A Community of Scholars: Seventy-Five Years of The University Seminars at Columbia 9780231552912

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A C OM M U NIT Y OF S CHO LARS

A Community of Scholars Seventy-Five Years of The University Seminars at Columbia

edited by Thomas Vinciguerra

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vinciguerra, Thomas J. editor. Title: A community of scholars : seventy-five years of the University Seminars at Columbia / edited by Thomas Vinciguerra. Other titles: Community of scholars (Columbia University Press) Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009252 (print) | LCCN 2020009253 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231199001 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231552912 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Humanities. | Learning and scholarship. | Columbia University. University Seminars–History. Classification: LCC AZ103 .C545 2020 (print) | LCC AZ103 (ebook) | DDC 001.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009252 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009253

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Courtesy of the University Seminars Archive, Latin America Seminar Meeting Cover design: Summer Hart

Contents

Foreword: The University Seminars at Seventy-Five: An Ongoing Experiment in Continuity with Novelty, by Robert E. Pollack vii Introduction: Engaged Learning, by Alice Newton xiii A Note to the Reader, by Thomas Vinciguerra xxv

1: Thinking Aloud: The Seminar in the Renaissance (#407), by Cynthia M. Pyle and Alan Stewart 1 2: Critiquing the Enlightenment: The Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture (#417), by Elizabeth Powers 16 3: Out of Chaos, Order: The Seminar on Content and Methods of the Social Sciences (#411), by Tony Carnes 30 4: Mirror Images and Parallel Progression: The Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation (#539), by William G. Luhr and Cynthia Lucia 46 5: Keeping Alive the Dream: The Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (#613), by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and Sheila D. Collins, with Helen Lachs Ginsburg 62 [v]

6: Exploring a Diverse Tropical Colossus: The Seminar on Brazil (#557), by Sidney M. Greenfield 77 7: “Where Do You Live?”: The Seminar on the City (#459A), by Lisa Keller and Robert Beauregard 90 8: Fruit Flies and Tomcod: The Seminar in Population Biology (#521), by Kathleen A. Nolan 104 9: Living Long and Prospering: The Seminar on Aging and Health: Policy, Practice, and Research (#695), by Victoria H. Raveis 118 10: Speaking About the Unspeakable: The Seminar on Death (#507), by Christina Staudt, Joseph W. Dauben, and John M. Kiernan 132 11: Thinking and Talking About Talking and Thinking: The Seminar on Language and Cognition (#681), by Robert E. Remez 149 12: Embracing Our Common Humanity: The Seminar on Human Rights (#561), by George Andreopoulos 162 13: Understanding Conflict: The Seminar on the Problem of Peace (#403), by Catherine Tinker 177

Appendix 1: Frank Tannenbaum: A Biographical Essay, by Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead 193 Appendix 2: Jane Belo: First Lady of the University Seminars, by Georgina Marrero 205 Acknowledgments

211

Author Biographies

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List of the Columbia University Seminars, 1945–2019 223 Name Index

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CONTENTS

Foreword The University Seminars at Seventy-Five: An Ongoing Experiment in Continuity with Novelty RO B E RT E . P O L L AC K

I

n the forty years that I have been at Columbia as a professor of biology, I have noticed that too often we value novelty above continuity. By novelty I mean the powerful impact of our faculty’s ideas and works on the greater world, our capacity for innovation, and of course the historical accumulation of awards by our faculty. We celebrate these, and why not? But that is not enough. After more than four decades as a professor here, and after almost a decade as director of the University Seminars, I have come to believe that we need, in addition, to give as much attention to the simple fact of our continuity and to celebrate the ways in which that continuity has been maintained. In particular, we need to acknowledge those generous people who have, over the past couple of hundred years, given Columbia funds for our endowment—which now is among the highest in the country and the world—and who remain for the most part unknown unless a school or a building has their name on it. But all donors to our university’s endowment should be thanked equally for their decision to give us their wealth while they can, so that Columbia will have the funds available to grapple with the problems of the future. In this book we celebrate such a gift to our endowment. The University Seminars offer a particularly clear example of the difference an endowment can make even without a building. Ours has allowed us to have half a century of continuity, with novelty emerging at all times. [ vii ]

The University Seminars at seventy-five is an ongoing experiment in safe conversation among groups of people of all ages and backgrounds brought together by common interests but never by common conclusions. The Seminars are for that reason also an experiment in the politics of democracy. We cannot take for granted our freedom to disagree without punishment. It is increasingly rare on a global scale and has become more challenged even in our own country. So long as endowments are to be spent according to the wishes of their donors, creative conversations are what we will continue to celebrate. Seventy-five years ago, as the terrible precedents in human cruelty and violence that were set by World War II were still emerging, acting University President Frank Fackenthal and Professor of Latin American History Frank Tannenbaum (Columbia College Class of 1921) founded the Seminars in response to the existential problems they saw emerging from a world at war. The University Seminars thus began as a presidential initiative. After the war ended they continued as a program that Professor Tannenbaum intended to one day become a school within the university—one that would concentrate its efforts, as the Seminars were designed to do, on existential problems that transcended the boundaries of Columbia’s schools and departments. In this the Seminars managed to maintain their unique bottom-up management style throughout the Cold War. But it was clear by the time of the rise of Fidel Castro that Tannenbaum was not going to be simply the dean of a new school. I saw this as a sophomore in the college from the window of my dorm room on the ninth floor of Hartley Hall in April 1959. As director of the University Seminars and also as chair of the Seminar on Latin America (515) that he had founded, Tannenbaum had invited Castro, Cuba’s new president, to visit the campus during his first trip to our country. This was well before the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent stand-down between our country and the Soviet Union, and Castro was quite a draw. The steps of Low Memorial Library were packed. One photo from the time captures a smiling Frank, a serious President Castro, and a rather unhappy University President Grayson Kirk surrounded by a dense crowd of students. You can guess by the expressions on their faces that Tannenbaum was not interested in currying favor with either of his colleagues on those steps. For our twenty-fifth anniversary in 1968, the year before he died, Tannenbaum edited a volume of essays called A Community of Scholars, in which he made clear that the University Seminars were not about to become any sort of “Seminars University.” Then, when she passed away in 1972, [ viii ]

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his widow, Jane Belo, left Columbia a gift to endow the operation of the University Seminars in his memory. This gift lifted the Seminars into the unique situation of having the continuity of an endowment coupled with a high rate of emergent novelty through shared management. This was Tannenbaum’s model for the program. Since then the Seminars have had a full half-century of freedom from any impulse to become important at the expense of their freedom to decide their own futures. Instead we have had fifty years of novelty and creativity as new members, new Seminars, and new directors have learned how to make use of the unique creative freedom our endowment was designed to reward and protect. Since I have been around for so long, I am pleased to be able to share a memory of each of my four predecessors. Each of us in our own different manner has managed so far to preserve the Seminars’ core value of nurturing novelty. Frank Tannenbaum was the founder and first director of the University Seminars, serving from their inception in 1944 until his death in 1969.Though I never met him, I am sure if I had, we would have found a lot to talk about, as we had similar backgrounds.We both went to Columbia College soon after devastating wars—World War I in his case and World War II in mine—and we were both the first in our families to graduate from high school. Professor of Philosophy James Gutmann (Columbia College Class of 1918) became the second director on Frank’s death in 1969. I returned to Columbia in 1978, getting my PhD and carrying out the research that led Columbia’s biological sciences department to offer me a professorship. My wife, Amy, my daughter, Marya, and I were given an apartment in a small Columbia building that also was home to Professor Gutmann. I did not know anything of the Seminars then, but I knew him to be a quiet, somewhat intimidating, always polite neighbor. Professor of Economics Aaron Warner, protégé of Frank Tannenbaum and Isidor I. Rabi, was the third director of the Seminars, from 1976 to 2000. Professor Rabi, a Nobel laureate in physics and founder of the Radiation Laboratory, where I had my time as an undergraduate, inculcated in many people—including Professor Warner and me—a deep respect for the social obligation of scientists to do their best to ensure that our work was in the interests of society as a whole. Professor Warner had had a distinguished career working for President Roosevelt during the New Deal, and he brought to the Seminars a new commitment to social consciousness. To his credit, he did not bring his own opinions into the Seminars’ choices F O R E WO R D

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of topics. And so, under his direction even as distant a fellow as myself could come to him with a radical notion and find that it would be acceptable as a new University Seminar. So it was that, in 1996, I proposed a University Seminar I called The Two Cultures Revisited: Current Representations of Human Diversity (Seminar #657). It was an experiment I had long wished to carry out, seeking to experience human diversity without the need to maintain the so-called academic critical distance. I wished to set aside this distance that academics are trained to cultivate in order to experience the marginalization I knew my colleagues suffered from for being black, or gay, or female, or any combination of those. To make this Seminar work, I made sure that its initial membership would place me in the minority by these criteria. Then, to give us a scaffold on which to hang our initially awkward conversations, I arranged that members would take turns choosing a book for us all to discuss. Through these discussions we came to know one another as real people, not representatives of any particular group. The Seminar served its purpose almost immediately, as we came to see one another through these books we had read. I remain friends with many of the members of this Seminar. Though it lasted only a few years, it remains an example of the freedom that the Seminars have always had to persist, mutate, or go senescent as their members may wish. My literature humanities teacher in 1957–58, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Robert Belknap (1929–2014), became the fourth director of University Seminars, from 2001 to 2011. I have no better way to introduce him here than to tell a story about him that I originally told at his 2014 memorial service in St. Paul’s Chapel. Belknap and I had a conversation just before Thanksgiving 2013. He had invited me to succeed him as director of the University Seminars in 2010–11, and we would often enjoy each other’s company in our offices in Faculty House. “Bob,” I asked him, “how many years have your family celebrated Thanksgiving?” Knowing that Belknaps were on the Mayflower, I expected a big number, in the hundreds of years; I waited to bask in the reflected light of his ancestry. “Oh,” he said, “about five thousand, or ten thousand years.” “How?” I asked. “Well” he said, “you don’t think I am going to remember my Mayflower ancestors and not my native ancestors too, do you?” [x]

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In that he taught me how much of our country’s history is built on the forgotten cultures of native peoples. He also taught me to think again before valuing any of my ancestors over any others, and in the largest sense to remember that as a person, my thoughts, my life, my decisions, and my actions define me—not my ancestry, and certainly not my DNA. I will close this review of my predecessors with a reflection on the remarkable variety of lifetimes that the Seminars have had. Three of the first University Seminars to be formed, in the mid-1940s, are still thriving: The Problem of Peace (#403), Studies in Religion (#405), and The Renaissance (#407). As I write this, I have been director for eight years. In that time more than a dozen new Seminars have been proposed, discussed by our Advisory Board, approved, and gotten under way. In the same period, almost the same number of Seminars have voluntarily taken a year off. Those that do not come back after a year are formally decommissioned. Here is perhaps the best example of the difference between the University Seminars and any hypothetical “Seminars University.” Consistent with our founder’s intentions, each Seminar may have its own arc of experience and its own lifetime as well; there is no tenure, no obligation to be permanent, nor even an obligation to be important, only an obligation to be clear and to be willing to listen. In these different ways, I have learned from each of my predecessors how to protect and preserve the freedom that each Seminar has to decide our purposes, our protocols, and our topics for discussion. The hundreds of books and public events that the University Seminars have supported have all emerged from one or more of the Seminars themselves, a permanent but ever-changing monument to the power and freedom that Tannenbaum’s and Belo’s vision has passed on to us and, through us, into the unknowable future. The University Seminars have never been the product of any director, nor even of their own membership. They have always been served by a cadre of dedicated colleagues who have administered funds, reservations, an archive, and meals and wine so that each Seminar might have its own life. Let me close by thanking our colleagues who maintain the Faculty House and those who make our Faculty House office a welcoming and serious place: Alice Newton, Summer Hart, Pamela Guardia, Gesenia Alvarez, and John Jayo. I know they join me in hoping that you will enjoy these essays by our Seminars colleagues.

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Introduction Engaged Learning A L I C E N E W TO N

T

he University Seminars at Columbia celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020. Founded in 1945 by a group of Columbia University professors, the Seminars launched a unique experiment. The founders, nineteen humanities faculty members led by historian Frank Tannenbaum, sought to create a different kind of space for intellectual discussions. In 1945, the tendency in academia was increasingly toward specialization. Believing this to be a limiting model, Tannenbaum sought and received permission and some limited funding from Columbia University to begin his experiment. The basic idea: bring together scholars from different departments and multiple institutions and, when possible, include practitioners, experts not of the academy. The participants would meet as equals on a regular schedule: the same people studying the same subject from different perspectives month after month, year after year. Tannenbaum and the other cofounders also wanted a structure within which they could educate one another by broadening their approach to a specific question or field of study. All this was against the backdrop of the end of World War II and a volatile international scene with increasing worldwide attention on complex problems. Interdisciplinary dialogue is more commonplace now, as evidenced by a proliferation of institutes and centers at Columbia and other universities, which host interdisciplinary research and education. However, in 1945, these were rare. In creating a holistic method of looking at problems, and by [ xiii ]

putting scholars schooled in diverse ideas and methods in a room together, the Seminars created a space in which new types of collaborations could incubate. In the beginning five Seminars were formed: The Problem of Peace, Studies in Religion, The Renaissance, The State, and Rural Life. The first three still meet regularly, and essays on two of them are included here. This volume includes essays on thirteen of the ninety-two active Seminars. The twentieth anniversary of the University Seminars in 1965 also prompted a book, also titled A Community of Scholars. This earlier volume included a foreword by Grayson Kirk, a preface by Isidor I. Rabi, and an introduction by Tannenbaum. By 1965, the number of Seminars had grown to thirty-nine. The eleven chapters in that volume, ten written by men and one by Margaret Mead, gave perspectives on the successes and failures of the University Seminars and a path for its future. Tannenbaum, a historian, Latin Americanist, ex-Wobbly, ex-prisoner of conscience, and our founder, authored chapter 1, “Origin, Growth, and Theory of the University Seminar Movement.” Tannenbaum concludes the chapter with a reiteration of the necessity to have both theorists and practitioners in a Seminar: “Only in this fashion can we hope to rediscover the unity of knowledge and lay the foundations for the wisdom man requires if he is to achieve the consensus necessary for survival in this perilous world he has created for himself.”1 Tannenbaum was the main force in the project and became the first director. He was also a member, attending several individual Seminars regularly. As his own life’s path indicates, Tannenbaum was driven by curiosity, and he structured the Seminars on the assumption that good professors also would need to be permanent students through direct conversation with colleagues from many corners of the academy and society. Robert Belknap, a former director of the University Seminars and a champion of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, often would say that Columbia University succeeded in the ongoing education of its own faculty. The Seminars are a natural part of that success. Tannenbaum and the other founders also set a rule that, in hindsight, has had profound implications: participants and speakers may not be paid. The privacy and the voluntary aspect of the Seminars has guaranteed that scholars come for the dialogue and to try out ideas. It has been a custom, since 1945, for the Seminar meetings to include eating and drinking together. “Tannenbaum, who felt very deeply the need of a strong sense of community among the academic profession, laid emphasis on the communal nature of the Seminars.”2 [ xiv ]

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One of the desired outcomes of regular meetings was an equality among the voices in a Seminar. The structure broke down the hierarchies, informal as well as institutional, that exist within a discipline. Tannenbaum made clear that a necessary aspect of a successful Seminar is that older and younger members of the university meet on equal terms. The rigid hierarchy of the academy is not welcome in the meetings and is actively discouraged. Age and status, including retired versus active, are irrelevant. The Seminars, as Tannenbaum hoped, are an opportunity for community, fellowship, and mutual intellectual appreciation, no matter your official role. “As the years go by the fellowship becomes more intimate, and thinking aloud, verbalizing for the first time some new view of the matter, is a unique experience.”3 The ninety-two current Seminars are concerned with such myriad subjects of investigation as the Middle East, dance, ecology and culture, animal behavior, sites of cinema, the Hebrew Bible, the role of the university in Harlem, the history of Columbia University, Latin America, and many other regions of the academic landscape. Some of the Seminars, at age seventy-five, have long outlived their founders. Others have just begun, and their organizers do not yet know whether they are onto a set of problems that will carry them beyond a few semesters. Each essay written for this celebratory volume records the trajectory of a particular Seminar. This collection is a good sampling of the University Seminars as they are now. (Of the thirteen Seminars presented, only one is inactive, Aging and Health.) The essays represent the variety of intellectual activity that makes up the unique entity that is a University Seminar. Some of the essays here demonstrate how a particular Seminar closely followed world events, of necessity because of its subject matter. The essay by George Andreopoulos, “Embracing Our Common Humanity,” and that by Catherine Tinker, “Understanding Conflict,” address some of the same events, and both demonstrate a wide, varied, and often global perspective. Tinker’s essay is about the Peace Seminar, and she traces its history from 1945. Andreopoulos’s essay is about the Human Rights Seminar, which began decades later, in the late 1970s. Both essays elaborate on the enormous complexity of their subjects. Both agree: “basic rights comprised two varieties: security and subsistence.”4 Tinker says this about achieving peace: “Today it is generally recognized that there is no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development.”5 And logically they shared some renowned members, including Louis Henkin. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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The essays indicate that the Seminars titled Brazil, Content and Methods of the Social Sciences, The City, and Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity have shifted focus with changing times. Those Seminars that study events on a much longer time scale—Death, Eighteenth-Century European Culture, and Language and Cognition—often have led in their fields by incubating new approaches. Sometimes advances were achieved because a visiting scholar (or a new member) brought a different lens through which to view an issue. An important collaboration for the Brazil Seminar was possible because in 2005, Professor Thomas Trebat became executive director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies and a member of the Seminar.6 Seminars are semiprivate affairs: attendance is by invitation of the Seminar members, offered by the chair, and although most are welcoming of visitors, speakers, and new members, enough intimacy is maintained that members typically describe their Seminar as an ideal place for experimentation and development. Thus part of the Seminars’ ethic is that the expert in the group is the group itself: we are here to learn from the expertise of us all. Cynthia Pyle and Alan Stewart write in “Thinking Aloud,” “The Seminar on the Renaissance quickly established itself as a venue to try out work in progress—to think out loud. Such work must be far enough along to be coherent and mapped out, but the idea was (and remains) to open it up to criticism and suggestions, both bibliographical and in terms of the matter under consideration.”7 Over time regular, usually monthly, meetings, unlike the occasional conference, have facilitated a development of trust and camaraderie. Reading the essays, it is clear that one or two men—acknowledged, and sometimes brilliant, scholars—often undertook to lead the discussions and set a course for the Seminar. A few men directed their respective Seminars, especially in the early decades. Examples include Sumner Rosen, Robert Krauss, Philip Jessup (more than one Seminar), Louis Henkin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and Austin (Bill) H. Kutscher. Sometimes this arrangement worked well, and some of the work has reverberated through decades in and outside the Seminars. These charismatic leaders almost certainly limited the peer interactions at the heart of the Seminars idea. And it is possible that such leadership at times became more of a constraint than a guiding light. It is hard to picture today’s Seminars acceding to such a style. Most early seminar members were male. The Renaissance Seminar had two female members early on: Josephine Waters Bennett and Helene Wieruszowski (CU Archives, Kristeller Papers). All of the secretaries were [ xvi ]

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women (one exception being Paul Oskar Kristeller, who began his participation as secretary to the chair, John Herman Randall, Jr.); however, Pyle, the current co-chair, observed that Kristeller and Randall were coequals. One rapporteur, as we call them, went on to start and chair her own Seminar (Victoria Raveis was a rapporteur for Drugs and Society and later started Aging and Health). Some of the essays make note of women joining and becoming chairs and cochairs. Tinker notes that it was the tenth anniversary of the Peace Seminar, 1955, when Professor Adda Bozeman presented and subsequently became the Seminar’s first female member.8 After the first decade of the University Seminars, there was clear participation of women in most Seminars. A typical pathway to becoming a member was by being invited as a speaker. As the Seminars grew, spanning the civil rights movement and the second wave of American feminism, many Seminars addressed issues affecting women, race, and inequality. The involvement of women has grown exponentially, a development I imagine Frank Tannenbaum, the Wobbly and activist, would have applauded. Women now participate actively in all of the current Seminars. They make up approximately half of the Advisory Board, and the acting director is a woman. In marked contrast to the 1965 volume, there are thirteen women authors in the current work. The essays detail their Seminars’ trajectories, often reflecting the social and economic realities of their moment. The Seminar on the Problem of Peace began in response to World War II. The world was volatile, but it also was awakened to the ideas of peace and human rights. The United States, with its long history of slavery and apartheid, was reluctantly confronting its widespread racism. The horrors of the Shoah prompted an international desire to codify a “do unto others” sensibility. The United Nations came into existence and developed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following years brought the complex issues of the Cold War and arms race. The civil rights movement; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Nelson Mandela; assassinations; nuclear realities; women’s liberation; the UN Fourth World Conference on Women; 9/11; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Internet; and more were life’s backdrop. Some of the essays analyze their early missions as they dove deeper into their subjects and as current events propelled new ideas.William Luhr and Cynthia Lucia, in their essay, “Mirror Images and Parallel Progression,” write, “What is fascinating about the historical positioning and trajectory of the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation is that it so closely parallels the very evolution of cinema studies as an academic field.”9 I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Some essays show an acknowledgment of the changes in historiography; these include the Renaissance and the Eighteenth Century. Elizabeth Powers, in the essay on the latter, “Critiquing the Enlightenment,” writes: The sense of disruptiveness can be seen in the liveliness of presentations in succeeding years, in which even canonical figures and works were shown in a heretofore unsuspected light: sexuality in James Boswell, pornography and Marie Antoinette, and London prostitutes in visual culture. Literary figures and texts were resituated in a larger frame, one reflecting current anxieties: Goethe and the question of the global climate, time, and the unsustainable countryside in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, corruption, consumption, and other tropes of national ill-health in eighteenth-century British literature. As John Richetti put it in his keynote address at the fiftieth-anniversary symposium of the Seminar in 2012, “For me at least, such papers were less predictable, more interesting in their specificity and quirkiness than the Olympian musings that dominated the earlier years of the seminar.”10 The essay “Out of Chaos, Order” notes the changes in the debates on rationality, science, and religion and relates the shift in New York City from secularism to acknowledgment of religion, many religions! In one classic example of interdisciplinary work, Tony Carnes writes about a presentation given in 2002 by Elta Smith and Courtney Bender. Their paper spoke to a realization of the practice of Muslim taxi drivers stopping to worship in New York City restaurant basements.11 All the Seminars nurture and welcome the cross-disciplinary requirement. However, unless a Seminar clearly needs the input of professional practitioners, their inclusion is not as widely practiced a principle, though this varies across the Seminars. Some, by virtue of their focus, lend themselves to the inclusion of practitioners. In this volume, illustrative are the essays on these Seminars: Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation (which necessarily engages highly technical, in addition to theoretical, dimensions), Brazil (which focuses on a nation in its diverse current struggles), The City (which is not only place-based but so close at hand that recruiting officials to participate is highly practical), and Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (which includes union representatives and politicians). For other Seminars, the link to practice is less immediate. As Pyle and Stewart say, the Renaissance has a “glittering cast of characters including Petrarch, Ficino, [ xviii ]

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Erasmus, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Copernicus and Galileo”12 . . . all of whom are, sadly, long departed. Naturally, meeting with the same people, month after month, possibly for years, influences the participants. In the essay “Thinking About Talking and Talking About Thinking,” Robert Remez offers this thought: Even people who differ in characteristic speaking style are likely, in subtle ways, to adjust their speech when they cooperate. The result is a miniature merger of productive practice, seen in pace, in intonation, and in segmental details. We fall in step with a band, of course. Yet a band continues to play to provide the meter for the stride. In conversations, interlocutors take turns. Still, they preserve something of each other’s characteristics in the alternating bouts. The devil is in the details in this phenomenon, as Jennifer S. Pardo of Montclair State University told us on October 22, 2015 (“Consolidating Findings on Phonetic Convergence: Challenging Puzzles for Speech Perception, Speech Production, and Language Use”).13 Powers, in “Critiquing the Enlightenment,” notes that language can constrict thinking: “I do not know whether it is true, as Canadian scholar John Noyes has suggested, that a mother tongue preprograms an individual’s thought with an entire cultural history of interpreting the world.”14 It’s useful to note how many intellectual émigrés from Europe were involved in the early Seminars. Each Seminar, if it survives, creates a subculture of its own, with its own lexicon and particular constraints and freedoms. Only the combination of intimate dialogue and longevity can be so impactful. The Seminar on Population Biology, according to the essay “Fruit Flies and Tomcod,” covers incredibly diverse subjects: leeches, DNA, climate, snow geese, bird vocalization, race, owls, and humans.15 The Seminar has weathered archaic directions and emerged as a useful forum to study all life on Earth. Individual Seminars have influenced their respective areas of study. An outcome of the Renaissance Seminar was the founding of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) in 1954. Pyle and Stewart note, Renaissance News and Notes still exists as the RSA’s newsletter online and has spawned the important periodical Renaissance Quarterly. From a modest beginning, the RSA became international with a meeting I N T RO D U C T I O N

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in Florence in 2000 under the auspices of Executive Director John Monfasani, a student of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s and a scholar of Byzantine and European Renaissance humanism. The RSA now boasts over 4,000 members, more than a quarter of them from outside North America.16 Victoria Raveis, in “Living Long and Prospering,” illustrates the wide net that is cast when diverse academic practitioners seek viable solutions for a pressing condition: in this case, aging populations worldwide. The essay examines the scope of the Seminar, Aging and Health, and its global reach. The members agreed to stop meeting partly because the Seminar had nurtured institutions that provided “the development of an intellectual community. The linkages and networks that were developed have continued to grow and flourish.”17 Another Seminar with a long list of fellow travelers is represented here in the essay by Goldberg and Collins with Ginsburg, “Keeping Alive the Dream.” The dream is full employment, and the Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity is working with many organizations that share the Seminar’s goals. The Seminar held an all-day event, “When Government Was the Solution: The New Deal’s Forgotten Legacy, Then & Now.” The authors note, “New initiatives in public policy do not emerge spontaneously. They are always preceded by a long period of deliberation and gestation among those who often do not get the credit for laying the foundations when they emerge.”18 This long period of deliberation and gestation is clear in “Speaking About the Unspeakable,” about the Seminar on Death. Authors Staudt, Dauben, and Kiernan trace the evolution of the way death has been talked about and how laws and practices have changed. Influenced by Dame Cicely Saunders, the British nurse, physician, and social worker credited with founding the first modern hospice, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross presciently argued for patients’ right to participate in their own medical decisions more than two decades before Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act (1990). Likewise, ahead of legislation and public understanding of the needs of patients, Saunders advocated for home care instead of hospitalization at the end of life, a model that was crucial for designing the Medicare Hospice Benefit, enacted in 1982.19 [ xx ]

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The Death Seminar has clearly advanced an innovative examination of our common mortality and how we deal with it. Our founder was an activist, and his guidance is evident. Tannenbaum was the first director and founder of the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University.The Brazil Seminar was an outgrowth of the Seminar on Latin America, founded several years earlier.The essay by Sidney Greenfield, “Exploring a Diverse Tropical Colossus,” outlines the bumpy road that the Seminar, and Brazil, have taken. Greenfield relates his and others’ deep, often personal, relationship with Brazil. The Seminar began in 1976, and soon “scholars across the country agreed that if one wanted to present the results of their research before an intellectually engaged and rigorously up-to-date community of students, the Seminar on Brazil was the place to do it.”20 One of the most productive Seminars for publications and conferences is the City Seminar. According to the essay “Where Do You Live?” in its early days, the City Seminar attendees went out into the city, holding walking tours in all five boroughs, examining their workings. After a hiatus, a more scholarly approach was adopted. Keller and Beauregard note, From 1971 on, the City Seminar featured presentations of scholarly works in progress rather than discussions of current issues. The purpose was to have new research vetted by colleagues; critiquing was meant to help authors improve soon-to-be-published works. That goal was successful, as scores of books emanated from presentations, overwhelmingly well received and well known. City Seminar speakers who laid the foundation for urban history include some of the most eminent names in the field.21 It is interesting to study an institution that arguably has flown under the radar here at Columbia University and see some of its profound influences on different fields. The Seminars remain a bottom-up organization. The central office has no say or impact on subject, members, and themes. We set the number of meetings to at least two a semester, but we are notoriously flexible. We have kept to several simple rules that hold us to the spirit of Tannenbaum’s idea: no speaker is paid; minutes of the meetings are taken; and members come from more than one department and institution. Our major suggestion is a popular one: eat (and drink) together. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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This book, which Bob Pollack willed into existence, is a labor of love. It is a reflection of the affection he and others, including all the essayists, have for the work of the Seminars. Tom Vinciguerra, our editor, took on the always difficult task of herding the volunteer authors toward a consistent volume and delivering it on time to our publishing partner, Columbia University Press. The Press has been a steadfast partner in this book. Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director of CUP, has generously applied her wisdom and editorial superpowers. Much credit goes to Bob Pollack for holding onto the idea of another celebratory book . . . a second Community of Scholars. The University Seminars has been very lucky in the directors we have had. Bob Belknap and Bob Pollack supervised digitizing half a million pages that are now available to scholars. Pollack invigorated the growth of our office and the Seminars, managing more than 90 active Seminars, diversifying our Advisory Board, and expanding the Seminars staff. He and I have had the good fortune to work with our stellar team, Gessy Alvarez, Pamela Guardia, Summer Hart, John Jayo, and Nataly Shahaf. The truth is that membership in a Seminar is great fun. To meet with colleagues, well known and strangers, old and young, retired and active, congenial and not; to show up reliably to monthly meetings, do one’s homework, challenge one another; to share a meal and a glass of wine and over time get to know our interlocutors more intimately—as Bob Pollack would say, “What can possibly beat that?” In the first Community of Scholars, Rabi wrote, “They do it for pleasure in the company of other minds and for broadening their own knowledge and horizons.” We plan to continue for many years to come.

Notes 1. Frank Tannenbaum, ed., A Community of Scholars: The University Seminars at Columbia University (New York: Praeger, 1965), 45. 2. C. Olinger, “University Seminars Are Twenty-Five Years Old,” GRA FAC Graphic, IV, no. 4 (August 1969): 4. 3. A Community of Scholars, 13. 4. George Andreopoulos, “Embracing Our Common Humanity.” 5. Catherine Tinker, “Understanding Conflict.” 6. Sydney Greenfield, “Exploring a Diverse Tropical Colossus.”

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Cynthia Pyle and Alan Stewart, “Thinking Aloud.” Tinker, “Understanding Conflict.” Cynthia Lucia and William Luhr, “Mirror Images and Parallel Progression.” Elizabeth Powers, “Critiquing the Enlightenment.” Tony Carnes, “Out of Chaos, Order.” Pyle and Stewart, “Thinking Aloud.” Robert Remez, “Thinking About Talking and Talking About Thinking.” Powers, “Critiquing the Enlightenment.” Kathleen Nolan, “Fruit Flies and Tomcod.” Pyle and Stewart, “Thinking Aloud.” Victoria Raveis, “Living Long and Prospering.” Gertrude Goldberg and Sheila D. Collins with Helen Lachs Ginsburg, “Keeping Alive the Dream.” 19. Christina Staudt, Joseph W. Dauben, and John M. Kiernan, “Speaking About the Unspeakable.” 20. Greenfield, “Exploring a Diverse Tropical Colossus.” 21. Lisa Keller and Robert Beauregard, “Where Do You Live?”

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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A Note to the Reader THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

I

n 1984, a laudatory New York Times article appeared about the Columbia University Seminars. Among the featured players was McVickar Professor of Political Economy (and future Nobel Prize winner in economic science) William Vickrey, a full member of half a dozen sessions. Although his primary interest was Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (Seminar #613), which he cochaired, the Times noted that he also was “concerned with questions of methodology in the social sciences, and as an urbanist, he studies the history and development of cities. As a pacifist and Quaker, he worries about world peace.” Vickrey explained his wide-ranging Seminars curiosity by quoting the Roman playwright Terence: “I am a man, and nothing human is beyond my interest.” Such is the nature of this volume. The assemblers have hoped to provide an intelligent lay readership with a diverse sampling of some of the most nettlesome, challenging, and rewarding intellectual excursions of both the present and the past, as broached within the unique framework of the Seminars. We trust that none of the contents are beyond your interest. Admittedly, we were faced with a formidable challenge. How could we present a fair representation of the more than two hundred Seminars that have ever existed and the more than ninety that are still active? Without dwelling on administrative esoterica, suffice it to say that we embarked on an extensive process of soliciting and winnowing to yield the baker’s dozen [ xxv ]

of essays now before you. We’d like to think that we’ve made a game effort. In any event, a complete list of all the Seminars is appended. May they further whet your appetite for this unique enterprise. When Robert Pollack, the Seminars’ current director, approached me to edit this volume, I was both flattered and fearful. As dean of Columbia College for most of my undergraduate years, Bob had been my dean. Now here he was, asking his former charge—who he knew back in the day mainly as an upstart reporter for the Columbia Daily Spectator—to head up a project of the deepest importance to him. For his trust and confidence, I am most grateful. In his preface to the Columbia College Bulletin—the annual catalogue of course descriptions, requirements for majors, faculty titles and degrees, rules of conduct, lists of prizes, and other essential information for students—Bob always provided a welcoming overview. Invariably he summed up, “I hope you will be properly dazzled, as I am, by the richness of the intellectual fare in the pages that follow.” That is now this editor’s hope as well.

[ xxvi ] A N O T E T O T H E R E A D E R

A C OM M U NIT Y OF S CHO LARS

CHA P T E R 1

Thinking Aloud The Seminar in the Renaissance (#407) C Y N T H I A M . P Y L E A N D A L A N S T E WA RT

A

s it celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance appears to be a natural fit for the University Seminars. Its subject denotes both the dazzling recovery of a classical past and seismic innovations in knowledge, science, and exploration with a glittering cast of characters including Petrarch, Ficino, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Copernicus, and Galileo. Understanding this phenomenon certainly requires a conversation across disciplines: the classics, literature, history, philosophy, science, art, and music, to name only the most prominent. Yet this particular Seminar’s reason for being was not obvious at the outset, even though it was one of the first five University Seminars established in 1945 as World War II came to a close. The four others—The State (#401), The Problem of Peace (#403), Studies in Religion (#405), and Rural Life (#409)—clearly spoke to the University Seminars’ rationale to open Columbia to ideas from the world outside, and to originate and communicate ideas from within the university to that world. All were “going concerns,” in Frank Tannenbaum’s words. These were topics of immediate societal import whose treatment clearly could benefit from the coming together of practical, worldly knowledge and experience and more conceptual and philosophical considerations commonly nurtured and developed within the context of the University.

[1]

Why, then, found a Seminar on the Renaissance, a phenomenon now some four or five centuries in the past? The answer may well lie in the avowedly interdepartmental structure of the Seminars, an approach that has proved highly compatible—indeed, essential—to the study of the Renaissance. Tannenbaum recalled the arrival in his office, one day in the fall of 1944, of the chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Oscar J. Campbell, an expert on the eighteenth-century Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg. Campbell said, “Why can’t we have such a seminar on the Renaissance?” “The Renaissance is not a going concern,” was the response. “Ain’t it now?” replied Campbell. “Look, here at Columbia we teach the Renaissance in the Departments of English, French, Italian, German, History, Philosophy, Art, Music, Architecture, etc., etc.; we do not know each other and have never sat down at the same table.”1 Tannenbaum subsequently had the insight to realize that scholars could make a “going concern” out of a historical period. As he once wrote, any Seminar “has as many methods at its disposal as it has members, and each possible combination of members and their special gifts, training and experience.”2 The Renaissance that could emerge from a Seminar would be something more than the multiple Renaissances as studied within their disciplinary silos. It could stimulate a rebirth of Renaissance studies. Indeed, over the years the term “Renaissance” has been fine-tuned insofar as it refers to the rebirth of ideas, literary and artistic devices, and interpretations—and what one of us has termed the revival of the “approach” of classical antiquity to the world around us. This approach is not, however, a slavish imitation of ancient themes. Rather, it is a creative imitatio, making new use of old themes, as bees create honey from the nectar of flowers (to borrow the image of Francesco Petrarch of the fourteenth century). This view of the Renaissance encompasses scientific thought as well as that of humanistic disciplines, especially when one takes into account the development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of arguably scientific areas such as philology and history. Moreover, subjects broached in our meetings range over myriad fields, including philosophy, theology, art history, musicology, literature, historical events, and the history of science between about 1350 and about 1650. We are open to the sharing aloud of serious thought in any field. After the Seminar’s establishment in 1945, Campbell served as its chairman for the first two years. But the driving force behind its continued existence lay elsewhere. For many years John Herman Randall, Jr., of the Philosophy [ 2 ] THINKING ALOUD

Department chaired the Seminar, with his colleague Paul Oskar Kristeller as its secretary. A Columbia professor since 1925, Randall was a well-established philosopher with a capacious chronological and topical range. Kristeller was a German Jewish émigré who had studied classical philology and philosophy in Berlin and Heidelberg with Ernst Hoffmann, Karl Jaspers, Richard Kroner, and Martin Heidegger, coming under the early influence of Ernst Cassirer, Werner Jaeger, and Eduard Norden. After writing his dissertation on the Hellenistic Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, Kristeller transferred his attentions to Renaissance Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). But he was forced to flee first Germany and then Italy with the rise of Nazism and Italian Fascism. Arriving at Yale in 1939, Kristeller was quickly lured to New York. As Randall’s son, Francis Randall, notes, his father was indispensable in securing posts at Columbia for both Ernst Cassirer and the younger and then less noted Kristeller. These men worked closely together. Randall and Kristeller (with Ernest Moody and others) team-taught a course on medieval and Renaissance philosophy. Along with James Gutmann, the second director of the Seminars, Randall and Kristeller translated into English Cassirer’s last two essays as Rousseau, Kant, Goethe. In addition, Cassirer, Randall, and Kristeller edited the influential anthology The Renaissance Philosophy of Man before Cassirer died suddenly on April 13, 1945 at age 70, leaving his introduction unwritten and Randall and Kristeller to mourn him in their preface. It is reasonable to hypothesize that, had he lived, Cassirer, with his own interdisciplinary approach to philosophical questions and epochs, would have eagerly joined Randall and Kristeller in the new Seminar on the Renaissance (as it was originally called). As Cassirer’s wife, Toni, wrote to Randall after his death, he had been happy to find it so easy to make friends and establish intellectual contacts at Columbia.3 The Philosophy Department at Columbia clearly assumed a crucial role through Randall, Moody, Gutmann, and Kristeller (as well as Richard Hofstadter of the History Department) in the formation of the University Seminars. As Randall once noted, philosophers—perhaps more than most scholars— require time to discuss questions at leisure among themselves, preferably over a meal. The Philosophy Department had, in fact, held such collegial meetings on Monday evenings into the 1930s. At the same time, the department had sponsored a series of speakers from outside the university, including some of the increasing number of European refugee scholars. These philosophical traditions, allowing for the deep and probing exchange of ideas, were infused THINKING ALOUD

[3]

into the Seminars movement.This was particularly true of the Seminar on the Renaissance through the direct participation of the two philosophy professors so profoundly involved in its founding, Randall and Kristeller. Although Randall was unquestionably the senior colleague, Kristeller was the mainstay of the Seminar from the beginning. Randall himself generously acknowledged this at the Seminar meeting of March 8, 1949: “Prof. Kristeller has probably done more work for the seminar than anyone else, since his interests coincide more exactly with it.”4 Certainly Kristeller exerted immense energy in developing the extracurricular possibilities of the Seminar. In the early years, typing much (if not all) of the correspondence himself, he spearheaded numerous initiatives. These included a bibliographical file on late medieval and Renaissance learning 1300–1600; a Renaissance reading and records room in Columbia’s library (with a budget for its books); and the beginnings of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, an important, ongoing biographical-bibliographical compendium of translations of and commentaries on Greek and Latin texts. He also proposed and began implementing a project to microfilm unprinted inventories of important European manuscript collections, which underpinned his indispensable catalogue of catalogues, Latin Manuscripts Books Before 1600 (1948, 1953,1960,1993). More importantly, Kristeller set the Seminar’s intellectual tone and early focus. Prompted by his work on Ficino, he was thinking deeply about Renaissance humanism. For many decades the dominant thesis of the Renaissance as the first modern age had looked to Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal study, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (1860). This was translated into English in 1878 under the title The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and reissued many times. In the 1940s and 1950s, Renaissance studies in the United States grew in importance as new ideas came to the fore. The process began in part when Cassirer participated in a symposium issue in the fourth volume (1943) of The Journal of the History of Ideas. He was responding—along with Kristeller, confirmed medievalist Lynn Thorndike (Columbia), Francis Johnson (Stanford), and Dean Lockwood (Haverford)—to two essays originating at the American Historical Association meetings of 1941. One was on Italian science in the fifteenth century by Dana Durand of Mount Holyoke. The other was by the émigré political and economic historian Hans Baron, who defended the fifteenth century’s contributions to the Renaissance, including its science. Then, in October 1945, six months after Cassirer’s death, his review of the English version of Kristeller’s The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, under the title “Ficino’s Place in Intellectual [ 4 ] THINKING ALOUD

History.” At that time Cassirer’s may have been the only mind capable of clearly grasping Kristeller’s subtle understanding and teasing apart of the strands of Ficino’s thought. It was no mere syncretism, as Cassirer pointed out, but a rethinking of Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine. In this review Cassirer also expressed his appreciation for Kristeller’s understanding of the various interpretations of the Renaissance—which he praised Kristeller for refusing to define. Cassirer discussed two of the most common approaches to the Renaissance. One was Burckhardt’s conception of the Renaissance as the “cradle of the modern spirit.” The other was the medievalists’ vision of the period as a continuation of their own focus. The stage was thus set for the first meeting of the Renaissance Seminar on October 8, 1945, in the Paterno Library of Columbia’s Casa Italiana. One week later, in a letter to “Jack” (Randall), we see Kristeller (“POK,” as he often signed his letters and memos, adding either “Paul” or “[P. O.] Kristeller” above it by hand, depending on the stage of acquaintance) taking the reins.5 Surely buoyed by such praise from his so recently deceased mentor, Kristeller interrogates the agreed-on choice of the first year’s topic for the Renaissance Seminar (“The Idea of Progress in the Renaissance”) as too narrow. He draws on three recent publications to support his argument. One is a recent PhD thesis by Herbert Weisinger on the history of the concept of the Renaissance as it had developed from the fifteenth century. Another is Wallace K. Ferguson’s article “Humanist Views of the Renaissance” in the American Historical Review of 1939. Finally there is Edgar Zilsel’s “The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress,” which appeared posthumously in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1945. Ferguson, of New York University, and Weisinger, of Michigan State College, would become early Seminar participants, along with the historian Hans Baron, then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (Weisinger became the first American Fellow of the Warburg Library and Institute where Cassirer had befriended and worked with its founder, Aby Warburg, in Hamburg in the 1920s. The Seminar “The Problem of the Renaissance” was thus engaged, and a continuing discussion of Burckhardt’s broad 1860 thesis of the Renaissance as the first modern age was begun in a new forum. It would have repercussions to this day. In 1946–47, we again find Kristeller (in his own recognizable typescript, with a few pencil corrections) thinking aloud in preparation for a meeting of the Seminar, teasing out the strands of a definition of Renaissance humanism on concrete historical textual grounds. He invokes the phrase studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, THINKING ALOUD

[5]

along with the ancient languages) as found in Cicero’s rhetorical and didactic works and in Quintilian. Kristeller had published this work in Belgian, but by then émigré New School journal, Byzantion, in 1945, at the same time as his friend Augusto Campana was preparing similarly empirical thoughts on the word umanista (humanist) for publication in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1946. In the context of the Renaissance Seminar, Kristeller based his thinking in 1946–47 on the year’s problem or topic suggested by Randall: “The Impact of Renaissance Humanism on Medieval Culture.” He questioned the terms “humanism” and “humanist,” first in their Renaissance connotations: “What does ‘humanism’ mean in our various fields? What did ‘humanism’ mean in the Renaissance? What does ‘the humanism of the Renaissance’ mean to present-day scholars?” Kristeller followed these queries with topics relevant to those mid-twentieth-century times: [T]he broader and modern sense of “humanism”—a shifting emphasis on values, reflecting a changing social experience. The thesis of Burckhardt—emphasis on the importance of the human individual— and its validity in the light of present-day scholarship. Grounds for criticizing Burckhardt: Emphasis on economic changes, with resulting continuity. Emphasis on development of science, with equal continuity. Emphasis on religious trends. . . . What significant shifts of values can actually be discovered in our several fields.6 Even the chronology of the central term “Renaissance” gave rise to debate, as it does today. Kristeller defined it broadly and inclusively as circa 1350 to circa 1650. However, he also quipped at one meeting in 1949 that were one to restrict the limits of the Renaissance to its earliest proposed final date and its latest proposed starting date, one would end up with a period of 30 years, from 1500 to 1530.7 Some answers to these questions would be provided in the early years of the Seminar by a remarkable series of papers.The Seminar on the Renaissance quickly established itself as a venue to try out work in progress—to think out loud. Such work must be far enough along to be coherent and mapped out, but the idea was (and remains) to open it up to criticism and suggestions, both bibliographical and in terms of the matter under consideration. On November 25, 1952, Kristeller wrote to Tannenbaum, providing “a statement concerning the present and possible future activities of the [ 6 ] THINKING ALOUD

Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance.”8 This included a list of Seminar papers that had served as the basis for published and forthcoming work. “In many cases,” Kristeller noted, “members of the Seminar have mentioned the Seminar in their published articles, and expressed their gratitude for helpful suggestions received during the discussion.” From Kristeller’s list it is evident that from its very beginnings, the Seminar already had heard some work that would stand the test of time as publications. Among these contributions were the following: Josephine Waters Bennett (English, Hunter College) on English humanism Enrico de Negri (Italian, Columbia) on Boccaccio Theodor Mommsen (History, Princeton) on Petrarch Charles Trinkaus (History, Sarah Lawrence) on Calvin Felix Gilbert (History, Bryn Mawr) on Livy in Machiavelli’s Discorsi Hans Baron (History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) on what was medieval and what was modern in Renaissance economics Germán Arciniegas (a Colombian historian then at Columbia) on the Vespuccis Donald Lemen Clark (English, Columbia) on Renaissance rhetoric Millard Meiss (Art History, Columbia) on religious painting in fourteenthcentury Florence William Nelson (English, Columbia) on the teaching of English in Tudor grammar schools George B. Parks (English, Queens College) on English travelers in Italy Edward Rosen (History, City College) and Ernest A. Moody (Philosophy, Columbia) on Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, and Brahe Helene Wieruszowski (History, City College) on epistolary art Jason Saunders from his 1955 Columbia PhD thesis on Justus Lipsius. Several of these and other early contributions were published in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Randall was editor and Kristeller served on the editorial board. Some full-length scholarly monographs also emerged from the Seminar. Several chapters from the European historian Garrett Mattingly’s landmark study, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955), were “discussed by the Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance with, I hope, consequent improvement,” as he wrote in his foreword. And it was at the suggestion of chairman Randall that the English Civil War historian J. H. Hexter agreed to work on Sir Thomas More’s Utopia THINKING ALOUD

[7]

for its assessment of English economic history. We can glimpse the Seminar’s early working methods in Hexter’s recollection that “The advantage of having one’s favorite mistakes and illusions firmly knocked over the head in the relative privacy of the Paterno Library by critics at once profoundly learned, altogether friendly, fair, and well disposed, and entirely ruthless is immeasurable.” It was only when Kristeller told him that his three Seminar papers were good enough that Hexter developed them in his important work, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (1952).9 Sometimes favorite mistakes could be “knocked over the head” by the shared interdisciplinary knowledge of the Seminar’s participants. Frank Tannenbaum recalled “one Seminar when the question under discussion required a broad knowledge of languages.” The specificity of his description suggests that this was most likely the Seminar on the Renaissance.Tannenbaum wrote, It was soon apparent that the group had among its own members the ancient and modern European languages, and a goodly number of Middle and Far Eastern languages as well. The Seminar could bring to bear a breadth of bibliographic knowledge upon the point in question that no single worker or group of workers in one discipline could hope to master, short of much hard labor and months of time—if then.10 At its founding the Seminar on the Renaissance drew on fourteen Columbia faculty members from the Departments of Philosophy, English and Comparative Literature, Italian, Spanish, Art History, Music, and the Libraries, as well as several from outside Columbia. Over the years the scope has only widened. The Seminar now also attracts scholars from the fields of classics, French, German, the history of philosophy, intellectual history, the history of science, social history, Reformation history, historiography, geography, political science, and political history. Other specialties include manuscript, incunabulum, and early book studies; archival studies; methodology in general; and Islamic studies, which brings with it a greater emphasis on the Near East and North Africa. The Seminar’s chairs and cochairs likewise have ranged across the disciplines. They have included the philosophers Randall and Kristeller; the historians Charles Trinkaus and Eugene Rice; English literature specialists Richard Harrier, Elizabeth Hill, and Alan Stewart; the environmental and Spanish historian John Wing; and the intellectual and cultural historian Cynthia M. Pyle. Secretaries have come from the fields of philosophy [ 8 ] THINKING ALOUD

(Kristeller), history (Trinkaus, Rice), the history of science (Paul Lawrence Rose), and English (Harrier, Peter Rudnytsky, and Susan Field Senneff). The Seminar on the Renaissance provided an attractive model for scholars working in other historical periods with related concerns. Otto Brendel of the Department of Art and Architecture, having attended the Renaissance Seminar for several years, in 1950 suggested a Seminar in Classical Civilization (#441). One current cochair of the Renaissance Seminar attends the Seminar in Classical Civilization to glean up-to-date work about the period so fundamental to the Renaissance—and, in turn, to encourage members of that seminar to attend Renaissance Seminar meetings on the transmission of classical texts. In January 1954, W. T. H. Jackson of the Department of Germanic Languages proposed to Kristeller that they form a Seminar in Medieval Studies (#431). Kristeller responded enthusiastically, while explaining that he could not attend all their meetings, since the Middle Ages was not the center of his work.11 Beyond Columbia the Seminar encouraged and even spawned scholarly enterprises and organizations centered on the Renaissance, its culture, and its thought. After the American Council of Learned Societies in 1951–52 withdrew financing from its own Committee on Renaissance Studies and its publication Renaissance News, the editors turned to the Renaissance Seminar for help. In addition to funding Renaissance News, the Seminar supported a new American Committee on Renaissance Studies (ACRS), comprised of “representatives of national learned societies with an interest in the Renaissance.” Its first formal meeting was held at the invitation of the Seminar in the Paterno Library on January 31, 1953. The ACRS’s mission was “to foster Renaissance studies by encouraging the work of individual scholars, by facilitating the exchange of information, and by suggesting or initiating cooperative scholarly projects.” The outcome was the founding of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) in 1954. Renaissance News and Notes still exists as the RSA’s newsletter online and has spawned the important periodical Renaissance Quarterly. From a modest beginning, the RSA became international with a meeting in Florence n 2000 under the auspices of Executive Director John Monfasani, a student of Kristeller’s and a scholar of Byzantine and European Renaissance humanism. The RSA now boasts over 4,000 members, more than a quarter of them from outside North America. The Seminar celebrated its seventieth anniversary on December 8, 2015, with a roundtable discussion of its founders and origins. The continuities THINKING ALOUD

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with the Seminar’s earlier years were striking. Participants included two of Kristeller’s doctoral students, Cynthia M. Pyle and Susan Field Senneff. Other longtime Seminar members in attendance were George Saliba (professor emeritus, Arabic history) and the late Edward Tayler (professor emeritus, English). Maristella de Panizza Lorch, who first addressed the Seminar in 1952 on the topic of Lorenzo Valla, celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday that evening. Her student Peter Rudnytsky, secretary of the Seminar for eight years in the 1980s, recalled his relationship with then chairman Eugene Rice. Whose daughter, the art historian Louise Rice, was in attendance. So was Francis B. Randall, a historian of Russia and the son of John Herman Randall, Jr. Louise Rice and Francis Randal subsequently presented papers to the Seminar, and Randall’s son, David Randall—representing the third generation of Randalls—did so in a remote presentation on May 12, 2020. The Seminars’ primary function as sites of intellectual ferment whose members are fully engaged in the society around them was and remains of paramount importance to those of us currently active in the Seminar in the Renaissance, as it is now known. Polite, reasoned disagreement has always been our hallmark. Some of our discussions and arguments span decades. The perennial questions of how to define the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism persist in our meetings, though their treatment can be controversial, even revolutionary. We began our list of speakers in fall 2014 with Christopher Celenza (then of Johns Hopkins), who proposed “new avenues for considering the importance of the ‘long fifteenth century’ as a coherent whole.” On November 10, 2015, Rocco Rubini (Chicago) explored “‘Shame’ and ‘Posteritism’ in Renaissance Studies: From Kristeller to Petrarch,” reconsidering a Kristellerian view of Renaissance humanism (fairly exclusively philological, historical, and didactic work) in favor of Eugenio Garin’s greater openness to what can be seen as humanist philosophy. By contrast, in December 2018, John Monfasani (State University of New York-Albany) developed a finely hewn adherence to Kristellerian views. Meanwhile in March 2016, Nancy Streuver (Johns Hopkins) pursued some of Cassirer’s thoughts in considering “Cusanus/Valla; Northern/Southern Versions of Humanist Inquiry?” We are open to all dialogues across this spectrum and across the ages, with the express purpose of discovering the current relevance of subjects seemingly esoteric but actually fundamental, to life and culture today. We find scholars addressing the same or related questions about Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, Copernicus, Machiavelli, Renaissance humanism, and the idea of the [ 10 ] T H I N K I N G A L O U D

Renaissance itself, from many angles. They are inspired by work in their own fields of expertise, from art history to music history, to literary histories, and the history of various sciences. In recent years Patricia Osmond (Iowa State University in Rome) and Robert Ulery (Wake Forest) jointly explored the transmission of Sallust in the Renaissance (October 4, 2016). Robert Westman (University of California, San Diego) spoke to us about “Copernicus and the Astrologers” (September 13, 2016), while the philosopher Alan Gabbey (Barnard) played with the idea of “Hamlet as Machine” (November 1, 2016). Some of our most lively meetings in recent years have centered on topics in art history, broadly construed to include intellectual and even economic history. Among these have been the following: Ingrid Rowland (Notre Dame) on the patronage of “Two Renaissance Magnates: Agostino Chigi and Jakob Fugger” (March 6, 2018) Louise Rice (NYU) on “The Natural Magic of Magnets: Images of Attraction in Seventeenth-Century Rome” (February 9, 2016) Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto) on Nicolaus Hogenberg’s engravings of the post-coronation cavalcade of Emperor Charles V in Bologna (1530) (November 14, 2017) Mark S. Weil (Washington, St. Louis) on the Mantuan Giorgio Ghisi’s complex engraving, “The Allegory of Life” (April 10, 2018) Michael Shank (Wisconsin), a historian of science, on Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation” (April 9, 2019), in part responding to a 1967 Seminar talk by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin Gail Aronow, an independent scholar who recently presented primary archival research on previously unknown activities of a major sculptor of the fifteenth century, Jacopo della Quercia (February 13, 2018). We also celebrate—and reopen discussion of—key figures and events. In 2017, to commemorate Martin Luther’s theses of five hundred years earlier, Euan Cameron (Union Theological Seminary) gave a talk entitled “From the 95 Theses to the Reformation WorldView.” Most recently, just days after the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death (May 2, 2019), we hosted the two discoverers of the recently unearthed (and controversially attributed) Leonardo painting Salvator Mundi: Robert Simon of the Robert Simon Gallery and Dianne Modestini, a conservator at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, spoke on “Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi: Looking Back at Its Discovery After Fourteen Years.” And in September 2019, we began our academic year with Carmen Bambach’s technical and intellectual analysis of Leonardo’s THINKING ALOUD

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St. Jerome, which she obtained on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Vatican Museums. Dr. Bambach has just published a four-volume study of Leonardo’s life and work, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale, 2019). These last two commemorative talks have centered on the technical points in studying and restoring Leonardo’s works. They are now far more visible, by means of ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, than they were in 1949, when the Leonardo scholar Ludwig von Heydenreich spoke in the Seminar on scientific illustration. The discussion of his talk exemplifies the informal “thinking aloud” that has characterized our Seminars from the beginning, as recorded in these slightly edited minutes from March 22, 1949: Dr. Moody, after the slides, observed that the Renaissance scientist and artist had the same interest. Leonardo represented this coincidence of art and science the best.This value of coincidence should be recognized by others. Prof. Fleming asked if the slides shown of Conrad Gessner of Zurich’s illustration were truly representative of his. The ones shown that night did not seem to be a just example of his work. He does some fine intricate work. Prof. Heydenreich answered that he did not want to illustrate Gessner’s type of work but merely wanted to show that Gessner, as a Renaissance scientist, desired to elucidate his research into biology, zoology, etc., by images. He agreed with Prof. Fleming that Gessner did some fine work illustrating birds and deer. Dr. Rosen asked why certain illustrations of the Creation myth of that period portrayed the 5th and 6th day upside down. Prof. Heydenreich and Prof. Meiss thought this was due to some mechanical defect. Mrs. Bennett asked why this had not been corrected if it was a mistake and not intentional. Mr. Miller pointed out that there was a mistake in the borders of illustrations as well. Dr. Moody asked how they could be called “upside down” if they were supposed to portray a center. Dr. Rosen said he was not referring to the traditional Aristotelian conception of the cosmos. Mrs. Bennett suggested that this was done to show the world as before the Fall, which was supposed to have caused a departure from the original work of God.

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Prof. Meiss said he had never seen such illustrations. Dr. Rosen stated that these illustrations had caused controversies. Prof. Fleming asked Prof. Heydenreich what had become of the Vesalian prints at Munich. Prof. Heydenreich answered that they had been destroyed. Prof. Fleming asked about the beginning of modern printing at Munich. Prof. Heydenreich said he did not know where it had begun and that he did not know much about its origins in Padua, Milan, etc. Prof. Hexter asked about other countries. Prof. Heydenreich stated that the Dutch are recorded as making an effort to detect and give true images of scientific illustration from 1400 on.12 These detailed minutes from more than seventy years ago (similar to those taken by today’s rapporteurs of discussions in the Seminars) bring alive to us what were then—and have remained—the Renaissance Seminar’s dynamics. Bringing to the meeting their own multidisciplinary perspectives, the participants come in from a tangent, asking questions clearly not expected by the speaker but informed by their own often very different training. Often a paper will open up multiple debates in adjacent fields. In the foregoing minutes Fleming asks Heydenreich about modern printing in Munich, and Hexter asks about scientific illustrations in other countries— both areas beyond Heydenreich’s expertise, as he notes—as the Seminar members realize how his paper’s insights might, furthermore, bear importantly and unexpectedly on their own scholarship. Our discussions continue to be lively, with a heady mixture of fields in attendance. At the same time, we are committed to encouraging presentations on topics that challenge our accepted notions of the Renaissance, widening the scope of inquiry (linguistic, geographical, methodological). Illustrative of these thrusts have been recent talks by Seth Kimmel (Columbia) on “The End of Islamic Iberia?” (February 12, 2013); Daniel Hershenzon (Connecticut-Storrs) on “Exchanging Slaves Head for Head in the Early Modern Mediterranean” (January 16, 2014); Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia) on “Islamic Embryology and Renaissance Polemics” (February 10, 2015); Claire Gilbert (St. Louis University) on Arabic translators in Renaissance Spain (April 11, 2017); and Francis Randall (Sarah Lawrence) on “The Renaissance in Russian History and Memory” (October 10, 2017). Our topics remain relevant. Many aspects of Renaissance politics, art, and science bring up current questions both in the lectures and in the discussions

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normally continued over dinner following the lectures. In our Seminar we are consistently aware of the need to revive and seriously reconsider ideas and topics from the fourteenth through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and part of the seventeenth centuries in relation to current events and phenomena. Indeed, one of our cochairs left the field of the life sciences to study this period with a Seminar founder because the period corresponded in many ways to our own, with relevant messages and potential lessons.This is in itself a controversial way of looking at the Renaissance these days. But it continues to be one of the main motivating forces behind our study of the period. Though this may sound Whiggish to some, it is well to recall that the Renaissance scholar Charles B. Schmitt (a student member of the Seminar in 1955–56) implicitly advocated the study of Renaissance university philosophy and science for its “positive value for the future [i.e. later] development of modern science and philosophy.”13 He may well have read Hans Baron’s 1943 Journal of the History of Ideas article alluding to these very intangibles among fifteenth-century humanist thinkers. The seventy-five years of the Seminar have, inevitably, seen changes. Since the early 1950s, the Seminar has not functioned as an accredited course, and its inclusion of even advanced graduate students has been wanting. Rapporteurs are enthusiastic about learning from our meetings and usually take part in the discussion over dinner following our talks. Advanced graduate students in related fields are always welcome to attend the meetings, and we are excited about plans to fund their participation occasionally in the continuing discussion over dinner at Faculty House. (As elected cochairs in 2014, we changed the order of meeting and “breaking bread,” as Tannenbaum called it, to allow for continuing our discussion time over a leisurely dinner rendered convivial with the wine kindly supplied by the Seminars Office.) We are happy with the format of the Seminars as they have been conducted in our experience (dating from the 1970s); that is, holding meetings centered on one talk and subsequent discussion. But we are open to exploring a partial return to the format of addressing, over several meetings, some themes discussed in the first meetings of the 1940s—including the idea(s) of the Renaissance and the idea(s) of Renaissance humanism. Some students and self-defined followers of Kristeller are calling the very existence of the Renaissance into question, to the point that the term “Renaissance” is (once again) falling out of fashion. We might begin to devote successive sessions to discussions of such thoughts based on papers read by members and guests, and possibly [ 14 ] T H I N K I N G A L O U D

stretching across two or more meetings, as in the 1940s and 1950s, when the term was returning to acceptance after a period of attack from medievalists who felt their age was being neglected. This is a cycle that seems to repeat every fifty years or so, one that our Seminar has weathered and will continue to weather in the future. Publications are certain to arise from these and many of our meetings, as they have throughout our Seminar’s long history. In other words, we shall continue our “Thinking Aloud” for the foreseeable (and even, it is to be hoped, the less foreseeable) future. We are happy to ponder imponderables, and so it seems that our thinking aloud in a congenial atmosphere has borne fruit and will continue to do so, both in concrete publications and in stimulating further thought and collegial conversation.

Notes 1. F. Tannenbaum, “Origin, Growth, and Theory of the University Seminar Movement,” in A Community of Scholars. The University Seminars at Columbia, ed. Tannenbaum (New York: Praeger, 1965), 10. 2. F. Tannenbaum, “The University Seminar Movement at Columbia University,” Political Science Quarterly 68 (1953): 171. 3. Columbia University Archives [CUA]. John Herman Randall, Jr. [1899–1980]. Catalogued Correspondence, Box 1: 1911–77. 4. CUA. Kristeller Papers, Ser. IV, Subser. iv, 3, Box 113, Folder 19. Thanks to Dr. Luka Boršic´ (Institut za filozofiju, Zagreb) for pointing out this fruitful box. 5. CUA. Kristeller Papers, IV, iv, 3, Box 113, Folder 16. 6. CUA, University Seminars, Box 95. 7. CUA. University Seminars, Box 95. 8. CUA. Kristeller Papers. IV, iv, 3, Box 113. 9. J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), viii. 10. CUA. Kristeller Papers. IV, iv, 3, Box 113, Folder 23. 11. Tannenbaum, “The University Seminar Movement,” 171-72. 12. CUA. Kristeller Papers, IV, iv, 3, Box 113, Folder 19. 13. C. M. Pyle, “The Renaissance Rediscovery of the Classical Approaches to the World: Reflections on History and Science, Then and Now,” in Building the Past. Konstruktion der eigenen Vergangenheit, ed. R. Suntrup and J. R. Veenstra (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 12.

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CHA P T E R 2

Critiquing the Enlightenment The Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture (#417) E L I Z A B E T H P OW E R S

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iven that one cannot read the minds of the founders of the Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture, one can only speculate on why they did not choose “Seminar on the Enlightenment” as its name—especially seeing that the movers behind the founding, in particular Otis Fellows and Peter Gay, wrote important works containing that resonant word in their titles. My own speculation is that the Germanborn Gay, who set the agenda at the inauguration of the Seminar, might have wished to distance the proceedings from the pessimistic view of the Enlightenment set down in the 1944 study by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In 1964, two years after the Seminar’s founding, Gay would publish The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf), which was followed in 1966 by The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf), the first volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The second volume, The Science of Freedom (New York: Knopf), which appeared in 1969, also underlines Gay’s positive assessment of the eighteenth-century intellectual movement. Indeed, Enlightenment loomed large at the start, as can be seen in Gay’s background paper circulated to participants at the first meeting of the Seminar on October 17, 1962. In it Gay referred to the Enlightenment as a “loose and varied collection of ideas and prejudices, belonging together as a ‘family’ of ideas.” A few years later, in the 1966 University Seminars directory, Gay’s influence on the Eighteenth-Century Seminar’s agenda is mentioned: “The [ 16 ]

program for the academic year 1962–1963 concentrated on an attempt to establish some definition of the term ‘Enlightenment.’ As a basis for later discussion we had an admirable statement of aims and themes prepared by Professor Peter Gay of the History Department.” The Seminar’s first year (1962–63) testifies to the Enlightenment focus. Besides discussions of Gay’s “Certain Problems Involved with Our Total Concept of the Enlightenment,” topics included “The Enlightenment’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Music” (Paul Henry Lang), “The Fine Arts in Relation to Enlightenment” (Rudolf Wittkower), and “Unitarianism: A Middle-Class Enlightenment?” (Robert K. Webb). In this first year and succeeding years, papers or outlines were distributed in advance to further discussion, after which minutes of earlier meetings were distributed to members for further remarks or corrections. It is in the 1966 University Seminars directory that we see that the naming of the Seminar was actually fortuitous. While alluding to “the same general problem” (i.e., a definition of the term “Enlightenment”), it continued: “What kind of generalizations can be made which will fit the different cultures in the various nations, and be significant in all disciplines?” Thus already by 1966, one observes a move away from the overriding theme of Enlightenment to an emphasis on the different components of the larger “family,” one representing so-called European culture. The directory, listing the names of members and the field of each, documents components of the larger European focus: German, English, French, history, philosophy, musicology, Russian history, French history, law, and art history. In the same 1966–67 directory, the presentations concentrated on works and figures of various national cultures: Rousseau and the origin of language (Ronald Grimsley), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Robert Halsband), English architectural literature (Rudolf Wittkower), and the politics of The Persian Letters (Orest Ranum). The topics covered in the first decade likewise drew from this broad territory: classicism in Germany (Joseph Bauke) neoclassical architecture (Rudolf Wittkower), manuscript collecting (James M. Osborn), Hobbes’s politics and religion (Quentin Skinner), the “mass production” of the Encyclopédie (Robert Darnton), the philosophes and music (Robert L. Issherwood). Peter Gay continued to wrestle with the larger issue in a 1972 paper entitled “The Persistence of Enlightenment Ideas in the Modernist Period.” These topics fit the purview (again, according to the 1966 bulletin) of drawing from “the different cultures in the various nations” and at the same time CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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being “significant in all disciplines.” I emphasize “significant,” as the topics centered on works and figures deemed, from the vantage point of the early 1960s, to have represented the conceptual (European culture) relatedness. The succeeding history of the Seminar shows that “significance” is itself a progressive term. Gay had used the word “ideas,” which offers a hint of how a felt European culture might have come into being. The eighteenth century was the first era in history in which ideas really could be said to travel, in the modern sense of the word. In his 2010 talk at the Seminar “This Is Enlightenment,” Clifford Siskin used the word “mediations” in connection with the rise of new infrastructures that enabled the transmission and communication of information. The intellectual commerce that occurred among the various nations of Europe in the eighteenth century was facilitated by improvements in postal service (which had begun in the seventeenth century), the increasing number of books printed in vernaculars (instead of Latin), and even overland travel. It has been said that one of Louis XIV’s worst ideas—the revocation of the Edict of Nantes— was a boon to publishing, as it led to the exodus of Huguenot printers to Holland, where publishing activities escaped the censorship of the Old Regime in France. A presentation by Marc Raeff in May 1964, “The Penetration of 18th-Century Western Ideas Into Russia,” reflects this age of intellectual commerce, and the presentation in 1970 by Leonard B. Schlosser, president of the Lindenmeyr Paper Corporation, “Paper: Messenger of the Age of Enlightenment,” tells us about the medium. The first two decades of the Seminar in particular reflect this commerce while again underlining the happy choice of “European Culture” as the title of the Seminar. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the typewritten announcements of the Seminar’s talks offer a glimpse of the early decades. They included the speaker’s name, the title of the paper, and the time and place of the meeting (generally the Men’s Faculty Club, which was renamed Faculty House in 1972), and were undersigned by Chair James L. Clifford in the first year. In this connection it might be pointed out that the rapporteurs (then called secretaries) were all women, their initials typed in the lower-left corner of the announcement. B.J. Rahn, whose work on the eighteenth-century novel under Clifford led to a professorship at Hunter College and research on the modern crime novel, was the first rapporteur. [ 18 ]

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A later rapporteur with whom I corresponded while writing this chapter is Lee Morrissey, now at Clemson University. For him the meetings were “akin to attending a high-level conference panel every month”: Aware as I am that there were graduate classmates of mine who knew more—much more!—about eighteenth-century European culture than I did, I cannot imagine why then-chair Jim Basker chose me to be a rapporteur for the Seminar; but I do know that the experience was one of several great acculturating gifts he gave me during my years at Columbia. . . . Few graduate students, it seems to me, have such an extended intergenerational conversation with faculty in their field in relatively formal settings outside the classroom, as rapporteurs. Once I joined the faculty at my university, I stepped into a mix of newly hired faculty, such as myself, just starting out, and senior faculty in prominent titled and administrative positions at my then-new university post. I have seen colleagues founder under the combination of generous solicitousness and intergenerational differences that characterizes even a good experience on the tenure track. In my case, though, I had become accustomed, without knowing it at the time, to balancing discussions of my work with discussions about changes in the field, or in universities more broadly, because I had been a rapporteur at a Columbia University Faculty Seminar. I know that I benefited from it, and can only hope that I have also emulated their interest in this young person, now that I have become a full professor, a department chair, and a college (interim) dean in turn. An important component of fraternization to which Lee refers, one that continues to the present, has been the cocktail hour preceding dinner and the talk. In the announcement of the November 28, 1962, meeting, Clifford mentions that the meeting had to be held at John Jay Hall, where there was no bar.Therefore, “those who would like to meet for cocktails before dinner will gather as usual at the Men’s Faculty Club at 6:15 and will walk over to John Jay from there.” A now quaint custom of the early years was Ladies’ Night, when wives joined the festivities at the final presentation of the academic year. In May 1980, mention is made in the announcement of the final meeting—“what used to be called ‘Ladies Night’ and now eludes fully adequate designation”— that members were encouraged to bring husbands, wives, or guests. By then CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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several female scholars had already given papers, with Helen Bacon of the Columbia Classics Department being the first, in 1964, on the subject of “Horace as a Classicizing Poet.” Alice Green Fredman spoke in 1970 on Mary Shelley, and Jean Perkins (on censorship) and Arline Meyer (on John Wooton) appeared on the 1979 program. Carol Blum, of Columbia’s French and Italian Department, was the first female chair (1983–84), followed by Gita May. Changes that have come into being in eighteenth-century studies generally can be seen in revisions of the description of the Seminar’s mandate. The 1970–71 directory reads, The seminar, since its inception in 1962, has been chiefly concerned with inquiries into the spirit of the Enlightenment under its various manifestations throughout the 18th century. Membership, which has been more or less constant across the years, has continued to consist of scholars expert in some particular field of literature, history, music, the fine arts, sociology, philosophy, economics, law, but who also enjoy discussing 18th-century culture in general. . . .The Seminar has, among its multiple functions, served as a useful sounding board for members and guests wishing to present future articles and chapters of books first as papers coming under the scrutiny of those present at the Seminar dinners. By 1983–84, the description in the annual bulletin had been slimmed down: Scholars from a variety of disciplines—historic, literature, philosophy, music, and art—present papers from works in progress treating some aspect of 18th-century European culture. These papers occasion discussions that are at once of interest to the group and of value to the speaker. In this way the Seminar serves both to widen the knowledge of the members beyond their immediate area of specialization and to provide a forum for the testing of new ideas and approaches. By this date a new generation of scholars had come into existence, bringing with them new ideas and approaches. The reassessment of foreign language education in the United States after the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, combined with study abroad, had produced younger scholars, males [ 20 ]

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and females both, trained in various European languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. So it was that the meetings of the Seminar in the 1970s and 1980s, although with a continuing focus on the now so-called traditional topics (“The Enlightenment Came First to England,” by Arthur Wilson in 1978), included presentations uncovering formerly underappreciated or underinvestigated aspects of the larger European culture. Four female scholars of this new generation can be included here: Jean L. Macary (The Jesuits and the Dictionnaire de Trévoux), Judith Colton (on politics, poetry, and landscape art on the example of John Wooton), Deborah Hertz (on female intelligentsia of the Berlin salons), and Jean Perkins (on French domestic life). Betty Rizzo’s talk in 1991, “Women’s Class Mobility: Potentialities and Limits,” might be considered the first entry into the field of women’s studies. The next season saw Rose Zimbardo speaking on “Genders, Sexualities & Representation in Restoration and Early 18th Century Satire.” By that date, culture studies were ascendant in any case, as can be seen in the presentation of Randolph Trumbach in 1989: “Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the Structure of Society in 18th-Century London.” The variety of topics listed in the annual directories includes politeness, gambling, self-love, black London, poverty, charity, Samuel Johnson’s Protestantism, Aphra Behn’s love letters to her brother, and the early romance genre. From a practical point of view, these trends were well established in academia by the time Michael McKeon brought them into focus in 1994 with a presentation on the eighteenth-century origins of interdisciplinary studies. McKeon already had contributed a chapter to a 1987 collection edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen), which, as per Nussbaum’s preface, promised a “revision or problematization of period, canon, tradition, and genre” in eighteenth-century studies on hand of “a variety of theoretical practices,” in the process representing a “break with traditional treatments of 18th-century culture.” Among the approaches Nussbaum mentioned were those of feminism, Marxism, new historicism, deconstructionism, and psychoanalysis, “sometimes combined.” The aim was the refutation of “a single story of the period, the texts, or methods used to examine them.” As if the presentations in the Seminar had endorsed a “single story of the period”—indeed, aside from the inaugural year, the abbreviated accounts of the foregoing talks suggest that even in succeeding years, when Peter Gay was chair, the meetings hardly offered a single story and certainly not CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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a single text. The difference was in the introduction of theory, which promised to “read forward.” It no longer would be a case, as in traditional scholarship, of reading backward, of unpacking the traces of literary predecessors (one could also apply this to historical events), documenting the immediate conditions of the creation of a work or its immediate reception. It would embrace, as McKeon wrote, placing a work (or, again, an event) as part of an ongoing historical process, “bearing within its own composition the distinguishing marks of its continuity with the world it has ostensibly left behind.” Note, however, that neither Nussbaum nor McKeon abandoned the notion of eighteenth-century culture. Although the two approaches might seem in opposition—a picture of a seemingly unified European culture (i.e., the Enlightenment) versus a centrifugal narrative—both testify to forces and factors (Siskin’s “new infrastructures”) that, starting in the eighteenth century, loosened the bonds of church, state, and tradition and led to the evolution of unprecedented economic, legal, and social forms. With the hindsight now offered by cultural studies (broadly defined), the early presentations of the Seminar enable us to appreciate that the various nations of Europe, comprehended in the term “European culture,” took part in secularization processes that were ongoing from the Renaissance. It was the conceptualization of these processes—again, Gay’s “ideas”— set down in texts and practices, that began to travel during the eighteenth century itself, emanating from the centers of Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin. From a twenty-first-century vantage point, one can see that cultural studies represents a continuing manifestation of the spirit of disruption that seized Western Europe in the eighteenth century and that led to the questioning—indeed, deconstruction—of the world of yesteryear. The sense of such disruptiveness can be seen in the liveliness of presentations in succeeding years, in which even canonical figures and works were shown in a heretofore unsuspected light: sexuality in James Boswell, pornography and Marie Antoinette, and London prostitutes in visual culture. Literary figures and texts were resituated in a larger frame, one reflecting current anxieties: Goethe and the question of the global; climate, time, and the unsustainable countryside in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; corruption, consumption, and other tropes of national ill-health in eighteenth-century British literature. And long before the “Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,” there was at least one presentation on a crime passionnel. In 2001, Joseph Reed spoke on “love and madness” in connection with James Hackman’s murder in 1779 of [ 22 ]

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Martha Ray, mistress of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (yes, he of the sandwich). As John Richetti put it in his keynote address at the fiftieth-anniversary symposium of the Seminar in 2012, “For me at least, such papers were less predictable, more interesting in their specificity and quirkiness than the Olympian musings that dominated the earlier years of the seminar.” He might have been alluding to such presentations as “Oysters for Hodge: Gender, Johnson’s Biographers, and the Cat” (Lisa Berglund, 1999), “Dancing Dogs and Wonderful Pigs: Curiosity and the Ridicule of Reason in 18th-Century Culture” (Barbara Benedict, 2000), “The Affair of the Poisoned Communion Wine” (Jeffrey Freedman, 2000), and “The Sensitive Man and Masculinity” (Heikki Lempa, 2004). And let us not forget Linda Merian’s presentation on representations of Hottentots in English literature! As Dan Edelstein has written, rather than “a neatly organized Encyclopédie,” the Enlightenment confronts us “with a corpus resembling Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia: an apparent jumble, missing an inherent classificatory system.” This seeming jumble, to which these later presentations of the Seminar testify, was the result of radical forces on the ground in the eighteenth century. Europe was becoming a commercial society, unleashed from religious restrictions on the market and the accumulation of wealth. The Continent was in the process of disturbing the quietude of a social order in which the majority of people were trapped in generational poverty or servitude—a situation very few could have perceived even a century earlier. It was the big thinkers of the period, among them the French philosophes, who sought to conceptualize the changes on the ground, imagining prospects for human society that, in current times, appear far-fetched. But those big thinkers did not enjoy our hindsight. They were simply the first to sense the ground moving under their feet, the first Adams and Eves venturing out to establish a new, better world. In this connection, a theme in recent years at the Seminar has been race. Three speakers in 1997–98 had race or slavery as their subject: Gretchen Gerzina on black London in the eighteenth century, Charlotte Daniells on slave traders, and Frank Felsenstein on gender and race in Inkle and Yairico. As of this writing, current Chair Kathleen Lubey has announced (by e-mail; no more laboriously typed letters) a forthcoming talk by Kathleen Wilson on “Blackface Empire.” The abstract of Wilson’s talk begins with this question: “How did the theatrical practice of blackface help establish geopolitical domains of the British empire?” Presentations at the Seminar have CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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demonstrated that support for the ideals of the Enlightenment—foremost among them equality among “men”—did not preclude ownership of slaves. At the same time, the eighteenth century, for the first time in history, was the era in which large numbers of people began to object to the inhumanity of slavery, the notion of “inhumanity” itself being an eighteenth-century product. James Basker, a past chair of the Seminar, in addition to making presentations at the Seminar on the subject, has edited a volume that demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, a commitment to the equality of all men took hold: Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery. The new approaches to eighteenth-century European culture remind us that “Enlightenment” remains an unfinished product. During the past fifty-plus years, the chairs have sought to draw up thematic assessments. These have included symposia on “Anglo-French Enlightenment: Affinities and Divergences” in 1971; “Classical, Hellenistic, and Late Antique Texts in the 18th Century,” an international two-day event organized by Seminar member Martha K. Zebrowski in 2003; and, in response to challenges in the early twenty-first century to freedom of speech, a forum on free speech and civil liberties in 2006. In that forum Arthur Cash (State University of New York) spoke on the radical journalist John Wilkes, and Vincent Blasi (Columbia Law School) presented about James Madison. In 2007–2008, the entire schedule was devoted to the origins of the modern concept of free speech in various European contexts (United States, Denmark-Norway, Russia, Germany, the Hispanic world, England, the Netherlands, and France). Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Seminar in 2012, Chair Al Coppola organized a two-day conference called “The Study of EighteenthCentury European Culture: Past, Present, Future,” which assessed the past scholarship of the Seminar and explored new directions. As Al acknowledged in announcing the conference: “The institutional memory of our seminar recalls a form of interdisciplinarity before it became a buzzword, and a style of studying culture that pre-dates cultural studies.” In his lively keynote remarks, John Richetti adroitly addressed both past and present, which included some choice personal anecdotes that constitute a first-person memory of the Seminar. John had been a graduate student at Columbia when the Seminar was founded, went on to become a member in the late 1960s when he was an assistant professor, and, later, when at Rutgers, had frequently journeyed to [ 24 ]

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the city to attend meetings.What he could never forget was “the formidable intellectual and academic distinction of the founders; there were giants in the earth (or at least on the Columbia faculty) in those days. The members were all distinguished full professors at Columbia, some of them very well known far beyond Morningside Heights.” He recalled an incident from his early days of attendance: I remember vividly that in those years I would buy two pretty good (as expensive and excellent as I could manage) cigars on my way to the seminar, and after dinner when we adjourned to the seminar room John [Middendorf] and I would sit in the back and actually smoke those cigars with great satisfaction. Nowadays such things defy belief as illegal and radically unhealthy behavior! As far as Q&A periods go, John confirms that the Eighteenth-Century Seminar in those days did not differ greatly from contemporary academic confabs: I won’t identify any of these characters by name, but they deserve grateful remembrance. There was (this my favorite) the German sociologist who at the end of the paper would always be among the first to respond, jumping to his feet, smiling seraphically and in an accent I can’t do justice to: “Your paper was very interesting. It reminded me of what Adorno (or Karl Barth, und so weiter [and so on]) said to me one day.” And then would follow an amusing anecdote like the one about Mozart and Bach (“In Heaven the angels listen to Mozart, but the good Gott he listens to Bach”), whose relevance to the paper was at best elusive. Then there was the elderly eminence in a French department, who in his later years would always ask the same, sometimes utterly bewildering and irrelevant question, “What does your paper tell us about the picaresque novel?” In this connection, David Liss, rapporteur under Jim Basker’s chairmanship, sent me the following anecdote: “Most of the things I remember about the Seminar (aside from the experience of socializing with scholars) were moments of hilarious disaster—like the time when a participant’s hearing aid was producing loud and disruptive feedback and the guest chair handed me a note asking me to handle it.” (David is now the author of historical CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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mystery novels, the first of which was A Conspiracy of Paper, set in London in the period leading up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1732.) For John Richetti, the most significant change in the Seminar over the decades is “a democratization, a distinct widening of the circle of participants from the Olympian heights of the founders, a definitive retreat from the cozy masculinist and elitist club that they envisioned.” The widening of subject matter—especially growing “out of the heightened awareness we have acquired in recent years of race as a factor in 18th-century culture and consciousness” and a similar “emphasis peculiar to latter-day shifts in attention to sex and gender”—indicates that the “old unthinking masculinist elitism has withered away . . . replaced by a bracing egalitarianism in which the idea of a gathering of academic Olympians no longer resonates or applies.” By the club-like nature of the Seminar, John might have had in mind a “tradition” I discovered while going through archives of the Seminar. For about a decade before 1986, the cocktail hour at the final meeting of the year was held at the Columbia residence of one of the members. John Middendorf ’s name shows up frequently in the announcements in this connection and, in May 1983, John Richetti: “Through the gracious generosity of Prof. John Richetti we are able to continue another seminar tradition,” with members and spouses invited to cocktails at his apartment starting around 5:00 p.m. In his own presentation at the fiftieth-anniversary symposium, Isser Woloch also noted of the eighteenth-century volume of the Norton History of Modern Europe published in 1970 that it “was heavy on the world of the century’s great monarchs and thinkers” but lacked any mention of “peasants, women, artisans, workers, literacy, or primary education” or of “material culture.” Yet it was the great thinkers—in opposition to the great monarchs—somewhat like canaries in the mine, who first formulated ideas that would find their expression in civil liberties and democratic forms of government that, in time, ushered noblesse oblige off the stage of history. Freedom of the press and of speech showed their first signs of life in the eighteenth century. It was the radical unsettling in Europe in 2005 when the legitimacy of one of its most ancient privileges was under attack—the right of artists to caricature a sacred cow—that led me to organize a series of talks at the Seminar on the history of freedom of speech in the eighteenth century.This was on the heels of the so-called Mohammed cartoons controversy, when widespread protests in the Middle East led to much division in Europe and [ 26 ]

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the United States concerning freedom of speech. For defenders, the right had become such a part of their self-understanding, regarded as inalienable, along with other democratic freedoms, that they were at a loss when confronting the contention that Islam had an equal right not to be discussed— much less insulted—even in the heart of Europe itself. The following is what I wrote in my foreword to the edited volume of essays that appeared in 2011 as Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press): What seemed required—since even legal scholars were neglecting it— was a renewed understanding of the historical background that preceded the institutionalization of freedom of speech.While it is true that some people—namely, thinkers like the radical philosophes who will be discussed below—spoke of the universal nature of rights, including freedom of expression, their assertions of universality had much to do with the spread of intellectual commerce, including the dissemination of their own ideas, from one intellectual coterie of Europe to another in the course of the 18th century. It was not at all foreordained, however, and certainly not foreseeable that freedom of expression would be a foundational element of modern liberal societies. Free speech legislation as it came to exist grew not in a vacuum but from soil that had been well prepared and cultivated by several generations of thinkers and writers. The essays in this volume show how men (and a few women) articulated the issue, preparing the intellectual groundwork for the eventual institutionalization of free speech. There was no particular uniformity in this process, and at times it was retarded violently. Freedom of speech, like other liberal rights, has been achieved historically and is part of the West’s cultural patrimony. Looking back on this essay, I think now that in place of “the West’s cultural patrimony,” I could have written “European culture,” meaning a culture that emerged from the various contributions of the cultures of the different nations of Europe. This brings me to a final consideration. A question has been posed in the commissioning of chapters for this volume: “What have you learned from the past and how have the ‘lessons learned’ shaped your approach toward the future?” The Seminars, as mentioned in the 1970–71 directory, were to serve as a “sounding board.” As Bob Belknap put it to me when I became chair of the CRITIQUING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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Eighteenth-Century Seminar, the meetings were a place to “hang out your problems and get some feedback.” The Seminar is not a place to come and read from a finished book; instead, one looks forward to a response, even disagreement. Going forward I see two problematic issues with respect to this matter of conversation. As to the first, although it is true that the emphasis on material culture and culture studies in recent decades has made the past—and not only the movers and shakers but also ordinary people and trades—more visible, how do we distinguish the eighteenth century from the seventeenth century? It was, after all, in the seventeenth that the “new infrastructures” in science and technology and even in the simpler crafts began to take root and become institutionalized. Unlike the ideas in the heads of men and women, these material practices cannot be discretely segmented so easily. It was not the case, as Paul Hazard memorably phrased it in connection with the Enlightenment, that the French went to bed one night “thinking like Bossuet” and woke up the next morning “thinking like Voltaire.” The groundwork was laid before January 1, 1900. Thus going forward, what does “eighteenth century” mean in contradistinction to what went before? At the same time, fields of study that would quantify the observations or add flesh to them—in particular economics, science, and even law—have been underrepresented in Seminar presentations. (This lack can be seen from the very beginnings of the Seminar.) Literature and the humanistic studies generally have dominated. The current and recent chairs of the Seminar have endeavored valiantly to keep the range of topics wide. But a glance at the 2019 schedule of talks at the American Association of 18thCentury Scholars (founded in 1969) shows an overwhelming presence of speakers representing English departments. Indeed, the field of eighteenthcentury studies in the United States is increasingly dominated by “English” or “British” or “trans-Atlantic” studies. If by the late 1960s, a generation of scholars with a background of intense study in at least one foreign language was coming to the fore, foreign language instruction in the States (and in Europe as well) in recent decades has moved in the opposite direction. A report in 2018 by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the mandate of which is the promotion of the study of modern languages and literatures, testifies to the trend: “The 2016 ratio [of enrollment in foreignlanguage instruction versus overall student registration] is less than half of what it was in 1960 and approaches the lowest ratio recorded, 7.3, in 1980. Taking a long view, modern language enrollments have lagged far behind [ 28 ]

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overall college and university enrollments since 1960.” The MLA report further states, “the percentage of four-year colleges and universities requiring students to take courses in languages other than English dropped 17 percentage points between 1995 and 2010, to about half of all institutions.” In my own field of German, for instance, course enrollment declined from 95,614 in 2009 to 80,594 in 2016. But compare that with 1968: 216, 263! And consider what happened with French enrollment in 1968: 388,096. The title of a book published in 2001 by French historian Marc Fumaroli suggests a challenge we face in eighteenth-century studies today: Quand l’Europe Parlait Français. Note the English title of the English translation of 2011: When the World Spoke French. As I understand Fumaroli’s title, “Europe” did not mean the world but a specific part of the world. And as Fumaroli’s book went on to portray, this part of the world was evolving into a shared culture. Yet, despite the dominance of France in the field of ideas in the eighteenth century, the Europe that came into existence represented something like a canon in the process of formation, constructed from the different vernacular traditions of the different countries. Although all of Europe indeed might have spoken French, and though the major thinkers might have proselytized on behalf of “universal” values, they all wrote in their mother tongues. I do not know whether it is true, as Canadian scholar John Noyes has suggested, that a mother tongue preprograms an individual’s thought with an entire cultural history of interpreting the world. But if one language dominates the “conversation,” if all ideas are expressed in a single language— today that would be English—how shall we address the issue of a “family” of ideas, as Peter Gay did in 1962?

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CHA P T E R 3

Out of Chaos, Order The Seminar on Content and Methods of the Social Sciences (#411) TO N Y C A R N E S

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947 was a cruel year.World War II had cast up its victims on the rubble. The ship Exodus sailed uncertainly with forty-five hundred Holocaust survivors until finally landing in Palestine. The Cold War began with iron curtains falling on Poland and Hungary. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set up its Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight. It was in this context that the Columbia University Seminar on Content and Methods in the Social Sciences was conceived with a sad eye on the recent global calamity, a wary eye on what could happen, and a hopeful eye on assembling democratic forces to prevail once again. The birth of the atomic age meant that great impetus was given to a complex statistical understanding of the natural and social worlds. The purview of the Seminar was outlined in an anonymous ten-page memo, “A Three-Year’s Program for the University Seminar on Methods in the Social Sciences.” The intention was to broadly cover the aims, concepts, and assumptions in the social sciences—as well as subject matter, definitions, verification, measurements, indices, correlations versus causations, value judgments, and applications to social policy. At any one time, the Seminar has tended to focus on a few aspects of the social sciences, with numerous allowances for individual interests. The early participants came from fields such as anthropology, economics, jurisprudence, history, mathematical statistics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Our records from 1955 to 2019 list 417 presentations. The Seminar has [ 30 ]

produced chairs that have represented the interests of the members during each phase of its history. The first chair of the Seminar was public utility economist James C. Bonbright. At Columbia’s Business School and in the Economics Department, he promoted an increase in the use of statistical methods in measuring the economy. One of the young economists he championed was economic theorist William S.Vickrey, who was inclined toward the new advanced statistical analysis of the economy and who soon joined the Seminar. Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, who would play a major role in developing the Seminar, was another early arrival. It appears that the Seminar initially acted as a training ground for professors to get up to speed on the cutting edge of statistical social research methods. Anthropologist Ruth Bunzel, a protégé of Franz Boas, recalled that early topics included “Development of Mathematical Models in Social Science,” “Logic and Techniques: Measurement in Social Inquiry,” and “Methodological and Other Problems Which Arise from the Application of Social Science Methods to Various Disciplines.” The presentations by leading scholars from dozens of countries ranged from global analysis to “microinteractions” to a scientific study of the soul. They invoked nearly every method and theory on virtually every type of social and cultural process and structure. But how did one bring all these studies together into a comprehensible form? In 1956, Charles Frankel, one of the longtime administrative strategists at Columbia, took up this issue (and others) in his presentation, “Problems for the President’s Commission on the Educational Future of the University.” One of the problems was how to overcome departmental parochialism. In the same year of Frankel’s presentation, Robert K. Merton presented a report about a similar discussion on the future role of the social sciences that took place during The Harvard University Self-Study. Ruth Bunzel showed in her 1958 presentation, “Anthropological Methods in Culture-Personality,” how she, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead brought together cultural anthropology and psychology. Paul Lazarsfeld became chair of the Seminar in 1955, and his presence was crucial. In a November 4 letter to his colleagues, he announced that he wanted to shift the Seminar from a technical focus on statistics to a broader consideration of the future of interdisciplinary education in the university. He noted that “many other members” had “dropped out because of the O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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mathematical turn it took.” In short, he felt that the math and the social science discussions had covered about everything that they could. Efforts to integrate math and the social sciences, Lazarsfeld felt, might provide lessons on how to integrate all of the fields into multidisciplinary studies. He proposed a year-long discussion on “Cross-Departmental Training in the Social Sciences” and asked, “Would the economist be helped by a course in the psychology of the consumer? . . . Do sociologists need more thorough historical knowledge? Should the anthropologist be better informed on the theory of economic growth?” The unwary nonmath members would soon discover that Lazarsfeld was plotting a new college within the university. He would muse that the new initiative could even be spun off into a whole new University of the Social Sciences, which would send out students across the world to establish a wave of such universities. As Lazarsfeld always said, “Think big.” Although this idea never took hold, his advocacy caused many universities to add mathematical social research centers. To understand where Lazarsfeld was coming from, it helps to understand where he had been. Born in Vienna in 1901, he tried religion for a time as a boy, even demanding that his parents put on a “big bar mitzvah.” He never tired of seeing religion as a piece in the puzzle of the human condition. But he found his calling as a puzzle master in the academy. In 1925, he completed his dissertation at the University of Vienna on the mathematical application of Einstein’s theory of gravitation to the movements of the planet Mercury. Via Einstein, Lazarsfeld had stumbled into the scientific revolution that was going to shake the world and, indeed, the University Seminars. The European scientists of his time were introducing a new model of the physical universe that would entail using advanced statistical methods to handle a vast quantity of unknowns, uncertainties, and subtle influences.The scientific transformation can be likened to a change from seeing the world as fixed geometry to seeing it as continually changing relationships among matter, time, and space. The more fine-tuned statistical methods also were well suited for analyzing complex fluid social situations. Because he was a Jew, there was not much chance that Lazarsfeld could get a university appointment in Austria. So he combined his interests in mathematics and social reform to create, in 1925, a new type of independent social research center in Vienna. One of the projects was an audience survey for Radio Vienna. Likely the first of its kind, it provided a paradigm for his later research on the American radio audience. The research institute [ 32 ]

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also produced a path-breaking community study of out-of-work laborers in the Vienna suburb of Marienthal. At about this time Lazarsfeld read about Robert and Helen Lynd’s famous Middletown community research, begun in 1924, which pioneered the in-depth case study of Middle America in the midst of vast national social changes. In 1931, Lynd was appointed a professor at Columbia. A similar process was playing out in Frankfurt, Germany. There a revolutionary spirit was channeled into the establishment of the Institute of Social Research. Leftist scholars were creating a neo-Marxism that allowed the growing forces of capitalism to be steered into unexpected forms by figures such as Goethe, Freud, and Lenin. The movement became The Frankfurt School, and many of its proponents fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Around this time, too, the Rockefeller Foundation recognized the importance of the scientific revolution arising in Europe and used its money to bring many revolutionary scholars to the United States, including any number from the Frankfurt School. With his Marienthal and radio audience studies, Lazarsfeld caught the foundation’s attention. He received a shortterm fellowship to tour the States from 1933 to 1935 and met Robert Lynd for the first time. A fascist coup by Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria foreclosed Lazarsfeld’s safe return, so he asked Lynd and others to help him obtain a place for his radio audience interests at Rutgers University. Lynd also shepherded the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School into Columbia’s orbit and introduced its scholars to Lazarsfeld. The physicist-turned-public opinion researcher in turn hired Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Joseph Maier, Werner Cahnman, Mirra Komarovsky, and others for his projects. Most of these colleagues eventually followed Lazarsfeld into the Seminar. But there was opposition to adding Lazarsfeld to the Columbia faculty. In the late 1930s, the Sociology Department was split between two formidable figures. One was Lynd, who favored the use of statistics and community studies in the service of radical politics.The other was Robert MacIver, who favored old-fashioned theoretical approaches and moderate social reform rooted in Protestant piety. Lynd saw Lazarsfeld as a fellow traveler. MacIver, on the other hand, favored the hiring of Robert Merton, who he believed would emphasize theory and oppose what Mirra Komarovsky called “the use of natural science methods in sociology, especially of quantification and measurement.” The department came to an impasse on whom to hire, so Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler decreed that both would be hired in 1941. O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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One might think Lazarsfeld would see Merton as a rival or even an opponent. Instead, Lazarsfeld invited his colleague to dinner at his home. It was interrupted (unexpectedly?) by a call from Lazarsfeld’s research group, announcing that they were going to interview two respondents in a communication study that night. Lazarsfeld told his wife that he and Merton must go to see what was going on. They sat through the first interview, and Lazarsfeld could see that Merton was getting engaged and offering advice. Lazarsfeld turned to Merton and said, effectively, “Why don’t you do the second interview to show how it should be done?” Merton agreed and was hooked into Lazarsfeld’s enterprise. They proceeded to work in a fruitful relationship for decades, more or less ignoring the interests of Lynd and MacIver. This dynamic duo and their colleagues used the Seminar as a think tank on how to spread their new ideas of social science. Lazarsfeld soon began using the Content and Methods in the Social Sciences Seminar to promote his mathematical revolution in social science training. He was “relentless” and “enormously energetic,” recalled former student (and former Columbia provost) Jonathan Cole. Usually he would promote the same ideas through multiple avenues. In the process he came up with some of the ground-breaking ideas of sociology. Among these were the survey panel method, the two-step flow model of influence, latent structure analysis, and a unique elaboration scheme. Indeed, Lazarsfeld didn’t think that it was a giant step to mathematize all fields, even literature. He felt that social science methods were a literary form using math as a language. Thus, he believed, with survey research one could make money, advance science, and even write poetry. He and his colleagues would try to realize Francis Bacon’s dream of “pantometry”—the belief that all things can be measured. Having established the Seminar’s direction, in 1956, Lazarsfeld handed the chairmanship to Merton, who was similarly delighted in his predecessor’s puzzle-solving methods, curiosity, intelligence, and charisma. “Both men,” recalled Cole, “exerted a powerful gravitational pull on students: some had no interest in trying to escape, others suffered in continual efforts to break free.” C. Wright Mills called his move into the world of Columbia as getting “inside of the whale,” as did Jonah in the Bible. However, during or shortly after his participation in the Columbia Seminar, Mills coined the term “public intellectual” to distinguish himself from Lazarsfeld and his technocratic approach. [ 34 ]

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Lazarsfeld’s and Merton’s distaste for Mills’s sermonic style fit into a belief at Columbia that ideology and religion were of declining importance to the future of the world. Their colleague and sometime Seminar presenter, sociologist Daniel Bell, forecast that the future would see the end of ideology making way for the triumph of scientific-technical thinking. After Lazarsfeld and Merton opened the Seminar to qualitative, historical, and theoretical scholars, the type of chairs started to change. Between 1957 and 1973, the Seminar had seven chairs, starting with social psychologist Otto Klineberg and economic historian Shepherd B. Clough. An anthropological era of Seminar chairmanship began with Solan T. Kimball and continued with Ruth Bunzel, Lambros Comitas, and Rhoda Métraux. A sociologist of development, Baidya Nath Varma of CUNY, guided the Seminars in 1963, producing a book entitled New Survey of the Social Sciences. Economist William Vickrey continued his contributions, some of which were cited in his 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In 1960, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter and his colleague Walter Metzger explored “Social Science Approaches to American Culture as Viewed by the Historian,” and Mirra Komarovsky presented “Norms and Behavior in American Marriage.” In 1967, publisher David L. Stills discussed “Structural Problems on Making the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences: Content, Methods, Problems.” In addition, in 1967, Amitai Etzioni, the Columbia sociologist who later would write the influential book The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society, puzzled over “The Methodological Problems of a Sociological Peace Movement.” Another specialist in complex organization in the Columbia Sociology Department, Peter Blau, discussed “Differentiation in Organization” in 1971. The Seminar took a profound turn when Joseph Maier of Rutgers University joined in May 1961, eventually serving as chair between 1973 and 2000. Born in Germany, Maier escaped the Nazi death camps because his father had brought most of the family to the United States when he became a rabbi at an American synagogue. The son remained in Germany to go to university in Dresden. But as the situation became more threatening, he was able to make his way to the New World. Maier had been a valued intelligence analyst of Nazi propaganda and then an interrogator/analyst for the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi high commanders. A subtle and highly discerning interviewer, he insulted the pride of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Maier said that the Nazi was a braggart and too incompetent to kill the millions of people that O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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he claimed. “Prove it to me,” Maier challenged Höss. “Write it down and sign your name!” Höss angrily responded with the only known handwritten and signed confession by a high Nazi leader to the Holocaust. Much later, at his first Seminar presentation, Maier described how his understanding of the Judaic sacred tradition as one of ethical doing gave him such discipline and strength to coolly interview the man who put to death many of his family members. Perhaps because of these experiences, Maier waged a lifelong struggle to understand the German mind’s weakness for totalizing ideologies. Therefore, he opened the Seminar up to discussion on the rise and fall of totalitarianisms and autocracies. In 1976, Karl Wittfogel, a former Communist Party youth leader in Germany who became disenchanted with Soviet communism under Stalin, discussed totalitarian societies in “Oriental Despotisms.” Owen Lattimore, China scholar and State Department consultant (whom Wittfogel, among others, controversially accused of being a Communist sympathizer), responded in 1979 with “Is There a Crescent of Crisis in Asia?” In 1968, Maier brought aboard Werner Cahnman, his friend and colleague from Lazarsfeld’s Radio Institute. He, too, was puzzling out the role of German youth in the rise of the Third Reich. Consequently, Maier and Cahnman were both very uneasy with the 1968 student radicals and the takeover of the Columbia campus. (Edith Kurzweil, coeditor of Partisan Review and, for a short time, a Seminar cochair with Maier, her Rutgers colleague, also saw the violence in light of her memory of seeing the torching of Vienna’s largest synagogue in 1938.) The Seminar, however, had adherents from both sides of the countercultural debate, and Maier welcomed their disputes. In 1971, Alvin W. Gouldner delivered a blast against the establishment (including Lazarsfeld and Merton) with “The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.” Directly or indirectly, Benjamin Nelson, Irving Louis Horowitz, Peter Blau, and Robert Endlemen responded that same year with critiques of Gouldner’s presentation. The 1970s brought interest in German sociologist Max Weber and, consequently, the theory, history, and qualitative study of the role of religion in social change. That new interest coincided with Maier’s chairmanship. He wrote that he “had a passion for things German” and gave Weber a prominent place in his own work. Maier’s interest in Weber was based on his loyalty to the German Enlightenment tradition of rationality and freedom.1 [ 36 ]

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Weber first appeared in a Seminar presentation title in October 1974. Benjamin Nelson, a sociologist at The New School for Social Research, spoke on “Civilizational Perspectives in Pre-Galilean Science in China and the West: Joseph Needham and Max Weber,” comparing Weber with perhaps the greatest historian of Chinese science. Nelson had a lifelong interest in Weber, starting with his reporting on religion for the New York Times while a Columbia student in 1927–31. However, enthusiasm for Weber was not universal. In 1976, Seminar member Abraham Edel, a philosopher from City College and the University of Pennsylvania, published his comments at a Seminar symposium on “Crisis in Western Sociology.” He called on sociologists to free themselves from father figures such as Weber. Following Nelson’s untimely death in September 1977, the Seminar often discussed his and Weber’s legacy. In 1979, Seminar member and Columbia sociologist Guenther Roth and his German colleague Wolfgang Schluchter of the University of Heidelberg dedicated their book, Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, to Nelson. In 1981, a colleague of Nelson’s from The New School, Guy Oakes, reported on his philosophy of the social sciences project with “The Problem of Methodological Relativism in Weber and Simmel,” Georg Simmel being Weber’s protégé. Seminar members also became regular participants at the annual 1980s Weber colloquia of Nelson’s friend and Seminar colleague, sociologist Ronald M. Glassman, at William Paterson College. In the 1990s, Guenther Roth delivered definitive presentations on “Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History” and “Max Weber, Father and Son.” Roth’s detailed biographical work seemed designed to undermine Weber’s scholarly influence. Disagreeing with his friend Nelson, Roth told the Seminar, “My underlying premise is that Weber made only a small contribution to explaining the rise of capitalism.” By 1981, the debate also had shifted to Weber’s idea that “rationalization” must result in the inevitable secularization of society. In his Seminar presentation “The Opus Dei and the Modernization of Spain,” sociologist Jose Casanova of The New School foresaw a continuing role of religion in modernization, with a Catholic lay group playing much the same role that the Protestant reformers had in northern Europe. In 1984 and later, Helen Berger, a sociologist trained at The New School, pointed out in the Seminar presentation, “Repression and Rationality in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the English Witch Trials,” that there existed a subterranean Wiccan tradition of resistance to modernity’s repression of emotion O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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and secularization. From time to time Berger reported on aspects of her first-ever census of Wiccans in America and a follow-up world census. The Seminar and The New School cosponsored a 1985 memorial meeting for Nelson. This yielded the volume Civilization East and West, which featured his work on Weber, Freud, and others. The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, a 1986 volume by Edmund Leites, a professor of philosophy at Queens College, offered several Seminar publications that supplemented Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, more questions arose about connecting the development of reason, social organization, and secularization. Protected by its social location in the large working class and a strong Roman Catholic Church, the nongovernmental trade union Solidarity (Solidarnosc) helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe. From China, the USSR, and the Eastern bloc, scholars and journalists brought their analysis of the rapid changes happening in their countries. Herbert Strauss, director of the Center for Anti-Semitism Studies in Berlin, explored what the fall of the Berlin Wall meant for German Jews in his 1990 presentation, “German Reunification: Eastern and Western Attitudes Toward Jews in Fusion.” In 1991, Columbia political scientist Andrew Nathan surveyed the Soviet and Chinese developments with “Maoism as a Type of Regime: A Comparative Perspective.” In the early 1990s, Seminar member (and Robert Merton disciple) Tad Krauze of Hofstra University was one of the leaders of an initiative to create a Polish Encyclopedia of Sociology. By the 1990s as well, the Seminar was regularly considering the comeback of religion. The Seminar’s shift was marked by a 1991 presentation, “Reappraisal of the Russian Mentality” by Vladimir Trusov, director of the Institute of Social Research at St. Petersburg University. Trusov discussed how current Russian language indicated a widespread search for a religious or ideological guide. A dramatic turn for the Seminar was the discussion in September 1991 of the attempted coup, a mere month before, against President Boris Yeltsin. Through interviews, I and Samuel Kliger—a sociologist who had recently moved from Russia—had, by that June, spotted a shift toward religion among almost a third of the Soviet security forces. On the first day of the coup, they forecast on public radio that division in the ranks would undermine the plotters and that they would fail within three or four days—which is indeed what happened. [ 38 ]

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In 1994, Emmanuel Maier, a geographer from the University of Massachusetts (and Joe Maier’s brother), considered the wider implications of Russian politics in his presentation on the geopolitical thinker “[Halford] Mackinder and the Pivot of History.” In 1998, Tong Yan, editor of the Shaanxi Provincial Daily News, gave a perspective on the impact of “News and Culture in China.” Comments were provided by other Chinese intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers. African developments also received consideration. In 1989, anthropologist Françoise Dussart considered “The Choice of Widowers Among Warlpiri Women.” David Rawson, who was preparing to become the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda, wondered in his 1992 presentation, “Dealing with Disintegration: Donors and State Disintegration in Africa,” how tensions could be kept from exploding in Rwanda. In general, the Seminar was not optimistic. At a Seminar planning session in the spring of 1996, Judith Marcus, a historian of the Frankfurt School, bluntly declared, “We don’t do God in this Seminar! That is medieval!” Joe Maier responded the next fall with a presentation, his last to the Seminar, on the Pulitzer Prize–winning God: A Biography by Jack Miles. The Seminar also celebrated the awarding in October of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to our oldest member, William Vickrey. By the end of the decade, the Seminar was directing its eyes toward the rise of religion in the large cities of America. In 1997, Samuel Kliger, who cofounded the Research Institute for New Americans, presented results from his survey of new Russian Jewish immigrants. He noted that the Russian Jews did not want their religious (or nonreligious) explorations of the meaning of their lives in America to be controlled by American Jewish organizations. And H. Dean Trulear of New York Theological Seminary, along with myself, offered the results of a follow-up to the classic study The Black Church in the African American Experience by C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya. The 1997 restudy discovered that contrary to scholarly opinion, African-American pastors were eager to work with the government to provide social services but wanted management training on how to do so. The re-examination was cited as a reason for the founding of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Services and a similar position in the New York City mayor’s office. The end of the decade saw, too, the passing of two major Seminar figures. On February 10, 1993, Frank Tannenbaum’s longtime assistant and all-around organizational foreman, Alice Maier (Joseph’s wife), passed away. When Tannenbaum died in 1969, she helped hold together the Seminars O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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and guide the new directors, becoming an associate director herself in 1976 and retiring in 1980. As Tannenbaum’s successor, Aaron Warner, recalled shortly after Alice’s death, “I believe that the organization of the Seminar Movement would have fallen apart were it not for Alice.” Maier outlived his wife by nine years. The Seminar already had celebrated him with its 1989 festschrift, Surviving the Twentieth Century: Social Philosophy from the Frankfurt School to the Columbia Seminars. In 1997, the Seminars gave Maier its Frank Tannenbaum Award. Looking back, Maier expressed his satisfaction that he had served in the Tannenbaum spirit: “For over twenty years, I have followed a tradition to be as anarchic as possible and to generate the sense that in the end anything goes.” On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was gathering materials for our first Seminar of the school year. It would be my first full year as chair. At 8:56 a.m., a federal agent called me. He shouted, “Quick, turn on your TV! I have got to go. Bye!”The towers of the World Trade Center soon collapsed. By late afternoon, religious leaders at Columbia were holding a prayer vigil on the steps of Low Library. The university canceled our first Seminar along with other meetings on Wednesday. I had succeeded Maier as chair of the Seminar in January 2001. Beginning nine months later, and for the next 18 years, the Seminar puzzled over 9/11 and the religious revolutions going on around the world. Consequently, it was a time of great exploration by Seminar members of a new frontier in scholarship. In that spring of 2001, my introductory talk as the incoming chair was focused on the value of “catastrophe theory” to explain the social change that results from unexpected events. In his 1969 minor classic, Social Change and History, Robert J. Nisbet, a Columbia sociology professor in the 1970s, had described two competing theories of social change. One was an aspirational tale of inevitable progress despite appearances to the contrary. The other was the notion that society tends toward fixity unless punctuated by unexpected, disruptive historical events, migrations, and diffusion of ideas, resulting in innovations and uncertain reactions. Nisbet’s idea came from Frederick J. Teggart, his teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, who had gone through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Our discussion prepared us for the unanticipated calamity of 9/11. In this sense, 9/11 was a catastrophe that disrupted ideas and social stability and indicated the religious upheavals that were occurring almost behind [ 40 ]

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the back of social scientists. The Muslim terrorists caused an upheaval in American politics, a shattering of scholarly assumptions of inevitable secularization of the public square, and a shocked recognition that New York City itself was becoming more religious. Mayor Michael Bloomberg summarized the new understanding that could encompass Muslims, Jews, Christians, and the like into a new social compact: “there is not one square inch of New York City that is off-limits to the love of God.” In fact, the attack brought to our attention the fact that some other topics, such as the life of cities, did not often come up directly at the Seminar. From 1947 to 1990, the Seminar directly considered urban society only sixteen times. In 1964 and 1965, the Seminars briefly turned to sociologist Herbert Gans and others to address the immense problems that were arising in American cities and particularly in New York. But religion was hardly mentioned. We had a lot of catching up to do. The disruptions of the post-Communist world, the Middle East, and elsewhere sent streams of refugees to American cities. This exodus also came after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. Two-thirds of the Seminar presentations on city life took place between 2000 and 2019. The immigrants also created a vast number of new religious groups in the cities. Oddly enough, observed sociologist R. Stephen Warner, scholars largely ignored the immigrants’ impact on religious life in the cities. The Seminar leaped to fill this gap. In a series of papers and books, Seminar member Jose Casanova helped to redefine ideas of secularization and the sociology of religion. In 2001, Seminar scholars and others collaborated to produce a major scholarly overview of Gotham religions (including Islam), New York Glory: Religions in the City.That same year Samuel Kliger presented the influential results of the American Jewish Committee survey of Russian Jewish immigrants and also assessed their attitudes toward Muslims. In 2002, Courtney Bender presented her and Elta Smith’s discovery of innovative restaurant basement worship centers for Muslim taxi drivers in Manhattan.The implication of several presentations on Muslims in New York City was a demonstration of the ways in which Muslims were committing themselves to America and the peaceful pluralism of the country. A vision of a renewal of the public square that could encompass both the religious and nonreligious started to be discussed seriously among Seminar members. Also in 2002, Asakant Nimbark reported on how Indians shifted from secularism to religion after arriving in America, and Kenneth Guest reported O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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on religion in Chinatown. In 2004, several Seminar members joined with other scholars in publishing one of the first overviews of Asian American religions, Asian American Religion: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries (edited by myself and Fenggang Yang). It seemed that every research area on New York City religion offered frontiers of intellectual discovery to the Seminar. In 2005, Lowell Livezey joined the Seminar to discuss his research and that of his colleagues at New York Theological Seminary on how religions were adapting to the social ecologies of different areas of the city. After his untimely death, his collaborators published a book on their discoveries. One, coeditor Richard Cimino, is a member of the Seminar and also founder of the newsletter Religion Watch. As the evidence grew of a religious turn within the modern world, scholars became increasingly disillusioned with the whole intellectual apparatus built around certain ideas of secularization. One attempt to go beyond this dogma came in 2007, when David Porter of Northern Ireland discussed “Talking to Terrorists:The Role of Religion in Making Peace in a World of Terror.” Himself a Protestant who helped bring the Protestants, Catholics, and secularists in Ireland together, Porter pointed out that terrorism was not just the work of Muslims but could come from various religions and, indeed, the nonreligious. As Islam and other religions grew in Europe, the disaffection with the old secularization paradigm finally infiltrated the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School in Germany. This led Jürgen Habermas, one of that movement’s leading lights, to develop the concept of “postsecular society.” With this impetus the Seminar took a turn back to the Frankfurt people. In the spring of 2009, the Seminar hosted a large meeting to discuss the postsecular idea. The main presentation was by Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council and the next president of the London School of Economics.2 Responses came from sociologist-psychologist S. Alexander Weinstock, Seminar presidents Dale Irvin and Paul de Vries, Laurent Stern, artist Makato Fujimura, and others. Seminar members count this as one of the best conversations in the history of the Seminar. For example, one discussant recounted how the study of religion was an offlimits topic in the training of military intelligence officers. Thus when the officers arrived in Afghanistan to talk to captured Al-Qaeda soldiers who wanted to talk only about religion, they were clueless about how to respond. In the spring of 2010, geographer Justin Beaumont came from the University of Groningen to lead a mini-symposium hosted by the Seminar, “Are [ 42 ]

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There Post-Secular Cities?” To advance the question, some called to replace Weber’s ideas of objectivity and inevitable secularization with what is called “sympathetic objectivity.” This concept came right out of the Columbia Seminar discussions. In brief, the flaws in Weber’s and Émile Durkheim’s philosophy of objectivity had long been recognized. Both sociologists seemed to assume the superior worthiness of their viewpoints on society—particularly over those with religious beliefs—without allowing for a continuous interaction with the viewpoints of those whom they studied. A critical question was how to take into account the viewpoints of both the religious and nonreligious while finding a common ground of objective agreement. The failure to do this contributed to the rise of a vast distrust of scholars and the media by Muslims and other religious actors. Tolerance is not a sufficient answer, as it actually institutionalizes social distance between the researcher and the subjects of the research. Thus in a 2019 Seminar, philosopher Laurent Stern said, “Motivated by rational self-interest the more powerful group within a given society tolerates second best beliefs, institutions, or commercial enterprises. By tolerating them as second best, the more powerful build a wall separating what is accepted from what is merely tolerated.” Merely tolerating Muslims hardly builds a fruitful relationship. In the fall of 2010, the online magazine A Journey through NYC religions, founded and edited by this author, utilized the methods of sympathetic objectivity to report on “The Rise of the Post-Secular City.” The report won the Gerald Renner Award, the highest prize for in-depth religion reporting given by the Religion Newswriters Association. The work on the series occasioned several presentations at the Seminar as well. A major finding was that there were 50 percent more mosques/masjids in New York City than anyone had realized, and that their number was increasing rapidly. In 2011, Portuguese anthropologist Donizete Rodrigues drilled down into another surprise, the fast rise in the number of Brazilian congregations in New York City. The Seminar also looked back on the city’s history to uncover religious dimensions that often were missed and so led us astray. For example, in the reporting on the Crown Heights riot of 1991, Ari Goldman of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism revealed that the religious dimension was almost totally neglected. In fact, anti-Semitism was powerfully involved. In his 2013 presentation, “Science and Religion: a Biologist looks at the Human Soul,” the current Seminar director, biologist Robert O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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Pollack, explored how a religious scientist living in New York might collate his faith and science. As an anthropologist who joined the Seminar at about this time, Sidney Greenfield introduced a focus on the relation of religion and economics, utilizing a comparison between the United States and Brazil. His first presentations in 2012 and 2013 also reflected on how the 2008 financial crisis was made worse by the fact that economists treated market economic theory like some sort of holy cult and themselves as far-seeing priests. His presentations—“The English Enlightenment and the Economy: How Some Men With a Vision Created the Modern World” and “A Culture in Search of Rules: Some Unanticipated Consequences of the Freedom to Choose”— connected economic history to current crises. The Seminar’s push into understanding the relation of religion and democratic freedom received extra help from a Seminar special event in 2016 to celebrate the publication of R. Scott Hanson’s City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens. Hanson promoted the religious peacefulness and pluralism involving Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, and others in Flushing as a paradigm for other cities. Greenfield, a winner of the 2017 Frank Tannenbaum Award for contributions to the University Seminars, encouraged the Contents and Methods of the Social Sciences Seminar to assess the contributions of ethnography to public policy in the dynamics of a public square with lots of religious actors. In 2017, we invited Carmen Silva de Morales Rial of Brazil to bring to the Seminar her questions about “Brazilian Anthropologists’ Political Challenges.” What do social scientists have to offer, she asked, to the Pentecostal mayor of Rio de Janiero, the Pentecostal-supported mayor of New York City, the Sikh mayor of Jersey City, or the Muslim mayor of London? To guide us to answers to such questions, the Seminar elected Sidney Greenfield as my cochair for 2019–20. As was 1947 when the Seminar on Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences was founded, 2017 was a cruel year. Seven decades after the Seminar’s inception, many social scientists who predicted a Hillary Clinton triumph couldn’t accept the idea of Donald Trump as president of the United States. The shock brought tears to some in the Seminar. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the setting of their Doomsday Clock to two and half minutes to midnight. Millions of immigrants flooded into the United States before the gates shut. A much-reinforced “Golden Shield” fell upon China. [ 44 ]

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A difficult problem was that the social sciences had abandoned interest in Middle America in favor of race, gender, and class studies. A few experts, including Arlie Hochschild at the University of California, Berkeley, took the disruption of expectations as an opportunity to get to know workingand middle-class Americans again. Her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award, was a demonstration of the power of empathy in understanding someone who seems to occupy a strangely different culture. After her brief visit to Columbia, some of us in the Seminar thought that we could flesh out her ideas on empathy. She had admitted that she barely had the vocabulary to fully describe what she meant. Seventy-two years ago, the Seminar had a sort of American exuberance for building the post-World War II social sciences. People like Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton were pioneers of a sociology that was grounded in new, sophisticated statistical techniques. Their current progeny are the charismatic whizzes of algorithmic calculations about the economy and Internet audiences. There was an inordinate exuberance then, as there is today, for systems and mathematical calculations. Maier’s Seminar cautioned about the totalizing tendencies in society and intellectual thought. He and his colleagues favored reasoned thinking through the lessons of history and qualitative sociology as opposed to an unqualified reliance on the flashy techniques favored by the current charismatic whizzes. Recently I received a long (almost short book-length) paper that claimed to be a blueprint for future religious changes. It was full of well-done statistics, nice graphics, and smooth narrative explanations that we have come to expect from management consultants and marketers. What seemed to be missing, however, was a sense of uncertainty and exploration and any real empathy for people of other faiths and ideologies. This is why I sometimes tremble for the future of the social sciences . . . but not for the future of the Seminar.

Notes 1. After World War II, Maier passed along food parcels to Weber’s wife, Marianne. 2. “In my first year at the Social Science Research Council,” Calhoun recalled, “they said that humanists study religion, and I couldn’t, because I was in the social sciences.” O U T O F C H AO S, O R D E R

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CHA P T E R 4

Mirror Images and Parallel Progression The Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation (#539) W I L L I A M G. L U H R A N D C Y N T H I A L U C I A

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hat is our society doing to us—and how does it teach us to get its messages across and make us act and think the way it wants?” These are the questions founding cochairs Leo Braudy (then a Columbia English professor) and Daniel J. Leab (then a Columbia assistant history professor) raised in their September 1973 proposal to form the new Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. As we approach the third decade of the new millennium, many of us, in our significantly altered media landscape, are asking the same questions—this time with not only the mediating roles of film and television in mind but also the ever-expanding Internet and continually sprouting social media sites. The conception of cinema studies as a scholarly field now encompasses many representational forms not limited to cinema, as signaled more than a decade ago when the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) changed its name to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Although contexts and approaches have changed, the questions initiating our Seminar remain presciently relevant. The proposal of the Seminar’s founding cochairs went on to discuss cinema’s crucial positioning in mass culture as a mediator of attitudes, trends, information, and ideology. They also discussed the thenemerging position of cinema studies as an academic field, arguing that a relevant Seminar, “by a systematic interweaving of disciplines,” would “initiate a discourse able to bring to cinema the critique of language and meaning, and doubling back of interpretation on itself.” The first meeting of the

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Seminar took place on February 4, 1974, with the renowned scholar of documentary film Eric Barnouw (then professor emeritus of Dramatic Arts at Columbia) as its first speaker. What is fascinating about the historical positioning and trajectory of the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation is that it so closely parallels the very evolution of cinema studies as an academic field. The questions we currently ask of the field and its cultural contexts may have shifted and expanded, but the theoretical undergirding remains more consistent than 1970s scholars might have imagined at the time. The underlying concerns and interest in cinema—and the opportunities its interdisciplinary roots afford—continue to spark the passion and intellectual engagement that fuel our field. The interdisciplinary history of our Seminar provides an intellectual excursion that, by its very nature, involves intersections across the arts, humanities, and social sciences while also merging critical/theoretical discourse with practice in the fields of both fictional narrative and documentary filmmaking. As Braudy and Leab pointed out in their proposal, the “converging of the humanities and social sciences, known by the label the Sciences of Man,” would inspire the work of the Seminar. It had as its principle the “bringing together [of] scholars whose philosophical backgrounds are different—who do not speak the same language—but who have in common that they are looking for this unconscious of knowledge and thus don’t like the distance between their fields.” Although the academic terminology has shifted, most if not all of the theoreticians anchoring the work in early cinema studies, as cited in the 1973 proposal, remain relevant—“Derrida, de Man, Eco, Kristeva, Lacan, and Barthes; as well as traditional sources which are under reinterpretation: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” Their work has been subject to additional layers of reinterpretation over the intervening decades. When the Seminar was founded, cinema studies was in its infancy and struggling to find self-definition and academic legitimacy. To illustrate, a proud New York University press release in May 1973 announced, “the first doctoral degree in Cinema Studies to be awarded in this country will be conferred on a Yugoslavian scholar” (Vlada Petric, then a Fulbright Scholar from Belgrade). NYU declared, “It marks a major step in the dream of specialists and scholars in film history, criticism and aesthetics to establish and gain recognition for their field as an academic discipline on a par with other graduate subjects, such as Drama, English, or History.” M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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Now, nearly half a century later, the field is solidly established. It has embraced emerging visual media in an age of ever-changing production platforms and distribution, and it regularly produces PhDs at major institutions while becoming indispensable to international cultural discourse. Seminar #539 on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation was the first University Seminar to deal with cinema and, throughout its existence, has had a substantial engagement with and influence on the still-growing field. The Seminar’s initial group of members included film critic Andrew Sarris (an associate professor of film at Columbia), film scholars Stanley L. Cavell (a professor of philosophy at Harvard) and Annette Michelson (an associate professor of cinema studies at NYU), and Film Quarterly editorial board member Brian Henderson. Our goal has been to consistently encourage a broad interdisciplinary awareness. To this end we have brought in many of the most influential cinema scholars in the English-speaking world to address our meetings and exchange ideas with us. Among these are Slavoj Žižek, David Bordwell, Laura Mulvey, Robert Sklar, Jay Leyda, David Rodowick, and Dudley Andrew.Their contributions have helped to provide this Seminar the robust international reputation it enjoys. Further, although primarily we have featured cinema scholars, we are committed to our interdisciplinary roots and have presented a diversity of approaches to film that draw on a variety of disciplines, including history, literature, philosophy, and those arts that converge within the cinema. In spring 2019, for instance, acclaimed biographer Carl Rollyson (Baruch College, City University of New York) spoke about his current project on William Faulkner’s work as a screenwriter and the ways in which his novels and short stories resonate within his Hollywood projects—both those for which he received credit and those for which he did not. Our Seminar has adapted repeatedly to transformations in the field. The fact that Seminar #539 was founded while the field of cinema studies was itself forming has proved to be an advantage, enabling us to draw on the different stages of its development—as well as from fields that were important to that development at various times. In the 1970s, the field drew on the more established disciplines of literary and drama studies while also seeking to distinguish itself with its own unique specificity and methodologies. Many of the presentations during that period engaged in thematic issues, much as had literary studies of the time. But soon, as one way of distinguishing the field, and drawing on the work of scholars and speakers such as David Bordwell, our Seminar began to [ 48 ]

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focus more and more on the ways in which film’s formal properties can create meaning. These properties, such as cinematography, editing, sound track, and screen performance are unique to cinema, and cinema studies’ engagement with such properties distinguishes it from related studies. By the late 1970s, cinema studies was influenced by structuralist and poststructuralist thought as well as by various important empowerment fields of the era. As the minutes of the Seminar’s first meeting with Professor Barnouw attest, the study of documentary film—and of film in general—is inextricably bound to the study of history in a global context. Barnouw’s talk addressed documentaries from the Depression-era United States, post-World War II Japan, and Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries. The book project on which Barnouw was speaking, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, appeared in 1974, shortly after his Seminar presentation, and went on to become a seminal work of cinema studies scholarship. In concluding his Seminar presentation, Barnouw raised a question that has continued to concern us: “What constitutes documentary?” In our postmodern digital age, we might add,“What constitutes reality? And what constitutes reality in representation at a time when the very ‘material’ of still photography and film—the negative and celluloid strip—no longer exist as indexical points of reference?” For Barnouw the question of documentary focused on Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), a commemorative reenactment of the 1905 mutiny that contributed to the larger Russian Revolution. The same question applies to many of the early Italian neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), in which actors and nonactors re-create moments in their recent histories of underground resistance and glimmers of humanity amid war’s brutalities. How do such films classified as fictional narratives differ from Errol Morris’s landmark film The Thin Blue Line (1988), for instance? Classified as a documentary, yet also reflexively built on highly stylized reenactments of false testimony surrounding the shooting of a Dallas police officer, Morris’s film grapples with the very question Barnouw posed while also extending to the philosophical question of reality itself and ways of seeing and perceiving it. We need only think of the pervasive reality television genre, along with viral social media postings, to broaden Barnouw’s question to include intersecting perspectives involving materiality, content, and aesthetic choices—as our Seminar and our field continue to do. Fast-forward to April 2019, when Seminar speaker Vinicius Navarro of Emerson College discussed what he terms “interactive documentaries,” M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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radically reframing Barnouw’s question of “What constitutes documentary?” to “When is a documentary?” Citing the film scholar Dirk Eitzen’s essay, “When Is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” published in Cinema Journal in 1995, Navarro examined interactive Internet documentary forms to which participants can contribute, as well as interactive museum installations. He pointed out that “Museum galleries constitute a responsive, reactive, and reflective space, wherein textual artifacts bleed into the environment, and gallery-goers become not so much viewers as visitors or inter-actors with this environment, which is also subject to change.” Such exhibitions might have different meanings for different visitors, and even for the same visitor at different times. This is a far cry from traditional notions of documentary as involving fixed, unchangeable texts, such as Nanook of the North (1922), that were posited as forever presenting an “authentic” reality and conveying the same meaning to all viewers. Barnouw was the first to challenge this idea. Exposing Nanook as entirely re-enacted after Flaherty’s original footage was destroyed by fire, he raised questions of authenticity and ethics surrounding Flaherty’s insistence that Nanook and his Inuit tribe dangerously re-create the obsolete hunting methods he had originally captured on film. The very concept of authenticity and ethical complications surrounding documentary filmmaking continued to fuel study and debate, as eloquently argued by documentary scholar Brian Winston and documentarian George Stony in their writings of the 1980s and beyond. As the realm of documentary expands, the form becomes less readable as a fixed text; the text itself can repeatedly change, and viewers can have diverse responses and even become easily distracted or disoriented. The notion of documentary’s “formal coherence,” which Barnouw first raised, has become richly textured—no more so than in the online interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here (Dorit Naaman 2016). As Navarro pointed out during his Seminar presentation, “Jerusalem neighborhoods take shape as viewers virtually meander the streets in search of Palestinian traces. As an openly edited map, the spatial constellation of Jerusalem changes over time, allowing varied ways of viewing and remembering. It is ongoing and, hence, regularly presents ever-evolving and different information to viewers.” There is not and can never be a single “It.” What a viewer sees on Tuesday is not what that viewer will see on Wednesday, and on and on. There can never be a “fixed text”—hence the idea of “When is documentary?” in the context of the “temporalization of space.” [ 50 ]

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From a different perspective, in September 2018, filmmaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz (Brooklyn College, CUNY) discussed her own documentary archives in response to the AIDS crisis and community reactions, including communal participation in documentary filmmaking. Her talk, “VHS Archives: Activating Queer Archives in Useful Ways,” examined the now nearly extinct VHS platform in the context of its full accessibility in the 1980s. As Seminar minutes explain, “In her own work, on queer and lesbian archives, trauma, and AIDS, Juhasz noted that forms of privacy and invisibility that surround gay and lesbian cultures offer ephemeral traces in the absence of institutionalized documentation.” Such ephemeral traces are poignantly self-reflexive, given the increasingly inaccessible video art, since technological and industry developments have rendered video obsolete, with video players virtually no longer in production. Barnouw’s question now has morphed into, What constitutes a document, and how do we preserve it and make it accessible as a historical archive? This question is relevant not only in the context of Juhasz’s micropolitical cinema but also to mainstream cinema as preservation becomes increasingly costly. Our December 2017 Seminar, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the internationally acclaimed New York-based Cineaste magazine, in part addressed film preservation. In the digital age, when technology enables the more efficient preservation of films shot on celluloid, more recent films shot on digital formats, ironically, present a complicated—indeed, an “ephemeral”—preservation circumstance. The absence of a material object in a world of rapidly changing platforms that quickly render earlier platforms obsolete and inaccessible presents a serious challenge to preservationists. Moving beyond the boundaries of documentary definitions of the 1970s, Karen Redrobe of the University of Pennsylvania discussed animation and documentary at the Seminar’s October 2017 meeting, in a presentation titled “Postcard from Tora Bora: Animation, Documentary, and the Contemporary Art of War.” Postcard from Tora Bora is about “the filmmaker Washmah Osman’s return to Afghanistan in order to examine the conditions in which women live in the wake of the 2004 U.S. invasion,” as Redrobe explained. The presentation was part of Redrobe’s book project that focuses on four artists who use animation as a means of “coming to terms with the phenomenon of endless war.” Animation has a unique relationship with traditional presumptions about photographic “authenticity” M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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as well as temporality, “including the periodization of war, its relation to other wars, psychological and physical damage in chronological time, and our understanding of war-time.” For Redrobe the merging of documentary and animation “offer[s] new means of meaningful cinematicity, modes of exhibition, and audience address.” Let’s flash back to March 1978, when Frank McConnell (then a professor of English at Northwestern University) spoke on the topic of “Film as History,” establishing groundwork for Seminar meetings in the years to follow, beginning in fall 1978 and extending through 1985. During this time, Leab (then at Seton Hall University) would be joined by Seminar cochair John O’Connor (then professor of history at New Jersey Institute of Technology). Their tenure shaped a series of Seminar meetings devoted largely to issues of film and history in part addressing the conundrum of accuracy in feature films on historical subjects—and its validity or lack thereof as a subject of scholarly debate and discussion. Among such presentations was that of Thomas Cripps, a noted scholar on African-American film. In December 1978, he discussed “Politics in the Reel World: Changing Liberalism in Casablanca,The Negro Soldier and Pinky.” Addressing the intersection of politics and history not only in these films but also in the film industry, Cripps pointed out an underlying paradox. In spite of an essentially conservative film industry, he felt, the liberal content of these films was “possible . . . because liberalism of the period [the 1940s] had no firm meaning.” Liberalism, Cripps said, was defined as “an emotional sympathy for the underdog.” By contrast, conservatism “led toward something Jeffersonian,” making it possible for producers such as Darryl Zanuck “to believe that the studio had a duty to put a black character in the center of the plot because Americans needed this to show we were resisting fascism.” At the same time, Zanuck and others were forging and supporting a blacklist of union organizers within the industry. Questions of race in cinema studies have shifted from those of simple inclusion or absence of traditionally marginalized peoples from representational modes within a white-dominated industry to issues of identity and self-image in the work of African-American filmmakers. During the October 2015 Seminar, for instance, Michael Gillespie (CUNY) presented “Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film,” and in March 2016, Paula J. Massood (Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center) presented “Baby Sister’s Lament: Chester Himes’s Struggle to Film Harlem.” [ 52 ]

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Gillespie discussed Chameleon Street (1989) as a film that reflexively addresses identity. Played by Wendell B. Harris, Jr. (also the film’s director), the African-American protagonist assumes a series of false identities. Dubbed “the black Zelig,” the film is based on the infamous imposter William Douglas Street, who impersonated various professionals, including a surgeon. Gillespie noted that Street’s self-conscious “performances” disregarded the implications of racial identity and that Harris’s film explores “the limits of ‘passing’ racial narratives.” Gillespie asked, “How to make a racial passing film where he who is passing has little regard for the political implications of the process? The film ‘unhinges’ passing from its historical moorings, foregrounding the discursivity of race’s construction.” Respondent Amy Herzog of Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center discussed the slippage in identity between Harris the black filmmaker and Street, whose conscious performance style “incriminates the neo-liberal white establishment for falling over itself to incorporate him into their structures.” In accepting Street into various professional circles solely on the basis of his identity claims that establishment enacts “a sort of fetishism,” Herzog argued. Massood examined the limits of liberalism through the representational politics of the 1940s and 1950s, tracing African American writer-filmmaker Chester Himes’s struggle to film Baby Sister in Harlem. The project, which never came to fruition, was an adaptation of Himes’s novel, which focuses on three days in the Harlem life of its title character. Himes met resistance not only from the film industry but also from black groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) “because studios were compelled to put forth palatable depictions of black life,” as Seminar minutes detail. “The 1950s and 1960s saw a selection of films such as No Way Out, A Raisin in the Sun, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Himes’s Baby Sister featured the types of characters that the NAACP was trying to eliminate from American film at the time.” The script presented “Harlem’s more lurid aspects much of which is highlighted in Himes’s lampooning style. This technique, complete with its aspects of parody, could have tipped the scales against investors worried about the film’s more ‘minstrel’ moments.” Massood pointed out that in his novels, Himes employed absurdity and humor to expose white racism and the conditions of black life. Just as cinema studies was expanding its focus to television in the mid1970s and 1980s, the Seminar was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a project titled “American History/American Television.” Announcing M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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this grant to Seminar members, cochairs Leab and O’Connor explained that it would facilitate a gathering of scholars from around the country who were working on “specific topics relating the history of television to American social and cultural history.” The grant enabled funding for speakers, a projectionist and series of screenings, and complete transcriptions of the meetings. The first grant-funded Seminar speakers were Leslie Fishbone of Rutgers University, who spoke about the 1976–77 television series Roots, and David Culbert of Louisiana State University, who spoke on Richard Nixon and the media. Culbert focused in part on the “Checkers” speech in a presentation titled “Political Television: Nixon’s Use of the Medium in 1952 and 1960.” Among the diverse television-related subjects addressed during the eight Seminar meetings were TV comedy, the soap opera, Milton Berle’s television presence and persona, the network news and its role in the 1972 presidential election, the political satire of the Smothers Brothers, and television advertising sponsored by drug companies. In recent years the Seminar has heard from television scholars Anna McCarthy of NYU and William Boddy of Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, whose works in television reception studies span the medium’s history. At the Seminar’s September 2017 meeting, independent film scholar Martha Nochimson interviewed Sopranos creator and producer David Chase as part of her book project on serial television. In retrospect the Seminar’s and the field’s mutual histories reflect similar growing pains and accomplishments. In a sense we have grown up together. Our topical focus is unlike that of more traditional disciplines, such as the study of Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament, which deal with a relatively fixed gnostic canon and can draw on decades, if not centuries, of tradition. Instead, we had no fixed structure or investigative traditions on which to draw when we got started. We borrowed from cognate fields as we sought an identity of our own. Cinema is an ongoing and evolving field, and its canon of works is regularly expanding and under revision. Cinema is a moving target, a fact that can be destabilizing as well as exhilarating for scholars. During the Seminar’s first decade or so, with cochairs from the fields of English and history, presentations tended to define the study of cinema using methodologies drawn from these contingent fields. By the mid1980s, however, the field was more focused on defining its own disciplinary boundaries, concerns, and methodologies. The Seminar reflected this trend [ 54 ]

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with the tenure of its first formally trained cinema studies cochair, film scholar and film historian Charles Musser (then of NYU and now at Yale). Musser cochaired from fall 1985 through spring 1995. During that decade he was joined by various cochairs, almost all of whom were formally trained and renowned cinema studies scholars.These included Janet Staiger (through 1987), Miriam Hansen (through 1989), Giuliana Bruno (through 1994), and Manthia Diawara (through 1995). During the Musser decade, the Seminar invited the growing field’s preeminent figures, including David Rodowick (then at Yale) and John Belton (then a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow), to share their work on CinemaScope technology and theory. Timothy Corrigan (Temple University) presented “The Hysteria of Genre: The Road Movie, Debris and Outer Space.” Cochairs Musser and Hansen discussed early film exhibition and the nickelodeon, and Dana Polan (then at the University of Pittsburgh and Rockefeller Fellow) addressed postmodernism and cinema. Angella Dalle Vacche (then at Yale) explored the intersections of German Expressionist cinema with German Romantic painting. On the subject of African-American cinema, Ed Guerrero (then at the University of Delaware) presented “Seeing Double: Black Stars and Double Consciousness,” following up an earlier panel on bell hooks’s Black Looks, which featured Michele Wallace (then at CUNY Graduate Center), Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (then at Rutgers University), and Steven Best (then at the University of Pennsylvania). Other speakers during this decade included such key figures in the field as Noel Carroll, David James, Gaylyn Studlar, Tom Gunning, and Lucy Fischer. Many of these scholars have made multiple Seminar appearances over the years, and several appeared at our most recent Seminar meetings, including Guerrero, who spoke in 2018 on Jordan Peele’s racially provocative horror film, Get Out (2017). Noa Steimatsky (then at Yale) first spoke in March 1995 on Italian cinema, appeared a second time several years later, and most recently spoke in September 2018 about the Italian studio Cinecittà and its role as an internment and refugee center during and immediately after World War II. From mid-1995 to the present, the Seminar has continued to feature internationally acclaimed scholars under cochairs Krin Gabbard (1995–97 and 2005–10) and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (1995–97); Rosalind C. Morris and David J. Levin (1997–99); Jane Gaines (2009); David Sterritt (1999–2005; 2010–15); William Luhr (1999–present); and Cynthia Lucia (2015–present). In 1995, Slavoj Žižek helped us explore philosophical approaches to cinema M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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study. In some ways his presentation marked a shift back toward interdisciplinary intersections forged between cinema and other subjects that had defined cinema studies and the Seminar in their emerging years. Now, however, cinema studies and the Seminar are engaged in interdisciplinary discourse with a difference: the field has understood itself more confidently both as a part of and apart from other intersecting fields. This more comfortable merging has characterized cinema studies from the mid1990s to the present. The Seminar has examined the materiality of film by bringing in Berkeley’s Russell Merritt to discuss the development and influence of Technicolor and Notre Dame’s Donald Crafton to discuss the film-related business dealings of Joseph P. Kennedy. Krin Gabbard, former Seminar cochair, has shown us the importance of film music. Numerous scholars—including Robin Wood, Barry Keith Grant, Peter Lehman, Christopher Sharrett, Pamela Grace, Martha Nochimson, Charles Affron, and Peter Stanfield—have addressed more traditional issues, such as the relationship of film genres to history and ideology. Part of our agenda also is devoted to engaging a variety of approaches to film, including the ways in which films are made, distributed, and understood in culture and how changing times have redefined the entire film landscape. Former cochair Janet Staiger (then at NYU and now at University of Texas-Austin), for instance, helped establish the field of reception studies— the specific ways in which films have been understood historically. At the same time, we have held roundtables on established figures, such as Orson Welles at the one hundredth year of his birth, and the ongoing cultural implications and media heritage of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or,The Modern Prometheus, at the time of its 2018 bicentenary. The ever-changing landscape of film publishing and pedagogy has been a subject of several Seminar meetings, most recently focusing on the publication of cochair William Luhr’s coauthored film studies textbook, Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying, fourth edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Seminar meetings also have been devoted to the work of filmmakers who are operating on the fringes of the industry, as in a spring 2018 Seminar devoted to the work of sexploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman. The Seminar has continued to explore the ways in which academic discourse on film is formed and circulated through presentations by prominent journalist-scholars. These include our former cochair David Sterritt (formerly the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor), as well as J. Hoberman [ 56 ]

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(former film critic at the Village Voice), Carrie Rickey (a former New York Times film critic), and Ying Zhu (a professor at CUNY Staten Island whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, among other venues). We have held roundtables to discuss the contributions of major national film journals and offered presentations by editors of important international journals, such as Hubert Niogret of the Paris-based Positif. Representatives from major academic publishing houses, such as Oxford University Press and Wiley-Blackwell, have addressed our Seminar about scholarly publishing in today’s challenging academic market. We also have sought the insights of industry practitioners, hosting presentations on the dynamics of working in both mainstream and independent cinema. Tony Award–winning actress and triple Academy Award nominee Joan Allen spoke about her work in cinema and theater, Samuel D. Pollard discussed his work as editor on the feature films of Spike Lee and others, and Joseph P. Reidy talked about his challenges as assistant director on feature films by Martin Scorsese and others. Since the late 1990s, Seminars on the avant-garde, independent, and documentary cinema have included presentations by avant-garde filmmaker MM Serra, as well as documentarians Albert Maysles and former cochair Charles Musser (both an independent filmmaker and a Yale professor). Columbia’s James Schamus, a director and producer of a wide variety of international films, also has discussed his work, as has archivist James D’Arc; the latter is recently retired from the unique film archive at Brigham Young University, which is engaged in a project of restoring and making available on CD many original orchestral film music scores of the classical Hollywood period. We have hosted Columbia’s Richard Peña, former director of Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival, and Dan Streible (NYU), founder of the Orphans Film Festival, both of whom outlined the ways in which film festivals have influenced the distribution and reception of film. Throughout our history we have encouraged a lively airing of and spirited debate about contentious issues. One intriguing aspect of the Seminar’s longevity is that we have seen some issues that were once controversial subsequently enter into the mainstream. Perhaps the most obvious is the status of cinema studies as an academic discipline. When the Seminar began, many considered the study of cinema trivial. That posture has changed fundamentally. Other provocative issues concerned the value of gender, race, and sexuality studies to the analysis of cinema. M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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The 1970s saw the rise of what has been termed “identity studies,” which focus on the social significance of categories in which individuals and groups have been classed historically. At this time the second wave of feminism had begun to take hold, and the field of women’s studies was forming and struggling for legitimacy. Over our many years we have sponsored presentations by groundbreaking and foundational feminist scholars, including Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams, Christine Gledhill, and E. Ann Kaplan. In a related vein, we have invited influential cinema scholars who are devoted to studies of racial representations in film, as noted, including former Seminar cochair Manthia Diawara (NYU). We have explored issues of Jewish representation in film with scholars such as Columbia’s Annette Insdorf and CUNY’s Stuart Liebman. We also have featured influential scholars who are engaging with LGBTQ issues, such as NYU’s Chris Straayer, Manhattanville’s David Lugowski, and Saint Peter’s University’s Scott Stoddart. When our Seminar began, presentations centered on these fields were rare and highly controversial even at major institutions such as Columbia; now they are commonplace. In December 2017, during the Cineaste panel, several members of the editorial board addressed the most controversial issues facing film discourse and delivery today. Among these were: Is film criticism still alive in the digital age, when print-media is fading and its seasoned critics have been downsized? What distinguishes film reviewing from film criticism? Does watching a movie on an iPhone truly constitute watching a movie? What challenges does the digital age present to film preservationists and film programmers who wish to bring original works to scholars, students, and audiences in their original formats? As the questions posed by the Seminar’s cofounders imply, cinema’s status as a cultural product often places it as an object of contention extending far beyond the scholarly or pedagogical boundaries of the field. A good example was our January 2019 roundtable devoted to publishing and pedagogy. A lively and, at moments, heated debate emerged concerning the value or harm of teaching D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in film history and aesthetics courses. From its appearance in 1915, Griffith’s film has been the object of controversy as both a stellar artistic achievement and an industry-shaping model [ 58 ]

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of film production, as well as a purveyor of blatantly racist ideologies in celebration of white supremacy and the revitalization of the KKK during Southern Reconstruction. Should we refuse to teach this film, regardless of its artistic merits, given its hate-filled and potentially hurtful content? Or should we continue to teach it as a way of understanding the evolution of film art and as a means of exposing the historical roots of racism in America? Seminar participants argued eloquently on both sides of the issue. One participant declared that she would not subject her students to such racist images, while another countered that in order to understand racism, students needed to see precisely these images. This Seminar discussion both reflected and refracted controversy concerning what a Cineaste editorial published in Summer 2019 has called “‘cancellation culture’ whereby prominent personalities or artworks deemed problematic by today’s standards are vanished.” Cineaste cites a debate that had emerged weeks earlier at Bowling Green State University in Ohio over its Gish Film Theater. The theater had been named in 1976 to honor actress Lillian Gish, who appeared in Birth of a Nation—one film in her long and illustrious career—and her sister Dorothy, also an actress. This issue sparked such headlines as one appearing on May 10, 2019, online in The Guardian, asking, “Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?” Its subhead further asked, “Cultural myopia or proof of newly enlightened times?” Film historian Joseph McBride unambiguously declared his position in the title of his May 21 essay online in Bright Lights Film Journal: “Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.” The recent series of debates, along with many others over cinema’s relatively short history, has centered on movies and movie figures. Flashpoints include the “checkered personal life” of filmmaker Woody Allen and the racist and homophobic comments of the late John Wayne. The status of actors Malcolm McDowell and Winona Ryder, “the stars of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Heathers (1989), two films recently taken to task for not lining up to ‘woke’ standards,” also has been called into question, Cineaste says. We need only recall the Hollywood so-called star scandals of the 1920s to recognize the lightning-rod impact that film and other visual media have exerted within our culture over the decades. Much of the theoretical groundwork for addressing such issues was established by former cochair Janet Staiger in her foundational book on reception studies, Interpreting Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University M I R RO R I M A G E S A N D PA R A L L E L P RO G R E S S I O N

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Press, 1992). The Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation has continued to address such debates, which are perhaps more vital now than ever before in our history and definitively expressive of film and other media as they function in our culture. Those of us involved with the Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation look forward to continuing the Seminar’s work, which has resulted in numerous book publications with authors’ acknowledgments citing Seminar support in shaping their work at its developmental stages, including the value of suggested resources, archives, personal contacts, and funding sources.1 Not only are formal meetings of the Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation devoted to conversations across disciplines, but our informal conversations over premeeting dinners and postmeeting drinks, as well as our annual spring party, are opportunities for the engaging, lively, and convivial exchange of ideas involving ongoing concerns and cuttingedge scholarship. In its early years the Seminar held meetings in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, where members sometimes would gather at the MoMA’s Garden Café for dinner beforehand or bring their own brown bag suppers or snacks. In recent years, thanks to the university and the generosity of the Seminars Office, we enjoy the wonderfully accommodating space of Faculty House. From its inception our Seminar has been nimble in engaging with an academic field that was in the process of formation. Today, even though cinema studies is an established discipline, cinema itself is undergoing fundamental change—from new exhibition and viewing modes to pervasive globalization. The credits of big-budget movies reveal a dazzling multinational array of contributors. By extension, classifying filmmakers by nationality is increasingly difficult, with directors such as Alfonso Cuarón, Mira Nair, Werner Herzog, and Ridley Scott hopscotching among nations while making their films, just as they hopscotch among multiple media and platforms. Finally and crucially, peoples traditionally marginalized by the industry now occupy center stage with major productions helmed by such filmmakers as Ava DuVernay, Patty Jenkins, Lee Tamahori, Guillermo del Toro, and Lana and Lilly Wachowski. When our Seminar began, it seemed that everything was in flux. Although today’s landscape is significantly different, we feel a great sense of continuity with our Seminar’s unique past and excitement about its everdynamic future. [ 60 ]

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Note 1. Among these books are Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film by current Seminar cochair Cynthia Lucia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Deviant Eyes: Deviant Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) by Chris Straayer; Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019) by Martha P. Nochimson; Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom by Diane Negra (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2001); Film Noir (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) by current Seminar cochair William Luhr; Screening Genders (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), dedicated to the Seminar, featuring a number of Seminar members as contributors and coedited by then Seminar cochairs Luhr and Krin Gabbard; Christopher Sharrett’s Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999); and former Seminar cochair David Sterritt’s The Beats: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). In addition, various journals, including Cineaste and Film International, regularly feature essays by Seminar members.

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CHA P T E R 5

Keeping Alive the Dream The Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (#613) G E RT RU D E S C H A F F N E R G O L D B E R G A N D S H E I L A D. C O L L I N S, W I T H H E L E N L AC H S G I N S B U R G

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wice since World War II, the U.S. Congress has seriously considered enacting full employment or a job guarantee, the first of the economic rights that President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed in his landmark Second (or Economic) Bill of Rights. Both congressional efforts resulted in legislation that fell far short of guaranteeing the right to a job. The Murray-Wagner Full Employment Bill of 1945 passed the Senate by a large margin, but a more conservative House of Representatives removed full employment from the legislation, as the title of the resulting legislation, the Employment Act of 1946, suggests. The second attempt, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, had an interim five-year target of 4 percent unemployment. At the five-year mark unemployment was more than twice that target rate (9.6 percent), having been in the double digits for more than a year in the interim. After that failure full employment was not only in political eclipse but largely out of mainstream research and academic discourse as well. During this time the Columbia University Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity played a significant role in keeping discourse and study alive regarding the economic right that FDR considered “the most fundamental” and the one “on which the fulfillment of other economic rights largely depends.”

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After the disappointing result of Humphrey-Hawkins, some likely advocates of full employment continued to consider it a desirable policy. But discouraged by the failure of a second congressional attempt at enactment, they thought the goal unattainable and ceased to promote it. Others, including some leading leftists, disparaged the policy itself, regarding it as a prescription for a low wage “coolie” economy and a deterrent to the development of adequate social welfare programs. Full employment, however, was the keystone of generous welfare states, such as Sweden, that had nearly eliminated poverty. Indeed, Swedish social scientist Walter Korpi had written that “the full employment policy  .  .  . has probably been the most important part of the policy package. Social policies . . . have of course also been valuable but would probably not have been sufficient.” In the mid-1980s, a group of academics and activists were still convinced that full employment was a major means of coping with the persistent, formidable social problems that existed at the time. Consequently, under the umbrella title of New Initiatives for Full Employment (NIFE), they began holding meetings and conferences and writing position papers. Sumner Rosen, a professor of social policy at Columbia and a leading member of NIFE, proposed a University Seminar on Full Employment that would help his fellow advocates to continue to develop and refine their thinking about the right to employment and their ability to contribute to its political resurgence. In March 1987, a meeting of likely participants in such a Seminar was held to discuss a long-term agenda, topics, and speakers. This description of the Seminar on Full Employment1 appeared in the following year’s (1988– 89) Annual Report of the University Seminars: We focus on the analytical and policy issues connected with the question of full employment. These include cross-national perspectives, primarily in other industrialized economies; changes on both the supply and the demand sides of U.S. labor markets; relevance of theoretical analyses of macro- and micro-aspects; changes in the content and organization of work; corporate and union roles, etc. Our central purpose is to identify and clarify the more difficult and central intellectual questions which relate to and affect the national commitment and capability to assure full employment over long periods.

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The resources provided by the Columbia University Seminars have been important in maintaining an intellectual dialogue on full employment at a time when other sources of support have been unavailable. Mainstream foundations are unlikely to provide support for such an undertaking, even in times more receptive to expansion of economic rights than the years after the Humphrey-Hawkins failure and much of the ensuing period. Full employment would require a major restructuring of the U.S. economy and a shift in political power. Removing the fear of job loss, the principal source of disciplining labor, full employment would spell increased power for workers and less for their employers. While full employment would increase national wealth, as it did during World War II, capital still would resist the potential decline in its power. It was the opposition of the Republican Party and moneyed interests to the Murray-Wagner Full Employment Act that removed the entitlement to useful work from the legislation. Opponents accomplished this when the time would have seemed right for enacting full employment. Mass unemployment and the suffering of the Great Depression were recent memories. Wartime had been a time of unprecedented and shared economic gains through full employment. And demobilization and consequent decline in massive wartime government spending raised the specter of a return to mass unemployment and severe recession. Compared with major foundations, mainstream churches were once supportive of full employment and had played a key role in morally and financially supporting civil rights, antiwar, and other social justice movements. These religious groups, however, have lost strength and influence in the era when full employment advocacy could have used their help. This was the result of declining church attendance and a coordinated corporate/right-wing attack that sought to reinforce the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism and to elevate the political power of the so-called religious right. The National Council of Churches and some mainstream religious groups initially did offer support to the National Jobs for All Coalition (the successor to NIFE), but those sources soon dried up. Although the working class generally stands to gain from full employment, organized labor has not supported a firm job guarantee. In the 1970s, the leadership of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) signed onto full employment legislation only when a job guarantee or a right to sue for a job was removed. Moreover, the [ 64 ]

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deep decline in the power of organized labor makes it a less likely source of substantial support for economic justice causes. The University Seminars have provided three types of vital resources for continuing to conceptualize and refine thinking about full employment. The Seminar framework itself makes it possible for an interdisciplinary group committed to full employment to hold dialogues with a variety of thinkers on a wide range of subjects. In addition, the Seminars have supported the publication of books written by Full Employment Seminar associates on relevant subjects. Finally, the Seminars program has supported conferences, memorial gatherings, and public meetings that have enabled this Seminar to present and promote its ideas to a wider audience. The Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity has served as a meeting place for the exchange of ideas among experts from various disciplines, including but not limited to economics, political science, sociology, social policy, history, and urban studies. Participants include academics, social workers, lawyers, editors, journalists, physicians, labor leaders, environmentalists, and statisticians. Participants who are academics and professionals are often activists in social movements that are dedicated to reform in the areas of not only employment but also health, the environment, labor law, and social welfare.The cross-fertilization of ideas produces both a respect for other disciplines and a deeper understanding of the problems and, we hope, solutions. As Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal said, “In reality, there are not economic, sociological, or psychological problems, but simply problems and . . . as a rule, they are complex.” The Seminar on Full Employment has been fortunate to feature as speakers some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners. They include three Nobel Prize winners, all of them economists: Professors Robert Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Joseph Stiglitz and William Vickrey of Columbia University (the latter having been cochair of the Seminar when he won the prize). Some speakers have come from outside the United States, from as near as Canada and as far as Australia. Many have been from Europe—for example, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. Most of the speakers are from the United States, many of them members of the Seminar itself or its guests. No time was wasted following the initial meeting that defined the scope and purpose of the Full Employment Seminar. In the remaining months of the academic year, two distinguished economists addressed the Seminar, each bringing the cross-national perspective that is one goal of the KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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Seminar and each setting a high standard for the years to follow. French economist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Olivier Blanchard, later chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, was the Seminar’s first speaker; his topic was “Alternative Theoretical Explanations of Widely Varied Rates of Unemployment in Europe.” In addition to an international voice, Blanchard provided evidence that challenged a prevailing theory inimical to full employment—namely, that low rates of unemployment threaten the permanent acceleration of inflation. This was encouraging to those Seminar leaders who were influenced by Sir William Beveridge’s definition of full employment as “having always more vacant jobs than unemployed men, not slightly fewer jobs.” William Vickrey’s 1999 presentation, “From the Doldrums to Real Full Employment,” was even more dismissive of this theory, referring to it as “one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined.” The Seminar’s second speaker was GØsta Rehn, professor emeritus of labour market policies at the University of Stockholm. A principal architect of Sweden’s fifty years of full employment policy, he symbolized the successful implementation of the policy to which the Seminar’s organizers aspired. His presentation, “Full Employment and Active Labour Market Policy in Sweden: Lessons for the United States,” addressed a central purpose of the Seminar: “to identify and clarify the more difficult and central intellectual questions which relate to and affect the national commitment and capability to assure full employment over long periods.” Employment as a right was the theme of several presentations in the early years of the Seminar. “A Constitutional Right to a Job” was the title of a presentation in September 1988 by Professor David Gil of the Heller School at Brandeis University. He made the case for achieving full employment via a constitutional amendment because “constitutional guarantees are enforceable in the courts . . . [and] are a non-violent way to expand and broaden rights to a job.” Economic rights, he pointed out, “enhance and protect political rights by removing barriers to their full exercise which stem from economic fear and insecurity.” In “Securing the Rights to Full Employment” (November 1991), lawyer and economist Philip Harvey held that full employment should be based in human rights as well as conventional economic rationality. Noting that the United States has neglected economic (as opposed to legal and political) rights, he pointed out that the precedent does exist in Roosevelt’s Second (Economic) Bill of Rights. The foundational relationship of the Roosevelt [ 66 ]

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formulation to full employment or a job guarantee is emphasized in several Seminar publications and public meetings. As the multidisciplinary composition of the Seminar suggests, presentations have been diverse. Full employment has touched on a wide range of subjects. The quality of work, not just its availability, is important. FDR had referred to “useful, remunerative work for all” and “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.” Early in the history of the Seminar, in March 1989, Professor Kathleen Christensen of the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center presented “Contingent Work: The Price of Flexibility for Workers.” Later Seminars dealt with the increasing deterioration of working conditions. In February 2004, New York Times economic writer Louis Uchitelle’s presentation was “Job Insecurity in America.” In December 2015, Professor Katherine Stone of the University of California, Los Angeles Law School made a presentation to a joint meeting with the Seminar on Globalization, Labor, and Popular Struggles (#671) on “The Changing Nature of Employment, the Vanishing Middle Class, and Implications for Social Policy.” She stressed the rise of temporary employment, declines in median years of tenure with one employer, in middle-class income, and union membership. “Living Wages and the Fight for 15: Assessing the Movement for Higher Wages” was a September 2015 presentation by Stephanie Luce of the Joseph S. Murphy Center for Worker Education and Labor Studies of the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to the Seminar’s view that living wages, not just a job, are integral to its concept of full employment, we invited, because we felt there should be a closer relationship between the advocacy of full employment and living wages. The particularly heavy toll of unemployment on African Americans— especially black youth—has been a subject of continuing concern to the Seminar. Addressing the Seminar in December 1989, Eli Ginzberg, a Columbia emeritus professor of economics and expert on manpower, held that “the great tragic employment issue of our time is the high rate of unemployment among Black Americans” and that work and jobs were key to assimilating them. In an October 1988 presentation on “Black Youth Unemployment,” Professor Robert Cherry of Brooklyn College assessed the influential work of William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, University of Chicago Press, 1987), which had emphasized the toll of black unemployment on African Americans. In May 2016, Professor Darrick Hamilton of The New School KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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for Social Engagement and a leader in conceiving a federal job guarantee made a case in his Seminar presentation for other interventions as well, such as reparations. The title of his presentation was “Why Studying and Working Hard Is Not Enough for Black Americans: Education and the Racial Wealth Gap.” From its inception, the Seminar has been concerned about climate change and has seen full employment as a means of coping with this crisis. We have maintained that full employment can mitigate a major deterrent to combating climate change: fear of job loss. Moreover, current proposals for full employment or a job guarantee feature government creation of jobs that tackle climate change—such as retrofitting to make the infrastructure more efficient and constructed with sustainable materials, as well as jobs in human services that use relatively few fossil fuels. Two Seminar presentations in the early years focused on the environment. One was by Richard Grossman, “Jobs and the Environment: The Myth of Conflict: The Reality of Synergy,” and the other was by Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute, “Jobs in a Sustainable Economy.” A 2010 talk by Sean Sweeny of the Cornell University Global Labor Institute was “More Green Jobs: Why an Aggressive Climate Policy Is Necessary to Drive Employment Growth and Economic Recovery.” Building a social movement to achieve full employment was one of the objectives of the Seminar founders, notwithstanding that hopes for success were minimal at that time. Hence several Seminar presentations dealt with movement building. For example, “Organizing for Full Employment” was the title of the May 1988 presentation of Professor Frank Riessman, editor of the magazine Social Policy and a leader in NIFE. Riessman held that “Properly understood and defined, full employment has the potential to unify a fragmented political scene, to energize and unify diverse constituent groups around a broad agenda with a potential for effectiveness possibly greater than that achieved in the 1960s.” Through the years a number of presentations have dealt with social movements and potential partners for full employment advocacy. In a March 2011 meeting of the Seminar during the Great Recession, Gertrude Goldberg spoke on “Strategic and Political Challenges to Job Creation,” contrasting the conditions during the Great Recession with those of the Great Depression, when a significant movement of unemployed workers did arise. Eight months later, in November, the Seminar held a joint meeting with student leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement: Mark Bray [ 68 ]

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of Rutgers and Yessenia Barragan of Columbia, as well as labor journalist Greg Heires. Similarly, eight months after 300,000 people participated in the People’s Climate March in New York City in 2018, the Seminar addressed the issue with “The People’s Climate March: Where Do We Go from Here?” This gathering featured Leslie Cagan, the chief organizer of the march; Joe Uehlein of the Labor Network for Sustainability; and Charles Bell of Consumers Union. Seminar presentations contributed to a small book authored by the three current Seminar chairs that served as a manifesto for the founding of a successor to NIFE, the National Jobs for All Coalition.2 Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America (Apex Press, 1994) set forth a plan for full employment with chapters such as “Adequate Income for All,” “Rights of Workers,” “Environmental Sustainability and Preservation,” and “Sound Government Finance.” The Jobs for All authors acknowledged the contribution of the University Seminar on Full Employment, which had, “over the years, provided us with a forum for presenting research and testing ideas.” As previously mentioned, the University Seminars program has helped to support the publication of books written and/or edited by associates of the Seminar on Full Employment. The following works reflect important themes in our proceedings and were strengthened by the opportunity for the authors to present overviews of their work at Seminar meetings and to receive feedback from their colleagues. Diminishing Welfare: A Cross-National Study of Social Provision (Auburn House, 2002): In response to the threat of welfare state retrenchment, the editors of this book assembled a team of international scholars to study trends in employment and social welfare policies and their outcomes in nine industrialized countries. The editors concluded that the welfare state was alive if not as well as it had been after its development in the post-World War II decades. Commitment to full employment or to relatively low levels of unemployment had declined since the mid-1970s. Poverty and inequality were increasing, though to different degrees. Despite its superior potential for social provision, the United States had higher rates of poverty in the mid-1990s than the other countries in the study. In April 2002, one of the editors and the coauthor of a chapter on Sweden made a presentation to KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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the Seminar titled “Are Welfare States Being Dismantled: To What Extent Is Full Employment a Casualty of Retrenchment?” Poor Women in Rich Countries (Oxford University Press, 2010): For this work scholars analyzed labor market and social welfare trends in eight wealthy but diverse countries, again reflecting the dual focus of the Seminar on both employment and social welfare programs. Using a relative poverty standard of less than 50 percent of median disposable income, the study found that at the turn of the twenty-first century, none of the eight countries achieved a poverty rate below 12 percent for lone or single mothers. On average one third of lone mothers were in poverty, compared with about one-fifth of lone older women. Many partnered women, the study found, would be poor if they had to support themselves. Labor market conditions were such that three-fifths of lone mothers and four-fifths of lone elderly women would be poor without government income transfers or social welfare programs. Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare “Reform” and the Road Not Taken: 1935 to the Present (Apex Press, 2002): Here two of the Seminar cochairs examined welfare-state retrenchment in the United States, bringing to it their perspective on the dual need of single mothers, particularly for both living wage employment and social provision. Their analysis of government policies from the Great Depression through the 1990s led them to conclude that the assurance of employment was “the road not taken.” Despite the preference of President Franklin Roosevelt and his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, for providing work rather than welfare to the unemployed, job creation programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) were temporary. By contrast, income support programs, including the very unpopular Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), had become permanent. In a Seminar meeting in February 1999, the authors presented highlights of their study of work and welfare policies from the New Deal to the repeal of AFDC in February 1999.They referred to welfare reform using quotation marks to imply that “reform” really meant repeal. Real reform, they held, must focus on the labor market, on the availability of living wage jobs as well as making affordable child care accessible to working families. When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal (Oxford University Press, 2014): The idea for this book was triggered [ 70 ]

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by the 2007–2008 economic collapse, which called to mind the collapse of 1929 and the New Deal response. Its editors (two of the Seminar’s chairs) felt that the parallels between the two events merited a reappraisal of the New Deal in terms of what could be learned from both its successes and its failures for policy making in the current era. It was clear to them that the Obama Administration had learned only one lesson from that earlier period: the need for swift government intervention. Yet the administration had missed the kind of intervention that was most needed—a direct government job creation program. There were many other lessons that a crisis of this magnitude could have taught us, such as the importance of the New Deal policy of holding the offending banks accountable. Consequently, the coeditors and authors assembled a distinguished group of scholars with expertise in each of the policy arenas central to the New Deal: banking and public finance, the roles of popular movements and labor, the New Deal’s direct job creation strategy, the creation of the welfare state, the role of arts and culture, environmental policy, and agricultural policy. The first two chapters set the two periods of crisis in their respective contexts. The first teased out the influences of contextual factors on the public’s attitude toward government intervention in the economy during both periods. The second chapter compared and contrasted the national industrialized consumer economy of the 1920s with today’s globalized service and information economy. A final chapter summarized lessons to be learned from a close study of the New Deal’s response to the collapse of the 1930s. The contributors subsequently gave a lecture based on When Government Helped at the Roosevelt Book Fair at the FDR Library and Museum at Hyde Park in 2015. The event was covered by C-Span. The third and last of the important resources that the University Seminars has provided to assist the Seminar on Full Employment in promoting its works is a series of gatherings that have more fully brought its ideals to the general public. The first was a Symposium in Commemoration of William S. Vickrey, who died only three days after he was told he had received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996. Organized by Professor Aaron W. Warner, a former director of the Seminars and a member of the Seminar on Full Employment, the November 1998 symposium featured presentations by such leading economists as Robert Heilbroner and James K. Galbraith. Contributions based on the presentations and by Vickrey were published in KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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Commitment to Full Employment: The Economics and Social Policy of William S. Vickrey (M. E. Sharpe, 2000). Among the essays were four by Seminar associates. A second public gathering was a November 2006 memorial lecture to commemorate Full Employment Seminar founder Sumner Rosen. The lecture, “Full Employment in a Globalizing Economy,” was given by Robert Pollin, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Seminar on Full Employment, it was decided to hold a day-long conference on October 18, 2013, devoted to “An Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century.” The choice of theme was obvious. FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights had laid out the definitive justification for full employment: This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. . . . They were our rights to life and liberty. . . . As our nation has grown in size and stature . . . these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness . . . We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. The Seminar, as noted, has focused on the first and what FDR considered the “most fundamental” of these rights. In preparation for the conference on a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, the planners assessed and developed a scorecard on the extent to which FDR’s goals had been achieved or enacted legislatively since he enunciated them in 1944. In addition to the Seminar itself, the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights Conference was endorsed by an impressive array of cosponsors. These were the Roosevelt Institute; The Nation; the National Jobs for All Coalition; Demos; Dollars & Sense; the Workers Defense League; the Modern Money Network; the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition; the Worker Institute at Cornell, ILR School; the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, CUNY; and Union Theological Seminary. The one hundred-plus attendees were welcomed by University Seminars Director Robert Pollack. David Woolner, Senior Fellow, Resident [ 72 ]

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Hyde Park Historian, and former director of the Roosevelt Institute, gave the historical background to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. The program included three panels featuring a multidisciplinary group of speakers. There were economists, journalists, political scientists, labor leaders, social ethicists, human rights advocates, and community organizers. Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), then the chief sponsor of the Jobs for All Act (H.R. 1000), gave the keynote address. Professors Gertrude Goldberg and Sheila Collins offered a scorecard on FDR’s list of economic rights, arguing that most had been achieved only partly, if at all. They pointed out that in addition to specifying rights, FDR proclaimed that those rights were to be assured “regardless of station, race, or creed.” A 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, Goldberg and Collins emphasized, should include the phrase “regardless of gender,” which often had been overlooked by the New Deal, as well as the categories of national origin, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation. The two presenters went on to propose other rights, including collective bargaining, security in childhood, and a safe and sustainable environment. The conference was a milestone in that it prefigured the renewed emphasis on economic rights among progressive Democrats. A unique opportunity for intellectual cross-fertilization came when Seminar Cochairs Goldberg and Collins made contact with the Living New Deal. This organization, based at the University of California, Berkeley, was preparing a Map and Guide to New Deal Public Works and Art: New York City. The cochairs were aware that New Deal job creation programs had vastly increased and upgraded the nation’s environment and infrastructure, as well as expanded both the creative arts and popular access to them. The Map and Guide would illustrate these accomplishments. Consequently, the Seminar saw an opportunity to use this publication to promote jobs for all. This would be done through a series of public events in New York City, collectively titled “The New, New Deal for NYC and the USA,” which sought to recover New Deal history as the basis for support of a federal and local jobs-for-all program. The design of a local full employment program was influenced by Philip Harvey’s Seminar presentation, “Securing the Right to Work at the State or Local Level with a Direct Job Creation Program” (February 2014). The current proposed means of creating jobs at the local and state as well as federal levels is envisioned as an updated version of New Deal work programs such as the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Living New Deal KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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Map and Guide, which showed how many of the iconic landmarks associated with New York were legacies of the New Deal, would help to demonstrate that a jobs-for-all program would benefit not only the unemployed but everyone. The slogan was “We Can Build Great Things Again.” At a time when federal action was stalled, some members of the Seminar felt that New York City could set an example for municipal action. We were able to persuade then-Public Advocate Letitia James to support New York City Jobs for All legislation that she intended to introduce to the New York City Council. Unfortunately, this initiative has stalled since James ran successfully for the position of New York State attorney general. Federal and New York City proposals for Jobs for All were the centerpiece of a public meeting called “Celebrate New Deal New York City” at The New School for Social Research. The meeting was financed principally by the Seminar and cosponsored by a diverse group of labor, religious, environmental, and other organizations that had been assembled and led by Seminar Chairs Goldberg and Collins. Franklin D. Roosevelt III, a longtime associate of the Full Employment Seminar, served as honorary chair of the New, New Deal for NYC and the USA. Related events to celebrate publication of the Living New Deal Map and Guide were held at Roosevelt House and the Museum of the City of New York. Another associated effort was an all-day event, “When Government Was the Solution: The New Deal’s Forgotten Legacy, Then & Now.” Consisting of lectures and workshops by a wide variety of largely academic experts, the event was held at the headquarters of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY Union Hall. Cosponsors were the New York Labor History Association, the Association of Teachers of Social Studies/UFT, the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, AFT, and the National Jobs for All Coalition. In contrast to these public events, the Seminar funded and organized an all-day “consultation” in February 2019 where twenty-five economists, lawyers, and other experts discussed and debated “Design Issues in Job Guarantee Legislation.” Although all advocated for a federal job guarantee, they disagreed about such issues as wage levels and benefits; funding mechanisms; criteria for eligibility such as age, immigration status, and length of time in the program; and sponsorship of job creation programs (e.g., whether by nonprofits, federal agencies only, or federal, state, and local). The consultation aimed to achieve further understanding and cooperation among the participants regarding appropriate legislation. In addition, it was decided to develop a joint statement or manifesto that would be circulated widely and [ 74 ]

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use inspiring language to explain precisely what a job guarantee is, galvanize support, and introduce its key principles. Held at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City, the consultation was cosponsored by the National Jobs for All Network and PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity with offices in Oakland, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The moderator, Angela Glover Blackwell, founded PolicyLink and is former senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she directed its Domestic and Cultural Divisions and developed its New Generation Leadership and Building Democracy programs. The concept of a job guarantee is no longer in political eclipse. Today some leading legislators support a job guarantee. Since 2014, comprehensive job guarantee legislation has been introduced and subsequently reintroduced in Congress, most recently in February 2019 as H.R. 1000, the Jobs for All Act, by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.). Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has introduced the Federal Job Guarantee Development Act, a pilot program that would allow high-need communities to participate in a pilot program to guarantee the option of employment for all its residents. Proposals for a Green New Deal recognize New Deal contributions to environmental preservation and successful responses to the Dust Bowl, the major environmental crisis of its time. Green New Dealers also have called attention to the Economic Bill of Rights and the need for creation of green jobs. Full employment, beginning in 1944, was a prominent part of Democratic Party platforms until 1992 when, running for his first term, Bill Clinton dropped it. Given the renewed interest of some leading Democrats, one hopes that full employment might make a comeback on subsequent party platforms. New initiatives in public policy do not emerge spontaneously. They are always preceded by a long period of deliberation and gestation among those who often do not get the credit for laying the foundations when they emerge. Through its Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity, the Columbia University Seminars has laid such a foundation—by providing support for the study and development of a public policy that could do much to overcome the problems of inequality and poverty in this country at a time when that policy was in political eclipse, off the policy agenda, and largely ignored in theory and research. The Seminar has helped to keep alive the dream of living wage work for all and has prepared its associates to contribute to its resurgence and, ideally, its enactment. KEEPING ALIVE THE DREAM

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Notes 1. In 2003–04, the title of the Seminar was expanded to Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity. It was recognized that social welfare and equity are the highly desirable outcomes of a full employment society; that social welfare policy is an important partner of full employment; and that social welfare and equity were frequently broached in meetings of the Seminar. 2. The National Jobs for All Coalition (now Network) has pursued the goal of a job guarantee through a national outreach network; opposition to the official undercount of unemployment; position papers and pamphlets; a website with material regarding full employment; and advocacy of federal and municipal legislation. NJFAN has been the chief consultant for the only pending federal job guarantee legislation, H.R. 1000, the Jobs for All Act.

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CHA P T E R 6

Exploring a Diverse Tropical Colossus The Seminar on Brazil (#557) SIDNEY M. GREENFIELD

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razil, the largest nation in South America, has the fifth largest land area in the world. It is larger than the United States in terms of contiguous territory. Its 210 million inhabitants, composed of descendants of Europeans, Africans brought as slaves, and Amerindians, make it the sixth largest nation in terms of population. With a gross domestic product of over $2 trillion, it ranks as the world’s eighth largest economy. It was a Portuguese colony until 1822 and since then has vacillated politically between being an empire, an electoral democracy, a dictatorship, and a democracy. There are fears that its government once again is returning to authoritarianism. The Columbia University Seminar on Brazil was established in 1976 to study this large and diverse nation. It was a logical outgrowth of the Seminar on Latin America, which had been founded five years earlier. In a sense, both were an expansion of a for-credit doctoral class over which Frank Tannenbaum, the founder of the University Seminars, presided. Brazilian studies at Columbia began in the early 1960s when Charles Wagley, an eminent anthropologist, was appointed director of the newly created Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies (ILAIS), subsequently renamed the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS). Wagley invited geographer Kempton Webb, historian E. Bradford Burns, economist Nathaniel Leff, political scientist Douglas Chalmers, and other Columbia faculty to teach courses on Brazil under the aegis of the institute. Once this [ 77 ]

was initiated, additional scholars in the metropolitan area who worked on Brazil looked to the Morningside Heights campus as a mecca for Brazilian studies. Several students taking classes on Brazil were accepted into a summer field-training program. Meanwhile, the Social Science Research Council and Ford Foundation were offering full-year grants. With this support the students from Columbia conducted their doctoral studies in Brazil, beginning a long-term research and personal relationship with the country as well as with the Seminar. Many of these scholars took jobs in Latin American area studies at universities in the greater New York area, and this proximity to Columbia enabled them to continue their participation in the Seminar. Within a short period, scholars across the country agreed that if one wanted to present the results of one’s research before an intellectually engaged and rigorously up-to-date community of students, the Seminar on Brazil was the place to do it. The majority of University Seminars have developed from a concern with an intellectual or practical problem. In many, cooperation among diverse academic disciplines on a subject of mutual and overlapping interest led to their founding. Such concerns give the Seminar a clear, but restricted, direction for speakers and conversation. Invited presenters are specialists on a topic who contribute from research devoted to the subject of the Seminar. Likewise, the conversations that emerge tend to be devoted to a specific intellectual theme. So-called area Seminars, in contrast, attempt to cover and discuss as much as possible about the diverse lives and institutions of people in a bounded geographical area.They do not want or need a practical or theoretical direction. Similar to a few other University Seminars that have as their focus a part of the world and the life of its inhabitants, we of the Brazil Seminar are devoted to a region and the beliefs and behavioral practices of the people who reside in it. Just as area Seminars differ from the bulk of University Seminars, the Seminar on Brazil itself differs from other area Seminars. A major reason for this is the historical and developmental similarities it shares with the United States. We have made implicit and explicit comparisons either in the topic presented or during discussions. We have returned periodically to subjects that call out for comparison, such as slavery, relations between the races following emancipation, inequality, and poverty. Each might have become the subject of an independent Seminar, but we have found that looking at these issues in terms of the larger cultures and histories of the two continent-sized nations enhances our understanding. [ 78 ]

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At the outset the topics covered at the Seminar were especially influenced by the Cold War political turbulence that existed throughout Latin America. In Brazil a “U.S.-encouraged” military coup in 1964 followed closely on the heels of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Fearing the spread of communism in a region that was little studied or understood, policy makers and foundations made resources available for Latin American studies. Columbia was one of ten universities to receive substantial grants not only to contribute to the cost of administering ILAS over a ten-year period but also to establish research and teaching programs. The first studies in Brazil by the founding members of the Seminar were conducted during the early years of the military dictatorship. As the regime hardened in 1968–69, scholars and intellectuals from Brazil such as Professors Florestan Fernandes, Octavio Ianni, and Pedro Pinchas Geiger left their homeland and came to Columbia, where they taught classes and participated in the Seminar.1 Whereas presentations on the disturbing events taking place in Brazil never dominated the coverage of the Seminar, they were—as they are today—a topic we continue to think about and discuss. When Brazil re-democratized in the mid-1980s, the Seminar chairs invited many of the by then growing numbers of Brazil specialists in New York and other cities in the United States and Europe to discuss the many politically driven changes in the nation and its culture that happened after the social opening that followed the repressive twenty-one-year dictatorship. In the years just prior to Brazil’s re-democratization, Professors Roberta Delson and Mario Bick were elected cochairs. Delson had been a student member when she was completing her doctoral studies. Bick, one of the few Seminar members who did not do his doctoral research on Brazil, became enamored with the country when he accompanied his wife, associate member and present cochair Diana Brown, on her numerous research trips. One of Delson and Bick’s principal concerns was to add the sciences to the list of Seminar topics and especially the topic of the damage and deterioration of the Amazon rain forest. Fay Haussman, a freelance journalist specializing on Brazil, and colleague Robert Goodland of the Office of Environmental Affairs of the World Bank discussed ecological and industrial conflicts in the Amazon Basin (October 24, 1985). Professor Ghillean Prance of the New York Botanical Garden spoke about the problem of conservation (September 16, 1987). The following year, Professor Barbara Weinstein of State University of New York-Stony Brook provided insight into the history of the Amazonian rubber boom (January 28, 1988). E X P L O R I N G A D I V E R S E T RO P I C A L C O L O S S U S

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Another topic added by Delson and Bick was Brazilian labor. Columbia PhD Michael Hall reviewed the history of the labor movement (November 18, 1992), and William Norris spoke on squatters’ rights (February 28, 1985). Professor Ligia Leite added a literary perspective, telling us in Portuguese about her studies of the writings of authors from Rio Grande do Sul (January 30, 1986). During this period the Seminar was first exposed to Sidney Greenfield’s research on Spiritist healers. At the time, Greenfield was a visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard and at Columbia. He later became cochair of the Seminar. Greenfield showed videotapes and discussed healer-mediums he observed who do surgeries—actually cut into patients—with anything from a rusty knife to a rotary saw or a sterilized scalpel. The patients show no signs of experiencing pain when cut and report feeling better—“cured,” in their words—after the treatment. The diversification of Seminar subjects continued as the abertura (or opening that led to the generals’ stepping down) advanced. In spring 1987, Fay Haussman and Frances Elizabeth Rand, an academic Brazilianist and a Latin American analyst for the U.S. government, took over as cochairs. They chose to select a focal theme for each year. In addition, they decided to hold one meeting a year on a topic of mutual interest with the University Seminar on Latin America (#515). Since Columbia and New York University were forming the Consortium on Latin American and Caribbean Studies—and several of our Seminar participants were from NYU—the cochairs accepted an invitation to hold one Brazil Seminar meeting annually at NYU. At the joint meeting with the Latin America Seminar in 1989, Ralph Della Cava, then professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, spoke on “The Church in Brazil Under Pope John Paul II.” The following year Martin O. Poblete, permanent adviser to the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center, spoke about “The Church in Chile Under the Leadership of Raul Cardinal Silva-Henriquez.” Nancy Leys Stepan, professor of history at Columbia, addressed the Seminar on “Eugenics, Race, and Gender: Latin America and the Movement for Racial Improvement, 1918-1940” (September 28, 1989). She compared and contrasted eugenic activities in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru. At a session at NYU, historian Warren Dean and his graduate student Sueann Caulfield presented “Productivity on Coffee Plantations of the Paulista West.” They covered vital issues such as labor, capital, the managerial [ 80 ]

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competence of Brazilian landowners, and the persistence of latifundia, or large estates. Relying heavily on quantitative data, they walked Seminar members through fifteen tables of statistics. At the next meeting at NYU on May 10, 1990, Professor Charles Perrone of the University of Florida spoke on “Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Brazilian Popular Music: Politics, Society, and Culture.” In May 1988, Professor Robert Levine—a former cochair of the Seminar, chairman of the History Department, and director of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami—described “the rise and fall of the holy city of Belo Monte, in the northeastern Brazilian backlands (1893–97), which traumatized the young Republic and shattered its facade of harmonious national progress.” Levine examined this landmark lower-class movement “in the cultural context of the rural population.” Also in 1988, Nina Gardner, a graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and of the Columbia Law School, spoke on “The New Brazilian Constitution: Issues, Processes, and Determinations.” Alfred Stepan, dean of SIPA and an eminent Brazilianist, served as discussant. He did so as well when Frank McCann, professor of history and director of the Center for International Perspectives at the University of New Hampshire, presented “The Brazilian Army Officer Corps.” In May 1989, Professor Margaret Keck of Yale University, who had first attended the Seminar as a Columbia doctoral student working under Stepan’s direction, spoke on “Labor and the Democratic Transition in Brazil.” On the centennial of the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil, Professor Herbert Klein, a renowned historian of Brazil teaching at Columbia, presented “Recent Research and Debate About Slavery in Brazil.” Professor Klein followed this a year later with a presentation on the centennial of the founding of the Republic (1889), “The Integration of European Immigrants in Brazil, 1880–1950.” Also in 1989, two visiting scholars, Elio Gaspari and Antonio Pedro, addressed aspects of the first free presidential election in Brazil in twenty-nine years. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, adjunct professor of political science at Columbia and a Fellow of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Human Rights, spoke on “The Control of Violence in the Brazilian Transition to Democracy” (February 22, 1990). In spring 1998, Roberta Delson, Laura Randall, and Sidney Greenfield were elected cochairs of the Seminar. (All three are Columbia PhDs; the first two were students of Frank Tannenbaum, and Greenfield had retired from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee after more than three decades.) E X P L O R I N G A D I V E R S E T RO P I C A L C O L O S S U S

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They continued the open and diverse practices for speakers and topics that had become Seminar tradition. But external factors were to modify Brazilian studies at Columbia, in New York City, and within the Seminar. In 2001, Jorge Paulo Lemann, a wealthy Brazilian, provided money to establish several Brazil Centers in the United States. During the second half of the twentieth century, Brazilian studies at Columbia, which began under the direction of an anthropologist, had become an integral part of a Latin American area studies program. Albert Fishlow, an economist, was appointed the first director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies. Under his leadership the previous area studies’ focus changed to an emphasis on economics, finance, and banking. Meanwhile, Albert Bildner, another philanthropist, had provided money to establish a center in his name at the CUNY Graduate Center. The Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, a nonteaching program, offers lectures and discussions on Brazil. The people invited represented primarily the fields of political science, economics, and sociology. The research offered by most speakers at the two venues was based primarily on official (that is, government) statistics and survey data.Those from Brazil who made presentations came mostly from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two wealthiest and most populous states, and their contributions focused on the relatively wealthy southeastern part of the country. But Brazil is a large and diverse nation. The cochairs and members of the Brazil Seminar decided that we would not compete with or replicate the presentations at the Lemann and Bildner Centers. Instead we would seek speakers whose presentations were based on research conducted in other parts of Brazil and who use at least some qualitative methodologies in their research. Although the presentations on Brazil at the Bildner Center have continued with little change, those at the Lemann Center were altered beginning in 2005 when Professor Thomas Trebat took over as executive director. The Brazilians invited to teach or be scholars in residence were more diverse in disciplinary training, the subjects of their studies, and in where and how they conducted their research. Some used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.The collaboration between the Seminar and the Lemann Center that started under Trebat’s tenure continued after he stepped down to become director of the Columbia Global Center in Rio de Janeiro and anthropologist Gustavo Azenha replaced him in 2013. Working with both Trebat and Azenha, the Seminar has had the pleasure of having many [ 82 ]

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of the scholars invited to teach in the Center’s program, or conduct their own research, as speakers and new voices in our continuing exploration. The second external influence on the Seminar developed out of the emphasis placed on education by the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) after Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was elected president of Brazil in 2002. In an effort to improve the educational attainments and research capacity of a new generation of Brazilians, the government made scholarships available for graduate and postdoctoral students. To make the most of this opportunity, many recipients of Brazilian government funds came to study at Columbia and other universities in the New York metropolitan area associated with the Brazil Seminar. The Seminar cochairs reached out to these visitors, and many participated, presenting their research projects while in New York. Following their return to Brazil, they have remained in touch. In 2008, the Seminar members elected Diana Brown and Sidney Greenfield as cochairs. They invited speakers to present new projects in progress rather than discuss books or articles already published. Seminar members thus could keep up with different ideas and directions in research, and the speakers could benefit from the experience of their audience. And as the members began to age, new blood was added. In 2011,Vânia Penha-Lopes, a Brazilian national of African descent who was teaching at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, joined as a third cochair. Shortly thereafter John Collins, associate professor of anthropology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, became a fourth. In his early years as Seminar cochair, Collins served as director of the Latin American Studies program at Queens College. He worked with the Seminar office to invite to New York Brazilians who were engaged in interesting activities that were little known outside their local communities. This was how a group from a favela (shantytown or slum) in Rio de Janeiro came to our Seminar. On another occasion (September 22, 2016), he arranged to have Nivaldo Ferreira da Silva, a resident of a favela in Salvador, come to present “Subjects of the Brazilian State: Social Movement, Social Science, and Mimetic Dissent in Salvador, Bahia.” Along with his neighbors, da Silva had been removed from his home when the municipal administration decided to gentrify the central part of the city. The favela dweller’s presentation at the Seminar in dialectical Portuguese and the protest music he sang were exceptional and exciting. Like Penha-Lopes and Collins, Brown and Greenfield have strong ties to Brazil and with Brazilians. Brown is married to Mario Bick, a fellow E X P L O R I N G A D I V E R S E T RO P I C A L C O L O S S U S

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anthropologist who previously cochaired the Seminar. They maintain an apartment in the city of Florianópolis in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, where they continue the multiple research projects they have set in motion. Brown’s presentation on cosmetic surgeries, a field of medicine Brazil is famous for, opened our eyes to yet another aspect of Brazilian culture. Greenfield has fictive kin (compadres) and several godchildren in the city of Fortaleza in the northeastern state of Ceará. One of his former students lives there and has run study-abroad programs for North American students in which Greenfield has participated. One of Greenfield’s closest friends is a Roman Catholic priest, medical doctor, and missionary who created a remarkable community development project in which Greenfield participates. In 2008, at a special meeting of the Seminar held in June, Father Otorino (Rino) Bonvini shared his experiences in “The Community Mental Health Project in Bom Jardim, Fortaleza, Brazil: A Systemic Approach to Encourage Self-Esteem and Community Building.” In 2011, on his way to a Lakota-Sioux Sun Dance, Bonvini stopped in New York to present his ongoing work with the Pitaguary Indians, residents of a municipality neighboring Fortaleza. Greenfield, Father Bonvini, and a volunteer staff have recruited people to teach the Pitaguary Tupi Grarani, the language of their ancestors. The indigenes also were taught aspects of traditional Amerindian culture and the way Brazilian society has treated its native peoples. Bonvini has introduced aspects of Lakota Sioux spirituality to the Brazilian Indians; he learned this on a Lakota reservation from North American natives he met and befriended while earning an MA degree in theology in Chicago. A few years ago, Brazilian colleagues from Rio who were former professors and friends of cochair Penha-Lopes conducted extensive conversations with a random sample of Seminar members. The discussions focused on the research careers of the members and the history of their participation in the Seminar. The first interview of cochair Greenfield has been published, with the others expected to follow shortly. Under Penha-Lopes’ leadership, several Brazilian colleagues organized and presented panels about the Seminar at professional meetings, proposing it as an ideal model that might be used by others for intellectual exchange and debate. The Seminar members have reelected Brown, Greenfield, Penha-Lopes, and Collins to cochair the Seminar at each May meeting since 2013. And each year the cochairs have chosen visiting Brazilians and scholars in the [ 84 ]

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United States whose research represents as broad a range of topics and locations as possible to address the changing realities that have followed re-democratization. Subjects have included extreme inequality, race, class, indigenous populations, the economic exploitation of Brazil’s natural resources, and deforestation and threats to Brazil’s environment and how they contribute to global warming and climate change. We have learned from several speakers that Brazil holds a special place with respect to global climate disruption. Within its boundaries are the largest areas of tropical forest in the world and immense expanses of cerrado, or scrub forest and prairie. It contains some of the most extensive biodiversity on the planet.These lands are in serious danger of being degraded, especially as Brazil pursues economic growth. Professor Sergio Pereira Leite spoke on “The Expansion of ‘Agribusiness,’ Land Grabbing, and Public Policies: A Critical Reflection on the Transformation of Rural Brazil” (May 12, 2016). Professor Gustavo Oliveira addressed us on “The Sacrifice of the Brazilian Cerrado: Greenwashing, Foreignization, and Financialization” (May 10, 2018). Both explained how the unchecked expansion of agriculture to raise soybeans, corn, sugar cane, and cattle has destroyed forests, killed river life, lowered water tables, and in other ways transformed the local environment and the life of the residents. Many are being driven off the land and into the favelas of major metropolitan centers. The Seminar cochairs have arranged joint meetings with the Seminar on Studies of Religion (#405), which Greenfield cochairs. At these meetings, speakers have explored alternative or “popular” religions in Brazil including the variety of beliefs and practices retained and reinterpreted by the African slave population and their descendants. These religions go by names such as Candomblé, Xangô, and Batuque. We have learned about Kardecism, the belief system that orients Greenfield’s Spiritist healers, its syncretism, or mixture with the Afro-Brazilian traditions to form Umbanda, and the growing presence of Pentecostalism and other Evangelical Protestant churches and their expanding participation in the social and political life of the country. Visiting scholar Professor Carmen Real even presented “From Playboys to Dads: Brazilian Football Players as Global Pastors of Neo-Pentecostal Religions” (February 1, 2017) and showed how star players use their position to recruit converts. Greenfield presented “When Is a Kickback Like Fulfilling a Promise to a Saint? Religion, Traditional Culture, and Corruption in Brazil” on November 16, 2017. He explored the ubiquitous exchange pattern in which E X P L O R I N G A D I V E R S E T RO P I C A L C O L O S S U S

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one party offers a bribe to motivate a hoped-for partner and then makes a payoff when what was requested is obtained. This pattern has long roots in Brazilian history and is pervasive throughout the society. It also is illegal and the basis for corruption charges when practiced by elected officials and the heads of companies to which construction or other contracts are granted. The recent corruption scandals involving Brazilian politicians, the national oil monopoly Petrobrás, and giant construction companies such as Odebrecht epitomize this practice. In collaboration with the Seminar on Religion, we held a small conference on July 20, 2016. There Professors Donizete Rodrigues from Portugal, Renata Menezes and Cecelia Maritz from Brazil, North American scholar Laura Premack (who studies Pentecostals in Nigeria), Tony Carnes (cochair of the Religion Seminar), and Greenfield compared and examined the relationship between the growth of religions such as Pentecostalism and its often hostile takeover of the beliefs and practices of local peoples. In 2009, the Seminar held a joint session with the Seminar on Modern East Asia: Japan (#445) to celebrate the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil. We have held sessions on Brazilian music. Professor Marcelo Hazan presented “Lundu: Music and the Politics of Class, Race, and National Identity in Past and Present-Day Brazil” (February 12, 2015), and Professor Liv Sovic spoke on “Politics and Subjectivities from a Tropicalista Perspective: Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa’s Recanto and Contemporary Brazil” on March 1, 2018. Literature and the arts were represented when Professor Scott Ickes presented “  ‘Eis a cidade!’ Odorico Tavares, the Museu de Arte Moderna, and the Mid-Century Struggle Over Cultural Politics in Salvador, Brazil” (March 12, 2015). The Seminar also has extended its mission on occasion to cover the Lusitanian world outside of Brazil. One memorable example was a presentation by Antonio Tomas, a Portuguese scholar who was completing a PhD in anthropology at Columbia, on the revolutions in Portugal’s African and Atlantic Island colonies and their successful independence movements. On November 29, 2018, following the fire that destroyed the worldfamous Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro, we held a session entitled “Brazil in Flames: The Museu Nacional Fire and Its Aftermath.” Associate member and former cochair Professor Mario Bick presented “Thoughts on the Broader Significance of This Brazilian Event.” At the same time, via satellite from the Columbia Global Center in Rio, Wagner Victer, secretary of education of the State of Rio de Janeiro, presented “Preventive Engineering as a Way to Preserve Historical Heritage,” [ 86 ]

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and Professor Renata Menezes presented “Amid Ashes, Affection, and Conflicts, Museu Nacional Lives On.” (Previously, via satellite, director of the Columbia University Global Center and Seminar member Thomas Trebat presented “The Outlook for the Brazilian Economy: What Went So Wrong? What Can Be Done About It?” on September 14, 2017.) The re-democratization of Brazil in the 1980s, when the military stepped down, led the mostly progressive academic Seminar members to be optimistic about the future of the country. As the euphoria subsided, however, the many political and economic problems that long had plagued Brazil came to the fore. Significant here were an almost endless series of corruption scandals that, on the surface, seemed to include members of all political parties. Following the exceptionally popular Lula da Silva’s eight-year administration, in 2015, his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff—the first woman to serve as Brazil’s chief executive—was impeached. By now public attention was fixated on the corruption scandals and the painful economic downturn that followed the exceptionally rapid growth during the Lula years. Many of the members of the congress that voted for impeachment had been indicted or were being investigated on corruption charges. Michel Temer, Rousseff ’s vice president and a member of another political party, completed her mandate. After stepping down from office he, too, was indicted on corruption charges. At its first meeting of the 2015–16 academic year and shortly after the impeachment, on September 21, the Brazil Seminar held a “Teach In” for Columbia students and interested members of the community to explain what happened. Cochair Greenfield organized, introduced, and moderated the event. Professor Kenneth Erickson presented an overview of the Brazilian electoral system. Cochair Penha-Lopes, who had just returned from Rio, and associate member Professor Sean T. Mitchell, who also was in Brazil during the impeachment, reported on the reactions in the street. Jessica Carvalho Morris, an attorney who practices in both Brazil and the United States and was executive director of Conectas, a human rights organization located in São Paulo, discussed the human rights implications via satellite. Lula took an early and commanding lead in the 2018 campaign for president. His opponent, Jair Bolsonaro, was a congressman who had long represented a constituency in Rio and was known for his ultra-conservative beliefs. Judge Sergio Moro brought Lula up on corruption charges that at first seemed trivial. It was not known at the time that the judge was advising prosecutors in preparing the case being brought before him. Moro ruled E X P L O R I N G A D I V E R S E T RO P I C A L C O L O S S U S

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that the evidence was sufficient to jail Lula, making him ineligible to run for office. After several legal maneuvers failed, the PT found itself in a campaign without a candidate. By the time the party chose a replacement, it was too late: Bolsonaro was elected. One of his first appointments was to make Judge Moro his minister of justice. Criminal violence has increased dramatically in Brazil, intensified by the economic decline. According to one report, more than half a million Brazilians have been murdered in the past decade, 64,000 alone in 2017. In that year the police in Rio de Janeiro are reported to have killed more than 5,000 people. In this context of intensifying economic and personal insecurity, researchers—including Seminar members—have been threatened and intimidated. The life of one of our Brazilian colleagues, who presented to the Seminar on her efforts to help indigenous youngsters in a region dominated by agribusinesses, has been threatened. She was told by a man who came to her home in an elite section of São Paulo that if she ever returned to the area, she would be killed. Another longtime Brazilian colleague, who addressed the Seminar on several occasions and managed the 2018 reelection campaign of the first openly gay member of the lower house of congress, has left the country after he and the congressman and his staff received death threats. After winning re-election, the congressman submitted his resignation from overseas while not revealing his whereabouts.2 Seminar members discussed reports that people whose way of life they study in favelas have been murdered, and some researchers are reluctant to return to Brazil to conduct further studies. Bolsonaro’s strong call to eliminate restraints on police and military abuse have led several of our Brazilian colleagues to send dire messages stating that they fear the country is in the process of returning to what it had been during the twenty-one-year-long military dictatorship. Politically, the Brazil Seminar seems to have gone full circle. Most members and associates began their careers during an authoritarian period. We followed the opening and re-democratization with our Brazilian friends and colleagues, free to do research without fear of government intervention. Although there was never unanimity in the Seminar in support of the PT, the party’s programs to aid the poor and include the excluded in the institutional life of the nation have resonated positively with us. We have often commented on the way these idealistic goals contrasted with life in Brazil under the military. [ 88 ]

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As a community committed to the people of Brazil and to understanding the challenges, triumphs, and setbacks they have experienced, Brazil Seminar members have followed closely the events there on both national and local levels since the 1960s. During the years of the military dictatorship, many were actively involved in disseminating information about the abuses and hardships imposed by the regime on the Brazilian populace. Our fellow academics and intellectuals who opposed the government there suffered greatly. More recently, Seminar members have joined colleagues, friends, and students who have organized groups to protest and inform the American public about what is happening in Brazil, as they had done during the dictatorship. Unlike the earlier period, when information about Brazil was difficult to obtain, today reports are readily available in the media and via new technology. In addition, the Brazilian students in New York regularly speak out about what they see as dangers to their families and loved ones and to their future. Life in Brazil, especially at the local level, will continue providing much to be learned and discussed, sometimes praised or lamented. But the events at the national level, and their repercussions, inevitably will influence the ongoing conversation of the Seminar in its efforts to understand this colossus and document the ever-changing dynamics of one of the world’s largest, most complex, and most interesting of nations.

Notes The author offers special thanks to colleagues Ralph Della Cava, Kenneth Erickson, and Roberta Delson for their help in reconstructing the early years of the Seminar. 1. Some Americans, including members of the Seminar, who accepted visiting positions at Brazilian universities were attacked with tear gas when they supported their students in protests against the government. 2. These participants are unidentified for reasons of personal safety.

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CHA P T E R 7

“Where Do You Live?” The Seminar on the City (#459A) L I S A K E L L E R A N D RO B E RT B E AU R E G A R D

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here do you live? There isn’t a more basic question anyone can ask, after “What is your name?” That simple question leads to others: Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What is your work? These questions matter because location is essential in defining our identities. We are influenced by our surroundings, shaped by their physical and cultural characteristics, formed by their economic and social dynamics. Our sense of place is created by the local: our villages, towns, and cities are the identifiers, not just by official and legal definitions but also by the nature of life in these places. Although cities have been an object of public concern and scholarly study since the late nineteenth century, it was in the 1960s that a fascination with the city spread across the academic disciplines. During that decade urban and suburban history became a recognized intellectual discipline. One of the most influential figures in the field was Lewis Mumford, whose 1938 work, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace), was groundbreaking. Reacting to the horrors of Nazism and fascism, Mumford saw the city as the lynchpin of civilization, a key to its success and survival. Yet he feared political and technological changes that could compromise our humanity and threaten progress. Born in 1885, Mumford went from a world without cars to one dominated by them, and he worried about the impact they would make on our culture.Worldwide admiration for his work [ 90 ]

rose steadily, peaking with his 1961 book, The City in History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a recipient of the 1962 National Book Award. That book was an erudite overview of cities from prehistory to the modern era, with a view to their progress and possible disintegration. It is no coincidence that the Seminar on the City was started in 1962, during a decade when the city as an academic focus rose to prominence and urban scholarship grew exponentially. That historic first meeting of this Seminar was held on October 17, 1962, at what was then known as the Men’s Faculty Club at Columbia. The speaker was Frank Tannenbaum, the founder of the Seminars themselves. In the mode of Mumford, he spoke about “Urbanization and Survival.” Chaired by Columbia engineering professor Lawrence Cohen until 1967, the Seminar left no minutes of its meetings. But we get a sense of its scope from some of the speakers and the titles of their sessions. Public intellectual Paul Goodman spoke on “Irresponsibility and Urbanization,” and prominent architect Victor Gruen headed a “Conversation on Order and Aesthetics of the City.” As we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the University Seminars, the Seminar on the City (now known as #459A) moves into its sixth decade, having convened more than four hundred sessions and dozens of special events, such as walking tours of Astoria, Prospect Park, Snug Harbor, Flushing, Fort Greene, and the Flatiron District. Presenters have published hundreds of books based on research presented at the Seminar, which is certainly a testament to its importance in the discipline. Those who spoke at and attended the Seminar have brought with them the energy, scholarship, and intellectual creativity that marks the field. The City Seminar has sponsored impressive conferences in which major scholars tackled timely issues. Some examples are “The Past and Present of New York’s Suburban Crisis” (1977); “A World on the Move: Emigration and Immigration in Europe and the Americas” (2009); “Shrinking Cities: Modern Crisis or New Path to Prosperity? Can Smaller Be Better?” (2010); cosponsor of the biennial meeting of the Urban History Association, “The Cosmopolitan Metropolis” (2012); “America in a Time of War: City, Economy, and Politics, 1914–1918” (2017); “Germany Past and Present” (2018); and “An Urban World: The Changing Landscape of Cities and Suburbs” (2019). The City Seminar, as it is usually called, has had a broad and interdisciplinary reach. Historians, architects, urban planners, sociologists, public “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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officials, archivists, politicians, museum professionals, librarians, and many others from institutions around the world have convened at regular intervals for cocktails, dinner, and discussion on a broad range of topics relating to cities. A sampling of the topics that have been parsed include crime, politics, architecture, hospitals, children, religion, planning, social stratification, population structure, mental health, schools, race, public health, environment, gender, and sexuality. Challenging public policy and political issues of the 1960s also were fodder for spirited discussions and an open exchange of ideas. Where people lived or worked became an extended conversation about place: its meaning, geopolitical significance, geospatial consequences, impact on the individual, currency in modern life, reach across the world, and impact on shaping the future of societies. It is no exaggeration to say that anyone who would become a prestigious scholar in urban studies after 1960 spoke at the City Seminar. Members often challenged conventional thought, and discussions could be lively debates that were sure to change perspectives on key issues. Much of the scholarship presented was published, becoming the foundation for all urban history. Most meetings were at Columbia, but some were at other universities and locations; special events and trips took Seminar members all over the five boroughs. Given the volume of presentations, this essay can only sample the broad sweep of offerings over the decades to provide a sense of the diversity and depth of the Seminars. In the City Seminar’s first five years, speakers reflected this intellectual and disciplinary diversity, as well as the Seminar’s intention to address pressing urban problems that remain with us in the twenty-first century. Francis A. Turner, assistant superintendent of the New York City public school system, addressed race and poverty, trenchant issues during the Kennedy Administration, in “Integration of the New York City School System” on January 9, 1963. Just two months later, Captain Carl Ravens of local Police Precinct 26 discussed policing at a time when relations with the public were increasingly strained. The nationally renowned educator Kenneth Clark spoke about “The Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited Project” on March 4, 1964. On May 6 of that year, Columbia’s eminent sociologist Herbert Gans was joined by Alfred Kahn and Frances Fox Piven in a discussion of “City Poverty: The Problems” on May 6, 1964. This was followed two weeks later with “What Can the City Do About Poverty?” [ 92 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

In rapidly growing New York City, whose population would soon reach a twentieth-century peak of 7.94 million in 1970, city government structure and transportation infrastructure became pressing themes. William Lassow, assistant to the chairman of the New York City Transit Authority, explored “From Somewhere to Somewhere—The New Subway Tunnel” (January 6, 1965). That had followed a session by John Ullman of Hofstra University on “Some Suggestions on Urban Transportation.” Entering the political fray was tantalizing to the City Seminar members. In December 1964, they were asked “to prepare platform proposals for a mayoralty campaign in the City of New York. . . . [T]hey must address city problems and past issues which city government can resolve.”The “valuable” proposals “will be presented to political personalities” (December 2, 1964). Proposals included “The extension of planning to a regional basis. . . . Internal reorganization of the city for administrative and possible political decentralization. . . . Improvement of subways and new parking regulations . . . [and] aesthetics, air pollution, traffic control, restoration of authority of site selection to the City Planning Commission.” All of these topics were germane to the 1965 New York mayoral race, when Republican Congressman John V. Lindsay defeated Democratic New York City Comptroller Abraham Beame—a revealing win in a Democratic majority city. The 1960s marked dramatic political and social shifts that resulted in increased challenges to societal conventions. The decade witnessed the advent of the free speech movement, the Vietnam War protests, the War on Poverty, race riots across the nation, the start of urban renewal programs, the black power movement, the women’s liberation movement, and an expansion of public protest—all topics at the heart of the City Seminar’s focus. The physical nature of the city was called into question, with a view toward examining architecture, planning, and construction. Prominent architect Philip Johnson, along with James Fosburgh, spoke on “City Aesthetics” (January 20, 1965), and Peter Eisenman of Princeton presented “The Linear City” (January 26, 1966). Many sessions were devoted to large-scale examinations. For example, in 1966, “The Future City” theme was addressed during several meetings. “What Can the University Do in Urban Affairs?” was another topic; Rockefeller Institute Professor Julius Edelstein discussed “The Academic Community in the City” (December 14, 1966). American Museum of Natural History Senior Scientist A. E. Parr ended the 1967 season with “Psychological Aspects of Technical Progress and Urban Design” (February 15, 1967). “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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That was the last session before a four-year hiatus for the Seminar on the City. It is not clear exactly what happened. But a different group met for a Seminar entitled The Changing Metropolis (Seminar 459B) and continued until 1996.The City Seminar (459A) resumed its meetings in 1971 under the leadership of Columbia Professor of History Kenneth T. Jackson, Columbia Professor of Art History George Collins, and Long Island University Director of Urban Studies Professor Albert Fein. The new format shifted from current events to urban problems examined “in an historical light.” It focused on academic speakers rather than the wider urban field. The first talk in this new series was by Columbia professor James Marston Fitch on “The Preservation of Historic Urban Centers.” Ken Jackson presented the first findings of his new research on suburbs, “The Crabgrass Frontier: Reflections on Suburbanization Since 1840.” That paper was the basis for his groundbreaking book, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press), an award-winning best seller that influenced all subsequent scholarly work on suburban development. Jackson, the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and Social Science, served as chair or cochair of the City Seminar for many years, presented numerous times, and was a major influence on its development and form. By the early 1970s, urban history was virtually a mandatory course offering in every American university. Cities were in trouble, financially struggling as manufacturing and jobs had left for rural or foreign places. “White flight” plagued cities that experienced ever-increasing problems in their inner cores. Public transportation was faltering; New York was technically bankrupt; federally funded urban renewal programs aimed at correcting urban decay had become ridden with problems; and once-prosperous major American cities were starting to fail. University urban studies programs employed new methodologies: demographic, quantitative, racial, ethnic, women’s, public space, substance abuse, suburban development. From 1971 on, the City Seminar featured presentations of scholarly works in progress rather than discussions of current issues.The purpose was to have new research vetted by colleagues; critiquing was meant to help authors improve soon-to-be-published works. That goal was successful, as scores of overwhelmingly well-received and well-known books emanated from presentations. City Seminar speakers who laid the foundation for urban history include some of the most eminent names in the field. A sampling of the hundreds of presenters and the brief descriptions of some of their talks [ 94 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

underscores the impressive nature of all the presenters—their scholarship, the relevance of their topics, and the lasting impact of their research many decades later. The legendary Herb Gans was known for his acuity and tough questions. Former president of the American Sociological Association, Gans authored The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon) in 1967, paving the way for intimate studies of new suburban developments. He took on difficult issues in “Underclass, Underdeservingness, and Antipoverty Policy” (November 19, 1990). Addressing the misuse of the word “underclass,” a term coined by Gunnar Myrdal, Gans asked who decided who was undeserving, who became so labeled, and what motivated the labelers. He discussed the way in which the label “undeserving” emerged from various threats, such as economic security or public safety, and which led to a need to scapegoat. The poor, he argued, are described in two ways: one narrow, such as the “welfare dependent,” and one broad, such as the “underclass.”The underclass was not based on any theoretical understanding but was a “marvelous funding term” that could be used politically and gave rise to the notion of the “permanent underclass.” Gans proposed abandoning the label “undeserving,” which he said does not evoke sympathy or effectiveness, particularly when applied to people of color. “Blaming is irrational,” he explained. He added that we need flexible concepts that distinguish between what is situational and what is pathological; such concepts do not require the poor to meet middle-class standards to “which the middle class doesn’t adhere.” Jobs aren’t enough—tax the rich and redistribute the wealth, he suggested. On November 9, 2016, Gans returned to the Seminar to participate in a panel discussion on the occasion of the publication of a fiftieth-anniversary edition of his classic book on postwar suburbs, The Levittowners. Another legend of urban history was Richard C. Wade, who established the primacy of urbanism in the American history narrative. In 1983, Wade, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School, held forth to a packed room on “Reflections on a Quarter Century of Urban History.” His beliefs were informed by his extensive first-hand experience in urban affairs, including serving as Chicago housing commissioner and advising the political campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. Decrying quantification methodology,Wade suggested that urbanists look at such qualitative assessments as the explosion of urban violence in the 1960s, New York City’s brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s, and the end of the “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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self-sufficient city. Wade urged scholars to look more closely at the critical changes in the economic base of American cities at a time when not much attention was paid to that issue. That people would continue to migrate to cities despite rising problems was a central premise of Wade’s beliefs; he saw the city as the most powerful historical force. At his last public academic appearance, at the City Seminar on November 15, 2005, Wade examined issues that he saw as critical to the well-being of the city: the decline of political parties and the resultant demise of electoral politics, as well as the scandal of adult illiteracy, a problem that few recognized and fewer worked to rectify. Urban historians, he suggested, needed to not only identify these societal ills but also work toward their improvement. Wade had identified cities as key to world development. And the City Seminar encouraged international and multicity approaches, to foster what was then called “comparative history” and now is known as “transnational history.” On March 21, 1984, Rutgers professor Andrew Lees focused on Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in his talk, “Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940.” Lees noted how cities in the nineteenth century affected patterns of thought and feeling over a span of 120 years. Some critics, Lees said, saw only the problems of the city, whereas others emphasized positive attitudes related to economic growth, the loosening of traditional restraints on personal liberty, and progress. The attitude toward the city, he added, often reflected a person’s social position. Lees did find a tendency for conservatives and critics of capitalism to be hostile to cities. Anti-urban feelings were strongest in Germany and weakest in the United States. Internationalism was also the perspective of Carola Hein, then at Bryn Mawr College and, as of 2019, a professor of the history of architecture and planning at the University of Delft. In April 2006, she untangled the intricacies of the polycentric capitals of the European Union, as it became known in 1992 under the Treaty of Maastricht. Hein outlined the pressures from the growing number of member states to have an administrative capital physically nearer or more closely related geopolitically. Language, culture, and politics had influenced the development of the EU over several decades, she argued. In the end, Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg became the critical centers of a now massive entity, resulting in the reshaping of these cities. [ 96 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

Five years later Hein turned her attention globally to “Rockefeller, Oil Money, and the City: From Williamsburg to Caracas to New York.” She focused on the global connections between economic flow, represented by oil, and the expression of those flows in the built environment. She explained that the Rockefeller family and the relationship between Standard Oil and national and local governments, oil-related industries, and architects, engineers, designers, and planners served as a platform for investigating international urban development. She also discussed how Standard Oil’s entry into global markets in the late nineteenth century influenced the built environment in Hamburg, Europe, and South America more generally. Gas stations, for example, became a standardized urban fixture worldwide. Landownership and urban design also were the focus of Alison Isenberg’s talk, “The ‘Land Grab’: A View from Urban History” (March 12, 2013). A former president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning, this Princeton professor authored Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), an example of recent scholarship resulting from the half-century of urban studies. Using her research on postwar San Francisco, Isenberg discussed the “hidden” landownership behind redevelopment projects based on examples of the Transamerica Tower and Ghirardelli Square. She argued that landownership influences urban design while also giving “the public” a stake in these projects through the various subsidies and deals involved in redevelopment. San Francisco, she felt, might have been atypical in many ways, such as the role of women, but it shared land issues with other cities participating in redevelopment efforts. On February 28, 1991, poverty was once again a focus—in this instance from the vantage point of those who tried to deal with it—in Michael Katz’s talk, “Surviving Poverty in Early 20th Century New York.” Katz, who had been Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote more than a dozen books focusing on education, poverty, and social welfare during a distinguished career. Using case records from the New York Charity Organization Society (COS) from 1890 to 1920, Katz attempted to reconstruct what it was like to be extremely poor in this period. The research was written from the point of view of the aid givers, not the recipients, and focused on how the latter negotiated the web of public assistance available to them. Drawing on the stories of two women, Katz revealed the resourcefulness with which they coped with the burdens of “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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accidents, ill health, and irregular employment, characteristics of life on the margins. Poverty, Katz said, reflected four aspects: routes into and out of dependency, family and gender roles, housing space and mobility, and the social constructions of moral worth. Although many people wanted to avoid charity, he found, even sympathetic COS staff were always on the lookout for imposters. Katz returned to the Seminar on January 9, 2009, to discuss “Narratives of Failure? Histories of Federal Housing Policy.” Taking on such a broad approach to capturing national scope, or changes of profound nature, was typical of City Seminar presentations. Sam Bass Warner, whose 1962 book Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) was a classic, used an analytical framework to show how national economy and urban growth were intertwined in his 1975 talk, “Regionalizing United States History: 1820–1970.” Dissatisfied with case studies of individual cities, he utilized data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to study 170 economic regions as delineated in 1960. He broadened his view further in 1983 with “The City is the World,” followed in 1990 with a pedagogical perspective in “When Urban History Is at the Center of the Curriculum.” The City Seminar ensured that broad worldviews were integrated into the presentation schedule. One such example is Margaret O’Mara’s 2011 exploration of “Landscapes of Wealth: Instant Cities and Global Suburbs in China and Beyond.” The transformation of villages into huge cities in one or two decades was the pattern of urban development in China, India, and other Asian capitals at a rate outstripping that of the West. O’Mara, from the University of Washington, posited that the “knowledge economy,” through its technology-based industries, shaped suburban development in non-Western countries with a particular focus on the built environment. Such development was done in collaboration with the economic and infrastructural policies of national governments. Mission Hills, outside Shenzhen, China, and Palm Meadows, outside Bangalore, India, are two examples of projects that emulated Silicon Valley in California in a style that O’Mara characterized as “anonymous internationalism.” Foreign and domestic governments, real estate developers, and tech firms collaborated to develop these new cities. In the process they contributed to the persistence of a gap between rich and poor as well as the myth of tech as a “clean industry.” Arguing that the concept of “green” cities has little influence on those who are actually building these cities, O’Mara nonetheless noted that [ 98 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

these “instant cities” were developing vibrant cultural activities and were not merely technology parks. The historical roots of planning new cities were the focus of a talk by one of the most respected American professors of urban planning, John Reps of Cornell University, author of the seminal 1965 book, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Reps explored “How Gotham Got Its Grid: The Inside Story of the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811” in 2013. He traced events leading to the development of the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, extending his gaze as far back as 1625, when the first plan for the Dutch town was created. As the population increased, Reps asserted, disagreements multiplied in connection with issues of authority, proprietor resistance, and conflicts within the Common Council. At the beginning the Commissioners set out to document which streets already had been accepted and, later, had to contend with competing street layouts, leaving the Commissioners to control public spaces. In the end the Plan hardly represented the decisions solely of the Commissioners and could best be described as the outcome of unintended consequences. Broadway, he noted, was kept in the plan, but not because the Commissioners wanted it. Cities had gained great notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s for rising crime rates, not coincidentally concurrent with a rise in substance abuse. Both topics were fodder for the perceptive research of Eric Schneider. Schneider, who had a distinguished career as a professor and dean at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), which followed his City Seminar presentation, “You Had to Get High to Play: Jazz and the Rise of New York’s Postwar Heroin Epidemic” (May 8, 2004). In 2010, Schneider delved further into the abyss with “Dying in the City: Homicide in Postwar Philadelphia.” That Pennsylvania metropolis had one of the highest homicide rates in the country, and most of its victims were African American males; almost all of these killings were intraracial. Why, he asked, did African American men kill each other and others, especially African American women? Analyzing trial transcripts from 1940 to 1949, he rejected traditional explanations: the “Southern culture of violence” hypothesis; the “civilizing process” school of thought; the “industrial exclusion” hypothesis; and the “political affiliation” hypothesis, which associates low homicide rates with political incorporation. “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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In their place, he argued that residential hyper-segregation and “ghettoization” led to homicide through its creation of an environment of social insecurity. He concluded, “Homicide has social, racial, and gendered patterns that are indicative of an environment of social insecurity.” That insecurity referred to neighborhoods where law enforcement was minimal and government failed to take black-on-black violence seriously. Philadelphia police, Schneider said, had a well-deserved reputation for poor relations with the community. He continued to research this topic, and his final work was delivered posthumously—the only such case in City Seminar history— when Rutgers professor Howard Gillette delivered Schneider’s unfinished research on “Murder in the Shape of a City” on April 18, 2017. Community was also at the center of David Badillo’s three presentations on the shifting ethnic populations of the United States. In 1997, Badillo first presented his seminal work on “Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in San Antonio and Texas, 1830–1965.” Badillo’s continued investigation into the Latino presence in America yielded his 2006 presentation, “Latinos and the New Immigrant Church: Urban Contexts and Contrasts,” which focused on ethnicity, Latino identities, spatial considerations, and religion. He parsed the intersections and contradictions of the Cuban, Puerto Rican, Nicaraguan, and Mexican communities, examining their enclaves in Chicago, Miami, and Pittsburgh, as well as some Mexican towns such as Guadalupe. Catholic congregations served each of these in a singular way, he found, but many of these congregations had other ethnic groups mixed in. A decade later, in 2016, Badillo drew on this analysis for his third talk to the Seminar, “When East Meets West: The L.A. Model and Latino Urban History.” This complex subject addressed the connections among Latino identity; legal cases involving civil rights, race, and ethnic identification; and discriminatory practices as compared with other racial groups. Increasingly, ethnicity, race, and gender have become critical topics of exploration. In 2007, Jaime Rodriguez of St. John’s University addressed “Modernity and the Making of a Mexican City: The Urbanization of Monterrey, Mexico,” and Columbia’s Pablo Piccato talked about “Crime and Urban Communities in Twentieth-Century Mexico City.” On March 31, 2010, an innovative scholar of Latina history, Brooklyn College’s Virginia Sanchez Korrol, urged Seminar participants to “Look for the Women: Latina Narratives in New York’s History.” And Andrew Sandoval-Strauz investigated “Latino Landscapes: The Transnational Origins of a New Urban America” in February 2015. [ 100 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

Many speakers have addressed trenchant issues in African American history. Larry Greene of Seton Hall University talked about “Harlem, the Depression Years: Leadership and Social Conditions” in a jointly sponsored event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in June 1987. Five years later Tom Sugrue, then at the University of Pennsylvania, presented “Hope Betrayed: Race, Decline, and Industrial Poverty in Postwar Detroit,” the draft of his award-winning book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). In 2016, Sugrue, who had served as Urban History Association president and joined New York University, explored the ramifications of race and property in “The Origins of the Suburban Crisis: Zoning, the Real Estate Industry, and Inequality.” Kevin Mumford, then at the University of Iowa, examined the continuing issues of inner-city discord in “Harvesting the Crisis: Riots, Race, and Political Discourse in Newark” in September 2007. Four years before he published his 2013 book, Cutting Along the Color Line (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), Professor Quincy Mills of Vassar College explored the enduring legacy of segregation in “Bigger Than a Haircut: Desegregation, Race, and the Barber.” The pernicious vestige of segregation on public beaches was discussed by Walter Greason of Ursinus College, in “Racial Reform on the Jersey Shore, 1915–1948” in November 2011. Gender, religion, and ethnicity have engaged a wide variety of speakers. One of the Seminar’s first presentations with a gender focus came in June 1976 with Marlene Stein Wortman’s “Governing the 19th-Century American City: Sex Roles and Decision Making.” Planning expert Eugenie Birch of the University of Pennsylvania followed a year later with “Thought and Reality: The Dominant Role of Women in the Evolution of Public Housing Policy.” Marta Gutman of the City College of New York discussed “Domesticating Institutions: Progressive Women and Environmental Activism in West Oakland” on March 27, 1996, and on February 24, 2011, Daphne Spain talked about “Constructive Feminism: Women’s Rights and the City.” Lisa Boehm explored a little-known mid-twentieth-century topic with “Marching in the Rain: Detroit’s African-American Women Workers During World War II” in May 2012. Prolific scholar Deborah Dash Moore, then a professor at Vassar College, looked at “Jewish Migration and Jewish Community in Five Sunbelt Cities” in March 1987. In 1991, a special event, “New York’s Really New Immigrants,” featured Charles Chin of the Chinatown History Project, Clifton Hood (LaGuardia Community College), Nancy Foner (State University of “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

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New York-Purchase), Luis Guarnizo (Johns Hopkins University), and filmmaker Renee Tajima. Numerous scholars have questioned the viability of the faltering infrastructure of cities across the nation. In 1978, Columbia’s David Rosner presented his early research in “From Bedside to Bedford: Demographics Change and the Development of Brooklyn’s Health System 1890–1915.” Increasingly turning his attention to one of the most pernicious problems in the nation—lead paint poisoning—he became the nation’s leading expert on the subject and returned nearly two decades later, in 2016, to discuss “Poisonous Paths: Tex-Mining, Lead Mining, and Urban Health History.” Urban transit became the focus for Peter Derrick’s “Rapid Transit and the Growth of New York City” (May 22, 1984) and for Clifton Hood’s “New York’s Enterprise Masterpiece Subways: Public and Political” (May 18, 1987), the basis for his monograph 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and the Transformation of New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). In 2018, Hunter College Professor Owen Gutfreund interpreted the story of one of the city’s oldest green spaces in “Parks and People vs. Cars: The Forgotten Battle Over Madison Square Park.” The overwhelming presence of New York in urban scholarship was reflected in many presentations. In the 1970s, journalist William H. Whyte investigated “Public Use of Plazas and Open Space in New York City,” Beverly Moss Spatt talked about the influence of the “New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission,” and Elliot Willensky, who updated the famous WPA Guide to New York, discussed his work in “New York Enclaves.” (Willensky revisited the role of the Landmarks Preservation Commission at another session in 1985.) On February 22, 1999, City University of New York professors Ted Burrows and Mike Wallace presented a critical assessment of their book Gotham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history a couple of months later. Two outer boroughs were areas of expertise for Jeffrey Kroessler, who spoke on “Lighting the Way: A Centennial Study of the Queens Borough Public Library” (April 15, 1997) and “The Limits of Liberal Planning: John Marchi and the South Richmond Plan” (February 13, 2001). Similarly, Evelyn Gonzalez investigated “Seeds of Decay: The South Bronx Before the Sixties” in 1998. Italian American studies scholar Donna Gabaccia (University of North Carolina) discussed “Little Italy’s Tenements: Homes, Neighborhoods, Investments” (October 22, 1990), and Claudio Remesaira drew broad conclusions about ethnic definitions in “Hispanic New York: The [ 102 ] “ W H E R E D O YO U L I V E ? ”

Redefinition of a Hemispheric Identity” (March 23, 2009). In 2018, City University of New York’s Michael Javen Fortner questioned urban political structures in “The Fox and the Lion: Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Identity Politics in New York City.” World cities have long garnered close analysis in the Seminar with regard to planning, religion, and culture. On March 8, 1973, when only limited attention was being given to Middle Eastern urban development, Douglas Johnson took a broad view of “The Islamic City.” Barbara Miller Lane explained “City Planning in Frankfurt-am-Main 1929–1930” the following year. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Carl Schorske examined “From Historicism to Modernism: Vienna’s Ringstrasse and Its Critics” the year after that. Then, in 1992, Saskia Sassen discussed her insights into “Global Cities: New York, London, Tokyo,” and The Levant was the focus in Susan Miller’s paper, “Mellah Without Walls: Jewish Space in a Moroccan City” in December 1996—the same year as a joint presentation of a United Nations/ UNICEF report on Istanbul. Apartheid had only recently been dismantled when Alan Mabin discussed “Reconstructing South Africa’s Cities: The Making of Urban Planning, 1900–2000” on February 24, 1998. In February 2001, Rosemary Wakeman took on the massive topic of creating new postwar cities—34 in the United Kingdom, 30 in Western Europe, 60 in Eastern Europe, and 1,000 in the Soviet Union—and more in “Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement.” One of the world’s most beautiful cities that was rebuilt in the nineteenth century was the subject for Nicholas Papagiannis’s talk, “Utopian Socialists, Paris, and the Birth of Modern Urban Planning” a week after 9/11. In the spring of 2013, Russell Shorto shook up the enduring stereotype of Amsterdam in “Hemp and Hookers: A History of Amsterdam.” Richard Wade once said that urban history is at the very center of modernity. The Seminar on the City has interrogated this modernity through its sweeping view of cities around the world. As in Jules Verne’s picaresque 1873 novel, Around the World in 80 Days (a 1956 box-office smash starring David Niven), one can only get a glimpse of the variety and vastness of the great places and spaces that shape our lives, all of which are shaped by human will. Place certainly does matter.

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CHA P T E R 8

Fruit Flies and Tomcod The Seminar in Population Biology (#521) K AT H L E E N A . N O L A N

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he Columbia University Seminar in Population Biology has changed substantially since its inception in 1971. Even its origins appear to have been in flux. Population Biology apparently dovetailed, and has continued at least some of the work of, a previous Seminar called the Genetics and Evolution of Man (#449). From the improvement of Homo sapiens to the emergence of the ecological movement; from models that explain population trends to the importance of conservation management; from the habits and patterns of a copious variety (or wide array) of species to the new concept of citizen scientists, Population Biology embodies the evolving nature of a robust Columbia University Seminar. How and why was the Seminar conceived? To answer this question, first it is necessary to say a few words about a man named Theodosius Dobzhansky. Dobzhansky was born in the Ukraine in 1900, was educated there, and came to the United States in 1927. In his book Genetics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), he became the first scientist to use frequencies of alleles (alternate forms of genes that can be dominant or recessive) to depict differences in populations. This put the field of population biology on the map, and Dobzhansky emphasized that evolution is manifested through changes in populations, not individuals. He conducted research at Columbia for one year in the lab of the biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan and his graduate student Alfred Sturtevant, both of whom were famous for immortalizing the fruit fly in genetics research. [ 104 ]

Morgan had a small lab at Columbia from 1904 to 1928, where he reared his flies, and this “Fly Room” in Schermerhorn Hall is still used today as a prep room for a biology teaching lab. Because fruit flies are small, easily bred, and have a quick generation time of two weeks, their mutants can be mated and used to study genetics. The offspring, produced by “crosses” or matings, have certain traits that can be followed genealogically, such as eye and body color and wing shape. Morgan discerned that genes located on a chromosome were responsible for these traits. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1933 for this work. Sturtevant also deciphered how to map the correct linear order of genes on a chromosome, and Dobzhansky was able to demonstrate this in the lab. Dobzhansky followed Morgan to the California Institute of Technology for ten years, then returned to Columbia from 1940 to 1962. He finished his career at Rockefeller University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1975, when he died from a heart attack, he was still going to work daily. Dobzhansky and British American anthropologist Ashley Montagu argued about race. Montagu favored discontinuing the term “race” in reference to humans and preferred the term “ethnic groups.” However, Dobzhansky favored “race” because he felt it depicted that genetic variation was due largely to geographic isolation. He admonished those who misused the term, biologically useful though he thought it was. Dobzhansky made connections between genetics and evolution in his 1937 manuscript, “Genetics and the Origin of Species,” which he revised two times (1942 and 1951). He was a founder of the “modern synthesis,” which uses mutations to explain Darwin’s ideas about natural selection. (Darwin did not know about DNA, genes, chromosomes, or mutations.) “Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution,” Dobzhansky famously said in a 1973 issue of The American Biology Teacher, a journal read by high school and college biology educators alike. This quotation could be considered as a counter to rigid creationism. Creationism, unfortunately, is still taught in many schools today as a dogma to be considered equally as plausible as evolution. It is sometimes called “intelligent design” or “ID.” Biology professors today still have their work cut out for them. Howard Levene, cochair of the Genetics and the Evolution of Man Seminar with Dobzhansky, was a professor of mathematical statistics and genetics at Columbia. As one observer put it, he attempted to “teach statistics F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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to geneticists and genetics to statisticians.” As Dobzhansky reached out to mathematicians for help in analyzing and quantifying his ideas about variation in populations, it seems natural that he and Levene would start a Seminar related to population biology. This they did in 1959, when Genetics and the Evolution of Man debuted. Early topics in the #449 Seminar included the study of blood groups and blood diseases. A typical announcement was, “Dr. Anthony C. Allison will talk on some of his recent results.” These results could have included the frequencies of alleles of sickle cell disease, and that a heterozygote of a dominant and a recessive allele conferred a resistance to malaria to the holder of those genes. Today this phenomenon is labeled the “heterozygote advantage” and is favorable to those who live in countries with high rates of malaria. However, these heterozygotes are carriers of the gene for sickle-cell disease, and any children of these carriers would have a one-fourth chance of inheriting the affliction. Another Seminar panel during that time posed the question,“What problems should be investigated in any new study such as that of the Black Caribs?” Jack Bresler, a Columbia biologist, once spoke on “Population Genetic Aspects of Lowered Fertility in Interfaith Marriages.” This latter title seems leading; one can usually discern correlations if one is looking for them. Bresler, a eugenicist, might have been looking for correlations between items that would diminish the purity of a particular desirable ethnic group. Indeed, eugenics was clearly a recurring theme of this Seminar. One 1960 session was titled “Glottochronology,” the study of the replacement of vocabulary over time. In 1964,Victor McKusick of Johns Hopkins Hospital spoke on “Genetic Studies in the Amish,” who are so geographically isolated that they have genetic variants not found in other populations. Sometimes joint meetings were held at Rockefeller University. For instance, in 1970, Dr. S. H. Boyer, from Johns Hopkins Hospital, delivered a talk titled “Evolutionary and Mutational Inferences from the Study of Primate Hemoglobins.” In 1972, Dr. L. I. Cavalla-Sforza of Stanford University explored a key premise of our transition from nomads to farmers with “Hunting and Gathering the Transition to Agriculture and Genetics.” Later in the 1990s, Cavalla-Sforza also started the Human Genome Diversity Project in an attempt to learn more about human populations and their migrations. The #449 Seminar members were encouraged to attend a joint Seminar held by the American Museum of Natural History and the New York [ 106 ]

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Eugenics Society in 1972. Some topics of that gathering at the museum were the question of race and even the “genetics of itinerants (Tinkers) from Ireland.” “Tinker begging is an instinct . . . as well as an art,” wrote Sean Maher in Road to God Knows Where: A Memoir of a Traveling Boyhood (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1972). We learn in biology that an instinct is a purely biological entity, so it is as if Maher was saying that begging is “engraved in the genes.” Maher grew up as a tinker (the preferred term is now “traveler”) and wrote the book when he was 40. Eugenics and all it stands for has fallen out of favor, although we have to be constantly vigilant for its resurgence. I lecture to my undergraduate biology majors now about eugenics and its origins, and usually they are appalled; most have never heard of the subject. They learn that eugenics is the “science” of trying to improve humans through “better breeding.” After seeing YouTube videos of people who were forcibly sterilized, the students are asked to examine their opinions about the topic. Most do not know that more than thirty states had compulsory sterilization laws on their books, many of which were repealed (ironically) around the time of the dissolution of the #449 Seminar in 1976. Current politics have forced us to reexamine what might be even subconscious views that border on eugenics. Robert Pollack, a Columbia biology professor and former dean of the college (currently director of the University Seminars), was interviewed in a 2018 video that was presented at Columbia’s School of Social Work. In “A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics, and the American Dream,” he discussed “modern” eugenics whereby people are discriminated against according to their socioeconomic status. One of the last talks of Seminar #449 was by Dobzhansky himself, who had moved on to become a geneticist at the University of California, Davis. The topic was “The Evolutionary Origin of the Ethical Conscience.” He was a proponent of group selection and thought that altruism could be explained on a genetic basis. The #449 Seminar was suspended in the fall of 1976 and discontinued thereafter. I discovered the Seminar in Population Biology as a graduate student at City College/City University of New York more than thirty years ago. This Seminar appeared to overlap #449 by a few years and was chaired by Howard Levene at its inception. It is likely that the members of #449 wanted to distance themselves from what could have been perceived to be their eugenics past and a belief that we could improve humans through better F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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breeding. The so-called reformed geneticists essentially started a new Seminar and gave it a new name. Louis Levine, a prominent Drosophila fruit fly geneticist from City College and a graduate student of Dobzhansky’s at Columbia, was a member. As my mentor, he invited me to hear some talks and participate in the discussions over dinner. I gave my own Seminar on the declining populations of the American shad, a migratory fish, in 1991. After graduate school, I landed a job as a lecturer at Columbia and soon became the rapporteur for the Seminar. As luck would have it, at the one meeting I missed, I was “elected” as chair and have remained a chair or cochair for the past twenty-five years. Levine religiously attended the Seminars before he passed away a few years ago. He always spoke to any students present and probed them about what they really wanted to do in life.1 Howard Levene was my cochair in my initial days, and he faithfully attended the Seminars in his wheelchair before passing away at age 89 in 2003. Three other greats have passed on since—Max Levitan (2011), Lou Levine, and Michael Levandowsky (who, along with Howard, constituted “The Four Levs”). Max Levitan was professor of anatomy, genetics, and genomic science at Mt. Sinai College of Medicine. He was a little hard of hearing but always affable and questioned all our speakers intensely. His research was ahead of his time, as he was able to show that the genes of the Drosophila robusta were changing due to global warming. Levine not only wrote genetics textbooks, he testified at trials when DNA first came to be utilized as evidence and collected fruit flies from Mexico to study. He dissuaded me from conducting a study of polydactyly (extra fingers) in island populations, because he felt that the study might be perceived negatively with “singling out certain groups” for anomalies and eugenics. Levandowsky, my cochair for five years, was an ecologist who studied and presented at the Seminars on a wide variety of topics, including soil amoeba and diatoms. Over the past twenty-five years, the topics have been broad. This might have been the intent of the original founders. Population biology is a broader topic than Genetics and the Evolution of Man and can move beyond people, primates, and Drosophila genes. The current rubric can now include plants, microbes, and fungi. In the mid-1990s, conservation management, biodiversity, phylogeny, and systematics were introduced as topics. These have been augmented by increases in computing power, which has enhanced our ability to conduct cluster analyses on population traits (as [ 108 ]

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was done by a Seminar presenter with Caribbean oysters) and phylogenetic analyses that depict the relatedness of species and/or populations through DNA sequence differences. DNA sequencing also has been used to tease out species of mixtures of microbes, such as those found in the intestine or mouth. In 2019, Michael Tessler, a newly minted graduate student from the Richard Gilder College of the American Museum of Natural History, regaled Seminar attendees with tales of how terrestrial leeches can be used to determine which mammals are present in a habitat. This is because DNA can be isolated from the blood meal of the leech, which reveals the identity of its last “victims” through this DNA. (Rare mammals have been found to exist in certain regions of Australia in this manner.) Tessler went on to note that environmental DNA (e-DNA) is being used in many aquatic environments to determine what is living in the water, from microbes to fish. Another compelling talk that directly tied into Dobzhansky’s opinions that race is important biologically was by Jefferson Fish from Queens College. In “Scientific and Cultural Perspectives on Race,” in 2005, Fish said, “Our race changes every time we fly in an airplane”—meaning, effectively, that race can mean different things to different people, depending on which country we find ourselves in. He elucidated attitudes about race throughout the world and mentioned that some ethnic groups looked down on the Caucasians of Russia because they were too dark. Christopher Jon Jensen from the Pratt Institute espoused the importance of cultural evolution in his 2016 Seminar offering, “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators: Culture, Biology, and the Future of Human Evolution,” noting that when human families are better off, they tend to have fewer children. He suggested that this could be because education can take precedence over reproduction in women’s lives. This particular Seminar reminded us all to think about factors in addition to those of genetics that might influence population biology, such as social factors. Interestingly, Jenson is a mathematician and has devised mathematical proofs that derive from his studies. As previously suggested, the general title “Population Biology” has enabled attendees to explore a breadth of topics that otherwise might not have been broached. Population biology as an umbrella description now opens up the possibility of inviting botanists, microbiologists, ichthyologists, herpetologists, entymologists, ornithologists, mathematicians, mammalogists, conservation biologists, general ecologists, and others to share their views. F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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Thus although the common theme of the Seminars has remained learning more about populations of any organisms, the individual topics have expanded in scope. For example, Gregory Cheplick, a botanist from the College of Staten Island, pointed out in his 2005 Seminar, “Population Biology of Seedlings,” that flowering of plants (or inflorescence) can occur underground. This protects the plant in adverse situations. Cheplick has been able to utilize this mechanism to grow grasses—first in a greenhouse and then transported to wetlands that he is helping to restore in Staten Island. By learning more about the relationship of these grasses and other plants and the best situations for their reproductive cycles, he has spread interest about wetland restoration in other parts of New York City and New Jersey. Another botanist, Andrew Geller from Queens College, pointed out in his 1995 Seminar session, “Defenses of Plant Populations of the Southwest and Spain,” that these green creatures are “not so green” underground and “fight dirty” with chemical defenses. These “barriers” actually regulate the populations of plants and assure proper allocation of resources. In other words, these chemicals are a form of population control. Nathan Ellis of the New York Blood Center spoke in 1995 at the Seminar about Bloom syndrome, a rare recessive genetic disorder that causes short stature, skin rashes upon sun exposure, and all types of cancers at an early age. Unfortunately, few resources are available to treat these rare diseases. Still, in describing different family pedigrees of the syndrome, Ellis pointed out that the more we know about the genetics of the disease, the likelier we are to develop treatments. Ellis has since moved to the University of Arizona, where he serves as program director of its Cancer Biology Program and director of its graduate program in genetics. The New York Blood Center also has connected with the Seminar through Sarah Lustigman. She studies Onchocerca volvulus worms, which cause river blindness. This disease is endemic in thirty-four countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South America and has infected possibly as many as 37 million people. Lustigman is studying drugs to kill the worms; recently she published an article that describes the genome of this scourge and the Wolbachia bacteria that live inside the worms. She invited my class to visit her lab and see live Onchocerca volvulus worms under the microscope. Lustigman has been trying to develop a vaccine that would work against the larval form of the worms and is interested in testing antibiotics against the bacteria. Hence the field of population biology can involve epidemiology, [ 110 ]

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which involves knowing the populations and patterns whereby the disease occurs, as well as trying to eradicate it. Lustigman spoke of her work in our special Seminar Conference on infectious diseases, “From Ebola to Zika: Emerging and Present-Day Diseases,” in 2016. Another Population Biology Seminar topic has been using animal vocalizations to learn how populations interact with other animals both inside and outside their circles. Recordings of bird vocalizations in Cape Cod finches by ornithologist Albert Burchsted from the College of Staten Island revealed fascinating findings at a Seminar in 1996.The birds can change their vocalizations to match the birds around them. Burchsted presented spectrographs that he recorded while bicycling around the cape. This malleability might become important in these current days of climate change. Sound libraries have been added where recordings have been digitized and are now available through the Internet. These sound libraries originally housed bird recordings but have expanded to include a whole host of vocalizations from drum fish to whale sonar. Seminar member Roberta Koepfer from Queens College introduced us to parasitoid wasps in her Seminar, “A New Fly Species of the Island of Guam” in 1997. Parasitoid wasps look like winged ants. They can take over the larval form of an insect, make that body their own, and eventually hatch out of it. A few years after her lecture, a former St. Francis College student, Michelle Batchu, studied parasitoid wasps with Shubba Govind at the City College of New York.We have written a paper for lab educators about using the wasps, which parasitize fruit fly larvae, in undergraduate genetics and parasitology courses. Another notable City College Seminar member was Robert Rockwell; he studies snow geese, which migrate vast distances. Rockwell remarked during the 1997 Seminar presentation, “Biology of Snow Geese,” that snow geese populations have altered with changes in available food sources during migrations. In recent years the populations have increased because of the more nutritious food available to them during their migrations, namely Louisiana farmed rice. These animals have increased so much in number—from one million in the 1960s to five million today—that the population might be unsustainable because of overcrowded breeding grounds in the Arctic. The Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC), now known as the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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(EICES), has been a source of many speakers and much Seminar fodder. Among the speakers are the late Don Melnick, a physical anthropologist who helped found CERC, his students who studied the population biology of primates, and Chris Raxworthy, who studied reptile and amphibian phylogenies. Other environmental Seminar topics have been vertical farming in the 2004 session, “Feeding the Next Three Billion People” by Dickson Despommier, which offered a feasible solution to our growing land problem; and “Effects of Forest Fragmentation on the Genetic Structure of Amphibian Populations” by James Gibbs of the CERC in 1997. Gibbs pointed out the importance of corridors for wildlife communities and populations. Wildlife corridors or green spaces are being used increasingly as connecters to counteract the fragmentation of habitat and habitat loss caused by humans, as from road construction. Seminar participants have learned, unhappily, that there is a thriving smuggling industry in endangered species. Mistreated by their mishandling, many of the animals die unnecessarily. Chris Raxworthy, a CERC researcher, spoke of birds and lemurs that are tucked into the inside of truck tires in “Populations and Habitat Fragmentation of Reptiles and Amphibians of Madagascar” (1997). Fish are captured from coral reefs and sold to pet stores, as was noted by the late Eugene Kaplan, former director of the Hofstra University Marine Center, in his 1996 Seminar presentation, “Disappearing Coral Reefs of Jamaica.” Through Rob DeSalle, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who delivered a Seminar lecture on metapopulation structure, we established a relationship with that institution.2 We eventually secured a collaborative National Science Foundation Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology grant with St. Francis College, Medgar Evers College (Carolle Bolnet as mentor), and the Museum. From 2002 to 2006, the Seminar funded many undergraduates who studied with Rob DeSalle’s graduate students. They did their research both in the field and in the large behind-the-scenes research labs housed in the American Museum of Natural History. These students in turn presented at the Seminar. Topics such as cluster analysis in oysters (William HarcourtSmith), mimicry in snakes (Mike Friedman), recognition of individuals in whale populations (Howard Lowenstein), sea turtles in Brazil (Eugenia Naro-Maciel), and sexual selection in insects (Richard Baker) were broached in lectures and subsequent discussions. One notable entry, devoted [ 112 ]

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to mongooses in Jamaica, was by Chanda Bennett, a graduate student of Don Melnick. (Mongooses were introduced to the Caribbean island to control rat populations, but rats are nocturnal and mongooses are diurnal. So never did the twain meet.) Seminars on fish population biology and genetics and coral reef ecology have held a special appeal over the years. Isaac Wirgin, an especially gifted scientist as well as fisherman, presented a Seminar on using tomcod, whose lower geographic limit is the Hudson River, as a natural population to study cancer. It appears that these fish experience more stress in this warmer water than at the southernmost part of their range, so they experience more tumors. It would be noteworthy to study whether climate change will influence the range of these fish (and other organisms) and subsequent disease patterns over time.3 John Waldman and Phaedra Doukakis (1999) also gave Seminars on the endangered sturgeon and elucidated this fish’s population dynamics, life history strategies, and systematics. In 1995, Richard Borowsky from New York University gave talks at both the Seminar (“What Happens in the Dark?”) and at St. Francis College about blind cavefish populations. He has demonstrated, through breeding with seeing fish, the development of rudimentary eyes. This is an important experiment because it demonstrates that something as wonderful as an eye can develop through evolution, not intelligent design, as creationists purport. Melanie Stiassny, from the American Museum of Natural History, gave a cautionary talk in 1997, “Crisis and Biodiversity in Freshwater Fishes,” about the loss of fresh water on our planet and the homogenization of cichlid fish populations in Africa. She warned that we would (as humans) eventually have to choose which specific organisms to “save” from extinction because “we won’t be able to save them all.” Another example of a species that we “chose” to save was the northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest. George Barrowclough, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, neatly presented the dilemma of the late 1980s and early 1990s of stripping yew trees, where northern spotted owls reside, to produce taxol, an anticancer drug. In so doing, important bird habitat was destroyed. The title of his 1997 Seminar was “Population Biology of the Spotted Owl.” This was a hot topic during those times, as conservatives looked disparagingly at the so-called tree huggers and asked, “Who cares about those stupid birds?” Unfortunately, this drama seems to present itself again and again in F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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the clash among environmentalists, developers, and those who claim species for food and/or medicines. (Barrowclough cleverly presented this information to get our attention before he moved on in his Seminar to discuss phylogenetic or evolutionary relationships among bird species.) In another Seminar, Varuni Kulasekera outlined an additional environmental crisis of the 1990s, the rise of West Nile virus, which causes encephalitis. Her PhD topic with Rob DeSalle, and the title of her Seminar in 2000, was “The Phylogeny of the Lower Flies.” (The subject struck close to home; mosquitoes classify as lower flies, and certain species in New York City carry West Nile virus.) Kulasekera was able to procure grant funding to the tune of $3 million to study the genetics and population biology of these mosquitoes, and she employed several of our students to assist her. An example of the ripple effect of the Seminars has been to expose the broader biological community to speakers who once presented there. For example, Rob DeSalle spoke at an annual conference of the Metropolitan Association of College and University Biologists (MACUB) that hosted more than three hundred attendees. A colleague at Mercy College recently asked Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a Columbia microbiologist, who conducts research on viruses, especially polio and Zika, to speak on her campus. She had heard him speak both at our one-day symposium on infectious diseases in 2016 that was sponsored by the University Seminars and at MACUB. A new Seminar cochair, Alison Cucco, has brought in many speakers from both Fordham University and the American Museum of Natural History. With the encouragement of Robert Pollack, a one-day symposium, “From Ebola to Zika: Emerging and Present-Day Diseases,” was organized in 2016. Six presenters spoke to more than one hundred attendees about the latest advancements in and knowledge of Ebola, Zika, malaria, Lyme disease, dengue fever, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Through serendipity I recently met two graduate students who were studying tropical organisms in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Pearle Cales was investigating populations of tree frogs, and Danielle Fibikar was studying bats. Both were interested in the impact of invasive tree frog and bat species on the native populations. They were the students of Richard Veit, who had led a Seminar session in 1997 about kestrels, an endangered predatory bird. Both graduate students gave Seminars in 2018 and plan to return to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to conduct follow-up work about the effects of Hurricanes Irma and Maria on tree frog and bat populations. [ 114 ]

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Antonia Florio, a former City College valedictorian, a member of the first graduating class of the Robert Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History, and an assistant professor at St. Francis College, delivered a Seminar talk in 2015 about cryptic species in Madagascar. She espoused the utility of DNA barcoding to help delineate these look-alike species. She has left New York City and is now leading a science education unit of the National Park Service in Florida. One reads constantly about the demise of species, and the “sixth extinction” of species, probably caused by our own species’ success. However, some species, such as snow geese (mentioned earlier), have increased greatly for various reasons. A 2018 Seminar session by my St. Francis College colleague, psychologist Kristy Biolsi, and I discussed the increase of California sea lions and harbor and gray seals. We noted that the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed to protect many endangered or threatened marine mammals. However, the success of these animals now clashes with the Endangered Species Act, which protects salmon. Some aggressive sea lions are foraging on endangered salmon that are harvested by fishermen. Another dilemma is the increase of seals that has caused an increase in sightings of great white sharks. One positive trend in the Seminar in Population Biology is the use of socalled citizen scientists to help acquire and analyze data. Last year Kathy Wydner from St. Peter’s University in Jersey City told us about Project Feeder Watch. Under this national program, begun by scientists at Cornell University, students and citizen scientists watch and record numbers and species of birds at strategically placed feeders around the country. These data are then entered into a database housed by Cornell and freely available to all.The data can be mined in search of trends. (Indeed, climate change might have added to the increase in the number of bird species noted in urban Jersey City.) Two facilitators in a course on active teaching at the American Museum of Natural History have given talks at the Seminar. Suzanne Macey spoke about hard-to-find turtles in upstate New York (2018), and Ana Luz Porzecanski—a former graduate student in Don Melnick’s lab—spoke about monkeys in the Amazon in the early 2000s. The two have formed the Network for Ecology and Conservation Practitioners (NECP), sponsor active learning seminars in biology, and provide interactive teaching materials in ecology, such as case studies with life tables. What does the future of the Seminar in Population Biology hold? F RU I T F L I E S A N D T O M C O D

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Speakers could be invited to discuss topics such as the population dynamics of newly discovered species in the deep ocean with remotely operated vehicles. Previous topics, such as vertical farming and aquaculture, could be reexamined. We could explore the tug-of-war among environmentalists, developers, and those seeking to exploit organisms for economic purposes. There are some very complicated cases, such as that of the horseshoe crab, an organism that has survived pretty much unchanged (according to fossils) for more than 350 million years. A variety of stakeholders want a piece of this Darth Vader–like creature. Eel fishermen want them for bait. Researchers want their blue blood for medicinal purposes. Still others (namely bird watchers) crave their eggs to supply nutrition for a migrating bird called the red knot. Topics as varied as endangered species and overpopulation of deer species could be explored. Human population growth, the effect of climate change on populations, the struggle between the environment and people, and citizen science projects are all fair game. Human population biology topics such as viral and bacterial diseases and the complicated biology of parasites and their effects on humans could be presented and discussed. Finally, perhaps, in a return to the beginnings of this Seminar as Genetics and Evolution of Man under Theodosius Dobzhansky, we should revisit the re-encroachment of topics such as race, intelligent design, and eugenics and figure out how to loosen their hold and importance on the American people. As population biologists, we might raise awareness in our everyday spheres. For this dissemination of knowledge is one of the purposes of the University Seminars.

Notes 1. Levine’s wife, Gabriella de Beer, instituted an annual lecture series at City College in both their names after her husband’s death (the Louis Levine-Gabriella de Beer Lecture in Genetics). The 2008 inaugural lecture, “Design Without Designer: Darwin’s Most Significant Discovery,” was given by Francisco Ayala, a member of Seminar #449 and a former Dominican priest. When asked by a high school teacher, “What do I tell my students when they ask how everything on earth began?” Ayala replied, “Tell them you don’t know.” 2. Metapopulations are subpopulations that might have become physically separated through the habitat fragmentation mentioned earlier. DNA studies often [ 116 ]

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give the answers as to which population is more closely related to which other population. 3. This author went fishing on a party boat with Dr. Wirgin and his son and caught quite the bluefish. However, Ike has made said author jealous over the years with pictures of large striped bass that he has caught. As it is, his PhD dissertation was on variation in striped bass populations as revealed by mitochondrial DNA analysis.

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CHA P T E R 9

Living Long and Prospering The Seminar on Aging and Health: Policy, Practice, and Research (#695) V I C TO R I A H . R AV E I S

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he University Seminar on Aging and Health: Policy, Practice, and Research was established in 2003. At the time there was a growing consciousness in academia and the service professions of the critical need to better understand and strategically plan for an aging and more diverse society. Globally there was growing recognition of the complex and far-reaching implications of population aging and its potential impact on all facets of society. In addition, the United Nations had just released the report “Political Declaration and Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing,” following its acceptance by the 2002 Second World Assembly on Ageing. The political declaration was a clarion call to the world. The foreword to the report by the UN Secretary summarized the weighty impact of global population aging on the world: Where once population ageing was mostly a concern of developed countries, today it is gaining real momentum in developing countries as well. And where once ageing may have been thought by some to be a stand-alone issue or afterthought, today we understand that such a dramatic demographic transformation has profound consequences for every aspect of individual, community, national and international life.

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Indeed, population aging is driving widespread changes in how a society’s resources will be used, potentially affecting intergenerational and intragenerational equity and solidarity. With expanded life spans, pensions and social benefits must cover more years of retirement. The incidence of chronic disease, medical expenses, and health service use increase as well. Given the declines in fertility and, consequently, changes in the family structure, informal support resources will decline. Formal support and long-term care demands will swell. Nonetheless, the benefits that longevity affords not only to the individual but also to society should not be overlooked. Older adults have an integral role in maintaining a society’s heritage, informing and guiding its cultural traditions. They are a source of intergenerational transfers of assets, properties, and other resources. Older adults also provide support and care to dependent family members, for example, young children and ill, disabled, or frail relatives. In addition, they engage in a range of volunteer activities, giving their time, talents, expertise, and experience in service to community groups, schools, religious organizations, political groups, and other essential societal institutions. In summary, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the Seminar on Aging and Health was organized, awareness was growing about this rapidly evolving area. The Seminar was founded because it was viewed as a feasible venue for promoting, both within the university and beyond, collaboration and collegial cross-disciplinary dialogue on aging-relevant topics and all that it portends. We, the founders, also felt that such a mechanism would facilitate initiatives focused on policy, practice, and research issues related to global population aging. In 2003, this kind of academic engagement in aging across Columbia University was limited. Although various schools and departments within Columbia had relevant programs and specializations, their emphasis was discipline specific. Further, the efforts were primarily campus specific; for example, either among the faculties on the uptown Health Sciences campus or within those located on Morningside Heights. My colleague Jacqueline Denise Burnette was a professor at Columbia’s School of Social Work on the Morningside campus. I was on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences on the Health Sciences campus. We posited that cochairing the

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Seminar would strengthen existing linkages, broadening expertise in this emerging area. Our decision to establish the Seminar was strategic. “There is now an unprecedented critical mass of scholarly expertise and commitment to geriatric health care across academic ranks and disciplines within the Columbia community,” we stated in our proposal. “The concept for this Seminar is, in fact, the culmination of a five-year dialogue between faculty in the Schools of Social Work and Public Health about the health of older adults in an aging society.” I was influenced, too, by my exposure, years earlier, to the University Seminars program itself. When I was an advanced doctoral student in Columbia’s Sociology Department, I served as rapporteur for the Seminar on Drugs and Society (#553).The sessions gave me the opportunity to meet and interact with leading academics in that field in an informal setting. I observed firsthand how the University Seminars format facilitated insightful discussion, generated noncompetitive discourse on critically important topics in the field, and fostered collegial relationships across institutions and between disciplines. As cochairs, Dr. Burnette and I jointly coordinated and co-led the Seminar sessions from their inception in 2003 until the Seminar was put on hiatus in 2010. The Seminar membership decided in an early group discussion to organize the sessions around broad-based, aging-relevant themes. The areas we covered evolved organically, reflecting emerging areas in the field and issues of current interest to the Seminar members. As the disciplinary representation in the membership expanded, new topics of discourse arose. Our members understood and appreciated the significance of one another’s efforts.They knew the challenges encountered in the field and the intellectual indifference that this area of inquiry could generate. They and the Seminar’s guest speakers encompassed national and international scholars, academic leaders, advocates, and change agents. All shared a commitment to the field of global aging, recognizing that it was transformative and would in large part define the twenty-first century. From 2003 through 2010, when the Seminar on Aging and Health was active, we convened twenty-one sessions, covering six broad areas. Generally, we held three to five Seminar sessions on a specific theme over a one- to two-year period. These initial sessions presented broad overviews on key topics related to longevity, such as health and life quality in the later stages of the life span. [ 120 ]

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We launched with “Global Perspectives on Aging and Health,” and Mohamed Nizamuddin, a clinical professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, spoke at our inaugural session on October 8, 2003. Nizamuddin, who directed the International Programme on Population Ageing for Developing Countries (a joint initiative of Columbia and the UN Population Fund), spoke on “Rapid Shifts in Global Population Aging: Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Countries.” His takeaway was that population aging differs in different parts of the world. Whereas population aging occurred slowly in most Western countries, allowing time for them to accommodate to these foundational changes, it is taking place rapidly in the developing world.This presents demographic challenges, especially insofar as the more limited resources available to the developing world are concerned. “Developed countries grew rich before they grew old; but developing countries are growing old before they become rich,” Nizamuddin said. For instance, in France and Sweden it took 114 years and 82 years, respectively, for the population age 65 and older to double. In contrast, Brazil, Indonesia, and Tunisia will be making this transition in less than 25 years. Moreover, for China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, the time span for making this transition will be 25 and 28 years, respectively. “As a consequence of these rapid population changes,” Nizamuddin concluded, “the developing world is faced with the challenge of establishing policies, and building the capacity and resources to both improve the quality of life and meet the needs of older persons, within the context of sustainable development.” This Seminar session provided a deeper understanding of the complexity of population aging from a global perspective. It also illustrated the necessity, when establishing policies or programs to address population aging, of incorporating a multilevel systems approach that is country specific and incorporates both resources and deficits. In another early Seminar session, “How Social Ties Shape Quality of Life in Old Age” (May 5, 2004), Howard Litwin of the Paul Baerwarld School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem reported on the benefits that older adults derive from social resources. In researching elderly Israelis, Litwin found that respondents in diverse or friends networks reported the highest morale. He also explored the relationship between activity level and well-being in later life. Active social engagement has been widely posited as an important component of quality of life for older adults. But Litwin’s investigations found L I V I N G L O N G A N D P RO S P E R I N G

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support for an alternative explanation. As the session’s minutes note, “The quality of older people’s social relationships influences their well-being rather than their activity level per se.” Moreover, “social relationship quality was found to be associated positively with well-being, and the quality of social ties had a stronger association with well-being than the extent of informal activities.” Litwin’s findings challenged widespread assumptions regarding social relationships and spanned geographic and cultural boundaries. On October 4, 2004, I delivered the final Seminar session in this thematic vein: “Perspectives on Quality of Life at the Later Stages of Life.” Quality of life, it turns out, is a broad concept encompassing a range of global states. These include happiness, life satisfaction, high morale, positive self-esteem, perceived self-worth, meaning in life, and success in achieving specific life goals. Findings from a growing number of cross-sectional, cohort, and longitudinal studies consistently indicate that older adults have relatively higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction than do younger people. My Seminar session emphasized the importance of implementing programs and supportive services to enhance the quality of life and psychological well-being of vulnerable older adults, as well as to address the factors that adversely affect morale and self-esteem. Indeed, a subsequent meta-analysis of this expanding body of research reinforces the significance of life quality. That review highlighted benefits that well-being (a subjective health state) has on physical health states. In 2005, we decided to focus on “Aging in Contemporary Society.” Florence L. Denmark, the Robert Scott Pace Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at Pace University (and past chair of the UN NGO Committee on Ageing), spoke on February 22, 2005, about “Commonly Held Myths and Misperceptions on Growing Old.” Denmark recounted how, in modern society, the emphasis on the aging population is often negative and phrased in terms of loss—of health, mobility, family, financial stability, and cognitive ability. She emphasized that as a result of highlighting loss as an age-related event, older adults are stereotyped and subjected to discrimination, thereby contributing to ageism. As she noted, this ultimately leads to limitations on the opportunities, services, and resources that are made available to older adults. Consequently, an older adult’s well-being, sense of fulfillment, and physical health can be adversely affected, hindering positive aging. A long-standing advocate for recognizing and offsetting ageism and its widespread consequences, Denmark identified empowerment as a valuable tool to achieve positive aging when dealing with change or loss. As she [ 122 ]

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explained in a subsequent essay, “Empowerment: A Prime Time for Women Over 50,” “Empowering others is the process of supporting people to construct new meanings and use their freedom to choose new ways to respond to the world, often to the benefit of others. Empowering others involves providing individuals with the appropriate tools and resources to enhance their self-confidence and self-esteem.” The Seminar on “Conscious Aging,” delivered on April 25, 2005, by Harry R. Moody, a senior associate at the International Longevity CenterUSA, advanced our understanding of what constitutes successful aging. Moody focused on the aging individual as a force for inner change. He posited that inner mastery, personal growth, and a sense of meaning in terms of the total life history are the hallmarks of successful aging. The focus, he said, should not be solely on physical decline or biological aging. Rather, attention also should be given to how one adjusts to such gradual decreases or losses—what he termed “compensation for decrement.” As Moody subsequently explained, this involves “personal meaning [that] is sustained through inner resources permitting continued growth even in the face of loss, pain, and physical decline.” He offered the example of Matisse: when the artist developed severe arthritis later in life and was no longer able to paint, he continued to produce art by cutting out colored pieces of cardboard and creating collages. For more than a decade, the World Health Organization has advocated a global initiative for age-friendly cities and communities. However, before this concept became widely known and implemented, Aging and Health Seminar members were introduced to aspects of the urban environment that can affect the aging experience. On October 18, 2005, Michael K. Gusmano of the Mailman School presented “Growing Older in World Cities.” His talk focused on the World Cities Project, an investigation that he carried out with Dr.Victor G. Rodwin of the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. They conducted a comparative analysis of the quality of life of older urban residents living in four world cities: New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Older urban residents in these cities are relatively healthier than the rest of the populace in their respective nations. But Gusmano noted, “Within each city, health status varies considerably. The variance in health is most striking in London and New York, where there are greater levels of ‘deprivation’ and greater disparities in mortality and morbidity across neighborhoods of the city.” Their investigation also determined that substantial differences exist L I V I N G L O N G A N D P RO S P E R I N G

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across these cities in terms of levels of institutional long-term care, social isolation, and living conditions for the oldest old residents, those 85 and older. He concluded, “The growth of so many older persons, particularly women living alone, has focused increasing attention on the importance of social interaction with friends, neighbors, and local programs to assist the frail older old.” From a policy and programmatic perspective, Gusmano and Rodwin’s research suggests actions that can make urban communities a place for all ages. A core goal of the Seminar was to generate interdisciplinary collaboration and aging-relevant program planning.We focused on this task in 2006, holding a series of sessions devoted to “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Geriatric and Gerontological Care.” They featured a range of interdisciplinary agingrelevant education and service programs and provided real-world examples of the attendant challenges involved in implementing them. Dr. John Toner, who held a joint appointment at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia’s interdisciplinary Stroud Center for Aging, delivered the first session on January 31, 2006. In “Opportunities and Challenges in Providing Interdisciplinary Geriatric Education to Health Practitioners: Insights from the Field,” he described a geriatric mental health education program that the Stroud Center was offering in collaboration with New York University and Utica College. The program exposed psychology, nursing, and occupational therapy undergraduates at Utica to interdisciplinary geriatric mental health care. The students received mentoring and accompanied interdisciplinary teams working in nursing homes and the geriatric units of psychiatric hospitals in upstate New York. There they observed care delivery first-hand. Columbia participated by consulting via teleconferencing during the team’s visits to nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals in upstate New York. Although telemedicine is now more widespread, this program was innovative in its early use of that technology to address a gap and improve access to mental health services for underserved populations and those in rural settings. “There are virtually no geriatric psychiatrists outside of the main cities,” Toner said. “To find them outside of the city is nearly impossible.” In summing up, Toner addressed a challenge that besets service providers and program planners—sustainability. Recent cutbacks in federal funding, he noted, were threatening the continuation of this novel, practice-based educational initiative. [ 124 ]

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Mental health services also were on the agenda on April 19, 2006, with “Meeting the Mental Health Challenges of the Elder Boom.” Michael B. Friedman of the Center for Policy and Advocacy of the Mental Health Associations of New York City and Westchester County reported on an initiative that provided mental health care tailored to the issues and needs of community-dwelling older adults. “The need to focus on late-life mental health issues is important,” he said, “as there are a variety of mental health problems that develop or are exacerbated in later life. Also, given the advances in longevity, the number of people aging with serious mental health conditions are [sic] steadily increasing.” Responding to a growing awareness that the prevailing mental health system was not adequately serving older adults and was ill equipped to handle the elder boom generation, the Geriatric Mental Health Alliance of New York established the Center for Policy and Advocacy. Since its inception in 2003, the Alliance has advocated for services and support that will enable older adults with mental health problems to remain in or return to the community, avoiding institutionalization. In addition, the center is facilitating older adults’ better access to the services that do exist and addressing the need for a culturally competent workforce in mental health services. The last Seminar session we held on the interdisciplinary approaches theme featured Amanda Edwards, head of Knowledge Services at the Social Care Institute for Excellence in London. On February 28, 2006, she took up “Look for What You Can Do, Not for What You Cannot: An International Study of Working Across Boundaries in the Care of Older People.” Edwards presented a comprehensive analysis of how the boundaries between service agencies are managed in different societies. Her case studies were Germany, Denmark, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. She deliberately selected these countries because they varied in philosophy, constitutional structure, and the funding and organization of their services. Given the bureaucratic nature of formal service agencies, Edwards’s analysis of these six countries documented that to work successfully across agency boundaries, new approaches and skills are required. Equally important, she noted, was the admittedly complex need to foster a shared philosophy or commitment among agencies so that mutual effort can facilitate and secure any necessary institutional or policy changes. Given the varied services and programs that an aging population requires, integrating the delivery of multiple services from different professions among many separate agencies L I V I N G L O N G A N D P RO S P E R I N G

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presents a formidable challenge. Seminar members heartily endorsed this remark, having experienced it themselves in their own settings. Advances in health promotion and disease prevention have contributed to reduced mortality, enabling people to live longer and more active lives. But not all older adults are reaping these benefits. Attention is now being directed toward developing and tailoring programs and services to meet the needs and preferences of the vulnerable and the underserved. We explored this emerging area in a series of meetings in 2007 that addressed “Tailoring Health Promotion and Disease Management for Older Populations.” Ruby Senie, a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School, kicked things off on January 30 with “Breast Cancer Families and Older Adults: Insights from the Metropolitan New York Registry.” Senie had devoted more than twenty years to researching breast cancer risk and prognostic factors. For ten years leading up to her Seminar presentation, she was the principal investigator of the Metropolitan New York Registry of Breast Cancer Families, a unique resource created for genetic and environmental studies of breast cancer funded by the National Cancer Institute. Thanks to earlier detection and advances in treatment, women are surviving longer following breast cancer treatment. However, limited attention has been given to the ongoing health care needs of these survivors. As Senie reported, “a growing body of evidence shows that symptoms associated with the cancer and its treatment can continue to emerge months to years following treatment.” This gap in care is particularly problematic for older women. “One in eight women who live to 85,” said Senie, “will have been diagnosed at some point in their life with breast cancer.” She pointed up a need for cross-disciplinary training among oncologists and geriatricians so that the complex health care needs of aging cancer survivors are adequately addressed. Senie’s Seminar reiterated the concerns raised in the landmark 2006 National Academies report, From Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in the Transition, regarding gaps in supportive and clinical services for aging and long-term cancer survivors. Another Seminar from this period was “ElderSmile: Delivering Dental Services to the Elderly in Northern Manhattan,” held on February 29, 2007. Stephen Marshall, associate dean for Extramural Affairs at Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine, described the innovative community-based program ElderSmile. This program was created by the dental college to serve older adults living at home or in area residential geriatric centers who lack access to and information about oral health care. [ 126 ]

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As noted in the 2000 U.S. Surgeon General’s report on oral health, “Oral health is essential to the general health and wellbeing of all Americans and can be achieved by all Americans. However, not all Americans are achieving the same degree of oral health. . . . ‘[A] silent epidemic’ of oral diseases is affecting our most vulnerable citizens—poor children [and] the elderly.” Indeed, the need for ElderSmile’s outreach service was evident in the health care history of the older adults served by this program. As Marshall noted, “Although the vast majority of senior participants (79.6 percent) had visited a medical doctor in the past year, fewer than half (47.5 percent) had visited a dentist in the past year.” He explained further that “cost was the most common reason given (50.2 percent) for not visiting a dentist in the past year.” Delivering programs and services that are tailored to and informed by the target community is particularly important when the target population is culturally diverse. This health equity issue was the theme of the 2008 Seminar sessions, “Multicultural Perspectives on Health, Wellness, and Aging.” These sessions focused on a variety of novel programs and services that applied a community-informed approach in outreach, delivery, and program scope to underserved elders from minority groups. The presentations described the service initiatives and covered the challenges, successes, and lessons learned. Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo of Columbia’s Center for the Health of Urban Minorities presented “Aging Research in the Latino Community: Chronic Disease Focus” on February 28, 2008. He described the procedures that the center followed to successfully implement community-informed behavioral interventions that promoted adherence to various health promotion and disease management behaviors. Older Hispanic and Latino adults living in northern Manhattan who were at risk for hypertension, diabetes, and obesity were targeted with a community-based, comprehensive lifestyle intervention. Especially efficient methods were cultural tailoring of the intervention using community workers or lay educators to lead the intervention; providing individualized, one-on-one assessment and monitoring; cultivating behavior-related tasks; providing feedback; and delivering long-term highintensity/contact intervention. In a related Seminar, Dr. Karen Bullock of the University of Connecticut offered “Healthy Aging, Mind and Body: Addressing Barriers to Mental Health Treatment in a Diverse Population of Older Adults” on April 14, 2008. Bullock, a professor of social work, described a program she created to provide mental health services to a vulnerable and hard-to-reach L I V I N G L O N G A N D P RO S P E R I N G

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population: older adults living in public housing in the inner city of Hartford, Connecticut. Using a community-informed approach, she designed a strategy that successfully reached this underserved older adult population. Trained bilingual clinicians carried out community-based outreach and delivered a home-based mental health services program to a diverse population of elderly public housing residents.The program also facilitated group meetings in these public housing residences to generate opportunities for the residents to engage in mutual aid. The theme for 2009–2010, the last years that the Seminar actively met, was “Challenging Ageist Stereotypes.” “Ageism is everywhere,” the World Health Organization has noted, “yet it is the most socially ‘normalized’ of any prejudice, and is not widely countered—like racism or sexism.” Ageist attitudes are exclusionary, restricting the opportunities available to older persons and limiting their full, active engagement in society. Consequently, their community is deprived of any benefits and contributions that their involvement would have produced. The Seminar sessions during this final period were inspiring, challenging ageist stereotypes and showcasing exemplars of active aging. On April 21, 2009, Joan Jeffri, director and founder of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia’s Teachers College, presented “Aging Artists as a Model for Society.” She discussed findings from her foundational study of aging visual artists. This was the first needs assessment of aging artists in the New York area. The study, “Above Ground,” was so named to reflect the response a 92-year-old artist provided when asked how she was doing. As Jeffri related, the artists were still fully engaged in their creative endeavors. One 83-year-old mixed-media artist remarked, “Art is what’s making me live.” A 72-year-old homeless mixed media artist commented, “Art is the only thing that’s left in the world.” Most of those whom Jeffri surveyed in her study were not retired (80 percent) and did not plan ever to retire (88 percent). The majority of respondents were satisfied with their careers; the vast majority (91 percent) would choose to be artists again. They reported a good to excellent quality of life, had high self-esteem as people and artists, and were aspiring to a higher level of artistic expression within the next five years. Moreover, as she related, “77 percent communicate every day with other artists; they go to their studios on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, even if it takes an hour to get there. They change their medium when required rather than give up art-making.” (This echoes the compensation [ 128 ]

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for decrement process that Moody discussed in his 2005 Seminar session on “Conscious Aging.”) Equally stirring was “Beyond the Olympics: An International Perspective on Aging Athletes,” held on February 11, 2010, with photojournalist Robert Jerome. His photos of older athletes competing in the World Masters Games events, supplemented with commentary on their backgrounds and personal stories, established that these individuals were a varied and inspiring group. The World Masters Games, held every four years, draw competitors worldwide. The 2009 games in Sydney, Australia, attracted almost thirty thousand competitors. The athletes included not only former Olympians and professional athletes but also ordinary persons for whom sports and physical activities were personally meaningful. Two Sydney 2009 World Masters Games competitors were centenarians: 101-year-old lawn bowler Reg Trewin of Griffith and 100-year-old track and field athlete Ruth Frith of Brisbane. The competitions shattered stereotypes about aging as older athletes demonstrated the physical ability to do things others would not have thought possible—such as the 80-year-old male athlete who pole-vaulted eight feet, or the female world champion discus thrower in the 90–95 age group. Jerome noted further that the relationship between older athletes is different from relationships observed between younger athletes. Off the field the older athletes are comrades, not competitors. “What we have learned from all the athletes,” said Jerome, “extends beyond the world of athletics. It is that no matter how old you are, if you do it with passion and commitment, you will achieve anything. No matter how old you are, you just have to try everything you want to do.” With the completion of the Seminar’s 2009–2010 series, the members collectively agreed to put their gatherings on hiatus for an indeterminate period. We had established the Seminar in 2003 to strengthen existing linkages and broaden expertise and interest in the health of older adults in an aging society—and we succeeded. The Seminar fostered new aging-related opportunities and initiatives and enabled the development of interdisciplinary networks and collaborations within and beyond Columbia. Unfortunately, this success came at a cost. The membership’s high degree of engagement in the aging field made it increasingly difficult to schedule Seminar sessions that did not compete with other commitments. Sessions were held less frequently, and attendance was limited. We realized that the L I V I N G L O N G A N D P RO S P E R I N G

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Seminar had fulfilled its founding reason. It stands ready to be reactivated for the next phase of its history. The decision to put the Seminar on hiatus was not made without regret. The shared interest, knowledge, and impassioned discussion that accompanied the sessions reaffirmed the importance of this area and implicitly challenged fellow members to strive toward excellence and greater rigor in their respective efforts. The Seminar on Aging and Health fostered the development of an intellectual community. The linkages and networks that were developed have continued to grow and flourish. From the onset, the Seminar performed a critical, formative function at a time when interdisciplinary discourse in the aging field was limited. Overall, the wide-ranging impact has offered a number of notable outcomes. First and foremost, the Seminar sessions generated a shared awareness of relevant issues and provided new insights with a local, national, and international scope. The sessions provided a platform in which interdisciplinary discussion, analyses, and strategic planning on a variety of aging-relevant issues and topics were facilitated. The forum changed the dialogue on aging, encompassing a focus on global perspectives and experiences. It initiated strategizing on initiatives or policies that ranged from micro to macro levels of societal change. The Seminar sessions also fostered innovative partnerships, which often led to the development of novel programs and services. One notable example is ART CART: SAVING THE LEGACY, an intergenerational arts legacy project that Joan Jeffri spearheaded in collaboration with several of the Seminar members following her 2009 presentation on older artists. This intergenerational project paired older professional artists with teams of graduate students to undertake the preparation and preservation of each artist’s creative work. The project was delivered in New York and Washington, D.C. ART CART provided an educational experience to the students while offering a model of positive aging and a service that ensured the preservation of the artist’s cultural legacy.The legacy project also touched the artists on both a personal and a professional level. It initiated the opportunity for life review and generated a new or reawakened creative contribution. (Joan Jeffri recently told me that the encouragement and guidance she received from Aging and Health members following her Seminar gave her the impetus she needed to establish the arts legacy program.) The Seminar on Aging and Health: Policy, Practice, and Research was convened to facilitate interdisciplinary discourse and generate a multipronged understanding of the unprecedented advent of global population [ 130 ]

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aging. Over the last fifty years, while the birth rate has declined, average life expectancy has continued to rise, tripling the number of persons 60 and older. By 2050, 1.6 billion people will be 65 and older, representing 16.6 percent of the world population. This will be more than double the number of children under age 5 (7.2 percent). This phenomenon has never before been experienced in human history. The population demographics of the past are unlikely to be achieved again. This global development has profound societal, economic, philosophical, and cultural implications. Widespread attention is needed to address the many issues that population aging generates—as well as to reap the benefits of an expanded life span. Population aging will have a momentous impact on modern society, and no single discipline can address its farreaching implications. A multipronged, integrative approach is required to live long and prosper. This Seminar has been an integral part of formulating that approach.

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CH A P T E R 10

Speaking About the Unspeakable The Seminar on Death (#507) C H R I S T I N A S TAU D T, J O S E P H W. DAU B E N, A N D JOHN M. KIERNAN

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death. —JE AN- JACQUE S RO USS EAU

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he University Seminar on Death was founded in 1971 at a time when social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer deemed death akin to pornography during the Victorian era: best hidden from sight and not broached in polite company. Over the last nearly half century, the Seminar has contributed to the erosion of the taboo against speaking about death. In collaboration with Columbia University’s DeathLAB—a transdisciplinary research and design initiative reconceiving how cities might better accommodate the mortal remains of the deceased—the Seminar is at the forefront of innovative expressions of mourning, final disposition, and spaces of remembrance. In the mid-twentieth century, ordinary death in the due course of life lay deeply concealed from private and public view. Television and the press provided visual and print access to the atrocities of war, homicide, and destruction: bombings; self-immolating Buddhist monks; a naked girl running from the napalm destruction of her village; deadly antiwar and civil rights protests; the political assassinations of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Jimi Hendrix’s and Janice Joplin’s drug overdoses; the Charles Manson murders; the Chappaquiddick drowning; and tornado casualties. Editors of the dominant news outlets modulated images, text, and voice into a carefully calibrated balance of information and sensation, all the while minding the boundaries of “good taste” to avoid repelling viewers and readers. [ 132 ]

In contrast, the media and the general public alike deemed the common experience of someone dying from serious illness or old age too intimate and fraught with raw emotion to bring into view in text or conversation. Such everyday deaths occurred behind hospital doors, where discussions about care options for a dying patient—if they occurred at all—typically did not even include immediate family members, let alone the patient. The end of life was a solitary event. Even close relatives purportedly needed (or wished) to be spared witnessing a loved one’s terminal stage and death. In The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1977/1981), an expansive survey of the approach to death in Western civilization from around year 1,000 CE to the mid-1970s, French historian Philippe Ariès theorized about the origins of this evasive attitude. He surmised that an increasingly secular society played a contributing role in the denial of death in the twentieth century. But above all, he deemed that the “medicalization” of death removed the end-of-life experience from the family and caused death to become invisible. Medical science proved increasingly successful in warding off death: vaccines and miraculous antibiotics battled serious illnesses and cured previously deadly infections, in addition to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), advanced life support, and progress in immunosuppression that enabled organ transplants. Later, chemotherapy and other pharmaceutical inventions made it possible to live with, rather than die from, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other health threats. Physicians marshaled their extensive resources to prolong life at whatever cost to the dying person and immediate family—a cruel but normalized state of affairs that continues into the present. The medical profession emerged as the primary authority on death and dying. The siren call to re-recognizing that dying is a natural, necessary, human, and familial event, rather than a medical problem to be solved, would not be heard loudly enough to have practical consequences until the twenty-first century. But a few voices were raised half a century earlier. Among the pioneers was American psychologist Herman Feifel. In 1956, Feifel assembled a team of philosophers, religionists, and scientists for his anthology, The Meaning of Death (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), widely regarded in academic circles as the single most important scholarly study of death, dying, and bereavement of its day. Feifel stressed that our inability to overcome death is not a failure and that repression, isolation, and denial need not be reflexive responses to mortality awareness. SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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A decade later, several of the contributors to The Meaning of Death joined Feifel in launching Omega—Journal of Death and Dying in 1970, and shortly thereafter, Death Studies in 1971. Although Feifel’s work and these periodicals were widely praised in academic circles, they did not promote wider public discussion of death and dying. That was accomplished by two books aimed at general audiences. One book was British journalist Jessica Mitford’s scathing bestseller on the excesses of American funerals and the exploitive practices of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), which attacked the unquestioned power of funeral directors as all-knowing authorities on postdeath matters. Her descriptions of ludicrous obsequies allowed for entertaining conversations and for discussions about the need for more transparent regulation of the funeral industry. It provided an entry into the risky territory of mortality while staying safely distanced from a loved one’s deathbed. Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969) moved to the heart of the matter. She posited a model of five psychological stages that she claimed patients follow after receiving a terminal diagnosis: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Her rigid pattern for understanding the uniquely personal and culturally contingent event of dying has since been refuted and refined. Still, her book arguably marks a turning point in the public discourse on death, the beginning of what has become labeled the “death awareness movement.” Influenced by Dame Cicely Saunders, the British nurse, physician, and social worker credited with founding the first modern hospice, Kübler-Ross presciently argued for patients’ right to participate in their own medical decisions more than two decades before Congress passed the Patient SelfDetermination Act (1990). Likewise, ahead of legislation and public understanding of the needs of patients, Saunders advocated for home care instead of hospitalization at the end of life, a model that was crucial for designing the Medicare Hospice Benefit, enacted in 1982. Other influential figures who, in the 1960s, challenged the wisdom of keeping death invisible were Sir Colin Murray Parkes, a British pioneer in bereavement scholarship; sociologist Robert Fulton, who created the first college course on death and dying in the United States at the University of Minnesota; and John D. Morgan, who introduced the formal study of death and bereavement to Canadian universities. [ 134 ]

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And then there was Dr. Austin (Bill) H. Kutscher, founder of the Columbia Seminar on Death. Bill Kutscher, a professor in the School of Dentistry and the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, initially was driven to understand the needs of terminally ill individuals and the bereaved through his wife Helene’s—and his own—excruciating struggles after she was diagnosed with, and subsequently died from, breast cancer in 1966. A few weeks after Helene’s death, Kutscher was hospitalized following an operation. The Stethoscope, the in-house publication of The Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York (as it was then known), described it in 1970 this way: In the silence of his hospital room, Dr. Kutscher tried to understand the meaning of life and accept the fact of human mortality. He sought the writings of specialists to help him recover from his grief. Dr. Kutscher found numerous isolated articles and some books for professional counselors but discovered to his astonishment that the whole area of bereavement had not been covered in any systematic way. The editor of three books, Kutscher thought a volume on the subject of death and bereavement would fill a major gap and be of great use to patients and professionals alike. As he discussed his plans with colleagues, a larger project took shape. In 1968, he and individuals from the Department of Psychiatry formed a national not-for-profit educational organization, the Foundation of Thanatology. The foundation’s goal appeared prominently on its stationery: “[T]o promote scientific and humanistic inquiries into death, loss, grief, bereavement, and recovery from bereavement.” Under Kutscher’s leadership, the foundation burst into activity. Within two years it established the quarterly scholarly journal Archives of the Foundation of Thanatology (1969–89) and the short-lived bimonthly Journal of Thanatology and Bereavement, which targeted a lay audience. The foundation also published three anthologies authored or coauthored by Kutscher: Death and Bereavement (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1969), designed for practitioner specialists; But Not to Lose: A Book of Comfort for Those Bereaved (New York: Frederick Fell, 1969), intended for the general public; and Loss and Grief, Psychological Management in Medical Practice (by Bernard Schoenberg, Arthur Carr, David Peretz, and Austin T. Kutscher; New York: Columbia SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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University Press, 1970), written for medical students and health care professionals. In addition, Kutscher organized a two-day symposium in November 1970 on the “Psychosocial Aspects of Terminal Care” at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S). Kutscher was determined to use every means at his disposal to bring death into open discourse. As the ultimate clinician-educator, he seized upon yet another platform to support his mission, the University Seminars, perhaps attracted by their concept of unfettered explorations. He presented his idea for a “Seminar on Death, Loss, and Grief ” to the chairs of the Seminars in the fall of 1970. According to an interdepartment memorandum dated February 26, 1971, to Professor James Gutmann, then director of the Seminars, the next meeting was scheduled for March 3. Kutscher’s minutes note that “upon the request of Dr. Gutmann . . . the title of this Seminar was examined and reconsidered.” After lengthy discussion, the participants adopted the succinct title “Death” to give the Seminar the broadest possible mandate. After the meeting, interested parties were asked to propose and rank topics of greatest interest. The list, presented in May, indicates the breadth and predominant interests of the early Seminar participants, in the following order: 1. Coming to Terms with Death—Education for Death 2. Anticipatory Grief, Dying, Death, and Bereavement: A Continuum 3. Anxiety and Faith: How the Dying Patient Faces Death 4. How to Professionalize Without Losing Compassion 5. Death: A Problem of Existence 6. Fear of Dying and Death 7. Sensitivity to Death: Love and Death 8. Enrichment of Life Through the Experience of Death 9. Death-Like States in Contemporary Society 10. Funeral and Memorial Services 11. Death: The Objective View 12. Liberation of Death from Professional Control 13. Overemphasis on Death 14. Developing the Self for Living Dr. Jacque Choron, author of the acclaimed volume Death and Western Thought (New York: Collier Books, 1963), was “unanimously selected to be the first discussant for the new Seminar year (1971–1972).” [ 136 ]

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From the beginning, Kutscher was concerned about ensuring unhampered discourse. In a note to James Gutmann, he explained that minutes of the meetings were brief “ to the point of indicating only the broad subject matter” in order to “maintain the very necessary and exciting spontaneity and intimacy of the group’s discussions.” Troubled with the silence around mortal matters, Kutscher made the Seminar a forum where these difficult issues could be aired. In hospitals, where the majority of people died and where the subject belonged, no one spoke of death. Kutscher believed it was primarily doctors who avoided the subject. His programs emphasized the practical aspects of caring for the dying and the bereaved. He often invited health care professionals from acute-care settings to participate. Academics, educators, interested laypersons from the community, and activist organizations occasionally attended, but his focus remained on educating professional providers. Kutscher understood the importance of training medical students to be more holistic in their care of terminal patients. He initiated and directed the first- and second-year death and dying electives at P&S. In 1975, he scheduled an “Open Discussion” in collaboration with Dwight Rosenstein (MD 1979), a P&S student. “The goal,” Kutscher said, was “to start students thinking about their own feelings towards death.” Under Kutscher’s leadership, the work of the Seminar and the Foundation of Thanatology were symbiotic. Robert G. Stevenson, a former cochair of the Seminar who taught a course on death education in River Dell Regional School in Oradell, New Jersey, recalled, “[M]any who developed the foundations of the study of thanatology made their first major presentations at the Seminar.” Among those who carried the discussion and insights of the Seminar into their own activities and areas of influence was Samuel C. Klagsbrun, MD. As a psychiatrist he was confronted in his practice with the sensitive issue of physician aid-in-dying, a subject intermittently that has been examined by the Seminar from various perspectives since it was founded. The Seminar on Death’s currently longest-serving participant, John M. Kiernan, recalled that Seminar meetings at that time were reflected in the themes, presentations, and symposia of the Foundation of Thanatology. Kiernan had become a member after his first presentation to the Seminar in 1980, when he was administrator & coordinator of the Organ Recovery Program for the Presbyterian Hospital. Presenters for both, among them Kiernan, were drawn from the staff of the Medical Center, as well as from SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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the growing roster of Seminar and symposia presenters. Kutscher, in Kiernan’s word, “dragooned” Seminar speakers into giving a talk at the symposia at the Medical Center as well: “Attendance at these meetings in Ferris Booth Hall at Columbia’s main campus could number 40–50, making them unwieldy . . . open to all interested staff and students of CPMC, CU, and the public. The more the better for Bill.” Once the Seminar started meeting in Faculty House on a regular basis (at the insistence of the director of the University Seminars), attendance became more manageable and more in keeping with the discussion format of an academic Seminar. Sherry Schachter, a continuously active associate, was invited to join in 1985. At the time, she was a head and neck oncology nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She recalled Kutscher’s encouragement: “Under the mentorship of Bill I published my first paper, ‘Mycosis Fungoides: A Case Study in Dermatology and Person Threatening Illness.’ ” The Seminar’s flurry of activities in its first two decades was almost entirely due to the tireless efforts of Kutscher himself. His focus as chair, as well as in his other endeavors, was on improving the end-of-life experience for terminal patients and the bereaved. His chosen method was to educate health care staff, chaplains, and social workers, and his turf was the medical school and the adjacent Columbia Presbyterian Hospital at 168th Street. His son, Kenneth Kutscher, Jr., reminisced: FT [the Foundation of Thanatology] was a life-long dedication of my Dad’s. It was also, almost entirely, a one-man operation, funded by a modest inheritance from his family. However, it was clear to all of us that the Foundation would cease to exist when he either ran out of money or the energy to keep up with his many faceted goals. Ironically, as the millennium approached, he became as much involved in chronic illness such as COPD as thanatology—probably because he had already published an exhaustive list of books he had edited. With his work taking a new direction, Kutscher resigned as chair of the Seminar in the spring of 1990, when he nominated Dr. Michael K. Bartalos as the new cochair with Robert Stevenson, cochair for the previous five years. Kutscher insisted that one of the cochairs have a Columbia affiliation.

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As Kiernan observes, with this transition of leadership, “Bill left the Seminar in good hands . . . an important part of his legacy.” Bartalos, who has held positions in psychiatry, surgery, pathology, radiology, pediatrics, and human genetics and development at Columbia, had seen death and destruction first hand, as a student activist in the Hungarian uprising in 1956. He fled the country under mortal threats from the Soviets and finished his medical studies at the University of Heidelberg. As a self-described secular humanist, he also had a deep personal interest in philosophy. Bartalos and Stevenson saw the Seminar as a comprehensive platform for the exploration of death. Medical concerns at the end of life and bereavement continued to dominate the program. But the cochairs were open to examining death in all contexts, as exemplified by a diversity of speakers and sessions. These included presentations by two UN ambassadors at the same meeting of the Seminar in March 1992. One was “Death in the Literature of Spain” by Spanish ambassador José M. Chaves; the other was “Death of an Empire” by Djoumakadyr Atabekov, ambassador from the Democratic Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Bartalos discussed “Death in Different Cultures—Past and Present” (February 1993) and “The Transsexual Experience—Metaphor for Death and Rebirth” with a transgender police officer (November 1996). Jerry T. Nessel, a medical doctor and current associate (since 1993), was invited to speak on “From the Nazi Death Camps in Poland” (1992) and “Guatemala: Being a Witness” (1993). Nessel subsequently addressed topics ranging from the AIDS crisis to life extension. Stevenson recalled as especially memorable two programs (April 1992 and October 1997) featuring Dr. Stanley Burns’s archival postmortem photographs from the Civil War, featured in his book, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twelvetrees Press, 1990). Suicide was a recurring theme in the 1990s, with eight presentations. These began with Stevenson’s “Two Decades of Death Education/Suicide Prevention in Schools: What Has Been Accomplished? What Still Remains To Be Done?” in 1991 and extended to current associate Thomas A. Caffrey’s introductory talk in 1999, “Suicide Prevention on the Front Lines: A Practitioner’s Perspective.” Bartalos invited Caffrey to speak at the Seminar

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after seeing his listing in the New York City phone book under “Suicide Consultation.” Caffrey reflected: My work in private practice had been quite isolating. Meeting with as many as 60 patients a week—individually—left little room for meeting with colleagues, research, or evening activities. When I accepted the Seminar’s invitation to join as a member, I began the series of 140 3-hour evening gatherings that served to punctuate the next 20 years of my work-life.The patients I met with weekly during those 3 hours came to know when it was time to “skip” a week; I was away at Columbia that night, discussing death. The diverse programs and speakers vitalized the Seminar. At a time when forums for serious and open discussions of death were rare, the Seminar was a haven for professionals and practitioners in the field. In a 1995 note to then director Aaron Warner, Bartalos reported, “Our seminar, which in the late 1980s was experiencing a decline in attendance, is attracting new members. Our regular attendance now is between 15 and 20 representing a doubling since 1990.” A few telling developments indicate that discussions about death and dying also were gaining traction outside the Seminar. Patient advocacy groups lobbied Washington, and in 1986, Congress expanded the Medicare Hospice Benefit. In 1991, that body passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, allowing patients’ wishes about refusing or accepting treatments to prevail over their physician’s judgment. The professional literature pointed to a growing recognition that ethnic and religious differences among patients necessitate adjustments of care models to suit individual families. The National Book Award was conferred on How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Last Chapters (New York: Knopf, 1994) by physician Sherwin Nuland, which gave a detailed account of how our bodies break down when affected by terminal illnesses. Tuesdays with Morrie (New York: Doubleday, 1997), the journalist Mitch Albom’s description of his weekly visits with a dying mentor, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 350 weeks. In September 2000, Time magazine, known for being in tune with mainstream America, published a cover story entitled “Death in America” with unflinching photographs and stories of terminally ill patients and their families. Despite these fissures in the taboo, Seminar participants noticed, in their professional and personal experience, the general public’s reluctance to [ 140 ]

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consider mortality in the context of their own and their loved ones’ lives. Kevin T. Keith, an ethicist and current associate, reinforced this in his 1998 inaugural Seminar presentation, “The Definition of Death.” In his talk he noted the continuing lack of public debate before and since the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which was passed by Congress in 1981 and updated in 1995. The UDDA defines death as “the irreversible cessation of function of the entire brain.” Such a critical and potentially controversial concept had barely been reviewed in Congress and had not reached public consciousness or elicited robust discussions seventeen years after it became law. (UDDA was updated again in 2010.) Following 9/11, terrorism and war fatalities were widely discussed. But on the whole, in the early years of the new millennium, the general public still looked away from ordinary deaths. Decades earlier, in his The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), Ernest Becker posited that the denial of death is an innate, immutable human reaction to our awareness of mortality. Under the leadership of Michael Bartalos, the Seminar decided to explore this seemingly entrenched concept to determine its contemporary relevance and meaning. With the intention of publishing an anthology titled The Denial of Death in the 21st Century, the Seminar devoted fourteen sessions of the academic years 2001–2003 to this theme. Delayed for various reasons, the book was published in 2009. By then the tide had turned, and with revisions the volume reached the market as Speaking of Death: America’s New Sense of Mortality (Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2008), edited by Bartalos. In the intervening years, topics of death and dying had become more frequent in all media. The public was beginning to speak more freely about death or, at least, was willing to listen and look without blanket rejection. Bill Moyers’s series On Your Own Terms featured the end of life of several individuals and their families. A frank portrayal of the contemporary experience of death, it aired on public television in 2004. That same year the nation followed the harrowing dilemma facing Terri Schiavo’s family, when no advance directive to determine her wishes had been prepared prior to her becoming unconscious. Several books on death-related themes deliberately targeted (and reached) the general market by offering appealing titles. Among the most popular was humorist Art Buchwald’s 2007 volume Too Soon to Say Goodbye (New York: Random House), with vignettes from his life as a hospice patient, bringing levity to a sensitive topic. SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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Palliative care, which had been around since the 1960s, became a certified medical specialty in 2006, and the number of hospital-based palliative care programs tripled from 2000 to 2010. Given the mounting evidence that many people were now thinking and speaking about issues surrounding the end of life, the Seminar decided it was time to “take the pulse of death” in America in a broad-based conference. Thus the first Austin H. Kutscher Memorial Conference, “The Pulse of Death Now,” was held in Columbia’s Kellogg Center in March 2008. Described as “an interdisciplinary meeting on the experience and representation of mortality in the 21st century,” the day-long conference was based on a selection of responses to a call for papers focusing on the contemporary status of death in America. Theme headings included “Death and the Clinician,” “The Psychology of Death—Religion and Violence,” “Reframing Death & Dying,” “The Dying Process,” “Death as Advocacy,” “Death & Representation,” “Life & Death as Willful Choices,” and “Memorializing in the 21st Century.” Current associates Jerry S. Piven, a philosopher with special interests in psychology, and Nathan Ionascu, a pediatrician and bioethicist, joined the Seminar following their participation. Most of the papers from the 2008 conference were published in The Many Ways We Talk About Death in Contemporary Society, coedited by Margaret Souza and Christina Staudt (New York: Mellen Press, 2009). Souza, a current associate who has expressed her appreciation for being able to share work in progress with fellow Seminar participants in an environment conducive to productive criticism, became a regular participant in 2007 on the invitation of fellow anthropologist Professor Lesley A. Sharp of Barnard College, an active member of the Seminar for a decade. Staudt had been invited to join the Seminar in 1995 when, as a doctoral student in art history, she was working on a thesis focused on images of death. After Stevenson stepped down as cochair in 1995, Bartalos remained as sole chair until in 2003 when he asked Staudt to serve with him as cochair. When Bartalos retired from active participation in the Seminar in 2010, Staudt was elected as chair and has been reelected annually. An independent scholar (Columbia PhD, 2001) and community activist, she is the first chair of the Seminar not to hold a teaching position at a university. The Second Austin H. Kutscher Memorial Conference (March 2010) was smaller and focused on the manifestations of inequalities and inequities experienced by the dying and the bereaved, and it made room for global perspectives. Among its intriguing conclusions were the fundamental [ 142 ]

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importance of trusted relationships to achieve longevity and the high risks of overtreatment at the end of life for people with limited income and education. Rhonda Sternberg, a psychologist and subsequent regular associate of the Seminar, addressed the subject of “Alone & Dying . . . Coming of Old Age in America.” Sternberg recalled that while working in nursing homes, spending her days speaking with residents about their fears, wishes, and realities related to their own soon-to-come end of life, she developed workshops on death and dying for the staff. “Yet, I had no one to talk to about my ideas, feelings, or philosophy about these issues,” she said. “My professional colleagues were ‘more interested in living’ and my personal friends thought I was weird.” Through the Seminar on Death, she has found “an interdisciplinary group of like-minded colleagues who believe it is important to speak aloud about the ‘unspeakable’ and to disseminate what we learn to the outside world!” That second conference also yielded a book of selected papers, Unequal Before Death (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), edited by Staudt and Marcelline Block. Professor Sayantani DasGupta, a faculty member of Columbia’s Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, called the volume “a critically important collection that illuminates how the politics of life are inextricable from the politics of death.” The third Austin H. Kutscher Memorial Conference, “Reshaping Our Journey to the End: Death, Dying, and Bereavement in 21st Century America” (March 2012), sought to describe and engender positive change in all mortal matters, from palliative care to corpse disposition. Staudt received an indication of the growing interest in information and insights about “all things death” when she approached the Praeger imprint of the academic publishing company ABC-CLIO about a publishing contract. She asked the acquisitions editor to select among several themes so that conference sessions could be planned accordingly. In response, she received a request for a two-volume work that covered all the proposed subjects. According to the editor, municipal libraries— important clients of the publisher—would welcome such diverse and indepth content for their patrons. Selected edited papers from the resulting comprehensive conference, with additional chapters by invited authors, were published in 2014 as Our Changing Journey to the End: Reshaping Death, Dying, and Bereavement in America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO), edited by Staudt and J. Harold Ellens. SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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At all of the conferences, the lively exchange among regular Seminar participants, as well as guest speakers and attendees from across the United States and abroad, sparked considerable creative energy and generated fruitful discussions that could challenge the status quo. An example was Thomas Caffrey’s 2010 presentation questioning mainstream grief theories: I spoke of the relative absence of grief I felt when my mother died at 99. The Seminar’s openness to, curiosity about, and receptivity to the ( lack of ) grief I showed, buttressed already extant research on the nonuniversality of grief following the death of loved ones, and my own belief that severe, unremitting grief stems from factors other than deep, healthy bonds. The ripple effect in the broader community of the Seminar’s conferences and books and the work by invigorated contributors is difficult to measure. Cause and effect—influencers and those inspired—intermingle in dynamic environments. The Seminar’s conference years coincided with the oldest baby boomers reaching retirement age (in 2011) and beginning to worry about how to control their end-of-life care. Habituated to shaping the practices of their day with the force of large demographic numbers, they now demanded—and began to effect—change in the care of individuals who were at or nearing their ends. Having seen relatives hooked up to life support in an existence that looked like prolonged dying rather than extended life, they sought guidance on how to improve the experience at life’s end and wanted information on how to initiate critical conversations with family members and medical providers. The first “death cafés” (informal events for sharing thoughts about death) appeared, and entities were established, such as the Conversation Project (2010), a national organization promoting dialogue about goals and wishes for care at the end of life. Concern about the thorny issues of self-determination and physician-assisted dying as related to Alzheimer’s patients brought Michael Teitelman, a psychiatrist and Columbia University Senior Scholar, to the conference in 2012. He has been a regular member since, with continuing interest in this disquieting problem. The Seminar has provided a valuable and stimulating academic framework for Staudt as an active hospice volunteer and in her role as president of a local end-of-life coalition with the mission to raise awareness around mortality issues. She has acknowledged that [ 144 ]

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the Seminar’s sessions on physician-aid-in-dying, hospice & palliative care, and on advance care planning, directly feed into the educational programs I develop for professional caregivers and the general public. They have stirred a more open and nuanced conversation in the communities where I am active. Inspired by the Columbia Seminars model, Staudt has initiated a similarstyle faculty seminar at Concordia College New York. Sherry Schachter, a professional bereavement counselor and past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, has noted that over the more than thirty years she has been an associate of the Seminar, its participants have become increasingly eclectic and diverse: “This has been exciting as it continually encourages me to broaden my thoughts and at times think outside the box. Attending the Seminar has clearly expanded my knowledge and enriched both my personal and professional life.” Michael Bartalos, who is coping with his own cluster of serious illnesses, also reflects on the Seminar in a personal context: “Anchored in many levels of death, dying, disposal and grief, the Seminar has given participants different views for seeking the road towards death. Are we lost if we do not seek to find the path?” Two of the Seminar’s recent additions to its rolls illustrate the multiplicity of disciplines represented. Associate member Joseph W. Dauben is a historian at Herbert H. Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with research interests in the history of science and Chinese mathematics, among other pursuits. He joined the Seminar to widen his contextual understanding of death while writing an institutional history of the Woodlawn Cemetery. Ari L. Goldman, a full member, is a former reporter for The New York Times and a professor of journalism at Columbia. He teaches a course called “The Journalism of Death & Dying,” “which looks at everything from writing obituaries to covering natural disasters and suicide.” Tom Caffrey values “hearing first-hand, and in breathing-distance intimacy, from leading experts on death-related issues (whether scientific, artistic, religious, or philosophical),” but he also finds that the congenial atmosphere at Faculty House is an important ingredient in the Seminar experience: The blend made possible by the Faculty House’s deliberately hospitable structure (meetings rooms surrounding large eating-and-drinking SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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areas) made membership in the Seminar more than a purely academic, research, or exploratory exercise.  .  .  . The meals allowed for more relaxed contact with other Seminar members and with the evening’s presenter. Among the speakers at the third Kutscher Memorial Conference was architect Karla Maria Rothstein, who shared her visionary projects in “Life After Death: Re-Conceiving Civic Infrastructures of Remembrance.” Design director of Latent Productions and associate professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), Rothstein has been an active member of the Seminar since 2010. She participates, as she put it, with “a focus on urban spaces of remembrance and the processes and rituals related to corpse disposition.” Her research and teaching center on “the design and experience of places related to death and memory, the role of civic-sacred spaces of sanctuary and reflection, and the potential to re-calibrate traditions associated with honoring the dead.” The work of her design studios “challenges the tendency to socially and spatially isolate death and cemeteries, understanding and advancing global practices with a 21st century perspective.” She recognizes, too, that her engagement with the Seminar has “broadened and deepened my association with individuals from myriad disciplines implicated in death and dying, opening new perspectives to consider, and through dialogue, reciprocally amplifying awareness.” As an outgrowth of her professional and academic work and relationships built in part through the Seminar on Death, in 2013 she founded the aforementioned DeathLAB at GSAPP. In 2016, DeathLAB and the Seminar on Death collaborated on a daylong colloquium in Columbia’s Low Memorial Library, “Designing for Life and Death: Sustainable Disposition and Spaces of Remembrance in the 21st-Century Metropolis.” Invited stakeholders and other experts—funerary industry leaders, designers, elected officials, and academics—explored how cities can adopt innovative ways to accommodate the mortal remains of their residents in responsible ways. Panel discussions probed the urban, cultural, economic, and legislative potentials of DeathLAB’s design research and facilitated dialogue. Two forthcoming books by Rothstein and Staudt are expected to emerge from this colloquium, one a coauthored volume to be published by Columbia University Press and the other a coedited volume surveying [ 146 ]

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contemporary mortuary practices and plausible future variations in human disposition and memorialization. The partnership with DeathLAB has brought public attention to the Seminar’s work, as evidenced by proposals for collaboration from corporations and not-for-profit organizations, as well as calls from the media requesting interviews and information. Being on the cutting edge of environmentally sound, well-designed approaches to “after care” is among the most exciting aspects of the Seminar for many of its members and associates. Among them are Rhonda Sternberg, who appreciates the examination of “new end-of-life care, burial possibilities, and death and dying philosophies, as well as new information about memorial spaces and alternatives to traditional coffin burials. . . . I share what I learn and open discussion with my professional and personal communities as well as with my patients and students and have referred many individuals to Columbia’s DeathLAB to learn about new advances.” Anthony J. Lechich, an associate and senior vice president for Clinical Strategy of the Continuing Care Community of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, points to a Seminar meeting featuring an obituary writer of The Times (November 2016), which “whetted my interest to see how the ‘pros’ lay out their task. It is gratifying that [we] are still exploring the endlessly fascinating and relevant aspects of death and dying for our fellow travelers.” The Seminar has played a vital role for scholars from diverse disciplines since its inception. It continues to be open, reflective, and forward-looking, providing a forum for purposeful discussion in an unthreatening environment and allowing for contrasting views and civilized controversy. The tone of the exchanges among the knowledgeable and thoughtful participants is direct—no euphemisms needed—yet respectful. Throughout its history the Seminar has maintained Bill Kutscher’s focus on confidentiality, intimacy, and spontaneity to make such investigation possible. At the February 2019 Seminar meeting, presenter Rabbi Adina Lewittes noted that her discussion was intended to consider how it was possible “to create a space where we can be open and speak of death.” That has been the goal of the Columbia University Seminar on Death all along. Quoting Rothstein, the Seminar has always believed in “the value of the creative imagination to inspire and educate. Through collaboration we share the courage and coeur (heart) to discuss and persuade, to envision and enact SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

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potential, and to bring opportunities into the world that do not yet exist.” If we do not always agree, though, she suggests, The tension is positive. It expands our thinking and our arguments, provoking us to ask better questions. From diverse points of view, we understand that the rhythms of life and death are intertwined, together defining and uniting us as mortals. Civil conversations uncover purposefulness in our individual work and the potential for interconnected, transformative generational impact. Death brings meaning to our solitary and our public selves, reminding us what a privilege and responsibility it is to be alive.

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CHA P T E R 11

Thinking and Talking About Talking and Thinking The Seminar on Language and Cognition (#681) RO B E RT E . R E M E Z

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ow can the study of language contribute to an understanding of human nature? This ambitious question has animated the meetings of the Seminar on Language and Cognition. If the question has varied in prominence when technical considerations dominated our conversation, it has been a recurring concern for us as common as the tides. To offer a taste of our discussions, when the topic turns toward biological evolution or lifespan development of the capacity for language, we are pressed to consider whether an ability to communicate linguistically is special in nature and if human language is truly one of a kind. Historically, our linguistic proficiency might be the surviving variant of a bygone era when there were many branches of talkative progenitors on our family tree. Today, language exists in a single living species, our own, distributed across a blue, watery world orbiting a middle-sized star in the arm of a galaxy within the Virgo cluster. As far as we know, language is a phenomenon of our little neighborhood alone, viewed physically, symbolically, or practically.This kind of communication is co-extensive with human biology. When our Seminar discussions concern language as an object of study, we take spoken symbolic communication as a natural phenomenon, exhibiting discoverable causal characteristics that are unique to our scale. The University Seminar on Language and Cognition began meeting in September 2000. Then, a single linguist held an appointment in the Faculty [ 149 ]

of Arts and Sciences. Yet research on language was thriving in the University. It was dispersed across the Departments of Anthropology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, the languages (including English), as well as the Departments of Neurology at the Medical Center and Biobehavioral Studies and Human Development at Teachers College. The proximity of meetings of the Language and Cognition Seminar to other institutions also made participation by our neighbors possible. Even in the earliest sessions, we welcomed regular and occasional members from New York University, the City University of NewYork, Princeton University, and Yeshiva University. Our discussions crossed institutional boundaries as well as traditional academic disciplines. We were off and running from the start. In our first year, our fledgling group was visited by Carol Fowler, president of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven; William Labov from the University of Pennsylvania and a member of Columbia’s Linguistics Department from 1964 to 1970; Michael McCloskey and Peter Jusczyk from Johns Hopkins; Paul Kay from Berkeley; and Lois Bloom from Human Development at Teachers College. Both Labov and Bloom aimed scrupulously to disabuse us of the conceit of innovation, if we displayed it, in creating a University Seminar devoted to discussion of language. Each of them told about their participation in a retired University Seminar, Language and Communication (#427A), with kindred focus—if different membership—during the 1960s. The reasons for the recess in Seminar meetings about language are lost to us.Yet in the interval between the end of Language and Communication and the start of Language and Cognition, attention to language remained ardent across the university. When Language and Cognition was proposed, none of our inaugural members suggested awakening the slumbering predecessor. We simply had no memory of it. If the Advisory Committee of the Seminars that chartered us recalled the antecedent, they did not propose a revival. Instead, they accepted our newly proposed emphasis on cognitive dynamics in language as sui generis and legitimate. Leading the discussion at the last meeting of our initial year, Professor Bloom sounded a poignant note, too, remarking that the first formal presentation of her career had occurred at the aforementioned Seminar. “It was a baptism of fire!” she said (although she did not say that the intensity was unpleasant, exactly). To our group, in our first year, still settling on a comfortable temperature, she offered an animated discussion of her studies, describing the effort exerted by a child in learning a native language. [ 150 ] T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

Articulating a singular perspective among language researchers, she posed a scientific challenge to the members of the Seminar and then announced that her presentation in May 2001 would be her scholarly finale. In her last time at the head of the table of a Seminar, it seemed as though she recognized the heat as warmth. Why would a group of scholars ever adopt language as a topical focus? It takes imagination and hope to seek the world in a grain of sand, not only to see it.To our participants then and now, a concern about language is both appealing and daunting because the phenomena encompass so much about human action and understanding. Scientific attention starts by examining the use of language to represent objects and events. It then extends to the neural and metabolic functions that establish and maintain an open-ended representational ability within a finite biological system. Attention to grammar strives to explain the patterning of words in expressions and the transformation of expressions into utterances. Sound production is one organizational state of the lungs, larynx, and upper articulators. They facilitate chewing, swallowing, and respiring as well as talking. Because of this convergence in biological resources, language has no dedicated anatomy. The higher-level capacity for speech and song is shared anatomically with mundane functions of breathing, eating, and swallowing, even if the coordination of these structures differs vastly from one mode to another. Following an acoustic speech wave out of the mouth and into a listener’s ear, the scientific focus shifts to the auditory sensory form of spoken sounds and the prospect that these match familiar words already committed to memory. If recognition occurs, comprehension ensues from the syntactic aggregation of known words. But if a word is obscure or articulated in an unfamiliar dialect or elusive style, or is malapropistic or misarticulated, then a form of reasoning akin to inference can be triggered to enable interpretation of the sequence of syllables and words and the phrases and clauses they compose. A person who speaks figuratively also depends on interlocutors to recognize metaphoric intent as well as the sequence of words, and ultimately to understand why someone would say something literally false, such as, “I smell a rat,” or “Keep your eye out for it,” or “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.” Our project in the Seminar has entailed the calibration of this ability to use language for both straightforward and oblique aims. Truly, T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

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some aspects of human experience might strain the adequacy of linguistic representation and remain ineffable. But if people persist in talking about it, it lands within our scientific scope. Progress in technical studies of language has driven our topical attention. For cognitive functions, evidence must be sought indirectly because they are unconscious or are the private, subjective states providing the impetus for speech. Yet, though language might be initiated privately, linguistic acts are expressed publicly.This externally projected aspect makes language more than a simple representational medium for semantic intentions. Linguistic communication is a rich collection of social practices by which a manner or style of speech presents a facet of the self, truly or deceptively. Simply by giving voice to semantic intentions, a talker also indicates membership in a group and a personal condition, whether geographical (New York or California), generational (young or old), affective (happy or sad), attitudinal (formal or casual), or many other features of character and temperament. Because of social conventions and ingrained habits, a talker’s acts exhibit a multiplex composition—part semantic, part social, and part personal. It is a condition of our age that these aspects of language find a home in different disciplines, and this dispersion supplies a critical premise for ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of our Seminar. Additionally, the disorders of productive and receptive language have drawn the Seminar’s attention. Indeed, some of our members have had scholarly and professional experience with clinical services for language disorder in childhood and in aging. The prevalence of this theme in our discussions has been a practical counterpoint to the abstraction invited by scientific argument about principle. For this reason a consideration of clinical language is a crossing dimension in the focus of our Seminar. In the academic year 2019–20, Language and Cognition will have met for twenty consecutive years. The agenda is composed as we go, a consequence of the imperatives of scientific news and weather, the chance to lure a passing expert to join us, and the dependable companionship of scientific and scholarly neighbors. Participants join when they learn about the group and stay until other appointments or obligations take them out of the community. Our scientific program over two decades has also been dependable. Here is a sample of some of our major topics, to offer a gauge of our interdisciplinary range. [ 152 ] T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

Basic Research Someone who uses speech to control a device or appliance might be surprised to learn that basic research on language continues with great vitality. After all, if a smart phone recognizes the meaning of a spoken message, the basic technical problems must have been solved, at least at the level of complexity needed to retrieve a Wikipedia article or to order a pizza. A moment’s thought should bring to mind the highly error-prone performance of such voice control systems and the peril of relying on them to recognize and understand spoken messages outside the narrow context of Internet searches and purchases. In meetings of the Seminar devoted to basic research, our discussions have concerned fundamental questions of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Within the past five years in particular, we have focused on diverse topics. In December 2014,Vincent L. Gracco of McGill University’s Speech Motor Control Lab discussed the symmetry of productive and receptive language in “Speech Perception and Speech Production: Two Sides of the Same Sensorimotor Coin.” In September 2016, Gary Dell of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois broached “What Freud Got Right About Speech Errors.” Less than three months later, Ohio State’s Peter Culicover gave the Seminar an update on syntactic innovations with “The Constructional Evolution of Grammatical Functions.” In 2018, Lauren Emberson of Princeton University spoke on “The Role of Prediction in Infant Language Learning,” and Laura M. Lakusta of Montclair State University presented “Sources and Goals: A Case for Parallel Structure in Language and Thought.” Each of these discussions drew our concern to fundamentals, in which the scientific question concerned the basic elements of language, whether consonants and vowels, or syllables, words, phrases, or clauses. With these elements described, we discussed the principles of combination, in expression or in perception; and conceptually, logically, formally considered representationally. One goal of descriptive accounts of language is to provide direction for ongoing investigations in cognitive neuroscience. In the nineteenth century, studies of language inspired the first scientifically legitimate speculation about the organization of neural networks.These studies also introduced the basic premises of systems neuroscience. The caliber of the questions posed about a nervous system today depends on the precision of the functional description that informs the search for neural correlates. T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

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It often seems as though basic research in language these days pursues two goals. One is to understand the organization of the behavior of spoken communication; the other is to describe neural mechanisms that are capable of supporting such intricate and subtle acts. It would be unlikely to expect to see a basic finding that did away with the idea of the consonant or the syllable. Still, there are puzzles remaining to be solved about the organization of linguistic properties. And, certainly, no one has yet a bad idea about how a word takes neural form, a specific instance of the challenge of reconciling the ideal and the real. Accordingly, our sessions have considered these topics, among others. Some are noted here with their presenters and dates. 1. The neural organization of analysis of phonemic contrasts: “Reverse Engineering the Neural Mechanisms Involved in Robust Speech Processing,” Nima Mesgarani of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University (September 18, 2014). 2. The unanticipated cognitive and neural effects of proficient bilingualism: “Bilingualism as a Form of Cognitive Reserve,” Ellen Bialystok of the Cognitive Development Lab at York University (April 23, 2015). 3. The cellular generators of neural oscillations that pace the metrical production of syllables: “Speech Is Special; Language Is Structured,” David Poeppel of New York University and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt (December 7, 2017). 4. The prospect that language and music share neural resources regulating form and conception: “Music, Language, and Human Brain Evolution,” Anniruddh M. Patel of Tufts University (January 31, 2019).

Social Modulators of Language Classic research in cognitive science once approached linguistic objects as if sentences, words, or syllables were natural specimens, collected similar to objects in an archeologist’s dig, detached from an exchange of utterances of a talker and a listener. Now, new methods and paradigms permit sharp questions about the effects on language of the social conditions of learning, expression, and motivation. And these modulators reveal the versatility of cognitive resources in language. Although our attention occasionally has considered the use of language, more typically we have considered social modulators of the form of expression. [ 154 ] T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

People who share social conditions talk similarly. This awareness is apparent even in childhood. Remarkably, new findings show that social affinity in childhood can be elicited by moments of spoken understanding—as if a child sometimes navigates the world by valuing the individual whose speech is understandable and similar in form to the child’s own production. A child might even discount the message of an individual whose speech differs from the familiar form, as we learned in the presentation of March 14, 2019, when Katherine D. Kinzler of Cornell University took on “The Development of Language as a Social Category.” Closer to home, we always knew that the speech of people in New York was distinct among that found in other Eastern cities. Yet the historic dialects that typified New York are changing now. Projects that track the change are finding that the difference between the vowel in ham and the vowel in the first syllable of hammer—a historic marker of the New York roots of a talker—is being lost.Young New Yorkers, even those whose parents are native to the boroughs and who speak the regional dialect, are leading the change. Linguist Bill Haddican of the City University of New York’s Graduate Center reported this social feature of dialect change on March 8, 2018; his talk was “Aspects of Vocalic Change in Contemporary New York City English.” Even people who differ in characteristic speaking style are likely, in subtle ways, to adjust their speech when they cooperate. The result is a miniature merger of productive practice, seen in pace, intonation, and segmental details. We fall in step with a band, of course.Yet a band continues to play to provide the meter for the stride. In conversations, interlocutors take turns. Still, they preserve something of each other’s characteristics in the alternating bouts.The devil is in the details in this phenomenon, as Jennifer S. Pardo of Montclair State University told us on October 22, 2015 (“Consolidating Findings on Phonetic Convergence: Challenging Puzzles for Speech Perception, Speech Production, and Language Use”). The characteristics of phonetic assimilation are noteworthy, both in the aspects of speech that are susceptible to adaptation and in those that remain unchangeable.

Clinical Concerns To probe the functions of a complicated mechanism, it can be useful to test its action when one or another part is missing. With a natural system such as T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

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language, clinical study permits similar analytic algebra when nature restricts normal function, whether due to atypical development, disease, or exposure. Through the contribution to our Seminar of experts on clinical diagnosis and intervention, we have considered how language capability develops abnormally, how language breaks down, and how interventions might restore or compensate for impaired function. As in many clinical fields, attention is commonly drawn to the consequences of aging, simply because the need for clinical service usually increases with age. And when early development takes an unusual turn away from good function, the youthful subject draws clinical attention, and our concerns follow this end of the age distribution, too. These days, much of the focus is placed on the integrity of cortical functions and the impairment of language when this anatomy is immature, develops insufficiently to sustain robust function, or declines with disease or age.Yet because so much of the evidence of neural function in language stems from the clinical consulting room, the use of noninvasive measures with healthy populations can produce results that are discrepant in part from classical findings of neurology. And so our discussions have struggled to find a unifying pattern of functional and anatomical connections. Witness the January 2005 presentation, “Tuning the Language Organ: A New Perspective on the Role of Broca’s Area in Language Processing,” by Sharon L. Thompson-Schill of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. Or consider “What the Speaking Brain Tells Us About Functional Imaging” from John J. Sidtis (Department of Psychiatry, New York University Medical School and the Geriatrics Program, Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research), presented in October 2007. Another to review is the January 2011 talk, “Neural Evidence for Invariance and Variance in the Perception of Phonetic Categories” by Emily Myers, who teaches in both the Psychology and Communication Sciences Departments of the University of Connecticut. In our era, the co-morbidity of autism and language impairment in childhood is well recognized.Yet the causes of the association remain hypothetical and unexplained. Psychosis as well is marked by disorders of language as an accompaniment to disorders of thinking and reasoning. To consider the models of neurodevelopment and cognitive development, and the prospect of identifying early functional manifestations of abnormal neural development, we have discussed research of both diagnostic types.

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Hence we have had “Exploring Language in Autism” in December 2010, conducted by Helen Tager-Flusberg of Boston University, and “Spatiotemporal Imaging of Language: A Window Into Thought in Psychosis” with Gina R. Kuperberg of Tufts University and the Massachusetts General Hospital in January 2012. For fifteen years of our run, the Seminar’s most senior member was Michael Studdert-Kennedy. He was president emeritus of Haskins Laboratories and professor emeritus at Yale and the University of Connecticut. He had been a doctoral student in psychology at Columbia whose dissertation examined basic phenomena of auditory sensitivity, supervised by future University President William McGill. As a scientist, Studdert-Kennedy had studied the perception of intonation; the spatial sensitivity of listeners to linguistic properties of syllables; and ways in which continuity in production and perception become cognitively symbolic, discrete, and segmental. He also was a classical Darwinian by conviction and provided much of the force to our frequent turns of attention toward the evolution of language in the natural history of human communication. At the Seminar table, his participation expressed a long career of encounters with the arsenal of empirical gambits and theoretical bluffs that typify the era of cognitive research. Fortunately, his incisive analysis, once emulsified with his Oxbridge charm, could stimulate a thorough evaluation of ideas. Although he might raise a point of finesse that served as a technical pivot in our attention to evidence during formal sessions, he often saved larger themes for the convivial portions of our meetings after the formal meeting adjourned. These sessions took place in the Ivy Lounge on the first floor of the Faculty House and in a dining room upstairs. For StuddertKennedy, these were occasions for evaluation, now and then, and to say how things looked to a veteran of the cognitive revolution. He was at his scientific and rhetorical best when he saw us dally with a discredited principle. For instance, he was especially impatient with the first and last explanatory resort of behavioral scientists, which is to cast the core of human cognition as prediction. As psychological theory it is flat, reducing an understanding of the causes of events to mere anticipation, and it presumes that we are more acute in noticing and remembering probability (an abstraction) than we are in noticing the salient properties that we allegedly tally.

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As a scientist, Studdert-Kennedy knew the intellectual limits of the claim: chiefly, neither rats nor people are especially accurate in noticing or remembering incidence, though we are often skilled in noticing the properties of objects and events, even subtleties. As a long-time instructor of statistics, he also was personally acquainted with the errors of ordinary statistical understanding that typify otherwise rational, successful college sophomores. It simply seemed unreasonable to him that highly reliable aspects of human psychology would derive from erroneous probability estimates and illogical statistical inference. Worst, to Studdert-Kennedy the recurrent proposal of this scientific idea seemed to be a repetition compulsion, a neurotic habit of our guild. When this argument was delivered in his weltschmerzy tone, we recognized his restraint given the conceptualizations of colleagues of narrow experience who do not read. Despite all, he eagerly anticipated the conceptual renewal of the field, which surely was a bud about to blossom before long. With a mordant wit and scientific erudition, Robert Krauss also brought a worldly viewpoint and expressive panache to our meetings and, with Studdert-Kennedy, created a sense of importance in our discussions. As of this writing, he is a professor emeritus of psychology at Columbia, having retired in 2006. He was a founding member of Language and Cognition and a mainstay from the start until he was prevented from attending by poor health in 2013. Krauss’s best-known scientific work examined gestures by the hands that accompany speech. His still-controversial findings present evidence that gestures are produced without communicative intent or effect but, instead, benefit the speaker attempting to find the words to fit an intended expression. Also influential are his theoretical studies of the effects of characteristic usage on comprehension, a reasonable and sensible alternative to the orthodox claims that language determines the ability to conceptualize the world, a principle known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Shortly after our meetings began in the fall of 2000, the Seminar fell into a custom of starting the questions at the end of the formal presentation by turning to Krauss to lead us in a good direction. In these excerpts, the acuity of his thought comes across with the playfulness of his expression. Here are some of his questions taken from the minutes of our meetings. Obviously I like this kind of research, but I do have a number of questions. One is about the cooperative, coordinated role of language, [ 158 ] T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

which you emphasized. In the literature there are also demonstrations of divergence rather than convergence, and they are found specifically in situations when the relation of the interacting is not entirely cooperative, when it is antagonistic. So what does that tell us? On the one hand you have [some who say] that language use, by its nature, is cooperative, and then, on the other hand, you have people saying that language is cooperative but that people can use it to compete. So what is the message that this is carrying? [September 28, 2000, Carol A. Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, “Why Speakers Imitate; How They Communicate”] In reference to Norbert Wiener, we have to realize that one does not have to know a lot to hear a lot. But, I’m not sure that I could easily identify something—for example, the song Take Five1 that you played—without having been exposed to it before. Another observation is that, from various studies, it has been shown that infants respond to speech as if they have some sort of propensity for it. Shouldn’t your model incorporate some sort of bootstrapping mechanism to account for this type of necessary knowledge, that is, the kind gained from experience and the kind that is inborn? [October 26, 2000, Robert E. Remez, Barnard College, “The Perceptual Organization of Speech”] You are saying that pottery shards are not very informative, but they are certainly better, for example, than the evidence we have for the origins of English, which is the few poems we have, and looking at the words that were taken to rhyme. My personal view is that there is value in a record for understanding how languages work, but also for understanding the history of a people, and the changes that a particular language has gone through. Hopefully, it will help us to generalize the underlying foundations of language. To create a useful record, you would have to be Kreskin2 to know what to preserve. [January 31, 2002, Marco Jacquemet, Barnard College, “Transidiomatic Practices: Language and the Global Situation”] We were fortunate to have Bob Krauss’s leadership, intellectually and personally, during a critical time for the Seminar. Once his distinctive intellectual generosity became inculcated as our own, it seemed obvious that students, whether graduate or undergraduate, would be welcome to participate in our discussions—as long as each took the role of a peer, irrespective of the real or imagined eminence of the others around our table. T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

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Among the University Seminars, ours is distinguished by the consistent presence of students. Maybe this is because of a freewheeling form of instruction that distinguishes the language sciences from which our members come. Or perhaps this is because of a special cooperative attitude that emerged in the Seminar itself. The director of the University Seminars during our first decade, Robert Belknap, offered yet another explanation: scientists typically work on projects as a group. Discourse in laboratories and research centers is a chorus of voices, some old, some young, some experienced, some energetic, some discriminating, some ambitious. In the social ecology of many labs, the exchanges are cooperative despite these differences. We are just used to one another’s intellectual company and are actually reassured by a mild din of alternative perspectives. At the time that the University Seminar on Language and Cognition was founded, another continuing Seminar also met to discuss topics in cognitive research. This group, the Seminar on Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience (#603), and our Seminar have met in concert when enthusiasm for a topic of discussion is shared. Viewed expansively, this also could be seen as an instance of crossing interdisciplinary boundaries. In 2016, for instance, we met to hear Philippe Schlenker from Institut Jean-Nicod discuss “Formal Monkey Semantics.” Our Seminars held the two-part “Workshop on the Evolution of Language” in December 2013 and the following October; our guest was Tecumseh Fitch of the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. To discuss “Stability in the Face of Change: Comprehension and Recall of Rapid Speech in Healthy Aging,” we hosted Arthur Wingfield of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University in 2013. It seems likely that joint meetings of Language and Cognition and Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience will continue, inasmuch as the human sciences are being remade through the burgeoning use of noninvasive techniques for identifying biological correlates of perception and action, thinking and reasoning, and problem solving. Beyond the intellectual link between the study of language and neuroscience, the foundational problems that unite language researchers are also developing. If anything, there is contemporary recognition of the technical difficulty of these challenges. The generation of cognitive pioneers seventy years ago enjoyed the clarity provided by plausible simplification. Our present methods now permit research to examine and measure language [ 160 ] T H I N K I N G A N D TA L K I N G A B O U T TA L K I N G A N D T H I N K I N G

and cognition at finer timescales. Such work has already exposed aspects of ordinary human versatility in language use that was not imaginable from the idealizations of classic studies. In the Seminar we are contending with a form of scientific progress that provides a truer estimate of the difficulty of our research problems. So the Seminar is a vital resource that will keep the intellectual agenda wide in scope. When useful new evidence about language and human nature is made, the Seminar on Language and Cognition will provide a forum for unfettered discussion to engage our members in the important questions of the day.

Notes 1. The instrumental jazz hit composed by Paul Desmond, most notably recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959 and featuring Desmond on saxophone. 2. George Joseph Kresge (1935–), aka Kreskin, aka The Amazing Kreskin, is an American mentalist and nightclub and television entertainer known for theatrical stunts of precognition.

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CH A P T E R 12

Embracing Our Common Humanity The Seminar on Human Rights (#561) GEORGE ANDREOPOULOS

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hortly before the 2004 presidential election, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights addressed the University Seminar on Human Rights on “Executive Detentions and Torture: From Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.” During this period, the abuses associated with the global war on terror— indefinite detention, enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions, trials outside constituted tribunals—were being systematically exposed. After the initial shock of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing complacency toward the reassertion of executive power, human rights lawyers were at the forefront of efforts to reclaim law’s relevance in the pursuit of justice. At one point during the ensuing discussion, Ratner referred to a recent debate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the use of torture as an effective means of stopping terrorism. “No one in the room was sympathetic to me,” Ratner said. “They saw this as an issue of game theory, not human rights.” His comment was a somber reminder of the severe tests to which the relevance of human rights was being subjected. The story of the Seminar on Human Rights is the story of an ongoing exploration into this relevance—an exploration into the reach and limitations of human rights in the quest to address human wrongs. From the nonviolent protests of Mahatma Gandhi, to the antiapartheid struggle directed [ 162 ]

by Nelson Mandela and the civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr., the recurring quest of the rights discourse has been one of empowering the disenfranchised and registering their demands for social justice. The interdisciplinary group of faculty who were “present at the creation” of the Seminar during the 1977–78 academic year was well aware of the challenges that such an exploration would entail. Still, it is no accident that Columbia led this endeavor. It was made possible by a combination of internal and external factors. Internally, the university was home to scholars who were already doing cutting-edge work on human rights–related issues. Externally, important developments in domestic and international politics necessitated a critical examination of the role and impact of human rights in policy making. In the United States, the election of Jimmy Carter had brought highlevel attention to human rights and rendered them a robust component of U.S. foreign policy. Sometimes the policies fell below expectations. Indeed, one of the early Seminar sessions (November 1978) featured Ernest Haas of the University of California, Berkeley, on “Human Rights: To Act or Not to Act Is Not the Question.” Haas offered a critical assessment of the Carter Administration’s human rights promotion. Around this time, the Helsinki Final Act (HFA) was serving as a catalyst for the emergence of a transnational network of activists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Signed by thirty-five countries on August 1, 1975, the HFA was an agreement that contained a number of key commitments on political, economic, environmental, and human rights issues that became central to the ongoing dialogue between East and West. Pioneering advocates such as Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov in the Soviet Union, and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, had seized the opening provided by the human rights provisions of the HFA to demand respect for fundamental rights and freedoms. Their principled commitment made the topic a central element in East-West relations and contributed to the growing erosion of communist rule. From the very beginning, the Seminar has focused on an in-depth examination of key issues relating to the capacity of human rights norms and of the corresponding instruments and practices to redress injustices and empower human agency. This exploration has covered many foundational questions about the origin and meaning of rights, the justification of rights claims, and the role of dignity as a moral basis for such claims. The Seminar has plumbed questions about the validity of existing classifications of rights and the correlative E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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duties of forbearance and active contribution. It also has probed the political and socioeconomic practices involved in making rights a reality and the backlash against human rights by hostile forces. Frequently, deliberations on these issues have unfolded in the context of major developments on the international stage. These events have included the end of the Cold War, the promise of a so-called New World Order, the global diffusion of human rights and their transformation into all sorts of demands for social action, and the “war on terror.” Seminar conversations have included scholars, practitioners, and activists in an effort to assess the merits of contending approaches to critical issue areas, to dissect existing ambiguities, and to discern gaps in the normative framework. These participants also have tried to address the costs incurred by the exploitation of human rights by opponents and proponents alike. From the start the Seminar was committed to an interdisciplinary approach. This was reflected in the composition of its inaugural steering committee. Columbia members and their departments (or schools) included John Bryant (public health), Arthur Danto (philosophy), Wm. Theodore de Bary (Oriental studies), Peter Juviler and Charles Hamilton (political science), Louis Henkin (law), David Rothman (history), Elliott Skinner (anthropology), and Paul Martin (Earl Hall Center, which fosters learning through spiritual, ethical, religious, and cultural exchange). When our Seminar was launched, foundational and conceptual issues loomed large. A key dispute centered on the traditional dichotomy between civil and political rights, and between economic, social, and cultural rights. This division is influenced by the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty, as initially suggested by Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 Oxford lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” One of the earliest Seminar presentations on this critical issue took place in 1978, when philosopher Henry Shue of the University of Maryland spoke on “The Priority of Economic Rights.” Shue introduced his concept of basic rights, referring to those entitlements whose enjoyment “is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights.” As Shue saw it, basic rights were of two varieties: security and subsistence. The basic right to security, he felt, entailed protection from “murder, torture, mayhem, rape, or assault.” The basic right to subsistence entailed minimal economic security, namely “healthy air, healthy water, adequate food, adequate clothing, adequate shelter, and minimal preventative public health care.” Shue developed these ideas in his classic work, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). [ 164 ]

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The theoretical insights he offered have shaped subsequent normative and empirically oriented research agendas in the field. Despite criticisms about the traditional dichotomy between categories of rights, the United States has seemed impervious to calls for a more holistic approach. Louis Henkin took this up in 1979 with “Human Rights in the United States, Concept and Content: Some Comparative Perspectives.” He argued that American constitutionalism has two elements: representative government and individual rights (with the latter anteceding the Constitution). By Henkin’s sights, the American conception of rights differs from both the one advanced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the two UN Covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The main differences between the American and the international human rights conceptions relate to the wider scope of particular civil-political rights and to an emphasis on socioeconomic rights in the latter. Henkin suggested that “American constitutionalism was a principal inspiration and model” for international human rights. Indeed, he said, “most of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and later of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, are in their essence American Constitutional rights projected around the world.” This raised several questions—including whether human rights are a Western construct and the extent to which the West has used this construct to impose its values globally. Political scientists Adamantia Pollis at The New School and Peter Schwab at the State University of NewYork-Purchase had taken up some of these questions in their 1978 Seminar presentation, “Human Rights: A Western Construct with Limited Applicability.” Their main point was that there was no universal consensus on the meaning of human rights, human dignity, and fundamental freedoms. The Western conception of human rights, they argued, did not apply to Third World countries, socialist states, and even southern Europe. In the non-Western world, they noted, rights are generally perceived as emanating from—and granted by—the state “rather than being inalienable and natural.” Pollis and Schwab called for a rethinking of the concept of human rights in light of the current “diversity in substance.” This would require examining the relationship of human rights “to the broader societal context.” In this regard certain participants suggested that the concept of human dignity E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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could be useful in the more general debate about the subject, given that it “transcends all cultures and is mutually recognizable.” Few predicted at the time that the universality of human rights would constitute a dominant feature of human rights debates over the next two decades. Several of the main challenges to universality emerged from the Islamic tradition. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, a historian and legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, tackled key facets in “Islamic Law and Human Rights Law: Conundrums and Equivocations” in 1997, focusing on Iran in particular. According to Mayer, this relationship has evolved in light of recent developments, including adoption of the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. Tensions between Islam and human rights exist in many areas, including women’s rights, lawful sanctions, and freedom of religion and association. But the impetus to fuse elements of Islam with human rights law might indicate a growing recognition of the binding nature of international norms. Such recognition was rendered possible, several participants noted, by the fact that there is no monolithic Islamic approach to international human rights law. This was demonstrated in the work of Islamic legal scholars such as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim and the development of shared understandings between Islamic law and international human rights law regarding key norms of conduct. These shared understandings reflect what philosopher John Rawls of Harvard has termed “overlapping consensus” and what philosopher Charles Taylor of McGill University has called an “unforced consensus” on human rights. Taylor, paraphrasing Rawls, observed that “different groups, religious communities, civilizations, while holding incompatible fundamental views on theology, metaphysics, human nature, etc., would come to an agreement on certain norms that ought to govern human behaviour.” These exchanges in our Seminar unfolded at a time when human rights were becoming an important and contentious element in global East-West and north-south relations. Over the years these arguments have evolved. But challenges in various forms to the universal appeal of human rights have remained part and parcel of the human rights landscape. One of the most common criticisms leveled at the international human rights regime is that it is state-centric. This is not surprising, in light of two critical developments. The first is the evolution of the rights discourse since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a way to both enable state [ 166 ]

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formation and constrain abuse by sovereign authorities in a world increasingly dominated by autonomous states. The second is massive and systematic human rights and humanitarian law violations that were committed immediately before and during World War II. These atrocities shaped the debates surrounding the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent legal instruments. As international legal scholar Richard Falk of Princeton University wrote in his 2002 essay, “The Challenges of Humane Governance,” “the general spirit of the UDHR suggested that if a government abused its own people it could be treated as a matter that engaged some kind of international responsibility.” Our Seminar initially emphasized the human rights consequences of state action (or inaction) in a variety of situations. Examples include philosopher Hugo Bedau of Tufts University on “Human Rights and Foreign Assistance Programs” (1979), political theorist Charles Beitz of Swarthmore College on “Democracy in Developing Societies” (1981), and Columbia’s Thomas Pogge, another philosopher, on “Obligations Beyond Borders: Do Foreigners Have Rights?” (1981). One aspect of state activity that generated considerable controversy involved states demanding a certain degree of latitude in their observance of human rights in return for greater responsibility. International legal scholar Balakrishnan Rajagopal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conveyed this in discussing the doctrine of national emergency, in International Law from Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This doctrine provides for suspending rights in situations of public emergency. There were exceptions for certain rights considered as non-derogable—that is, rights that states could not suspend under any circumstances. The ICCPR, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the American Convention on Human Rights include such provisions. European and American human rights regimes have repeatedly confronted challenges emanating from emergency situations. In the Seminar philosopher James Nickel of the University of Colorado examined the challenges posed by public emergencies with “Human Rights During National Emergencies” (1983). So did international legal scholar Claudio Grossman of American University in “Emergency Situations in the Americas” (1986). Nickel scrutinized what he termed the mixed or compromise approach to human rights derogations reflected in the ICCPR and the European Convention. He argued that this approach, which designates a few rights as non-derogable and the remaining as derogable, stands up fairly E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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well—provided that the costs of complying with and implementing those rights is considered. However, this test does not explain the exclusion of due process rights and the right to petition government that also could be made immune to derogation. Latin America—the focus of Grossman’s paper—had witnessed massive and systematic human rights violations that included arbitrary detentions, torture, wanton killings, and enforced disappearances. The enormity of these violations notwithstanding, it would be wrong, Grossman felt, to perceive countries in the region “as being accustomed to human rights violations.” As evidence he offered the popular mobilizations against torture and enforced disappearances. The political culture of any number of Latin American societies pointed toward authoritarianism and recurring states of emergency. But other indicators signaled challenge to oppression and military rule. The grass-roots mobilizations for truth commissions, and for holding those who planned and ordered mass atrocities (in countries such as Argentina) accountable, testified to the transformative potential of civil society activism. This transformative power ultimately constituted a dynamic force for human rights in the region—because, as the record has shown, it is not possible to regulate emergency situations. Despite ratification by Latin American countries of the relevant legal instruments, they did not comply with these instruments’ provisions during emergencies. In general, the international human rights regime has focused on states. By contrast, nonstate actors (NSAs) have received comparatively little attention. Yet nothing in the concept of human rights mandates a state-centric paradigm. In fact, the dual potential (protectors/violators) of NSAs registered early on in foundational human rights documents. And they have been of increasing interest to our Seminar. The preambles of both the ICCPR and the ICESCR are clear.They state that “the individual having duties to other individuals and to the community to which he belongs, is under a responsibility to strive for the promotion and observance of the rights recognized in the present Covenant.” In this regard Lowell Livezey of the New York Theological Seminary spoke to the Seminar on “The Impact of Religious Organizations on the Human Rights Movement” (1991); Arati Rao of Wellesley College presented “Rights in the Home: Some Issues in International Human Rights and Feminist Theory”(1992); and Eric Goldstein of Human Rights Watch spoke on “The Ethics of Human Rights Monitoring” (1995). [ 168 ]

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Given the rising profile of individuals, international organizations, multinational corporations, civil society actors, nonstate armed groups, and the media, our Seminar decided to systematically address their role and impact on human rights. In February and May 2000, we held special brainstorming sessions. Among the issues raised were the need to better articulate the state/nonstate actor distinction, to identify key areas of NSA activity, and to assess critical human rights challenges posed by NSA activities and their implications. We determined that the next two years should be devoted to these critical areas. The NSAs theme generated a series of thought-provoking presentations. Many participants argued that the distinction between states and nonstate actors was becoming increasingly blurred. NSAs are defined by state-initiated actions, they said. Yet this definition is in flux. One issue is the socalled internationalization of the state and the transnational networking of NSAs. Several presenters argued that major developments such as increasing corporate power, globalized political activism, and the growing number and density of transnational networks display a shift in the capacities of NSAs to affect outcomes in world politics. Our members also suggested that the rise of NSAs and the concomitant proliferation of actors in the human rights landscape would necessitate a shift from retroactive measures to more effective and timely monitoring and reporting that could help prevent abusive conduct. The research papers presented at our Seminar, together with some additional contributions specifically commissioned for the project, resulted in a volume by myself, Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, and Peter Juviler: Non-State Actors in the Human Rights Universe (Boulder, CO: Kumarian Press, 2006). Our Seminar conversations in this regard were part of the broader disciplinary discussion on the role of actors, whether state or nonstate, and their implications. The rules associated with governance in the public realms and what traditionally were considered the private realms—for example, family, the economy, and cyberspace—have demarcated new spaces for action. They also have generated corresponding adherence to international human rights norms. This is an area with unresolved puzzles relating to the identity of the key stakeholders, as well as new responsibilities for monitoring and enforcement. At various times the Seminar has taken up the issue of challenges to inclusion—that is, situations in which the protective potential of human rights is undermined or otherwise unattained. These situations include E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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gender bias, obstacles generated by religious traditions and forces, the erosion to human rights caused by the “global war on terror”, and misuse of the human rights framework. During a dinner preceding one of our Seminar sessions, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, we discussed whether the foundational document should—in light of subsequent developments—be revised. One criticism was the gendered nature of its language. All the relevant references were in terms of “man,” “he,” “him,” and “himself.” Clearly, if the document were to be redrafted in 1998, such language would be eliminated. Such gender bias was not confined to human rights; it characterized the broader corpus of international law. Briefly stated, human rights violations committed outside what was conventionally perceived as the “public realm”—for instance, domestic and other kinds of physical violence— traditionally have been relegated to the realm of “private actions.” They are therefore below the radar of the international legal process. To address this critical challenge, our Seminar devoted several sessions to human rights and gender. For example, political philosopher Susan Okin of Brandeis University provided a perspective on evolving notions about sexual inequality in 1981 with “What Happened to Women’s Rights? Or the Making of the Sentimental Family.” For Okin, natural rights theories as articulated by philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke constituted a challenge to societal perceptions favoring the preservation of patriarchal relations. However, these philosophers did not provide a solution. Subsequent thinkers, such as Rousseau, Kant, and even the English utilitarians, contributed to perpetuating inequality by idealizing the so-called sentimental family. They envisioned women as being guided by their feelings and attached to their husbands and children. Thus they were turned into “beguiling companions for the increasingly important domestic sphere.” This idealization denied women the need and capacity to participate in public life. By the late eighteenth century, this attitude had enormously complicated the task of feminist thinkers and activists. Some Seminar participants asked why the sentimental family emerged as the dominant ideological framework for the perpetuation of inequality. They also asked about its connection to the rise of capitalism. And they debated whether sexual discrimination correlated with the distinction between negative liberties and welfare rights and the privileging of the former over the latter. (As it [ 170 ]

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was, Okin was not prepared to “assert more than the claim that the need for the sentimental family corresponded to the rise of capitalism.”) Hilary Charlesworth, an international legal scholar at Australian National University, examined the limits of the international legal framework in her 2000 presentation, “Gender Biases in International Human Rights Law.” She noted the fundamental importance of nondiscrimination in international human rights law. But she also noted that gender equality was still understood only in a very limited way. In this context Charlesworth further argued that civil and political rights have been defined to operate in the public realm, with the right not to be subjected to torture constituting a prime example. She specifically cited the instigation, consent, or acquiescence of a public official as an essential element in characterizing as torture an act involving the intentional infliction of pain or suffering. In addition, economic and social rights likewise have been connected specifically to the public realm—for example, the right to work did not cover housework done primarily by women. Having identified these biases, Charlesworth asked, “How do we move forward?” She suggested that women could advance claims under existing statutes by going beyond “black letter” law. This they could do by interrogating how these laws could affect their capacity to function in their effort to realize the kind of lives that they have reason to value.The discussion that followed revolved around ways in which the rights could advance women’s empowerment. A major criticism leveled at foundational human rights instruments is that they incorporate a Western liberal understanding of religion, whereby religion is confined—as Richard Falk wrote—“to individual conscience and private domain.” As a result, human rights have encountered backlash from certain religious forces that have sought to alter, restrict, or resist the promotion and enforcement of the relevant norms. Thus on several occasions our Seminar has sought to address the complex and ambivalent relations between religion and human rights. We did so especially during the 1996-97 academic year. Our presentations addressed the capacity of religion to act as a force both for and against human rights. On the positive side, Max Stackhouse of the Princeton Theological Seminary argued in “Human Rights and Public Theology: The Triumph of and Threat to Human Rights” (October 18, 1996) that resurgent religious movements held promise, “as they focus on the only thing that could be a truly universal moral reference for understanding our common humanity.” With E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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“Catholicism and Human Rights:The Case of Latin America” (December 3, 1996), Hunter College’s Margaret Cahan noted that the vacuum created by political repression in Latin America had enabled the Catholic Church to step in and mobilize its resources to promote social change. And Columbia’s Arati Rao, speaking on “Seeking/Speaking a Common Language: Women, Religion, & Human Rights in India Today” (March 11, 1997), emphasized that religious communities were not monolithic but constituted spaces where contested interpretations could provide hope for liberal reforms. On the critical side was Donna Sullivan of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, who spoke on “Religious Challenges to Women’s Human Rights: Lessons from Beijing” (November 12, 1996). She observed that indeterminate religious constructs and the lack of an agreed-upon arbiter regarding the determination and/or content of religious constructs rendered the notion of accountability foreign to advocates of religious values. Also on the critical side was Larry Rasmussen of the Union Theological Seminary, speaking on “Human Environmental Rights and/or Biotic Rights: The Relationship of Religion, Environmental Rights, and Human Rights” (April 8, 1997). He warned that unless religious organizations—especially in the West—confronted their troubled past on environmental protection issues, they could not credibly advance any claims to moral authority. Rasmussen made this observation in light of Christianity’s long-standing association with modernization, colonization, and commerce. These presentations, together with a few commissioned contributions, were included in a book by Carrie Gustafson and Peter Juviler: Religion and Human Rights. Competing Claims? (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). In his conclusion Juviler noted that religion “can help validate or repudiate human rights for all. It can unite and divide societies.” He thought that one of the main tasks of religion was to promote efforts “to transcend boundaries of gender, and to eliminate exclusive identities that foreclose inter-religious dialogue and cooperation.” Basically, religion should be perceived as a terrain of contestation where emancipatory and repressive trends clash in an effort to ensure religion’s continuing relevance in the public sphere. The legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bishop Desmond Tutu constitute important pathways to humane governance and signal resistance to the capture of this terrain by the forces of intolerance and exclusion. These difficulties notwithstanding, nothing had prepared the human rights community for the challenge posed by 9/11 and its aftermath. [ 172 ]

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September 11 shifted geopolitical and everyday norms alike. Beginning in the fall of 2002, our Seminar devoted several sessions to this issue. We were particularly interested in exploring the evolving intersections between national security and human rights and the use or abuse of domestic and international legal processes to combat transnational terrorism. Father Brian Hehir of Catholic Charities USA addressed legal processes in his Seminar remarks in 2003 with “National Security Strategy of 2002: A Case of American Exceptionalism.” Hehir noted that the National Security Strategy (NSS) document of September 2002 was an appeal to American exceptionalism, whose dominant theme seemed to be revival of the idea of imperial power. In this context he offered an overview of competing perspectives on the role of the United States after the end of the Cold War. On the one hand, Hehir noted, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Charles Krauthammer felt that the United States should seize the “unipolar moment.” On the other hand, he cited Yale historian John Gaddis, who was skeptical about polarity arguments. In light of developments such as globalization, Gaddis urged thinking in terms not of power but of issues cutting across states, to be addressed through international cooperation. What would the human rights policy implications be of such a development? Any presumption that military intervention would be permissible only in case of genocide could be superseded by the proliferation of plausible human rights and humanitarian triggers for action—and thus for more wars. During the discussion that followed, several participants asked whether the NSS document advocated prevention and therefore the preventive (as opposed to preemptive) use of force. They also addressed the role of the church in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the document’s focus on states (as opposed to transnational actors), and the impact of these developments on multilateralism. Columbia’s Jose Alvarez, an international legal scholar, addressed multilateralism on March 24, 2003, with “The UN’s ‘War’ on Terrorism.” He challenged the widespread view that things would have turned out better if the United States had worked with the United Nations. On the contrary, he argued that U.S. unilateralism did not stop at the UN’s door: Once in the UN, the United States continued to pursue a unilateral approach by seeking to harness the collective processes of international law to advance its interests. Alvarez cited UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1373, adopted shortly after 9/11. This resolution has been widely perceived as a legislative act mandating certain actions by all member states and is unconstrained by E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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geographical or temporal limitations. UNSCR 1373 singled out the UN Convention on the Financing of Terrorism. But, in doing so, it cherrypicked its provisions, taking from the convention what suited its counterterrorist agenda. And it omitted key constraining provisions regarding the rights of persons accused of terrorism-related offenses and the requisites of international human rights law. This was not the end of the story. UNSCR 1373 created, among other things, the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) to monitor states’ compliance with the resolution’s provisions. All states with questionable human rights records have seized on the opportunity provided by the CTC’s “review” process to launder their problematic (from a human rights perspective) counterterrorism legislation. “We should be worried about when the U.S. actually ‘uses’ the UN,” Alvarez said, “as we do when the U.S. does not.” In the discussion that followed, participants debated the so-called imperial nature of U.S. actions, the effects of post-9/11 developments on the prospects for UN reform, and the extent to which the U.S. was seeking to assert its own version of international law—and the attendant relevance of human rights. A recurring puzzle in our Seminar’s deliberations has been the dynamic interplay between narratives of progress and setback and the way in which human rights advocacy has shaped or been shaped accordingly. Two competing trends have characterized this dynamic. One is toward the progressive transformation of human rights. Charles Beitz and Robert Goodin have called this the “lingua franca of global moral discourse.” The other is the persistence of human rights violations around the world. For a more systematic inquiry, our Seminar decided to devote 2009-2010 to “The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights.” We asked participants to identify patterns of use and misuse of human rights in a particular issue area and to examine the interaction between such patterns of use and misuse. In this context the word “use” referred to “the advancement of human rights norms and effective application of the human rights framework and instruments in redressing injustices.” “Misuse” referred “to actions that are undertaken by sincere and devoted advocates of human rights but unintentionally undermine international norms, question the validity of some human rights, adversely affect the well-being of their intended beneficiaries, or violate others’ human rights.” The theme generated a series of thought-provoking presentations and exchanges. Cyanne Loyle and Christian Davenport, both from the University [ 174 ]

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of Maryland, held forth on February 5, 2009, with a presentation about how institutions of transitional justice can be used to propagate injustice.1 Nine months later, Samuel Martinez of the University of Connecticut discussed the plight of people of Haitian ancestry living in the Dominican Republic and the benefits and perils associated with litigation strategies before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And on March 8, 2010, Joel Pruce of the University of Denver tackled the risks posed by a particular model for human rights campaigns: namely, “celebrity-infused benefit concert[s]” that are inclined to target the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of human rights violations. These presentations, together with a few additional specifically commissioned contributions, yielded the volume The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights: A Critical Approach to Advocacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat and myself. At the invitation of my late colleague Peter Juviler, I became cochair of the Human Rights Seminar in 1998. One of the first things we discussed was the need to “keep the spirit of the University Seminars alive.” Keeping the spirit alive meant that the Seminars were conceived and expected to remain as forums for the exploration and exchange of ideas-in-progress. To be sure, this involved a certain type of risk. Some ideas, on further examination and cross-examination, would result in publications. Others would not. A true laboratory of ideas should welcome and learn from both outcomes. Overall, our Seminar has lived up to this commitment. This has been made possible by a small and dedicated core group of colleagues and practitioners who invariably have participated in our deliberations over the years, by additional participants who have been attracted by particular themes and/or presenters, and by a series of presenters who have invariably challenged us to think outside the box. This does not mean, of course, that there is no room for improvement. On the contrary, the Human Rights Seminar needs to devote more attention to emerging and cutting-edge issue areas that so far have received inadequate attention. These include artificial intelligence and its implications for human rights, the evolving configurations of authority and territoriality and their impact on such issues as securing human mobility and citizenship regimes, and the prospects for emerging rights such as freedom to connect in an era of digital politics and increasingly sophisticated censorship regimes. As threats to human dignity proliferate, it is increasingly imperative to resist the siren calls of stability and order at the expense of humane forms E M B R AC I N G O U R C O M M O N H U M A N I T Y

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of governance. A deliberative forum in which the human rights discourse is incessantly dissected and reassessed signals our commitment to its continuing relevance in the quest for just and inconclusive social orders. As the Human Rights Seminar enters its fifth decade, the best way to honor its legacy is to ensure that the pursuit of these challenges will remain anchored to the spirit of the University Seminars.

Note The author wishes to acknowledge those colleagues who have made the work of this Seminar possible. These include the late Peter Juviler, the late Louis Henkin, Paul Martin, Zehra Arat, Yasmine Ergas, and Susan Heuman. 1. “Transitional justice,” as defined by the International Center for Transitional Justice, refers to the ways in which countries that are emerging from periods of conflict and repression address widespread or systematic human rights violations that the normal justice system cannot.

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CHA P T E R 13

Understanding Conflict The Seminar on the Problem of Peace (#403) C AT H E R I N E T I N K E R

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n 1945, how to define the “problem of peace” was a crucial subject for intellectuals resolved to avoid another world war. The Seminar on the Problem of Peace began with a small group of Columbia University Law School faculty who met frequently to identify tensions leading to war. These tensions were classified as either “engendered by fear” or “engendered by desire for gain”—tensions that might be “managed or defused” through international organizations. By exploring the nature of peace, the group sought to understand how best to prevent further armed conflict that could again threaten the world with war. No subsequent world war has erupted over the last seventy-five years, but armed conflicts have continued to afflict people in many regions in brutal civil wars, torture, rapes, massacres, attempted genocides, use of child soldiers, and human trafficking or other acts causing untold suffering. The very real threats of rising militarization, sectarianism, extreme nationalism, and potential nuclear destruction have plagued the modern world. These threats are tempered by diplomacy, détente, disarmament, and deterrence brokered through multilateral institutions, principally the United Nations system. Although the rise and fall of conditions that disrupt peace have been episodic and localized, current globalization makes the search for solutions to conflict highly relevant. Today any risk analysis or list of potential triggers of conflict includes environmental degradation, climate change, the loss of biodiversity, exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, and the resulting [ 177 ]

large-scale movements of people. Scarcity of food, water, shelter, and medicine can be exploited to trigger violence or displace people on a vast scale across the globe. Armed conflict can break out in ways not controlled or defined by traditional laws of war or humanitarian laws. These twenty-firstcentury challenges resonate with themes explored across the seven and a half decades of the Peace Seminar. The University Seminar on the Problem of Peace is one of five original University Seminars begun in 1945. Their creator, Frank Tannenbaum, was a regular participant in Peace Seminar meetings for many years, developing his vision of informed conversation together with the first chair, Columbia Law School Professor Philip Jessup. Jessup embodied the highest standards of scholarship. He taught and engaged in public service as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, where the UN Charter was negotiated and adopted in 1945. He was the first U.S. expert on the UN International Law Commission at its inception in 1947 and became a judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague.The annual international law moot court competition for law students worldwide is named for him. In 1960, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and Columbia University President Grayson Kirk celebrated Jessup’s chairmanship of the Peace Seminar during its first fifteen years and its close connection with the United Nations. Another early chair of the Peace Seminar was John Hazard, a Columbia professor of political science and public law who, in 1946, founded the university’s Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute). Leland M. Goodrich, a Columbia professor of political science and international organizations and a UN expert, also chaired the Peace Seminar in its formative years. The University Seminar on the Problem of Peace has always drawn on deep connections with lawyers and diplomats from the United Nations, faculty from the Columbia Law School and the School of International Affairs, Columbia’s Political Science and History Departments, and invited faculty from colleges and university law schools in and around New York City. Graduate students with research topics relevant to the Seminar have participated by invitation. Speakers who are members themselves or invited guest experts from many institutions and countries have shared their assessments of current events and analyses of global issues. Members of the Peace Seminar have examined shifts from enmity to cooperation and back between or among certain states at various times. [ 178 ]

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They have sought to frame the issues, understand their historical and geopolitical context, track new threats to peace erupting in different regions worldwide by new actors and weaponry, and explore possible responses by international organizations and states. Seminar discussants have searched for ways to resist the pull into armed conflict, to avoid or reduce the terrible suffering in war that afflicts civilians, and to task governments and international institutions alike to meet the challenge of peace. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “concerted citizen action” toward the world as it should be is needed to achieve the goals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948. Broad questions about the meaning and practice of peace or its absence (i.e., war) have been raised in seventy-five years of Peace Seminar meetings. Members have tried to define conditions that foster peace and offer opportunities for the world’s people to live in dignity, with equality, inclusion, and empowerment, as means to reduce conflict. Records of Peace Seminar discussions over decades highlight the crucial role played by international organizations and international law in managing crises in international relations, so-called proxy wars, repression, and displacement of persons at different times and places through the years since the end of World War II. Through the decades some members have urged that the Seminar concentrate on scholarly analyses of larger questions related to peace and war, while others have insisted on discussions of immediate crises. In each meeting, members have raised challenging questions and suggested explanations or approaches in various situations affecting peace. Such discourse has offered the opportunity to reflect, offer personal opinions where appropriate, or provide the background to unfolding dramas. Throughout, the Seminar has referred to the basic values in the UN Charter, as Professor Elizabeth Defeis, former dean of Seton Hall University Law School and a Seminar member for nearly 30 years, reminds us: The Charter of the UN expresses the greatest hopes of all peoples: to eliminate the scourge of war, to promote fundamental human rights without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion and to maintain peace and security.The peoples of the UN are further enjoined to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors. The Peace Seminar continues to examine both the content and the implementation, or unfortunately non-implementation, of these aspirations which are the foundation of a good and just society. U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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Mutual understanding—the very foundation of the practice of peace— has deepened through the years from this combination of analysis of current issues, historical insights and approaches, and practical reflections from policy makers and diplomats engaged in the important issues of the time. It is ironic that several “un-peaceful dust-ups that enlivened our sessions” have occurred in past years, noted Francis Randall, professor emeritus of economics at Sarah Lawrence College. Randall joined the Peace Seminar in 1959, is still active today, and is its longest serving member. He recently reflected on the value of discussions of contentious world events when approaches differ, opinions are not unanimous, and questions remain unanswered: Since the Peace Seminar is not, as, say, the Trilateral Commission, was, a coherent propounder of specific programs, it has not “influenced the world.” Its hundreds of programs have enlightened its members on hundreds of subjects, some of which may have influenced individual actions, but that would be hard to trace. (And sometimes endarkened us, as when an ambassador from Pakistan assured us that its InterService Intelligence agency never worked against the policies of its government.) Early discussions include a 1957 meeting on security led by Dr. Warner Schilling of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later a Columbia professor. He noted that the concept of “limited war,” as in East Asia or the Near East, was “likely to have a large guerrilla element.” John Hazard, the expert on Russia, discussed the relationship of the theory of limited war and the Soviet totalitarian system. (Indeed, through the decades the Peace Seminar has often focused on Russia, the sphere of influence of the former USSR, and the “balance of power.”) In this regard Columbia history professor and Seminar member Harold Lasswell offered valuable insights in his book World Politics Faces Economics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1945). He compared and contrasted the idea of the power-balancing process (as much economic as political) with that of the power-balancing doctrine (referring to several such doctrines of the past). For Seminar purposes, Columbia History Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes summarized Lasswell’s thinking about a balance of power with four elements that will sound familiar to readers from the history and strategies of many civilizations. These were (a) “avoid entangling alliances,” (b) “divide and conquer,” (c) keep on the side most likely to win a war, and (d) support a [ 180 ]

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“concert of power or league” while calculating “how long it will last and under what contingencies it will break up.” The first decade’s meetings explored a wide scope of issues relevant to peace and the difficulties of defining it. By spring 1946, Peace Seminar member and Columbia Professor of Political Science and Economics (and future Nobel laureate) Arthur R. Burns concluded, “The world is organized  for war.” He recommended that the Peace Seminar undertake a “detailed examination of various efforts for organizing the peace, either regional or on a worldwide basis, and why they failed.” He wanted to see how this “readiness for war” could be “either (1) so weakened as to become inoperative or (2) so transmuted as to become a collective instrumentality for maintaining the peace.” Burns produced a lengthy and detailed outline. But at the time there was no consensus in the Seminar on how to proceed with discussions or how to disseminate its ideas more widely. In place of the broader approach of the Burns outline, in 1948, the Peace Seminar adopted a general plan of work based on a short outline of the Cold War “bases of tensions” between the USSR and the United States, followed by possible actions that might reduce them. Under the theme of “American national destiny,” Seminar members considered “hostility to communism and socialism, witch-hunting and loyalty tests, and deportation.” Positive steps to reduce these tensions were cited studies of foreign cultures, the Foreign Policy Association, world federalism, and area study institutes in universities. Similarly, the Good Neighbor Policy could counter the tensions of “Imperialism—Political Aspects,” as illustrated by the Truman Doctrine, U.S.–China relations, and pressures on Latin American countries. There also were tensions created by “Imperialism—Economic Aspects,” which included the Marshall Plan and American domination of what is now the World Bank. On the other side was growing support for the proposed (but unrealized) International Trade Organization1 within the UN and “American direct investments not necessarily exploitative (c.f. Mexico, Brazil, Arabia).” When the plan was adopted to study five themes relevant to the idea of peace, some Seminar members strongly suggested a second approach. They urged that the themes “take account of the two major international developments since the adjournment of the Seminar, discussions of Yugoslavia’s breach with Moscow” (1948) and the first steps toward a European Union. Significant attention to developments in the Soviet Union and Cold War conflicts continued to characterize Seminar meetings for decades. U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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The tenth anniversary of the Peace Seminar in 1955 was marked by a report from Professor Adda Bozeman of Sarah Lawrence College, shortly after she became its first woman member.2 The Bozeman report, entitled “War, Tension, and Peace in the Modern World,” began by analyzing the modern system of international politics. The author suggested a differentiation of the two concepts of “war” and “conflict” and a “distinction between underlying and precipitant causes of war and conflict.” The report addressed the interaction of economic and political factors with “the objective factors that are likely to promote war and conflict  .  .  . in the quest and exercise of power.” Factors tending toward conflict were “the individual ‘cussedness of man,’ the collective mind (public opinion, nation, government and other ruling elites), and the problem of fear of war, poverty and depression (including ‘felt’ poverty and inequality in development).” Acknowledging the existence of some tensions that could be resolved by war or “values that war ostensibly protects,” the report also looked at examples where war had been eliminated as a method of resolving tensions. In 1955, these included Switzerland, the British Commonwealth, the interAmerican system, NATO, and the European Coal and Steel Community. The report concluded that if “security” were seen as a separate value or interest, then “international institutions can be set up for its attainment,” with the United Nations as the “trusted international authority.” During the Cold War, the tumultuous consequences of balance-ofpower struggles were felt around the world, and the Peace Seminar tackled wide-ranging topics. Among these were self-determination and the emergence of new states from colonial domination, the global impact of domestic priorities and values in the Kennedy era, the reverberations of the struggles for civil rights and recognition of human rights, divisions in American society over the war in Vietnam, the domino theory, the unification of Vietnam on U.S. withdrawal, the end of the Soviet Union, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.3 At times of bitter divisions over foreign policy and international relations, the Seminar provided a space for airing differences and “advancing (mostly) civilized discourse.” Illustrating the give and take among faculty, diplomats, and UN officials at the Seminar, Professor Francis Randall recalled an incident related to the UN’s first large-scale military peacekeeping mission in the Congo in 1960. This mission emerged in the context of direct experience of decolonization and the creation of newly independent states brokered by the United Nations. As Randall put it: [ 182 ]

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During 1960–61, the catastrophes in the newly independent ex-Belgian Congo dominated the U.N.’s activities and were much discussed in the Seminar. Almost forgotten now but obsessive then, the central leader, Patrice Lumumba, sent armies to subdue—and massacre—the breakaway province of Katanga under Moise Tshombe, until he himself was kidnapped and murdered in Katanga. The U.N. was heavily involved, climaxing in a failed offensive against Tshombe’s Katanga called Operation Morthor—Hindi for “Smash.” In my first presentation to the Seminar, which I perversely called “A New Threat to the Peace: The United Nations,” I showed big photos of noted sculptures from the Kongo, the Baluba, and other peoples engaged in these conflicts, an element not covered in the press and the UN. And I objected to the attempts to crush the Baluba people of Katanga, no matter how disruptive they were, an attempt supported unsuccessfully by the UN. Our member, George Sherry, a high-level UN official, strongly objected. His colleague at the UN, Brian Urquhart, similarly objected. Both the United Nations and I survived this conflict unscathed. In 1964, the dean of Columbia’s School of International Affairs, Andrew W. Cordier (later to become University president), spoke at the Peace Seminar, also analyzing the background of the Congo crisis. He questioned the wisdom of some UN decisions in the peacekeeping mission, as well as that body’s commitment of resources. He discussed these developments against the background of the emergence of new nations and the “collapse of empires”—which he called “one of the most important events of modern times.” This debate exemplifies the ability of participants to critically assess actions taken by the UN, acknowledging its failures as well as praising its successes, and explore other models or directions for the future. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War brought out strong disagreements and profound changes in the United States and abroad over foreign policy, intervention, and the use of armed force by superpowers in global ideological struggles. These tensions erupted in the Seminar as well as throughout Columbia. Francis Randall recalled when two UN Secretariat officials—from New Zealand and the United Kingdom—engaged in “an exchange in the Seminar that nearly resulted in fisticuffs but for the physical intervention of the Chair of the Seminar.” He remembered that on another occasion, U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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After President Johnson escalated our presence in the Viet Nam War [sic], our Seymour Melman proposed another meeting on the subject. A senior member objected:“Not that tired old subject again. . . .” Melman exploded with a marvelous ethical-vituperative jeremiad against war and indifference to human suffering. Such a meeting was eventually scheduled. Amid this highly charged atmosphere, Columbia Law School Professor Louis Henkin regularly attended the Peace Seminar. In 1963, he gave a presentation on law and foreign policy regarding the U.S. blockade of Cuba, which was organized through the Organization of American States (OAS). Invoking the prohibition on the use of force against another state in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, Henkin argued that the blockade alone did not violate international law. He suggested that, in fact, the article might have restrained the United States from other actions that would have violated international law, such as bombing Cuban missile bases or invading Cuba.4 Professor Oscar Schachter, an influential member of the Columbia Law School faculty, was another long-term chair of the Peace Seminar. His leadership as counsel and drafting officer for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the crucial years of 1945–46 was followed by his work as the senior lawyer in the Office of Legal Affairs and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. Schachter was consulted on many major matters, including the design of rules of procedure for the Security Council, the General Assembly, and other UN organs and for advice on their functioning throughout the Cold War.5 He played a crucial role in developing the concept and legal basis of UN peacekeeping, having been in the Congo on the peacekeeping mission with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. His teaching and mentoring inspired many students, who became international civil servants, lawyers, and judges on international courts and tribunals, and professors of international law and international relations. In the last thirty years, three developments expanded the work of the United Nations and led to new international law in areas affecting peace, all of which were explored in the Peace Seminar. The first was the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The second was the adoption and entry into force of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the creation of the multilateral institutions designed to implement it. The third was the emergence of the field of international environmental law and sustainable development, addressing root causes of conflict. [ 184 ]

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A new era of individual criminal accountability began after World War II based on the Nuremberg principles, the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law limiting the use of certain weapons and practices of warfare. Yet atrocities against civilians continued to erupt within some states embroiled in civil or proxy wars. In the 1990s, in response to local and regional horrors in the Balkans and Central Africa, the UN Security Council established ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. There, individuals were tried, convicted, and punished for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.6 The Peace Seminar’s speakers and members discussed the effectiveness of these courts and tribunals in acknowledging the extent of suffering incurred by victims and ending impunity for responsible individuals. In 1998, due in great part to UN leadership and the demands of civil society coalitions, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted, entering into force in 2002. Criminal prosecution of responsible individuals—even heads of state—who commit crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide became a reality. In 2005, Professor Roger Clark of Rutgers University presented for the Seminar a detailed analysis of the Rome Statute’s provisions on the crime of aggression, a new development in international law. Definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide were readily accepted after the Nuremberg Nazi trials. But the definition of the crime of “aggression” was highly debated until its adoption by states that were party to the Rome treaty in 2010. Even so, it was not until 2018 that the International Criminal Court’s ability actually to exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression began, showing the twenty-year time frame that was sometimes needed for creation of new international law that complements national laws and courts. A second watershed development was creation of the Law of the Sea Convention, a global treaty that codified rules to resolve centuries of conflict. The treaty balances freedom of the seas for navigation and fishing with the rights of coastal states to control and protect resources and waters near their coastlines and ports. Adopted in the early 1980s after nearly thirty years of negotiations, UNCLOS created another new international court, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea and the International Seabed Authority, to regulate and adjudicate claims. Meetings of the Peace Seminar have considered various aspects of these developments in international law and their implications. A third major advance in international law and the work of the UN system explored in the Peace Seminar was the creation of principles of U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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international environmental law for the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. The process began with the Stockholm conference on the human environment in 1972 and was elaborated in 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the so-called Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro. Legal principles were developed to prevent transboundary harm between states and conserve natural resources while recognizing states’ sovereign right to their own environmental and developmental policies. Since then, diplomats, scientists, lawyers, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the private sector have been working together to define and implement “sustainable development,” linking sustainable economic growth, strong environmental protection, and social rights to address root causes of conflict and inequalities. Today it is generally recognized that there is no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development. In 1981, Noel Brown, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, spoke on “Conflict Management in the Environment.” He illustrated how environmental pollution and dumping of toxic chemicals, degradation of natural resources, and scarcity of water, forests, or fish can lead to armed conflict and the use of food as a weapon. Some Seminar members defended state sovereignty over natural resources and economic growth goals. Others advanced the prevention of environmental harm and other principles such as, the common heritage of humankind as applied to key natural resources such as biodiversity and extractive minerals—which could require compensation to be paid to their state of origin by other states or companies that extract resources. The debate continues today concerning access to resources in areas beyond national jurisdiction, such as outer space or the high seas. Other ideas explored in the Peace Seminar were the effect on peace of treaties addressing specialized or sectoral matters, such as the successful Ozone Convention with its subsequent technical Montreal Protocol, or the treaty on pollution by ships at sea. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity were adopted. They have since been implemented through protocols and conferences of the parties convened by treaty secretariats. The Peace Seminar has studied all of these developments, along with the current policy adopted by the UN General Assembly in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and efforts to coordinate activities under this agenda throughout the UN system. [ 186 ]

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Nuclear energy has been the subject of conversations in the Peace Seminar in connection with not only peace but also the environment. In 1989, Berhanykun Andemicael, the representative of the Director General of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), defended the use of nuclear energy as a clean source that is useful in an energy mix, along with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and resource conservation measures. If a state relies on nuclear energy, however, Andemicael conceded that international safeguards and inspections might not be able to control the risk of conversion of nuclear material from peaceful to military uses. Columbia Political Science Professor Roger Hilsman further probed the military aspect of nuclear power with “Beyond Nuclear Military Strategy” in 1990. The potential threat of nuclear attack was a key aspect of international relations and popular consciousness during the Cold War, restrained in part by the reality and practice of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) between the United States and the USSR. But Jutta Bertram-Nothnagel, a member of the Peace Seminar since the early 1990s, has countered the notion of MAD.7 The UN representative of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and the Union Internationale des Avocats noted: Relying on nuclear deterrence for the maintenance of peace amounts to a pact with the devil. Better to build peace on care for each other and for nature! Peace is interdependent with respect for human dignity and the protection of the planet.We are sitting in one boat. Peace flows from conscience and compassion and requires commitment to the human rights of everyone, a commitment backed by the rule of law and by institutions for accountability and for the pacific settlement of disputes, notably the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. True peace entails trust that it will last. In 2003–2004, U.S. allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were used to justify invasion. However, the Peace Seminar heard to the contrary from Dr. Hans Blix, head of the IAEA Inspection Unit, which conducted the search within Iraq and found no evidence of such weapons. Today the potential for conflict with Iran, North Korea, or other states with nuclear capability that could become weaponized recall the fear of nuclear war during the 1960s that marked a generation. U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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As always, assessing and understanding the future functions and effectiveness of the United Nations and its crucial role in maintaining peace around the world remain a top Seminar priority. In the late 1980s, senior secretariat official Bertrand G. Ramcharan and Ambassador Ismat Taha Kittani, former permanent representative of Iraq to the UN and UN Interim High Commissioner for Human Rights, were invited to speak about UN operations and responses to challenges raised by member states. A decade later, Danilo Türk, former president of Slovenia, ambassador to the United Nations, and UN Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, spoke on “Problems with the UN Reform.” He addressed the purpose, functioning, and legal status of the United Nations organization itself and evaluated its effectiveness and growth. He concluded that the UN had contributed to the reduction of armed conflict through peacekeeping missions and efforts to curb the proliferation of conventional weapons and small arms. But, he added, that international body had not met updated and revised principles of international law sufficiently. The lessons of the first Gulf War and the proper use of the UN Charter in 1990–1991 to compel Iraq to withdraw from its occupation of Kuwait, with authorization for the use of force (“by all necessary means”), have been analyzed by speakers at the Peace Seminar ever since. This discussion includes exploring the use of economic sanctions as an alternative to military force to compel states to change behavior according to the wishes of the international community. In 1990, the Peace Seminar chair asked Professor Nico Schrijver of Leiden University Law School in the Netherlands to speak about “collateral damage” from sanctions imposed by the Security Council. The ensuing discussion considered who actually is targeted and what evidence of change can be attributed to such sanctions. These questions remain unresolved today with current sanctions, whether imposed collectively under international law or unilaterally by individual states against other states, such as North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran. Over the last twenty tumultuous years, the speed of change in the world has disrupted certainties about the ability of international institutions and law to respond adequately and in a timely fashion to new threats to peace. After the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Dr. Yassin El-Ayouty of Cardozo Law School spoke about the teachings of Islam on peace, explaining that the use of violence (jihad) traditionally was justified only when the land of Islam was attacked. The reemergence of modern jihad might date from the time of the Soviet invasion of [ 188 ]

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Afghanistan, which El-Ayouty deemed a “very significant event in the Arab world.” He wondered whether conflict with terrorists as exemplified by Osama bin Laden might be “perpetual,” characterized by the use or threats of use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. After the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Ambassador Ahmed Kamal of Pakistan delivered a defense of terrorism at the Seminar. The record does not reflect what was said after that. The events of 9/11 caused many changes in international relations and security concerns worldwide, in addition to triggering direct U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Ambassador Zuhar Tanin, Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the UN, spoke with Seminar participants about developments in Afghanistan, beginning with the American attacks in 2001–2002 on al Queda terrorists who were being sheltered in Afghanistan, and the effort to push Taliban fighters outside the country. Yet by 2008, he said, as the United States diverted attention, money, and troops to the ongoing war in Iraq, the Taliban reemerged in Afghanistan. Overall, terrorist cells have proliferated around the world, and random asymmetrical attacks have continued in many locations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, including religious, cultural, and civilian targets. Military analysts, diplomats, and NGO relief groups in conflict or postconflict zones continue to deal with a disconnect between traditional laws of armed conflict and humanitarian law, and the realities of asymmetrical warfare and nonstate actors. Former Seminar member Steven Marks of Harvard University reminds us that the International Committee of the Red Cross convened the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts in Geneva from 1974 to 1977 to expand the application of humanitarian principles. As new international laws covering NSAs and procedures for involvement of NGOs continue to emerge, the Seminar expects to address them. Dr. Roy Lee, a distinguished UN official and adjunct professor at the Columbia Law School, became chair of the Peace Seminar in 2000. He first arrived at the UN as a young diplomat prior to his career service in the Secretariat. As a senior UN lawyer, he contributed to the prolonged and difficult negotiations of UNCLOS and the Rome Treaty. Lee served as the first executive secretary of the ICC when it was created in 2002. He is now the representative of the Asian African Legal Consultative Organization, an intergovernmental body with a permanent observer mission at the United Nations. He has brought UN practitioners, both men and women, to the U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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Seminar as speakers and as members over the past twenty years to focus on “concrete, current and emerging crises and situations having an impact on world peace.” Lee has shared his belief that “economic development, the environment and human rights are the foundation of peace.” As the University Seminar on the Problem of Peace approaches its seventy-fifth anniversary, the scope of threats to world peace has expanded. Conversations about international law and the purpose and functioning of the United Nations—the “practice of peace”—continue to be the focus of the Seminar. Those directly involved in policy and operations at the UN add their experience to that of scholars with legal, economic, and historical perspectives. Peace Seminar members recently have talked about the Arab Spring and its speed of diffusion by social media. From 2010 to 2012, UN ambassadors from Tunisia, Libya, and Syria spoke at a number of meetings on prospects for change across North Africa and the Middle East in Arab states, illuminating differences from one state to another. In the past decade, Peace Seminar members and speakers have discussed topics including the increasing militarization of outer space with artificial satellites and their potential for remote sensing. New technologies and social media have been used both to challenge regimes and demand popular participation in governance and to weaken the liberal world order established after World War II on which our multilateral institutions are based.The same technological developments that make communication instant and bring cell phones and Internet access even to remote villages around the world also give rise to the potential for social and political control by extremists with new threats to international peace and stability. Governments can use artificial intelligence and big data for surveillance, whether for legitimate law enforcement or government censorship. Access exists for individuals worldwide not only to previously unimaginable quantities of information and online activities but also to “cyberintrusion” or hacking and bombardment with fake news. In short, today’s world offers the greatest amount of connectivity and mobility for many people that has ever been known. At the same time, privacy, trust, and physical safety are no longer guaranteed anywhere. Corruption, wide dissemination of hatred of the “other,” and extreme economic inequality—all of which have led to exploitation and war in the past—are present to one degree or another worldwide. Discussions have continued in the Peace Seminar for seventy-five years on how international institutions like the UN system can best respond to [ 190 ]

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various challenges to peace in different times and places.8 Seminar members still seek to understand how or whether the United Nations can adjust to changing realities and be able to respond to contemporary threats to the peace. We can only manage these challenges through international cooperation. But governments are reducing their commitments, turning away from our means of cooperation with resurgent nationalism and populism. Has multilateralism failed? Can we cooperate globally to deliver a safe, sustainable future with greater dignity for all, based on aspirations such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals? Will there be financing available to those most in need? Where are we heading by 2050? What if climate change or growing inequities are unmanaged? Can global institutions be renewed and strong global cooperation encouraged? A current Seminar member, lawyer Stanley Futterman, recently concluded, The problem of peace today is, as it was at the beginning of this Seminar—at the dual dawn of the nuclear age and the United Nations— how to fashion international arrangements and institutions in a world of nation state rivalries that will avoid the destruction of those states and all their inhabitants. The tensions that threatened us after 1945—those “engendered by fear” or “by desire for gain”—remain. The “problem” of peace has not yet been solved.

Notes 1. In 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was created and replaced in 1994 by the World Trade Organization. The idea of amending the charter to change and enlarge the membership of the Security Council was raised at the Seminar early on by Professor Louis Sohn of Harvard Law School, author of the first casebook on UN law. 2. It was not until 1963 that another woman, Anne Winslow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was invited to become a member of the Seminar. Ellen Frey-Wouters of the UN, coauthor of Legacy of a War:The American Soldier in Vietnam, also became a member. By the 1980s, the number of women members of the Peace Seminar grew, with Lilly Landerer of the UN Secretariat; Carol Lubin, NYS Association of Settlement Houses (formerly U N D E R S TA N D I N G C O N F L I C T

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

with the International Labour Organization); Ann Lakhdir, NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security; Professor Mary Dominick Donovan of Hunter College; and Professor of International Relations Charlotte Patton of Queens College, City University of New York. Other women who have contributed to this chapter joined in the early 1990s. Henry Kissinger attended the Peace Seminar during this period, before he began advising presidents, as a current member recalled. In 1978, Henkin became the first chair of the University Seminar on Human Rights (#561), the field of law he helped to create. Schachter also was consulted on the construction of the General Assembly chamber at the New York headquarters, including the number of seats that would be required. He guessed—wrongly, as he later wryly admitted—that 75 would be sufficient. Today, 193 states are members of the United Nations, plus two nonmember observer states. The technique was used in other situations. For example, independently of the United Nations, so-called hybrid judicial systems were created in Cambodia after the genocide within national courts. Other postconflict mechanisms were adopted by certain other states, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings after the end of apartheid. Another member of the Peace seminar also embodied the values of peace and the value of the group on both a human and an intellectual level. Prakash Singh, a Pace Law School professor of international law, brought a special warmth to the Seminar meetings. He welcomed participants, led off with questions after a presentation, and offered some of the older members transportation home afterwards—especially in inclement weather. In 1953, the Seminar debated a proposal from the chair based on an address by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to “select certain underlying problems to study,” rather than have the Seminar undertake specific tasks, such as detailed drafting of amendments to the UN Charter. Given the pace of change in world events, the Seminar wisely chose to continue with its study of selected topics concerning peace, rather than draft potential charter amendments. This remains our practice.

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APPENDIX 1

Frank Tannenbaum A Biographical Essay J O S E P H M A I E R A N D R I C H A R D W. W E AT H E R H E A D

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ditor’s Note: For twenty-five years following his initial proposal in 1944 to create the University Seminars, Frank Tannenbaum—labor leader, Latin America specialist, historian, sociologist, criminologist, and Columbia professor—was their first director and guiding spirit. In 1974, five years after his death and on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his creation, the Seminars privately published the monograph Frank Tannenbaum: A Biographical Essay. The authors, Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead, knew the man and his work. Maier, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, chaired or cochaired the Seminar on Content and Methods in the Social Sciences (#411) from 1973 to 2000. Weatherhead was a student of Tannenbaum’s and a close friend. The two already had edited The Politics of Change in Latin America in 1964 and dedicated it to Tannenbaum; ten years later they published a collection of Tannenbaum writings, The Future of Democracy in Latin America. Maier and Weatherhead joined forces once again for their 1979 volume, The Latin American University. Professor of Philosophy James Gutmann, then the Director of the Seminars, wrote in his foreword to the Tannenbaum sketch that its subject called the Seminars “the source of the richest experience of his life.” Gutmann added, “Though Frank sometimes spoke in hyperboles there can, I think, be

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no reason to question this assertion.” The following is an abridged version of the Maier/Weatherhead portrait.—T.V. Frank Tannenbaum was more a maverick than a conventional scholar. During his years at Columbia University (1935–69), as professor of Latin American history and later as director of the University Seminars, there used to hang on his office wall two pictures, one above the other. The upper one was a caricature of a scholar wearing his academic raiments and mortarboard, with angular features and an aquiline nose, a figure obviously ascetic in tastes and pedantic in manner. The one below was an enlarged snapshot of Frank Tannenbaum wearing a weather-beaten, dirty old hat, a pipe protruding from a broadly smiling mouth. The contrasting portraits suggested that Frank Tannenbaum saw himself more as a maverick in the university and in the world. Born in Brod, a small town in Austrian Galicia in 1893, he was raised in meager circumstance and helped his parents do odd jobs on the land when he was not in the village school. Frank journeyed with his parents and a younger brother and sister to America in 1904. They came for the usual reasons that attracted immigrants—to escape poverty and in search of a better life. Some of the family’s relatives had already established themselves in the New York area. Soon after arriving they were fortunate enough to hear of a three-hundred-acre abandoned farm in the Berkshire Hills near Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Tannenbaums purchased the land for a nominal price with money borrowed from relatives and friends. Young Frank’s first lessons came from farm life and the sundry daily chores that everyone in the family had to perform. Each morning he rose early to attend to the usual round of farming duties, and when he had finished his share of them, he would walk a mile and a half to the local schoolhouse. As he was growing up, he learned to follow many of the maxims of Poor Richard, which reinforced at the same time the family’s Jewish heritage: the enduring ties of family, thrift and hard work, deeds above words, life is learning (and vice versa), and compassion for the underdog. Almost immediately after landing in New York, Tannenbaum began to experience the process of Americanization, identifying himself, and these values, with the rural setting and the natural rhythms of farm life. Following a quarrel with his father about chores in 1906, Tannenbaum ran away, took the train down to New York City, went to his relatives, and stayed with them for the next five years. It was a partial and temporary [ 194 ]

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separation, not a break from the family. And Frank went back to the farm regularly when an extra hand was needed. While living with his relatives in New York, Tannenbaum made his own way by doing odd jobs such as waiting table and operating an elevator, and when he had the time, he would attend night classes. He went to the Ferrer School at 63 West 107th Street in Manhattan. It was “a laboratory in which new social theories are tested,” as the school’s president described it, adding that it was “the first institution devoted to the constructive side of anarchism.” Here anarchist intellectuals, radical labor leaders, and social activists met, discussed, and learned from one another about the world as it was and how it could be. Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, and Alexander Berkman (“Sasha”) were among the faculty. By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century,Tannenbaum’s interests in the problems of the poor workingman and the unemployed were focused on an attempt at solutions. He joined the “Wobblies,” the Industrial Workers of the World, and soon became a local leader. In the winter of 1913–14, thousands of unemployed workers roamed the streets in search of jobs but without success; they were hungry and desperate, and the IWW message held out a promise of immediate relief. On March 1, 1914, Frank Tannenbaum led a group of three hundred homeless poor into the First Presbyterian Church and demanded money for food and shelter. After some negotiation, he convinced the church leaders to provide each of the “sit-down strikers” with thirty cents. This technique worked and was to be repeated at different churches. No church in the city could be sure that it would not be the next target. On the fifth of March, the New York Times lead story was “IWW Invaders Seized in Church—Tannenbaum Is Held in $5,000 Bail.” The following day, Tannenbaum spoke about the specific purpose of the church “sit-ins”: Until a few days ago New York didn’t have an unemployed movement. Then we decided to show the city what it meant. . . .Tonight we have 500 men. In two weeks we will be 20,000 strong and when New York learns that these men mean business it will hurry and scurry to do something for us. There is no right but might. If such a thing as justice could be had in this city, why, we wouldn’t have to go around this way to get something to eat. F R A N K TA N N E N B AU M

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Radicalism was essential to Tannenbaum’s social philosophy; violence was not. The passion of his radicalism was in fact tempered by his experience with the Wobblies. He did not abandon their goals of improving the workers’ condition, nor was his compassion for the underdog lessened. But he had learned the distinction between reform and apocalypse and had realized the complexities of human organization. When Tannenbaum was arrested and imprisoned, he was exposed to institutions, procedures, and people different from those he had known as a labor leader. His response to the abruptly changed situation was one of fascination and curiosity about the new environment and experience rather than one of personal resentment toward the world. That this is so may be seen from having had himself committed voluntarily for a period in Sing Sing in early 1916 for the purpose of observing, participating in, studying, and living the life of the prison. In 1920, he spent his summer vacation by taking a trip across the United States in a Model T Ford to visit some seventy penal institutions. When he wrote his first book on crime and society, Wall Shadows (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), Tannenbaum was concerned with the complex nature of crime and community organization in prisons. The book describes what happens to the criminal after conviction, and although the focus might appear somewhat narrow, nonetheless Tannenbaum’s attitude is that of a reformer who hoped that the book would “help some few to take up the cause of society against our medieval prisons.” Thomas Mott Osborne, the reform-minded warden of Sing Sing, whose improvements in prison administration caught Tannenbaum’s imagination, contributed an introduction to the book. His most detailed study of the general problem was Crime and the Community (Ginn & Co., 1938). It soon became a basic source, widely adopted in criminology and sociology courses in colleges and universities throughout the United States. Later, parts of it were made required reading for the Chicago police. Tannenbaum believed that prisons could, with difficulty, be improved, but that crime itself was an inevitable problem reticulated through all levels of society: There is no reason to assume that in dealing with the criminal we are dealing with something extraneous. We are really dealing with all of society even when we begin dealing with the problem of crime. What is true of the pattern of criminal life is true also of the various social [ 196 ]

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and political agencies that have grown up around the attempt to deal with the problem of crime. If the criminal had to be understood in relation to society at large and to the institution of the prison in particular, he could not be seen to be separate from the group or groups that molded him. It was the special traits of group activity—communal, if you will—that endowed the criminal with roles, hence a social character: The only way to reach the criminal is to reach his group. It is the group that sets the pattern, provides the stimulus, gives the rewards in glory and companionship, offers the protection and loyalty, and, most of all, gives the criminal life its ethical content without which it cannot persist. To offer to reform a criminal by tearing him out of his own value-giving environment . . . without making him part of another group which provides an equally genuine essential base of existence . . . is to attempt the impossible. Tannenbaum’s experience and studies in labor organization and crime (as a necessary and natural aspect of society) taught him that we live in an “intractable” and “recalcitrant” universe (words that would recur among his writings frequently), one in which he took the etymological value of utopia, “not a place,” at face value: Until I went to school [he recalled in his mid-thirties] I thought there was only one way to accomplish an end. Now I know there are many ways.The study of history is dangerous to radicalism. One of the greatest blows I suffered in college was the realization that the world had a past as well as a present and a future. College education came largely as a result of Tannenbaum’s imprisonment. He had achieved a good deal of fame or notoriety, depending on one’s viewpoint, leading up to his jail sentence in 1914. One person, Grace Hatch Childs, who had turned to social work in the Charity Organization Society, had followed Tannenbaum’s brief career. Her husband, Richard Childs, recalled his wife’s interest in the young Tannenbaum: she “found him to be a boy of character, eager above all else to get an education. She pledged him what money he needed to supplement his own earnings through four years of college.” F R A N K TA N N E N B AU M

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The invitation was carried to Tannenbaum by E. Stagg Whitin, Grace Childs’s friend and chairman of the Executive Council of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, located on the Columbia campus. Whitin was also a good friend of Thomas Mott Osborne of Sing Sing and Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes at Columbia. It was through Whitin that Tannenbaum met both of these men, and through them he entered the university in the fall of 1916. Whitin had gone to Hayes and asked if it would be possible to admit Tannenbaum even though he had no high school education or, for that matter, much in the way of formal schooling of any sort. Hayes said that he would discuss the matter with Dean Frederick P. Keppel. An interview was arranged, everything went smoothly, and after it was over, Keppel was heard to remark that it would be easier to get Tannenbaum in than to get him out. (Tannenbaum claimed to have read all of Plato’s works before entering Columbia.) Tannenbaum added the university to the collection of institutions that compelled his interest. While in college he continued to think and write about the prison community and the labor movement. He led the full life of a student, attending classes, going to the library, participating in the founding of a new poetry magazine called The Lyric, and developing lasting friendships. He was a serious student, perhaps partly because he was several years the senior of his classmates, partly because he originally had thought of using his education as a tool of advancement in the labor movement. When he graduated from Columbia in 1921, he did so with highest honors, a Phi Beta Kappa key, accolades from Carlton J. H. Hayes and Harry Carman as one of their best students, and a favorable write-up in the New York Times. In later years Tannenbaum almost always wore his key as if it were an insignia identifying him as belonging to a special order of men. The normal consecutive four-year residence at Columbia College was broken for Tannenbaum by the intrusion of World War I. In the summer of 1918, he left Columbia to join the army, and during his one-year stint he rose to the rank of sergeant. As usual, he wrote about the experience. In a brief critique, entitled “Life in an Army Training Camp,” published in The Dial in April 1919, Tannenbaum wrote about the stultifying aspects of day-to-day life in the army. In general he found the consequences of army life destructive of the human personality—the social leveling, the monotony that “dresses all bodies in one cloth, and contracts all souls into one mood—irresponsibility,” boredom, gambling, and wanton sex. “Man,” he wrote, “cannot live on obedience and submission alone.” [ 198 ]

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Part of his service in the army was spent at Camp Sever in South Carolina, where Tannenbaum first noticed fundamental differences between the North and the South. Later he went to the South again to continue his writings on crime and prison life. As he traveled from state to state, he noticed a quick-tempered penchant for violence, a geographic isolation from other sections of the country, and a crippling obsession with race. The five institutions he examined in Darker Phases of the South (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924) to explain the violence, isolation, and obsession with race were the Ku Klux Klan, the cotton mill village, the prison system, the dominance of the single crop, and the consequences of slavery. He felt that the race problem cannot be solved. There is no solution which can be devised that will do all of the things a solution would have to do: remove not only the difficulties but all traces of it. There is no solution for the race problem. And one might add that that is true of all fundamental social problems. [Emphasis in original.] In 1922–23, as a journalist for Century magazine,Tannenbaum went to Mexico. His first piece on Mexico (August 1923), entitled “The Miracle School,” describes a spontaneous and grass-roots educational enterprise—learning by doing—in which “the children in the school have spread out into the community so that the community is becoming the school and the school is becoming the community. Soon it will be hard to tell which is which.” The school itself was located in a slum section called la colonia de la bolsa, “a haven for the outcasts of Mexico City: The bums, tramps, thieves, pickpockets, burglars, and disreputable women . . . [and] the delinquent children.” One would not have thought that such an environment—a thieves’ market—would be fertile ground for the growth of any educational experiment. But the “miracle” did in fact occur. There was an outpouring of energy on the part of the people who lived in the colonia, in particular the children. There was self-reliance, self-government, cooperative organization for the solution of practical problems. And as they learned about dealing with hygiene, crafts, and planting vegetables, they learned to read and write and, in the process, gained confidence and pride in themselves. What impressed Tannenbaum about this school was its base in the spontaneous communal effort of these slum people and their ragamuffin children in their effort to improve themselves: “I have never seen brighter, more self-reliant and promising children anywhere in Mexico than in this outcast F R A N K TA N N E N B AU M

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district.There is an obvious seriousness and joy of enterprise.” He helped set up a “Friends of Mexico Committee” in 1924 whose purposes were to collect books for an English library in Mexico and “to see better acquaintance between the peoples of Mexico and the United States.” Tannenbaum’s knowledge of Mexico was to broaden with his assignment by Survey magazine to go there and ask leading figures of the revolution to write special articles on its different phases for a special issue to coincide with the reopening of diplomatic ties with the United States. In May 1924, Survey came out with an issue on Mexico that Tannenbaum had been commissioned to prepare. The nineteen articles he put together presented what we would call today an overview of the contemporary situation, and most of the contributors were leading lights of the revolution. Tannenbaum’s introductory piece was entitled “Mexico—A Promise.” He found in the revolution a promise of new social stability and an augury of inevitable changes that were dramatically disruptive to the traditional setting in Latin America: “in understanding the meaning of the Mexican revolution we can find patience and sympathetic good will for Latin America when the need for them arrives.” The promise of the revolution lay in the possibilities it offered to achieve political stability for the first time since independence and in releasing the potentialities of a gifted people. Once again Tannenbaum was attracted to the active as well as the reflective aspects of the enterprise in which he was involved. Tannenbaum himself was taking the dual role of participant and observer. He could not write on a situation, a problem, or a country without some personal exposure to it. He had to see the lay of the land and react to it before he could organize his thinking about it. He was proud that he had spent two years traveling in the rural and remote areas of Mexico “a lomo de mula.” In the company of five Indians, he went down the Amazon in a dugout; he rode horseback high in the Andes of Peru; he hiked from one end of Puerto Rico to the other for the better part of a year; and he was at one with W. H. Hudson in his appreciation for the Argentine pampas. (Curiously, Tannenbaum’s spoken Spanish and Portuguese were nothing more than a patois of the real thing. He was fluent but ungrammatical, and his ideas often flowed too rapidly for any sense of grammar to come to the repair.) Three of Tannenbaum’s fifteen books dealt with the broad area of Latin America: Whither Latin America? (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1934), Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), and Ten Keys to Latin America (New York: Vintage, 1962). Ten Keys to Latin America, [ 200 ]

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Tannenbaum thought, could have been written only after many years’ association with the people it describes, adding, “It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for anyone, especially an outsider, to understand and evaluate the major facets of a culture. This is a book about the totality of Latin America. The Ten Keys are merely ten different angles of vision.” As a result of this book, and also in recognition of his many writings on Latin America, he was awarded the Bolton Prize in 1963. Perhaps Tannenbaum’s most important book for its impact on the scholarly world and American society is Slave and Citizen. The book developed out of an interdisciplinary seminar on slavery held at Columbia in the late 1930s and early ’40s in which this peculiar institution was looked at comparatively, bringing to bear on a common theme the historical experience of different cultures. It was, incidentally, the immediate forerunner of what were to become the University Seminars. This is Tannenbaum’s shortest book but the most scholarly in appearance— it has hundreds of footnotes taken from many different sources. Branch Rickey, then general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, credited this book as having influenced him in his decision to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues to play baseball. It is possible that this particular statement of Tannenbaum’s was especially compelling to Rickey: The shadow of slavery is still cast ahead of us, and we behave toward the Negro as if the imputation of slavery had something of a slave by nature about it. The Emancipation may have legally freed the Negro, but it failed to free the white man, and by that failure it denied to the Negro the moral status requisite for effective legal freedom. In his overall interpretation of Latin America, Tannenbaum always gave considerable attention to the foreign policy of the United States there and to what he called the American tradition in foreign policy. He was inclined to believe that this tradition was democratic, reflecting the ingrained values of equal opportunity and the upward movement of individuals in American society; benevolent and constructive in effect; reflecting the goodness and innocence of the American people; and pluralistic, reflecting the American experience that each state was accepted and dealt with on a par with every other state. In his book on the subject, The American Tradition in Foreign Policy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), he wrote, “the American F R A N K TA N N E N B AU M

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commitment to the ideal of the juridical equality and moral integrity of states explains our participation in two world wars.” He went on: There is a peculiar consistency in this belief of ours that the little nation has the same rights as the big one. Our quarrel with Russia is upon this ground. . . . We really believe that Ecuador and Haiti are coordinate with the United States, just as we believe that Poland and Bulgaria are coordinate with Russia. To some, these American notions seem impractical and foolish. Influential scholars and counselors would have us abandon them. They suggest that we cease being childish and idealistic and recognize that the national interest requires us to become disciples of Machiavelli, take our lessons from Richelieu, Bismarck, or Clemenceau. In The Balance of Power in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1969), Tannenbaum describes the coordinate state in terms of the equal dignity and “historic personality” that each sovereign state brings to a federal relationship with other states regardless of wealth, power, size, population, and culture. He saw this principle in American domestic history deriving from the conditions for admission to the Union contained in the Northwest Ordinance. And Tannenbaum strongly felt that the relations of the United States with other nations perforce had to be shaped by this principle and our long experience with it. For him there could be no getting away from it. He recognized a long string of violations of the basic principle as he defined it, including the main instances in Latin America, but he still maintained that they were “side currents at the edge of the broad stream of our foreign policy. The major drift of our relations with the rest of the world has with more or less consistency responded to the basic tradition of the coordinate state.” Tannenbaum willingly pitted these underlying American ideals against the doctrine of balance of power. In the end he thought they would win out and that they represented the real and incontestable strength of the United States. Tannenbaum believed in the goodness and decency of the American people, their government, and their relations with other states and peoples. He saw the aberrations, but he did not believe that the many exceptions disproved the rule. Tannenbaum was always strong of body and vigorous of mind, until the crippling disease of cancer took its toll at the end. He died early on Sunday [ 202 ]

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morning, June 1, 1969. He was an outdoorsman, not in a sporting sense but as one who enjoyed the sensations of being exposed to nature. He would love the long summers spent at Pine Lodge Camp in Saranac, New York, where he could fish each afternoon or go canoeing (and he could handle a heavy guide boat with muscular ease). Once he spent a summer canoeing down the Susquehanna River, camping along the way. Or he would putter around his farm in Canopus Hollow, repairing fences, milking cows, driving the tractor, and occasionally riding horseback. When not outdoors, he would be in his large log cabin study reading and writing, or conversing animatedly at the dining table or between meals with his wife and friends. At home he usually would dress casually and eat almost carelessly. He was concentrating on the ideas at hand and not the food. The two dogs, a dachshund, Lanny, and a Saint Bernard, Samson, would receive scraps or bones from him. The big dog was almost always with him, and when Samson and Tannenbaum played, a big boyish grin would come onto Frank’s face. Frank’s marriage to Jane Belo in 1940 was a happy turning point. His first marriage in the 1920s had not proved happy and ended in divorce by the end of that decade. But with Jane Belo there were bonds of deep affection and common intellectual interests. What Jane brought to Frank Tannenbaum’s life was a rediscovery of the enduring qualities of family life (even though they had no children), an appreciation for various forms of beauty, and an even greater sense of belonging and security. When she died in April 1968, she left what seemed to their close friends an irreparable void in Frank’s life. Her death exhausted his youthful reserves of physical vitality. At the memorial service held at Columbia’s Low Memorial Library rotunda on January 8, 1970, Margaret Mead spoke of the affection that brought and held them together: Jane thought it frightfully romantic to be married to a Columbia University professor. She had lived in Europe and in many parts of the world in the company of painters and musicians, but she saw being a professor through a veil of romance—which, of course, Frank shared.  .  .  . He loved Columbia with a kind of feeling that he also had, I think, for the United States. I mean the feeling of someone who came from a long way off, and discovered essences that were not always there in everyday practice. F R A N K TA N N E N B AU M

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Probably the best label for Frank Tannenbaum would be that of social philosopher, although he called himself a generalist. He investigated human experience as a philosopher would, drawing from his own experiences and observations. He had acquired much formal knowledge, but he knew that the complexities of social organization and human motivation could not be understood from afar. His focus essentially was on institutions singly and in competition with each other, and he understood that all human experience must occur within institutions of one kind or another. Writing in The Balance of Power in Society, he said, The road to social peace is the balance of the social institutions, and a wise statesman would strengthen those institutions that seemed to be losing ground, even if he were not addicted to them; for the only way to peace in this world of fallible human nature is to keep all human institutions strong, but none too strong; relatively weak, but none so weak as to despair of their survival. It is only thus that peaceful irritation and strife, so essential to social and individual society, can be maintained.

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APPENDIX 2

Jane Belo First Lady of the University Seminars G E O R G I N A M A R R E RO

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ehind every great man, the cliché goes, is a woman. In the case of Frank Tannenbaum, the founder and guiding spirit of the University Seminars, the woman was his wife, Jane Belo. Her support of the Seminars, evidenced by her devotion to her husband and her personal benefactions to them, has helped them continue to flourish in their seventyfifth anniversary year. But there was more to Jane Belo than her marriage to Frank Tannenbaum and her Columbia association. A cultural anthropologist, she was a confidante of Margaret Mead, a debutante turned world traveler, and an all-around example of how unlikely currents can inform a life well lived. Born to a wealthy Dallas family in 1904, Belo was brought up in a wellcultured and traveled environment; her mother, Helen, took her and her sister on half a dozen transatlantic crossings before Jane was ten. The girls debuted in Dallas, and the young Jane made many important social connections, among them the Macy family of Macy’s department store fame. Armed with wanderlust and curiosity, she accompanied Edytha Macy and her family to Egypt, the Sudan, and the Near East. These excursions, suggested anthropologist Rhoda Métraux, awakened Belo’s interest in anthropology. Jane graduated from the Brearley School and enrolled at Bryn Mawr for the 1921–22 term. In 1923, she transferred to Barnard. In a sociology course, “Cultural Factors in Social Change,” she met Margaret Mead. Mead became not only Belo’s primary anchor in almost every facet of their shared [ 205 ]

intellectual passions but also a fast friend. Indeed, Mary Catherine Bateson, Mead’s daughter, would call her Aunt Jane. “Jane always married interesting men,” Mead once said. In the fall of 1924, when she went to Paris to study psychopathology at The Sorbonne, Jane met her first husband. Almost twenty years her senior, artist George Biddle was her “Best Beau.” Jane had already discovered a love of painting in both oil and watercolor; she shared her creations and insights into the artist’s craft with George throughout their courtship and marriage. The Biddles also shared a social conscience. In keeping with the customs and fashions of many of the well-heeled during the 1920s, they eschewed formality and embraced the so-called Exotic. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, bringing to prominence such African-American artists and writers as Langston Hughes and Belo’s Barnard friend Zora Neale Hurston. Following a honeymoon in Cuba, the Biddleses settled in Crotonon-Hudson, not far north of Manhattan. George continued to paint while Jane taught art. As the Biddleses mingled with their comfortable yet bohemian set, they branched out. In 1928, George went to Mexico to paint with Diego Rivera; Jane remained to close up the Croton house. Assisting her was an old acquaintance from Paris, a gifted young Canadian composer, Colin McPhee. Before long, they were a couple. Throughout the summer of 1928, Jane wrote to George, telling him of her “transformation” and keeping him abreast of her artistic progress. But by summer’s end, Belo had realized that her “present state” was actually one “of being in love.”That she had fallen for McPhee, whom she called “a feminine man,” was problematic. Still, she said, they had a “like temperament.” Biddle and Belo parted amicably. The stage was now set for Jane’s artistic, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional formation. That stage was Bali, which defined much of the rest of her life. In Bali the McPhees were part of an eclectic group of bohemian Western artists who were continuing the Exotic inclinations of the intellectual and artistic elite of the 1920s. The anchor of the Bali group was Walter Spies, a German-born autodidact—painter, musician, botanist, polyglot, polymath—who had gained fame for having “introduced” Bali to the West. Soon Belo was developing research on Balinese mediums who achieved their visions through trances. In the early 1930s, helped by a California couple—photographer Jack Mershon and his wife, Katharane, a dancer—Belo began filming sequences [ 206 ]

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of daily Balinese events, rituals, and trance dances. She would then develop photographic stills to illustrate her scholarly articles. Spies accompanied her to the village where she gathered her research, which included examining how twins born to the higher castes were treated differently from those born to the lower castes. Belo’s first article, “A Study of Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali,” was published in 1935. During a trip back to the United States, she reconnected with Margaret Mead, who provided editorial and publication assistance with several subsequent articles, including “A Study of the Balinese Family,” which ran in American Anthropologist in 1936. In “The Balinese Temper,” published in Character and Personality in 1935, Belo described her effort as “a sort of behavioristic [sic] study of the Balinese, taking in everything from the way they move to the way they compose music.” Belo’s interest in children’s art led her to visit local primary schools. There she tried to get the children to produce more of their own personal work rather than the mythological depictions that formed the basis of Balinese art. Her observations and conclusions were published in the journal Djawa as “Balinese Children’s Drawing” in 1937. Mead and Gregory Bateson had arrived on Bali in 1936 and marshaled their friends and associates to do research independently and collaboratively on topics related to their theories about Balinese character. Mead placed Belo in charge of trance phenomena research. However, Jane found the Batesons’ data-gathering techniques—for example, correlating filmed records and notes using synchronized watches—“cold and analytical.” (It is ironic that Belo ended up adapting to such techniques and utilizing them so extensively that they formed the basis of her data gathering for the rest of her life.) Although Jane and Colin supported each other during their Bali years, it became increasingly apparent that they could not sustain a lifelong commitment. And so Jane returned to the United States and divorced him in Reno in 1938. The end of their relationship was not as smooth as that with George Biddle. “They couldn’t be in the same room,” said Martha Ullman West, Mead’s goddaughter, “couldn’t be invited to the same parties.” With the divorce settled, Belo now hoped to structure her Balinese findings. The chief research psychologist of the Psychiatric Institute of New York, Dr. Carney Landis, trained her in several object-sorting techniques. Belo returned to Bali in 1939—in part to continue her research and in part to help her friend Walter Spies, who had been imprisoned when, as Mead JANE BELO

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put it, “a witch hunt against homosexuals broke out in the Pacific.” (Belo could not help Spies. He was deported and died when the Japanese sank his ship in 1942.) Jane came back to New York in the fall of 1939 to find true love. Aware that she was now alone—and that her Columbia colleague Frank Tannenbaum also was not partnered—Mead played matchmaker. Her attempts soon bore fruit. After a whirlwind courtship, Jane and Frank decided to marry in 1940. Before the ceremony Belo went on a “Southern Expedition” with Zora Neale Hurston. Dr. Buzzard, a psychic in South Carolina, helped convince Belo that her mother, Helen, would accept Tannenbaum as a son-in-law, predicting that Belo “couldn’t find a better man than this one.” Indeed, Tannenbaum’s rebellious youth, tempered by his respectable Columbia affiliation, perfectly matched Jane’s own love of adventure and passion for academia. In the company of her like-minded husband, the dilettantish debutante came into her own as a serious scholar. In 1946, taking advantage of her proximity to Columbia, she finally earned her bachelor’s degree at the School of General Studies. She immediately began on her master’s and progressed to the predoctoral stage under such eminent figures as Alfred Kroeber, Franz Boas’s first Columbia doctoral student and the first professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. All the while, beginning with her honeymoon in 1940, Jane accompanied Frank on many of his trips to Central and South America, as well as to the Caribbean, regularly visiting Puerto Rico and Haiti. There, deploying the object-sorting techniques she had used on her Bali data, she compared childrearing exercises with children on both islands. She also used these techniques when she visited orphanages and insane asylums in Venezuela. In the 1940 and 1950s, Belo produced several monographs on subjects she had studied since the early 1930s. These included the life/death stance between the good Balinese spiritual king Barong and the demon queen Rangda and a detailed study of a temple festival. At this time, too, she participated in the French Culture Group of Columbia’s Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) program. Her fluency in French, psychological insight, and sharp wit were welcome additions to a group that included Mead, Rhoda Métraux, and other distinguished social scientists. Her research was featured in both the RCC’s The Study of Culture at a Distance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) and its specialized volume Themes in French Culture: A Preface to a Study of French Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954). Belo’s scholarship was perhaps fully realized with the [ 208 ]

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1960 publication by the Columbia University Press of her original volume Trance in Bali. On the domestic front, she and Frank settled in Manhattan but craved space elsewhere. They made Canopus Hollow Farm, a special parcel of land in Putnam County, their weekend retreat. They had another property at their disposal: the Belo family compound, Pine Lodge Camp, in the upper Saranac Lake area of the Adirondacks. At The Farm and at Pine Lodge, Jane painted and rode horses. At all three locales she appointed the homes with art and artifacts (many of them Balinese) and enjoyed playing with her dachshunds. For his part, Frank “enjoyed the sensations of being exposed to nature.” He could canoe across the lake as easily as surround himself with his papers, all the while smoking his pipe. (He, too, loved dogs, albeit large ones, including a St. Bernard named Samson.) Still, there were times when each Tannenbaum craved his or her own space. At The Farm, Jane had her own “lady’s sitting room” at one end of the long, two-storied farmhouse, and Frank had “his large log-cabin study” at the other end. Here, Métraux recalled, “there was a kind of distance between Frank and his office and Jane, but they enjoyed each other somehow without communicating.” For all of her distinguished scholarship and associations, Belo viewed being Frank Tannenbaum’s wife as paramount. When the Columbia University Seminars were launched in 1945, it was with Jane’s financial assistance. She contributed to the Seminars movement whenever necessary, ever the doting faculty wife and gracious hostess, without giving short shrift to her academic pursuits, which Frank Tannenbaum always supported in full. Belo had warm friendships with several of her husband’s Faculty Club friends, with whom he had established lifelong bonds as a Columbia undergraduate. One of them, Albert Redpath, was the couple’s financial adviser and executor. Horace Friess, another member of the group, was a staunch supporter and soulmate. Whenever she could, Jane participated in her husband’s brainchild. Indeed, she became an associate member of the Seminar on Content and Methods of the Social Sciences (#411) in the 1960s, joining Métraux and the Rutgers sociologist Joseph Maier—whose wife, Alice, was Frank’s assistant. But if Jane’s intellectual and social life was rich, her health was another matter. Beginning in the early 1940s, she showed signs of physical debilitation that would require hospitalization, treatment, and medication off and on for the remainder of her years. Frank, said Métraux, “was very delicate JANE BELO

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with her,” and she continued to travel with him whenever she could into the 1960s. However, she became increasingly frail and, in the fall of 1966, was diagnosed with throat cancer. Rhoda Métraux and Frank were with her when she died on April 3, 1968. Three days later, she was buried at The Farm. To her beloved alma mater Jane gave an indelible legacy when she bequeathed to the Seminars approximately $1.5 million. By the terms of her will, 75 percent of her estate went “to the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York to be added to the permanent endowment funds of said University, and the income therefrom to be used for the work of the University Seminars.” The “veil of romance,” as Mead put it, that defined Jane Belo’s marriage to Frank Tannenbaum extended to her relationship with Columbia and the University Seminars to the end of her life. This connection on many levels ensures that the Seminars will endure and benefit its participants and guests for generations to come.

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Acknowledgments

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he editor of this volume and the director on sabbatical of the Seminars extend thanks to all those who have made this diamond anniversary collection possible. By extension, we extend handshakes to everyone who has kept the Seminars going. Our contributors deserve our first nod. The idea behind A Community of Scholars began hatching as early as 2014. At that time the Seminars’ prime movers vaguely felt that their enterprise deserved some kind of attention as the semi-sesquicentennial drew near. Ultimately they decided that this volume was the best approach. And so the call went out to chairs, cochairs, and members of the respective Seminars to submit proposals for essays about their areas of expertise. More than a few responded admirably. Therefore, we again applaud our authors: Alice Newton, Cynthia Pyle, Alan Stewart, Elizabeth Powers, Tony Carnes, Cynthia Lucia,William Luhr,Trudy Goldberg, Sheila Collins, Helen Lachs Ginsburg, Sidney Greenfield, Lisa Keller, Robert Beauregard, Kathleen Nolan,Victoria Raveis, Christina Staudt, Joseph Dauben, John Kiernan, Robert Remez, George Andreopoulos, and Catherine Tinker. Those who submitted proposals and essays for this book but who are not represented here deserve commendation as well. They are Allan Gilbert, chair of the Seminar on the Ancient Near East (#479); Gary Sick, chair of The Middle East (#525); Ari Borrell, cochair of Neo-Confucian Studies (#567); Joseph Davis, an associate member of Columbia School [ 211 ]

Linguistics (#739); and especially Chauncey Olinger, Jr., chair of the History of Columbia University (#667), whose contributions to the Seminars for many years have extended considerably beyond his particular bailiwick. The Seminars’ fourteen-member Advisory Board expertly articulates our administrative path so that we remain true to Frank Tannenbaum’s vision of us as a wholly and completely bottom-up organization. Several of our contributors are board members. They are Professor of Psychology at Barnard College Robert Remez; Professor of History at Purchase College SUNY Lisa Keller; Professor of English and Comparative Literature Alan Stewart; and Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice George Andreopoulos. Their board colleagues are the deeply appreciated Associate Provost and Columbia University Press Director Jennifer Crewe; Vice Provost and University Librarian Ann Thornton; Professor of Political Science David Johnson; Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences Kenneth Jackson; Professor of Music Susan Boynton; Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College Paige West; William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies Farah Griffin; and Senior Vice President for Faculty Affairs and Career Development Anne Taylor. Special thanks go to ex officio member Alice Newton, the interim director of the Seminars, who provided exemplary leadership as acting director during the sabbatical of board member and Seminars Director Robert Pollack, professor of biological sciences. To make full use of the independence given to the Seminars by the endowment of Jane Belo, previous directors arranged to have the Seminars report to the university provost—so that with that office’s ongoing approval, the director and Advisory Board would have the full discretion to spend or add to the endowment as the needs of the Seminars allowed. Provost John Coatsworth and Executive Vice Provost Troy Eggers have been models of clear but gentle administrative oversight. Credit is due, too, to the memories of Joseph Maier and Richard Weatherhead. Their joint biographical portrait of Frank Tannenbaum is both an authoritative account of his life and an ideal supplement to this book. Maier’s daughter, Doris Vallejo, offered valuable information about her father, thereby adding to our depth of field. Georgina Marrero’s complementary account of the life of Jane Belo was most welcome. Ron Gross, cochair of the Seminar on Innovation in Education and last year’s winner of the Tannenbaum-Warner Award, deserves praise for providing valuable historical information about the Seminars. In the 1980s, [ 212 ] A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

he published both a Columbia-issued dispatch about the program and an overview in the periodical Change. These entries provided background and context that remain helpful more than a generation later. Deep thanks go as well to Columbia University Archivist Jocelyn Wilk. Her ability to retrieve and recall every last bit of arcana requested by present company remains unparalleled. Personal exchanges with Letty MossSalentijn, Harry R. Kissileff, and Anthony Sclafani also proved most helpful. At Columbia University Press, the services of Sheniqua L. Larkin were indispensable. Above all, we salute Frank Tannenbaum, the guiding spirit of the Seminars, without whom this entire enterprise would not have been possible. Thomas Vinciguerra Robert Pollack

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Author Biographies

GEORGE ANDREOPOULOS is cochair of the Seminar on Human Rights (#561). He is professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center and is founding director of John Jay’s Center for International Human Rights. He has written extensively on international organizations, international human rights, and international humanitarian law issues. He is past President of the Interdisciplinary Studies Section of the International Studies Association and of the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association, he has received grants and fellowships from such organizations as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Alexander Onassis Foundation, and the German Research Foundation. ROBERT BEAUREGARD is professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. His most recent books are Planning Matter: Acting with Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Cities in the Urban Age: A Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). He is also the author of Voices of Decline:The Postwar Fate of US Cities (2nd ed., Abington, UK: Routledge, 2003). Beauregard has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, New School University, and Rutgers University and has been a visiting professor/scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles; Kings College (London); Tampere University (Finland); and the Helsinki University of Technology. His current projects include a book on planning theory and another on the moral geographies of cities and nations.

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TONY CARNES, chair of the University Seminar on Content and Methods in the Social Sciences (#411) and cochair of the Seminar on Religion, is the founder and editor of the online magazine A Journey through NYC religions. His books include New York Glory: Religions in the City (edited with Anna Karpathakis, 2001), the first book-length overview of religion in New York City; and Asian American Religions: Changing Borders and Boundaries (2004), both published by New York University Press. In 2018, his “Asian American Religions” was published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on American Religions. SHEILA COLLINS, cochair of the University Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (#613), was a member of the Political Science Department of William Paterson University from 1990 until 2011, serving as department chair and coordinator of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs. She is the author or editor of six books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and policy monographs. Her professional experience includes a stint as National Rainbow Coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. She is a member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group, an international network of scholars working on issues related to the current environmental crisis. JOSEPH W. DAUBEN is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science at the City University of New York. A graduate of Claremont McKenna College (BA 1966) and Harvard University (MA 1968, PhD 1972), he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Senior ACLS Fellowship and member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) as well as Clare Hall (Cambridge, UK). He is also a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an honorary member of the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he received the American Mathematical Society’s Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics. He is writing a history of Woodlawn Cemetery. HELEN LACHS GINSBURG, cochair of the University Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (#613), is professor emerita of economics, Brooklyn College-CUNY. She is a cofounder of the National Jobs for All Coalition and, along with her fellow Full Employment Seminar cochairs Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and Sheila Collins, is the author of Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America (Lexington, KY: Apex Press, 1994). In books, book chapters, and professional and popular periodicals, she has written or cowritten extensively about poverty, unemployment, subemployment, and public policy in the United States and Sweden. She is a recipient of the Lawrence Klein Award of the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, for work on comparative employment. GERTRUDE SCHAFFNER GOLDBERG is cochair of the University Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (#613) and professor [ 216 ] AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

emerita of social work and social policy at Adelphi University. Her latest book, Poor Women in Rich Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), was the first to look at the poverty of women both internationally and across their life course. A social activist, she is the cofounder and chair of the National Jobs for All Network. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Tannenbaum-Warner Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service to the Columbia University Seminars. Goldberg and her husband, architect Alan Goldberg, recently donated their onethousand-piece collection of Mexican folk art to the Mexican Museum of San Francisco. SIDNEY M. GREENFIELD is professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and cochair of the Seminars on Brazil (#557) and Studies in Religion (#405). He has conducted ethnographic research in Barbados and New Bedford, Massachusetts, but mostly in Brazil. He also has conducted ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems including family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery, entrepreneurship, Spiritist surgery and healing, syncretized religions, and Evangelical Protestants in Brazilian politics. He has written and/or edited nine books; produced, directed, and written five video documentaries; and published some one hundred fifty articles and reviews in books and professional journals. LISA KELLER chairs the Seminar on the City (#459A) and is a professor of history at Purchase College SUNY. Her book Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) received the Herbert H. Lehman Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the New York Academy of History in 2012, and the Urban History Association Best Book Award in 2009. She is executive editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City (second edition). She founded the journalism program at Purchase College in 1998 and directed it for ten years; she also has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship in American Civilization, and National Endowment for the Humanities grant for local history. JOHN M. KIERNAN has been a member of the University Seminar on Death (#507) since 1981. He served as administrator and coordinator for the Organ Recovery Program at the Presbyterian Hospital from 1979 to 1989. He also has worked closely with Dr. Austin Kutscher as a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation of Thanatology, as a symposium presenter and moderator, and as part of the multidisciplinary faculty for the first- and second-year death and dying electives at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. He has lectured on organ recovery in the undergraduate and graduate death and dying electives at Columbia’s School of Nursing and the ICU Core Orientation of the Department of Nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital. AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

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CYNTHIA LUCIA, cochair of the Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation (#539) since 2015, is professor of English and director of Film and Media Studies at Rider University. She is the author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) and a range of anthologized essays and book chapters. A longtime editorial board member of Cineaste magazine, she is coeditor of Cineaste on Film Criticism, Programming and Preservation in the New Millennium (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017) and coeditor of the four-volume Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (2012) and the two-volume series American Film History: Selected Readings (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). WILLIAM G. LUHR, a professor of English and Film at Saint Peter’s University, is the longest serving cochair of the Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation (#539), having assumed that post in 1999. He is the author of Film Noir (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and The Coen Brothers’s Fargo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and is coauthor of Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying (4th ed., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), Blake Edwards (1981), and Returning to the Scene: Blake Edwards V. 2 (1989) (the latter two both from Ohio University Press). Luhr is coeditor of Screening Genders (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2008), and his essays appear in numerous anthologies. He lectures widely, both nationally and internationally. GEORGINA MARRERO is a bilingual/foreign language teacher and a former staff assistant at Harvard Law School. Her early interest in and travels to Indonesia led her to explore the lives and times of Margaret Mead and Jane Belo, the wife of University Seminars founder Frank Tannenbaum. A periodic oral historian and author of biographical entries about notable women in the Miami area, she is a 1976 cum laude graduate of Barnard College and holds a master’s degree from the Lesley College Graduate School of Education. ALICE NEWTON has helped to organize and support the Columbia University Seminars since 2005. Currently interim director of the Seminars, she has been deputy director for the past four years. She attended Rutgers University-Newark, where she became deeply involved in the student protest movement against the Vietnam War and actively worked for racial justice, human rights, and women’s equality. She later graduated with a BA in history from New York University and a master’s degree in International Affairs, with a specialty in Human Rights, from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She continued her social justice work in Bergen County, New Jersey, before moving back to New York City in 2013. KATHLEEN A. NOLAN has been a cochair of the University Seminar in Population Biology (#521) since 1994. She has taught biology at Columbia, Yeshiva University, and, for the past twenty-four years, at St. Francis College. [ 218 ] AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

At St. Francis, she has been professor of biology and chair of the Department of Biology, Health Promotion, and Health Care Management since 2006. She received a BS in biology with a minor in geology from Northeastern University in 1979, an MA in biology from the City College of New York in 1983, and a PhD in biology from CUNY in 1992. ROBERT E. POLLACK, Columbia College ’61, has chaired a University Seminar since 1996, when Director Aaron Warner enabled him to begin the Seminar on Human Diversity (#657). Since then he has cochaired the Seminar on Memory and Slavery (#689) and currently cochairs the Seminar on Science and Subjectivity (#791). In the decade since he succeeded Robert Belknap as director of the Seminars, he has found himself unexpectedly lifted from his earlier career as professor of biological sciences and dean of the college to the remarkable and unexpected role of Columbia student once again. ELIZABETH POWERS, chair of the Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture (#417), is a scholar of eighteenth-century German literature and has written extensively on Goethe and world literature. Her recent essays on V. S. Naipul and Phillis Wheatley have focused on the engagement of non-European writers with the Western literary heritage. She is the editor of Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011) and has written reviews on literary subjects for National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her Goethe blog can be found at goethetc. blogspot.com. She is writing a novel. CYNTHIA M. PYLE (PhD, Columbia, 1976) is cochair, with Alan Stewart, of the Seminar in the Renaissance (#407), with training and experience in biology prior to her move into Renaissance Studies. She has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and is a visiting scholar at New York University. Her publications include the facsimile edition of Pier Candido Decembrio’s De animantium naturis (Codices e Vaticanis Selecti, LX, 1984); Milan and Lombardy in the Renaissance (Rome: La fenice, 1997; and the edition of M. D. Feld, Printing and Humanism in Renaissance Italy (Roma nel Rinascimento, 2015). VICTORIA H. RAVEIS (MA, MPhil, PhD) is a medical sociologist and social gerontologist with a background in psycho-oncology and public health. She is a research professor at New York University and founding director of NYU’s Psychosocial Research Unit on Health, Aging and the Community. Raveis has conducted extensive research on health services and supportive care that has informed public health policy and program development for an aging population. Targeting the patient and family caregiver as the unit for care, her application of a multigenerational, family-focused care management perspective informs the integration of health delivery systems and service programs attuned AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

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to diverse life stages. She is a Fellow in the Gerontological Society of America and is the author of more than one hundred thirty publications. ROBERT E. REMEZ is the current chair of the University Seminar on Language and Cognition (#681). He is a professor of psychology at Barnard College where he has taught since 1980 and has held an Ann Whitney Olin Chair and chaired the Departments of Psychology and Sociology. He is coeditor of The Handbook of Speech Perception (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and was associate editor of the journals Perception & Psychophysics and The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. He has been elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Psychonomic Society. CHRISTINA STAUDT, chair of the University Seminar on Death (#507), received her PhD from Columbia in 2001. A Presidential Scholar at Concordia College New York, she has been a hospice volunteer since 1998 and is the cofounder and president of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition (2003–2019), a not-for-profit organization offering support to individuals with serious illness and at the end of life. Her advisory board positions include Columbia’s Death LAB, Jansen Hospice & Palliative Care, and the Cancer Support Team. She has coedited and contributed chapters to several publications on contemporary concerns about mortality and end-of-life care, including Post Mortem: Sustainable Disposition and Spaces of Remembrance in the 21st Century Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). ALAN STEWART is, with Cynthia M. Pyle, cochair of the Seminar in the Renaissance (#407) and a member of the Seminar in Shakespeare (#581). A professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia and chair of the department, he is the author, most recently, of Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Oxford History of Life-Writing, volume 2, Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). A codirector of the Oxford Francis Bacon, a new sixteen-volume edition of Bacon’s works, he edited volume 1, Early Writings, 1584–1596 (2012), and is now at work on volume 2, Late Elizabethan Writings, 1596–1602. CATHERINE TINKER has been an associate member of the Seminar on the Problem of Peace (#403) since 1991. She is the Distinguished Fellow, Center for UN and Global Governance Studies, and adjunct professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and heads a nongovernmental organization accredited with the United Nations. She has a doctorate in international law from NYU Law School and is an expert member of the IUCN World Council on Environmental Law. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Grant for independent research and a 2020 Fulbright U.S. Scholar award in Argentina. She has taught international law as a visiting [ 220 ] AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S

professor at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, UFRGS Law School (Brazil), Pace University, and elsewhere. THOMAS VINCIGUERRA, a founding editor of The Week magazine, has published some one hundred eighty articles, essays, and reviews in the New York Times. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, GQ, Esquire, and Newsday. He is the author of Cast of Characters:Wolcott Gibbs, E. B.White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker (New York: Norton, 2015) and the editor of Conversations with Elie Wiesel (New York: Schocken, 2001) and Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker (Bloomsbury, UK: Bloomsbury, 2011). His three degrees from Columbia include a BA (1985) in history from Columbia College.

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List of the Columbia University Seminars 1945–2019

Dates signify the years of creation. Seminars designated with a dagger (†) are inactive.

1945 #401: The State† #403: The Problem of Peace #405: Studies in Religion #407: The Renaissance #409: Rural Life†

1947 #411: Content and Methods of the Social Sciences

1948 #413: Labor†

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1949 #437A: Population and Social Change†

1950 #417A: The Professions in Modern Society† #419: Higher Education†

1951 #421: Public Communication† #423: Organization and Management

1953 #425A: Social Change and Economic Development† #427A: Language and Communication†

1954 #405A: Interreligious Relations† #415: Development of Pre-Industrial Areas: Theory, Research, and Policy† #429: American Studies #431: Medieval Studies

1955 #437: Education and Social Work†

1956 #433: The Role of the Health Professions† #435: Studies in Contemporary Africa [ 224 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

1957 #441: Classical Civilization #443: Modern East Asia: China

1958 #445A: Science, Scientific Training, and Society†

1959 #425B: Problems of Interpretation (Hermeneutics)† #447: Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences† #449: The Genetics and Evolution of Man† #451: The Study of the New Testament

1960 #445: Modern East Asia: Japan #453: Power and Social Structure† #455A: Communism†

1962 #417: Eighteenth-Century European Culture #425: Asian Thought and Religion† #457: The Atlantic Community† #459A: The City #461: Technology and Social Change†

1963 #463: Basic and Applied Social Research† #465: Law and Politics LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

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1964 #467A: International Research† #469: The Theory of Literature† #471: Ecology and Culture #473: Basic Texts† #475: Human Maladaptation in Modern Society† #477: South Asia

1965 #481: Ancient Mediterranean Studies†

1966 #467: Knowledge, Technology, and Social Systems #479: The Ancient Near East #483: Studies in Modern Italy #485: The Use of Language†

1967 #459B: The Changing Metropolis in America† #487: Traditional China† #489: Biomaterials† #491: Early American History and Culture #495A: Pollution and Water Resources: Scientific and Institutional Aspects

1968 #427: Studies in Political and Social Thought #473: The Study of the Hebrew Bible #493: Soviet Nationality Problems† #497: Slavic History and Culture [ 226 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

#499: The Nature of Man† #501: Israel and Jewish Studies

1969 #503: Economic History

1970 #505: Social and Preventive Medicine† #511: Innovation in Education #513: Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century†

1971 #507: Death #509: The Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas #515: Latin America #517: Korea† #519: Law and Social and Economic Change in the American Past† #521: Population Biology #523: Political Economy and Contemporary Social Issues #525: The Middle East

1972 #527: The Uses of the Ocean† #529: Appetitive Behavior #531: Culture, Power, and Boundaries

1973 #439: Economic Planning: Public and Private† LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

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#533: The History and Philosophy of Science #535: Irish Studies #537: Crime and the Community†

1974 #539: Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation #541: Intra-Uterine and Infant Development† #543: African-American Studies† #545: Women and Society #547: Elites and Power† #549: Language and Behavior† #551: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

1975 #553: Drugs and Society #555A: History of the Working Class†

1976 #557: Brazil

1977 #559: Arabic Studies

1978 #561: Human Rights #565: Aging and Adult Human Development† #563: Neurobiology† [ 228 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

1979 #567: Neo-Confucian Studies #569: The Permanence of Values and Moral Change†

1981 #477A: Contemporary India†

1982 #571: China: International Business† #573: The Caribbean† #575: Arms Control† #577: Genetic Epidemiology† #579: Urban America† #581: Shakespeare #583: Southeast Asia in World Affairs

1983 #585: Ethics, Moral Education, and Society #587: Global Habitability† #589: Philanthropy† #591: The Theory of Values† #595: Telecommunication Policy†

1984 #593: Communications and Society† #597: Incentives and Motivations for Social Benefit†

1985 #601: Privatization and the Changing Welfare State† LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

[ 229 ]

#603: Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience #605: East Christian Studies†

1986 #599: U.S. Monetary-Financial Reform in a World Context† #607: Modernism and Post-Modernism† #609: Longevity†

1987 #611: Scientific Literacy† #613: Full Employment #615: Iranian Studies

1988 #617: Cancer†

1989 #619: Ethics in Business† #621: Homosexualities†

1990 #495B: Legal, Economic, and Social Environment Issues† #623: American Culture† #625: Molecular Evolution† #627: The History of American Architecture† #629: Buddhist Studies

1991 #631: Land Policy and Development† [ 230 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

1992 #455: Post-Communist States, Societies, and Economies† #555: Twentieth-Century Politics and Society #633: Drama: Text and Performance† #635: Japan’s Global Role: The Multilateral Dimension†

1993 #637: Genome: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues† #639: Modernism and Modernity: Art, Literature, and Cultural Theory† #641: Children and Their Families in the Big Cities† #643: The Changing World of Mathematics† #645: National Health and Science Policy† #647: Indology†

1995 #649: New York in the Twenty-First Century† #651: Mineralized Tissue† #653: The Book in History† #655: The Morningside Centennial†

1996 #657: The Two Cultures Revisited: Current Representations of Human Diversity† #659: Iran in Modern Times†

1997 #661: Religion in America #663: Conflict Resolution† #665: Historic Monuments and Sites† LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

[ 231 ]

1998 #667: The History of Columbia University #669: Oral History: Theory and Methods in Oral Documentation† #671: Globalization, Labor, and Popular Struggles

1999 #673: Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights† #675: Comparative Study of Cultures† #677: Child and Family Policy†

2000 #679: Jazz Studies† #681: Language and Cognition #683: New Media Teaching and Learning† #685: Psychoanalytic Studies†

2001 #687: Urbanism and Public Health† #689: Memory and Slavery

2002 #691: Early China #693: Science and Religion

2003 #695: Aging and Health: Policy, Practice, and Research† #697: Disability Studies† [ 232 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

2004 #699: Romanticism and Its Aftermath† #701: Modern British History

2005 #703: Modern Greek #705: Post-Communism† #707: Early Modern France #709: Religion and World Community† #711: Literary Theory

2007 #715: Religion in New York† #717: Cultural Memory #719: Injury Prevention and Control #721: Comparative Philosophy

2008 #723: Modern Europe† #725: Educating Scientists†

2009 #727: Theory and History of Media #729: History, Redress, and Reconciliation #731: Medical Economies and Professionalism† #733: Japanese Culture

2010 #735: Sites of Cinema #737: Narrative, Health, and Social Justice LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

[ 233 ]

2011 #739: Columbia School Linguistics #741: Interdisciplinary Curricula #743: Complexity Science† #745: Catholicism, Culture, and Modernity #747: Global Strategy† #749: Dance

2012 #751: Religion and Writing #753: Big Data and Visual Scholarship #755: Work/Family in the Twenty-First Century #757: Global Mental Health†

2013 #759: Defense and Security #761: Visual Perception†

2014 #763: Beyond France #765: Logic, Probability, and Games #769: Human-Animal Studies #771: Indigenous Studies #773: The Integrative Study of Animal Behavior

2015 #775: The Future of Aging Research #777: Affect Studies #779: Disability, Culture, and Society [ 234 ] L I S T O F T H E C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y S E M I N A R S

2016 #781: Society and Neuroscience† #783: Sustainable Finance

2017 #785: Energy Ethics #787: Material Texts #789: Water in America

2018 #791: Science and Subjectivity #793: Columbia University Collaborative of Community Programs for Youth & Families

2019 #795: Thinking Europe Now #797: Korean Studies

LIST OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

[ 235 ]

Name Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 16, 25, 33 Affron, Charles, 56 Albom, Mitch, 140 Allen, Joan, 57 Allen, Woody, 59 Allison, Anthony C., 106 Alvarez, Gessy, xxii Alvarez, Jose, 173, 174 Andemicael, Berhanykun, 187 Andreopoulos, George, xv, xxiin4, 162 Andrew, Dudley, 48 An-Na'im, Abdullahi Ahmed, 166 Annenberg, Walter H., 97 Antoinette, Marie, xviii, 22 Arat, Zehra F. Kabasakal, 169, 175, 176 Arciniegas, Germán, 7 Ariès, Philippe, 133 Aronow, Gail, 11 Atabekov, Djoumakadyr, 139 Augustine, 5 Austen, Jane, xviii, 22 Ayala, Francisco, 116n1 El-Ayouty, Yassin, 188, 189 Azenha, Gustavo, 82

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 25 Bacon, Helen, 20 Badillo, David, 100 Baker, Richard, 112 Bambach, Carmen, 12 Barnouw, Eric, 47, 49, 50, 51 Baron, Hans, 5, 7, 14 Barragan, Yessenia, 69 Barrowclough, George, 113–14 Bartalos, Michael K., 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145 Barth, Karl, 25 Barthes, Roland, 47 Bary, Theodore de, 164 Basker, Jim, 19, 24, 25 Batchu, Michelle, 111 Bateson, Gregory, 207 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 206 Bauke, Joseph, 17 Beame, Abraham, 93 Beaumont, Justin, 42 Beauregard, Robert, xxi, xxiiin21, 90 Becker, Ernest, 141 Bedau, Hugo, 167

[ 237 ]

Beer, Gabriella de, 116n1 Behn, Aphra, 21 Beitz, Charles, 167, 174 Belknap, Robert, xiv, xxii, 27, 160 Bell, Charles, 69 Bell, Daniel, 35 Belo, Helen, 205, 208 Belo, Jane, 203, 205–10 Belton, John, 55 Bender, Courtney, xviii, 41 Benedict, Barbara, 23 Benedict, Ruth, 31 Bennett, Chanda, 113 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 7, 13 Berger, Helen, 37–38 Berglund, Lisa, 23 Berkman, Alexander “Sasha,” 195 Berle, Milton, 54 Berlin, Isaiah, 164 Bertram-Nothnagel, Jutta, 187, 192n7 Best, Steven, 55 Beveridge, William, 66 Bialystok, Ellen, 154 Bick, Mario, 79, 80, 83–84 Biddle, George, 206, 207 Bildner, Albert, 82 bin Laden, Osama, 189 Biolsi, Kristy, 115 Birch, Eugenie, 101 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 202 Blackwell, Angela Glover, 75 Blanchard, Olivier, 66 Blasi, Vincent, 24 Blau, Peter, 35, 36 Blix, Hans, 187 Block, Marcelline, 143 Bloom, Lois, 150–51 Bloomberg, Michael, 41 Boas, Franz, 31, 208 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 7 [ 238 ]

Boddy, William, 54 Boehm, Lisa, 101 Bolnet, Carolle, 112 Bolsonaro, Jair, 87, 88 Bonbright, James C., 31 Bonvini, Otorino “Rino,” 84 Booker, Cory, 75 Bordwell, David, 48 Borges, Jorge Luis, 23 Borowsky, Richard, 113 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 28 Boswell, James, xviii, 22 Boyer, S. H., 106 Bozeman, Adda, xvii, 182 Brahe, Tycho, 7 Braudy, Leo, 46 Bray, Mark, 68–69 Brendel, Otto, 9 Bresler, Jack, 106 Brown, Diana, 79, 83–84 Brown, Laura, 21 Brown, Noel, 186 Bruno, Giordano, 7 Bruno, Giuliana, 55 Bryant, John, 164 Buchwald, Art, 141 Bullock, Karen, 127–28 Bunzel, Ruth, 31, 35 Burchsted, Albert, 111 Burckhardt, Jacob, 4, 5, 6 Burnette, Jacqueline Denise, 119, 120 Burns, Arthur R., 181 Burns, E. Bradford, 77 Burns, Stanley, 139 Burrows, Ted, 102 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 33 Buzzard, 208 Caffrey, Thomas A., 139–40, 144, 145–46 Cagan, Leslie, 69 Cahan, Margaret, 172

NAME INDEX

Cahnman, Werner, 33, 36 Cales, Pearle, 114 Calhoun, Craig, 42, 45n2 Calvin, John, 7 Cameron, Euan, 11 Campana, Augusto, 6 Campbell, Oscar J., 2 Carman, Harry, 198 Carnes, Tony, xviii, xxiiin11, 30 Carr, Arthur, 135 Carrasquillo, Olveen, 127 Carroll, Noel, 55 Carter, James, 163 Casanova, Jose, 37, 41 Cash, Arthur, 24 Cassirer, Ernst, 3, 4, 5 Cassirer, Toni, 3 Caulfield, Sueann, 80–81 Cavalla-Sforza, L. I., 106 Cavell, Stanley L., 48 Celenza, Christopher, 10 Chalmers, Douglas, 77 Charles V (emperor), 11 Charlesworth, Hilary, 171 Chase, David, 54 Chaves, José M., 139 Cheplick, Gregory, 110 Cherry, Robert, 67 Chigi, Agostino, 11 Childs, Grace Hatch, 197–98 Childs, Richard, 197 Chin, Charles, 101 Choron, Jacque, 136 Christensen, Kathleen, 67 Cicero, 6 Cimino, Richard, 42 Clark, Donald Lemen, 7 Clark, Kenneth, 92 Clark, Roger, 185 Clemenceau, Georges, 202 Clifford, James L., 18, 19

Clinton, Hillary, 44 Clinton, William, 75 Clough, Shepherd B., 35 Cohen, Lawrence, 91 Cole, Jonathan, 34 Collins, George, 94 Collins, John, 83, 84 Collins, Sheila D., xx, xxiiin18, 62, 73, 74 Colton, Judith, 21 Comitas, Lambros, 35 Conyers, John, Jr., 73 Coppola, Al, 24 Cordier, Andrew W., 183 Corrigan, Timothy, 55 Crafton, Donald, 56 Crewe, Jennifer, xxii Cripps, Thomas, 52 Cuarón, Alfonso, 60 Cucco, Alison, 114 Culbert, David, 54 Culicover, Peter, 153 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 11 Daniells, Charlotte, 23 Danto, Arthur, 164 D’Arc, James, 57 Darnton, Robert, 17 Darwin, Charles, 105, 116n1, 157 DasGupta, Sayantani, 143 Dauben, Joseph W., xx, xxiiin19, 132, 145 Davenport, Christian, 174–75 da Vinci, Leonardo, xix, 1, 11, 12 Dean, Warren, 80–81 Defeis, Elizabeth, 179–80 Dell, Gary, 153 Della Cava, Ralph, 80, 89 Delson, Roberta, 79, 80, 81, 89 Denmark, Florence L., 122–23 Derrick, Peter, 102

NAME INDEX

[ 239 ]

Eco, Umberto, 47 Edel, Abraham, 37 Edelstein, Dan, 23 Edelstein, Julius, 93 Edwards, Amanda, 125 Einstein, Albert, 32 Eisenbichler, Konrad, 11 Eisenman, Peter, 93 Eisenstein, Sergei, 49 Eitzen, Dirk, 50 Ellens, J. Harold, 143 Ellis, Nathan, 110 Emberson, Lauren, 153 Endlemen, Robert, 36 Erasmus, Desiderius, xviii, 1 Ergas, Yasmine, 176 Erickson, Kenneth, 87, 89 Etzioni, Amitai, 35

Fellows, Otis, 16 Felsenstein, Frank, 23 Fenggang Yang, 42 Ferguson, Wallace K., 5 Fernandes, Florestan, 79 Fibikar, Danielle, 114 Ficino, Marsilio, xviii, 1, 3, 4, 5 Fischer, Lucy, 55 Fish, Jefferson, 109 Fishbone, Leslie, 54 Fishlow, Albert, 82 Fitch, James Marston, 94 Fitch, Tecumseh, 160 Flaherty, Robert J., 50 Fleming, 12, 13 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 55 Florio, Antonia, 115 Foner, Nancy, 101–2 Fortner, Michael Javen, 103 Fosburgh, James, 93 Fowler, Carol, 150, 159 Francesca, Piero della, 11 Frankel, Charles, 31 Fredman, Alice Green, 20 Freedman, Jeffrey, 23 Freud, Sigmund, 33, 38, 47, 153 Frey-Wouters, Ellen, 192n2 Friedman, Michael B., 125 Friedman, Mike, 112 Frith, Ruth, 129 Fromm, Erich, 33 Fugger, Jakob, 11 Fujimura, Makato, 42 Fulton, Robert, 134 Fumaroli, Marc, 29 Futterman, Stanley, 191

Falk, Richard, 167, 171 Faulkner, William, 48 Feifel, Herman, 133, 134 Fein, Albert, 94

Gabaccia, Donna, 102 Gabbard, Krin, 55, 56, 61n1 Gabbey, Alan, 11 Gaddis, John, 173

Derrida, Jacques, 47 DeSalle, Rob, 112, 114 Desmond, Paul, 161n1 Despommier, Dickson, 112 Diawara, Manthia, 55, 58 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 116 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 33 Donovan, Mary Dominick, 192n2 Douglas, William, 53 Doukakis, Phaedra, 113 Drake, Francis, xix, 1 Dulles, John Foster, 191n1 Durand, Dana, 4 Durkheim, Émile, 43 Dussart, Françoise, 39 DuVernay, Ava, 60

[ 240 ]

NAME INDEX

Gaines, Jane, 55 Galbraith, James K., 71 Galileo Galilei, xix, 1, 7, 37 Gans, Herbert, 41, 92, 95 Gardner, Nina, 81 Garin, Eugenio, 10 Gaspari, Elio, 81 Gay, Peter, 16–17, 17–18, 21, 29 Geller, Andrew, 110 Gerzina, Gretchen, 23 Gessner, Conrad, 12 Ghisi, Mantuan Giorgio, 11 Gibbs, James, 112 Gil, David, 66 Gilbert, Claire, 14 Gilbert, Felix, 7 Gillespie, Michael, 52, 53 Gillette, Howard, 100 Ginsburg, Helen Lachs, xx, xxiiin18, 62 Ginzberg, Eli, 67 Gish, Dorothy, 59 Gish, Lillian, 59 Glassman, Ronald M., 37 Gledhill, Christine, 58 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xviii, 3, 22, 33 Goldberg, Gertrude Schaffner, xx, xxiiin18, 62, 68, 73, 74 Goldman, Ari L., 43, 145 Goldman, Emma, 195 Goldstein, Eric, 168 Gonzalez, Evelyn, 102 Goodin, Robert, 174 Goodland, Robert, 79 Goodman, Paul, 91 Goodrich, Leland M., 178 Gorer, Geoffrey, 132 Gouldner, Alvin W., 36 Govind, Shubba, 111 Gracco, Vincent L., 153 Grace, Pamela, 56

Grant, Barry Keith, 56 Greason, Walter, 101 Greene, Larry, 101 Greenfield, Sidney, xxi, xxiin6, xxiiin20, 44, 77, 80, 81–82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Griffith, D. W., 58–59 Grimsley, Ronald, 17 Grossman, Claudio, 167, 168 Grossman, Richard, 68 Gruen, Victor, 91 Guardia, Pamela, xxii Guarnizo, Luis, 102 Guerrero, Ed, 55 Guest, Kenneth, 41–42 Gunning, Tom, 55 Gusmano, Michael K., 123–24 Gustafson, Carrie, 172 Gutfreund, Owen, 102 Gutman, Marta, 101 Gutmann, James, 3, 136, 137, 193–94 Haas, Ernest, 163 Habermas, Jürgen, 42 Hackman, James, 22 Haddican, Bill, 155 Hall, Michael, 80 Halsband, Robert, 17 Hamilton, Charles, 164 Hamilton, Darrick, 67–68 Hammarskjold, Dag, 178, 184 Hansen, Miriam, 55 Hanson, R. Scott, 44 Harcourt-Smith, William, 112 Harrier, Richard, 9 Harris, Wendell B., Jr., 53 Hart, Summer, xxii Harvey, Philip, 66, 73 Haussman, Fay, 79, 80 Havel, Vaclav, 163 Hayes, Carlton J. H., 180–81, 198 Hazan, Marcelo, 86

NAME INDEX

[ 241 ]

Hazard, John, 178, 180 Hazard, Paul, 28 Hehir, Brian, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 3 Heilbroner, Robert, 71 Hein, Carola, 96, 97 Heires, Greg, 69 Henderson, Brian, 48 Hendrix, Jimi, 132 Henkin, Louis, xv, xvi, 164, 165, 176, 184, 192n4 Hershenzon, Daniel, 14 Hertz, Deborah, 21 Herzog, Amy, 53 Herzog, Werner, 60 Heuman, Susan, 176 Hexter, J. H., 8, 13 Heydenreich, Ludwig von, 12, 13 Hill, Elizabeth, 9 Hilsman, Roger, 187 Himes, Chester, 53 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 170 Hoberman, J., 56–57 Hochschild, Arlie, 45 Hoffmann, Ernst, 3 Hofstadter, Richard, 3, 35 Hogenberg, Nicolaus, 11 Holberg, Ludvig, 2 Hood, Clifton, 101, 102 Hopkins, Harry, 70 Horace, 20 Horkheimer, Max, 16 Horowitz, Irving Louis, 36 Höss, Rudolf, 35–36 Hughes, Langston, 206 Hurston, Zora Neale, 206, 208 Hussein, Saddam, 187 Ianni, Octavio, 79 Ickes, Scott, 86 Inácio da Silva, Luiz “Lula,” 83 [ 242 ]

Insdorf, Annette, 58 Irvin, Dale, 42 Isenberg, Alison, 97 Issherwood, Robert L., 17 Jackson, Kenneth T., 94 Jackson, W. T. H., 9 Jacquemet, Marco, 159 Jaeger, Werner, 3 James, David, 55 Jaspers, Karl, 3 Jayo, John, xxii Jeffri, Joan, 128, 130 Jenkins, Patty, 60 Jensen, Christopher Jon, 109 Jerome, Robert, 129 Jessup, Philip, xvi, 178 John Paul II (pope), 80 Johnson, Douglas, 103 Johnson, Francis, 4 Johnson, Lyndon B., 184 Johnson, Philip, 93 Johnson, Samuel, 21 Joplin, Janice, 132 Juhasz, Alexandra, 51 Jusczyk, Peter, 150 Juviler, Peter, 164, 169, 172, 175, 176 Kahn, Alfred, 92 Kamal, Ahmed, 189 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 170 Kaplan, E. Ann, 58 Kaplan, Eugene, 112 Katz, Michael, 97–98 Kay, Paul, 150 Keck, Margaret, 81 Keith, Kevin T., 141 Keller, Lisa, xxi, xxiiin21, 90 Kennedy, John F., 92, 132, 182 Kennedy, Joseph P., 56 Kennedy, Robert, 95, 132 NAME INDEX

Kepler, Johannes, 7 Keppel, Frederick P., 198 Kiernan, John M., xx, xxiiin19, 132, 137, 138, 139 Kimball, Solan T., 35 Kimmel, Seth, 14 King, Martin Luther, Jr., xvii, 132, 163, 172 Kinzler, Katherine D., 155 Kirk, Grayson, xiv, 178 Kissinger, Henry, 192n3 Kittani, Ismat Taha, 188 Klagsbrun, Samuel C., 137 Klein, Herbert, 81 Kliger, Samuel, 38, 39, 41 Klineberg, Otto, 35 Koepfer, Roberta, 111 Komarovsky, Mirra, 33, 35 Korpi, Walter, 63 Korrol, Virginia Sanchez, 100 Krauss, Robert, xvi, 158–59 Krauthammer, Charles, 173 Krauze, Tad, 38 Kresge, George Joseph “Kreskin,” 159, 161n2 Kristeller, Paul Oksar, xvi–xvii, xx, 3–10, 15 Kristeva, Julia, 47 Kroeber Alfred, 208 Kroessler, Jeffrey, 102 Kroner, Richard, 3 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, xx, 134 Kulasekera, Varuni, 114 Kuperberg, Gina R., 157 Kurzweil, Edith, 36 Kutscher, Austin H. “Bill,” xvi, 135–39, 142, 143, 146, 147 Kutscher, Helene, 135 Kutscher, Kenneth, Jr., 138 Labov, William, 150 Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile, 47

Lakhdir, Ann, 192n2 Lakusta, Laura M., 153 Landerer, Lilly, 192n2 Landis, Carney, 207 Lane, Barbara Miller, 103 Lang, Paul Henry, 17 Lassow, William, 93 Lasswell, Harold, 180 Lattimore, Owen, 36 Lavin, Marilyn Kronberg, 11 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 31–36, 45 Leab, Daniel J., 46, 52, 54 Lechich, Anthony J., 147 Lee, Roy, 189–90 Lee, Spike, 57 Lees, Andrew, 96 Leff, Nathaniel, 77 Lehman, Peter, 56 Leite, Ligia, 80 Leites, Edmund, 38 Lemann, Jorge Paulo, 82 Lempa, Heikki, 23 Lenin, Vladimir, 33 Levandowsky, Michael, 108 Levene, Howard, 105–6, 107, 108 Levin, David J., 55 Levine, Louis, 108, 116n1 Levine, Robert, 81 Levitan, Max, 108 Lewittes, Adina, 147 Leyda, Jay, 48 Liebman, Stuart, 58 Lincoln, C. Eric, 39 Lindsay, John V., 93 Lipsius, Justus, 7 Liss, David, 25–26 Litwin, Howard, 121–22 Livezey, Lowell, 42, 168 Livy, 7 Locke, John, 170 Lockwood, Dean, 4

NAME INDEX

[ 243 ]

Lorch, Maristella de Panizza, 10 Louis XIV (king), 18 Lowenstein, Howard, 112 Loyle, Cyanne, 174–75 Lubey, Kathleen, 23 Lubin, Carol, 192n2 Luce, Stephanie, 67 Lucia, Cynthia, xvii, xxiiin9, 46, 55, 61n1 Lugowski, David, 58 Luhr, William, xvii, xxiiin9, 46, 55, 56, 61n1 Lumumba, Patrice, 183 Lustigman, Sarah, 110–11 Luther, Martin, 11 Lynd, Helen, 33 Lynd, Robert, 33, 34 Mabin, Alan, 103 Macary, Jean L., 21 Macey, Suzanne, 115 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xix, 1, 7, 11, 202 MacIver, Robert, 33, 34 Mackinder, Halford, 39 Macy, Edytha, 205 Madison, James, 24 Magellan, Ferdinand, xix, 1 Mahatma Gandhi, 162 Maher, Sean, 107 Maier, Alice, 39–40, 209 Maier, Emmanuel, 39 Maier, Joseph, 33, 35–36, 39, 40, 45, 45n1, 193, 194, 209 Mamiya, Lawrence, 39 Man, Paul de, 47 Mandela, Nelson, xvii, 163 Manson, Charles, 132 Marcus, Judith, 39 Maritz, Cecelia, 86 Marks, Steven, 189 Marrero, Georgina, 205 [ 244 ]

Marshall, Stephen, 126, 127 Martin, Paul, 164, 176 Martinez, Samuel, 175 Marx, Karl, 47 Massood, Paula J., 52, 53 Matisse, Henri, 123 Mattingly, Garrett, 8 May, Gita, 20 Mayer, Ann Elizabeth, 166 Maysles, Albert, 57 McBride, Joseph, 59 McCann, Frank, 81 McCloskey, Michael, 150 McConnell, Frank, 52 McDowell, Malcolm, 59 McGill, William, 157 McGovern, George, 95 McKeon, Michael, 21, 22 McKusick, Victor, 106 McPhee, Colin, 206, 207 Mead, Margaret, xiv, 31, 203, 205–6, 207–8, 210 Meiss, Millard, 12, 13 Melman, Seymour, 184 Melnick, Don, 112, 113, 115 Menezes, Renata, 86, 87 Merian, Linda, 23 Merritt, Russell, 56 Mershon, Jack, 206 Mershon, Katharane, 206 Merton, Robert K., 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 45 Mesgarani, Nima, 154 Métraux, Rhoda, 35, 205, 208, 209, 210 Metzger, Walter, 35 Meyer, Arline, 20 Michelson, Annette, 48 Middendorf, John, 25, 26 Miles, Jack, 39 Miller, 13 Miller, Susan, 103

NAME INDEX

Mills, C. Wright, 34, 35 Mills, Quincy, 101 Mitchell, Sean T., 87 Mitford, Jessica, 134 Modestini, Dianne, 12 Monfasani, John, xx, 10 Montagu, Ashley, 105 Montagu, John, 23 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 17 Montaigne, Michel de, xix, 1 Moody, Ernest, 3, 7, 12, 13 Moody, Harry R., 123, 129 Moore, Deborah Dash, 101 More, Thomas, 8 Morgan, John D., 134 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 104, 105 Moro, Sergio, 87–88 Morris, Errol, 49 Morris, Jessica Carvalho, 87 Morris, Rosalind C., 55 Morrissey, Lee, 19 Moyers, Bill, 141 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 25 Mulvey, Laura, 48, 58 Mumford, Kevin, 101 Mumford, Lewis, 90–91 Murphy, Joseph S., 67, 72 Musser, Charles, 55, 57 Myers, Emily, 156 Myrdal, Gunnar, 65, 95 Naaman, Dorit, 50 Nair, Mira, 60 Naro-Maciel, Eugenia, 112 Nathan, Andrew, 38 Navarro, Vinicius, 49, 50 Needham, Joseph, 37 Negra, Diane, 61n1 Negri, Enrico de, 7 Nelson, Benjamin, 36, 37, 38 Nelson, William, 7

Nessel, Jerry T., 139 Newton, Alice, xiii Nickel, James, 167–68 Nicolaus Copernicus, xix, 1, 7, 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47 Nimbark, Asakant, 41 Niogret, Hubert, 57 Nisbet, Robert J., 40 Niven, David, 103 Nixon, Richard, 54 Nizamuddin, Mohamed, 121 Nochimson, Martha, 54, 56, 61n1 Nolan, Kathleen, xxiiin15, 104 Norden, Eduard, 3 Norris, William, 80 Noyes, John, xix, 29 Nuland, Sherwin, 140 Nussbaum, Felicity, 21, 22 Oakes, Guy, 37 Obama, Barack, 71 O’Connor, John, 52, 54 Okin, Susan, 170, 171 Olinger, Chauncey, Jr., xxiin2 Oliveira, Gustavo, 85 O’Mara, Margaret, 98–99 Orlov, Yuri, 163 Osborn, James M., 17 Osborne, Thomas Mott, 196, 198 Osman, Washmah, 51 Osmond, Patricia, 11 Papagiannis, Nicholas, 103 Pardo, Jennifer S., xix, 155 Parkes, Colin Murray, 134 Parks, George B., 7 Parr, A. E., 93 Patel, Anniruddh M., 154 Paterno, Charles V., 5 Pedro, Antonio, 81 Peele, Jordan, 55

NAME INDEX

[ 245 ]

Peña, Richard, 57 Penha-Lopes, Vânia, 83, 84, 87 Pereira Leite, Sergio, 85 Peretz, David, 135 Perkins, Jean, 20, 21 Perrone, Charles, 81 Petrach, Francesco, xviii, 1, 2, 7, 10 Petric, Vlada, 47 Piccato, Pablo, 100 Pinchas Geiger, Pedro, 79 Piven, Frances Fox, 92 Piven, Jerry S., 142 Plato, 5, 198 Plotinus, 3, 5 Poblete, Martin O., 80 Poeppel, David, 154 Pogge, Thomas, 167 Polan, Dana, 55 Pollack, Robert, xxii, 43–44, 72, 107, 114 Pollard, Samuel D., 57 Pollin, Robert, 72 Pollis, Adamantia, 165 Porter, David, 42 Porzecanski, Ana Luz, 115 Powers, Elizabeth, xviii, xxiiin10, xxiiin14, 16 Prance, Ghillean, 79 Premack, Laura, 86 Pruce, Joel, 175 Pyle, Cynthia, xvi, xviii, xix, xxiiin7, xxiiin12, xxiiin16, 1, 9, 10 Quercia, Jacopo della, 11 Rabi, Isidor I., xiv, xxii Racaniello, Vincent, 114 Raeff, Marc, 18 Rahn, B. J., 18 Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, 167 Ramcharan, Bertrand G., 188 [ 246 ]

Rand, Frances Elizabeth, 80 Randall, David, 10 Randall, Francis, 3, 10, 14, 180, 182–83, 184 Randall, John Herman, Jr., xvii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Randall, Laura, 81 Ranum, Orest, 17 Rao, Arati, 168, 172 Rasmussen, Larry, 172 Ratner, Michael, 162 Raveis, Victoria, xvii, xx, xxiiin17, 118 Ravens, Carl, 92 Rawls, John, 166 Rawson, David, 39 Raxworthy, Chris, 112 Ray, Martha, 23 Real, Carmen, 85 Redpath, Albert, 209 Redrobe, Karen, 51–52 Reed, Joseph, 22 Rehn, GØsta, 66 Reidy, Joseph P., 57 Remesaira, Claudio, 102–3 Remez, Robert E., xix, xxiiin13, 149, 159 Renner, Gerald, 44 Renner, Michael, 68 Reps, John, 99 Rial, Carmen Silva de Morales, 44 Rice, Eugene, 9, 10 Rice, Louise, 10, 11 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, 202 Richetti, John, xviii, 23, 24–25, 26 Rickey, Branch, 201 Rickey, Carrie, 57 Riessman, Frank, 68 Rizzo, Betty, 21 Robinson, Jackie, 201 Rockwell, Robert, 111 Rodowick, David, 48, 55 NAME INDEX

Rodrigues, Donizete, 43, 86 Rodriguez, Jaime, 100 Rodwin, Victor G., 123, 124 Rollyson, Carl, 48 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 179 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 62, 66–67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 Roosevelt, Franklin D., III, 74 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 9 Rosen, Edward, 7 Rosen, Sumner, xvi, 12, 13, 63, 72 Rosner, David, 102 Rossellini, Roberto, 49 Roth, Guenther, 37 Rothman, David, 164 Rothstein, Karla Maria, 146, 147–48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 17, 132, 170 Rousseff, Dilma, 87 Rowland, Ingrid, 11 Rubini, Rocco, 10 Rudnytsky, Peter, 9, 10 Ryder, Winona, 59 Sakharov, Andrei, 163 Saliba, George, 10 Sallust, 11 Sandoval-Strauz, Andrew, 100 Sarris, Andrew, 48 Sassen, Saskia, 103 Saunders, Cicely, xx, 134 Saunders, Jason, 7 Schachter, Oscar, 184, 192n5 Schachter, Sherry, 138, 145 Schamus, James, 57 Schiavo, Terri, 141 Schilling, Warner, 180 Schlenker, Philippe, 160 Schlosser, Leonard B., 18 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 37 Schmitt, Charles B., 14 Schneider, Eric, 99–100

Schoenberg, Bernard, 135 Schorske, Carl, 103 Schrijver, Nico, 188 Schwab, Peter, 165 Scorsese, Martin, 57 Scott, Ridley, 60 Senie, Ruby, 126 Senneff, Susan Field, 9, 10 Sergio Pinheiro, Paulo, 81 Serra, MM, 57 Shahaf, Nataly, xxii Shakespeare, William, xix, 1 Shank, Michael, 11 Sharp, Lesley A., 142 Sharpe, M. E., 72 Sharrett, Christopher, 56, 61n1 Shelley, Mary, 20, 56 Sherry, George, 183 Shorto, Russell, 103 Shue, Henry, 164–65 Sidtis, John J., 156 Silva, Luiz Inácio da “Lula,” 87, 88 Silva, Nivaldo Ferreira da, 83 Silva-Henriquez, Raul, 80 Simmel, Georg, 37 Simon, Robert, 12 Singh, Prakash, 192n7 Siskin, Clifford, 18, 22 Skinner, Elliott, 164 Skinner, Quentin, 17 Sklar, Robert, 48 Smith, Elta, xviii, 41 Sohn, Louis, 192n1 Solow, Robert, 65 Souza, Margaret, 142 Sovic, Liv, 86 Spain, Daphne, 101 Spatt, Beverly Moss, 102 Spies, Walter, 206, 207, 208 Stackhouse, Max, 171 Staiger, Janet, 55, 56, 59–60

NAME INDEX

[ 247 ]

Stalin, Joseph, 36 Stanfield, Peter, 56 Staudt, Christina, xx, xxiiin19, 132, 142, 143, 144–45, 146 Steffens, Lincoln, 195 Steimatsky, Noa, 55 Stepan, Alfred, 81 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 80 Stern, Laurent, 42, 43 Sternberg, Rhonda, 143, 147 Sterritt, David, 55, 56, 61n1 Stevenson, Adlai, 95 Stevenson, Robert G., 137, 138, 139, 142 Stewart, Alan, xvi, xviii, xix, xxiiin7, xxiiin12, xxiiin16, 1, 9 Stiassny, Melanie, 113 Stiglitz, Joseph, 65 Stills, David L., 35 Stoddart, Scott, 58 Stone, Katherine, 67 Stony, George, 50 Straayer, Chris, 58, 61n1 Strauss, Herbert, 38 Streible, Dan, 57 Streuver, Nancy, 10–11 Studdert-Kennedy, Michael, xvi, 157, 158 Studlar, Gaylyn, 55 Sturtevant, Alfred, 104, 105 Sugrue, Tom, 101 Sullivan, Donna, 172 Sweeny, Sean, 68 Tager-Flusberg, Helen, 157 Tajima, Renee, 102 Tamahori, Lee, 60 Tanin, Zuhar, 189 Tannenbaum, Frank, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxiin1, 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 39–40, 44, 77, 81–82, 91, 178, 193, 194–204, 205, 208, 209, 210 Tayler, Edward, 10 [ 248 ]

Taylor, Charles, 166 Teggart, Frederick J., 40 Teitelman, Michael, 144 Temer, Michel, 87 Tessler, Michael, 109 Thompson-Schill, Sharon L., 156 Thorndike, Lynn, 4 Tinker, Catherine, xv, xvii, xxiin5, xxiiin8, 177 Tomas, Antonio, 86 Tommasino, Pier Mattia, 14 Toner, John, 124 Tong Yan, 39 Toro, Guillermo del, 60 Trebat, Thomas, xvi, 82, 87 Trewin, Reg, 129 Trinkaus, Charles, 7, 9 Trulear, H. Dean, 39 Truman, Harry S., 181 Trumbach, Randolph, 21 Trump, Donald, 44 Trusov, Vladimir, 38 Tshombe, Moise, 183 Türk, Danilo, 188 Turner, Francis A., 92 Tutu, Desmond, 172 Uchitelle, Louis, 67 Uehlein, Joe, 69 Ulery, Robert, 11 Ullman, John, 93 Urquhart, Brian, 183 Vacche, Angella Dalle, 55 Valla, Lorenzo, 10, 11 Varma, Baidya Nath, 35 Veit, Richard, 114 Verne, Jules, 103 Vickrey, William S., 31, 35, 39, 65, 66, 71–72 Victer, Wagner, 86

NAME INDEX

Vinciguerra, Tom, xxii Vries, Paul de, 42 Wachowski, Lana, 60 Wachowski, Lilly, 60 Wade, Richard C., 95–96, 103 Wagley, Charles, 77 Wakeman, Rosemary, 103 Waldman, John, 113 Wallace, Michele, 55 Wallace, Mike, 102 Warburg, Aby, 5 Warner, Aaron, 40, 71, 140 Warner, R. Stephen, 41 Warner, Sam Bass, 98 Wayne, John, 59 Weatherhead, Richard W., 193, 194 Webb, Kempton, 77 Webb, Robert K., 17 Weber, Marianne, 45n1 Weber, Max, 36–37, 38, 43, 45n1 Weil, Mark S., 11 Weinstein, Barbara, 79 Weinstock, S. Alexander, 42 Weisinger, Herbert, 5 Welles, Orson, 56 Westman, Robert, 11 Whitin, E. Stagg, 198 Whyte, William H., 102 Wiener, Norbert, 159 Wieruszowski, Helene, 7

Wigirn, 117n3 Wilkes, John, 24 Willensky, Elliot, 102 Williams, Linda, 58 Wilson, Arthur, 21 Wilson, Frederica, 75 Wilson, Kathleen, 23 Wilson, William Julius, 67 Wing, John, 9 Wingfield, Arthur, 160 Winslow, Anne, 192n2 Winston, Brian, 50 Wirgin, Isaac, 113 Wishman, Doris, 56 Wittfogel, Karl, 36 Wittkower, Rudolf, 17 Woloch, Isser, 26 Wood, Robin, 56 Woolner, David, 72–73 Wooton, John, 20, 21 Wortman, Marlene Stein, 101 Wydner, Kathy, 115 Yeltsin, Boris, 38 Ying Zhu, 57 Zanuck, Darryl, 52 Zebrowski, Martha K., 24 Zilsel, Edgar, 5 Zimbardo, Rose, 21 Žižek, Slavoj, 48, 55–56

NAME INDEX

[ 249 ]