounds like is, ‘You don’t want to listen to my pain,’ and it shuts them down and isolates them further.”

Read the full article.

The Anderson Gallery was awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant of $20,000 for the upcoming exhibition of artists Duane Slick and Martin Smick.

Duane Slick is an artist of Native American descent, the Meskwaki Nation of Iowa and the Ho-Chunk Nation of Nebraska. His acrylic paintings blend the subjects of oral and visual Native American traditions with a focus on trickster strategies and modernist/post-modernist painting histories.

Martin Smick is an artist who has been living and working in Rhode Island since 2007 and has taught in the Painting Department at Rhode Island School of Design since 2013. Both artists have exhibited nationally and have collaborated on two previous exhibitions.

As collaborators, Slick and Smick are conscious of their respective cultural identities and have been able to create exhibitions that engage in issues surrounding Native culture. The grant will fund their site-specific installation at the Anderson Gallery that will be open to the public from Oct. 26–Dec. 10, 2023.

Lilah Anderson, Anderson Gallery Exhibitions and Community Engagement Manager 

Three psychology students, Alex Chavez, Brittany Scott, and Bridgette Browning received a Psi Chi Award for their presentation, “The PSASE Project: Impact of a Vocational Intervention on Application Self-Efficacy,” at the 95th annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association Association in Chicago.  These students worked under the mentorship of Meaghan Rowe-Johnson, assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Chris Klietherme, Associate Professor of Psychology

The Office of Community Engaged Learning is proud to announce four recipients of the 2023 President’s and Engaged Campus Awards from the Iowa & Minnesota Campus Compact (IAMNCC) in recognition of their outstanding commitment to community engagement and civic responsibility. This year, 86 awardees were selected from 55 colleges and universities across the two-state network.

The following Drake recipients were recognized at an in-person ceremony on April 13, 2023, at St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, MN.

• Matthew Williams, a senior majoring in accounting, was recognized with the Presidents’ Student Leadership Award. Williams has been an advocate for people with disabilities and involved with Easter Seals his entire life. On campus he has built a community of students, faculty and staff dedicated to developing the resources needed to create a more inclusive campus environment.
• Alejandro Hernandez, Dean of the Zimpleman College of Business was recognized with the Presidents’ Civic Engagement Leadership Award. Dean Hernandez has led a rebrand of the college focused on ‘Business as a Force for Good’, launched the Dean’s Honor Roll for Social Impact, and created a new Social Impact Research and Outreach Award to recognize faculty and staff contributions to improving society through their research and service.
• Homeward, Polk County’s homelessness planning organization was recognized with the Presidents’ Community Partner Award. Following up on a one-time community-engaged learning course partnership, Homeward worked with Drake University to commission a first of its kind community engaged research project to provide a platform for 157 people experiencing homelessness to tell their stories and the findings are being used to inform local public policy.
• Elizabeth Talbert, assistant professor of Sociology was recognized with the Engaged Campus Award for Community Collaboration. Dr. Talbert has spent the last two years building relationships with affordable housing agencies, the staff that run them, and the people who are served (or not) by them. What began with a sociology methods service-learning project morphed into a collaboration involving Talbert, Dr. Matthew Record, assistant professor of Public Policy and American Politics, 8 students, and the members of the Polk County Homeless Coordinating Council to examine why individuals face barriers to shelter and permanent housing in the Des Moines community.
• Sprout Learning Garden and Food Forest received Honorable Mention for the Engaged Campus Award for Emerging Innovation. Sprout, located at 1300 30^th Street, is home to more than 60 food-producing trees and shrubs, hundreds of edible perennial plants, pollinator-attracting flowers and natives, three permaculture swales, a half-acre learning garden, gathering spaces, and a walking trail.

Additionally, Marguerite Stoffel, a third-year business student, was selected for the 2023 National Campus Compact Newman Civic Fellowship!  One of her key projects on campus has been supporting the administration of the Dean’s Honor Roll for Social Impact and serving as an ambassador to business college students on how to meaningfully engage with the community.

Iowa & Minnesota Campus Compact (IAMNCC) is a network of 55 colleges and universities committed to strengthening the capacity for civic engagement and campus-community partnership in the service of

Contact: Renee Sedlacek Lee, Director of Community Engaged Learning, 515-271-2454, or renee.sedlacek@drake.edu.

Renee Sedlacek Lee, Community Engaged Learning

Drake Law School recently earned an outstanding top 20 ranking from preLaw Magazine’s list of “Best Law Schools for Practical Training.” Law schools were graded based on key offerings such as clinics, externships, simulation courses, and moot court participation. The annual rankings were featured in the Spring 2023 issue of the magazine.

“At Drake Law, we like to say that ‘practice makes professional,’” said Drake Law Dean Jerry Anderson. “Our mission is to create ‘complete professionals’ – graduates who not only know what the law is, but how to use it in the real world to serve their clients and their communities. This recognition shows we are succeeding in that goal.”

Drake Law School provides numerous experiential learning opportunities to students, beginning in their first year with two intra-school moot court competitions and the unique First-Year Trial Practicum. Drake is the only law school in the country where all first-year classes shift to a campus courtroom for a week, enabling students to view an actual state or federal trial. The Trial Practicum dissects every phase of a trial, from jury selection to verdict. Not only do students witness a trial, but they also have opportunities to discuss the proceedings with the presiding judge, lawyers, and jurors.

Drake Law’s legal clinics give students the opportunity to build valuable professional experience by working with clients in real-world situations. Clinics include the Children’s Rights Clinic, Criminal Defense Clinic, General Civil Practice Clinic, Transactional/Entrepreneurial Clinic, Refugee Clinic, and Wrongful Convictions Clinic.

As the only law school in the capital city of Des Moines, Drake Law students have countless opportunities to participate in internships, externships, and clerkships. Students have served as legislative interns, drafted legislation, tried and won felony jury trials, interned for the Iowa Supreme Court, worked for government agencies and nonprofits, and more.

Drake Law students also develop practical skills in interschool competitions at the regional and national levels. The Law School sponsors nine Moot Court, Mock Trial, and skills teams, which annually are among the best in the nation.

Professor Suzan Pritchett, Director of Clinical and Experiential Education, oversees much of Drake Law’s practice-based training. She sums up the Law School’s approach: “Many law schools like to say they teach students to think like a lawyer. We teach them to be one.”

About Drake Law School

For over 150 years, Drake Law School has helped launch successful careers, providing a legal education that emphasizes experiential learning backed by a solid foundation in legal theory. As the only law school in the capital city of Des Moines, students gain unparalleled access to internships, externships, and clerkships. Drake Law graduates leverage the experience gained from hands-on learning and are ready to put the law in action from day one, joining an alumni network of 6,000+ who use their law degree in all 50 states and across the globe—in every facet of the legal profession. Learn more about a legal education at Drake.

Taylor Johnson, Law School

Professor Mary Edrington was recently named as the recipient of the 2023 Hugh G. Wales American Marketing Association Faculty Advisor of the Year. This award, announced at the 2023 International Collegiate AMA Conference in New Orleans last week, recognizes her outstanding contributions to our AMA Collegiate program. It is a notable recognition given there are over 320 AMA collegiate chapters worldwide. Professor Edrington has served as the Drake AMA Advisor from 1987 to 1993 and from 2003 on.  The Drake chapter has approximately 50 student members.  This award program began in 1977 and is named in honor of Dr. Hugh G. Wales, who was instrumental in founding the collegiate chapter at the University of Illinois–Champaign, and served as its first faculty advisor. Congratulations, Professor Edrington!

Drake University students from the College of Arts and Sciences were selected as finalists in the 2023 OpenAir Carbon Removal Challenge. This worldwide competition tasked team to create new processes, approaches, and prototypes to remove carbon from the land, water, or air. The Drake team will present their design to judges at New York University on April 21.  The students’ design called SPARCC: Semi-Passive Algae Rooted Carbon Capture device collects carbon through photosynthesis while also cleaning local rivers of nitrate pollution due to agricultural runoff.

Congratulations to Tyler Bartolome, Bryan Coronado, Anna Miller, and Betsy Richardson and faculty advisor Prof. Edward Kelley.

Virtual tickets to the event can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/carbon-removal-challenge-finalist-showcase-tickets-586069348197

— Edward Kelley, College of Arts & Sciences

The Principal Global Citizenship Award was presented during the 2023 Global Citizen Forum in early March. The award recognizes Drake faculty or staff who have made outstanding contributions to global engagement and internationalization of the campus and curriculum.

The 2023 recipient of the Principal Global Citizenship Award is Jeff Kappen, associate professor of international business in the Zimpleman College of Business.

Kappen arrived at Drake University in 2012, and from the beginning he has contributed to a multitude of projects and programs at Drake that have shaped the global mindset of students and built the global and intercultural capacity of Drake faculty and staff. Kappen has been active in engaging with many of Drake’s international partners. He has conducted collaborative research, taught faculty seminars and short-term courses on their campuses, and developed joint curricular programs. His work in this area has significantly contributed to Drake’s profile as a global university.

Kappen also provides direct advising support to more than fifty students each year on how they can achieve their study abroad goals. He has led short-term travel seminars for Drake students on programs to China, Italy, Uganda, and Mexico – impacting over 200 students. Many of these program participants have been student-athletes, beginning with the men’s and women’s soccer teams travelling to Mexico in 2015 as part of a unique model pairing international competition with academic experiences using the foreign destination as the classroom. He returned to Mexico with the soccer teams in 2019, led a women’s basketball trip to Italy and traveled with the entire football team to China.

Kappen has also notably supported the Mandela Washington Fellowship at Drake, the flagship program of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) that Drake has hosted since 2016. Kappen has taught leadership and international business curriculum to 150 Fellows from across sub-Saharan Africa. He has also served as a mentor to many Fellows and continues to monitor some of their projects virtually. Kappen was awarded a Reciprocal Exchange by the U.S. Department of State in 2021 and spent two weeks in Ivory Coast delivering seminars on entrepreneurship while working with the U.S. Embassy to promote higher education.

On the Drake campus, Kappen has taught “Business 070: Globalization” since he arrived in 2012. He has worked collaboratively with students on global research and takes part in the Drake iBiz Young Scholars Program. Off-campus, Kappen has helped position Drake as a global hub in the Des Moines community through working with the Iowa Economic Development Authority and the Iowa International Center.

“Dr. Kappen’s efforts to develop responsible global citizens at Drake, and his work in creating impactful global partnerships have been transformative. His lifelong commitment to internationalization and his embodiment of a global mindset is a contagious inspiration to campus. We are very fortunate to have Kappen as a member of the Drake community, and he is very deserving of this prestigious award.” – Provost Sue Mattison, in her remarks at the Global Citizen Forum

— Hannah Sappenfield, Global Engagement