by Angela Borda

Some places you have to experience first-hand to understand just how special they are. The first thing you will notice about Pacifica is the beauty of our campuses: richly green, peaceful, a bounty of organic fruit trees, flowers, and the Santa Ynez Mountains rising above us. The campus at Lambert Road is a restored 1920’s-era estate, and higher up toward the mountains is the beautiful retreat of the Ladera Lane campus. One of these campuses will be the setting for your Pacifica Experience Day.

An Interview of Pacifica President Joseph Cambray

by Angela Borda

Angela Borda: We are fortunate to have Dr. Peter Rojcewicz as our new provost, a post which you previously held in conjunction with the post of president. Please describe why Peter was your choice for provost. How is his background in psychology, administration, and poetry a good fit for Pacifica?

Dr. Joseph Cambray: While I made the final choice among the candidates for the position, I would extend this to say that Peter was Pacifica’s choice. We began with an extensive national search with two rounds of committees. The first one vetted the qualified applications and then the second, a selection committee developed criteria and choose the top two candidates to bring to Pacifica. We held a day and a half set of interviews with each of the candidates, in which we introduced them to the president’s council then the IMC. They each gave a presentation open to the entire community, town hall fashion, relating their vision and style of leadership as they would imagine it for Pacifica. 

Montecito Journal's Steve Liebowitz's article on Pacifica alum Cheri Steinkellner and her new play, "Prima Materia." Cheri is a graduate of the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life M.A. program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. 

For the full schedule, visit cominghometopacifica.com.

An interview by Angela Borda of Mary A. Wood & Susan Rowland, Pt. III of III

An interview by Angela Borda of Mary A. Wood & Susan Rowland, Pt. II of III

An Interview by Angela Borda of Mary A. Wood & Susan Rowland, Part I of III

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part III of III

What do you most enjoy about teaching at Pacifica?

Juliet: The active engagement of the students who come here. They truly care and they are really interested. It created this reciprocal loop of learning that’s not passive. So I enjoy the level of depth that people come in with already, so we’re jumping off from a different point than you might find at other places where people just want a surface experience that will get them a job. We have people who are clinical supervisors, people who are very experience in clinical settings but they come to broaden their capacity to articulate what they already have a sense of knowing. It’s not exclusive to Pacifica, but we have people here who are making quite a difference in the world.

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part II of III

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part I of III

What attracted you to the field of psychology? Please tell me a little about the journey to being a teacher at Pacifica.

Juliet: I grew up with a brother with a brain injury and he opened me to consider that there’s much more to this human condition than meets the eye. I became fascinated with why people think and act the way they do. My temperament was inclined to be that way anyway. I was very shy and also drawn to the arts, so I originally thought that the arts would be my path. I did some acting and singing in the 80s. As I was coming into the 90s I was transitioning and asking questions of my life that led me to I want to do more purposeful work in the world, something that would be helpful to people. That can be done through the arts, but in terms of making a living, in my early 30s, I got involved in hypnotherapy and did a yearlong training and supervision in that area. So in the first part of the 90s, I was a hypnotherapist and I worked with people with medical issues like AIDS as well as with others.