A Bursting Bouquet of Academic News

Curriculum for a new St. Catherine University MBA program was approved by the Education Policy Committee. A launch date has yet to be set, but keep your eyes peeled for information about this new opportunity in the School of Business and Leadership.

This fall, a new Bachelor of Science degree in interior design will be available in the College for Women. Upper-level classes will be held at International Market Square in Minneapolis, a trade center for residential and commercial design, giving students the rare opportunity to witness interior designers, architects and other creative professionals in action.

The new Master of Physician Assistant Studies program was accredited in March by ARC-PA (the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant). It is the second program of its kind to be accredited in the state and produces graduates prepared for the new healthcare economy.

certificate

Beautiful Words

The second collection of poems by Robert Grunst, professor of English at St. Kate's, hit stores this spring and was called out by the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune last December. Titled Blue Orange, Grunst's collection explores the human impulse to mar beauty.

"Beauty is dangerous inasmuch as there's a certain human tendency," Grunst explains. "You see something beautiful and you touch it, and that spoils it."

Reviewers have called the work, published by The Ashland Poetry Press, an "extraordinarily vibrant book, peopled with vivid characters," populated with poems that are "at once both shrewd and true."

Blue Orange

The world is blue as an orange — Paul Eluard
Here is an orange long-ensconced in the fruit drawer's far corner, wrapped in its exile's blue jacket. Its beauty's increased by a circumspect green, merely a hint in this spectrum of light. At this angle. The slight bite at the tongue is the taste of sour baking soda edged with a tincture of yeast. There's a bloom of acidic vapor. An effect of quick condensation: Just opening a door. Just pulling a drawer out. The drawer's plastic bonds too are coming undone one molecule after another. The humidity control is off kilter of course. Now one touch to this orange will bruise its veil of bracts, buds, and blue spores. There's beauty also in how one sees spoilage. How seeing's bruise is prelude to touching's. How pliant the orange is. How rampant decay comes after the touching.