Get Involved Outside the Classroom,
Where Learning is Limitless

by: Steven Benson

With over 20,000 undergraduate students, it is very easy for one to get “lost in the crowd.” Walking through the Diag, students often see unfamiliar faces, an occurrence quite different from the typical high school experience. The University of Michigan prides itself on the sense of community present among students. Community on this campus is built in a number of ways, with student activism and involvement in different organizations playing a major role. There are over 1,200 active student groups on this campus, each with a unique focus and mission statement. The excuse for student complacency can no longer be, “I couldn’t find anything that interested me.”

I decided to get involved on campus not to boost my resume, or to make my encouraging mother proud, but rather to satisfy my intrinsic needs. College is a unique experience for most in its requirement of self-motivation. College is only four years long, and it is what you make of it. No one is peering over my shoulder telling me what to do or how to make my decisions. To me, simply attending class and coming straight home was not the way I wanted to remember my college experience. I needed to become a part of something that was greater than myself. Solely attending classes didn’t offer me that “something;” I wanted to make my mark on the University. Then I found LSA Student Government.

My involvement as President of LSA Student Government is something from which I have extremely benefited. Academics come first, of course, but I have learned certain skills from Student Government that cannot be learned in the classroom. These skills are practical by nature and will help me advance myself in the real world. Networking is one important skill that first comes to mind. Through my collaboration with students, faculty, and administrators, I have built relationships and made connections with very influential people. Not to mention that I have made some of my best friends through my work. While we are a very tight knit group, we are also very critical of each other when needed Student Government taught me many useful things: how to conduct professional meetings, set a budget, address sensitive issues, and motivate others to complete their projects.

Furthermore, Student Government enabled me to strengthen my overall leadership skills, a requirement for any occupation or graduate program. The top recruiters in the workforce stress the importance of student involvement on campus specifically student leadership. Being an organization member is important; however, it is equally important to show growth inside an organization.

Student activism is an idea open for interpretation. There is no right way to become involved on campus. To some, joining an organization with three members is the right decision.

Piece of advice: rather than joining ten different student organizations at once, join a few and hold a leadership position in each.

To others, joining a fraternity or sorority with over 100 members is a perfect fit. Regardless of personal preference, students need to see beyond the classroom and acknowledge that any form of involvement is better than no involvement at all.

University of Michigan students are lucky to attend school in such a beautiful city that is interconnected with the campus culture. Take advantage of the many resources that Ann Arbor has to offer. Work with Ann Arbor Organizations , such as the Hospital or the public schools, to help them reach their goals. Even doing something as small as planting a flower in the arboretum, picking up trash on South University, or even volunteering at the Ann Arbor YMCA or JCC will make a difference. As a student at the University of Michigan it is our duty and obligation to give back to our community.

Let me offer a piece of advice: college is too short to only focus on classroom academics. These are meant to be the best years of our lives, so why not take advantage of them? Make the most out of this opportunity by getting involved, and you will be sure to benefit in the long run. Do you want to reflect back on your college experience and only remember aspects of student life relating to academics? Or do you want to realize that your four years were filled with great experiences, memories created through your involvement in an organization, and a sense of impacting our campus culture after earning your degree? These choices will help define the person you are, and the person you aspire to be.

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Introduction to Fascinating Ideas: Why Attending Class Matters

by: Tim Dodd

Excerpts from the Fall 2010 LSA Course Guide: “Critical Theory in Medicine and Healing,” “Ghosts, Demons, Monsters: Fear and Dread in Literature,” “Experiments in Nonlinear Dynamics,” “Geoenvironmental Engineering,” “African Cinema,” “Introduction to Ethnobotany,” “The Mathematics of Language.”

To paraphrase that famous line from the Wizard of Oz: Toto, we’re not in high school anymore!

By now you’ve heard the drill from the deans: coming to the University of Michigan means learning from some of the world’s most renowned scholars in superb academic departments, most of which are ranked among the top 5 in the country. In addition to that spiel from the academic affairs administration, you have undoubtedly heard this line from representatives of the student affairs administration: “Your most memorable learning experiences at UM occur outside the classroom.”

As the director of academic advising in the Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center, I find myself amazed every semester by the number of interesting and unusual course titles and topics – just a few of which I noted above – that sprout up in the curricula at UM. This university provides myriad opportunities to take classes that deepen understanding, stretch the imagination, challenge assumptions, and gain new and nuanced perspectives on ourselves and the universe around us. That UM students sail beyond limited and conventional thinking and immerse themselves in ideas never before considered is central to my attempt as an advisor to inspire students to participate in the grandeur of the undergraduate experience. Frankly, there is no comparable time in your life – and I’ve lived many years in many places since leaving the undergraduate ranks – that permits the breadth of subject exploration and elicits the degree of intellectual wonder as do the undergraduate years.

While I attended a much smaller institution as an undergrad (Fordham University in the Bronx), I also had the pleasure of taking a diverse set of courses that enrich my life to this day. Would I have the appreciative and critical eye for art and film that I developed as a student in philosophy of aesthetics and film studies classes? Could I be the critical consumer of political discourse that I am had I not taken a course on rhetoric and propaganda? Do I still find compelling the range of human beliefs, behaviors and motivations because I took a religion and psychoanalysis class? Is my ability to assess quantitative data derived from my two semesters of calculus?

That UM bifurcates student existence into “academic affairs” and “student affairs” and then watches those distinct bureaucracies compete over which realm provides the best and most memorable “learning” is not at all representative of the undergraduate experience at UM.

Learning is a dynamic and integrative process that, as practiced particularly by UM undergraduates, spurs intellectual, social, personal and ethical development inside and outside the classroom.

True, you will grow smarter and more confident because we have many “top 5” departments and programs (and great thinkers and experts in each). But profound learning occurs throughout the undergraduate years because we also have 1241 student organizations (it says so on the Maize Pages; look it up) and tons of spontaneous moments of interaction, inquisition and reflection with friends, colleagues, and strangers on and off campus.    And here is the key: what is absorbed in class is tested through application in social, organizational, and community settings, and what is experienced in those settings informs and animates understanding of classroom theories and concepts. There’s a catch, though: it doesn’t happen by osmosis.

You have to go to class and be an active participant in the course “dialogue.”

With the advent of PowerPoint slides and lecture notes posted to Ctools course sites, some students believe it is unnecessary to attend class. To me, skipping class is like buying a ticket to a concert and, instead of attending, downloading the play list. Sure, you know what was performed, but you didn’t hear the words, you didn’t listen to how songs were played, you didn’t become aware of what nuanced shadings on verse and melody occurred, and you weren’t present to discuss the concert after it ended. You never would skip a concert and think that viewing the playlist was sufficient, so why would you skim a PowerPoint loaded on Ctools instead of attending class? Even in a 400-person lecture, listening to a scholar present his or her ideas stimulates a much deeper understanding of the course material, and discussing the lectures outside of class often solidifies or expands that understanding.

Maintaining the habit of class attendance can also provide practical benefits. It helps you develop a productive discipline and a rhythm of responsibility, both of which enforce effective time management and a healthy sleep schedule. There’s also no better way to get to know your professors, who, after all, will be writing your letters of recommendation. As wonderful as these benefits are, though, the most important reason to attend class is the intrinsically valuable experience the classroom environment provides. In fact, the classroom experience can be just as useful and important as other “real life” experiences. There is no substitute for a direct encounter with fascinating ideas and the minds that produced them.

So, yes, Go Blue . . . but go to class, too

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edited by: aaron bekemeyer and lexie tourek

Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.

Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths.

Although human nature has historically been seen as essentially selfish, recent science suggests that it is not. The capacity for empathy is believed to be innate in most humans, as well as some other species.

I think this last point is especially important.  Economics and political science often assume that individuals are inherently rational actors, and many go so far as to say that economic and political society are essentially founded on competition between self-interested parties.  This article points to an alternative way of thinking about this – rather than selfishness and competition, empathy and cooperation ought to form the cornerstone of a good society.  The human mind is endlessly flexible, with the potential for both cruel selfishness and expansive empathy.  Which tendency predominates depends on what we cultivate in childhood.

I also want to say that the article seems to be based on very good science.  I personally believe that some of the best psychology comes out of social psychology.  We’re all really just nodes in an enormous network of relationships with other people, and the best way to understand who we are is to study these relationships and how we interact with others more generally – hence, my penchant for social psychology.

–Aaron Bekemeyer

Schmidt doesn’t hide his grand vision. When he speaks, he comes off as a professor rather than a businessman, a guy who’s far less interested in consumer electronics than in big ideas. In October 2008, the week the U.S. economy had ground to a halt and Congress was poised to pass a $700 billion bailout plan, the Google CEO was talking up Google’s sprawling renewable-energy stimulus plan, which Schmidt believed could “solve all of our problems at once.” He didn’t seem the least bit worried that the crashing economy would sour his own company’s fortunes (and in fact, Google’s revenues barely slipped). Schmidt gives such big-idea talks all the time. He holds forth on the future of information with people in the newspaper industry; on the future of tech innovation with systems administrators; on the future of the country in his numerous chats with Barack Obama. (Schmidt endorsed Obama during the election and now sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.)

A lot of people worry about Google becoming too big and turning into an information hegemon, but as this article points out, the scarier people and firms are probably the nastier and more aggressive ones (like Apple and Steve Jobs, though don’t get me wrong – I love Apple).  In fact, the author of the article doesn’t think we really need to worry about Apple at all.  He thinks that while Apple is off worrying about the (relatively) narrow concern of cornering the mobile devices market, Google’s broad vision will carry it on to bigger and better accomplishments – which, surprisingly, I’m okay with.  Nothing against Steve Jobs, but I’d rather have a professorly nice guy running the world any day.

–Aaron Bekemeyer

As for me and the rest of the Conversationalist regulars, we’re going on an extremely relaxed schedule till the fall. You might see a post up here or there but finals are fast approaching and this chief blogger, for one, is pooped. So we’re going to slow the blogging schedule down, but don’t worry, we’ll be back.

Thanks for reading!

–Daniel Strauss and the Consider Staff

I was meaning to get to this earlier today but Economix has a list of the top ten private, public, and liberal arts schools average full-time professor salaries and Michigan is fourth behind Berkeley (of course. Wah.) and before North Carolina (woot! Take that Tar-Heels!). But keep one thing in mind: the University may not be spending its money wisely. One of the most popular professors is paid well below the average here. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Now, that’s not entirely fair. Plenty of my favorite professors are paid more than a fair salary and one also has to consider for, say, Business School professors, they have to be paid a lot because otherwise they could just leave their job and go join Bain Capital or the Caryle Group instead. At the same time though, there are plenty of good professors out there you could get relatively cheaply and instead use that money on the professors that make the university exceptional. It seems to be more a question of what kind of university Michigan wants to be.

–Daniel Strauss

A while back I posted a similar map comparing bars to grocery store. This one compares where pizza stores, gun stores, and strip clubs are most common. It’s a pretty unremarkable map EXCEPT in southern Nevada. Catch that? That’s right, there are more strip clubs than pizza. I would usually suppose that wherever there are people there’s a plethora of pizza offering eateries. I guess southern Nevadans want strippers more than a slice…

–Daniel Strauss

(h/t: Chicagoist)

Many are now familiar with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s ‘Confederate History Month,’ announced in a proclamation which failed to mention slavery. After the ensuing backlash from pundits and bloggers, the Governor managed to offend antiracist observers a second time with his retraction, which excused the omission by suggesting that in crafting the original proclamation, he had “focused on the ones [he] thought were most significant for Virginia.” Slavery, one must suppose, did not make the cut.

Like previous Civil War controversies, from history textbook entries to the display of the Confederate flag, this most recent outburst has given rise to a flurry of controversy which is virtually incoherent to those unfamiliar with Southern culture. The Civil War ended one hundred and forty-five years ago. No one who was alive during the Civil War is still alive, and most that fought in it were ancient during the childhood of our generation’s grandparents. Yet, somehow, the memory of the Confederacy remains a live issue, re-appearing out of nowhere to shock a wide variety of groups across the political spectrum and leave the rest of us wondering: didn’t we already settle this?

There are many theories why, try as we might, the Confederate hangover refuses to fade. One, put forward by John Meacham, editor of Newsweek, examines how the narrative of the Confederacy has perennially resurfaced during times of social unease among Southern whites, writing that the selective memory of the heroic Lost Cause “…is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.”

The problem with slavery, from the perspective of contemporary populist conservatives, is that it interferes with their mythical notion of the Founder’s “liberty” and “freedom” as “inalienable rights.” While many conservatives are only too happy to compare Obama’s health plan to human bondage, when the topic turns to the actual historical antecedents for their comparisons, the right has little to say. Those who will protest and throw teabags to valorize the individualism of the Sons of Liberty on this coming Tax Day will likely not mention that the heroic authors of the Constitution considered other humans as disposable, beat-able, rape-able property. Slavery is always getting in the way of the myth.

Few have come to the myth’s aid as vocally as Haley Barbour, the conservative governor of Mississippi, who responded to the controversy with glib savagery, an untroubled derisiveness almost begging to be taken as folksy. Dismissing the proclamation as irrelevant, he defended McDonnell’s omission of slavery from Confederate heritage, pointing to similar resolutions passed in his own state and others. Commenting on the event as a whole, he drawled “…it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly.”

Neo-confederate symbolism is a bellwether for the contemporary Right, lost adrift a sea of clashing ideologies, desperately trying to find their foundational Truth in tradition of all stripes. Governor Barbour’s apathy is symptomatic of his larger movement’s lack of interest in finding the barest semblance of coherence; freedom, slavery, patriot, traitor; the words all run together in revisionist double-speak. The contradictions are certainly manifold; between upholding Confederate heritage and militant patriotism, between demanding freedom and honoring slave-owners, between defending “war on terror” national security and fondly recalling the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, between valorizing unity and celebrating secessionism. Consider CNN Political Analyst Roland Martin’s editorial titled “Were Confederate soldiers terrorists?”, which directly compares the rhetoric and arguments for jihadist terrorism against the West (“they imposed their Western values on us, invaded our land and so on”) with arguments supporting the racist violence of Confederate soldiers (“they imposed their anti-slavery values on us, invaded our land, and so on) .

After years of bombastic Manichean rhetoric of good and evil, us versus them, it is somewhat revelatory, if only in a twisted way, to see those conservatives who defended the concept of ‘America’ to the exclusion of all else, once again take up the mantle of the secessionist enemy. Those who once demanded wiretaps and secret detention to keep America safe have now returned to the narrative of justified treason to destroy and overthrow the once unquestionably pure and necessary federal government. The irony would be delicious, if it weren’t so obviously pathetic.

–Edmund Zagorin

Science Based Field Research Could Address the Roots of Terrorism

by:  Dr. Scott Atran

S enators, I appreciate your letting me, an anthropologist, relate my views on the U.S. government’s strategy and efforts to counter violent extremism and radicalization and the military’s role in these efforts. I’ve been with would-be martyrs and holy warriors from Morocco’s Atlantic shore to Indonesia’s outer islands, and from Gaza to Kashmir. My field experience and studies in diverse cultural settings inform my views.

We are fixated on technology and technological success, and we have no sustained or systematic approach to field-based social understanding of our adversaries’  motivation, intent, will, and the dreams that drive their strategic vision, however strange.

On the intelligence side, the Christmas Day bombing attempt was a deep failing, caused in part by too great a reliance on technology to the detriment of social intelligence.  Computers, and the stochastic models and algorithms they use, are not well suited to pick up the significance of the almost unimaginable effort and anguish it took for one of the most respected men in a nation to swallow his pride and love of family and walk into an American embassy to say that his son was being dangerously radicalized. Widgets — for which there are billions of dollars-cannot do the job of socially sensitive thinkers — for whom there is relatively little concrete support — in creating alliances, leveraging non military advantages, reading intentions, building trust, changing opinions, managing perceptions, and empathizing (though not necessarily sympathizing) with others so as to understand, and change, what moves them to do what they do.

On the military side, career advancement in the armed forces privileges operational prowess and combat experience, which are necessary to gain victory in battles. But different abilities may be necessary for winning without having to fight, or for ending a war in Lincoln’s definitive sense of destroying enemies by making them into friends.  As George Marshall understood, this is what American efforts at democratization abroad are ultimately about. Soldiers should be adequately trained and rewarded for the political mission they are now being asked to carry out, which requires cultural and psychological expertise at being social mediators, managers, and movers.

If you want to be relevant in dealing with the radicalization problem — and successful in the long run in stopping the next and future generations of disaffected youth from finding their life’s meaning in the thrill of taking on the world’s mightiest power — then you have to understand the pathways that take young people to and from political and group violence.  Knowing these pathways, you can do what needs to be done.

The concept of science-based field research – embedded in potential hotspots and open to public verification and replication, with clear ways and means to falsify what is wrong – is often misunderstood in Washington.  Most legislators and policy makers think we have a great deal of this type of research being undertaken and funded.  We don’t.

The concept of science-based field research…is often misunderstood in Washington.  Most legislators and policy makers think we have a great deal of this type of research being undertaken and funded.  We don’t.

With assistance from the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, ARTIS puts interdisciplinary teams in a conflict region to explore the nature of the conflict with leaders, community members, and youth. We follow up with an experimental design — which allows ready replication of initial results or falsification of our hypotheses — to understand pathways to and from violence.

The main security concern now isn’t from any organization, or from well-trained cadres of volunteers.  The main security concern is from a Qaeda, an inspired viral social and political movement that abuses religion in the name of defending Muslims.  This is particularly contagious among youth who are increasingly marginalized —  economically, socially, politically — and in transition stages in their lives: immigrants, students, in search of friends, mates and jobs.

The popular notion of a “clash of civilizations” is woefully misleading. Violent extremism represents a crash of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies: in small groups of friends —  from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.

Lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality. But given half a chance to take up a moral cause, some petty criminals become hyper-altruists ready to give up their lives for comrades and cause. This is one indication – our research reveals others – that economic opportunities alone may not turn people away from the path to political violence. Rather, youth must be given hopes and dreams of achievement, and plausible means to realize such hopes and dreams.

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Embedded Anthropologists
Threaten Military Security

by: Gabriel Tourek

While it seems that anthropology has a rightful place among all scientific disciplines in determining proper action and intelligent decision-making, I think we can definitively say that, in military issues, pragmatics matter most.  This is not to say an anthropologist could never offer useful insight into practices that constitute some of the most momentous our government will make – to take the lives of those who threaten ours – but that in the majority of circumstances anthropological reflection on military ops can do more harm than good.

Certainly, we must be clear about the function of the “embedded anthropologist” about whom we are speaking.  This social scientist studies, records, removes herself, and philosophizes into the ever growing Word file that will eventually become her doctoral thesis.  This seems uncontroversial: journalists have traveled with the military since the time of Herodotus, publishing their observations far and wide, with significant implications for how future battles and wars are conducted.  For the most part, these are what current embedded anthropologists are like – working with the military as part of a research project, returning home, and submitting, eventually, recommendations to concerned parties.  What frightens me, however, are proposals to incorporate social scientists into the daily planning and strategy operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military operations are about quick response, communication along the chain of command, and – let us be clear – cold, unflinching violence.  We can care about the victims of war in an abstract sense, but the truth is that we as a society have made a decision to fight when there is a pressing need.  The moral status of the decision to condone violence is exigent circumstances is a separate question; what is at issue here is whether we should allow social science perspectives to influence how our military apparatus carries out its assigned duty.

…We cannot jeopardize our military’s ability to target…and destroy.

To be blunt, we simply cannot jeopardize our military’s ability to target, smash, and destroy.  Gun battles with insurgents should be about simple troop movement, strategic missile targeting, and coordination with local forces.  The unaccounted-for assumptions of our military model do, no question, carry terrible implications for how we are fighting our wars, but fighting has always been about the balance sheet: wiping out the enemy while sustaining the least damages possible.  Our military machine is doing its job; it is killing the bad guys.  Admittedly, this seems to any liberal arts student an unsettling justification.  Yet could we imagine war being conducted in a good way?  Wouldn’t anthropologists simply help the military to be more efficient, to incorporate social observations into the calculating model that spits out death and destruction.

What could a social scientist even contribute in an immediate sense?

What could a social scientist even contribute in an immediate sense?  Let’s consider the nature of our war in Afghanistan.  Drone attacks operated out of the Western United States constitute a significant portion of military action.  Soldiers not on the ground, removed from context, are killing our targets.  Drones are not without efficiency and ethical problems, but we are using them, and it seems that “linguistic interpretations of Taliban metaphor-making in religio-ethnic ritual demonstrations of nationalism” can add little to the job of the man or woman who sits at a screen, points and clicks.

Finally, anthropological recommendations seem more properly situated as reflections, as evaluations of collected data and, most significantly, as comparisons of projections to the actual results of war.  We can only affirm the value of anthropological reflections on military operations after the fact.  Proposals to include anthropologists in military strategizing conflate the work of anthropology with the eagerness of its proponents to fix the problems they see in the world.  The rigor of scientific work, moreover, depends on its non-interventionist stance: how can one observe and reflect upon an event when s/he is affecting the outcome?  When we are dealing with people with bombs and guns, attempting to “understand the situation in context” and change the direction of military deployment not only makes for bad research but may delay action, cost lives, and jeopardize security.

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edited by: Trisha Jain

The Pulitzer’s were announced today and Pro Publica, the online investigative enterprise, snagged one. It’s being hailed as a triumph of online journalism which…makes absolutely no sense. Here’s why: even though Pro Publica itself is an online institution that often publishes its content at its website, this particular piece of journalism was published in The New York Times magazine. So what makes that different than a writer for, say, Slate magazine, who publishes some serious piece of journalism in The New Yorker? Furthermore, the report at the Times pretty much admits that this isn’t a pure online journalism win:

Over the last few years, the Pulitzer Prize board has relaxed the eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online; this year there were many such submissions, though none of them won.

(emphasis mine) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this makes Sheri Fink (the author of the Pro Publica/Times magazine article) any less deserving, but she is not the person that broke into otherwise unexplored territory for online investigative journalism or online journalism for that matter. When an online news outlet wins a Pulitzer, it will be without the help of a major print newspaper like the Times. That hasn’t happened yet.

–Daniel Strauss

Photo by Katerha used under a Creative Commons license.

This study is incredibly revealing to the state of our seemingly equal opportunity education. As a math major here, the gender gap and its implications are a reality to me. Though there are great affirmative action math programs sponsored by the University, like Project Algebra and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), the UM Math department chooses to ignore structural inequalities or address disparities head on. 

Hopefully this study will force UM and all higher level educational instutions to shift focus to the importance gender equality in math as a social justice. It should be the goal of every department to recognize their ability to make an impact in structural barriers that are easily written off as the inevitable status quo.

I acknowledge that I may be biased in my perspective of the gravity of this problem. Do you think gender gaps will always exist in certain academic fields and professions? Do you think this is something that needs to be changed? There’s soon to be an open seat on the Supreme Court, should any amount of deliberation be with respect to closing that gender gap?

–Lexie Tourek