Fall, 2010 is off to a gumbo start. We have been in classes for three weeks. Even so, there’s a lot of action in my academic life.
        For one thing, I have increased the enrollment for my still newish “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course. Although I created and first taught the course in 2006, it’s still newish because I have continued to work on details of what goes into the course. Up to now I have kept the enrollment at 35 to ensure we can have good group discussions. My students have liked that, but at the same time encourage me to find some way to have more students take the course. That’s why, as an experiment, this semester I have increased the enrollment to 75. So that has meant new group dynamics for this social psychologist to manage. It seems to be going well; I’ll report on that at the end of the semester.
          Aside from my regular two courses, I am teaching a six week course for the NCSU Encore Program for Lifelong Enrichment. The course is for adults 50 and older. To explore how an older group of adults reacts to the ideas I am teaching to undergraduates in my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course, my Encore course is “Living on the New Racial Frontier.” I’ll report later on how that goes, but the start has been fun and productive. It has also made for a very busy schedule of preparations.
          And that’s the other part of the gumbo start of the semester. I am being asked to do a lot of presentations based on my memoir “Making Gumbo in the University” and based on my “living on the new racial frontier” ideas. Wednesday, September 15th, the same day I opened my Encore course I also gave a presentation on “Making Gumbo…” at our College of Natural Resources. If you’d like to see that presentation, here is the link:

http://mediasite.online.ncsu.edu/online/Viewer/?peid=7fedabf703f84d048b4eb9ae53b80e761d

      Like I said my Fall, 2010 is off to a gumbo start. But I like that. As I said in my talk to the College of Natural Resources:
    “My people are gumbo people. We don’t make or serve anything bland.”