A few years ago, the idea of 3-D printing a major body organ like a kidney was unthinkable, but now scientists eye North Carolina as a national hub for human organs partly due to regenerative medicine research at Wake Forest University.  Medical advances in biotechnology seem to be coming faster than the public can understand them all or even discuss how society should handle ethical, legal and moral considerations.

To spark the national conversation, Wake Forest has partnered with Baylor University to host “After the Genome: The Language of our Biotechnological Future” April 12-13. Fourteen scholars from across North America with expertise in medicine, science, religion and communication will present, including:

• Baylor University President Ken Starr;
• Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine Dr. Anthony Atala;
• Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth Ronald M. Green;
• Ezra E.H. Griffith, Professor of Psychiatry and African-American Studies, Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at Yale School of Medicine 

“There is a rising awareness that the way we talk about science, biotechnology and medical miracles is not neutral, but suggests agendas,” Michael Hyde, Distinguished Professor of Communication Ethics at Wake Forest and conference organizer said. “And this national conversation will help shape public expectations regarding medical science. How far can we stretch science to give us longer or better lives through medical miracles? And if we use the word miracle, should we consider the religious implications of biotechnological advances?”

In many conferences, the papers presented are compiled into a publication afterward, but in this case, the book comes first. Wake Forest and Baylor University Press have worked for nearly two years to produce a book of essays containing the scholarship of the thought leaders who will present at the conference. That book will be available at the conference. 

“Everybody is a moral agent,” said Nancy King, co-director of the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society. “Academics don’t have any special corner on figuring out what the right thing to do is, but we can help to deepen and broaden public discussion. Science is extremely important and medicine is extremely important, but they’re not going to solve all the world’s problems. What’s going to solve all the world’s problems is how society makes use of science.”

The conference will end with a debate between Wake Forest and Baylor’s collegiate debate teams, using the presentations given over the two-day event as evidence and materials for discussion. Both schools trace their debate team histories back to the 1850s and have national titles under their belts, so it should be a spirited conversation.

Beyond the language, biotechnology has enormous economic implications. North Carolina is third in the nation behind California and Massachusetts when it comes to the life-science industrial sector and it generates $59 billion in economic activity, according to a recent study.

The Office of the Provost, Department of Communications, Humanities Institute and the Center for Bioethics, Health and Society at Wake Forest University, along with the Provost’s Fund, Baylor University Press and the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University have organized the event. 

Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week” and senior correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour” will deliver Wake Forest’s 2013 commencement address on Monday, May 20.

Ifill has covered six Presidential campaigns and moderated two vice presidential debates – in 2004 between Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and former Democratic Senator John Edwards and in 2008 between Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Gov. Sarah Palin. She is also the best-selling author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.

“Her record of achievement as a journalist and author, a significant career of reporting on current events both national and international and commitment to straightforward dialogue mean so much to the Wake Forest community,” President Nathan O. Hatch said. “Ms. Ifill’s career provides an example for young women and men at Wake Forest, and gives her great currency with our graduates, their families, and our faculty and staff.”

Before joining PBS in 1999, Ifill was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a local and national political reporter for The Washington Post. She reports on a wide range of issues from foreign affairs to U.S. politics and policies, interviewing national and international newsmakers. Her journalistic work has been honored by the Radio and Television News Director’s Association, Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center, Ebony Magazine and Boston’s Ford Hall Forum.

She currently serves on the boards of the News Literacy Project, the Committee to Protect Journalists and she is a fellow with the American Academy of Sciences. A native of New York City, Ifill graduated from Simmons College in Boston.

“I am certain Ms. Ifill will find a warm and enthusiastic welcome at Wake Forest,” Hatch said.

Also joining Wake Forest for commencement weekend will be Baccalaureate speaker Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo, president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. She came to CRS in January 2012 after a distinguished academic career.

“Dr. Woo has led a life and career characterized by academic achievement at the highest levels, strategic and visionary leadership as well as deep moral and ethical commitments that have inspired and directed both her personal and professional life,” Hatch said. “Integrity and success are not trade-offs in her career.”

Woo speaks often on issues around corporate citizenship, ethical business and individual integrity. She was born and raised in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States to attend college at Purdue University, where she received her B.S., M.S.I.A. and Ph.D. degrees. She was the first female dean to chair the accreditation body for business schools and directed its initiative for Peace through Commerce.

Wait Chapel saw two big crowds on Saturday, February 23. The 1,250 or so people inside for TEDxWakeForestU: Defining Our Future and the hundred or so outside rolling the Quad after Wake Forest’s huge win over No. 2 Miami.

On the inside, students, faculty, staff and Piedmont-Triad community members gathered to hear nine speakers from around North America give inspirational and motivational talks. One big highlight: the return of CollegeHumor.com co-founder Ricky Van Veen (’03).

This is the second TEDx event Wake Forest University has hosted. One of the student organizers for both events, Jake Graham (’13), says initial survey feedback shows the audience is there for future events.

“Now that it’s going to be an established tradition at Wake Forest, we hope it’s one the spring semester events people look forward to,” Graham said. “After our first TEDx last year, there was some talk about making it an every other year event, but it is clear there is an interest in having events like this to hear people’s ideas and discuss them whether you’re from Wake Forest or a member of the surrounding community.”

Attendance figures are preliminary while organizers wrap up the event. Meantime, if you weren’t able to attend the event, you could follow along via social media and the #TEDxWFU hashtag. The Storify below captures some of the event highlights.

Nearly a billion people on the planet don’t have enough to eat and more than half a billion are obese. In response to growing food-related challenges, the Wake Forest University School of Divinity has established the Food, Faith and Religious Leadership Initiative.

With a focus on providing current and future religious leaders with the knowledge and skills to lead their congregations and religious communities around food issues, it is the first of its kind in the country.

“Food – food access, food quality, food production – is one of the defining issues of this generation,” says Gail O’Day, dean of the School of Divinity.  “The rapid growth of local food and farm-to-table movements has sparked a creative and essential conversation that links the revitalization of rural economies, food access for urban neighborhoods and the health and well-being of all our communities.”

O’Day says the initiative, launched this fall, has the potential to redefine theological education, reenergize the church and transform how we understand service.

Fred Bahnson, director of Food, Faith and Religious Leadership

“Food is an important frame for faith issues,” says Fred Bahnson, who was appointed director of the program. “Over the past seven years, I’ve witnessed the rise of a new faith-based movement, and I believe this renewed interest in food, justice and sustainability is driven by an even deeper hunger to see embodied what the biblical writers call Shalom, that graced state of being that results from the right relationships between God, people and the land.” Bahnson co-founded Anathoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, N.C., and is the co-author of “Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation.” He has been invited to present a TED X talk in Manhattan Feb. 16 on “Changing the Way We Eat.”

While churches have often focused on food in terms of food aid, many are now thinking outside the food pantry/soup kitchen model to recreate local food economies and address food issues beyond “filling bellies,” Bahnson says.

The Initiative will train religious leaders to look beyond emergency-based responses and begin to address the root causes of hunger, obesity, food injustice and damaged ecosystems.

Third-year divinity student Nathan Peifer has a strong interest in environmental and faith issues. But, he has a particular passion for gardening and is excited about the food and faith initiative. “I think faith communities have the right combination of social capital and financial capital to manage healthy and productive community gardens,” says Peifer, who plans to be a Presbyterian minister. “I will certainly be involved in the local community garden movement and in equipping congregations to produce food for those who experience food insecurity as a daily reality.” He is looking forward to taking Bahnson’s course, “Food, Table, Communion” in the spring and has already taken “Faith, Food Justice and Local Communities,” a course taught this fall by Mark Jensen, associate professor of pastoral care and pastoral theology, and Sara Quandt, professor of public health sciences at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

“Food is the way we celebrate, the way we connect, the way we care for one another,” Jensen says. “It is at the spiritual and ethical core of faith communities to help hungry people.”

Caleb Pusey, a third-year divinity student who is also earning a joint degree in counseling, sees the value of making food and faith issues an important part of theological education. “The food most of us eat creates distance from our tables, distance from our farmers and distance from our fields. This is as much a crisis of the spirit as it is a crisis of practical insight and public resolve. This is why future faith leaders have a vital role to play.” Pusey co-founded the student group, Eco-Theo, three years ago.

Wake Forest School of Divinity Dean Gail O'Day

The Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative works with current students at the School of Divinity, but has also created a continuing education program for religious leaders and congregations. The program will focus on two geographic areas: Winston-Salem and Asheville. “The geographic, agricultural and religious richness of central/western North Carolina creates a living laboratory for engaging the crucial issues of food insecurity, food deserts and the attendant health disparities that confront the region,” O’Day says.

The initiative’s first event, a seminar and lecture on “The Spirituality of Eating” in Asheville this month, drew more than 130 people aged 19 to 82. “Its success pointed to the urgency of the topic and the incredible all-generational appeal of these issues,” she says.

Nearly one-third of the world’s Muslims live as minorities in 149 countries, facing diverse, complex challenges as they attempt to maintain their Islamic identity. Politics professor Michaelle Browers and religion professor Nelly van Doorn-Harder have brought together a group of international scholars to look at these groups and explore why the issues confronting them are so important in today’s world.

Browers and van Doorn-Harder answer a few questions about Muslims as Minorities. To read more about this event, click here »

Q:  Why do you believe this topic is relevant and important to both Wake Forest and the community?

Michaelle Browers

Browers: This is such an important issue and addresses general questions of what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a believer, and how we can coexist with each other in the modern world where there is so much movement of ideas across borders. These humanistic questions, it seems to me, would be of interest to a much broader audience. We have a growing number of faculty on this campus who have an interest in the Middle East and students who are interested in the Middle East. We have an expanding Arabic program and have many people minoring in Middle East and South Asia studies. My hope is that even though this is an intellectual exchange, the conversation will be meaningful to a wide range of faculty, students and community members.

van Doorn-Harder: I think it’s very important for students to become aware of all of these issues because they are very vital in our contemporary world. There are always cases of bias and discrimination, and we have these fixed ideas about where they take place, but we forget that situations change all the time. I think it’s important for students that we as professors become more aware of what is happening so we can translate that into our classes.

Q: What was the initial driving force behind the conference?

Nelly van Doorn-Harder

van Doorn-Harder: Since the Arab Spring in Egypt, Muslims have been in the news a lot, in a mostly negative way. We need to look at who the minorities in the Middle East are, what their positions or situations are and how they negotiate problems in society. I thought it was a good time to gather a group of international scholars here at Wake Forest to discuss these issues from a variety of angles. I am originally from the Netherlands where we have a large Muslim population that is often approached in very Islamophobic ways. There are a lot of people there who are the same age as students at Wake Forest and are second and third generation, they’ve grown up in the Netherlands, they speak the language perfectly, they go to high school and universities. They are fully settled in, and still they are not looked upon as Dutch, but as Muslims.  For many years, I have studied Coptic Christians in Egypt, a minority group with its own challenges.

Browers: I work on Arab and Islamic political thought, and I’ve been writing on two very significant political thinkers: Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah from Lebanon and Yusuf Qardawi from Egypt. I had noticed the way in which they were speaking to two audiences, one that was transnational or global, and one that was local. That was the academic basis for the conference. Also, I have this fantastic colleague in religion, Nelly van Doorn-Harder, and I was looking for ways to connect with her so that we could collaborate.

Q:  What are some of the biggest challenges you think Muslims face as minorities, and what will you address here?

van Doorn-Harder: Whenever there are social or economic or political problems or crises, the minorities in countries are in a very vulnerable position. I hope that we can really look deeper at the roots of that kind of behavior and what minorities themselves do or can do to counter these situations. There is this polarization in the Muslim world. Ahmadiyyahs who have lived in Indonesia for over one hundred years are suddenly being attacked, their villages burned to the ground and are becoming displaced persons in their own country. That is new. And, then we look at Iraq with the Sunni/Shi’ite issue there, which was aggravated by our invasion. Those issues have come much more to the forefront in the last 20 years. Muslims are moving away from where they used to live which creates new situations, and so part of what the conference is discussing is how people are negotiating these situations. The hope is that we will see certain themes emerge that can interact and that have more in common than one would think at first sight.

Browers: We’re going to look at the issues Muslims are facing not only in North America, but also in Europe, Africa, China and South Asia. We have a global scope to the conference. We’re addressing issues, and all the questions that one would have who has a significant difference from the majority population in a new country. There are Muslims throughout the world now, so many have left those majority contexts. There are also many people converting to Islam, so it’s a growing religion in a number of contexts.

Q: What are the highlights of the conference?

Browers: We have two keynote addresses, Peter Mandaville – who looks at transnational Islam and Muslim identity issues, will speak on Thursday night. Friday night after the first day of panels, our second keynote speaker, John Bowen, will look at Muslim groups in Europe, predominantly England, and the issues that are raised there after 9/11 in particular.  We have scholars from all types of fields such as history, religion, political science and literature, 19 of which are from the U.S. Scholars are coming in from Turkey, Ethiopia, Greece, Belgium, Hong Kong, the UK, Israel, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. We also have opportunities for students to interact with speakers. Groups of students are going to have lunch as part of our  “Take a Visiting Scholar to Lunch” session.

Q: What are your goals for the conference?

Browers: Our main goal is to get a conversation started on campus to educate people about the Muslim faith and hopefully to plant the seeds for future instances of cooperation and collaboration among the faculty, as well as between the faculty and students to study minority issues. We want people to engage in these areas of study on a national level and to raise the standing of Wake Forest as a center for discussion. Although many international conferences have occurred on campus, we’re not always seen as a place that’s a center of Middle East and South Asia studies. We plan to publish the best papers from this conference in a series of journals. We’ll see if we want to do a book out of it. This is the starting point of the conversation.

With its strategic plan, Wake Forest charted its path to staying comparable to its best peers, but keeping its priorities and culture distinct. In his annual State of the University speech, President Nathan Hatch outlined Wake Forest’s progress along that path.

Service is the key to rekindling the American Dream, Time magazine columnist and bestselling author Joe Klein said in his speech, “Exploring the State of the American Dream: On the Road in America with Joe Klein,” in Wait Chapel Oct. 10.

“Think more about the things that you owe than the things that you want,” said Klein, whose popular Time.com blog, “The Swampland,” has captured an international audience fascinated by the stories of Americans who pursue the American Dream despite challenging times.

Klein’s message resonated with Leann Westin, a junior from Boston who is majoring in biology and attended the event.  “Mr. Klein’s speech reminded me what we can do to become better Americans—the importance of the habits of citizenship.”  She liked the idea of national service.  “I think it should be required.  It would make for a much better world.”

The experience of service and sacrifice united his parents’ generation, said Klein, who is writing a new book “The New Greatest Generation” focused on the contributions soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are making in their communities.

“If I had one wish for my generation, it would be that everyone in my generation had gone to boot camp to push themselves physically and psychologically,” he said.

He emphasized the importance of shared experience for this generation of college students, too. “The things we have in common are more important than those that divide us…How can we make you better than us?  As good as my parents?  The answer is service.  It is going to make you better people, better citizens.”

In a wide-ranging talk that included stories from his more than 40 years covering wars in the Middle East and U.S. presidential elections, he also commented on the detrimental effects of political consultants on politics and the challenges facing today’s journalists.

“We’ve gotten to the point where people only hear what they want to hear,” he said.  “We moved from three channels to 1000.  If this has been the golden age of anything, it is the golden age of marketing.  We’ve retribalized ourselves.”

Five Wake Forest students had the opportunity to ask questions during the event. Shelby Smith, a senior political science major from Charlotte, asked about women’s place in the American Dream.  Klein responded, “We’re going to have a woman president pretty soon.  We’re going to be better off as women move into positions of power in this country.”

Marc Barnett, a philosophy major from Tennessee, asked how America can redefine the American Dream in a way that goes beyond the monetary.  Klein said moving the values of the military into mainstream society in other forms of service is one way.

Klein hit the road last year to find out what people in America were thinking outside the Washington Beltway. He traveled from New York to Los Angeles, and more recently, drove south to north, starting at the border in Laredo, Texas, and winding up in Iowa. Along the way, Klein met with politicians and community leaders as well as everyday people who invited him into their homes and businesses to talk about politics, politicians and the challenges facing America.

Klein’s speech was the kickoff for Wake Forest’s Rekindling the American Dream Conference, a symposium jointly sponsored by the music department and the politics and international affairs department.

The idea for the conference started with a conversation between David Coates, professor of politics and international affairs and Patricia Dixon, senior instructor in music.  Both immigrants, Coates from the United Kingdom and Dixon from Chile, they talked about what they could do to add to the quality of the debate around the elections.  They focused on exploring the history, character, present condition and future potential of the uniquely American vision of continuing prosperity and rising social mobility.

“We thought it was a good thing to combine a serious discussion of public policy with a celebration of the music of the American Dream,” Coates said.  “Rekindling the American Dream” brings together eminent speakers and performers who will build on Joe Klein’s discussion of the American pursuit of the prosperity.

Dixon teaches a first-year seminar, “Music of the American Dream,” this fall.

“Just because you are a music major, doesn’t mean you are not interested in politics. And, majoring in politics doesn’t mean you are not interested in the arts,” Coates said.  “We want people to be both socially sensitive and culturally aware.”

The event is part of Wake Forest’s Voices of Our Time speaker series, which recently featured Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. Voices of Our Time brings to campus the world’s thought leaders—including scholars, scientists, writers, business and public policy leaders, activists and religious leaders—for discussions on the important national and international issues of our time.

While at Wake Forest, Klein also met with the editorial board of the student newspaper, Old Gold & Black, to share insights about the evolution of the journalism industry and wisdom from his years of on-the-ground reporting. He stressed the importance of political engagement among college students, said Old Gold & Black editor Meenu Krishnan. “And, he encouraged us not to lose hope in politics.”

With just six weeks until the presidential election, it is rare to find political leaders from both sides of the aisle making joint appearances unless there is an organized debate – especially in a swing state such as North Carolina.

But on Sept. 25, Wake Forest hosted “American Debt and Deficit Crisis: Issues and Solutions with Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.”

In 2010, President Obama appointed Simpson, the former Wyoming senator (R), and Bowles, the former Clinton White House chief of staff (D), to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan group looking to erase the United States’ multi-trillion-dollar debt.

In Wait Chapel, Simpson and Bowles outlined the five principle challenges the commission faced – health care, defense, the income tax code, social security and compound interest – with a combination of comedic wit and sobering realism.

“We’re running out of money. We’ve got to start thinking,” said Bowles, paraphrasing Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford. “We have to make tough choices and set priorities. If we do that, the future of this country – your country – will be all right. If we don’t, we’ll be well on our way to a second-rate nation.”

The event was part of Wake Forest’s Voices of Our Time speaker series, which brings the world’s thought leaders to campus for discussions on important issues.

India Prather (’13) had an “aha” moment when Bowles explained that mandatory spending (on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) and interest on the debt account for every dollar the U.S. makes. Meanwhile, money that covers defense spending, education funding, infrastructure improvements and many other programs are borrowed at a rate of 41 cents to every dollar spent.

“As a political science major, I typically focus on how national problems affect the political parties and how the parties use certain issues to their advantage. Tonight Simpson and Bowles focused on the economic aspect,” said Prather, a senior from Charlotte, N.C. “The numbers really have a wow factor. They were in your face. I’m walking away feeling more empowered because I’m now more aware of our national debt situation.”

Alan Simpson talks with a group of students.

Prather and fellow political science major Taylor Harvey (’13) were among a small group of students who discussed the debt crisis with Simpson prior to the public address.

Harvey, who interned this summer for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that promotes bipartisan solutions to the various policy challenges the nation faces, said he believes that young voters should care about debt issues now more than ever.

A Wake Forest student asks Alan Simpson a question.

“Politicians constantly use young people as an excuse for why we need to get the debt under control, to ‘give us a future,’ they say. But when bipartisan debt proposals get introduced, nothing happens because neither party wants to concede that the other side is even half right,” Harvey said. “It’s really a matter of when, not if, we have to address the debt in a comprehensive way. The sooner we act, the less pain there will be in the long term.”

Simpson and Bowles both thanked N.C. Sen. Richard Burr (’78), who attended the event, for putting politics aside and reaching across party aisles – a challenge that so far has prevented the commission’s recommendations from being adopted.

“If you can’t compromise on an issue without compromising yourself, you shouldn’t be in a legislative body, that’s for sure. For that matter, also don’t get married, do a contract or get into business,” Simpson said. “If re-election means more to you than helping your country when it’s in need, then you do not deserve to be in Congress.”

For Prather, a greater understanding about the politics of policymaking presented a real learning opportunity.

“The hard part is the ‘so what?’ It all starts in educating people like myself to care,” she said. “A lot of people here at Wake Forest are politically inclined, so it’s easy to discuss it and go lobby. The challenge I present to myself is to take it and go back home and talk to my peers about it to see if they can become more involved in these types of issues.”

Melissa Harris-Perry, host of her own MSNBC show and a 1994 Wake Forest graduate, encouraged students to ask, “What difference does that make?” in her address “Only Youthful Folly Can Make Democracy Real” on Sept. 10 in Wait Chapel.

“This question, and asking this of yourselves and of your political process, is the consistent gift that we give to democracy,” Harris-Perry said.

First-year students and their academic advisors attended the event as the culmination of the summer academic project focused on civic engagement among young voters.

Earlier in the day, Harris-Perry met informally with students and was a guest speaker in two politics classes. She also signed copies of her new book, “Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America” in the atrium of Z. Smith Reynolds library.

Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She was also on the faculty at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.

A social entrepreneur is someone who tries to make things tomorrow better than they were today. That is the definition Jessica Jackley, perhaps best known as the co-founder of Kiva, an online microlending service, gave Wake Forest students, faculty and staff at a talk September 6^th in Brendle Recital Hall.

“When she said we should look at lending as interaction, and not just a transaction, that made a big impact on me,” said Abishek Tadikonda (’14), co-president of the Wake Forest Micro-Lending Club. “I think it epitomizes the way our club, and Kiva, view microlending.”

Jackley said her path to Kiva started with Sunday school sparking an interest in charity, but she didn’t really act until she heard a speaker from Bangladesh talk about microlending at a talk at Stanford University, where she worked as a temporary secretary. Inspired by his passion and ideas, she quit her job and bought a plane ticket to Africa to see what she could do.

A year later, she was working on Kiva with co-founder Matt Flannery.  “I spent a year thinking about the problem I was trying to solve,” Jackley said. “I was waiting for permission to start our venture.”  But once Kiva started, it found exponential success. The service allows people to make loans as small as $25 to an entrepreneur almost anywhere in the world and even became one of Oprah Winfrey’s “favorite things.” To date, more than $350 million in loans have been made, by more than 1.2 million Kiva users.

Jackley said we must be willing to make the jump from planning to doing, and urged students to take action.

Micro-Lending Club Co-President Adam Mysorewala (’14) said “We spent six months formulating our ideas and are finally getting off the ground now. We may have been a little hesitant in making the ‘jump’ to get things started, but are now excited to be working with Kiva in the microlending sector.”  The club formed in April 2012.

Although Jackley is no longer with Kiva on a full-time basis, she still serves an advisor. Jackley’s most recent venture is ProFounder, a crowdfunding tool for U.S. entrepreneurs. Regulatory issues led to ProFounder’s close in February. But that doesn’t daunt Jackley. After starting an unsuccessful venture, Jackley said she is finally able to call herself an entrepreneur.

She’s in good company at Wake Forest. The University’s largest undergraduate minor? Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise.

For Tyler Gaetano, (‘15) the message about failure resonated. “Once you have crashed and burned with a venture you realize there is just as much to be learned there as with success,” Gaetano said. “I will now be much more willing to make that ‘jump’ and launch my own venture while at Wake Forest.”

Campus Life, The Center for Innovation, Creativity & Entrepreneurship, Office of the Dean of the College, Institute for Public Engagement, Office for Personal and Career Development, the Schools of Business, the Department of Economics, Departments of Women’s & Gender Studies and The Entrepreneurship Society all worked together to sponsor Jackley’s visit.