Political Talk

I heard an interview recently with Frank Luntz, the Republican language maestro who uses polling and focus groups to advise political candidates, organizations, and corporations on how to choose their words and frame their issues for the highest political impact. He’s got a new book called Words that work : it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. He has recommended that organizations use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming”, “gaming” instead of “gambling”, and “death tax” instead of “inheritance tax” or “estate tax”. You might be able to still hear the interview here. Here’s the web site of Luntz’s research company. There are also some short articles by Luntz in Lexis Nexis Academic(sorry, can’t give you the direct links to the articles, LNA doesn’t enable that). In a Dec. 28, 2002 NTY article, Luntz describes how he was an advisor to TV’s “West Wing” for a while, giving direction on the script from a Republican point of view. The job didn’t last, evidently.

It occurred to me that it would be interesting to read the Luntz book along with books by linguists (academics) whose work has been associated with liberal causes, Geoffrey Nunberg and Georg Lakoff. Nunberg does a regular spot on Fresh Air, the NPR interview show. Temple has quite a few books by both authors. Nunberg’s most recent book is Talking right : how conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show (Paley doesn’t have a copy of this, have to correct this). Lakoff’s most recent book is Whose freedom? : the battle over America’s most important idea.

And of course there’s George Orwell’s famous Politics and the English Language, written in 1946.

—Fred Rowland

Whither the university?

I’ve been reading about the future of the university lately. Detractors think it costs too much, is inefficient, is too politicized, doesn’t properly train the workforce of the future, and is generally out of step with the great demographic changes of the past 25 years. It’s not flexible enough (what is?), researchers don’t teach well and teachers don’t research well. Supporters point out that universities are among the few institutions that have survived from the fifteenth century, that good education is just plain expensive, that education is about more than just posting “content” online somewhere, that Socrates got it right, and that businesses are out to privatize lots of publicly-funded infrastructure as was done with the healthcare industry (there is even talk about Educational Maintenance Organizations, EMO’s). Both supporters and detractors seem agreed that there’s a lot of change ahead for the university.

Of course the development of the Internet plays a huge role in the debates surrounding the future of higher education. Techno-utopians see the Internet as bringing more democracy, more education, more knowledge, more love, new life forms… More practical sorts see the reduced costs of information delivery on the Internet as a great business opportunity, so you see for-profit educational organizations popping up. More traditional sorts see the Internet as improving but not overturning current educational practices.

What interests me the most is the way the Internet (and high-tech in general) produces what can only be described as religious passions in many people. Cyberspace becomes a heavenly realm where information and emotions are transmitted friction-free and conflict melts away. You saw this in the millennial binge of the late 1990’s dot.coms, where profits were suddenly deemed unimportant and market share was everything. The fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet, and Y2K (remember that?) made everyone a bit crazy for a time.

Below are some of the sources I’ve been looking at and thinking about:

Digital Diploma Mills–short book, well written and closely argued, author very much against distance education, makes interesting comparisons to the “correspondence movement” in the early twentieth century

Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University–seems a bit too focused on the technology and not enough on the institutions that create the context for the technology

After the New Economy–includes interesting analysis of 1990’s business bubble

Post-Capitalist Society–by Peter Drucker (aka “the management guru”), Drucker began talking about the “knowledge worker” decades ago, thinks the university won’t last

Startup.com–this documentary unwittingly highlights the excesses of the 1990’s dot.com boom

Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer–puts Internet in historical perspective

Death of the University–written in 1987, interesting but makes a lot of sweeping generalizations

The Future of Work

Higher Education in the Digital Age

The University in Transformation

Technology and the Rise of the For-Profit University— authored by Donald Norman, an educational entrepreneur (UNext), says scholars should create content and instructional specialists should deliver it

Undisciplined–by Louis Menand, interesting, about the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in the university

Linkages Between Work and Education?

Dearing Report–influential UK report on higher education

Distance Education and the Emerging Learning Environment–short, interesting article

The Rise and Rise of the Corporate University–good article, part of an entire issue of the Journal of European Industrial Training devoted to corporate education

Surviving the Change: The Economic Paradigm of Higher Education in Transformation–interesting article by a guy with economic training

Educating the Net Generation–from Educause, about learning styles, likes and dislikes of the net generation

—Fred Rowland

Political Resources from Congressional Quarterly

CQ Researcher Online Great for researching pressing public policy issues that come before Congress. CQ Researcher takes an issue and explores it in depth. Start here on a research paper, or use it for in-class discussion. CQ Press Political Science Suite Contains many CQ Press titles that researchers and policy makers are so familiar with. Broken into sections: Congress and the Nation; Historic Document Series; Political Handbook of the World; Politics in America; Supreme Court Yearbook; Vital Statistics on American Politics; Washington Information Directory CQ Weekly Online Congressional Quarterly’s weekly magazine online back to 1983. —Fred Rowland

ARTstor’s Dunhuang Archive

The term “Silk Road” was coined in the nineteenth century by German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the informal network of roads that connected China to Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Along its corridors between 200 BCE and 1500 CE flowed trade goods, technology, and weapons, as well as social, cultural and religious ideas. Religions like Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoastrianism, Manicheanism, Judaism, Islam, and Nestorian Christianity all traveled the Silk Road at different times and different places. Buddhism followed this route to China from India and Central Asia.

The Chinese city of Dunhuang was strategically located along the Silk Road on the western frontier of China at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. It became an important place to stop, rest, pick up provisions, and trade. Between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, thousands of Buddhist cave sanctuaries were carved from the sandstone hills about 25 kilometers southeast of Dunhuang. These caves served the religious and secular purposes of a vibrant Buddhist community. Fortunately hundreds of caves survived intact to the present. Artifacts from the caves include murals, sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, and textiles. After removal of many artifacts to Western countries in the early twentieth century, the Chinese government set up the Dunhuang Research Academy to oversee the study and preservation of the Dunhuang caves.

ARTstor provides thousands of high resolution images of the Dunhuang caves and their contents through its Mellon International Dunhuang Archive collection. MIDA “is the product of a major and ongoing multi-institutional, multi-national effort to create high-quality digital reconstructions of the mural paintings and related art and texts associated with the several hundred Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China”. Images come from the caves themselves, from artifacts found in collections worldwide, and from the Lo Archive at Princeton University.

Each image comes with a complete description that allows for easy access. You can browse the Dunhuang Archive by Object Type, Cave Number, or Contributor. The Advanced Search lets you perform complex keyword searches while limiting your search by Collection and Object Classification. I’ve created a few Image Groups below to give you a small taste of what’s in this collection. You will have to disable your popup blockers to view the images.

Image Groups
Dunhuang Buddha paintings

Dunhuang Bodhisattva, Buddha sculptures
More Dunhuang Bodhisattva, Buddha sculptures

Other Links
Historic Maps of China (click on the timeline to see the borders of China during each dynasty)
Buddhist Art in China
Buddhist Art in Central Asia
Buddhist Art in India
Silk Road (saved search from Oxford Reference Online)

 

—Fred Rowland

Religion in the news

Over the past year many of the popular weekly news magazines, like Newsweek, Time, and US News and World Report, have featured cover stories on religious themes, most involving religion in the public sphere. Below are links to a number of these cover stories, accessed through the database Academic Search Premier.


WHERE WE STAND ON FAITH.
 (Cover story)
Newsweek

Religious Protection. (Cover story)
New Republic

In Search of The Spiritual. (Cover story)
Newsweek

A New Welcoming Spirit in the Mosque. (Cover story)
Newsweek

DOES GOD WANT YOU TO BE RICH? (Cover story)
Time

God vs. Science. (Cover Story)
Time

A Passionate Voice And a Moral Vision. (Cover story)
Newsweek

A New Social Gospel. (Cover story)
Newsweek

The Case Against Faith.
 (Cover story)
Newsweek

A Shepherd Protects His Own Backyard. (Cover story)
Newsweek

Debating ‘Da Vinci’ (Cover story)
U.S.News & World Report

The Kingdom of Christ. (Cover story)
U.S.News & World Report

THE WAYS OF OPUS DEI. (Cover story)
Time

—Fred Rowland

Guest Speaker on the Middle East

Hassan El Menyawi will speak on Monday, November 27, at 2pm in the Women’s Studies Lounge on the 8th Floor of Anderson. Menyawi is currently Assistant Professor at the United Nations University for Peace, teaching courses on international law and human rights. Toward Global Democracy is an article by Manyawi published in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. —Fred Rowland

Wendy Doniger to speak at UPenn

Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago will give presentations at the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday (11/8, 5:15, Logan 17) and Thursday (11/9, 3:00pm, Penn Humanities Forum, 3619 Locust Walk). “Mythology of Gender in Kama-Sutra” (Wednesday) // “Bisexuality in Classical India: A Workshop” (Thursday) These events are co-sponsored by Fund to Encourage Women (FEW) of the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women, Department of South Asia Studies, Department of Religious Studies, and Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center. Here’s a description of Doniger from the University of Chicago Divinity School web site. Here are some works by Doniger (books) (articles1) (articles2).

Darwin Exhibit at the Franklin Institute

There’s a Darwin Exhibit running at the Franklin Institute from October 6 to December 31 that I will try to get to. Darwin is arguably the most influential thinker of the past two centuries and his theories continue to be a rich source of inspiration and controversy. I’m not sure the exhibit will be as “astonishing” as the Franklin Institute self-reports but certainly worth seeing. Museums have become a bit like theme parks so get ready for plenty of rides, games, and make-believe as you enter Chuckie D’s world. Getting back to the real world, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities is hosting The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online, described as the “largest collection of Darwin’s writings ever published”. Thanks to science librarian Kathy Szigeti for pointing this site out for me. Check it out, it looks very impressive.

You might also take a look at some of the books the library has from Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, two scientists who have done much to make Darwin accessbile to popular audiences. William A. Dembski has written a lot in support of Intelligent Design. Here’s a review in the Skeptic magazine of five different books (including one edited by Dembski) that challenge evolutionary theory. As the name suggests, the Skeptic is all about debunking, in this case Creationism/Intelligent Design. Here John C. Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, critiques “Darwinian thinking” run amok. Mary Midgley is a philosopher who has written some interesting stuff on the religion in science.

Finally, we are often romantically inclined to see Big Ideas as the result of some lone genius working his magic, the paradigmatic cases in science being Newton and Einstein. It’s important to remember in this case that Darwin was not the only one who was thinking about the principles and lines of evidence that would lead to the theory of evolution. Alfred Russell Wallace came up with the mechanism of natural selection about the same time that Darwin did, which just goes to show that Big Ideas are often “in the air”.

Also, take a look at my Science and Religion subject guide for more resources on the intersection of science and religion.

Fred Rowland

Memory, Counter-Memory and the end of the Monument

James Young, professor and chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst speaks tonight in Annenberg Hall, Room 3, 5:40-8:30. Young was on the German commission for the “Monument for Europe’s Murdered Jews” and also on the jury for the World Trade Center Memorial competition. Below are a book and two articles by Young. Germany’s Holocaust Memorial problem–and Mine The Holocaust as Vicarious Past The Texture of Memory –Fred Rowland

ARTstor Arrives!

The Temple University Libraries are very pleased to announce online access toARTstor, a magnificent database of approximately 500,000 high resolution digital images covering “architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture”. ARTstor’s mission is to make great works of art and visual culture available for educational and noncommercial use. It has the potential to revolutionize the relationship between text and image as students and faculty liberally sprinkle images on presentations, research papers, and web pages. Each image comes with a detailed description that allows for effective searching at both a general and fine-grained level. You can even search ARTstor and JSTOR together! Participating institutions include the MOMA Architecture and Design Collection, the Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and the Schlesinger History of Women in America, among others. It is a growing collection adding new content regularly.

ARTstor was created with both users and content-holders in mind. Users can access and share hundreds of thousands of images that until now were accessible to a relative few. At the same time, controls are in place to satisfy the concerns of content-holders with regards to their copyrighted materials. Each ARTstor image comes in high and low resolution. To view the high resolution images, users must either view the images online in ARTstor or offline using ARTstor’s presentation software, the Offline Image Viewer (OIV). This means that you can only download high resolution images to the OIV, which can itself be downloaded for free on the ARTstor web site. Users can import PowerPoint presentations and their own images into the OIV as well. With the low resolution images, on the other hand, you have much more flexibility as long as the use is for educational and noncommercial purposes. You can download low resolution images to your desktop and use them in presentations, research papers, and web pages.

Within ARTstor users can create Image Groups and Shared Folders to organize, annotate, and share images with other users. Everyone can create Image Groups after creating an ID and password. To use Shared Folders you have to receive instructor privileges. This level of access is reserved mainly for faculty members. You can email your request for instructor privileges to Andrea Goldstein atandrea@temple.edu.

For more information, access ARTstor from the library web site and you’ll find a wide variety of tutorials and explanatory materials. On a more technical note, you will have to disable your popup blockers to use ARTstor. Click on Using ARTstor to see how to do this. To get started, just click Launch and away you go!

Fred Rowland