Arnold brings new perspective to students

By Kelly L. Griffith, News Editor
And
Brittany Andrews, Staff Writer

LSOP, student activities and the office of advisement and retention sponsored “Toto, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” on Wednesday Oct. 8 at 10 a.m. Dr. Mary Francis Arnold presented the hour-long lecture on diversity among all people. She focused the workshop on compassion, kindness and how people treat one another.

“We do hurt each other with words,” Arnold said as she discussed the effects of discrimination.

Dr. Arnold said the people are less likely to think for ourselves when we are around others. She spoke about how many people are pushed by peer pressure to have eating disorders or commit suicide.

Dr. Mary Francis Arnold received her masters and educational specialist degrees in counseling from UNC-Greensboro, and her doctorate degree in counseling from Oregon State University. Additionally, she is a psychotherapist in a private practice located in Burlington, VT.

Arnold said, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”

She directed the program towards many of the discrimination problems students face today – financial status, gender, race, age, sexual orientation and disabilities, incorporating various personal stories.
Arnold ended the seminar with a poem by Mary Ellis called “The Dash” and a challenge for students to talk with someone who feels invisible.

At 7 p.m. Dr. Arnold continued her talk on diversity in the leadership seminar, “A ‘Just’ Community, or ‘Just’ a Community.”

The workshop related to the ways in which people hurt each other and what can be done to remedy these insults, much like the lecture at 10 a.m. However, in the leadership seminar, Arnold focused on the games people play as children and what they take from the games as adults.

Simon Says, an example Dr. Arnold used, instills the message that when a person makes a mistake they are out of the “game,” or cannot move on from the error.

Throughout the workshop she refers to children’s games such as Tag, Red Rover and Musical Chairs enforcing “negative” messages that children carry with them as adults.

Arnold concluded the presentation with projection slides of dramatic images. The slides showed people suffering, overcoming obstacles, and helping others accompanied by music artist, R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.”

Arnold said she became a motivational speaker “by accident;” when she began speaking at UNC-Greensboro.

“I was so nervous I nearly passed out,” Dr. Arnold said of her first experiences in motivational speaking to large audiences.

Despite her fears, she said people responded well to her presentations and would ask her to speak on several occasions, which made her more passionate and comfortable about speaking.

She credited some of her material as being the “brain-child” of Dr. Maura Cullen, but said she adds her own personal touch to the material and creates programs that are her own.

Dr. Arnold said that watching too much injustice made her compassionate and want to make a difference through enlightenment.