New site–please visit over there!

In October of 2011 the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs moved to a newly-designed website with more features to serve the faculty, students, and alumni of its member programs. This blog became part of that site, too. Please visit us there–thanks.

The AGLSP site.
The new blog site.

Freedom Riders fifty years on

IU South Bend alumnus David James reports back from a recent trip to the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders who helped to break segregation in the American South.

The quality of political discussion

When we discuss policy or politics, do we argue in order to win the day or to seek the truth? In two recent NY Times articles, Thomas Friedman and Patricia Cohen explore the allure of both approaches.

Call for submissions for the 2011 Writing Awards

Check out the Writing Awards link on the top of the page for information about the 2011 AGLSP writing awards competition, with entries due for submission by campus directors, after a campus screening process, in January 2011. If your program is a Full Member of the AGLSP, your students can participate. Graduate students and recent alumni, please consult with your program’s director to indicate your interest in participating and to discover any local guidelines for submission.

What is Graduate Liberal Studies? #2

Skidmore College has joined Wesleyan University of Connecticut in producing its own beautiful web video on the appeals of graduate liberal studies.

And Wesleyan:

Intelligence and interdisciplinarity

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)

Symposium news filters in

A news item shared via the USC program’s Facebook page gives a clue or two about the pleasures of attending and presenting at one of the annual graduate student conferences–check it out.

Brooks on dual consciousness

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.

Tragedy in the Coal Mines

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.

Museums in a digital age

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.