The Origin of Stories

Novelist Vikram Chandra chatting with Vivek Jain of the IU physics department before his lecture at the University Club

 

     Where do novels come from?  Salman Rushdie imagined a great sea of stories, always intermingling, always adaptable.  Vikram Chandra, author of three major novels, offered a much grittier vision of the origin of stories as he spoke about the genesis of his sprawling novel, Sacred Games.  “Curiosity drives the making of a book,” Chandra explained.  “My curiosity began as I considered the nature and structure of corruption.  The story grew out of the anger and fear that accompanied the increase in crime in Mumbai in the early 1990s—and the discovery that organized crime came awfully close to home, and the recognition of how soon we become used to it.

             “In my desire to understand the nature and structure of corruption, I talked to everyone I could in order to find out what was going on in my city.  This included the bad guys, who, it turns out, were easier to find than those fighting crime, who by necessity keep a low profile.  We like to think the underworld is a place very far away from our lives.  It’s not.

             “The detective novel is the one new narrative form of the modern era,” explains Chandra, professor of creative writing at Berkeley.  “The detective is the incarnation of celestial order.  In detective stories, there is always a solution, and there is magic.  On TV, forensic equipment reveals secrets like the waving of hands to cast spells. 

             “I had intended to write a simple 250-word detective story, but I found I couldn’t write about crime without writing about politics and the partnership of crime and the state which allows it to exist.  I couldn’t write about politics without considering religion and media, and all this had to be set in the context not only of the struggle of states in South Asia, but also the domestic scene behind all the players, criminals and otherwise. The story took on the shape of a mandala—a circle of seemingly unrelated elements that lead inevitably back to the beginning, the symmetry of the world.”

             Chandra splits his time between California and Mumbai.    The award winning Sacred Games was published in 2007 it follows his earlier works, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), and Love and Longing in Bombay (1997).  His talk and reading, “Sacred Games: Reading Gangsters, Writing Cops,” was the 2012 Hrisikesh and Sailabala Bhattachara Memorial Lecture, and was sponsored by the Dhar India Studies Program, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Creative Writing Program.

Charity, Trust, and Cultural Traditions

 

Abbie Jung speaks from Vienam about her experience with NGOs in Souteast Asia. Listening are Bloomington (upper left) and panelists and an overflow audience in the IUPUI Global Crossroads classroom (lower right).

 

          The Red Cross Society of China is one of that country’s oldest and largest charities; yet in a recent survey in China, 82% responded that they would not contribute to it.  In Communist or former Communist countries of Southeast Asia, the government looks suspiciously on nonprofit philanthropic organizations, suspecting that their very existence is a tacit criticism of the government’s failure to provide an important service, and so regulates nonprofits heavily.  As a consequence, some nonprofits prefer to register as for-profit companies, and face the tax implications instead.

             This year, the Center on Philanthropy celebrates a quarter century on the IUPUI campus.  The store of knowledge and expertise it has accumulated in that time has drawn international attention.  The center’s reports on the impact of new laws and regulations on philanthropic giving are watched closely and reported widely in the press.  But the laws of philanthropy are not quite the same as the laws of physics.  Habits of giving and expectation of the results of giving operate differently in China than they do in the U.S.

             The China Philanthropy Leadership Initiative, a group of IUPUI students interested in Chinese philanthropy, gave those differences center stage in a symposium at the Global Crossroads classroom of the IUPUI Office of International Affairs.  The event included participants from campus and from the Indianapolis community; the truly “wired” venue allowed Bloomington to participate and brought in a speaker currently working in Vietnam.   

             Leslie Lenkowsky, SPEA and Center on Philanthropy professor and one of a handful of top international philanthropy experts in the nation, opened the session with a challenge to the notion that the laws of philanthropy vary around the world.  He outlined five problems that all nonprofits must address—from the need to define their mission and expectations, to the difficulty of measuring outcomes and determining impact, to the lack of incentives to perform effectively. 

             Melynne Klaus, director of the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, outlined the work of that organization to make a positive impact on the arts scene in Central Indiana.  They have worked to simplify the application process (and reduce the grant application time that organizations must devote) by standardizing the application form with similar organizations in the city, and to establish rules of transparency and clarity of mission.  They ask organizations that apply for funding to establish their own measurable goals as part of the application process, and then the organization is evaluated for how well it meets its own goals.  Anthony Lorenz, CFO for WFYI, the nation’s 19th largest public broadcasting corporation,  provided a financial context for establishing transparency.  It tracks community needs through patterns of annual giving.

             Abbie Jung, based in Hong Kong and San Franciso, happened to be in Vietnam when she spoke to the group about her experiences with nonprofits in China and Southeast Asia.  Philanthropy is a long-standing tradition in Asia and giving is generous.  She noted differences from Western trends. Private giving is still more common than strategic support of civil entities and NGO’s.  Family interests and education are the traditional objects.   Patterns of  government regulation and enforcement are still evolving. 

            The IUPUI symposium was the signature event of semester-long program exploring philanthropy and its global implications.  The initiative was completely student driven and was developed both to expand cultural understanding of the workings and issues of philanthropic organizations and to train young professionals through resources that go beyond the campus.

Elite, Mass, Universal—What Is Education Doing to Us?

 

Anthropologist Susan Blum spent 30 years studying China, 10 years researching education, and is now trying to merge the two with an ambitious goal.  “Schooling helps create children.  All education is political.  At the same time, all education is cultural involving values, meaning, structure, and family.“  Blum wants to explain how this creation works; she is currently conducting research on the effect of higher education in six different societies.  China, with its staggeringly ambitious goals for education, is a challenging case in point and the subject of her lecture, specifically the “massification” of Chinese higher education. 

Educational theorists will understand that the horrible word massifcation has a specific meaning in higher education.  Martin Trow used it to refer to the twilight zone between two social goals–the higher education of the elite alone and universal higher education—exactly where China stands today.  Blum has the statistics:  In 1978, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, China had 400 colleges and 3% of youth attended them.  Today, there are 3,500 colleges with 23% of the college-aged population in attendance, a ramping up of tertiary education similar to, but even greater than, the effect in the U.S. of the GI Bill after World War II.

Blum traced the history of higher education in China from the meritocracy of Imperial China and the corrupt exam system it produced for entry into the higher ranks of the civil service; to the Cultural Revolution, begun at Peking University in 1966 with a specific goal of eradicating educational inequality; to the end of that revolution and the restoration of the exam system; to the current day when vast forests of students spend much of their childhood and youth with the single goal of getting the highest possible score on the Gaokao, the national exam that decides students’ access to the best universities. 

As Blum recounted the effect of this national exam, the situation began to sound more local than foreign.  Teaching to the test produces an empty curriculum relying on disembodied facts and a community of stressed-out students. Achieving the demanding educational goals no longer assures a job and with that comes disillusionment and increases in subtle forms of social inequality.  While the U.S. is further along the “massification” road than China, the impact of social and economic conditions on education began to have a familiar ring. 

Blum announced at the start that she was in the early stages of this research.  She did not finally offer an answer to the question of how these changes in the world of education changed the people themselves.  How will the contradictory educational goals of status vs. return on investment play out?  Can the national exam make society more equitable, or does it always lead to scandal and fraud?  Are we moving towards an international form of leadership with where class is more important than citizenship?  Questions abound both locally and globally, but answers are elusive.

Susan D. Blum is professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.  Her most recent book is My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009).  Her presentation was sponsored by the IU Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business. 

Reconciliation in West Africa

Nobel Laureate Lehmah Gbowee and Marion Broome, dean of nursing. The School of Nursing is working with the University or Liberia to rebuild the university’s nursing and public health programs, whose facilities and programs were devastated by decades of civil war.

“In most of our communities today, people are still looking over the heads of women and looking beyond for experts to come and reconcile their communities,” Lehmah Gbowee said recently to a packed room at the IUPUI McKinney School of Law.  “Women have the capacity.  They understand the context and issues.  They know the stakeholders, and they know in part some of the solutions to their problems.”   

Gbowee, joint recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in ending civil war in Liberia, related some of the ways women worked for peace in West Africa–from establishing benchmarks to assure that the process did not stall, to making sure that leaders knew when promises were not being kept.  When peacekeepers come from the outside, the peace process “is one size fits all,” Gbowee explained.  They have their formulas and their books, and although relying on local knowledge is highly publicized, it is rarely done.  “One of the ways to hide things from the African people is to bury them in books,” Gbowee said.  And some stories of how peace is accomplished don’t get told, especially the stories of the successes of the women who are part of the affected communities.

Besides the practical and pragmatic advice that only someone on the front lines of the process can give—like making sure that soldiers who give up their guns receive promised payments—women are in tune with a vital component of the reconciliation process, exemplified in the story of the woman who while feeding a wounded soldier, heard the soldier’s admission that he had killed her daughter.  “Was I supposed to stop feeding him?” the woman asked.  Peace can only come, Gbowee suggests, when the answer to that question is “No.”

Gbowee’s presentation can be viewed in its entirety here.  The event had sixteen sponsors representing every part and every constituency of the IUPUI campus.

When is Law Not the Law?

Sida Liu spoke of the legal climate in rural China

 

In China, the further you get from cities—from the centers of money and power–the less lawyers control the law.  In a symposium on “legal services for vulnerable populations in India and China,” Sida Liu spoke about one western province of China that had a total of two lawyers.  To cover their territory, they would travel on horseback six hours across the desert.  “They would get so lonely on these trips that they would sing to themselves for comfort.”  They might be paid in produce by their clients.  China has a substantial number of lawyers, but they are concentrated in the big cities where salaries are exponentially higher than in the provinces.

 Legal services in outlying areas are mostly in the hands of legal workers or barefoot lawyers.  Lawyers may be have paid by the government; legal workers must negotiate payment with clients.  Barefoot lawyers have no legal training; they are self-taught and don’t charge fees.  With so much law outside the profession, most grievances are solved outside the courts.  Mediation and negotiation are invoked more than regulation.  Clients therefore can be at the mercy of local custom and tradition. 

 The distribution of lawyers is better in India, but the total number is still so small and the population so large, that “vulnerable populations” are still dominated by customary law and the local climate of opinion.  Laws related to marriage and divorce in India have improved in the last thirty years, but local opinion and the legal climate is still under control of men.    

 In China too, the version of customary law that gets codified is the version by men. Among those who suffer the most from a situation are women caught in bad marriages.  A wife who has the courage to seek a divorce has no customary rights.  To get the divorce, they must give up property, home, and children.  And if they try to get a divorce, they face obstruction, harassment, and physical abuse from husbands; threats can last for years after the divorce.  Susan Williams spoke of a similar situation in Africa.   “Women have greater access to justice, but this access to justice doesn’t translate into delivery of justice.” 

 The symposium sponsored by the Maurer School of Law Center for Law, Society, and Culture included experts from outside and inside the law school:  Sida Liu, assistant professor of sociology and law at the University of Wisconsin, spoke on China’s legal situation.  Sylvia Vatuk, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago addressed the legal situation for Indian women.  From the Maurer School were Ke Li, doctoral candidate in sociology, and Christiana Ochoa, Carole Silver, and Susan Williams, professors of law.

 The symposium was long on problems and short on solutions.  Most of the solutions proposed—such as pre-nuptial agreements—seem to impose an outside culture on traditionally patriarchal societies.  Still, the divorce rate is going up in China, it was pointed out.  Chinese women are making the effort internally to mobilize new ideas of the marriage contract.   The symposium did make a start at addressing one of the most fundamental problems that the law makes for vulnerable populations.  Two members of the panel explained that Chinese law students never hear about basic legal workers or barefoot lawyers, so they never know about the legal processes experienced by vast numbers of Chinese.  U.S. law schools have been criticized as well for not addressing the way law works for the poor.   From the reaction of the audience at the Maurer School event, most were hearing these detail about China and India for the first time.  That, at least, is a first step.  

Sylvia Vatuk described the legal world faced by Indian women

 
 
 
 
 

Economic Interconnection

 

SKKU-IU Undergraduate Economic Research Conference--Impact of Exchange Rates on Exports

 

Some experts say that Korean students are among the most academically competitive in the world.   Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) is Korea’s oldest university with roots in Seoul going back to 1398.  IU students had a chance to share the scholarship of their Korean colleagues recently when 24 SKKU undergraduate students came to Bloomington to participate in a conference on economic research. 

The presentations by students from the SKKU Department of Global Economics (where courses are taught in English) were highly technical—including titles like “Loss Aversion and Fiscal Policy,” and “Analysis about the Effect of Exchange Rate Volatility on Exports” –and highly professional, with reviews of research and methodology.   Their conclusions suggested how interconnected the world economy is:  Fluctuations in exchange rates (the Korean won is the most volatile currency in the world) produce fluctuations in production so that potential loss from one is cancelled by gain in the other.  The U.S. response to its economic crisis of 2008 has indirectly benefitted Korea by making the results of Korean research and development of increased interest in the U.S. IU graduate students and faculty members prepared formal responses to the presentations, and a sizeable audience of advanced IU undergraduates questioned speakers and respondents. 

Dr. Young Se Kim, SKKU chair of the Department of Global Economics, explained that the students had been working in groups for two months to research and to prepare their presentations.  When they return, they will turn the presentations into formal papers. 

The day was packed with nine research sessions and a luncheon presentation by Gerhard Glomm, professor of economics.  Korean students joined American students at a dinner at the Global Living-Learning Center.   “The dinner was a real success,” Kirstine Lindemann, conference organizer, said.  “I have multiple requests for email addresses; students want to keep in touch.”

The College of Arts and Sciences hosted the conference and arranged for the Korean students to spend a day in Chicago where they toured the Federal Reserve and the Mercantile Exchange.

IU President Michael McRobbie visited the SKKU campus in 2008 to sign a university-wide presidential agreement of cooperation.  Currently, SKKU has formal agreements with the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Informatics and Computing, the Kelley School of Business, and the Maurer School of Law. 

This conference, one product of this institutional cooperation, provided the opportunity for undergraduates at both institutions to engage in a kind of discourse usually available only to professionals in the field.   Lindemann travelled to Seoul last fall to interview SKKU students  interested in coming to Bloomington.    Another result of the agreement will come in March, when seven IU graduate students will travel to the SKKU campus in Seoul for a conference on graduate and professional education.

Caught in the Dark Net

Carolyn Nordstrom framing the global

She moves fast.  She talks fast.  She covers a lot a ground and rarely looks back.  When Carolyn Nordstrom is done giving a talk, everyone in the room is out of breath.  Never more so than when her subject is the cyber version of fire and brimstone—the dark, subterranean world of the computer hacker.   I suspect there are few times in the university when listeners leave so fully believing in the existence of Hell—at least the hell that she was describing.

Computer hacking has been around a long time.  It preceded the internet.  Some may remember having to be wary of sharing invisibly infected floppy disks.  The global spread of hacking, made possible by the internet, is also not new.  Users around the world are aware, however dimly, of the likelihood of lurkers in dark corners.

Nordstrom brings two important matters to the public discussion of cyber security. First, she offers a mountain of data demonstrating the reach, and perhaps more terrifying, the high level of organization and entrepreneurship of the hacker’s world.  And then she adds the central question, “Why don’t more of us know about it?”

She layers statistics upon statistics.  Experts estimate that as many as 15% of all computers have suffered a “drive-by” infection or some other undetectable change to their basic operating system that pulls the computer into a botnet.  The computer becomes a zombie totally at the mercy of a bot master to send spam, disrupt major web services, or collect private information like social security numbers and passwords.

Nordstrom talks about internet regions, “the dark net,” that only those in the know can find, and how cyberattack supplies and support services are readily available there. “Click here for money laundering.”

“It’s in front of all of our faces, but we don’t see it, and we deny it exists,” she says.  “The facts are terrifying, but what is more scary is what we don’t see.  I’m an optimist.  If I can see it, I believe it can be fixed.  The fix to the spread and power of cyber warfare will take the efforts of a generation of new students.” Indeed, the very young may be more on top of these issues than most adults, and she quotes one twelve-year-old, “The chaos is coming.  You adults don’t help.”

The internet and the potential it offers for attacks level the cyber battlefield and redefine our most basic concepts of power.  “The individual has the same power as the military in the hacking world.”  Those who explore and attend to the hackers’ world can quickly become hackers themselves.  It doesn’t take a huge government organization to master these skills.

Her talk is thin on moral proclamations and on solutions.  “I don’t want to alienate anyone from the discussion right now, and I don’t want to pre-empt or stifle your suggestions for solving the problem.”  The only advice she offers at the moment is, “Let’s talk.  Let’s get this subject out into the light.”  That’s the first step, but there are many questions left to answer.  Why, if so much power is vested in the hands of a few individuals, have they not brought down power grids or the world’s online money systems?  Why do individuals acknowledge the existence of a dangerous online world, but turn to their laptops and other connected devices as though they themselves were invulnerable?  And what should we do to change things?  Should we hide the extent of the threat (and so the panic that would ensue) and rely on individual morality and mutual trust?  Or should we train all the world to hack so that they can recognize it when they see it and find ways to protect themselves from it?

Carolyn Nordstrom is on the anthropology faculty at the University of Notre Dame.  She has devoted her career to the ethnographic study of dangerous issues—war in Africa, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and other transnational crime.    She has published several books, most recently Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World, based on three years of research into illegal trade around the world, research that took her to some of the world’s most dangerous places.  She spoke in Bloomington as part of the “Framing the Global” joint initiative of the IU Center for the Study of Global Change and the IU Press, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reaching Out: The O’Meara International Lecture Series

Patrick O'Meara: As part of the inauguration of the new lecture series, President McRobbie awarded the President's Medal for Excellence.

         “It was an exciting ride,” said Patrick O’Meara of his global peregrinations with IU President Michael McRobbie, in a brief chronicle of his two decades as dean and vice president charged with overseeing IU’s international affairs.  “The long plane trips were like an academy in the air as we batted ideas around across the world.”

               The occasion was the inauguration of a new series of international lectures named in O’Meara’s honor.  Timothy Roemer, former member of Congress from Indiana, and U.S. ambassador to India from 2009-11, spoke about the connections between the U.S. and India.  In a period of economic uncertainty, a time when instincts are to pull in the reins and view new initiatives with suspicion, Roemer reminded us of a better way.  He began with an image of a book published two decades ago.  It spoke of the United States and India as “Estranged Democracies.”  “It is unfortunate,” Roemer said.  When we recognize how much common ground and how many common interests there are between the nations, we begin to understand how powerful a benefit a mutual reaching out would be.  He offered as a case in point a photo of himself in the driver’s seat of a rickshaw, which was circulated by the press throughout Indian and which spoke worlds to Indian citizens.  Another, Roemer pointed out, was the work of individuals like Patrick O’Meara, who are not content to wait until world issues come to them;  and like Michael McRobbie and O’Meara’s successor as vice president for international affairs, David Zaret, who this fall spent more than a week in intensive meetings on campuses all over India, looking for ways for IU to connect.  Roemer’s final example consisted of three words, “We the people.”  India is a young democracy, the U.S. an old one, but both have constitutions that begin with these words.

Democracies should not be estranged. That was the message from Ambassador Timothy Roemer.

What Can I Do to Help?

Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in conversation about current international affairs

The question from the student was “What would you do about the political stalemate in Washington?”  Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton, first blurted out “I have no idea.”  (That got a round of applause.)  Then she thought for a moment (really half a moment; she’s quick on her feet) and told the large crowd assembled for this Union Board event in the IU Auditorium, about efforts to promote democracy overseas.  “People agree that compromise and cooperation are part of the democratic process.  It’s hard to go abroad and represent the values of democracy when we are setting such a bad example at home.” 

          Albright has been known for fiery and brutally frank speaking.  For this event, she chose a more personal and heartening tone.  Her speech was part of the Themester project, “Making War, Making Peace.”  Her initial remarks asked the audience to consider what war and peace really are.  “Peace is not just the space between wars, but something that needs to be worked at constantly.”  She spoke of her direct experiences of war as a child in Czechoslovakia and then Britain during World War II.   Conscious of her student audience, she traced how her family background and her college experiences led her inexorably to international affairs.  She encouraged students not to limit their attention to those with whom they already agree and to make college “an adventure.”  She assured students that if they did, they would be “surprised by the miracles they could achieve.”

          In an earlier, private meeting with Patrick O’Meara, special advisor to President McRobbie, the two life-long internationalists shared their insider’s views of current world affairs.  The tenor of that meeting was not as positive; they found much that is troubling in the direction events were going in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.  And neither felt confident that solutions were near at hand. 

          Albright was interested in the international activities at IU.  When the subject came up regarding one important project that had taken years to develop and was nearly—but not quite—ready to go, the immediate and startling response was, “What can I do to help?”  Albright made it clear that this was not a polite or gratuitous offer.  She stood ready to take action if that would help move the project forward. 

           Perhaps the former secretary and continuing international activist knows more than she admits in dealing with the stalemate in DC.  The willingness and readiness to do something to make a positive difference might just be the solution.

Madeleine Albright

Trade, but Not with Japan

George Wilson opens the IU Art Museum exhibition of Japanese prints related to Commodore Perry's commanding arrival in 1853.

It is difficult to imagine how the townspeople of Edo felt when the black-hulled steam frigate USS Susquehanna arrived in their harbor in 1853.  Edo was the Japanese capital and one of the largest cities in the world at the time.  Contact with the outside world had been forbidden for 250 years.  The ship was five times larger than any ship the Japanese had known, and steam technology was completely new.  That show of force convinced the de facto national powers of the shogunate to accept a letter proposing a treaty.  When Perry returned seven months later with a quarter of the U.S. Navy—eight ships—he left with a treaty.  And so Japan was opened for trade with the West.

George Wilson

George Wison, professor emeritus of history and East Asian languages and cultures

But not quite.  The U.S. had sent Perry on this mission not to gain access to Japanese trade, but for two other reasons, George Wilson, Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures emphasized in a brief lecture at the IU Art Museum.   The U.S. was more concerned with protecting its trade in tea from China and in whale oil from the North Atlantic.  Perry’s treaty secured two open ports, one in the South that allowed ships bound for China to refuel, and one in the North, whose main function was to provide a way of repatriating American sailors whose whaling ships had floundered.  Perry’s treaty was the first unequal diplomatic treaty, Professor Wilson explained.  Japan did not get the same rights in the U.S. that they granted the U.S. in Japan.  It also opened a door for a U.S. consul in Japan.  Consul Townsend Harris arrived in 1856 and with persistent pressure won the first treaty securing trade between the two nations.

The impact of this nineteenth-century version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind has been disputed ever since.  Perry and Harris laid the groundwork for the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and ultimately for Japan to play a role as a world power.  At the time, the Japanese wrote of the “Black Ships of Evil Men.”   “Black ships” is still used by the Japanese to describe technological threats from the West.  Although Japanese law forbade depicting current events, Perry’s visits saw artists lined up at the waterfront preparing images for broadsides and street sales around the country.  Professor Wilson’s lecture marked the opening of an exhibition of several of those images which combine the delicate Japanese artistry of line and color with billowing black smoke and fearful military monsters.  With the help of these drawings, we can imagine how the townspeople of Edo felt—the terror and panic, and the fascination–that the arrival of the Western military produced.

The lecture is part of the College of Arts and Sciences Themester, Making War, Making Peace.   The exhibition is one of several special programs at the IU Art Museum.

USS Susquehanna steam frigate, one of the "Black Ships"

Who Represents Who to Whom?

African Studies began its anniversary celebration with an African photojournalism exhibit

            The African Studies Program turns 50 this year.  Courses in African studies began at IU in 1948.  A five-year Ford Foundation grant in 1961 gave Liberia scholar Gus Liebenow the support to coordinate and consolidate IU’s African offerings.  The program received its first federal funding in 1965 and has earned continuous federal support since that time.  That support has made IU a national and international resource for teaching African languages and culture. 

            Anniversary celebrations began with the opening of a gallery exhibition at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center of photographs taken by two of Africa’s most important photojournalists, Djibril Sy, from Senegal, and Jacob Otieno from East Africa.  They have photographed most of Africa’s major political crises since the 1980s.  Brutal images from coups and crackdowns kept their fellow Africans aware of the truth of what was happening around them.  “You are warriors,” Samuel Obeng, current director of African Studies, said.  “You are educators.  Not even a gun can turn you away from your task.”  War and violence weren’t the only subjects of these photojournalists’ lessons.  The exhibit included images of celebration when President Obama came to Africa, of healing ceremonies, and of things outsiders might not notice—like the series of photographs of salt harvesters.

            Life lived violently on the one hand.  Life lived locally on the other.  The exhibition shows us what Africans consider important to show each other.  The anniversary celebration continues with lectures, reminiscences by past and present directors of the program, concerts of Ghanaian drumming and Afro Hoosier popular music. You can read more here.

IU’s connection with Africa thrives with major new projects begun or on the cusp—developing a national flagship center at IU for the teaching of Swahili, rebuilding Liberian resources for training nurses, for example, or digitizing important national land records that presently exist only in handwritten ledgers. 

Jacob Otieno, photojournalist from Kenya

Djibril Sy, photojournalist from Senegal

It Takes a Village

Jason Baumgartner and the future of immigration management software

 

It was not quite a decade ago that Jason Baumgartner proposed a renegade solution to managing the immigration and visa issues of international students and scholars.  No major software developer was attempting to capture information made available through the federal government’s data systems to institutions with international students and then weave that data together with institutional data to produce something that would spare advisors both the constant need for cross-checking and the worry that an inadvertent slip could result in a student’s being sent home.  The thought was too radical.  It couldn’t be done.  No institution the size of Indiana University should build its safety nets from homespun threads.  Too much was at stake.

Christopher Viers, the director of international services at that time and now the associate vice president for international services, went to bat to make Baumgartner’s system the foundation of the immigration services that IU provides to international students and scholars.  Formerly an advisor himself, Viers saw the potential and efficiency of this new approach. “I knew at the time it was either going to be the best or the worst decision I ever made.”  If only Baumgartner could make it work.

Make it work, he did, and the Office of International Services has relied on it for several years now.  Viers relates that “no one thought when the decision was made that other institutions might benefit from such a solution,” but Ron Cushing of the University of Cincinnati saw its potential when it was demonstrated at a regional conference.  He kept after his colleagues at IU to share the product, and his office became the first outside client of the product, now dubbed Sunapsis.  “I was sure at the time that it was the best solution around, and I have never regretted adopting it,” Cushing said.

Now, 23 institutions use Sunapsis, which has become a complete advising management tool and has extended its reach to study abroad and international admissions.  As more and more institutions signed on, it became apparent that their collective experience was exactly what was needed to grow and expand.  Representatives gathered in Bloomington this week for the first annual Sunapsis User’s Conference. They shared their separate experiences, learned new techniques, and listened to Baumgartner explain some of what the future holds for the software system.  It is a future which that group was helping to define, Baumgartner said  at the beginning of his keynote address, for the conference  was “building a community so that we can all resource together.”

For more information see the press release and the Sunapsis website.

Honoring the World’s Best Ideas

Michael Sohlman, executive director emeritus of the Nobel Foundation

Alfred Nobel once said that if he had 300 ideas in a year, and one of them turned out to be a good one, he would be satisfied.  A chemist and engineer, holder of more than 300 patents, Nobel’s best known invention was a way to tame unpredictable nitroglycerin by combining it with chalk and other inert ingredients; the result he named dynamite after the Greek word for power.  He had less successful inventions, such as the bicycle that the rider moved with pedals that pumped rather than spun. 

Michael Sohlman retired as executive director of the Nobel Foundation in May 2011 after nineteen years in that position. He spoke last week in Bloomington about Nobel and the intellectual origin of the prizes.  Nobel was known to be a shrewd businessman, but he also had lifelong engagement with philosophy and political theory.  He kept up a correspondence of 20 to 30 letters a day to friends, philosophers, and intellectuals all over Europe.  He wrote a prose tragedy with such a dismal view of the world that made his friends attempt to destroy all copies when it was published at the end of his life.  Sohlman believes it was the philosopher in Nobel, not the inventor or businessman, that prompted him to create an award that would come to define the way to honor creative endeavor around the world. 

Although in rare cases institutions were honored, the award went overwhelmingly to individuals, individuals with the creative energy to define a new idea and to convince others of its “benefit to mankind” (to quote Nobel’s will).  Ideas do not honor national borders.  Nobel spoke six languages, and the Nobel Prize was possibly the first such honor to have an international reach, much to the chagrin of some of his countrymen, who wished it had been set up to promote Swedish achievements only. 

Although Nobel’s will stipulated the bodies that would choose each year’s awards, he left no instructions on how the effort was to be coordinated.  The Nobel Foundation, established in 1900 for this purpose, has been singularly successful in assuring the secrecy of deliberation and the respect for Nobel’s defining principles in making the awards.  Asked if the Foundation regretted any of the prizes it had given, Sohlman was quick to point out that historical context must be understood before such judgments are made.  He offered a single example.  In 1949, Antonio Egas Moniz received half of the physiology/medicine prize in recognition of his promotion of lobotomy for certain psychoses.  “At the time,” Sohlman commented, “there were few treatments that seemed as humane. We of course understand such things a great deal better now.” As a man who saw that one good idea in 300 made the intellectual effort worthwhile, Nobel would have been pleased with the Foundation’s track record. 

Questions and answers at the Herman B Wells House

 

Surabaya to CNN: Alumnus Eli Flournoy Remembers IU

Seated in the Indiana Memorial Union Gallery, Eli Flournoy talked about IU and his international career.

Eli Flournoy was on the ground for CNN during major crises in Angola, in the Middle East, and in India, Pakistan, and Hong Kong.  As part of CNN’s international news “desk” in Atlanta, he has directed coverage of the Bosnian war, the Kosovo War, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Princess Diana’s death, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  He was part of teams that received major awards for coverage of the Southeast Asia tsunami, the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon, Hurricane Katrina, and the 1999 Indonesian elections. 

He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and African studies from IU in 1991.

 Asked if his experience at IU had turned him into an internationalist, he replied instantly, “That happened long before I came to IU.  My parents took my sister and me for a year-long stay in Surabaya when I was nine.”  After that experience in Indonesia’s second-largest city, the family entertained international visitors frequently at their home in Athens, Ohio. The international perspective was inescapable.  “I came to IU with a specific goal.  I would major in political science with an emphasis on international issues, go on to graduate work, and then take the Foreign Service exam with the goal of working in an embassy overseas.” 

 While IU may not have created the internationalist, it did have an impact on the direction of Flournoy’s career.  “IU is outstanding in the opportunities it makes available to its undergraduates.  I was president of the Residence Halls Association, and in that job I was allowed to take on mature and real responsibilities for such things as the management of a million dollar budget and responding to significant personnel issues.”  Flournoy had developed a strong interest in Africa.  ” With its undergraduate certificate in African Studies, IU was one of the few places that gave undergraduates major opportunities to study Africa.”

Flournoy found that not only could he study Africa, but even as an undergraduate, he could get involved in teaching about Africa.  Patrick O’Meara was director of African studies at the time.  “Dr. O’Meara gave me, an undergraduate, a chance to do a teaching assistantship.”  He became teaching assistant to Charles Bird in a course in African Studies with a special emphasis on South Africa.  “I learned a lot from Professor Bird.  He was always determined to experience not just to study.  He made his own wine and beer. He would have African drumming sessions at his house.” 

The shift in his career came in a summer internship after his junior year.  With a grant from IU, he worked at the CNN Atlanta headquarters that summer while investigating why news organizations didn’t get more information out of Africa.  During the fall semester of his senior year, CNN contacted him with an offer of another internship for the spring.  With the help of Dr. O’Meara, who agreed to oversee a major independent study project, Flournoy spent the spring at CNN.  He joined the team that produced CNN World Report, a  CNN venture to encourage international coverage by broadcasting and sharing news briefs, uncut and unedited, prepared by other news organizations around the world.  He was there during the Gulf War, and for the equivalent of a senior thesis, he investigated the media propaganda of the war, comparing the media strategies of Saddam Hussein and George Bush. 

The CNN internships jump-started a career that celebrated its 20th anniversary last August.  Flournoy comes back to IU periodically.  His visit this time was part of the “Making War, Making Peace” Themester of the College of Arts and Sciences.  He was much in demand as an expert visitor to telecomm courses.  In a presentation sponsored by the Union Board, he fielded passionate questions from students about the role of the media in today’s world.

Saskia Sassen’s Compulsion: Territory, Authority, and Rights

 

Saskia Sassen (right), professor of sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University in conversation with Hilary Kahn, Director of the IU Center for the Study of Global Change, and David Zaret, vice president for international affairs.

By 2010, rich governments, firms, and individuals bought or rented 70 million hectares of land in mostly poor countries.  That is 1.7 billion acres or more than a billion and a half football fields.  When Saskia Sassen ponders that figure, and many other current trends, she thinks of territory.  She claims to be a geek about that word; it, along with authority and rights, has become her obsession.  When faced with trends of this scale, we need to rethink what that word means and what territory is becoming. Territory has for centuries been closely aligned with the idea of sovereign states.  Indeed, land ownership is one thing we have come to expect to be documented rigorously and protected to the full extent of the law.  When a company buys a million acres in a poor country, there is no immediate thought that the land is no longer part of the national sovereignty—the nation’s laws still apply to it, don’t they?  Yet, with such a powerful economic presence, the company can win exceptions to regulations and laws.  Localities will bend their rights and authority to keep the economic well-being that seems  promised by such a massive presence. 

Sassen’s goal is not to deny the truths of world economics and politics as we have come to understand them, but to assert that those truths are not sufficient; she wants to provoke us to be less comfortable with our large well-established definitions as globalization expands our ways of working in the world.  Sassen is known world-wide for her work on defining the impact of globalization.  IU Vice President for International Affairs David Zaret explained in his introduction, “She persuasively argues against convention and overly simple accounts that juxtapose global and national as mutually exclusive categories for social forces that are thought to be engaged in a zero-sum game. Instead, she shows that many important global changes operate within the institutional structure of nation-states, but also restructure those states.”  Judging by the many pockets of animated conversation after her presentation, Sassen has succeeded in her provocation.

Sassen is the first in a series of visiting scholars who are part of the IU Framing the Global Initiative, a five-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The Center for the Study of Global Change and the IU Press are working jointly to bring top scholars together, virtually and actually, to begin to define new global concepts and analytical frameworks. Their work will take formal shape in a series of books by participating scholars to be published by the IU Press. 

Saskia Sassen grapling with concepts of territory, authority, and rights.

Seeing America through Foreign Eyes after 9/11

          The tenth anniversary of the worst foreign attacks on U. S. soil have prompted a period of intense reflection.  Workshops, performances, memorial services, reminiscences—all have tried to articulate what the events of 9/11 meant and how the country and its peoples have changed as a result.  Indeed, the IUB College of Arts and Sciences has set issues of war and peace as a theme for events during the entire fall semester.  As part of that extended program, international experts from Indiana University gathered in the Georgian Room at the IMU on Monday, September 12. The first half of the three-hour session, moderated by Maria Bucur (history) , was dedicated to political ramifications of the 9/11 events, the second, moderated by Bob Ivie (Communication and Culture), to their cultural implications. There were few confident answers and no sense that we are ready to put these issues behind us.

           The political experts provided few answers.  Rather they struggled with finding the right questions.

Patrick O'Meara (Political Science; African Studies)

Patrick O’Meara spoke of the “terrorists” and “freedom fighters” (the same individuals depending on one’s point of view) that brought significant and largely successful change to South Africa, and noted the differences between those efforts and 9/11.    His question:  Are we in a new dimension, a different form, of terrorism, one with no possible meeting point? 

Nick Cullather (History)

Nick Cullather asked, Why do we care what others think of the U.S.?  He traced the history of America’s interest in the world’s opinion, which began optimistically with Woodrow Wilson embracing it as moral conscience to guide foreign policy, and quickly declined as experts came to see it as a fickle master, and then sank even further as government officials saw it as a force to be surreptitiously manipulated. 

Micol Seigel (African American and African Diaspora Studies; American Studies; Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Micol Seigel brought her expertise of Latin America to the table and counted up the dead in Mexican drug wars–numbers more than ten times those who died in the 9/11 attacks, and many killed in unspeakably horrible ways.  Her question:  Why are some deaths more visible than others?

Padraid Kenney (History; Russian and East European Institute)

Padraic Kenney’s question came from an encounter in Budapest in 2003.  He was there when the U.S. declared war on Iraq, and he expected his Hungarian university colleagues to protest America’s aggression, but they didn’t.  His question:  Why was there sympathy in Central Europe for the U.S. attacking Iraq? Kenney’s answer:  At the time (and possibly no longer), there was still a sense that there is such a thing as moral foreign policy, and Central Europe understood well the corrosive power of dictatorship.

The cultural experts spoke more personally, remembering their immediate reactions in September 2001, but they too provided no resolution, and their presentations became a litany of unrealized hopes and dreams.

Gardner Bovingdon (Central Eurasian Studies)

Gardiner Bovington’s area of expertise is the nation of Uyghurs in Western China.  His colleagues there hoped they would find sympathy and support in the multi-ethnic U.S. for a China whose constitution guarantees equal rights to all its ethnic groups. Since 9/11, U.S. foreign policy, sensitive to the importance of trade, has not responded to that hope.  Bovington saw the possibility of two positive U.S. responses to the events of 9/11:  (1) that Americans would show a greater desire to understand others, and (2) that the U.S. might gain a better perspective on its behavior in the world.  Neither has been achieved.

Jeff Isaac (Political Science)

Jeff Isaac did not cancel his class on Civility in American Democracy on 9/11/2001, but rather prepared a lecture that he was asked to deliver again later on.  But, he said, “The things I was hoping for did not come to pass.”  Instead, he sees a war on terrorism that accomplished none of the things that we needed to address.  “Is there the possibility that things can be better now?”  Now he offers no answer and does not speak in public about the issues of war and peace in the Middle East.

Kevin Jaques (Religious Studies; Islamic Studies)

Kevin Jaques also taught his class that day.  He had expected in teaching the history of Islam that only in the last two weeks would he speak about living persons, but the class was full on the first meeting of the second week of term, and students were asking for answers, “Why would Islam support doing something like this?”  That the question was posed wrong—that Islam is so broad and varied that no one can speak for Islam as a whole—became the theme of the rest of the semester.  And Jaques worries that what America has done and not done since 9/11 has achieved only its’ own inability to have an impact in the Muslim world. 

Hilary Kahn (Center for the Study of Global Change; Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

Hilary Kahn is an expert in aspects of Guatemalan culture, and has spent much time in Jamaica.  She spoke of the intractable ambivalence Latin America feels towards the U.S.  The U.S. is blamed for all the evils visited upon Latin America—everything from short skirts, to drugs, to AIDS.  But at the same time, Latin America held out hope that the U.S. would be a force for local good.  However, since 9/11, their perception is that the U.S. has abandoned the needs of its own hemisphere.

Nazif Shahrani (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Anthropology)

As an Afghan and a Muslim, Nazif Sharani, declares he himself sees the U.S. through “foreign” eyes.  What he sees since 9/11 is that the U.S. has written the wrong stories.  At one time, the U.S. had built enormous trust in the Middle East; that trust has gradually winnowed away.  The “dastardly acts” of 9/11 were meant to signal the loss, to bring into the foreground the political grievances that the Middle East had towards the U.S.  But the U.S. wrote a different story, a clash of civilizations.  “They hate us because of our freedom.”  The U.S. story didn’t resolve into a search for peace, but in a declaration of the need for better security.  Military victory was the end of that story, not cultural engagement.

DanceJerusalem, by Leah Boresow

 Leah Boresow spent last spring studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in a new program that combines intensive training in dance with study of the Hebrew language and Jewish Culture.  Here is the report she prepared for the first issue of DanceJerusalem Journal.  We thank that journal for giving us permission to reproduce the article here.
 
 
 
 

Leah Boresow is the first dancer on the left. Photo credit: Melissa Strain

 

I started studying dance when I was about 3 years old. I knew that I wanted to be
a dance major towards the end of my high school career. I am receiving a B.S in
Dance through Indiana University’s Department of Kinesiology, a Hebrew Minor, a
certificate in Arts Administration, and a minor in Non-Profit Management. I
chose DanceJerusalem for a few reasons; first, I had already traveled to Israel
in the summer of 2009, and really loved my experience there. I couldn’t wait to
go back. Second, there are very few study abroad opportunities for university
level dancing today. So, when I heard that I could have the opportunity to go
to Israel and dance while still receiving college credit, it was like a match
made in heaven.

Adapting to life in Jerusalem was definitely an interesting experience. I learned very
quickly that I was going to have to be very self-sufficient, knowing that the
“system” of the city was a very busy and crowded one. Eventually, I got the
hang of things, with the support from my fellow DanceJerusalem participants. My
pursuit of studying the Hebrew language has helped me immensely to adapt to my
life in Israel. Even though I have early mornings with Hebrew that start at
8:30a.m., I really enjoy learning the language of the land that I am living in.
Not only do I learn the Hebrew language, but in doing so I have also learned so
much about the history and culture of Israel. Not to mention that it has been
great to speak to Israelis and interact better with my surroundings. In the
beginning of the semester, we took a group trip to the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi
area of Israel, and it was so much fun. It helped me to further realize what
natural treasures Israel has. We have also taken trips to historical areas in the
North of Israel, such as Tzfat. It has been so wonderful to travel to different
parts of the country.

One of my favorite courses at the Academy is my Ballet Repertoire class that meets
once a week. I come from a very strong ballet background, and it has been such
a joy to be able to learn many famous ballet variations and perform them in
class. I can say that because of my dancing experience in the Academy, I have
even further expanded my perspective on global dance. I believe now more than
ever that dancers should be aware that the world of dance is so much bigger
than one dance company, or one region of known dance studios. It is a gift to
be able to be exposed to dance traditions and techniques of all kinds.
Participating in DanceJerusalem is a great opportunity to experience a
different life and culture, and to learn more about yourself. I have grown in
many ways. First, I have grown to be even more self-sufficient and independent
than I was before, because I had to figure out so much on my own, and I have
grown as a person because of it. I have also become more confident and sure of
myself. I know now more than ever who I am and what I want, both as a dancer
and as a regular person.

1,712 New International Students So Far

 Another new record.  This year 1,712 new international students have checked in at the Office of International Services orientation, a 5% increase over last year.  Monsoons in China are causing inevitable delays for many students, so these numbers may swell.  Already, academic advising sessions have been scheduled practically up to the first day of classes. 

 The tents at the alumni center overflowed at the traditional ice cream social.  New international students were eager to network, to visit the food tent, and to meet officials from the university and the City of Bloomington. 

“It’s a polite group this year,” says Rendy Schrader, director of advising.  “They listen and pay attention; they will do well.” 

 

J. T. Forbes, executive director of the IU Alumni Association, spoke of connecting students with their alumni peers.

 

Beverly Calender-Anderson, Safe and Civil Director for the City of Bloomington encouraged students to get beyond the campus and noted opportunities they would have in the community.

 

Advising never stops. Outside the tent, Rendy Schrader, OIS director of advising, talks with a new student.

Chris Viers, associate vice president for internaitonal affairs, told students to make five new friends each. He warned them that he would be checking how well they did.

David Zaret, vice president for international affairs, welcomed students and spoke of all the ways IU was international. Afterwards, he took the opportunity to speak with many of the students in small groups.

Zaret Becomes Vice President for International Affairs

David Zaret and Patrick O'Meara
David Zaret (left) and Patrick O’Meara (right), current and past vice presidents for interational affairs
           On July 1, 2011, David Zaret became Indiana University vice president for international affairs. Zaret comes to OVPIA from the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences, where he served for over a decade as Executive Associate Dean and Interim Dean, and also from the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President, where he worked as Senior Advisor to the Provost. He completed his doctorate from Oxford University in 1977 and joined the IU Bloomington Department of Sociology the same year.  He currently holds academic appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of History. His published work includes Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton University Press, 2000), which explores the role of public opinion in British politics. Topics in Zaret’s other publications include religion and social change, human rights, and methodological issues in cross-cultural research.
             Patrick O’Meara, who led international affairs for eighteen years, will now chair the IU Center for International Education and Development Assistance and will advise the president on matters of international protocol.  O’Meara’s tenure as vice president saw the Bloomington campus rise to the top twenty institutions nationally for study abroad and for the number of international students enrolled.  Continuing the work begun by Herman Wells in the 1940s, he has helped secure affiliations with top universities and has been part of IU’s international development activities in countries around the world.  He has assured IU’s place at the vanguard of international academic endeavor.
            “I am honored that President McRobbie has asked me to undertake this work,” said vice President Zaret.  “I am humbled by the thought of succeeding Vice President O’Meara in a program respected around the world. I want to assure that this reputation continues and that IU students and faculty are prepared to meet the challenges of a world where interdependence is key.  To do this will require efforts on many fronts:  We must develop more opportunities for undergraduates to study abroad, and along with those opportunities, more resources to defray the additional expenses of international study.  We will continue our efforts to attract top international students, and we will continue to seek and enhance agreements with the best universities around the world. Our overseas alumni are a valuable resource in these efforts, and I look forward to cultivating deeper ties with them.  Our long history of institutional development has already made a difference to universities in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia; this work too must continue.”

 

Bridges: Children, Languages, World

Bridges Mini-Camp: Crafts

A participant in the Ya Ya Mini-Camp shows off his Beijing mask.

Children and their parents worked together on Chinese crafts at a mini-camp offered by the Bridges Chinese Language program, Ya Ya.  The mini-camps, designed by Ya Ya instructors, Jen Pearl and Xini Wang, provide a way to connect with students during IU’s summer break.  They also make it possible for members of the Bloomington Chinese community, including visiting scholars at IU, to meet the Ya Ya students and their families.   

Two more camps are planned for the summer, one on martial arts and another on cooking.  Jen and Xini hope that the camps will keep students interested in Chinese so that they will continue language class in the fall.  Jen and Xini will volunteer their time to teach the Ya Ya students throughout the academic year on Saturdays at the Center for the Study of Global Change.

The Bridges project facilitates the development of world language instruction programs for children, emphasizing Less-Commonly Taught Languages and provides instruction in Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Mongolian and Swahili during the academic year.   For more information see the Bridges webpage.