Popularity and Culture

Lynn Hooker, associate professor of Central Eurasian Studies, describes the variety and reach of Romani music.

Lynn Hooker, associate professor of Central Eurasian Studies, describes the variety and reach of Romani music.

            Sometimes it seems that social scientists and environmentalists have taken ownership of the world, or at least the study of the world.  Despite the fact that global competency is meant to touch all academic disciplines, discussions usually begin and end with anthropologists, political scientists and the like.  We often forget that in the arts—music, drama, literature, painting—the crossing of cultural boundaries is commonplace and has been for a very long time.  Thus it was good to see that the 2013 Global Mini-Conference, a public portion of the Institute for Curriculum and Campus Internationalization (ICCI—the directors don’t like it referred to as Icky), included amidst sessions on safe water, sexual violence, coffee production, climate change, human trafficking, and the like, a couple of sessions that spoke to the function of art in a global context.

            One of those sessions investigated issues of artistic tradition and popular culture.  Lynn Hooker, of IU’s Central Asian Studies department, introduced Romani history and culture, with its diaspora extending back more than a millennium.  The musical world of the Roma was determined by the ‘Gypsy’ epithet imposed on them by the cultures they passed through.  Ever persecuted, they were perceived to be capable only of “lower” art forms.  However compelling, accomplished, original—the music of the Roma, at least as it was generated from within its own culture, could never achieve status as serious art.  Romani music was permitted a place in high culture only when “purified” by composers who themselves were not Romani (Lizst, Bartók, Brahms, the list is very long indeed).

            Instead, Romani music blended with local folk music and became a feature of popular venues, weddings, public houses, holiday celebrations.  As an essential part of popular art, it carried meaning and value to larger numbers of people than “high art” could, and became equally indispensable.  Its popularity offered a livelihood to Romani musicians, many of whom have established worldwide reputations.

            Jennifer Goodlander, of the Department of Theatre and Drama, then introduced the popular tradition of wayang kulit, shadow puppets, whose performances can last days and must go on even when no one is watching.  The tradition of shadow puppets is as ancient and revered as the Hindu epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, whose roots are older than the Bible.  The puppeteer has almost the rank of a priest.  The puppets themselves have special status.  Though seen only in shadow on a translucent screen, they are lovingly and brightly painted.  There is even a ceremony of marriage between puppeteer and puppets.

            Goodlander has studied with a puppeteer in Bali. She demonstrated how this revered tradition revivifies itself with each new generation by bringing in local color and details relevant to the audience.  After introducing and animating the ancient character of one particular clown, she flashed onto the screen an image of Homer Simpson.  The aptness of the analogy was undeniable.

            Romani music provides connections to Romani past, but was culturally pigeonholed by external ethnic hostility.  Despite that prejudice, it absorbed local folk traditions wherever it went and earned a significant role in popular culture all over Europe.  Shadow puppetry, another art of the people, provides a revered link to ancient culture via an avenue that is constantly repaved with elements of the popular familiar present. 

This shadow puppet, slightly smaller than normal, was made for the tourist trade. The elaborate pattern of holes carved into the leather (which show on the shadow screen) and the detailed coloring (which doesn’t) are typical.

This shadow puppet, slightly smaller than normal, was made for the tourist trade. The elaborate pattern of holes carved into the leather (which show on the shadow screen) and the detailed coloring (which doesn’t) are typical.

    

The stories are ancient and the characters in them well known to their audience. The shadows lend mystery and magic to the legends they tell.

The stories are ancient and the characters in them well known to their audience. The shadows lend mystery and magic to the legends they tell.

      

 

Jennifwer Goodlander, assistant professor of theatre and drama, demonstrates the art of wayang kulit and Homer Simpson.

Jennifwer Goodlander, assistant professor of theatre and drama, demonstrates the art of wayang kulit and Homer Simpson.

 

What has the government been up to?

Is our historical record being destroyed?

Is our historical record being destroyed?

The government is destroying our history.  Matthew Connelly did not say this in his recent presentation as part of IU’s Framing the Global Project.  But those who heard him couldn’t be faulted if they left with that impression.  In his lecture on the history and future of official secrecy, Connelly, professor of history at Columbia, ranged from sovereignty, to diplomacy, to government secrecy, to the habits of archivists, and the power of computing to foil the best efforts to hide and destroy. 

The statistics are daunting.   The government produces about 270 million pages of classified documents each year.  Changes in regulations over the past decade—more documents tagged secret, fewer individuals with the authority to change the tags—have led to about 200 million documents a year being withheld from public scrutiny.  The result is that by 2010, the government had accumulated 9 billion pages of classified material.   

One immediate impression is that the government is trying to hide its tracks, to cover its mistakes, and that may be true.  Since we cannot see the documents, we can’t know for sure.  But other motives are at work as well.  Some matters we are better off not knowing—how to create a deadly flu virus for instance, or how to create a nuclear weapon.  Connelly also has concluded from reviewing the metadata of classified documents that much has been retained in classified status to create noise and make it difficult for enemies to ascertain the motives for classification.  And the Supreme Court has made it more difficult for private citizens to accomplish a successful declassification review. 

Other more venial motives are at work as well.  The pile of paper and electronic material has not escaped the notice of government agencies.  The State Department, among others, has set goals for processing the declassification backlog.  The targets for declassification are ambitious, but the agencies have not established sufficient funding to accomplish them. They spend on declassification one twentieth of the amount they spend on classifying documents.  “Archivists are completely overwhelmed,” Connelly explained.   To get the job done, they have had to resort to sampling methods—methods not random and often misguided, Connelly concluded.   In order to manage the workload, whole classes of records are being destroyed. Historians of immigration thus have lost much potential history as immigration and visa application records are thrown away.  Historians interested in sports diplomacy may never know all they need to about the national role in the Olympics because documents tagged to sports may be discarded.  “Only 3-5% of the governments documents are retained,” Connelly said. “I don’t think the agencies know what has been lost.”

 “People who have been trying to stop pushback have been completely outgunned.”  Still, 1.4 billion pages have been declassified.  With so much material, no historian could ever work through it all, so isn’t the destruction a moot point?  Outdated thinking, Connelly would reply. 

Firstly, the habit, fostered by academe’s methods of graduate education, of historians working in isolation will not be the only way for historians to work in the future.  As scientists assemble big, worldwide teams to solve their biggest problems, so historians now have tools that will make it possible to work as teams.  And those tools work best the more they have to operate on.  The application of computers to natural language processing, latent semantic analysis and machine learning has changed the face of linguistic and literary research.  Connelly sees it doing the same to history.  Feed all of these documents into a computer and as the data set becomes ever more massive, the computer will find patterns, clues that will not only reveal what is in the available historical record, but also what might be in the destroyed or redacted documents.

“These records are now valuable in a way they were not in the past. In data mining research, we don’t always know what kind of data is going to be useful.  We need to ask different questions about what is worth preserving.”  By aligning the databases representing the work of large numbers of historians, scholars can find unredacted versions of redacted text.”  With enough of these samples, computers can begin to predict what lies under the large chunks of text blackened out in documents that are released.   That will make it more possible to know if the redacted material contradicts the apparent direction of the text. These processes can analyze classification data that accompanies most government documents to identify linguistic styles–and so make it possible to identify authors.

“How do you have democracy if you don’t know what your government did 40 years ago?” Connelly asked.  With these new tools, and with a new attitude and procedures for handling the massive documentary materials that the government has accumulated, historians “can begin to restore the integrity of the historical record.

Click here for more information and sponsors of the Framing the Global Project.

Beyond the Blind Eye

Journalist Lesley Yarranton describes the difficulties in raising awareness of human trafficking.

 

            Imagine coming home after work and discovering a body in your backyard.  Some years ago, many who lived in the landing path of Heathrow Airport had that or a similar experience.  Autopsies concluded that all had fallen from a great height, probably from wheel wells as flights lowered their landing gears; victims probably died of cold before they fell. Many were traced to airports in Africa, and investigations there suggested that the individuals had help getting to the wheel wells to stow away, help that may or may not have been voluntary. When the press reported that human trafficking was the most likely explanation behind the deaths, readers in Britain began to recognize the enormity of this issue.

            Lesley Yarranton, a British freelance journalist who has investigated human trafficking since the 1980s, related this series of events during a panel discussion of “Human Trafficking and Media.”  She traced the frustration journalists had in convincing readers of the seriousness of the situation.  “The term itself did not help in generating public attention,” Yarranton explained.  “Human and trafficking are blind words in journalism.” The terms don’t have the impact needed.  Traffic is an annoyance, not a profound, violent offence to another person.  In Britain at least, shocking photos and lurid reports over many years, have convinced the public first, that human trafficking is not confined to other, poorer countries, and second that the issue is not a source of titillation but of shame.

            Yana Hashamova, Associate Professor and Director of the Slavic Center at Ohio State, spoke about her research into attitudes towards trafficking and audience reactions to films that address that issue. She first reported on research she had conducted regarding attitudes towards trafficking in Bulgaria and in the U.S.  Some of her findings:

—  Trafficking in Bulgarians is perceived as something which is not right, unfair. However, when trafficking involves foreigners in Bulgaria, attitudes change.  “It is their own fault” is the predominant answer. And, when it comes to sexual exploitation, public opinion is more likely to “blame” those who engaged in prostitution.

—  American students hold a more general (abstract) view of the “positive aspects” of trafficking while Bulgarians connect the “positive side” to concrete economic opportunities (to avoid poverty in one’s own country). The reasons for trafficking are also perceived differently: Americans believe that the whole society is responsible for it, while Bulgarians ascribe it to “business with people.”   American men exhibit lower interpersonal empathy and higher rape myth acceptance; they show more hostile attitudes towards rape victims.

             Hashamova then turned to the portrayal of trafficking in cinema.  She noted a voyeuristic tendency that exploited the sexual side of trafficking.  Only with more recent films, like Lilya 4 Ever, where all is seen through the woman’s eyes as she is subjected to harrowing and humiliating treatment, does the horrific over the voyeuristic aspect of trafficking come clear.  Americans found many of these movies dissatisfying; they wanted happy endings and acceptable solutions to the problem.  She is pessimistic about the impact cinema can have on the problem because cinematic elements so easily block the “shocking trauma” that trafficking represents.

            The third member of the panel was an undercover detective working in a large urban area on problems of sex trafficking.  He made it very clear that the problem has no easy solutions.  Even cases that he saw as clear cut could be compromised before they could be prosecuted.  Victims were often reluctant to speak or ran away before matters could come to trial.  Getting clear evidence that behavior was forced was difficult.  Prosecutors sometimes did not know the specifics of the trafficking laws on the books or in other instances wanted an airtight case before moving forward.  The detective was pessimistic that the legal system could solve the problem.  He offered up an unsentimental and (to the large audience present) uncomfortable view of the world of the traffickers–which might include parents who sold their daughter into prostitution or domestic servitude to pay off a gambling debt. 

            Although his close experience over many years made him sympathetic to the victims, he engaged in an extensive discussion with a member of the audience over the legalization of prostitution.  “Legalization,” the detective said, “would only make it harder to prosecute trafficking.”  He spoke of the unhelpful side of journalist sensationalism, for example when the press reported for the last Dallas Superbowl that there would be tens of thousands of women trafficked in, when in fact, the police identified 28 cases.  For the Indianapolis Superbowl, eight cases were identified.   Trafficking is more associated with what happens every day than what happens once a year.  And pending cases can be destroyed when journalists release too much information early on.

            Journalists in Britain have had some success at raising public awareness of trafficking as an offence to humanity.  Filmmakers          have made found ways to involve audiences in victims’ suffering and degradation, though such films are hard to watch.  The undercover would like to see (but doesn’t expect to see) more prosecutions, especially of pimps and those in control.  All agree that public awareness of the reality of the issue is the most practical near-term objective, and all agree that media plays an important but ambiguous role in raising awareness.  Exactly how media has succeeded so far, how much its presence impedes and assists, and exactly what the media should do to “solve” the problem are still unanswered questions.

            The panel was organized by Stepanka Korytova, as part of a faculty study group on “The Many Faces of Human Trafficking,” of the International Studies Program and of the College of Arts and Sciences Themester Fall 2012: Good Behavior, Bad Behavior: Molecules to Morality.

Mapping the Synapses of International Office Management

Jason Baumgartner, key developer of Sunapsis and Director for International Services in the IU Office of International Services, presented the keynote address at this year's conference.

The International Office management system that came to be called Sunapsis was conceived in 2003 when the U.S. government implemented new rules that required much closer tracking of foreign students studying in the United States.  Increased tracking meant larger and more complex data management; it also meant that a minor failure of reporting could seriously compromise a student’s right to study in the U.S.  To complicate matters, the data that needed to be managed resided in two separate places—one in Homeland Security computers and one in university computers. 

            The earliest version of the software that became Sunapsis provided an innovative link—a synapse—between these two massive sources of data.  Developed by the IU Office of International Services, that office quickly realized that far more than immigration status could be effectively managed with the software tools that were becoming part of Sunapsis.  Orientation and data collection could begin as soon as students were admitted.  Student advising could be more focused and functional in a system that remembered advising sessions as well as important personal data.  International admissions, with its own deadline and tracking needs, could also be served by these tools—and in turn serve to collect vital information for active-student tracking later on. 

            Sunapsis thus became much more than a solution to Homeland Security regulations.   In addition to serving the technical reporting requirements of international visitors better, Sunapsis provided ways to assure that their needs didn’t fall between the cracks and to enhance their experience in the U.S. by reducing the time to sort out red tape and expanding communication and so allow students and scholars to be more fully a part of campus life.

            The unique features of Sunapsis attracted the interest of other institutions and IU found itself heavily lobbied to make the product available to others.  Since 2007, the number of institutions using the software system has grown from one (IU) to 23, representing major universities all over the United States. Once a year, Sunapsis users get together to compare notes and hear about new features. 

 

Jason Baumgartner, left, is chief architect of the international office management system.

           This week, the Frangipani Room has standing room only crowd, more than a hundred participants from 40 institutions, each participant with laptop in hand, to hear about checklists, encryption, e-forms, and user management.  These new tools assure that documents don’t get stuck in someone’s inbox, that collecting information from students and scholars can be handled electronically and managed without expert intervention, and that messages can be programmed to be sent automatically when needed or desired. 

            The group will also be introduced to a new module that expands the system’s service to students studying abroad.  The module manages students throughout the study abroad cycle, from program search, through application processing and dossier review, to completion and standardized reports.  Photos: Rendy Schrader

 

Vice President for International Affairs addresses the Sunapsis Conference 2012.

 

Guitar Virtuosos at Lunchtime Concert

Rodrigo Almeida and Daniel Duarte perform a waltz of Ernesto Nazareth

            “Yesterday was hot; today is cold.  That’s bad for the guitars,” said Rodrigo Almeida, as he and Daniel Duarte struggled with keeping their instruments in tune.  If there were tuning problems, no one in the audience could tell as the guitar duo performed  a brief concert of pieces from the Baroque (Soler) to the contemporary (IU grad Jon Godfrey), from a delicate transcription (by Duarte) of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” to the rhythms and dances of Brazil in music by Nazareth, Pixinguinha, and Pereira.  The concert continues a decade-old tradition of intimate, Friday lunchtime concerts sponsored by the Office of International Services, now in the Willkie Formal Lounge.

            Almeida and Duarte established their Villa Guitar Duo in 2004.  They have won competitions in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America and completed their first US tour in 2009.  They have done many of their own transcriptions, and hearing their version of Debussy on guitar makes one wonder if perhaps the French composer had been composing for the wrong instrument.  Their most recent CD renders Scarlatti, Bach, Albeniz, Villa-Lobos, and Boccherini with the same conviction, and offers challenging examples of Spanish and Latin American music written for guitar.  Both currently reside in Bloomington and are associate instructors for the Jacobs School, working under Ernesto Bitetti.

Cultures Ancient and Modern, Connections Old and New

SE Asia Debriefing

               Four countries, 13 days, 9 campuses, multiple meetings with government officials, hundreds of IU alumni.   “It was work,” David Zaret said at a briefing on the trip in the Grand Foyer of the IU Auditorium.  Zaret, vice president for international affairs, and President Michael McRobbie led an IU delegation to Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia in May.

             “We went to Southeast Asia for the same reason we have visited other regions of the world—to advance strategic priorities of the IU international plan,” Zaret explained.  “We would like to have more agreements with top quality universities across the world, agreements that provide opportunities for faculty and students to go back and forth.  We want to expand opportunities for undergraduates to engage in study abroad experiences. Finally, we were looking for ways to help our Indiana alumni reconnect to the university.”

             When they returned, they had recognized an “odd discrepancy,” Zaret said.  “Among American universities, we have some of the oldest ties to universities in Southeast Asia.  We have 10,000 IU alums in the four countries we visited, possibly more than any other US institution. Yet, though we have many active programs in area studies, Southeast Asia is perhaps the one region of the world where we do very little.  The president and I agree that it really ought to be an institutional priority to develop a thriving program in Southeast Asian Studies.” 

The campuses visited:
National Institute for Development Assistance, Bangkok
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
National University Singapore
Yale-National University of Singapore
Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta
Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam
 

All the alumni receptions attracted a rambunctious crowd. I was overwhelmed by number and enthusiasm and affection they feel for Indiana University.--David Zaret

Displacement and Recovery

 

When Štěpanka Korytová had to leave her home in Czechoslovakia for political reasons, she had no expectation that she would ever be able to return.  The displacement of forced exile is something she knew at first hand, and it became the theme of her scholarly life.

 

Czech immigration beyond the Mississippi, 1850-1900

Czech immigration beyond the Mississippi, 1850-1900

Contact with a distant cousin from Nebraska prompted Korytová’s first book, which traces Czech immigration to the farmlands west of the Mississippi.  In the early Czech settlers to the U.S., she found a familiar ethos of displacement—“loneliness, isolation, homesickness, and pride in being Czech.”  As these settlers became more successful in their farms and businesses, their ties to the U.S. became stronger, but still “they cherished their language and preserved it through cultural activities.”

In recent years, Korytová has turned her attention to the displacement caused by human trafficking.  As a visiting scholar-in-residence at the IU Center for the Study of Global Change, she started a multi-disciplinary faculty study group, The Many Faces of Trafficking.  The function of the group has been to get beyond the sensational tabloid material of forced migration for work or sex, to the long-term effects and emotional damage that forced separation from family and country produces.

Korytova at AWSS Reception in Washington, DC

Korytová (left) received the Zirin Prize in Washington, DC, from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies, for her scholarship and current research.

For her “innovative scholarship and current research agenda that promises to make an important intervention on Slavic Women’s studies,” Korytová was awarded the Zirin Prize by the Association of Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS).  The AWSS particularly acknowledged Korytová’s complex view of the impact of immigration both on the immigrants and on those with whom they came in contact, and hoped that the award would encourage and support her study of sex trafficking in Central and Eastern Europe.

Utery, Western Bohemia

When Korytová left her homeland, she never expected to return. But the political scene has changed and she can again see views like this one, from her home in the village of Utery, Western Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic.

Sideli Elected to CIEE Board

Kathleen Sideli with committee chairs at the CIEE Conference 2010

For more than 60 years, the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) has been at the center of high school and collegiate international exchange, with study abroad programs for undergraduates, teaching abroad for faculty, seminars, and work and internship opportunities.  CIEE announced in June that Kathleen Sideli, IU Associate Vice President for Overseas Study, has been elected to the CIEE Board of Directors.  The appointment will mean not only that IU will have access to the latest developments in international exchange, it will also have an impact on future directions of global education.

“Having direct access to CIEE decision making will help IU,” explains Sideli.  “We currently send 200 students a year on CIEE programs all over the world.  We have a vested interest in ensuring that the programs are affordable and of high academic quality and that they will provide a safe and secure environment for our students.”

Sideli will be one of only two study abroad professionals on the board.  She brings 30 years of study abroad administrative experience as well as nationally recognized expertise in policymaking and data collection and analysis.  “CIEE has had many upper-level staff leadership changes, and I hope to be able to assist the board as they ponder new directions in the coming years.”

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.