On Friday, April 15 Rock Valley College will host the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, which takes place from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Student Center Atrium. The RVC website states: “The Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour – the first ever collegiate entrepreneur tour – includes keynotes, exhibits, workshops, and question-and-answer sessions with young entrepreneurs. Students will brainstorm with business professionals and meet like-minded students through networking events.” CEE’s Executive Director, Dr. Stephen Hicks, will be a panelist at the event.
Jeffrey van Davis talks with Dr. Stephen Hicks about the inspirations for making his documentary Only A God Can Save Us, which explores Martin Heidegger’s involvement with the National Socialist movement. Mr. van Davis also discusses the process of making the film and its public reception. Parts I-IV are embedded below.
Martin Heidegger is considered by many to be the most profound thinker of the 20th century, and his philosophy continues to be influential.
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In May of 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and became the first Nazi Rector of a German university.
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Heidegger’s final words of despair in a famous Der Spiegel interview make it clear that he had no faith in democracy: “Only a God can save us.”
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The film Only A God Can Save Us is a critical view of Heidegger’s so-called “flirtation” with Nazism and examines the elements of his philosophy which may have led him to support the National Socialist revolution.
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Come watch highlights from the two-hour documentary film about this controversial philosopher and stay for a discussion panel featuring Jeffrey Van Davis, the film’s director, and Rockford College faculty members Stephen Hicks (Philosophy), David Sytsma (History), and Jules Gleicher (Political Science).
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Friday, March 4 from 3-5 p.m. in the CEE office in Burpee
Eduardo Marty is the Founder of Junior Achievement Argentina, an educational outreach program. Students in JA are taught how to prepare a business plan and raise funds. Approximately 50,000 students per year across Argentina participate. Marty has also held academic posts as professor at the University Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, and the University of Buenos Aires. He was the host of Buenos Aires’s major television talk show Boom—Politics and Economics. We met with Mr. Marty in Buenos Aires to talk about his business education programs for young people and the state of entrepreneurship in South America.
. Kaizen:Where did you grow up in Argentina?
Marty: In Buenos Aires. I went to elementary and high school here and the University too.
Kaizen: Before university, what was your education like?
Marty: Well, I went to school called National Buenos Aires. That’s the oldest high school in Buenos Aires, created in 1770. It’s a public school, but it’s a very prestigious one. It was the first school in Buenos Aires. To enter, you need to pass a very tough test once you finish elementary school. From five students submitting and applying—they accept just one. Our education is divided into elementary school and then secondary school. When I was in sixth grade I tried to pass the exam and I did it, so I was one year younger than the rest.
The Jewish community attends that school a lot. It is a very intellectual community here in Buenos Aires. By the way, you know that after New York Buenos Aires has the second largest Jewish community in the hemisphere.
Great news via Stephen Hicks’s website: the Department of Philosophy at Rockford College announced a new minor track in Ethics.
The core courses include several sponsored by CEE: Introduction to Ethics, Biomedical Ethics, Sports Ethics, Business and Economic Ethics, Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Ethical Theory. The department will also offer occasional special topics courses with a strong value component that can count toward the minor.
Mary Mazzio is an award-winning independent filmmaker, Olympic rower, and former law firm partner with Brown Rudnick. She received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a law degree from Georgetown University, and studied film production at Boston University. Her company, 50 Eggs, LLC, has produced five independent films shown across the United States on television, in classrooms, and in theatres. We met with Ms. Mazzio outside of Boston, Massachusetts, to explore her thoughts on entrepreneurship and the challenges and excitement of making documentaries.
Kaizen: You’ve been a lawyer, an Olympic rower, and now a documentary filmmaker. When you were young, did you have any idea your adult life would be so varied?
Mazzio: Not at all. Although as a kid I remember always having a sort of boundless enthusiasm for whatever it was that I was doing. So I always thought that good things would happen in the end but I had no idea.
John Chisholm is the founder, former CEO and chairman of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (now part of Google), and of CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools). A 30-year veteran executive of Silicon Valley, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He chairs the MIT Club of Northern California, serves as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, as member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, and as mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Previously, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, one of Stanford’s twelve independent laboratories; as a member of the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Mathematics; and as vice president of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association. He is author or co-author of two patents in online polling. We met with Mr. Chisholm in the San Francisco bay area to explore his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of entrepreneurship.
Kaizen: You have founded two high-tech companies, Decisive Technology and CustomerSat. Were you technically oriented as a youth?
Chisholm: I think you would say so. I liked to take clocks apart and try to figure out how the gears and springs worked together. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, a small town about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach. In junior high school, my best friend Al Pion and I each memorized pi to over 100 decimal places—we would recite it alternating the digits, like tossing a ball back and forth. Talk about geeky!
On Friday, April 15 Rock Valley College will host the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, which takes place from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Student Center Atrium. The RVC website states: “The Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour – the first ever collegiate entrepreneur tour – includes keynotes, exhibits, workshops, and question-and-answer sessions with young entrepreneurs. Students will brainstorm with business professionals and meet like-minded students through networking events.” CEE’s Executive Director, Dr. Stephen Hicks, will be a panelist at the event.
