Scranton Professor Elected to Serve on National Board

Dec 17, 2012
Gretchen J. Van Dyke, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at The University of Scranton.
Gretchen J. Van Dyke, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at The University of Scranton.

Gretchen J. Van Dyke, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at The University of Scranton, has been elected to a four-year term on the national board of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts.

Dr. Van Dyke is in her 19th year teaching international relations at Scranton since completing a master’s and Ph.D. in foreign affairs at the University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va.  Deeply committed to the liberal arts, she has served as The University of Scranton’s faculty representative to the Lilly Fellows Program since 2000.

Dr. Van Dyke said she is honored by her election to the national board.

“I value the mission of the Lilly Fellows Program, the multiple projects it supports, and the crucial dialog it encourages among the network schools – all of which are critical in higher education today,” she said.

The University of Scranton has been a member of the Lilly Fellows Program since 1997 and will host the program’s annual Workshop for Academic Administrators and National Network Conference in 2013.

Founded in 1991, the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts seeks to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of learning for the 21st century through three programmatic initiatives. First, it offers postdoctoral teaching fellowships for young scholars who wish to renew their sense of vocation within a Christian community of learning in order to prepare themselves for positions of educational leadership within church-related institutions. Second, it supports young men and women of exceptional academic talent who are exploring vocations in church-related higher education during their first three years of graduate school in the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program. Third, it maintains a collaborative National Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities that sponsors a variety of activities and publications designed to explore the Christian character of the academic vocation and to strengthen the religious nature of church-related institutions. The national network represents among its current membership of 96 schools a diversity of denominational traditions, institutional types, and geographical locations. The Lilly Fellows Program is based at Christ College the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Ind.

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