Issue Twelve
Portraits of a University
It seems to me that there are no great American cities without great Universities.”
–John Simpson
It seems to me that today there are no great American cities without great universities.
The public research university is a uniquely American invention–a manifestation of the belief that research is a public good, that there is a distinct social benefit from a citizenry educated in a scholarly environment, and that these opportunities should be available to all who have the talent and motivation to pursue them. I am convinced that being a professor in a research university is the most interesting job there is, and I have had the great good fortune of working in these institutions throughout my professional career. We in Buffalo, through our research university, have a tremendous local resource, which I believe is even more important for the region’s future than it has been for its past. I did not come here three years ago to maintain the status quo. Rather, I came here with the aim of leading this university deeply into the realm of great American public universities.
Portraits of a University
– John Simpson
A person should be able to:
heal a wound, plan an expedition,
order from a French menu, climb a mountain face,
enjoy a ballet, balance accounts,
roll a kayak, embolden a friend,
tell a joke, laugh at a joke, laugh at oneself,
cooperate, act alone,
sing a children's song, solve equations,
throw a dog a stick, pitch manure,
program a computer, cook a tasty meal,
love heartily, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
–Robert A. Heinlein (KATE FOSTER)
‘great buildings do not occur in isolation; they grow out of flourishing architectural cultures where the habits of good construction and imaginative planning have solidity and momentum’
Recognizing one particular American city as a focus of international architectural significance the renowned critic and historian Reyner Banham went on to identify a collection of outstanding landmarks. Those buildings, designed by many of the world’s most famous architects–H.H.Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Richard Upjohn, Daniel Burnham, McKim Mead and White, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Albert Kahn, Gordon Bunshaft, Minoru Yamasaki, Paul Rudolph and others–were also, he noted, set within an extraordinarily democratic and elegant city-wide plan created by Olmsted.
The inspired patronage and enlightened design which shaped that city were, Banham commented, also advanced by work carried out in simple workshops there–wide open daylit spaces that made it possible to connect design and fabrication and transform ideas into reality. These too are buildings that continue to inspire modernism.
This is an enviable place to live, study and teach architecture, environmental design, urban and regional planning, pursue design research and explore new forms of critical practice. It is the setting for UB’s School of Architecture and Planning where we are all working hard to ensure that those cultures in Buffalo continue to flourish.
–Brian Carter
I think of Freud as a late romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t
have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or
moving or intriguing or amusing–whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in.
This sentence from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, points to the connection between my interest in poetry and my interest in psychoanalysis. As an English professor who teaches courses through UB’s Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, I often have difficulty explaining the connection. Shouldn’t English professors be teaching literature? Wasn’t Freud’s model of the mind discredited long ago, with neurophysiology and psychopharmacology replacing a “talking cure” that never seemed very effective even in its heyday? What is a Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis doing in an English department anyway? All good questions.
The model for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice is not science, in spite of Freud’s original hopes. The model for psychoanalysis–which is, after all, a peculiar form of conversation–might be closer to the arts or the humanities. Or, to invoke a feature that the arts and the sciences share in common, I’d say that psychoanalysis is an experiment in conversation: an experiment in which one person agrees to say whatever comes into his or her mind, no matter how apparently nonsensical, while the other person agrees to suspend his or her usual prejudices, reactions, and conversational formulas. No matter how intimate the conversation gets, no matter how important their relationship becomes, both partners also agree not to sleep together.
The results of this somewhat uncontrolled experiment are known as psychoanalytic literature. It is a literature filled with attempts to explain what this strange conversation is actually like. Anybody involved in it keeps returning to the basic question: to what can psychoanalysis be compared? If we agree that it is more like poetry than like science, then how can psychoanalysis be of any use to anyone? What use is poetry?
Poetry, like psychoanalysis, is not true in the way that we consider science to be true. It doesn’t describe objects or experiences in ways that can be reliably verified. If poetry, like psychoanalysis, has an impact, then we describe it as subjectively rather than objectively true. We say that it resonates. Perhaps it haunts us or makes our world look different. Perhaps it brings us pleasure rather than solid facts or something that can be translated into income. Perhaps we find it intriguing without quite knowing why.
Psychoanalysts are intrigued by what intrigues others, especially when others aren’t sure why they’re intrigued. Psychoanalysis as a theory regards people as conglomerates of competing interests, only some of which are known and cultivated. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is for those who are curious about what their own other interests might be. It is based on the assumption that life is enriched by finding out about the other interests that you have. In order to discover what those other interests are, you have to be willing to say the things that normally you wouldn’t let yourself say. Psychoanalysis is about paying a lot–in time as well as money–to truly speak freely. It is not as easy as you’d think.
–Tim Dean
Kazimierz Braun has unusual qualifications for the task. As a director, manager, theater artist, author, scholar, and teacher, he has been totally involved with Polish theater throughout his career in Poland, in America and Europe, and as a cultural ambassador between East and West. Wherever he has been, he has created Polish theater, studied it, taught it, and written about it. Only a lifetime commitment and passionate love for theater in all its aspects can give such an authoritative grasp of the subject.
–Daniel Gerould
When I took over as Professor and Chairman of Neurosurgery and Professor of Radiology in 1990, our program had one full-time attending and four residents; we were on strict academic probation by the Neurosurgery Residency Review Committee, faced with extinction. Today, we have ten attending neurosurgeons, twelve residents, and four endovascular fellows and are widely considered one of the best neurosurgery programs in the country. We have recruited experts from top universities and research centers around the country, and our department performs more than 3,500 procedures each year on patients throughout the region and the United States.
We provide the complete spectrum of neurosurgical expertise from vascular disease (stroke), brain tumors, spine and functional neurosurgery (Parkinson’s Disease) to pediatric neurosurgery. Our program is equally strong in the three areas required for a successful department–patient care, education and research.
Clinically, our neuroendovascular group was one of the first in the world to begin the use of catheter-based interventions for treatment and prevention of stroke. In these procedures the vascular system is used to access and treat lesions in the farthest regions of the brain through a tiny needle puncture in the upper part of the leg or arm. Our center has become one of the largest in the world, with well over 1,000 neuroendovascular procedures performed annually–35% of which are performed on patients coming from outside the Western New York area.
In the mid-1990s, we recognized the need for a research effort to help realize the potential of this new specialty. Translational research specifically responds to the clinical work at hand. This need led to the founding and development of The Toshiba Stroke Research Center. The Center is generously funded by Toshiba as well as the National Institutes of Health and brings together clinicians and scientists from disparate backgrounds to focus on stroke. The combination of aerospace engineers, physicists, and neurosurgeons working together was unheard of when we started but is now recognized worldwide.
– L. Nelson Hopkins
A Self-Evident Truth by Herbert Hauptman
I wish to express the hope that, at long last, after struggling for thousands of years, mankind has finally learned to accept as objective reality nothing based on faith or dogma alone but only that which is supported by external evidence, or that which is derivable from such evidence by rational processes alone. We owe ourselves nothing less.
–Herbert A. Hauptman
You know I always wanted to do a radio show called, “So Now You Know.” I would discuss a serious life issue with myself, reach a reasonable conclusion, turn into the microphone and say, “So Now You Know.”
–Elliot Caplan
When slavery was enshrined in the Constitution of the fledgling United States, it ensured that an internal conflict would be nurtured in the bosom of the new nation. The freedoms guaranteed to those persons America recognized as citizens could not but serve as a beacon for all those who found their essential humanity denied, their persons declared some other’s property. From the beginning, the enslaved strove to escape the chains that bound them.
–Keith Griffler
The Polish Experience: a Journey
At the age of 14, I stood at a podium in Lublin, Poland, in front of a large academic audience for the first time, a finalist in a competition for reciting the poetry of Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz. As I began with the famous words in Polish literature, “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!” (“Lithuania, my country”) that won for me the grand prize, I pondered the riddle in those words, embodying the paradox of the Polish identity I was born into. As I now assume the position of Director of Polish Studies at the University at Buffalo, I continually return to them as I probe the meaning of the “Polishness” the program I head references.
I am conscious of assuming the directorship of what aims to be the flagship Polish Studies program in the United States at a historic moment. As Poland enters a new era as the third largest member of the European Union, its present mirrors its past: a nation in the center of Europe geographically, culturally, intellectually and economically. From Nicholas Copernicus, whose theory of planetary motion ushered in the era of modern science, to Joseph Conrad, father of the twentieth century novel, to Ignacy Lukasiewicz, whose discovery of the means to refine crude petroleum created the basis for modern industry and transportation, Poland was central to world history long before the Solidarity movement sounded the death knell of the Soviet bloc.
While Europeans remain familiar with the rich history of the nation the great French writer Balzac called the “France of the North,” Americans have viewed it for the last half-century through the lens of victimization at the hands of its two dominant neighbors, Russia and Germany. As such, they have missed within its history some of the dominant themes of modernity–cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora–that make its study so instructive for an understanding of our world.
So cosmopolitan have Poland’s greatest artists, writers, and intellectuals been, they have virtually lost their Polish identity–the great composer Frederick Chopin and the Nobel Prize winning pioneer of the nuclear age, Marie Curie (nee Maria Sklodowska), most closely associated with France, Conrad with Great Britain.
More transnational than national, Poland itself disappeared from Europe’s maps for more than a century, and its boundaries have perpetually shifted, the resultant nation comprising a remarkable mixture of peoples, languages, and cultures: Slavic, Germanic, Semitic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian.
For its size, it boasts one of the world’s largest diasporas, spread throughout Europe and the Americas–the North American Polish population alone amounting to half of Poland’s current 38 million. As much as in any nation, those expatriates have loomed large in the Polish national psyche. The refrain of its haunting national anthem consists of a plea to one of its many freedom fighters abroad, Henryk D?browski, to lead his army–in this case fighting under Napoleon in Italy in 1795–to liberate a newly partitioned homeland.
Foreshadowing processes that have gained ever-greater intensity in our modern world, “Polishness” was always something more, and something less, than a national identity. So complex is the resultant notion of Polish identity that Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, considered the last great epic poem in European literature, confusingly begins with the words I quote above. That Poland’s national epic, a text memorized and recited by every Polish student, references–and is even claimed by other nations–embodies the paradoxes of Polish identity. Such complexities are, of course, far from unique today. Indeed, it is their increasing universality in a world of conflicting and contested identities that makes the exploration of the Polish experience rewarding.
–Janina Brutt-Griffler
Since World War II, when the Nazis exemplified pure evil in the Holocaust, there has been a rhetorical commitment to repudiate genocide. Even so, several genocides have been carried out since then, making a mockery of that famous refrain: Never Again. What is shockingly unacceptable is the fact that those who have been in a position to stop these genocides either did nothing, or acted only when it was too late.
–Makau Mutua Professor of Law
If it can be done, why do it?”
-Gertrude Stein
When I started studying Gertrude Stein’s writing in graduate school, I was confused but compelled by her language experiments, in which she strove to divorce language from function, representation, and even communication. Although this struck me as futile and even foolish, I came to realize that what Stein really cherished was the attempt, the bald embrace of the impossible. The best projects are those that seem impossible.
It’s a radical idea, but it lies at the heart of creative work and progress and it’s a philosophy I try to follow in my research and teaching. One of the benefits of working in academia is having the room to discover, explore, and redefine the impossible. So much of our society is based on productivity, on the end result of a streamlined process: what will be produced?; how much? how quickly?; how efficiently?; how cheaply? That’s great for automobiles, but ideas don’t work that way. Thinking is inefficient and research can seem counter-productive at times. But by constantly working toward the seemingly impossible, we can expand our world in infinite directions. It’s what working in theatre and performance is all about for me: testing and redefining the limits of what’s possible, comprehensible, and knowable. As Stein’s question implies, why should we do what we already can?
–Sarah Bay-Cheng
Far too many ADHD children are taking medication in America, and the long-term risks of the medication are unknown. If physicians and families would use behavioral interventions first–teaching skills to parents, teachers, and children–medication could be eliminated in 2/3 of the children who are typically treated with it. I have met very few parents who would choose to use a psychoactive medication as the first line treatment with their child if they knew they had an alternative. Unfortunately, they are not being made aware of the alternative.
I have published more than 100 papers dealing with medication and ADHD, and I would never allow my own child to take medication except as a last resort. I would use a behavioral skills training approach instead. Who wouldn't rather learn new skills for working with their child than use a psychoactive drug to manage their behavior.
Nearly 5% of the school children in America are identified as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most common mental health disorder of childhood. Unfortunately, diagnosis with ADHD is typically followed almost immediately and for the vast majority of children by a doctor's prescription for psychoactive medication, usually a CNS stimulant. New research has shown that there are significant risks of these medications, particularly for young children, and that there is an alternative that is nearly as effective but carries no risks–behavior therapy. Behavioral interventions involve teaching parenting skills to parents, classroom management skills to teachers, and social skills to the children themselves. This skill-focused approach has better long-term success than medication, where the effects disappear as soon as the pill wears off. Most ADHD children should receive this approach to treatment, with medication used as a back-up only when needed. Such an approach–behavioral treatment first, medication second–would decrease the number of children medicated nationally by two-thirds AND improve the children's long-term success.
–William Pelham
How does a poem relate to its portrait
respond as a tone in
the brain-phrase continent?
How does 2 become two
yet not quite a “we”
with all its interactive game therapies
caught, an error’s echo
a delay in words [?] as at
when if a furtherance
from a portrait of experience
ostensibility, a tone
two voices listening
to a face ?
Now everything is opposite
to what is said.
–Steve McCaffery
CORE VALUES
Character–this requires ones ethics to be without question.
Attitude–the quality of always making the choice of being positive.
Teachability–being able to take information given to you and then being able to put that knowledge into action.
Communication–sharing knowledge and ideas in order to transmit a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to others.
Humility–being yourself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Unity–putting others ahead of your own personal gain.
Commitment–the enemy of resistance; making a serious promise to press on and to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down.
–Turner Gill
The public research university is a uniquely American invention–a manifestation of the belief that research is a public good, that there is a distinct social benefit from a citizenry educated in a scholarly environment, and that these opportunities should be available to all who have the talent and motivation to pursue them. I am convinced that being a professor in a research university is the most interesting job there is, and I have had the great good fortune of working in these institutions throughout my professional career. We in Buffalo, through our research university, have a tremendous local resource, which I believe is even more important for the region’s future than it has been for its past. I did not come here three years ago to maintain the status quo. Rather, I came here with the aim of leading this university deeply into the realm of great American public universities.
Portraits of a University
– John Simpson
A person should be able to:
heal a wound, plan an expedition,
order from a French menu, climb a mountain face,
enjoy a ballet, balance accounts,
roll a kayak, embolden a friend,
tell a joke, laugh at a joke, laugh at oneself,
cooperate, act alone,
sing a children's song, solve equations,
throw a dog a stick, pitch manure,
program a computer, cook a tasty meal,
love heartily, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
–Robert A. Heinlein (KATE FOSTER)
‘great buildings do not occur in isolation; they grow out of flourishing architectural cultures where the habits of good construction and imaginative planning have solidity and momentum’
Recognizing one particular American city as a focus of international architectural significance the renowned critic and historian Reyner Banham went on to identify a collection of outstanding landmarks. Those buildings, designed by many of the world’s most famous architects–H.H.Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Richard Upjohn, Daniel Burnham, McKim Mead and White, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Albert Kahn, Gordon Bunshaft, Minoru Yamasaki, Paul Rudolph and others–were also, he noted, set within an extraordinarily democratic and elegant city-wide plan created by Olmsted.
The inspired patronage and enlightened design which shaped that city were, Banham commented, also advanced by work carried out in simple workshops there–wide open daylit spaces that made it possible to connect design and fabrication and transform ideas into reality. These too are buildings that continue to inspire modernism.
This is an enviable place to live, study and teach architecture, environmental design, urban and regional planning, pursue design research and explore new forms of critical practice. It is the setting for UB’s School of Architecture and Planning where we are all working hard to ensure that those cultures in Buffalo continue to flourish.
–Brian Carter
I think of Freud as a late romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t
have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or
moving or intriguing or amusing–whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in.
This sentence from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, points to the connection between my interest in poetry and my interest in psychoanalysis. As an English professor who teaches courses through UB’s Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, I often have difficulty explaining the connection. Shouldn’t English professors be teaching literature? Wasn’t Freud’s model of the mind discredited long ago, with neurophysiology and psychopharmacology replacing a “talking cure” that never seemed very effective even in its heyday? What is a Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis doing in an English department anyway? All good questions.
The model for psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice is not science, in spite of Freud’s original hopes. The model for psychoanalysis–which is, after all, a peculiar form of conversation–might be closer to the arts or the humanities. Or, to invoke a feature that the arts and the sciences share in common, I’d say that psychoanalysis is an experiment in conversation: an experiment in which one person agrees to say whatever comes into his or her mind, no matter how apparently nonsensical, while the other person agrees to suspend his or her usual prejudices, reactions, and conversational formulas. No matter how intimate the conversation gets, no matter how important their relationship becomes, both partners also agree not to sleep together.
The results of this somewhat uncontrolled experiment are known as psychoanalytic literature. It is a literature filled with attempts to explain what this strange conversation is actually like. Anybody involved in it keeps returning to the basic question: to what can psychoanalysis be compared? If we agree that it is more like poetry than like science, then how can psychoanalysis be of any use to anyone? What use is poetry?
Poetry, like psychoanalysis, is not true in the way that we consider science to be true. It doesn’t describe objects or experiences in ways that can be reliably verified. If poetry, like psychoanalysis, has an impact, then we describe it as subjectively rather than objectively true. We say that it resonates. Perhaps it haunts us or makes our world look different. Perhaps it brings us pleasure rather than solid facts or something that can be translated into income. Perhaps we find it intriguing without quite knowing why.
Psychoanalysts are intrigued by what intrigues others, especially when others aren’t sure why they’re intrigued. Psychoanalysis as a theory regards people as conglomerates of competing interests, only some of which are known and cultivated. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is for those who are curious about what their own other interests might be. It is based on the assumption that life is enriched by finding out about the other interests that you have. In order to discover what those other interests are, you have to be willing to say the things that normally you wouldn’t let yourself say. Psychoanalysis is about paying a lot–in time as well as money–to truly speak freely. It is not as easy as you’d think.
–Tim Dean
Kazimierz Braun has unusual qualifications for the task. As a director, manager, theater artist, author, scholar, and teacher, he has been totally involved with Polish theater throughout his career in Poland, in America and Europe, and as a cultural ambassador between East and West. Wherever he has been, he has created Polish theater, studied it, taught it, and written about it. Only a lifetime commitment and passionate love for theater in all its aspects can give such an authoritative grasp of the subject.
–Daniel Gerould
When I took over as Professor and Chairman of Neurosurgery and Professor of Radiology in 1990, our program had one full-time attending and four residents; we were on strict academic probation by the Neurosurgery Residency Review Committee, faced with extinction. Today, we have ten attending neurosurgeons, twelve residents, and four endovascular fellows and are widely considered one of the best neurosurgery programs in the country. We have recruited experts from top universities and research centers around the country, and our department performs more than 3,500 procedures each year on patients throughout the region and the United States.
We provide the complete spectrum of neurosurgical expertise from vascular disease (stroke), brain tumors, spine and functional neurosurgery (Parkinson’s Disease) to pediatric neurosurgery. Our program is equally strong in the three areas required for a successful department–patient care, education and research.
Clinically, our neuroendovascular group was one of the first in the world to begin the use of catheter-based interventions for treatment and prevention of stroke. In these procedures the vascular system is used to access and treat lesions in the farthest regions of the brain through a tiny needle puncture in the upper part of the leg or arm. Our center has become one of the largest in the world, with well over 1,000 neuroendovascular procedures performed annually–35% of which are performed on patients coming from outside the Western New York area.
In the mid-1990s, we recognized the need for a research effort to help realize the potential of this new specialty. Translational research specifically responds to the clinical work at hand. This need led to the founding and development of The Toshiba Stroke Research Center. The Center is generously funded by Toshiba as well as the National Institutes of Health and brings together clinicians and scientists from disparate backgrounds to focus on stroke. The combination of aerospace engineers, physicists, and neurosurgeons working together was unheard of when we started but is now recognized worldwide.
– L. Nelson Hopkins
A Self-Evident Truth by Herbert Hauptman
I wish to express the hope that, at long last, after struggling for thousands of years, mankind has finally learned to accept as objective reality nothing based on faith or dogma alone but only that which is supported by external evidence, or that which is derivable from such evidence by rational processes alone. We owe ourselves nothing less.
–Herbert A. Hauptman
You know I always wanted to do a radio show called, “So Now You Know.” I would discuss a serious life issue with myself, reach a reasonable conclusion, turn into the microphone and say, “So Now You Know.”
–Elliot Caplan
When slavery was enshrined in the Constitution of the fledgling United States, it ensured that an internal conflict would be nurtured in the bosom of the new nation. The freedoms guaranteed to those persons America recognized as citizens could not but serve as a beacon for all those who found their essential humanity denied, their persons declared some other’s property. From the beginning, the enslaved strove to escape the chains that bound them.
–Keith Griffler
The Polish Experience: a Journey
At the age of 14, I stood at a podium in Lublin, Poland, in front of a large academic audience for the first time, a finalist in a competition for reciting the poetry of Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz. As I began with the famous words in Polish literature, “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!” (“Lithuania, my country”) that won for me the grand prize, I pondered the riddle in those words, embodying the paradox of the Polish identity I was born into. As I now assume the position of Director of Polish Studies at the University at Buffalo, I continually return to them as I probe the meaning of the “Polishness” the program I head references.
I am conscious of assuming the directorship of what aims to be the flagship Polish Studies program in the United States at a historic moment. As Poland enters a new era as the third largest member of the European Union, its present mirrors its past: a nation in the center of Europe geographically, culturally, intellectually and economically. From Nicholas Copernicus, whose theory of planetary motion ushered in the era of modern science, to Joseph Conrad, father of the twentieth century novel, to Ignacy Lukasiewicz, whose discovery of the means to refine crude petroleum created the basis for modern industry and transportation, Poland was central to world history long before the Solidarity movement sounded the death knell of the Soviet bloc.
While Europeans remain familiar with the rich history of the nation the great French writer Balzac called the “France of the North,” Americans have viewed it for the last half-century through the lens of victimization at the hands of its two dominant neighbors, Russia and Germany. As such, they have missed within its history some of the dominant themes of modernity–cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora–that make its study so instructive for an understanding of our world.
So cosmopolitan have Poland’s greatest artists, writers, and intellectuals been, they have virtually lost their Polish identity–the great composer Frederick Chopin and the Nobel Prize winning pioneer of the nuclear age, Marie Curie (nee Maria Sklodowska), most closely associated with France, Conrad with Great Britain.
More transnational than national, Poland itself disappeared from Europe’s maps for more than a century, and its boundaries have perpetually shifted, the resultant nation comprising a remarkable mixture of peoples, languages, and cultures: Slavic, Germanic, Semitic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian.
For its size, it boasts one of the world’s largest diasporas, spread throughout Europe and the Americas–the North American Polish population alone amounting to half of Poland’s current 38 million. As much as in any nation, those expatriates have loomed large in the Polish national psyche. The refrain of its haunting national anthem consists of a plea to one of its many freedom fighters abroad, Henryk D?browski, to lead his army–in this case fighting under Napoleon in Italy in 1795–to liberate a newly partitioned homeland.
Foreshadowing processes that have gained ever-greater intensity in our modern world, “Polishness” was always something more, and something less, than a national identity. So complex is the resultant notion of Polish identity that Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, considered the last great epic poem in European literature, confusingly begins with the words I quote above. That Poland’s national epic, a text memorized and recited by every Polish student, references–and is even claimed by other nations–embodies the paradoxes of Polish identity. Such complexities are, of course, far from unique today. Indeed, it is their increasing universality in a world of conflicting and contested identities that makes the exploration of the Polish experience rewarding.
–Janina Brutt-Griffler
Since World War II, when the Nazis exemplified pure evil in the Holocaust, there has been a rhetorical commitment to repudiate genocide. Even so, several genocides have been carried out since then, making a mockery of that famous refrain: Never Again. What is shockingly unacceptable is the fact that those who have been in a position to stop these genocides either did nothing, or acted only when it was too late.
–Makau Mutua Professor of Law
If it can be done, why do it?”
-Gertrude Stein
When I started studying Gertrude Stein’s writing in graduate school, I was confused but compelled by her language experiments, in which she strove to divorce language from function, representation, and even communication. Although this struck me as futile and even foolish, I came to realize that what Stein really cherished was the attempt, the bald embrace of the impossible. The best projects are those that seem impossible.
It’s a radical idea, but it lies at the heart of creative work and progress and it’s a philosophy I try to follow in my research and teaching. One of the benefits of working in academia is having the room to discover, explore, and redefine the impossible. So much of our society is based on productivity, on the end result of a streamlined process: what will be produced?; how much? how quickly?; how efficiently?; how cheaply? That’s great for automobiles, but ideas don’t work that way. Thinking is inefficient and research can seem counter-productive at times. But by constantly working toward the seemingly impossible, we can expand our world in infinite directions. It’s what working in theatre and performance is all about for me: testing and redefining the limits of what’s possible, comprehensible, and knowable. As Stein’s question implies, why should we do what we already can?
–Sarah Bay-Cheng
Far too many ADHD children are taking medication in America, and the long-term risks of the medication are unknown. If physicians and families would use behavioral interventions first–teaching skills to parents, teachers, and children–medication could be eliminated in 2/3 of the children who are typically treated with it. I have met very few parents who would choose to use a psychoactive medication as the first line treatment with their child if they knew they had an alternative. Unfortunately, they are not being made aware of the alternative.
I have published more than 100 papers dealing with medication and ADHD, and I would never allow my own child to take medication except as a last resort. I would use a behavioral skills training approach instead. Who wouldn't rather learn new skills for working with their child than use a psychoactive drug to manage their behavior.
Nearly 5% of the school children in America are identified as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most common mental health disorder of childhood. Unfortunately, diagnosis with ADHD is typically followed almost immediately and for the vast majority of children by a doctor's prescription for psychoactive medication, usually a CNS stimulant. New research has shown that there are significant risks of these medications, particularly for young children, and that there is an alternative that is nearly as effective but carries no risks–behavior therapy. Behavioral interventions involve teaching parenting skills to parents, classroom management skills to teachers, and social skills to the children themselves. This skill-focused approach has better long-term success than medication, where the effects disappear as soon as the pill wears off. Most ADHD children should receive this approach to treatment, with medication used as a back-up only when needed. Such an approach–behavioral treatment first, medication second–would decrease the number of children medicated nationally by two-thirds AND improve the children's long-term success.
–William Pelham
How does a poem relate to its portrait
respond as a tone in
the brain-phrase continent?
How does 2 become two
yet not quite a “we”
with all its interactive game therapies
caught, an error’s echo
a delay in words [?] as at
when if a furtherance
from a portrait of experience
ostensibility, a tone
two voices listening
to a face ?
Now everything is opposite
to what is said.
–Steve McCaffery
CORE VALUES
Character–this requires ones ethics to be without question.
Attitude–the quality of always making the choice of being positive.
Teachability–being able to take information given to you and then being able to put that knowledge into action.
Communication–sharing knowledge and ideas in order to transmit a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to others.
Humility–being yourself, knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Unity–putting others ahead of your own personal gain.
Commitment–the enemy of resistance; making a serious promise to press on and to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down.
–Turner Gill