Washington College is hosting a meet and greet event featuring Justice Leo Strine, Jr. on Saturday, April 27th at 4pm in Hynson Lounge. It truly is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet the Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme court. He will be making some remarks and there will be a networking opportunity afterwards.

There will also be 25 special law affiliated alumni, faculty members and Board members scheduled to attend including Joe Getty, who is a judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals. Getty was appointed to that court in 2016, by Governor Larry Hogan. He is a former state senator and delegate, where he represented Maryland’s 5th district.

Here is the event invitation on the WC site:

https://www.washcoll.edu/live/events/21584-meet-and-greet-the-honorable-leo-strine-jr

And more information about Leo Strine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_E._Strine_Jr.

This event is free and open to the public. We hope you can join us!

Washington College has joined forces with FESCO Energy to help the College reduce carbon emissions while improving energy efficiency and resilience, a major step toward implementing a vigorous and sustainable College-wide energy policy. The College has signed a Master Energy Services Agreement with the Frederick, Maryland company to develop and implement methods that will help the College reduce its energy demand, costs, and carbon footprint. By analyzing and implementing low- and no-emissions energy generation, storage technologies, and energy conservation solutions, the partnership will provide the College increased energy security and limit its dependence on the power grid.

“The agreement secures a long-term approach to reduce our energy consumption and expenses by upgrading our infrastructure and our processes, and we plan to proceed using a shared-savings approach wherever possible,” says Greg Farley, the College’s Director of Sustainability. “All of this will result in a robust energy strategy and policy, which we will use to drive innovation and enact energy security. I think institutions generally in the higher-ed sector haven’t had to think about comprehensive energy strategy from anything but a price perspective, and this gives us a chance to take at strategic look at energy use, procurement, security,and waste in a strategic way.”

FESCO, which in its first six months of operation earned a 2018 Innovator of the Year award from the Maryland Clean Energy Center, was formed to change the way customers manage and optimize their energy use, maximize energy efficiency, and employ the latest technology to manage and produce clean, secure, and grid-independent energy. In the process, FESCO’s customers will become more resilient to volatility in electricity supply and pricing, reduce their energy expenses, and minimize their site-specific impact to climate change. The company’s work with Washington College will pursue all of these goals.

“We are thrilled to help Washington College revolutionize the energy value stream,” says John Dukes, FESCO’s president. “This commitment is a revolutionary leap forward in securing energy resiliency and budget control by implementing energy-related projects that are sustainable, durable, and cost effective. By fully leveraging its annual energy expenses and committing those dollars to acquiring the energy services to meet their clearly defined goals, the College has set the template for others to follow. These services will ensure the College can withstand long-term power outages without additional expense, replace inefficient equipment with the newest equipment to enhance student and faculty comfort and controllability, and reduce overall site air emissions simply by changing what they expect from an energy provider.”

FESCO and Washington College are performing energy and infrastructure audits to identify opportunities for demand reduction and energy security. This work has already begun with examination of the electrical and thermal infrastructure, HVAC, and building control systems in several target buildings.

Early projects being examined include a combined heat and power energy generation plant; privatizating electrical and thermal infrastructure; modernizing HVAC systems and campus wide controls; adding motion-activated set back controls to ensure that demand consumption like HVAC and lights go off when no one is present in an area; and repairing and improving building automation systems so that energy use can be automatically adjusted for more efficient use.

Over the long term, Washington College aspires to cut its energy use significantly by upgrading infrastructure and building a culture of conservation, so that faculty, staff, and students make a conscious effort to turn off lights when they leave a room, unplug computer chargers that are not in use, or adjust the thermostat to use less energy when no one is occupying a room or building—to name just a few examples. Significant reduction in energy use, and the potential installation of cyber-secure, grid-independent electricity generation on campus, will work towards a goal of campus carbon neutrality and greater resilience for the campus and the surrounding community.

These goals coincide with the College’s new emphasis on environmental practices, and with improvements to waste-stream management, water efficiency, and remediation of stormwater runoff for the Chestertown campus. Improvements and upgrades will also serve to make the campus into a “learning laboratory” for students who are focusing on the study of the environment, and will help prepare all Washington College graduates for success in the climate-changed future they will inherit upon graduation.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

About FESCO Energy

FESCO Energy provides complete turnkey energy supply, demand and resiliency projects managed by an executive team with over 80 combined years of proven experience. Based in Frederick, Maryland, FESCO develops and implements energy efficiency, distributed generation, renewable energy, water conservation, operations and maintenance, and provides electricity and natural gas commodity contracts nationally for educational, public sector, commercial, and industrial customers. It helps customers develop electricity and natural gas cost-of-service analysis and advises on rate designs using a cloud-based analytics platform that ensures the right rate based on customer usage patterns.

Washington College’s Communication and Media Studies (CMS) Speaker Series resumes this semester with Allison Page, Assistant Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University, and Stephanie Brown, visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at St. Louis University, speaking on the issues of race and gender, respectively.

Page’s talk, “ ‘Meet, Help, Become a Slave…to Better Understand History’: Race and Agency in Educational Videogames” is set for Feb. 4, and Brown’s presentation “Open Mic?: Gender, Labor, and Gatekeeping in Stand-up Comedy,” will be March 25. Both events, held at Litrenta Lecture Hall in the Toll Science Center, are free and open to the public. Page’s talk begins at 4:30 p.m. and Brown’s begins at 5:30.

Page, who holds a joint appointment in Old Dominion’s Humanities Institute, focuses on critical cultural studies of race and mediated technologies. Her presentation will examine the educational role-playing videogame Flight to Freedom, part of the Mission U.S. series of games designed to teach middle school students about the history of slavery in the United States. Through an analysis of the game as well as the broader educational agenda and policy discourse in which Flight to Freedom is situated, Page argues that the game is a technology of racialized citizenship, part of a longer legacy of public media works that govern race.

Allison Page and Stephanie Brown

Brown, whose research looks at the intersections of gender, comedy, and popular culture, will discuss how stand-up comedy tends to produce and exacerbate gendered and racial inequality, especially at the local, least formalized levels. Like other cultural industries, stand-up is marked by short-term precarious employment, informal networks of entry, and a lack of managerial structure or formal policies on diversity and inclusion. Brown’s presentation will also touch on the ways in which women, especially queer women and women of color, are treated within the stand-up industry—locally, nationally, and in digital spaces—as outsiders who must constantly prove their worth through a shifting and slippery set of aesthetic and cultural norms that reinforce masculine dominance both on and offstage.

The CMS Speaker Series is dedicated to advancing discourse and learning around contemporary issues in communication and media studies across disciplines.For more information on the CMS program, please visit https://www.washcoll.edu/departments/communication-and-media-studies/ or contact Prof. Alicia Kozma at akozma2@washcoll.edu

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations.With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.