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Director (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu) Letters to the Editor Click on the above link to let us know what you think (or send email to emeriti@emory.edu)! |
Upcoming Events--
All on Zoom
Lunch Colloquium Holly York June 8, 2020
Lunch Colloquium Daniel LaChance June 15, 2020
Lunch Colloquium Ron Gould June 22, 2020
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
After a well-deserved break for all of those working behind the scenes to make our programs available, we had a fascinating presentation on Monday by Vernon Robbins. If you missed it, you will be able to read about it in our next newsletter issue. In this issue, thanks to Clark Lemons, you can read about the amazing talk given by our own Brenda Bynum two weeks ago. She used carefully chosen archival material to illuminate the friendship between Flannery O'Connor and Betty Hester. Although her talk will not be placed on our website, a link is given below to the Zoom recording.
There is information below on two programs coming up: Holly York next week will lead us in a collaborative reading of poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. There will be assigned homework for those who sign up (but don't worry-there will be no quiz). The week after, Daniel LaChance will be talking about the radical right in Cold War America. He is particularly interested in talking to an audience that can actually remember that time!
Two weeks ago, I asked for members to send comments on their experiences in teaching last semester. Thank you for your responses! They have been really interesting to read but make me very glad I wasn't teaching! The first set of responses is included below and there will be more next issue. There is still time to submit if you would like to share with us.
It is of course impossible to ignore current events, nor should we. I have been painfully reminded of a Lunch Colloquium we had on March 19, 2018. Erika Hall, Assistant Professor of Organization and Management in the Goizueta Business School spoke to us on "Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of Unarmed Black Male Civilians." Her data-driven talk is still all too relevant and was featured in our April 2, 2018 newsletter, where you can read Jan Pratt's report on her talk. You can also view her entire talk on our YouTube channel by clicking here. You can also join with other members of our academic community in an online solidarity vigil on June 5 to mourn the lives lost and to lift our hope for an anti-racist world. The link will lead you to a Zoom registration page. Now that many of you are Zoom-proficient, this is a way than any of us can join together.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, June 8
"Reading Collaboratively: Poems by Emily Dickinson and
Walt Whitman"
Location: Wherever you are
Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Holly York, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of French and Italian
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Lunch Colloquium -- Monday, June 15
"Mrs. Miller's Constitution: Civil Liberties and the Radical Right
in Cold War America"
Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities, Department of History
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Lunch Colloquium Report -- May 18
"An Introduction to the Epistolary Friendship of Flannery O'Connor with Betty Hester"
Brenda Bynum, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Theater Studies
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COVID-19 Teaching Stories
Some of our members taught online classes this past semester. There are so many interesting stories that this issue has only Part 1!
Click here to read below about some of their experiences
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New Members
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, June 8
"Reading Collaboratively: Poems by Emily Dickinson and
Walt Whitman"
Holly York, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of French and Italian
For her April 6 Colloquium, Gretchen Schulz invited us to participate in what faculty and students might experience as their normal face-to-face courses migrated online to end the semester. She successfully guided the group through a close reading of James Joyce's short story "Araby," even though she herself was new to the remote learning format. The rich variety of experience contributed by our emeriti brought the work alive, even for those who might not otherwise have been enthusiasts of Joyce (or indeed of literature itself).
So let's try poetry! With its highly figurative language, poetry lends itself particularly well to collaborative reading where participants co-create meaning. Holly York, who has had much experience in online work with literature in MOOCs she's enrolled in during her retirement, will guide us through discussion of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892), both radical poets for their time who are seen by some as polar opposite precursors of contemporary American poetry. She'll ask us to do some "homework" ahead of time by reading several of the typically terse poems by Dickinson and a single section of Song of Myself by the longer-winded Whitman and then she'll invite us into conversation with one another to see what we can make of this seminal material. We hope for as much revelatory fun as we enjoyed in examining "Araby."
About Holly York
Holly York earned a BA from Denison University, an MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD from Emory, all of them in French. Her first year of teaching French at Emory was as a graduate student in 1978. Having also served the Emory French Department as an ABD instructor, she later taught at Agnes Scott College and Georgia State University before returning to the Emory Department of French and Italian in 1992. She is now Senior Lecturer Emerita in that department.
A specialist in intermediate-level writing and literacy, Holly redesigned the curriculum at a time when technology's potential for revolutionizing language learning was just becoming evident. She conducted classroom research on the benefits of electronic resources in simulating a language immersion experience and on the role of content-based instruction in second language acquisition. Because the learning technologies were new to graduate teaching assistants, she mentored them in the use of electronic media in their own classes. An award from the American Association of Teachers of French sent her to the summer theater festival in Avignon. With a grant from the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, she studied at the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris, where she developed a course in French for Business. Another grant from the Cultural Service allowed her to produce an annual French and Francophone Film Festival on the Emory campus. Prior to retirement in 2013, she directed the Emory Summer Study Abroad program in Paris.
Her interest in the transformation of higher education in the electronic age continued past retirement, as she finally had time to explore the wealth of online courses available. Having happened on the offerings of the Iowa International Writers' Program, she immediately became immersed in writing poems, rediscovering a long-buried passion. This led her to Coursera's ongoing offering in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, which has a special live session every fall semester, and where she has participated as a Community Mentor for five years. As for pursuing her own work in the genre, she has found that online writing workshops abound and in addition has attended in-person poetry retreats in Georgia, Florida, and Italy.
In the spring of 2020, the Emeritus College honored Holly for this and other scholarly and creative work she has done in her years of retirement thus far with a Faculty Award of Distinction.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, June 15
"Mrs. Miller's Constitution: Civil Liberties and the Radical Right
in Cold War America"
Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities, Department of History
In the early years of the Cold War, grassroots activists on the far-right end of the political spectrum waged a campaign against government bureaucracies they believed were quietly ushering in an age of despotism. They grew especially alarmed at the growing power the government was giving to psychiatrists to oversee the psychological wellbeing of Americans. Under the pretense of treating mental illness, they feared, liberals would soon banish conservatives to mental institutions. As Emory historian Daniel LaChance will explain, two events in the 1950s brought these anxieties to a fever pitch: the involuntary confinement of Vermont anti-communist activist Lucille Miller to a federal psychiatric hospital and federal legislation to fund the construction of a mental hospital in the Alaska territory. In their campaigns to free Miller and stop the construction of what they believed would be an Alaskan gulag, these activists turned to the law, arguing that the Constitution safeguarded a vision of liberty as the absence of unwanted government intrusions into an individual's life. In subsequent decades, as we know too well, others, too, would grow wary of government paternalism and embrace a more libertarian and procedural understanding of rights, countering the alternative vision of rights as a tool for pursuing collective, egalitarian ends that so many of us prefer.
About Daniel LaChance
Daniel LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. LaChance studies law's uneasy relationship to violence. Some see the rule of law as the defining mark of civilized society, an antidote to "might makes right" approaches to conflict resolution. Nonetheless, law depends on the state's capacity to physically coerce, injure, and sometimes kill human beings. LaChance studies how legal actors justify that violence and how the creators of fictional and nonfictional works represent it to wide audiences. His first book, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016), won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award from the American Library Association. The book examines the decline of the American death penalty in the years following World War II, its revival in the 1970s, and its subsequent use over the past forty years. In it, he argues that shifting ideas about the nature of freedom reshaped the dominant meaning of capital punishment in America. Other work has appeared in the journals Law and History Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Punishment and Society, Law Culture, and the Humanities, and Crime, Media, Culture. LaChance has also contributed to national discussions on the past and present of the American death penalty through opinion pieces and news analyses published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Newsweek. He is currently at work on two major projects. Empathy for the Devil: Executions in the American Imagination is a history of journalistic and fictional accounts of executions since 1877. With Paul Kaplan of San Diego State University, he is studying "crimesploitation," reality television depictions of crime and punishment, from Cops to Lockup, and their place in American culture. LaChance is the current treasurer of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He earned his BA in English from Carleton College and his PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Prior to his appointment to the Emory faculty, he was an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Visiting Associate Research Scholar in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
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Lunch Colloquium Report - May 18
"An Introduction to the Epistolary Friendship of Flannery O'Connor with Betty Hester"
Brenda Bynum, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Theater Studies
On Monday, May 18, 2020, Brenda Bynum presented "An Introduction to the Epistolary Friendship of Flannery O'Connor with Betty Hester" to the EUEC via Zoom. Brenda is Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of Theater Studies at Emory.
Brenda is active in EUEC, in the scholarly community, and as teacher and actor--one of the finest actors in Atlanta. A recent EUEC newsletter (May 6, 2020) provides a biography, including a list of awards and distinguished accomplishments, and an introduction to this presentation. We at Emory and in Atlanta know her as a generous, outspoken, witty, brash, fun, thoughtful critic--which makes her perfect for sharing some of Flannery O'Connor's letters and commenting on them.
Brenda began with O'Connor's words and ended with them, and most of her presentation was in those words, drawn right from the letters to O'Connor's pen pal and friend, Betty Hester. (Emory has possession of almost 300 of them, in the MARBL collection, and Brenda read short excerpts from about 50.) For nine years, until O'Connor's death in 1964, O'Connor and Hester engaged in a lively, heartfelt relationship conducted primarily through their letters although they met in person occasionally for brief times at Andalusia, O'Connor's home in Milledgeville.
Hester wrote first to O'Connor from her home in Atlanta, not knowing her, only her work, but even her first letter revealed that she understood O'Connor's stories and interests, and O'Connor appreciated that fact. She began her first letter back to Hester, in July of 1955, thus: "I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter."
As noted, letters from O'Connor to Hester are in MARBL at Emory and can be read on request. Of Hester's letters to O'Connor there is not one. Hester was a writer, but not successful; only one unpublished manuscript remains (also at MARBL). But their correspondence flourished, full of discussions about writing and publishing, about authors and scholars, about religion and Catholicism, about daily life. Brenda also read us some published letters from The Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being by Sally Fitzgerald (1979) in which Betty Hester is referred to as "A."
O'Connor could be caustic, but with Hester she was mostly not. In an early letter (Aug 1955), she wrote Hester: "Which brings me to the embarrassing subject of what I have not read and been influenced by. I hope nobody ever asks me in public. If so I intend to look dark and mutter, 'Henry James, Henry James'-which will be the veriest lie, but no matter. I have not been influenced by the best people." O'Connor could be modest and witty at the same time.
When O'Connor heard a recording of her own reading of a story on TV (November, 1956), she wrote Hester: "I couldn't stand much of it. I sound like a very old woman with a clothespin on her nose and her teeth in a dish beside her," but, she felt she redeemed herself somewhat in that her "voice is a great deal better in the dialogue [of the story] as I actually sound like a real hillbilly girl."
Betty Hester eventually revealed she was a lesbian and had been discharged from the military for that reason. O'Connor, although a devout Roman Catholic, accepted that fact immediately and completely. However, she requested that this information not be shared with her mother, Regina O'Connor, who she felt would not be able to understand.
We can be very orthodox in religion or stringent in politics, yet still be accepting and affirming of those we love who have different beliefs and lives, don't you think?
O'Connor wrote to Hester: "On the subject of the feminist business. I just never think, that is never think of, qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome."
During the program, Brenda's husband, the writer Cary Bynum, was in Brenda's "home recording studio," but invisible. Yet in the background we could hear Cary's chuckling, and sometimes hearty laughter, since Brenda was unmuted of course, and we participated vicariously in his laughter--muted as we were, at home. O'Connor evokes laughter in novels and stories, certainly, but Brenda's program demonstrated how very much she does so also in letters. On Zoom Monday, you could see the whole gallery of our little faces smiling and nodding.
I will close this brief report with two more excerpts Brenda chose to read to us:
"I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic. Anyway the thought of your writing something--anything--as a kind of exercise has got me down . . . Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you."
And here's the second: "Yes, I saw the television play [a dramatization of her story 'The River'] . . . Immediately it was over, the telephone rang and a friend of the family said 'Three generations . . . have just watched your television play and we were all spellbound!' Several children have stopped me [O'Connor] on the street and complimented me. Dogs who live in houses with television have paused to sniff me. The local city fathers think I am a credit now to the community. One old lady said, 'That was a play that really made me think!' -- I didn't ask her what." (emphasis mine).
--Clark Lemons
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Members in Transition
Sheryl Gabram-Mendola, MD, MBA, FACS, Professor, Division of Surgical Oncology of the Department of Surgery
Debra Saxe, PhD, Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Medical Director of Oncology Cytogenetics
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COVID-19 Teaching Stories
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology Emeritus
An article in Emory News featured Steve Nowicki and several of his students talking about their experiences in Steve's Psychology of Leadership course for seniors in the Business School. The article begins:
Once Caroline Wilkinson learned she would be completing her senior year remotely, she set to work establishing her new learning environment - which led to transforming the living room into a yoga, meditation and contemplation space for her family. Meanwhile, psychology professor Stephen Nowicki learned how to incorporate remote technology into class for the first time in his 50-year career at Emory. He soon realized that the technology was more than a channel for continuing class. It also provided a way for him to still see and interact with the students he missed so much.
The article then describes the preparation that both students and professor had to do in order to prepare for remote learning. Steve then reflects on what it was like to begin remote teaching:
Without applying the technology, I might never have seen my students again. I was very emotional when at the starting time for my class their video squares began to pop up all over my computer screen like the stars blinking into light at night. All I could think about and say for the first few moments was how very, very good it was to see them.
The students talk about their experience in class, and what they learned. One student's response in particular stands out:
Dr. Nowicki told our class that a crisis occurs when something happens and you cannot use what you did before to address current needs. In a crisis, you have to develop new ways of doing things. I remind myself that this crisis is an opportunity to learn about myself and to lead. By doing this, I will be better prepared for future crises. When I am back in a normal classroom, I will not take the gift of sitting with people for granted. Being physically connected with people, free from computers, with the opportunity to learn, will be a sacred experience. I will be mindful of that and grateful.
Fredric Menger
Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Chemistry
Last semester I taught "Chemistry 190" on "How Things Work," a Freshman seminar to 20 students. I covered topics such as nuclear energy, genetic engineering, pheromones, refrigeration, transistors, HIV infection, and the photocopier. The final lectures had to be delivered by Zoom. I managed to get the information across, but (thankfully) something was lost in the process. If this were not the case, Emory College as we know it would go out of business.
Darryl Neill Goodrich C. White Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience
Darryl Neill's reflection on his teaching this past semester begins as follows: My last classes as a regular Professor of Psychology in Emory College were my Spring 2020 classes, as I officially retire September 1 of this year. I had hoped that I could stand in an empty classroom at the end of my last class and spend a little time reflecting on 49 years of teaching Emory students. Instead, I clicked the "Leave" button on my Zoom session and marveled at how the teaching, and the students, had changed over the years. It then ends with his summation: My conclusions from my experiences are: - It helps a lot to have more lead time in preparing online classes. Faculty should make use of the training being offered this summer.
- It helps to have guidance, advice, and even handholding in preparing online classes. See #1 above.
- For online teaching, Small Lecture classes are different from Large Lecture classes are different from Seminars. Large lectures are a major challenge.
- Online teaching is a challenge for faculty. It can be an even greater challenge for the students. Students taking courses online are living in very different environments compared with being on campus and this has psychological consequences. One of the much-studied topics in mental health is why some people are "resilient," while others are "vulnerable." We have known for years about students who have difficulties being away from home at college; now we need to learn about those who have difficulties doing college from home.
In between is a fascinating account of his prior teaching in an online course and the contrast with this semester. His article is too long to reproduce in this newsletter, but it is well worth reading and you can read all of it by clicking here.
Woody Hickcox Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Department of Environmental Sciences
I taught a class this past Spring semester: Climatology, a 300-level course in the Environmental Sciences Department. The class concerned climate change more than the nuts and bolts of classic climatology. Then BOOM! No more class. No more handouts, and no more 5-minute quizzes at the end of the hour. What are the odds that any of the students took their textbooks home with them? Can I trust them to peruse the Times effectively without me looking over their shoulders? Things were about to change.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
On our last walk....or bike ride....we discovered a hidden gem for any Emory community bike enthusiast.
The Fixie is a bike repair shop on the campus run by The Emory Bike Social which includes a group of undergraduate students dedicated to promoting cycling in the Emory community. They organize group bike rides and educational/activism oriented events. They also collaborate with the Emory Spokes Council, which is a graduate student club, to run the Fixie, a bike co-op (free bike repair shop).
I've visited the shop a couple of times, for bicycle repair advice as well as learning how to put new brake pads on my bike.
The shop is located in the big glass room in the parking deck underneath the freshman quad and accessible off Eagle Row across from Kaldi's at the Depot.
The pandemic has affected their normal operations, but you can get more information by going to the Emory Bike Social Facebook page or emorybikesocial@gmail.com and emory.spokes.council@gmail.com.
I've included another photo below to give you a better view of where the shop is located. Let's continue our walk....you may find statues of eagles and even skeletons on campus (the eagle is our official mascot, while the skeleton known as Dooley is our unofficial mascot), but did you know there is a statue of a lion on campus?
Where will you find this on the Emory Campus?
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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