In one of the briefest of TED talks, Nalini Nadkarni looks for dynamic elements in rather static things: trees. And by teaching natural history and sustainability in a prison, she sees movement in a group of people whose lives cry for change. If we seek movement and hope, we can find clues and traces in the most difficult of circumstances, and we can learn to nurture it, she suggests, in “Life Science in Prison.”

Tags: environment, sustainability

In the national news, the passing of civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth recalls not just a long and vital history of struggle and triumph but also, on a smaller, more personal level, for many AGLSP folks, the excellent annual meeting held in Memphis a few years ago where many of our panels, keynote talks, and excursions focused on this history. We might remember from that program, for example, the witness offered us by Rev. Billy Kyles, who was with Dr. Martin Luther King during the last hour of his life, or the storming of the stage during a Nat King Cole concert that historian Michael T. Bertrand described for us as part of his talk on the roles music played in the unfolding of cultural change. Hey, thanks again to The University of Memphis University College for hosting that conference for all of us in AGLSP.

At the annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, we will be celebrating the accomplishments of the winners of this year’s AGLSP writing awards:

Eriika Etshokin, Hamline University, for “Insights From Outside the Bathtub”

Toni Bunton, The University of Michigan-Dearborn, for ”A Tree Grows in Prison”

Congratulations to these two writers and to the faculty and students of their home programs which helped foster their fine work.

The New York Times obituary for historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, who died recently, hints that his writing has much to offer GLS programs. Praising Mr. Judt for his “ability to see the present in the past” and for “free-ranging inquiry across disciplines,” the article points out a longer passage from a 2005 interview in which he recalls Raymond Aron, a French professor with a “capacity to move unselfconsciously between disciplines for the purpose of understanding things.” Judt suggests that our very thought may be hobbled if we are unable to follow that example:

A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about. Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently. (Jan./Feb. 2006, Historically Speaking)

The New York Review of Books offers a series of Judt’s articles and blog postings for those who would like to read more. For example, in a recent blog entry Judt talked about the way our choice of social role–a profession or a particular public role in society–also weighs upon our written words and influences their nature and quality:

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today’s “accessible” writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience’s consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn. (“Words,” 7/17/10, NYR Blog)

Columnist David Brooks contrasts the fabled stability of certain large organizations with a surprisingly adaptable one, the United States Army:

They say that intellectual history travels slowly, and by hearse. The old generation has to die off before a new set of convictions can rise and replace entrenched ways of thinking. People also say that a large organization is like an aircraft carrier. You can move the rudder, but it still takes a long time to turn it around.

The Army, Brooks says, has substantially changed its mind and its practices in a few short years, in part because it has found a way to link action and reflection, experience and inquiry:

The process was led by these dual-consciousness people — those who could be practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next. They were neither blinkered by Army mind-set, like some of the back-slapping old guard, nor so removed from it that their ideas were never tested by reality, like pure academic theoreticians.

Read more of “Leading With Two Minds” in the May 7, 2010 New York Times.

Most of what I know about coal mining comes from a few old movies that each center around a classic scene. The emergency siren screams out and people from all over the town hurry to the entrance of the mine. Their faces are full of dread as they ask, frantically, what has gone wrong down below.  Families and friends wait and pray, but their hope is repaid with devastating news.  It turns out that sometimes those old movies aren’t far from the truth.

Last week’s tragic news reminded me, too, of something I overheard once in a restaurant. The six people at the next table might have been anybody’s gray-haired grandparents enjoying a weekend away from home. As they talked about the coal mining district in West Virginia where they lived, one woman, perhaps the youngest, said her father had worked in the mines for more than forty years. Instantly an older woman chimed in, quietly and firmly saying “God bless him.” One of the men hadn’t heard it quite right, so the first woman repeated, “My father worked in the mines more than forty years.” Again, instantly, without any other comment or gesture, the older woman gave her refrain, “God bless him.” As I drove home that day, she stayed on my mind.

I thought the woman’s three repeated words meant that she had gathered from personal experience a vivid understanding of the sacrifices miners make for their families and for the rest of us who benefit from their labor. And now she had become the miners’ witness. I guessed that there was a name she was not saying, some particular miner who taught her what risk and sacrifice mean. That unnamed minor embarrassed me as I thought of my own safety and ease, and the comfort that comes into our lives because of his labor.

But their sacrifices keep slipping our minds, somehow.  Several years ago, my own brother died working on a power line back in my home town.  On the day of his funeral, the line of cars going to the cemetery was more than a mile long. A federal investigator told my family about the safety regulations that are meant to protect electrical workers.  “Each one of these regulations,” he said, “is written in blood.” How many of us have the skill and fortitude to insist upon new laws and safer working conditions in these dangerous industries?  No matter how long the line of cars might be at the funeral, a few days later we start to forget.

I met a brave firefighter once who risked his life to rescue a small child who had fallen down a narrow well. This man, who grew up in Michiana, was invited onto the Oprah Winfrey show after the rescue. But many public servants perform their dangerous work almost in private, and we acknowledge them only occasionally and often from a safe distance. I don’t know any of the miners who risk their lives to provide coal for our foundries and power plants. For that matter, I don’t know the name of anyone who digs foxholes or picks coffee beans or packs bunches of bananas into crates or sews leather uppers to the soles of shoes or picks up trash at the curb. Sometimes I wonder if this is, for many of us, the central luxury of American life – not having to know.

This 2006 essay by Ken Smith is republished by permission of the author from the Michiana Chronicles radio essay series broadcast on WVPE, the NPR affiliate station for the region around South Bend, Indiana.

At Indiana University South Bend this fall, graduate students can choose a seminar in which they will work as a team to curate an art exhibit at the Snite Museum on the Notre Dame campus. In the Spring 2010 issue of Confluence, which will be mailed in May or June, M. Carmen Smith of Southern Methodist University’s Meadows Museum offers an essay on the value of original works of art in an age of easy mechanical reproduction. And in the New York Times, Randy Kennedy’s article on digital imaging shows how 3-D techniques are in use at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (“New York’s Met, Replicating Art Works Bit by 3-D Bit,” March 13, 2010)

Are there art-related courses underway on your campus that you would like to mention–AGLSP folks are always happy to hear about a great course idea.

Dr. Arnall Patz, a graduate of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Johns Hopkins and noted medical researcher, died recently in Maryland at the age of 89. Dr. Patz’s accomplishments were catalogued in a lengthy New York Times obituary published on March 16, 2010. He received a Lasker Award in 1956 for research pinning down the cause of the retinopathy of prematurity, a form of blindness his team proved to be caused by the high levels of oxygen then commonly used in in the care of prematurely born infants. When their findings were widely understood, the rate of new blindness among children was immediately reduced by 60%, according to the Times.

Dr. Patz pursued his MLA degree in retirement, completing it about a decade ago.  He went on to serve as a member of the Hopkins MLA program’s advisory board and was an enthusiastic advocate of the program. Dr. Melissa Hilbish recalls his belief that many people from medical and technology fields would enjoy graduate liberal studies.