Each spring,
the College's classrooms and laboratories close for a day
as more than 250 students present the results of their
creative, scholarly, and research activities.
The event is the Charles P. Steinmetz
Symposium, named after the famed General Electric
scientist and Union professor. For an afternoon and an
evening, students and their faculty mentors enjoy oral
presentations, poster sessions, and arts performacnes.
The breadth of the work is illustrated
by these few examples:
— Tamara Albury '98, a
sociology major, and Monet Warren '00, a sociology/modern
languages major, explored being black in Brazil.
Albury studied poor African-Brazilian
children's perceptions of blackness, positing that
“If Brazil's black consciousness movement has
progressed, then these children will identify themselves
as Negro, seeing blackness postively.” She found,
however, all the children stating that blacks were not
liked in Brazil. “By not identifying with being
black, they are distancing thesmelves from a category
they believe is bad,” she says.
Warren asked poor youth in Sao Paulo
questions about beauty, intelligence, and wealth in
conjunction with viewing a chart of pictures of men and
women of different colors. The findings? Nearly all of
the youth said that the blackest subjects were the
“most ugly.”
–Emily Sparks '00, an anthropolgy and art history major, wondered about the impact of tourism on the art and craft market in Barbados. On a term abroad, she found that the market is geared almost entirely toward tourists; in fact, these tourist-geared images are almost the only kind of art or craft available — even to locals. She hypothesizes that this fact will influence how the locals think of their country and their Bajan identity.
— Amy Forrester '98, a
political science major, noted that university “hate
speech” codes are being criticized as a form of
censorship that will stifle the campus community. After
surveying student and faculty opinion, she concluded that
a university should have a limited speech code — one
that would restrict all demeaning and threatening actions
and threatening speech that is directed at minorities and
women.
— Daniel Couture '98, an
economics major, explored the “bilateral
monopolistic competition” in college football
recruiting. A player high on the recruiting lists has a
good deal of bargaining power; the NCAA, however, sets up
barriers to control the negotiations. Couture examined
other factors that affect athletes' choice of colleges
and found that location matters more than school
characteristics.