Tag Archives: scu

The Survey Games

Source: Michael Hyatt

So for our latest assignment, my class is collecting survey data from students at our university, with our focus being the same or related to our archival research. (Funnily enough, I just took a ton of surveys as part of of my psychology class.) As said before my focus revolves around undergraduate knowledge of archives and archival knowledge, thus my main goal going forward is gauging the extent of this knowledge among undergrads at my school. I plan to generally distribute my survey online to a variety of people across class years, and I’ll try to avoid distributing to my own class to prevent bias. Since, you know, we just learned about the archives.

There will probably be questions on their ability to locate the archives, if they even know the archives exist, and if they participate in the stereotype that archives are only available for research/grad student/professional use. If all things go well, I’ll end up with data which reflects my own experiences concerning archival research. That is, hardly any undergrads know anything concerning the archives. However, because I’m not using random assignment and random selection, the data I receive will have some bias, as bias hasn’t been eliminated (shoutout to Psychology 1 for that lesson on conducting experiments).

“Green is Good”

Source: Santa Clara University

Okay, so I know I’ve been talking a lot about Greens, Greene, and now green, but hear me out. As said before in “Into the Stacks“, the research question that I held going into my university’s archives was something along the lines of “how does my university express its stance on environmental issues?”. Luckily, I was able to find several documents dating back to the 1970s that explored my university’s outlook on environmental concerns, for example, many of these documents focused on an ecological symposium that my university hosted called “The Crisis of Man’s Environment” (Major 1).

But taking a look at the image above, you can see that many of these environmentalist sentiments still remain today. My university still remains dedicated to talking about the issues that affect our planet and what we, both academics and everyday people, can do to sustain the nature that surrounds us. Though my 1970 archival documents described the events that occurred during the Modern Environmental movement, following in the wake of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the ideas behind these events continue to fuel the environmental efforts of SCU (“Silent Spring”). Just look at the sustainability efforts pictured in the image below, like the running hashtag #SustainableSCU (SCU).

Source: Santa Clara University

But enough about me, what are some of the things that my classmates unearthed from the far corners of the internet? Well Leslie (found here) related her research on a student sports scandal between our university and UNM to more recent scandals found among universities (and their athletes and their coaches). She brings our university’s past into the context of both a ‘reoccurring’ theme of grade-fudging and student athlete scandals that have spread both across time and across schools.