Around the Block

Colorado College’s NPR-member radio station KRCC was hugely successful in bringing the popular radio show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” to Colorado Springs. KRCC Program Manager Jeff Bieri said the event had been two years in the making, dating from 2008 when Bieri contacted NPR’s main office in Washington, D.C., asking to host the Saturday morning show. “They said, ‘Sure, you can host in it May 2010,’” Bieri said.
“Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” billed as the “oddly informative news quiz,” has an audience of 3 million listeners and 1 million podcast subscribers. The show featuring Host Peter Sagal, Official Judge and Scorekeeper Carl Kasell, and panelists Tom Bodett, Faith Salie, and Paul Provenza was taped live before a sellout crowd at the Pikes Peak Center on May 6, and aired on May 8.
“People came from all over the state – Boulder, Greeley, Montrose – to see this,” Bieri said. “People were coming in from everywhere. This is the only time this show is happening in Colorado this season, and people from around the state knew about it and were coming. The audience was hungry for this thing.”
Colorado College, as one of the underwriters of the show (Fountain Valley School was the other), had to develop a 10-second tagline. Delaney Utterback, manager of KRCC, and others came up with a spot that mentioned Colorado College “challenging students to mono-task, one class at a time,” and provided the web address for information about the college’s Block Plan.
That “mono-task” phrase resonated with panelist Salie, who used it while on the air. And it also resonated with a listener in Chicago.
The same day the show aired, Colorado College received an e-mail from Marne Glaser in Chicago, which read:

I want to tell you that as I was listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell  Me” on the radio this morning, my ears perked up when I heard the words “mono-task,” “Block Program,” and “Colorado College” mentioned. I am many decades past college, and have no college bound kids, but the idea of one course at a time really cheered me.  I have been a school psychologist for many years, and just been so disappointed in the continuation of “whoops, there’s the bell—put your work away– next!” practices in the schools.  Perhaps it’s my Montessori training that sensitized me to the need for children to focus and mono-task.  I think it’s no wonder that kids are so unable to concentrate these days—we sure don’t help them.  Likewise, I have been disappointed in the way higher education continues to operate—every day and week fragmented so that success in school has more to do with your ability to administratively orchestrate all the required tasks, while deep learning, thinking, and understanding are short-changed.  It gave me a little feeling of hope that some college honored those needs, as well as fortified the connection between the real world and the academic. I wish my college (university) experience could have been like that!
So I just want to say, whatever resources you put toward your advertising, they were effective in getting at least one person’s attention and admiration!  Keep up the good work!
Best wishes,
Marne Glaser
Chicago

The May 8 “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” show can be heard at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=35

Six Colorado College faculty members have been approved for tenure and promotion to associate professor. They are:

David Brown, mathematics. Brown joined Colorado College in 2004. He earned a B.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., in 1992 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California, Davis, in 2001. Brown is a mathematical biologist, using mathematical models to investigate biological phenomena. His research is in population biology and ecology, with a recent foray into bacterial genetics. In his dissertation work, he studied stochastic (i.e. incorporating chance) models of the spatial spread of plant diseases. As a postdoctoral candidate, he studied the interactions between global climate change, soil food webs, and nutrient fluxes.

Emily Chan, psychology. Chan joined Colorado College in 2004. She earned a B.A. in psychology from Princeton University in 1997 and a
Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002. Chan’s research interests include social psychology; interpersonal perception and self-presentation; prejudice and stereotyping; conflict and negotiation; judgment and decision making; evolutionary psychology; and cross-cultural social psychology.

Gail Murphy-Geiss, sociology. Murphy-Geiss joined Colorado College in 2004. She has a B.A. from Westminster College in Pennsylvania, a master’s of divinity from Boston University and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology. Her doctoral work in religion and social change culminated in a dissertation on family values among mainline Protestants. She teaches in the areas of gender, religion and family, and research methods. Her most recent research projects focus on sexual harassment in the United Methodist Church and women arrested for domestic violence. She also is interested in religion in relation to social institutions, especially law (civil religion and globalization; secularization; Supreme Court decisions on the “separation” of church and state and their social roots/consequences), church-sect-cult development, and new religious movements. Within the sociology of family, she is interested in changing family structures and domestic violence.

Andrew Price-Smith, political science. Price-Smith joined Colorado College in 2005. He has a B.A. from Queen’s University in Ontario, an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto, where he also served as founding director of the Project on Health and Global Affairs at the Munk Center for International Studies. Before coming to Colorado College, Price-Smith taught in the government and environmental sciences departments at the University of South Florida. He is a specialist in international health and development and biosecurity issues and the author of “The Health of Nations,” which was short-listed for the Grawemeyer Award, and “Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization.”

Wade Roberts, sociology. Roberts joined Colorado College in 2004. He holds a B.A. from Minnesota State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He currently teaches courses in political and environmental sociology, the sociology of health and medicine, and quantitative research methods. He also teaches a field-based course on development in Sierra Leone, where he is conducting a case study to examine both the institutional origins of state failure and the present organization of development efforts in a failed state context. That research builds on his continuing cross-national research on the institutional determinants of economic and social development. Roberts is particularly interested in the broad-based impacts of national family planning programs for a variety of development outcomes, and remains engaged in an ongoing project on the politics of institutional design of the U.S. welfare state, examining privatization reform efforts of Social Security and Medicare.

John Williams, history. Williams joined Colorado College in 2004. He earned a B.A. from Indiana University in history and East Asian languages and literature in 1990, an M.A. from Harvard University in East Asian regional studies in 1993, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. His dissertation, titled “Fraud and Inquest in Jiangnan: The Politics of Examination in Early Qing China,” studied the political culture of Qing China using a civil service examination scandal as a point of departure for examining the relationship between ethnic tension, social mobility, and corruption in the early 18th-century. His research interests include 18th-century Qing political culture; Manchu aristocratic politics; the Yongzheng succession; popular religion and peasant militias in 20th-century China; and China, the Columbian exchange, and the Pacific Rim.