Will Cohen, Ph.D.
Excellence in Integrating Mission and Justics into the Curriculum
This award honors a faculty member whose special efforts ensure that students have a keen understanding and appreciation of the realities of the world, including pressing justice issues in a local, national, and global context. The award recognizes the efforts of a faculty member dedicated to the service of faith and the promotion of justice, as it relates to his or her teaching (including therein efforts to develop courses and programs and to select texts that address contemporary faith and justice issues). This year’s recipient of the Mission and Justice Award is Dr. Will Cohen.
Will is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, having joined the University in 2009 after earning his PhD from Catholic University.
Will's curricular work in support of forwarding the mission of the University, focusing on instilling in students a desire to pursue the service of faith and the promotion of justice, is extensive. It includes curricular development at the course level, the program level, and all the way up to the level of the Core curriculum that forms all students at the University.
Will's service on the General Education (GE) Review Committee has been extensive and vital to the progress in mission-infused educational formation represented by the new, recently approved Ignatian Core Curriculum, which all students who graduate from the University will be required to complete. He assumed the leadership role as the co-Chair of the GE Review Committee at a pivotal time in the committee's work. Successful leadership in this task required balancing patience, discernment, and listening on the one hand, with the drive and capacity to shepherd the faculty through the intense, high-volume work of curricular revision on the other, all on a series of timelines that were at times grueling and demanding. Will's willingness to engage in dialogue about all aspects of the curriculum under consideration for revision demonstrated his interdisciplinarity, his respect for his colleagues and their areas of expertise, and most of all, his desire to propose a new curriculum that would better form students into people for and with other people.
And his approach within the GE Review Committee was the same as his approach to discussing the proposal with the wider faculty: collaborative, conciliar, and with discernment at the forefront of tools available to the committee to successfully conduct the work expected.
He furthermore played a central role in communicating the proposal at its various stages of development to multiple constituents, including faculty, administrators, students, and eventually, the Board of Trustees. Thanks to Will's leadership, the proposal for the new lgnatian Core Curriculum passed an all-faculty vote. The Board of Trustees went on to approve the proposal for implementation at the University.
The lgnatian thread of forming people for and with others is woven into the Core curriculum course attributes at multiple points, including at both the start and conclusion of students' Core curriculum studies, in the First-Year Seminar and new Core Capstone, respectively. Will continues this year in his second year as Chair of the GE Review Committee, now tasked with work aimed at ensuring the curriculum is successfully implemented over the next year and a half.
At the program-level, Will previously served as co-director of the Peace and Justice Concentration. He has built and supervised the curriculum and elicited new courses; recruited, advised and mentored students; taught the Capstone course frequently. Most of his courses are shaped by common commitments to issues of justice in relation to economic and labor issues, God and the Earth in relation to environmental issues, and Latin American Liberation Theology in relation to social questions, all informed by Catholic social teaching and a deep concern for the common good.
For the past nine years, together with his colleague and friend Christian Krokus, Will has co-directed the campus organization called Christians for the Common Good (CCG). CCG meets five times each semester and continues to engage pressing topics through the framework of how our Christian faith ought to inform work toward justice in the world.
The contributions above are just some of the examples of how Will's work as a member of our faculty, helps to ensure that when students leave the University of Scranton, they will possess the awareness, competence, skills, and insights to critically reflect on prevailing social, political, economic and cultural issues, and that they will be able and willing to take action on behalf of justice.