While many of us have grown tired of Zoom, in some ways the platform has opened a world of new opportunities for engagement with people we would not normally have access to, as we recently learned from the latest Pitts Center event.
On Feb. 17, the Pitts Center held an ambassadors roundtable discussion available for students, faculty and community members to connect to on Zoom. Former congressman Joe Pitts, an Asbury alumni and donor, moderated the event. The guests interviewed included former ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Baktybek Abdrisaev and ambassador to the Western Sahara Mouloud Said.
Topics of discussion included the role faith has played into their work serving as Christians in Muslim-majority nations. The guests also offered updates on the particular political contexts and issues their respective nations have been facing in recent times.
This is just one of many kinds of events the Pitts Center sponsors throughout the year. All of these events aim to offer a wide variety of opportunities for engagement in relevant political arenas.
“The Pitts Center does events that are meant to stimulate political science majors or bring people into public policy and convince people to become political scientists,” said Jonah Fern, an Asbury junior and student worker at the Pitts Center.
Fern also emphasized how Pitts Center events can offer benefits to students majoring in subjects outside of political science.
“We go to a liberal arts institution where our goal, among other things, is to widen our perspective and gain knowledge in all sorts of areas to become well-rounded students and well-rounded members of society,” said Fern. “A really good way to do that is to go to these events that are opening our eyes to parts of the world we’ve never been to.”
The Pitts Center began as a vision Joe Pitts had for Asbury’s campus. The former congressman highly valued the experiences he had on Asbury’s campus that led him to run for office in Pennsylvania and ultimately led him to a long career on Capitol Hill. Pitts wanted to give students the opportunity to engage in relevant areas of public policy and gain experience that could lead to opportunities later in their career path. This is part of the reason he chose to invest in a center that bears his name: to cultivate these experiences for students.
“I think the Pitts Center events are so useful for people to have these conversations they wouldn’t normally have, and it helps widen their perspective and scope on life,” said Fern.