From the desk of President Leslie K. Guice
Faculty Feature: Dr. Jeremy Mhire
Dr. Jeremy Mhire is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts. I have always found Jeremy to be a deep philosophical thinker and one who will throw out a challenging question to his students, colleagues, and others – including me! Working with people like Jeremy is one of the great things about being in a university environment. Before coming to Louisiana Tech in 2008, Jeremy was a post-doctoral fellow in the Program on Constitutional Government at the University of Virginia. He was also a visiting fellow in the Center for American Political Studies, as well as a Lecturer in the Department of Government, at Harvard University (2009-2010). His research interests include political philosophy, classical and modern republicanism, and politics, philosophy, and literature. He has published on the political theory of Aristophanes, on the intersections of classical and modern political thought, and on the contemporary relevance of Robert Penn Warren’s political essays. He is currently at work on two articles, one on the politics of Hesiod’s Theogony, and another on the philosophical basis of the Socratic Turn. Jeremy obtained his B.S. from ULL and PhD from LSU.
Over the past four years, Jeremy has been working with a multidisciplinary team of faculty members who have been collaborating in education, discovery, and outreach in the field of cyberspace. Jeremy and his colleagues in architecture, sociology, computer science, engineering, and mathematics taught an honors course dealing with the social, political, philosophical and, yes, technical issues surrounding cyber security. This work has led to other courses as well as a major K-12 outreach effort in partnership with the Cyber Innovation Center of Bossier City. Cyber-Discovery camps have been hosted by Tech every summer for the past four years and these camps bring many high school students and teachers to campus to probe cyber challenges posed by Jeremy and the Tech team leaders.
Jeremy’s role in these efforts has been to think about what the threads (engineering/technology; math/cryptography; liberal arts) have in common theoretically, and use those links as the foundation for working across the disciplines. Thus, the basis for Cyber-Discovery is ‘cyber-citizenship’; the idea is that the primary mission of public education in the United States is and has always been civic in nature.
When asked about the impacts of their multidisciplinary team, Jeremy responded “We ask ourselves what an informed citizenry needs to know about cyberspace, which has technical, computational, ethical, and legal dimensions. In this way, we try to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with multidisciplinary work; we do not try to teach a bit of STEM to Liberal Arts students, or some Liberal Arts to STEM students. Instead, by starting from a common base, we teach future citizens how their lives will shape and be shaped by cyberspace. We also think (hope) that this will help us recruit better students over time by showing them how faculty can and do work together in non-traditional ways.”
If you want to see more about Jeremy’s approach to teaching cyberspace to some 8th and 9th graders this summer, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqBn1RVVnDg
Special thanks to Dr. Jeremy Mhire and his colleagues for offering unparalleled educational experiences to our students and our future students!
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