Stacks on Stacks: Class of 2028 Welcomed to Campus with Unique CIE Common Event Experience

As first-year students arrive to Ursinus College at the beginning of each academic year, they go through an orientation process that includes meeting their new classmates while getting acclimated to campus.

They’re also introduced to the Common Intellectual Experience (CIE), Ursinus’s renowned two-semester course that asks the central questions that ground their entire four-year liberal education experience. CIE isn’t just a class; it allows students to meet for common events and this year, something new was added to the fold. Librarian of the College Diane Skorina and Associate Professor of Art and Art History in Sculpture and Drawing Cari Freno – both CIE Coordinators – put together a new and unique common event to welcome the class of 2028.

Stacks on Stacks is a project inspired by artist Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books Project. CIE students were grouped together and assigned specific stacks in the Myrin Library. There, students searched for books that poetically or narratively related to each other and created a sequence when stacked. The groups then copied the book titles, along with the style of their design, onto sticky paper that was placed at the end of each stack.

“I reflected on the event with my class, we discussed how playing is a kind of learning,” Freno said. “The entire point of the exercise was for it to not be rigorous or stressful, but experimental and playful.”

Every single group had a different way of completing the project. Each stack held a different genre or topic of books, leading to many different iterations of styles and interpretations on the end of each stack. The set-up of the project also allowed for a social experience for the students.

“We wanted to get students active in a space that they hadn’t been in before and create a CIE orientation experience that was both educational and social,” Freno said.

The idea for this common event originally stemmed from a previous Common Event exercise that involved the “Live the Questions” smokestack on campus and similar, but nonpermanent, art pieces at Ritter Hall.

“This year, we wanted to do something a little more permanent that would bring students back to the library,” Skorina said. “It’s a sort of temporary poetic art installation that we can leave up all year.”

Skorina and Freno plan to have students revisit their art pieces at the conclusion of CIE in April.

“We want students to come back and get a sense of where they were and how they’ve grown over the course of the school year,” Skorina said.

For now, Myrin Library will continue to be decorated with the stacks from the Class of 2028, the first intellectual works of their college careers.