Professor Explores ‘The Play of the Mind’

Provided by Bucks County Community College:

To celebrate its founding in 1964 and opening its doors to students in 1965, Bucks County Community College is hosting a 50^th Anniversary Faculty Lecture Series to share compelling topics with the community and showcase its instructors.

The series continues Thursday, March 5, when Professor Christopher Bursk, Ph.D., presents “The Play of the Mind: An Interdisciplinary Lecture.” Bursk, an award-winning poet and author who has taught at Bucks for more than four decades, will draw on the work of educator John Holt and historian Johann Huizinga, research essays and poems by Bucks graduates, and a case study from the Harvard Business School.

“The lecture will invite those attending to consider that the play of the mind lies at the heart of all academic disciplines,” explained Bursk. “It’s what gives life its adventure, its flavor, its greatest rewards.”

Bursk, who has touched the hearts and minds of thousands of students throughout his long tenure at Bucks, still finds it an honor to be part of this unique educational enterprise that is the community college.

“Although the students I originally taught when I came to Bucks did not have smart phones or computers, they shared, with the students of today, the same eagerness to develop their potential and the same receptivity to the play of the mind,” said Bursk. “The student body then was also made up of  veterans, single parents, first-generation Americans, young people unaware just how they smart they might be, and workers returning to college to chart new careers.”

Bursk, the 1978 Bucks County Poet Laureate, is the author of 13 books, most recently Unthrifty Loveliness and Selected Poems. He is the recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships. Several of his books have won awards, including Ovid at Fifteen (New Issues Press), winner of the Green Rose Prize; The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of Donald Hall Prize in Poetry from AWP and the Milton Kessler Prize; and The First Inhabitants of Arcadia (University of Arkansas Press), winner of the Patterson Prize. The Langhorne resident’s poems have earned the Another Chicago Magazine Award, the 49^th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, the New Letters Prize in Poetry, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.

Bursk’s presentation takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 5, in room 142 of Tyler Hall, the historic mansion that is the cornerstone of the college’s original campus at 275 Swamp Rd., Newtown, Pa. Admission and parking are free.

The 50^th Anniversary Faculty Lecture Series, which was launched last fall at the Upper Bucks Campus, concludes April 2 at the Lower Bucks Campus with instructor Courtney Polidori on “Knowledge is the New Black: Teaching Literature in a Maximum Security Women’s Prison.” To learn more about this and other 50^th anniversary events, visit www.bucks.edu/golden.