… is interviewed in this article about scholars traveling to dodgy parts of the world. He talks about one of this year’s institutes, in Ukraine.
Some U.S. colleges with overseas-study programs won’t touch Ukraine. Tufts University, on the other hand, is drawn to the turmoil in the former Soviet republic, which the U.S. State Department deemed dangerous for travel.
The potential to help activists and scholars, Tufts professor Peter Levine says, outweighs the risks posed by an unstable country. He is leading a conference in Ukraine next month on civics studies, in part because the country exemplifies the struggles of a fledgling democracy.
“American universities, at our best, have people who should be getting on a plane to go to a country that’s in crisis,” Levine said. “Sometimes they do a lot of good.”
Indeed at the end of this week Mr UD and Peter meet in Warsaw (where Mr UD has been reconnecting with many Soltans) and then fly together to Lviv (“also known as: Leopolis, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg, לעמבערג, Լվով, İlbav, Leopoli, Léopol”) and then rent a car or get driven to (can’t remember which) Chernivtsi (the summer school will take place in the “phantasmagorical university building“.)
Ah. And UD has just received this comment from Peter himself:
I am in lovely L’viv with the above-mentioned Mr. UD. It is of course completely safe here. I am actually quite embarrassed by the AP article; I tried to emphasize that we weren’t facing any risks. When I talked about American professors going to danger zones, I didn’t mean to include us. It would be a shame if the article dissuaded Americans from visiting western Ukraine for pleasure – it’s an excellent destination.
… a typically gallant Ukrainian, gives an interview (it’s in German). Ukraine, she points out, is a democratic shield. If that shield breaks, global democracy is under grave threat.
She lives and teaches in Germany; she and Mr UD for a number of years co-directed, in Ukraine, the European Summer Institute of Civic Studies.
My old friend Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert recommends it. A Ukrainian who teaches at a German university, and the initiator of the very successful Ukraine-based Institute of Civic Studies, Tanja is currently fielding interview requests from German radio programs, organizing protests in the center of Augsburg, and serving cups of coffee to distraught friends.
Western Ukraine, so don’t worry too much, to hold a civic studies summer institute.
Also on the subject of Ukraine: The country’s got its first university in exile. Most of Donetsk University has cleared out of the separatist east and moved to Vinnytsia, where students and faculty are waiting for the government to transfer the budget so they can eat. Their situation sounds rather dire.
…We hike the fees and we re-prioritize.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything ,and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights…
… We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only)
Plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables or else we’re uncompetitive…
Here she talks about how California’s great public university system got her started:
Fortunately, the semester fees at UCLA at that time were extremely low. I worked in the library, at a dime store, and at the bookstore. I was able to complete my undergraduate degree without going into debt. I took courses across the social sciences and graduated after three years by attending multiple summer sessions and by taking extra courses throughout. In my last year as an undergraduate, I graded Freshmen Economics.
Getting off the ground wasn’t easy:
[I]t was very hard for any department to hire a woman in those days. Fortunately, the [Indiana University] Department of Political Science later needed someone to teach Introduction to American Government on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday mornings at 7:30 a.m. They appointed me as a Visiting Assistant Professor to do that. After a year of teaching freshmen, they asked me if I would be Graduate Advisor and moved me to a regular appointment at that point.
Mr UD is away at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, La Kid is at her internship at Congressional Quarterly Press, and UD is at home in Garrett Park. It’s too hot to go outside. She has positioned her laptop in front of the kitchen windows because she wants to watch two yellow-shafted flickers feed their baby.
These beautiful birds look like this.
If you enlarge the image (click on it), you’ll see a bit of yellow under one of the bird’s wings. What the image doesn’t show you is the whole bird suddenly turning bright yellow when it flattens and shakes itself in the dirt while cleaning its wings.
UD can watch tons of robins and cardinals feed their babies. That’s nothing. The flickers are special.
After her dog died last year, UD cleared the fenced-in wilderness that had been his play area. She took out a lot of bushes and weeds, cut back on ivy, relocated azaleas. She created a path and threw down mulch.
In a hidden corner, she placed a black chaise.
Years of overgrowth and a surrounding of mature trees make the place very shady, a private little garden wrapped in green. As UD cuts back on it more and more, she realizes what she’s got, what she’s wrought, is a meditation space, a zen oasis.
I’ve had that phrase from James Taylor’s song Walking Man in my head all day. Because one thing or another from morn til night hasn’t been right.
I’ve been staying in a ‘thesdan hotel for a couple of days – electrical trouble in Garrett Park – and as I chatted on the phone this afternoon with Mr UD (the Civic Studies Institute at Tufts just ended; he’ll be back from Boston soon) I looked idly out of my fourth floor window at the Rockville Pike.
“That has got to be the ugliest black cloud I’ve ever seen,” I said to him as I caught sight of a fast-moving mass off to the left. Behind it churned thick gray clouds. “Wow.”
The moment we finished talking, the cloud swooped onto the Pike – it looked as though someone had suddenly released canisters of tear gas – and a frightening wind and rain storm came up.
The speed of the thing! In an instant it was something out of Hurricane Andrew — vast horizontal rains, trees bending all the way down, stunned traffic edging away from the street, lightning streaks, a long horrible howling sound…
Clang. The electricity in my room shut down.
Should I go to the lobby? What if the door’s key card is electrical? I wouldn’t be able to get back in. On the other hand, I felt vulnerable in my room.
I called the front desk. “Stay in your room,” the woman said.
The storm quickly passed; the sun came out. I sat by the window and read Hitch-22. But the electricity stayed off, and the heat of the room became uncomfortable.
The front desk had no idea when PEPCO would get to the hotel, but they knew that an immense area was without power.
I packed, got a cab, and took another hotel room – a place in downtown ‘thesda which does, for some reason, continue to have electricity.
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All of this is by way of explaining why you’ve not heard much from me today.
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Update: La Kid and her friend Maura will join me in my hotel room. Maura’s family’s house is without power.
Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own
skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,
dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab
shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding
a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.
Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making
intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
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An elegantly outfitted seaside poem. The writer sends a few lines to a friend, presumably a rather concerned friend, since the writer seems to have gone to the beach off-season in order to recompose herself after a trauma.
The engrossing drama, power, and simplicity of the setting distracts her from herself, and clears her head. She wants to be like a surfer, alone, balanced upright on troubled waters, and concentrating on nothing but balancing, on nothing but negotiating the waves. She’s after a brave and redemptive form of simplicity, one that gathers up the fragments of the self into one “smooth stand.”
But she’s not there yet – the tired jetty, the frail egg sack, these convey the writer’s exhaustion and frailty on her first dark March day at the beach. In the darkness, she walks off – tries to walk off – her suffering, all the while deriving some sense of inner order from hymns. Singing to the waves, like the singer in The Idea of Order at Key West, she tries to generate a kind of counterpoint to her inner discord.
And indeed the next day is much better; the sun’s come out, and the gulls don’t even need two legs to stay upright. making / intricate moves against the March ice-water is a gorgeous line, with its alliterative M’s and its use of the greatly poetic word “intricate.” (“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”) And it carries the point of the poem as well, this line, the idea that her emptied, simplified, calmed self is the start of her mending, and that eventually she may become, like the surfer, capable not merely of simple balance, but intricate moves over the perilous surface of life.
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I like everything about Rehoboth, but
especially, as longtime readers know,
… where Mr UD has been a visitor, houses the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics: Elinor Ostrom. She is Mr UD’s friend.
“She’s the most prominent person working to preserve the connection of political science to all things civic. So she was, for instance, part of the small group of people that we brought together to plan the Summer Institute in Civic Studies.
You need to keep alive the civic impulse of the social sciences, and she’s been active in promoting, for example, civic education.
It’s a wonderful endorsement of a way of thinking about social science which connects it to civic practice.
She’s very committed to interdisciplinary studies. She’s done a lot of work on systems governing the allocation of water.
Farmers and governments develop such systems. The general question is: How do you get people to cooperate? She works pragmatically with people and institutions on this, and does the theoretical work.”
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Here’s an excellent place to read an essay of Ostrom’s. Hers is the first chapter in the book.
Oliver Williamson of Berkeley is the other winner this year.
After the Summer Institute in Civic Studies was over, Mr. UD met an old friend, David, at the Red Barn Grill and Tavern, in Summit, New York, and from there they drove to our house in the hills (take Bear Gulch Road – if your car can handle it – and you’ll eventually get to our hidden lane) for a little male bonding in the wilderness.
As these results show, there’s not much to do up there, so a lot of people — including college students — get drunk or high. You can, in season, go hunting. Hiking. Berry-picking. Swimming (lots of ponds). But drinking’s big all year round.
“Sure we drank,” said Mr. UD, glancing up from a piece of paper headed A CIVIC INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. “Water.”
Apparently the C-Span coverage of the final event of the Institute for Civic Studies at Tufts (Mr UD‘s one of the organizers) will not be live today, as I thought. It will be broadcast some time in August. I’ll let you know.
