A sampling of media clippings about Lawrence University, its faculty, students, and alumni from Spring 2007 and Summer 2007. For more clippings, see the Lawrence in the News index page.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
August 24, 2007
Headline: Global
Village Aids Sierra Leone in Move Toward Democracy
Byline: Claudena M. Skran
Excerpt: At age 12, orphaned Abu Marah mined for diamonds in a country torn apart by civil war. For his labors, he earned one cup of rice a day. After three years of hardship, Marah moved to the capital city of Sierra Leone, where he worked selling water on the streets. When Freetown was sacked by rebel forces in 1999, Marah walked to neighboring Guinea as a refugee. He and thousands of others fled a deadly conflict fueled by “blood diamonds.”
Marah returned to Freetown in 2001, when the war in Sierra Leone officially ended. To help rebuild this shattered West African country, the United Nations sent a large peacekeeping force to provide security and stability. Today, these military forces are gone, and Sierra Leone is on its own again.
On Aug. 11, Marah, now a student and part-time security guard, cast his vote in a Freetown polling station. As an educated man with a job, he's a lot better off than most Sierra Leoneans, 70 percent of whom live in absolute poverty. Even so, every day he walks to work over bumpy dirt roads; every night he sits in darkness because Sierra Leone lacks modern electric power. In casting his vote, Marah hopes that his country's long-delayed development will become a reality.
(Claudena Skran is associate professor of government and coordinator of the international studies program at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. She spent 2005 06 as a Fulbright Scholar in Sierra Leone studying post-conflict development.)
The New York Times / Education Life
July 29, 2007
Headline: Safety First: Counselors offer suggestions on new fallback campuses.
Byline: Michelle Slatalla
Excerpt: Lawrence University (68 percent acceptance rate): "Undervalued in a lot of ways," says [Will Dix, a college counselor at the Lab Schools of the University of Chicago]. "They have a music conservatory, which really adds value." His "city kids" list it as a safety for Oberlin.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 20, 2007
Headline: Generation Hex
Byline: Sierra Millman
Excerpt: Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader's guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, says he could probably enroll more than 100 students in this fall's course [Thinking about Harry Potter], but unless he falls under the sway of an "imperius curse," he would like to preserve the university's small class size.
The Chicago Tribune
July 18, 2007
Headline: Platform 9 3/4: As fans await last book, a visit to where Harry's adventures all began
Byline: Julia Keller
Excerpt: Edmund M. Kern, associate professor of history at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., and author of The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us About Moral Choices (Prometheus, 2003), believes that the series has striking contemporary relevance. “In this postmodern age, when people are skeptical of lots of things — they’re skeptical of government, they’re skeptical of the economic system — Rowling’s decision to depict Harry as both victim and hero appeals to people at a subconscious level,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think the books came along at just the right time. Harry is a hero in the midst of circumstances he did not choose. We’re able to relate to him. And the stories are so well told. [Rowling] makes use of ancient archetypes and symbols.”
The Bend (Ore.) Bulletin
July 13, 2007
Headline: Growing Up With Harry
Byline: Jenna Robinson
Excerpt: "[The books] can be read at different levels of comprehension,” said [Lawrence University] associate history professor Edmund Kern, author of The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us About Moral Choices. Kern says while the books work well as adventure stories, older readers also can see layers of history, legend and myth woven into the tales. "What draws them is the adventure, freedom, and autonomy they see in Harry,” said Kern. In the end, he says, young readers leave “talking about responsibility and doing the right thing ... they leave with a greater sense of right and wrong." Kern suggests that Rowling depicts “adolescent development realistically.” He also says that, as the characters age, the stories are getting more complicated and ambiguous, which can appeal to older readers.
The Charlotte (NC) Observer
July 09, 2007
Headline: College credit for wizards?
Byline: Alandra Johnson
Excerpt: Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history and science. For example, Edmund Kern, a professor of history at Lawrence University and author of "The Wisdom of Harry Potter," is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.
The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling's seven-book series about a young boy's adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter's battle against evil reverberates among this generation much as "Catch-22" and "Catcher in the Rye" captured students of the 1960s.
St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times
July 7, 2007
Headline: 7 Heaven: The Magical Connotation of the Number Assumes Tremendous Significance for One Day, and One Day Only. After All, Its 7-7-7.
Byline: Angie Drobnic Holan
Excerpt: Pinning down the origin of the lucky number 7 is tricky, said Ed Kern, a history professor at Lawrence University who studies superstition. Its appearance in the Bible contributes, as do the 7 notes of the musical scale or the 7 planets known to the ancients. In the dice game craps, 7 can be an automatic win — or an automatic loss. Those unrelated connections combine over time to create a sense of a lucky 7. "Superstitions take on meaning through a process of association, rather than through the use of reason," he said. "Anyone who tells you that they know the origin of a superstition is lying."
amNewYork
July 4, 2007
Headline: Why Is the Number 7 Lucky?
Byline: Tania Padgett
Excerpt: "There is no easy answer to why people think the number seven is lucky," said Edmund M. Kern, associate professor of history at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wis. "The simplest answer is that they have been told and accept it without question." Seven, in fact, can be associated with unlucky or unfavorable situations, including the seven-year itch, seven deadly sins and breaking a mirror and supposedly getting seven years of bad luck.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 8, 2007
Headline: Take Me Back to Old Main
Byline: Lawrence Biemiller
Excerpt: The first thing you notice about Richard P. Dober's latest campus-architecture book, Old Main: Fame, Fate, and Contributions to Campus Planning and Design, is that it's illustrated with picture postcards. The oldest are sepia-toned or black and white, while others have the bright pastel hues of cards from the ’20s and ’30s, with gauzy white clouds painted in behind eclectic towers or proud domes. A few of the cards have messages scrawled on them. "I have four classes in this building, which are the best of my life — Jessie" appears beside a photograph of Lawrence University's 1853 Main Hall.
The Capital Times, Madison, Wis.
June 6, 2007
Headline: Traveling Exhibition of Student Movies to Kick Off Here
Byline: Rob Thomas
Excerpt: The traveling festival is showcasing the work of one local filmmaker at each stop. In Madison, that film will be "Made With Love," a documentary by Madison Tift and Raad Fadaak about a group of Lawrence University students who travel to Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish on spring break 2006 to help people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Many of the student volunteers are experienced campers who could survive on their own in the forest, skills they used to create a fully functioning kitchen in the middle of a disaster area. Tift, a Lawrence student, says he and Fadaak went with the volunteers to Louisiana without thinking they were going to make a film, but just to document the experience. As he saw students interacting with residents, they decided they should make a documentary out of the experience so others could see what it was like. "We were really surprised at how open everybody was, and how well everybody was working together, how well everyone was dealing with the fact that everyone was destroyed," Tift says. "It was something I don't think we had seen before and weren't expecting, considering the disaster." "Made With Love" was screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival this year, and Tift hopes to get it into other festivals and perhaps shown on public television sometime in the future.
Ottawa Citizen, Saskatoon StarPhoenix
June 4, 2007
Headline: Tragedy May Bring Smile to Your Face
Byline: Shannon Proudfoot, CanWest News Service
Excerpt: "People sometimes react to their negative emotional experiences in paradoxical ways," writes Matthew Ansfield, associate professor of psychology at Lawrence University. It happens in all sorts of everyday situations, he adds: People smile when they're hugely embarassed, grin while being terrorized by a roller coaster, and smile or laugh while discussing their recently deceased spouse. . . . In Ansfield's study, published in the June issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 80 men and 80 women watched a selection of amusing, neutral, or disgusting videos. . . . Oddly, volunteers smiled 22 percent of the time while viewing the disturbing segments — just as often as they showed a disgusted expression. Men smiled twice as much as women (30 percent compared to 15 percent), and they grinned even more (46 percent of the time) while watching the upsetting footage with another man in the room.
Sunday Morning, CBS News
May 27, 2007
Headline: Blanche Dubois Was Right
Byline: Ben Stein
Excerpt: A few days ago, I was packing my bags in a lovely hotel room in the pretty little town of Appleton, Wisc. The desk clerk had gone out to the Walgreen's to buy me some orange marmalade for my toast. The students who were my hosts while I spoke at Lawrence University had just taken me for a midnight visit to the grave of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. I was marveling at several things: First, like Blanche Dubois, we travelers depend on the kindness of strangers. And, wow, do I see a lot of kindness! Airline flight attendants who cheer me up when I am getting claustrophobia. Room service waiters who go to a lot of trouble to get my herbal tea right. Passengers who change seats with me to let me sit on the aisle. There is a heck of a lot of sweetness in this great big loveable lug of a nation.
Charlotte (NC) News-Observer
May 25, 2007
Headline: 30 years later, Haleys re-establish 'Roots'
Byline: Phil Kloer, Cox News Service
Link: http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/579420.html
Exerpt: Even with heavy marketing (big displays for the book and DVD at Wal-Mart are planned), it's unlikely that the relaunch of "Roots" will have anything like the effect it had the first time. "I don't think it will have anywhere near the impact of its initial release," said Jerald Podair, professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. "In the 1970s, before the advent of multiculturalism, celebrating racial or ethnic identity through one's roots was a novel idea. It isn't anymore," Podair continued. "There's a been-there-done-that quality to 'Roots,' which will reduce it to the level of a historical artifact when it comes out again."
Townhall.com, Arlington, Va.
May 22, 2007
Headline: Flexibility Is Key to Finding Affordable Universities
Byline: Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Excerpt: Like a lot of families, Patti and her husband let her daughter Jenny
assemble her own list of schools. Kids select schools with their emotions,
which is OK if parents don't mind picking up a potentially obscene tab or they
don't mind strapping a financial millstone onto their child's back. Jenny got
into the University of California Berkeley, the University of California San
Diego, and Sarah Lawrence College, which is a prestigious liberal arts college
in New York. Berkeley and UCSD were obviously education bargains, but Jenny,
who wants to major in theatre, had fallen in love with the idea of attending
a small school with all the personalized attention, small classes, and other
perks that it brings. The problem, however, was that Sarah Lawrence offered
her a puny financial aid package, and my friend wasn't willing to mortgage
her retirement for her daughter. With application deadlines looming earlier
in the spring, I suggested that Jenny apply to some schools with excellent
theatre programs — including Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and Lawrence
University in Appleton, Wis., that routinely award top kids merit
scholarships.
Yahoo.Com
May 11, 2007
Headline: A Few Lessons from the Road
Byline: Ben Stein
Excerpt: As I write this, I'm in the lovely Fox River Valley of Wisconsin. To be specific, I'm in Appleton, home of a beautiful school called Lawrence University. The campus is leafy and green. The students look happy, young, and healthy. A magnificent breeze is blowing across College Ave., where the charming old hotel I'm staying in sits. In a world of mass killings, rapid climate change, and nuclear proliferation, this town is an oasis of happiness, sweetness, and light.
University at Buffalo Reporter, Buffalo, New York
April 26, 2007
Headline: Need for Change Draws Noted Scholar to UB
Byline: Patricia Donovan
Excerpt: [UB English Department Chair Christanne] Miller, a prolific and respected
author of 19th- and 20th-century poetry by women, recently edited a fascinating
book that she calls "an
interpretational, literary, and documentary monument to the cultural centrality
of poetry in mid-19th-century America." The book, Words
for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (Amherst University
Press, 2005), was compiled with Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English
at Lawrence University. It differs from the many other anthologies
of Civil War poetry in that it awakens in the reader a profound sense of "being
there." It does so by presenting a wide range of works by published, unpublished,
anonymous, and posthumously published writers, professional and amateur.
The inclusion of a war time line permits readers to "follow the war in
poetry" and,
in so doing, to summon up an often startling affiliation with a period that
many do not understand.
Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts
April 25, 2007
Headline: The Impact of Sport to Halberstam
Byline: Jerald Podair
Excerpt: When does a book about sports become literature? When David Halberstam
wrote one. Mr. Halberstam, who died in a car accident Monday, was best known
for his scathing indictment of American arrogance in Vietnam, The
Best and the Brightest, published in 1972. Its meditation on the nature
of privilege and power in the United States established him as one of the nation's
most acute sociocultural critics. It might seem surprising, then, that seven
of Halberstam's subsequent books dealt with sports-related themes; he was working
on an eighth at the time of his death. Some questioned sports stories as an
appropriate topic for an author of Halberstam's talent. Often patronized as
the "toy department" of journalism, they appear at first glance as
unworthy of a serious writer's attention. But Halberstam was that rare author
who used sports to tell larger stories about America, Americans, and the human
condition. He chose his topics with an eye for complexity and nuance. The baseball
season he chronicles in October 1964 becomes a social laboratory in which white
members of the St. Louis Cardinals wrestle with entrenched racial attitudes
at a critical moment in the American civil rights movement, one in which the
question of whether a catcher raised in the white South will drink from the
same glass as his star African-American pitcher assumes critical significance.
Jerald Podair is associate professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University. He is writing a biography of Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodger owner Walter O'Malley.
United Press International, Washington, D.C.
April 19, 2007
Headline: Analysis: No contender yet post-Wolfowitz
Byline: Shihoko Goto
Excerpt: Bill Clinton has been named as a potential candidate among Democrats,
and Claudena Skran, an associate professor of government at Wisconsin's Lawrence
University, pointed out that the former president was very popular
in the developing world, particularly in Africa, and he would be able to
master the policy details needed to understand how the institution operates.
Clinton "can
raise the prestige ... and raise more money" for the bank to lend more to
developing nations, Skran said. After all, the bank needs to be able to raise
more capital to be able to be an effective financial institution. But she also
pointed out that leaders of multinational organizations might be equally suited
to run the organization. "The bank is a highly bureaucratic agency ... a
corporate experience would be very helpful" to navigate the internal
politics, Skran said, adding that a more market-oriented approach to development
could prove beneficial to the bank's longer-term growth prospects as well.
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
April 11, 2007
Headline: Scholars Weigh in On Don Imus Flap
Byline: Shilpa Banerji
Excerpt: Dr. Peter Glick, professor of psychology at Lawrence University, told Diverse there
is no doubt that Imus’ statement is fused with race. “It is a double
whammy because it is a very sexualized stereotype,” says Glick. “Both
Black men and women are sexualized, but when it comes to women the effects are
more devastating. The race element on top of it is a way of being dismissed.” Glick
says he agreed with the Rev. Al Sharpton who said in his talk show earlier that
it was necessary to punish the behavior, and not just the person. This case “is
playing out in a scripted way — denial, apology, redress — but it
doesn’t contribute to an honest conversation about a real solution,” says
Glick.
Palm Beach Post, Boca Raton, Florida
April 4, 2007
Headline: College student's documentary to be shown at film festivals
Byline: Samantha
Frank
Excerpt: Madison Tift, a Boca Raton native, bought his camera only months before
the big trip. The 20-year-old junior at Lawrence University in
Appleton, Wis., traveled to New Orleans with 40 other Lawrence students in
March 2006 to volunteer at a food kitchen. In just seven days, Tift and his
college roommate were able to capture footage that they later turned into a
documentary — a potentially award-winning documentary. The film will be shown
at the 2007 Wisconsin Film Festival, which runs April 12 to 15. It also will
be competing overseas at the international Swansea Bay Film Festival in Wales,
which runs May 29 through June 10. "It's very validating to be accepted
on my first try," Tift
said. Tift applied to 18 film festivals, all of which he researched online.
The group of student volunteers worked at a make-shift food kitchen under two
tents, preparing and serving meals to New Orleans residents. "We
didn't know what we were going to film down there," Tift said. What they
saw and captured through film was a lot of destruction, and also people trying
to rebuild and put their lives back together. "The film is about the power
of community to help in the rebuilding process," Tift said. He said he
hopes his film inspires people to do volunteer work and give money to Hurricane
Katrina relief organizations. The name of the makeshift food kitchen, Made
With Love, became the title of Tift's film.
Bloomberg News, New York, New York
March 1, 2007
Headline: Arthur Schlesinger, historian, Kennedy adviser, dies
Byline: Cary O'Reilly
Excerpt: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian who became
an adviser to President John F. Kennedy and helped define his legacy for
a generation, has died. The bow-tied, bespectacled academic made the transition
from the ivory tower to the White House, becoming an adviser to President
Kennedy on domestic and international affairs. His history of the administration, "A Thousand Days," written after Kennedy's 1963 assassination, helped promote the
"Camelot" myth of the greatness that might have been achieved had the president lived. "Arthur Schlesinger epitomizes
the historian as public intellectual, a dying breed in America," said Jerald
Podair, associate professor of history at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. "In
an intellectually isolated historical profession where professors write solely
for each other, Schlesinger writes for informed Americans, both academics
and laymen. His is a unique American voice."