Academics and Lectures

Karen Guillemin, associate professor of biology in UO’s Institute of Molecular Biology, “Molecular dialogues with the microbes inside us.” Guillemin, the 2012 R. E. Dyer lecturer for the National Institutes of Health, studies interactions between microbes and their animal hosts. She describes interactions between microbes living in the guts of zebra fish and the implications for understanding how humans interact with these microbial guests.

Andrew Bacevich discussed the U.S.’s over-reliance on military power to achieve its foreign policy aims in his 2011-12 Kritikos Lecture, “A Decade of War,” that took place on May 15th 2012 in the EMU Ballroom. In his talk, Bacevich addressed several urgently important questions: “More than a decade into the ‘Global War on Terror,’ where has that conflict taken us? What has it achieved? What has it cost? Although,” Bacevich notes, “the inclination to turn away from these questions may be strong, Americans should resist that temptation.” Andrew Bacevich was a persistent and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the outset, describing George W. Bush’s endorsement of such “preventive wars” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.” His son, Andrew Bacevich Jr., also an Army officer, was killed in action in Iraq in 2007 at the age of 27. In 2010, Bacevich accused President Obama of “want[ing] us to forget about the lessons of Iraq.” A graduate of West Point (1969), Bacevich holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton. He taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998. Bacevich is the author of several books, including Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010); The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008); and The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005). He is also the editor of a book of essays titled The Short American Century: A Postmortem (March 2012). Read Andrew Bacevich’s blog at the Huffington Post.

This video from Resource Innovations, a program within the Institute for a Sustainable Environment, details how heating buildings with woody biomass can save money and promote carbon-neutral energy uses. The video highlights the first public school in Oregon to switch from a heating-oil system to one based on woody biomass. As communities struggle with climate change and rising energy costs one isolated rural community is using what’s in their backyard to heat their school and save money. The episode features Nils Christoffersen from Wallowa Resources, a community-based non-profit, Brad Royce, Superintendent of Schools for the Enterprise School District and Cameron Hamilton of McKinstry Co, the contractor who supervised construction. A companion guidebook, Wood Heat Solutions: A Community Guide to Biomass Thermal Projects is available from Resource Innovations.

The legal battles surrounding Google Book Search raise basic questions about the digital future facing all of us — not just authors and publishers but ordinary readers and everyone concerned with access to information. Research libraries should have a say in shaping that future. Digitization gives them an opportunity to democratize knowledge by opening their collections to the outside world. But how can they share their intellectual wealth when commercial firms want to market it? What will be the place of printed books in a world where most works will be “born digital” and read in new ways by “digital natives”? Libraries are developing strategies to cope with these issues, which are vital to our country’s future and deserve widespread discussion before the general public. Event: 2009-2010 Kritikos Lecture Speaker: Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library Title: Digitize, Democratize: Google, Libraries, and the Future of Books Date: Thursday, November 12, 2009

Gabriel Dance, art director for news for Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, and former Chief Multimedia Producer at The New York Times, discussed “”Multimedia Journalism and the Landscape of News” as the School of Journalism and Communication’s 2011 Frazier Journalist in Residence on February 4. The Frazier Journalist-in-Residence program honors the memory of Robert B. Frazier, former editorial page editor for The Register-Guard; he was described as the “complete newspaperman,” excelling as a reporter, feature writer, editor and columnist. The Frazier Endowment Fund was established by his family in 1992.

Chomsky is considered to be one of the fathers of modern linguistics, but has become better known since the 1960s as a political dissident and anarchist. He refers to his views as “fairly traditional anarchist ones,” and calls himself an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (”Wobblies”) international union and his book, Chomsky on Anarchism, was published in 2006 by the anarchist book collective AK Press. His opposition to the Vietnam War established Chomsky as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy, and he has since gained notoriety for his political commentary and activism. He accuses the U.S. of double standards for preaching democracy while strategically befriending repressive regimes. Other targets of Chomsky’s criticism include the U.S. mass media and the global war on drugs – which he describes as “the war on certain drugs.” Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He then went to MIT and in 1961 was appointed professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Russ Feingold was a U.S. Senator for Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011. He is well known for his lone dissent against the Patriot Act and his attempts to limit the corrosive influence of corporate money in politics. An honors law graduate of Harvard Law School and Oxford University as well as a Rhodes Scholar, Senator Feingold now teaches at Marquette University School of Law. In 2011, he founded Progressives United, a political action committee dedicated to shining the spotlight on corrupt corporate interests in government.

“If you count it, they will come” - Stanley Fish, Humanities and Law, Florida International University “Textualities in the Digital Age” focuses on concrete examples of digital projects and then moves to broader considerations of tools and approaches to help the audience consider how digital methodologies might expand the horizons of their own research. The symposium participants present a range of approaches to digital texts, from digital critical editions to computer-assisted historical inquiry.

In his talk “Open Education, Open Access, and Challenges to Higher Ed,” Wiley discussed how traditional degree-granting institutions might respond to technological, social and political trends that have created new market forces, putting them in steep competition with a new wave of “edupreneurs,” for-profit education initiatives such as Udacity and open education prototypes such as MITx. Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, directs the Open Education Group, which conducts research that focuses on how openness can dramatically increase access and enhance the affordability of education while improving student success. He is senior advisor to Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of open college textbooks for students worldwide.