MET hires five new faculty, launches online liberal arts program
International business program in Brussels gets new campus
Metropolitan College is starting the school year with five new full-time faculty members and a new online degree program in liberal studies designed to provide a later-in-life liberal arts education.
“There’s a great need for mature adults to have the opportunity of really plunging into the liberal arts,” MET Dean Jay Halfond says of the new offering, which is part of the Executive Undergraduate Degree Completion Program. “This is a new opportunity to reward the person who’s accomplished both professionally and personally and now really wants to learn what he or she didn’t appreciate as an 18-year-old.”
The 16-course curriculum, developed in collaboration with faculty at the College of General Studies, offers a variety of courses, including Exploring Philosophy Through Film, and Food Stuff: A Taste of Biology. “The premise is that we take a subject matter and use a particular focus to illuminate the whole field,” says Halfond.
The program will be supervised by Gregory Salyer, one of MET’s new faculty members and the college’s first chairman of liberal studies. Salyer, who holds a doctorate in literature from Emory University, comes to BU from Longwood University in Virginia. “He’s a very good example of the kind of interdisciplinary faculty member that will be ideal for this program,” Halfond says.
MET has also experienced other changes recently: four other full-time faculty positions were filled over the summer, and the new campus of BU in Brussels, a graduate program in international business supervised by MET, is opening this month.
William Chambers, a new associate professor of professional practice in administrative sciences, comes to MET from the credit-rating company Standard and Poor, where he was the managing director for risk solutions. Chambers holds a doctorate in economics from Columbia University and teaches finance classes. Roger Warburton, whose doctorate in physics is from the University of Pennsylvania, is a new associate professor of administrative sciences.
Former part-time and visiting faculty members joining the full-time faculty this fall are Samuel Mendlinger, who was named a full professor in the department of administrative sciences, and Robert Shudy, who was named an associate professor of computer science. Mendlinger has a doctorate in genetics from Hebrew University and has been a research agronomist and plant geneticist at Ben-Gurion University; Shudy has a doctorate in computer science from the University of Rochester and is coordinating MET’s online master’s degree program in computer information systems.
The new Brussels campus moves MET’s program, located in the city since 1972, into the heart of the university district, and offers state-of-the-art facilities such as classrooms with wireless Internet access. The grand opening will be held on Tuesday, September 27. To read more about it, click here.