Two CSUSB professors picked for prestigious fellowship

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – Two Cal State San Bernardino faculty members have been selected as 2013 Wye Fellows and will participate in the Aspen Institute’s Wye Faculty Seminar this July at the Aspen Institute-Wye River Campus in Queenstown, Md.

Public administration professor David Baker and associate professor of history Cherstin Lyon have been chosen to participate in this year’s Wye Faculty Seminar, which will be held July 20-26.

The Wye Faculty Seminar consists of a week-long series of facilitated discussions in which faculty are challenged to explore the meaning of liberal education in the 21st-century. According to the Aspen Institute website, “This is a rare opportunity, over the course of a week, to develop rich interior and communal conversations about the issues at the heart of why and what we teach. Faculty become better teachers as they are renewed in their experience—both in and out of seminar—of what it means to learn.”

The purpose of the Wye Faculty Seminar is to assist professors from colleges and universities in relating their teaching to broad issues of citizenship in America and beyond. Limited to 20 participants, the formal seminar sessions allow faculty to sharpen their skills of cooperative conversation and collective intellectual engagement, exploring a variety of issues and values with faculty from other institutions and a diverse assortment of disciplines.

Baker has taught a variety of public administration, financial management and economic development courses at Cal State San Bernardino since 2005, after previously working at San Diego State University and Arizona State University. Previously, he was a county administrator with San Joaquin County and Tuolumne County, and an officer with the San Bernardino County Superior Court.

Lyon recently published “Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory.” Her book provides a detailed account of 41 Nisei, or second-generation Americans of Japanese descent, known as the “Tucsonians,” who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during World War II. Her research and teaching interests include U.S. history; race, immigration and citizenship; and public and oral history.

For more information about the Wye Faculty Seminar, contact Charlene Costello at (410) 820-5374 or Charlene.costello@aspeninstitute.org.

For more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Public Affairs at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu.