Winter 2017

Women who feel dissimilar to philosophers tend to leave the field, study finds

Anonymous — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 20:28:19 +0000

Women who feel dissimilar to philosophers tend to leave the field, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 12/03/2017 - 13:28

Jeff Thomas

‘People think of philosophers as stereotypically a dead white man, or old white man with a beard,’ says Heather Demerest, who notes that Descartes was more than such a caricature

One reason female students of philosophy are under-represented is they don’t see a lot of philosophers who seem to be like them, and professional philosophers can take steps to reverse the trend, a �鶹ӰԺ philosopher has found.

“They always talk about this leaky transition, from about 50-50 (men and women) in introductory course to about 30 percent (women in advanced courses),” said Heather Demarest, who joined the philosophy department as an assistant professor this fall.

Heather Demarest, now a member of the philosophy faculty at CU �鶹ӰԺ, found that female students of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma were more likely to stop taking philosophy classes if they felt dissimilar to most philosophers. Demarest is shown here in a video produced by OU.

At the University of Oklahoma, she implemented a study of undergraduates “to see if I could find any attitudes that correlated with that transition.”

Demarest, a �鶹ӰԺ native and CU �鶹ӰԺ graduate, published these findings while a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma in the July edition of Analysis, along with several graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher at OU.

Her team found that the participation rate of women in philosophy was indeed affected by students feeling dissimilar to professional philosophers, perhaps even their instructors.

“Women who do not feel similar to professional philosophers, and who do not enjoy thinking about philosophy, are not likely to go on to take additional courses,” the paper states.

“Instructors who care about the retention of women should do what they can to show their women students how they are similar to professional philosophers and to make thinking about philosophical issues and puzzles more enjoyable.”

Demarest said that the statement, “I feel similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers,” was a strong predictor of whether women would choose to continue in philosophy. It was also a predictor for men, though with slightly less significance.

There were also fewer women in the study who agreed with the statement at the end of an introductory semester, compared to the beginning, though those numbers did not quite reach statistical significance.

Instructors who care about the retention of women should do what they can to show their women students how they are similar to professional philosophers and to make thinking about philosophical issues and puzzles more enjoyable.”

Such findings are also found in analyses of women continuing in Science, Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, she said. Interestingly, changing the perspective of women could begin even before there are significant changes in the gender makeup of department faculty—nationally women only account for 17 to 24 percent of full-time faculty positions in philosophy.

“People think of philosophers as stereotypically a dead white man, or old white man with a beard,” Demarest said. “But few people present Descartes as a devout Catholic, or as a father who loved his daughter, or as someone who liked to sleep in until noon. Nobody teaches it, and many students are left without anything to relate to, thinking of Descartes only as an abstract thinker.”

“If we present some non-typical information about the authors, that could go a long way to changing the make-up of the major,” she continued. “There are a lot of different strategies for making women feel more at home in this field,” such as examining current events in philosophical context.

Demarest knows something about feeling a bit out of place in university courses, having majored in both philosophy and physics as a CU �鶹ӰԺ undergraduate (she was summa cum laude in both).

“I did find I was only the only woman, or one of only a few women, in class a number of times,” she said. “I don’t think I had a single female professor in physics.”

The numbers at CU �鶹ӰԺ

31 percent of philosophy majors in fall 2017 are women (a 10-year high).
16 percent of physics majors (which Demarest also studied here) are women.
Source: CU �鶹ӰԺ Office of Data Analytics

But while she might have felt out of place in terms of instructors and fellow students, Demarest said, feeling at home with the material was never a problem. “I was always so passionate about the subject matter — I knew that was what I wanted,” she said.

Demarest specializes in philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of physics and will be teaching courses in metaphysics, philosophy and science, critical thinking and writing, the philosophy of physics, introduction to philosophy and an honors course in scientific method.

Demarest was well aware of the sexual harassment issues that preceded her hiring at CU �鶹ӰԺ, and hopes her presence helps women overcome any lingering fear about participating in philosophy courses.

“This is a big problem in philosophy, and not just at CU — it exists across the discipline,” she said. “For me, it’s always been important not to be discouraged by some bad actors.”

And as a woman immersed in physics and philosophy, as well as a mother of three small children in a family that does not own a car, Demarest seems to present the kind of example she wants to use in her introductory courses.

“I think most people in philosophy do want to see more women in philosophy,” Demarest said. “My research suggests there are a lot of small changes that could add up to a big difference in the attitude of women when it comes to continuing in philosophy.”

CU scholar's research found that the participation rate of women in philosophy was indeed affected by students feeling dissimilar to professional philosophers, perhaps even their instructors.

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Collaborative effort aims to bolster artists, scholars

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 21:22:42 +0000

Collaborative effort aims to bolster artists, scholars Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 14:22

Clay Bonnyman Evans

‘Archive Transformed’ residency at CU �鶹ӰԺ will pair scholars with artists

David Shneer is hoping to arrange a half-dozen hookups on the �鶹ӰԺ campus next year — in a way that’s never been done before. And, no, not that kind of hookup; he wants to facilitate collaboration between scholars and artists.

The goal is to boost scholars’ creativity and to boost artists’ depth.

Shneer, the Louis P. Singer chair of Jewish history and department chair of religious studies, recently launched “Archive Transformed,” a scholar-artist collaborative residency that will take place May 13-18, 2018, at the historic Colorado Chautauqua in �鶹ӰԺ.

David Shneer, shown here teaching a history class, hopes to encourage collaborations between artists and scholars. CU �鶹ӰԺ photo by Casey A. Cass

“There is clearly a hunger for scholars to work with artists, who are thinking about how to be more creative. And the same is true from the artists’ perspective, who are looking for more depth” he says.

Shneer defines an archive as any body of knowledge — physical, digital, documentary — that can be mined by scholars to produce new knowledge. The new residency is intended to bring scholars and artists together to present that new knowledge in creative ways.

Scholars and artists apply together for the all-expenses-paid residency. A committee will then choose six pairs to spend five intensive days together at Chautauqua, working on bringing archival material to life through collaboration. The residency will conclude with a public presentation of the first results of the collaborations.

“The residency is wide-ranging and could bring together anyone from a neuroscientist interpreting fMRIs with a painter who visualizes the brain, to a historian investigating slave-trading routes and a musician working with music that reflects the slave experience,” he says.

“These collaborations will take archival material and transform it for the 21st century in some innovative way, whether musical, filmic, dance, visual, digital, or other modes of presentation not yet imagined.”

“The ‘Archive Transformed’ residency is a truly interdisciplinary project that seeks to merge interrogations and celebrations of historic archives with lived and embedded scholarship, thus lending a steady pulse to the past,” says Erika Randall, chair of the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Theatre and Dance and a member of the advisory committee for the residency.

Shneer and the members of the advisory and selection committee believe this is the first residency of its kind. It is being funded by the University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives at CU �鶹ӰԺ, the CU Art Museum, Center for Humanities and the Arts, Center for Western Civilization, Thought, and Policy, as well as the Louis P. Singer Fund for Jewish History and several departments.

When we have been doing performances around the country, people come up to me, scholars, and say, ‘I want to do what you are doing, how can I find an artist?’”

The story that inspired Shneer to come up with the idea is remarkable in its own right.

In Berlin, Germany, in 2008, he shared a Shabbat dinner with Jalda Rebling, daughter of Dutch Jewish cabaret singer and Holocaust survivor Lin Jaldati. When he asked Rebling, a lesbian cantor ordained by the Jewish Renewal movement, based in �鶹ӰԺ, how she came to be a cantor, she replied, “I was a star of East German Yiddish theater.”

“I’m a scholar of East European Jewish history, and I’d never even knew there was such a theater,” Shneer recalls. Intrigued, he pressed for more details, and she “went on an hour-long monologue and told her mother’s entire life story.”

Rebling said that her mother and aunt had been the ones to break the terrible news of Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s death from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 to her father, Otto. Shneer says, Jaldati “was arguably the last person to see Anne Frank alive.”

To confirm the incredible story, he traveled to the archives at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam.

“Not only was there truth to the story,” he says, “but I knew this was going to be my next project.”

In 2015, he published a German-language biography of Jaldati for popular audiences. But the material so inspired him that he wanted to do something more.

“I didn’t want the same old narrative,” Shneer says. “I needed help with how I could take her story and do something different than just writing a traditional scholarly monograph.”

So he called a friend, San Francisco-based artist and performer Jewlia Eisenberg, initially thinking she would bring her musical talents to the project.

The result of their collaboration, Art is My Weapon, is a 70-minute, TED-style performance that tells Jaldati’s remarkable life story through words, images and songs performed by both. The pair first performed a pilot version for the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015, and has now presented a more refined version in Philadelphia and Toronto, with performances in Los Angeles and New York scheduled.

Art is My Weapon will open the Archive Transformed residency on Sunday, May 13, 2018.

“That project has served as a model of collaboration for people who think about what an artist-scholar collaboration can look like,” Shneer says. “When we have been doing performances around the country, people come up to me, scholars, and say, ‘I want to do what you are doing, how can I find an artist?’”

He hopes the residency will also serve as “a kind of matchmaking service for scholars looking for artists and artists looking for scholars, who ideally can be paired with people at CU. Anybody can apply, and we’re hoping that working with a CU collaborator will really make our faculty and staff shine.”

Anyone may apply for the “Archive Transformed” residency, including freelance artists and scholars. The call for proposals can be found at www.colorado.edu/rlst. The deadline for application is Dec. 15. For more information about how to apply, email archivetransformed@colorado.edu.

David Shneer is hoping to arrange a half-dozen hookups on the �鶹ӰԺ campus next year — in a way that’s never been done before. The goal is to boost scholars’ creativity and to boost artists’ depth.

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Both sides misunderstand Margaret Mead, prof contends

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 17:15:16 +0000

Both sides misunderstand Margaret Mead, prof contends Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:15

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Late anthropologist’s Redbook columns undercut both conservative and liberal stereotypes, expert finds

It’s hard to overstate the reputation of Margaret Mead as both a public intellectual in post-World War II America and as the public face of anthropology.

For Paul Shankman, professor emeritus of anthropology at the �鶹ӰԺ, though, her public reputation was never simple, and that was especially apparent looking at what Mead wrote for Redbook, a popular women’s magazine of the time.

Paul Shankman

Both Mead’s conservative critics—some of whom went so far as to claim she “caused” the moral degradation of America—and liberal supporters—who tend to see Mead as a feminist icon—have misunderstood her views on these issues. In a careful review of her magazine articles, Shankman found that the way people view Mead depended on their prior views about the 1960s.

“It’s almost as if people listen only to the stories they want to hear,” says Shankman, whose article, “The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead: Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s,” will soon appear in the journal Current Anthropology.

At the time of her death in 1978, she was one of the most widely known women in the United States. As late as 2001, The Wall Street Journal was using her image in ads to promote its online service.

“Mead was more than a public intellectual; she was an icon,” says Shankman. “She was also an oracle, somebody that people turned to for opinions on everything from marijuana to nuclear war, sex to civil rights.”

But in 1983, anthropologist Derek Freeman upended her public image, publishing a book that sharply criticized Mead’s methods and most famous work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928).

The fallout from Freeman’s criticism still haunts Margaret Mead. Most people don’t have the time to take a look at what Mead actually said.”

According to Mead, Samoa was sexually permissive; but Freeman claimed that Samoa was among the most sexually restrictive cultures known to anthropology. Freeman’s critique was widely publicized, and “Mead went from respected public figure to cultural roadkill,” Shankman says.

In 2009, Shankman published, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, based on careful research demonstrating that Mead’s work in Samoa was basically sound and that Freeman cherry-picked much of his data to attack her.

Margaret Mead, shown here around 1950, has been wrongly characterized by some as having been a feminist icon or a "cause" of moral degradation, Paul Shankman contends.

Nevertheless, the notion that Mead and her work on Samoa were somehow “tarnished” remains imprinted on the minds of many Americans, from public intellectuals to laypersons.

“The fallout from Freeman’s criticism still haunts Margaret Mead,” Shankman says. “Most people don’t have the time to take a look at what Mead actually said.”

Freeman also argued that Mead’s permissive view of Samoa in the 1920s had negative consequences for American society decades later, inspiring the 1960s and the sexual revolution. To better understand Mead’s views about sex and the 1960s, Shankman began examining the long series of monthly columns that Mead wrote for Redbook in the 1960s and ‘70s.

“Redbook was Mead’s major public platform during that period,” Shankman comments.

In the Redbook columns, Mead — and her uncredited co-author and domestic partner, Rhoda Metraux — used two formats: a short question-and-answer fromat and a longer article-length essay format. The question-and-answer format addressed almost every imaginable topic (with some noteworthy exceptions, including the war in Vietnam). For example: “Does the Bible condemn interracial marriage?” and “Barry Goldwater’s View on Poverty.”

In the longer “think pieces,” Mead examined pressing social issues, especially “women’s issues.” Although she was widely seen as accepting and encouraging non-traditional sexual norms, Mead’s Redbook columns are quite traditional, Shankman says.

Margaret Mead wrote a long-running column in Redbook magazine.

For example, she urged young women not to engage in premarital sex. She wrote that college wasn’t necessary for young women and that motherhood should be considered a “career.” And, though she edited American Women (1965), a landmark work on the status of women in the 1960s, she did not write about discrimination against women, did not consider herself a feminist and “railed against the radical feminists,” Shankman found.

Feminist pioneer Betty Friedan criticized Mead for “reinforcing traditional stereotypes of women and limiting women’s choices,” he writes.

Mead’s views did evolve in the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, but “her columns belie the idea that she was in the vanguard of the sexual revolution,” Shankman says, adding:

“Like many anthropologists, my initial impression (before I read the Redbook columns) was that Mead would have been supportive of the sexual revolution, would have been against discrimination, would have been for careers for mothers with kids, and would have been part of the feminist movement. But none of those things were true for Mead in the ‘60s, At the time, she was very much in the mainstream of thinking about women’s issues rather than being on the cutting edge.”

Shankman also found that Mead’s high profile was not always appreciated by her colleagues.

“When Margaret Mead was a great public figure in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, people loved her,” he says. “But anthropologists had very mixed feelings about her.”

Today, he says, many anthropologists regret the loss of exposure that Mead once brought for the field and wish there were someone of her stature to help the public understand the importance of anthropology and give the field a public voice.

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Standing up to madness, for decades

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:47:30 +0000

Standing up to madness, for decades Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/30/2017 - 17:47

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU �鶹ӰԺ grad’s new memoir details notorious stalking case that began in the 1970s and continues today

Frederick R. Karl, the esteemed biographer of the 20th century German-language writer Franz Kafka, defined ‘Kafkaesque’ as being in a strange world in which one loses all control despite your best efforts.

He put it this way: “You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque.”

It’s hard to think of a more apt description for what Kaia (formerly Peggy) Anderson (BA, EnvBio’78; MLA‘86) has endured since shortly after graduation. For more than three decades, a mentally ill man named Robert Vinyard has single-mindedly harassed, threatened and terrorized Anderson and her family.

Kaia Anderson

And thanks to the failures of a judicial system that continually elevated the stalker’s rights over theirs, the very institutions intended to protect them have too often put them in danger.

Anderson is known for helping to strengthen the state’s anti-stalking law, but now, for the first time, Anderson is telling the full story of her ordeal in a new memoir, Trial by Fire, which she self-published in August. She planned the book for more than a decade, initially spurred by work with a transpersonal therapist who helped her see her experience differently and to work with it.

“When I discovered the wealth of wisdom we all have buried in our unconscious minds and the transformative power of owning it and making it conscious, I felt this information was so important and so relevant today that it had to be shared,” she says, sitting in the dining room of her Longmont home. “And the best way for me to share it was to tell my personal story.”

Despite years of stress and trauma that would have driven many people to flee, Anderson refused to surrender to fear. She would not buy a gun or move, despite the advice of friends.

“Kaia has an amazing strength of spirit,” says Tim Johnson, deputy district attorney for the 20th Judicial District, who has worked on the case since 2002. “I used to joke with her and say, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t the original DA on case — I was 9 when it started.’ She has lived her entire adult life under this and she’s been able to take adversity and make something of it. She may not even know how many other people she has helped.”

We had been violently invaded, and now the person we looked to for help, for protection, accused me.”

Adversity, though, seems too civilized a word to describe Anderson’s experience.

While studying at CU, she showed kindness to Vinyard, a classmate who seemed isolated and ignored by other students. She wasn’t thrilled when he began to show up on the doorstep of the house she shared with her future husband. But, she told herself, “Welcoming any visitor, especially one who’s just lonely, is the right thing to do.”

She was relieved when the visits stopped for a couple of years. But shortly after the couple married in 1979, Vinyard appeared at their new, rented home. When she asked him to leave, he began banging violently on doors, windows and walls, shouting, “You need to come now and be with me!”

The police officer that took the report seemed intent of shifting the blame to Anderson: “What did you do to encourage him?” he asked, and “Do you wear lipstick?” He even commented, “You’re a pretty girl.”

“We had been violently invaded,” she writes, “and now the person we looked to for help, for protection, accused me.”

That was only the first of countless failures on the part of law enforcement and the judicial system. Hoping to “fix” the mentally ill Vinyard, judges deferred sentences and blithely issued “no contact” and counseling orders, despite the stalker’s repeated history of ignoring them to terrorize Anderson.

Vinyard’s criminal persistence essentially stripped Anderson and her family of their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, she watched in frustration over the years as arrests that seemed to promise long periods of incarceration were whittled down or plea-bargained to time served.

Even when he was confined, Vinyard wasn’t prohibited from obsessively calling Anderson and sending deranged, sexually violent letters. And when he wasn’t in custody, it was all but certain he’d soon come knocking on her door, terrorizing her and her children.

Anderson was at one point forced to take the stand while her mentally ill stalker, acting as his own attorney, interrogated her in court. And after Vinyard was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” and committed in 2005, prosecutors were rebuffed by hospital officials who said they were barred from releasing any information on the perpetrator’s case or treatment.

And the ordeal still isn’t over: In March, a judge ignored prosecutors’ objections and granted Vinyard permission to leave a state mental hospital under staff supervision. And because he was found “not guilty” due to mental illness, Vinyard could, in theory, be released at any time.

“I just don’t think that we have been upholding our rights as citizens when the rights of the accused have been overriding those of victims,” Anderson says.

Despite all of the setbacks, she has refused to give up advocating for herself, her family and other stalking victims. Defying Karl’s pessimistic definition of Kafkaesque, she has made a difference in the face of madness. Her advocacy has been critical to passing new, stronger anti-stalking statutes in Colorado and forcing a state hospital to change its policy regarding survivors’ access to information.

She has made a difference in the face of madness. Her advocacy has been critical to passing new, stronger anti-stalking statutes in Colorado and forcing a state hospital to change its policy regarding survivors’ access to information.

“I feel it’s important for me to continue working to ensure that victims of crimes committed by mentally ill perpetrators have the same rights and protections as other crime victims,” she says.

Anderson would like to see Colorado join other states that have adopted a law creating a verdict of “guilty but insane.”

“He was guilty,” she says. “To say he was ‘not guilty’ is to deny the impact he has had on me and my family and limits our rights as victims of crime.”

In writing Trial by Fire, Anderson felt it was important not merely to focus on the nightmare of being stalked for decades, but also on her journey of self-discovery and the evolution of her power. She chose to self-publish the book in part to maintain control of subsidiary rights, and worked closely with a professional editor.

“I believe that anyone who wants to write and is willing to dedicate the time and effort it takes to complete a book should be able to publish,” she says. “But for self-publishing to thrive, I feel it’s incumbent upon each of us in the industry to maintain a high standard and publish professional-quality books.”

Trial by Fire: A Personal Journey of Consciousness, Power, & Freedom by Kaia Anderson. Pyxis Press, 430 pp. $17.99

For more than three decades, a mentally ill man has single-mindedly harassed, threatened and terrorized Kaia Anderson and her family. Her case helped strengthen Colorado's stalking law. Now she's telling her full story.

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Cogswell award to recognize inspiration in CU classrooms

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:05:35 +0000

Cogswell award to recognize inspiration in CU classrooms Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/30/2017 - 17:05

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Former Colorado Teacher of the Year wants to recognize university’s best teachers

Craig Cogswell grew up in eastern Kansas and started his college career at the University of Kansas. But after his parents moved to Colorado during his freshman year, he decided to pursue his education about 10 meridians to the west.

He’d vacationed in Colorado many times with his family, and from the moment he arrived at the �鶹ӰԺ, he knew he’d made the right decision.

“I don’t have a good explanation for this, but the very first day I was at CU somehow it felt like home,” says Cogswell, 69. “It just always felt right.”

Craig Cogswell

It must have. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in history in 1970, followed by master’s degrees in education in 1979 and 1984.

And now that he’s retired from a long career as a high school social studies teacher, corporate educator and young-teacher mentor, he’s giving back through the establishment of the Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

The award will be available to anyone who teaches at the university, whether a full professor, a student teacher, a graduate assistant or an adjunct professor.

Cogswell believes that having inspirational teachers in the classroom is critical to an excellent education.

“I think university instructors always have the dilemma that their primary focus is research or writing, things like that,” he says. “To me, at the university level, when someone really works hard on being a dynamic, interesting or challenging teacher, that is something that should be acknowledged and rewarded.”

Cogswell’s own experience at CU informed his decision to create the award.

“One thing I remember as an undergraduate, I had a lot of professors who were excellent teachers. That’s part of what motivated me to want to encourage that now,” he says.

Cogswell didn’t take long to realize that he was interested in education, though he confesses his choice of undergraduate majors was not necessarily a matter of deep consideration.

When someone really works hard on being a dynamic, interesting or challenging teacher, that is something that should be acknowledged and rewarded.”

“When the time came to declare a major, I wrote on one side of a piece of paper, ‘English,’ and on the other, ‘history,’ and put it on a dartboard,” he says. “I let fate take control. The dart hit history, but it turned out to be a good choice.”

It wasn’t until very late in his senior year, in 1970, that Cogswell decided to get certified to become a teacher — “See a pattern here?” he asks, laughing.

For the next year and a half, he took part-time classes, plunged into an intensive eight weeks with a full load, then spent eight weeks as a student teacher at Westminster High School, just down U.S. 36 from CU �鶹ӰԺ. The school was sufficiently impressed that it offered him a job when he graduated in December 1971.

Cogswell earned his first master’s degree, in education, from CU in 1979. In 1984, he returned to earn another MA in educational technology.

“At the end of that, I got a job at a tech company in corporate education,” he says. “I did a year and a half there, then it sort of came down to, ‘OK, I know I can do other things now, but what do I really want to do?’ And what I really wanted was to teach.”

So he returned to the classroom, first for a year at a junior-high school in Westminster. After that he went back to Westminster High. In 2000, the Colorado Department of Education named him the state’s Teacher of the Year. That prestigious award is given to an outstanding teacher, who then spends the next year as a kind of spokesperson for public education on behalf of the department, Cogswell says.

He spent the last two years of his career working for the Westminster School District as a full-time mentor to new teachers, and retired in 2003. He hopes the award, which will be overseen by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will reward those who put students first at CU.

“For many of my teachers, that was not their primary job,” he says. “Yet they were willing to put their time and energy into classroom teaching.”

At the top of the page, Steven Pollock, professor of physics has won several awards for his teaching, including the Carnegie/CASE US Professor of the Year in 2013.

The award will be available to anyone who teaches at the university, whether a full professor, a student teacher, a graduate assistant or an adjunct professor.

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Author refuses to ‘dumb down’ the story

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 17:50:08 +0000

Author refuses to ‘dumb down’ the story Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/30/2017 - 10:50

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Self-publishing enables novelist, CU grad Zindell’s return to ‘pure joy’ of writing

At the outset of his writing career, David Zindell was that true rara avis in American publishing — one of the few, the talented, the fortunate, who found success with ease.

He sold his first novel after publishing just a couple of short stories, swiftly garnering praise as a complex, literary science-fiction writer and eventually graduating to a million-dollar advance.

But now Zindell (Math ‘84) has joined an increasing number of successful authors in stepping away from traditional publishing — no more contracts, no more agents, no more writing to the dictates of someone else’s bottom line. He self-published the American edition of his latest novel, The Idiot Gods, in August, and now offers self-published editions of his earlier work through his website (davidzindell.com) and most online booksellers.

David Zindell

“My primary aim is no longer to be a commercially successful writer. If it happened, I wouldn’t turn down fame or money,” says Zindell, 64. “Today I’m writing for the pure joy of writing — the best motive of all for writing.”

“The Idiot Gods” is a kind of “alien contact” story, narrated by an orca who is drawn to communicate with humans, often disastrously. The whale, dubbed Arjuna by the novel’s “translators,” serves as a witness to humanity’s ongoing destruction of itself and the planet that sustains it.

The novel tackles big-canvas, moral quandaries — animal captivity, nuclear weapons, climate change, war, slavery — and ruthlessly skewers contemporary American culture, from Viagra (“to excite their diseased, drained-out males”) to acid rap. The book’s title, it’s worth noting, is the name that the orcas have given humanity.

“It may seem hackneyed to say things are getting worse,” Zindell says, “but cultures really do reach a high point and decline. They do fall.”

But Arjuna’s suffering does eventually lead to a surreal journey and awakening, concluding on a hopeful message: “You can be good. … You are stardust; you are drops of water in an ocean that can never be destroyed,” Arjuna tells humanity. “… Someday, you will come to love the world. You will sing of life. You will sing our songs.”

Raised on the East Coast and in the Midwest, Zindell grew up reading voraciously, from Harold Robbins to Dickens to Hesse. He left Bard College when his high draft-lottery number reduced his likelihood of being sent to Vietnam, and headed west to become “a ski bum and rock-climbing bum.”

Living in �鶹ӰԺ, he worked as a bartender and began to write short stories and a novel in his spare time. When he failed to sell any of his work after several years, he enrolled at CU the University of Colorado to study mathematics.

While coaching high-school students for standardized tests, Zindell has noted that most kids read only what they are assigned for school (if that) and says many parents don’t keep books in the house. Even many students destined for good colleges have what he calls “impoverished vocabularies.”

But in the summer of 1984, before abandoning his dream, he attended a workshop in Cannon Beach, Oregon, taught by three science fiction and fantasy writers known for their complex, literary style: Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop and the late Edward Bryant of Denver. Zindell had read widely, including science fiction, but wasn’t particularly looking to become a genre writer.

“I just wanted to learn from three really great writers,” he says.

He soon sold two of his workshop stories and his story Shanidar won the Writers of the Future contest. One of the judges, writer and editor Robert Silverberg, called to ask Zindell if he’d write a novel set in the same universe as the story.

“For me that was like god calling. Silverberg was one of my all-time heroes,” Zindell says. “I thought, ‘That’s all there is to it? I enter one story in a contest and people are contacting me?’”

By the time he graduated at age 33, Zindell had contracts to publish his debut novel Neverness in both the United States and United Kingdom, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. He soon signed contracts to write a trilogy set in the same universe and six years later, sold a four-volume fantasy trilogy for a combined advance of a million dollars.

All that may sound like nirvana to aspiring writers, but Zindell was about the walk into the diamond-edged buzzsaw of big publishing.

Following a merger, his publisher was in a cost-cutting mood and demanded that he cut 27 percent from the first novel in the fantasy series, The Lightstone. He spent six months cutting, only to learn that the publisher was canceling the contract.

His British publisher, Harper Collins, published all four volumes of the Ea Cycle. And American paperback house picked up the first two volumes, then dropped the series.

“Think of what contempt that shows for readers,” Zindell says. “Here they have thousands of new readers of a new series, who suddenly can’t find the books. … That was the beginning of the end of my desire to publish with mainstream publishers.”

Zindell has always been popular in Britain, and he’s pleased that Harper Collins published The Idiot Gods last summer. But he’s glad to be out of “the ruthless big business” of mainstream publishing in the United States, where bottom-line pressures have led to increasingly “dumbed down” books.

Zindell’s novels are full of biblical or literary references, where the mega-bestsellers and potboilers he sees on supermarket racks are written “at the level of a first-grade reader.” There is now a paucity of “books that take any kind of chances,” he says, or feature complex syntax or vocabulary.

While coaching high-school students for standardized tests, Zindell has noted that most kids read only what they are assigned for school (if that) and says many parents don’t keep books in the house. Even many students destined for good colleges have what he calls “impoverished vocabularies.”

“Ambivalent, tact, surly, austere, egregious, unmitigated, stark, persecute, culmination, pinnacle, apex, altruistic,” he intones, citing just a few of the words his college-bound students don’t know. “Those don’t strike me as hard words.”

Zindell sees all of this simplification and bowdlerization as a reflection of much deeper problems with a society that has embraced 140-character media, “fake news” and ever-more-brazen lying by public officials.

“I think our culture is completely decadent, on the road to collapse and publishing is a microcosm of that,” he says. “I may be wrong, but I feel like somebody should be writing about this.”

The Idiot Gods by David Zindell. Self-published, 506 pp. $23.95.

David Zindell (Math ‘84) has joined an increasing number of successful authors in stepping away from traditional publishing — no more contracts, no more agents, no more writing to the dictates of someone else’s bottom line. Today, he's writing for the "pure joy of writing — the best motive of all for writing.”

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Global climate-change pacts moving toward market-based approaches, scholar finds

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 05:12:53 +0000

Global climate-change pacts moving toward market-based approaches, scholar finds Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/29/2017 - 22:12

Jeff Thomas

United States’ announced exit from Paris accords leaves opening for leadership, CU �鶹ӰԺ sociologist contends

While President Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement probably dismayed climate scientists, it did at least provide some interesting data for scholars who study trends in the negotiations.

One of those researchers is David Ciplet, an assistant professor at the �鶹ӰԺ who recently returned from the climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, and who said other nations are mulling ways to fill the climate-leadership vacuum left by the United States.

Ciplet’s research, which includes a recently published study, suggests that the world’s most influential states have shifted their governance over climate change mitigation to more market-based priorities in the last two decades, and that this development might not address the needs of the world’s most-vulnerable people.

David Ciplet

“The U.N. climate negotiations have long been heavily influenced by the United States’ reluctance to take bold action on the issue,” Ciplet said recently.

“With the Trump administration largely absent from the negotiations in Bonn, there was at least a feeling among many participants that leadership could take new forms. This does not, of course, mean that the world doesn’t need the United States to dramatically step up its game on climate action.”

While the Obama Administration favored strong climate action, the Paris Agreement was written specifically so that it could be adopted without a vote by Congress, which was dominated by the Republican Party at the time. Years earlier, after heavily influencing its content under then-President Bill Clinton, the United States never ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Ciplet, a sociologist in the Environmental Studies Program, along with co-authors Timmons Roberts and Mizan Khan, published a study of how the market-driven forces have affected international efforts to mitigate climate change through a 25-year history.

Published in the September edition of Global Environmental Change, their study “Climate change and the transition to neoliberal environmental governance,” found that U.N. governance of the issue has gradually become more and more affected by market-driven concerns—liberal meaning more “laissez faire” in economic parlance.

Even without the Trump administration’s climate-change stance, Ciplet said there was a profound difference in how responsibility to slowing climate change was being addressed at the U.N. over time.

“We’re in a very different space than even a decade ago; a decade ago, there was real consideration of a framework that the large polluters (nations) would be explicitly responsible for reducing emissions and contributing economic resources in relation to their responsibility,” Ciplet said.

We’re negotiating over who should have the right to pollute, how much pollution can safely be emitted, and who should bear the costs of transitioning to a green economy."

“Now we have more of a voluntary framework that is less explicit about who is responsible for ultimately cleaning up this mess. Bonn was more or less about hammering down details of how states would use transparency and peer pressure to encourage more ambitious action on climate change, especially in the near term.”

The voluntary and bottom-up process established in recent years has meant that many of the most important decisions concerning climate change are being made in domestic contexts, and in bilateral agreements between nations outside of the formal U.N. process. For example, the United States and China reached a bilateral agreement on climate change in 2014, and other nations and the European Union have also sought such arrangements.

Ciplet said the problem with such a bottom-up and voluntary approach is that U.N. climate negotiations have historically provided a platform for advocates seeking to protect the rights of smaller, less-powerful nations.

“The U.N. process has really been one of the only places in the world for the countries that are excluded from economic progress to make demands of equity,” he said. If basic decisions such as who should be responsible for reducing emissions and providing finances to help other countries adapt to climate change are made outside of the formal U.N. process, Ciplet argues that issues of inequality may gain less traction.

“The biggest polluters are often negotiating outside of this process,” he said. “So it’s very hard to imagine how we’ll make decisions that adequately address issues around equity and justice facing the most vulnerable countries to climate-change impacts, such as the 48 Least Developed Countries, and the rights of marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples.”

In the case of developing nations, Ciplet noted, many are relying on cheap fossil fuels to help them develop out of poverty. Unless the wealthy nations financially support a clean-energy transition in the Least Developed Countries, he said, these nations will have no choice but to use fossil fuels to develop their economies.

“We’re negotiating over who should have the right to pollute, how much pollution can safely be emitted, and who should bear the costs of transitioning to a green economy,” he said. “Who gets to use that atmospheric space and what framework should determine that?”

Climate-negotiation milestones

1992: U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change
1997: Kyoto Protocol, introduced legally binding emission reduction targets for developed countries
2015: Paris Agreement, develops plan to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C
2017: COP23 climate change summit in Bonn

These questions, he said, were not meaningfully addressed in Bonn, but progress was made in ensuring that a process is created in which states will discuss whether commitments and actions are sufficient for preventing catastrophic climate change.

“With current commitments made by states, we are currently on track for more than 3 degrees Celsius of global average warming, which is far more than the safer 1.5-degree Celsius target established in Paris,” Ciplet said. “On the issue of equity, very little of the promised money has been delivered to impacted countries by the wealthy states responsible for causing the climate problem.”

Ciplet thought one interesting aspect at Bonn was the Powering Past Coal alliance, started by the United Kingdom, Canada and the Marshall Islands, which were joined by 12 other countries. But by far the most confrontational was the Trump administration’s decision to use the only event it hosted for a conference touting the effectiveness of “clean coal,” which refers to carbon capture and sequestration at coal-burning facilities.

“Efforts to phase out coal have definitely emerged as a unifying point — we simply cannot continue to burn coal and stay within the confines of the Paris Agreement,” he said.

“In Bonn the most extreme case was the Trump Administration, in the most clear kind of market-driven example, advocating for the expansion of fossil fuels and coal. More than half the people left the room” during the U.S. event.

“There’s little support for that blatant level of open kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry,” Ciplet said, “but most polluting countries are still falling far short of taking action to end fossil fuel use commensurate with what is needed for a stable climate.”

The U.S. decision to leave the Paris climate agreement provided some interesting data for scholars who study trends in the negotiations. One of those researchers is David Ciplet at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

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Scholar probes lynching of Mexicans in early 20th-century Texas

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 04:29:57 +0000

Scholar probes lynching of Mexicans in early 20th-century Texas Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/29/2017 - 21:29

Steven Hlavac

‘What I am most proud of is finding the voice of the forgotten dead,’ Nicholas Villanueva says

Bands of Texans, some operating under the auspices of the legal system, engaged in mob violence against scores of Mexicans during the early 20^th century, and these killings were not originally recognized as lynchings, according to research published in a book by a member of the �鶹ӰԺ faculty.

Nicholas Villanueva, an instructor in the ethnic studies department at CU �鶹ӰԺ, detailed these killings of marginalized Mexicans between 1910 and 1920 in The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands, published this summer.

Nicholas Villanueva

Villanueva’s dissertation at Vanderbilt University led to the research at the heart of the book.

“What I am most proud of is finding the voice of the forgotten dead,” Villanueva says.

Written in a narrative style, the book provides a critical retelling of history and its injustices that often go untold by other texts, Villanueva says.

Research for Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands began when Villanueva noticed an obscure case mentioned in the text of the book Lone Star Justice. That book cites the case of Leon Martinez Jr., who was executed in Texas in the early 1900s.

As Villanueva probed further, he found that Martinez was under the legal age for execution. Marinez’s jury consisted of six people from a “lynch mob” the night a member of their community was killed.

I did not expect to find haunting similarities… laws that target surveillance of ethnic Mexican people in the region, to even large political figures speaking out against (and) broadly saying Mexicans, when not distinguishing between citizens, non-citizens, and various Latino/a groups not just of Mexican descent."

Martinez was blamed because he helped the victim carry groceries from her buggy earlier in the day.

“He was my inspiration for the project,” Villanueva states. “This was a legal lynching.”

Villanueva says it is important to remember the forgotten dead, and looking through primary sources, he was surprised when he found the name Salvador Villanueva—his grandfather.

“He was actually a refugee during this time of the Mexican Revolution. He and his cousin fled to Texas,” Villanueva states. “My father never told me that story as a youth, and for some reason at graduate school I found myself examining Mexican refugees. When I told him this, he said, ‘You know your grandfather was a refugee of the Mexican Revolution, right?’”

Salvador’s family was executed in front of him when Salvador was 16, Villanueva learned.

“You will not find lynching of Mexicans during this decade in any history textbook I have used in a history survey class. To my knowledge, I am the second person who published a book on this topic,” Villanueva states.

The other book, Forgotten Dead by William Carrigan and Clive Web, speaks of mob violence between 1848 and 1930 against Mexicans, and Carrigan and Webb speculate about why this violence spiked between 1910 and 1920. Villanueva explored and built on these ideas specifically during that decade.

“There’s a lot more room for literature and historians and sociologists to examine this topic,” Villanueva states.

The Tuskegee institute and Chicago Tribune have classically archived these cases. Under the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s criteria, a death by law enforcement is not categorized as a “lynching,” so Villanueva argues that more people were lynched than have previously been estimated when one counts mobs that included members of the Texas Rangers.

Though the NAACP definition leaves the Texas Rangers unaccountable in lynch mobs, more than 2,000 people died at the Rangers’ hands in what became known as the “bandit wars.”

“I did not expect to find haunting similarities… laws that target surveillance of ethnic Mexican people in the region, to even large political figures speaking out against (and) broadly saying Mexicans, when not distinguishing between citizens, non-citizens, and various Latino/a groups not just of Mexican descent,” Villanueva said.

“We, unfortunately, are repeating some of the same social problems that existed literally 100 years ago, today.”

Villanueva says he takes pride in humanizing people who were so marginalized that they were senselessly killed. He also finds it important that readers understand at the end, families and lives are associated with people who are labeled as undocumented, or “illegal” today.

Villanueva’s follow-up book, (Un)Making Citizens, looks at segregation of Mexicans in the Texas borderlands during the 1920s, which is similar to Jim Crow but for Latinos during this period.

At CU �鶹ӰԺ, Villanueva also directs the Critical Sports Studies program. In this role, Villanueva utilizes his expertise in contemporary and historical social problems, and designs courses that view these problems within the context of sports.

In another soon-to-be-published book, Politics, Protest, and Social Justice in Sport, Villanueva rifts on these same themes by providing a global contemporary examination of sports, from South African segregation at golf courses, to the German world cup team that insulted Argentinian team, to white privilege in sports.

Villanueva dedicated The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands to his father and his late mother.

At the top of page, Texas Rangers are shown with bodies of Mexicans killed in 1915. Photo courtesy Bullock Texas State History Museum.

Bands of Texans, some operating under the auspices of the legal system, engaged in mob violence against scores of Mexicans during the early 20th century, and these killings were not originally recognized as lynchings, according to research published in a book by a CU �鶹ӰԺ instructor.

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Is America heading back to the ‘50s?

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:44:34 +0000

Is America heading back to the ‘50s? Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/29/2017 - 11:44

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Professors of anthropology and linguistics see Trump’s rise as driven, in part, by ‘nostalgic racism’

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, two scholars at the �鶹ӰԺ argued that the unanticipated success of then-Republican primary candidate Donald J. Trump could be explained, in part, by his extravagant use of physical gestures and spectacle.

The researchers argue that as both candidate and president, Trump has tapped into what they call “nostalgic racism”—nostalgia for the pre-civil-rights, industrial-welfare-state America of the 1950s.

Donna M. Goldstein, professor of cultural anthropology, Kira Hall, associate professor of linguistics and anthropology, and a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, Matthew Bruce Ingram issued this assessment before last year’s election:

“In Trump, we find a Rabelaisian character that deploys bawdy humor to entertain his audience. He provides carnivalesque moments as he pokes fun at other candidates,” they wrote in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer known for his crude humor and extravagant caricature.

Donna Goldstein

“Like Rabelais, Trump understands that crude humor has the power to bring down the princely classes—aka, the political establishment—as well as anyone who opposes him.”

A year after the election, Goldstein and Hall have edited a colloquium for the same journal and published a lead essay that explores how Trump’s implicit signals (or “semiotic displays”) and repeated violation of political norms won him not just the GOP nomination, but propelled him into the White House, and what it says about the American electorate.

Trump’s “semiotic ambiguity … enabled (him) to launch a sustained critique of ‘political correctness’ that proved more compelling than anyone on the left might have realized at the time,” they write, arguing that his implicit messages were clearly received:

We are trying to deepen the explanation of his appeal, and understand how the Democratic Party lost the working-class population it thought it had in the bag.”

“Trump’s style conveyed plenty to followers and critics alike, projecting a dream of a particular kind of America that resonated with some and terrified others.”

Mining the work of well-known writers such as Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin, as well as current scholars who have written about the Trump phenomenon, Goldstein and Hall argue that the president has gone beyond mere entertainment to represent the backward-looking aspirations of some of his fans.

“Trump embodies revolutionary hedonism (or at the very least, a dream of what may be possible if the United States returns to a protectionist national economy),” they write. “Trump’s pussy-grabbing abusiveness was not overlooked; it was part of the dream. … His spectacle of sexual transgression, civil lawlessness, and excessive opulence is exactly what is being embraced.”

Kira Hall

“What we tried to do here is a kind of post-election deep-think piece,” says Goldstein. “We are trying to deepen the explanation of his appeal, and understand how the Democratic Party lost the working-class population it thought it had in the bag.”

The paper examines the ideas and work of correspondents and colleagues who have sought to analyze how and why Trump managed to capture the Electoral College, even while losing the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes.

The authors extend the work of contributing scholars such as Michael Silverstein, who argues that Trump mastered “negative branding,” and Kaifa Roland, associate professor of anthropology at CU �鶹ӰԺ, who examines Trump’s use of “dog whistle” politics in discussions of race.

By looking to Sontag’s 1964 definition of “Camp” as “a consistently aesthetic experience of the world” that “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ irony over tragedy,” the authors note that 58 percent of all white Americans and 62 percent of white males voted for Trump and asked: “What if Trump is an example of white privileged heterosexual Camp, a repackaged version of white 1950s hypermasculinity?”

Overall, Goldstein says, “maybe the thing that white suburban liberals didn’t see was how angry white middle America seemed to be.”

Meanwhile, black (and Hispanic) voters—who did not match the prodigious turnout that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012—may have recognized that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was burdened by her own racial baggage with things as high rates of black incarceration and her husband’s rollback of welfare in the 1990s.

And with most 11th-hour polls suggesting Clinton would win in a “slam dunk,” supporters simply may not have felt the urgency to vote. Goldstein recalls attending an election-night party at which most people weren’t even watching the returns.

“There were only one or two of us sitting there watching, and somewhere around the 9 o’clock hour it was, ‘This isn’t going the way we thought,’” she says.

And those who thought Trump was just a showman who would no doubt settle into the decorum of office were in for a surprise, Goldstein says.

In the end, Hall and Goldstein argue, Trump’s theatrical, winking skill at evoking and stoking white nostalgia for a past in which racial minorities were well down the totem pole is a key factor that led to his electoral victory.

“We suggest that it is the fear of a civically engaged multiracial electorate that left the Republican Party in crisis, leading them down a troubling path of regression and reversal that now seems to threaten us all,” they conclude.

Professors of anthropology and linguistics argue that as both candidate and president, the president has tapped into what they call “nostalgic racism”—nostalgia for the pre-civil-rights, industrial-welfare-state America of the 1950s.

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Good, and more, advice for students

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 17:48:02 +0000

Good, and more, advice for students Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/29/2017 - 10:48

James W.C. White

Some students arrive at the university with their careers carefully planned. Others arrive knowing they will receive a great education but less aware of all their academic options.

James W.C. White

Academic advisors serve everyone on that continuum, and the College of Arts and Sciences is committed to improving the experience for all. There are several reasons to do this, but the first is most compelling: It’s the right thing to do.

Good advising helps more students stay enrolled, earn their degrees and lead fuller lives.

In recent years, the college’s Academic Advising Center has evolved. It also has a new assistant dean for academic advising and student success, Cindy Justice, who brings a wealth of experience, leadership and vision.

The college intends to improve advising by stabilizing a budget structure that has historically restricted the organization’s options, and by adding additional advising staff in the coming year to make it easier for every student to see an advisor.

Meantime, the college is redoubling efforts to create connections between departments and advising staff that facilitate easy communication and access to curricular and other information that students need.

Our students have all the right stuff to succeed, but they can sometimes soar higher with a little help from their friends.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

From the interim dean: We are improving academic advising by stabilizing a budget structure that has historically restricted the organization’s options, and by adding additional advising staff in the coming year to make it easier for every student to see an advisor.

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