2008 Notre Dame Forum

Today, the University hosted its fourth annaul Notre Dame Forum. The topic was sustainable energy. For those of us unfamiliar with the Forum,

The Notre Dame Forum is an annual event that aims to engage Notre Dame students in intellectual discussion about an issue significant to the nation, the world, and/or the Church. Instituted by Notre Dame’s President, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., during his inaugural weekend in 2005, the Forum aspires to serve our wider society by staging interdisciplinary debate and discussion that calls upon the moral and spiritual values that help define Notre Dame as a Catholic university.

The idea is to gather experts from all different backgrounds to discuss the challenging issues of our time. Then, the University encourages students, faculty, alumni, and staff to continue the discussion in dorms, classes, and everyday life on campus. In other words, its sort of a theme for the academic year. The focus of the 2008 Forum on Sustainable Energy is described on the website as:

The 2008 Forum on Sustainable Energy invites us to take note of the issues; to review a variety of perspectives—from science, the Church, and the media; and to come to an understanding of our own individual accountability.

Take a look at this video, which describes the speakers at this year's Forum. Even better, take a look at this funnier video featuring the Notre Dame Leprecaun. (The Leprecaun is about the only way to make the issue of sustainable energy funny.)

In terms of research being conducted on campus, there are endless possibilities. For example, did you know there was a Notre Dame Energy Center, a Center for Building Communities, a Center for Environmental Justice and Children's Health, a Center for Environmental Science and Technology, the GLOBES Program, and the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center. (If you don't want to read about each of these programs individually, you can get a short summary of all of them at this site.) In addition, there is a new Office of Sustainability whose job it is to promote conservation and energy sustainability all over campus.

When John Affleck-Graves spoke at our Universal Notre Dame Night a couple of years ago, he talked about educating students one at a time (and also important your donations were to that effort). If you take a look around the sites linked to the Forum website, you can start to see strong contributions by individual students in unique opportunities to demonstrate real leadership. These opportunities for individualized education did not exist in such large abundance when you and I were there.

The video and transcripts from the Forum have not yet been posted, but a summary is found here. If any of the transcripts are particularly interesting, we'll provide some quotes in a later post.