Posted on Aug 1, 1999

To Amber Johnston '99, whose senior thesis examined the impact of western medical methods on Fijian society, the following story is not unusual:

A Fiji woman suffering from schizophrenia goes to a psychiatric ward and receives sedatives, which do little to improve her condition. Worse, because she is using western medical treatments, she is an outcast in her community.

Finally she goes to a local healer, who “discovers” that the woman has been living on another person's land, and that the land's owners have placed a curse on her. She apologizes to the family that owns the land, moves to another house, and is cured.

Johnston, an interdepartmental anthropology and psychology major, studied in Fiji on a term abroad created by Steve Leavitt and Karen Brison, both associate professors of anthropology. Last summer Johnston returned to Fiji to conduct research for her thesis as one of nine students supported by a grant from the Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust (she also received an Internal Education Fund grant from the College).

During her term abroad, Johnston and two other students — Sarah Ahart '99 and Debbie Cederbaum '99 — lived in small villages and conducted anthropological field research on village life. Johnston became fascinated by the underlying emphasis on indigenous ancestral spirits in all of Fijian life.

“Fiji was missionized 200 years ago and outwardly appears to be a Christian society,” she explains. “But Fijians really do believe in their indigenous spirits. A lot of their indigenous culture is filtered through Christianity. Since the indigenous spirits play a direct role in almost every aspect of Fijian life, they are an integral component of traditional beliefs about mental illness.”

According to traditional Fijian culture, mental illness is caused by a curse put on an individual, either by another person or by a spirit. Fijian healers help find the curse that has caused the misery, and when the sufferers rectify the situation, the curse is lifted and the illness is cured. (Johnston says the system helps maintain the Fijian social order. “People behave in a certain way because they are afraid of having a curse put on them. This provides a socially-appropriate way to deal with problems in Fiji — all through the guise of mental and physical illness.”)

The people who do not get better are thought to have curses placed on them by the most powerful spirits. Although they don't improve, they are supported by their communities and families as they seek the curse that is causing their problems.

Not so for those who go to St. Giles, the westernized psychiatric hospital in Fiji. These people are treated differently from those pursuing traditional treatments, even though they may have the same symptoms. “Some of the patients at St. Giles are ostracized by their communities because they are labeled as mentally ill, something that is only associated with St. Giles,” she explains.

A good deal of the treatment at St. Giles involves trying to educate the local residents about their illnesses. But indigenous views die hard, and many patients don't regularly take their medication — a staple for western treatments.

Johnston concluded that the introduction of westernized treatment methods has done more harm than good in Fiji.

“These people have the choice of being admitted to St. Giles, taking medication for an indefinite amount of time, and being isolated from their villages — the most important part of their lives — or remaining in their villages, cared for and accepted by the community, and going to an indigenous healer who offers them a hope for 100 percent wellness. It is no surprise that many choose to go to a local healer.”

Johnston thinks we could learn from traditional Fijian treatments. “We take the mentally ill out of their communities, and the hospital becomes their families. In Fiji, they stay in their homes, within their support systems.” In addition, she stresses that there are few differences in the success rates for treatments. “We haven't found anything that amazingly cures people,” she says.

“Mental illness does have a social factor that you can't ignore,” she continues. “At Ellis Hospital, I work in the adolescent psychiatric unit, where ninety percent or more of the children have social problems — they were abused, they have no family, or suffer from other problems. I have to believe that their illnesses are not simply chemical. There is something else affecting these kids.”

Johnston traces her interest in mental illness to a volunteer program she completed at a local hospital near her hometown of Bradford, Vt., when she was in high school. She has worked in the recreational therapy department of the psychiatric ward at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady since her sophomore year at Union.

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

To any observer, they appear Catholic: they go to mass and confession, send their eldest sons to the priesthood, and celebrate Easter and Christmas.

But these “crypto-Jews” in the American southwest secretly practice the traditions of Judaism in the privacy of their own homes.

Daniel Pesikoff '99 discovered the crypto-Jews when writing a paper about his own ancestors, who settled in New Mexico in the 1800s. He returned to the topic for his senior thesis under the supervision of Teresa Meade, associate professor of history.

The crypto-Jews can trace their heritage to fourteenth-century Spain, when the Holy Office of the Inquisition demanded that all Jews in Spain either convert to Christianity or leave the country. “About half of the 300,000 Jews fled, and the other half remained in Spain and Portugal,” Pesikoff explains. “While some of them converted to Catholicism, others continued to practice Jewish traditions within their homes while openly practicing Catholicism.”

With the discovery of the New World, many of these Spanish Jews had new hopes of religious freedom in New Spain. “But the Church was no less stringent than it was in Spain and continued to try heretics in Mexico,” Pesikoff says.

Over time, the some Jews migrated northward into New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado, hoping to find greater religious freedom in less populated areas. But the grasp of the Catholic Church was still strong, and these crypto-Jews had to continue to practice their religion secretly.

Crypto-Jews still live in these areas, Pesikoff says. “In every type of public exposure, they appear to be Catholic,” Pesikoff says. “They go to mass. They go to confession. They are buried in Catholic cemeteries. But they also observe the Sabbath on Friday nights by lighting candles and by resting Saturday. They cover mirrors in their homes during time of mourning and celebrate the Festival of St. Esther. While their traditions are clearly nontraditional for a Christian society, neither are they the practices of mainstream Judaism.

“What has made them distinct is that their secrecy was initially required to hide their religion; presently, the secrecy is part of their religion,” he continues.

Since the crypto-Jews still maintain their secrecy, Pesikoff relied on interviews with people in areas where they are thought to live as well as transcripts of interviews with crypto-Jews who have decided to break their silence. The College's Internal Education Fund supported his trips to Mexico City, Tucson, and Denver, where he interviewed rabbis and historians, pored over documents in libraries, and scoured graveyards.

His thesis focuses not only on the history of the crypto-Jews but also on the circumstances that compel them to keep their religion a secret. “The crypto-Jews live in communities that are still very Catholic,” he says. “It would be scandalous for these people to reveal themselves as Jews. All of their neighbors think that they are Catholic.”

Pesikoff was particularly struck by a discovery he made during the recent spring break. While traveling in communities in New Mexico that were said to include crypto-Jews, he found Catholic cemeteries that also held the graves of crypto-Jews. “These are Catholic cemeteries, but if you look closely at some of the tombstones, you can see the Star of David or the Hebrew letter 'shesh,' which is the symbol for the 'Shema,' the holiest prayer in Judaism,” he explains. “I remember one tombstone included etchings of flowers. If you looked closely at the pistil of the flower, you could recognize the letter shesh. It made it all very real.”

With only thirty to forty crypto-Jewish families still remaining, Pesikoff predicts that the sect may disappear. In his thesis, he concludes:

“Crypto-Jews are in a difficult position and one that threatens the life of their tradition. They still live in fear of the Church, their communities, and now mainstream Judaism. However, with each generation, they are losing to acculturation. The children do not have the same sense of family tradition and, like many other American Jews, are not tied to the same beliefs. In crytpo-Judaism and normative Judaism, there are many intermarriages that endanger the traditions. It is difficult to determine how much longer crytpo-Judaism will remain. Since the age of Columbus, crypto-Judaism has survived out of necessity to protect Judaism. Today, secrecy may threaten the continuation of this practice.”

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

Irene Kan '99, a first-generation Chinese American, knew vaguely of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II, such as the Nanjing Massacre.

But when she read Iris Chang's 1998 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, she was horrified by the numbers: 300,000 people brutally killed, 20,000 women raped in just six weeks. And she was shocked that she hadn't heard of the massacre until her junior year at Union. Despite mass international publicity at the time, the event seemed to have slipped through the cracks of history until the publication of Chang's book.

Kan says that she wondered whether the details of the massacre were suppressed by the Chinese, American, and Japanese governments — and this question became the focus of her senior thesis. Working closely with her advisor, Assistant Professor of History Joyce A. Madancy, Kan conducted the bulk of her research last summer at the University of California at San Diego. Spending hours examining primary and secondary sources on the Nanjing Massacre and related events, she found that the governments of China, Japan, and the United States did, in fact, deliberately ensure the suppression of information about the massacre.

“After World War II, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was eager to form economic ties with Japan, and they were willing to disregard past atrocities in their own country,” she says. “While the victims of the massacre sought reparations, leaders of the CCP turned their backs on their own people since they did not want to tarnish their trading relationship with Japan or forgo Japan's economic assistance.”

China's post-World War II foreign policy goals were to obtain political recognition and international legitimacy from Japan through economic ties, she explains. Therefore, the Chinese government suppressed information about the massacre.

“I was shocked because the violent deaths of 300,000 Chinese citizens and the raping of 20,000 women is so atrocious that the least the Chinese government could have done is to commemorate it,” Kan says. “But it wasn't until four decades later that the Nanjing Memorial Massacre Museum, the first of its kind in China, was built.”

Kan discovered that the cover-up was even more elaborate in Japan. Information about the massacre was simply not disseminated to the Japanese people, she says, due to censorship of the press, including newspapers and history textbooks. In addition, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has publicly denied or failed to acknowledge Japanese atrocities during World War II, she says. Leaders of the LDP have continued to honor many of these war criminals by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which treats these men as worthy of worship as gods.

Similarly, the facts of the Nanjing Massacre were downplayed in the United States during the Cold War. “The massacre was very well publicized at the time that it occurred,” Kan says. “There were Western observers there who reported what they saw. But when the Cold War began, North Korea and China became America's newest enemies. The U.S. chose Japan to serve as a bastion against communism in Asia.” By rebuilding Japan, she says, the U.S. chose not to confront past Japanese aggression.

“The best part about this project was seeing how this event was suppressed by all three governments,” Kan says. “It's fascinating to find out about the cover-up because the Nanjing Massacre was such a huge event that even today it is called the 'forgotten Holocaust.' Until now, I didn't think that the government had that much control over history — or, shall I say, the history that we read in our history books.”

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

In
the winter issue of Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, a number of distinguished scholars
addressed the distinctively American theme of residential liberal arts
colleges. One of those scholars was Christina Sorum, dean of arts and
sciences at the College and the Frank Bailey Professor of Classics.
Her essay was titled ” 'Vortex, Clouds, and Tongue': New Problems
in the Humanities?”, and we present the following excerpts.

“'Vortex,
Clouds, and Tongue': New Problems in the Humanities?” reprinted
by permission of Daedelus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, from the issue entitled “Distinctly American: The
Residential Liberal Arts Colleges,” Winter 1999, Vol. 128, No. 1.

Inside
and outside the academy the historic debate continues over the proper
subject of study in the humanities, the appropriate methodology to
carry out that study, and the particular value of studying the
humanities. To acquire a contemporary perspective on these issues, I
asked six undergraduates if and why they should study the humanities,
and where this study should fit into a liberal arts education at an
undergraduate residential college. Five students spoke of the
importance of reading the great works of literature, history, and
philosophy (both Western and Eastern) in order to answer the perennial
questions of mankind that are important for individual and human
development: “Literature
presents imaginative and exploratory uses of language; reading,
talking about, and writing about these uses not only exposes us to
different ways of conceiving and expressing human experience, but also
requires us to integrate them into our own lives,” or, more simply, “The humanities are the only place to turn
when we want to study ourselves, to know how and why we live.”

Then,
sounding more like Protagoras than Plato, they presented a utilitarian
argument for the study of the humanities as “language.” One said with great assurance, “The most important skill
students can learn is taught by the study of literature. The study of literature is a study of manipulations of
language. The humanities, in general, concern themselves with the use
of language, teaching us skills like persuasion through reading and
writing about novels, philosophical treatises, and historical
documents.”

In
response to the particular question of the virtue of studying the
humanities in a liberal arts college, they viewed the answer as
self-evident. Said one, “The only authentic approach to the
humanities can occur in a liberal arts college because the institution
itself (ideally) is governed by the same belief as the humanities in
the importance of dialogue.” They noted that the teacher in small
classes engages the students so that they are compelled to grasp the
difficult messages about thought, experience, and knowledge and that
this is unlikely to happen in another educational format.

In
light of these affirmations of the value of studying the humanities,
it is difficult to believe that the humanities are considered to be in
dire straits. But we regularly hear, even at liberal arts colleges
with their long traditions in the humanities, that enrollments are
shrinking, that humanities teachers are demoralized, and that students
resent studying topics that don't seem relevant to their future
careers. It is clear to me — as a classicist, a faculty member, and a
dean — that there are, in fact, major problems with regard to the
faculty, the students, and the curricula that must be addressed so
that the humanities can continue to flourish at liberal arts colleges.

THE FACULTY

The
students quoted above regard the close interaction of faculty and
students in small classes as an essential part of studying the
humanities and as one particular virtue of a liberal arts college.
Yet, while I believe that most faculty at liberal arts colleges
endorse the ideal, seldom do I hear faculty rejoice in this
opportunity. Rather, many perceive themselves as assailed by a variety
of forces that prevent them from fully achieving this ideal.

Primary
among these forces are the increased specialization and
professionalization of the faculty of liberal arts colleges. Almost
all of these faculty have trained at a research university, where
specialization is the mode of study. Students trained in such
institutions emerge into the profession as specialists in one area in
which they continue to work, for they understand that if they are to
be successful they must contribute something new to the discussion,
and this requires the close examination of a topic, of learning more
about it than is already known. Over the years, as more and more of
these young scholars have accepted jobs at liberal arts colleges, they
have brought with them not only their talent but also the professional
mode and expectations acquired in graduate school at research
universities. This mode defines excellence in terms of peer reviewed
publications in scholarly journals or with scholarly presses. And the
peers are specialists.

This
situation certainly does not mean that these scholars are not good
undergraduate teachers; most whom I have known consider their teaching
of primary importance, are successful at it, and enjoy it. But there
is an underlying tension or sense of dissatisfaction in many of these
men and women. They begin their new job eager to profess their topic,
but immediately learn that the special skill of a college teacher is
to be able to translate the significance of the topic — presumably of
a topic that he or she loves — into a context that is meaningful for
the undergraduate. This takes a reorientation of scholarly values, for
the details and complexity that are the essence of scholarly work must
be put aside and the grand scheme — which as scholars they have
learned to distrust — must be put forward.

Furthermore,
many in the humanities will not be teaching their particular topics to
upper level students in seminars. Rather, they will teach introductory
or core courses with large enrollments that cover a broad area in a
brief time and in which they must emphasize not only content but also
basic reading and writing skills. Finally, many of the students in the
classes may not be planning to continue study in the discipline or may
be present only because the course is required.

The
problems posed in teaching by specialization do not, however, have the
same impact on morale and behavior as those posed by the demand —
real and imagined — of remaining a productive scholar in a liberal
arts college. For professors, the time available for research is to a
large degree dependent upon the number of courses they teach. The
teaching load at liberal arts colleges is normally higher than that of
a research university. Furthermore, for humanists, the load can be
especially time consuming because a number of their courses will be
introductory, hence larger and entailing considerable amounts of
graded writing, a time-consuming task. An additional demand upon the
time of all liberal arts college faculty is the expectation that they
will participate in the intellectual life of the students outside of
the classroom with extensive office hours and attendance at language
tables, poetry readings, and philosophy colloquia. Many also are
regularly asked to talk to student groups, join student-faculty
panels, plan trips to museums and theaters, attend student
productions, plan film series, and entertain students in their
homes….

As
both a humanist and a dean of arts and sciences, I believe that
research expectations for humanists at liberal arts colleges should be
encouraged. In fact, I have become increasingly committed to the idea
that liberal arts college faculty must be active scholars, not least
because providing research opportunities for faculty makes these
colleges appealing to the most competitive job candidates. Equally
importantly, scholarship can and does inform teaching in a variety of
ways including exposing the teacher to new ideas, methods, and
information. Furthermore, most of us became faculty members because we
were intensely interested in our fields and wanted to pursue them;
this is an important part of our identity and our happiness. By
engaging in scholarly activity and submitting work for consideration
by their peers, teachers of undergraduates are able to maintain a high
level of engagement and performance in their disciplines.
Consequently, the administration must find ways to enable faculty to
concentrate on their teaching without abandoning their research, and
faculty in judging each other must take a broad and generous view of
what constitutes appropriate research and productivity. Only in this
way will liberal arts college faculty thrive as teachers and scholars
and realize the goals of a liberal arts college education.

STUDENTS

Although
the students with whom I spoke clearly expressed their belief in the
importance of studying the humanities, they do not appear to be a
representative sample.
Nationally, in 1966 humanities degrees were 20.7 percent of
the total degrees awarded; by 1993 they were only 12.7 percent.

The
most frequently cited scapegoat for this state of affairs is
preprofessionlism; students, like faculty, have been soiled by the
mundane reality of getting and keeping jobs. In 1993, 85 percent of
students reported that they had come to college with a specific career
in mind for which they wished to prepare. In 1996, 72 percent said
they went to college in order to make more money. At the same time,
the number of students who reported that they came to college to gain
a well-rounded education and to formulate the values and goals in
their life went down from 71 percent to 57 percent. This pattern
applies to all groups of students, regardless of age, race, gender,
full-time or part-time attendance status, or the type of institution
attended.

This
preprofessional attitude is moderated, according to Alexander Astin's
latest surveys, in students who attend private independent,
Protestant, or Roman Catholic colleges. These institutions have the
strongest “Humanities Orientation,” a measure he defines by
the importance given to teaching the classics of Western Civilization,
using essay exams, offering of general education courses, and
encouraging the use of multiple drafts of written work.
Small highly selective colleges exhibit the strongest
Humanities Orientation, whereas the larger, nonselective institutions
show the weakest. Clearly, in spite of the prevalence of
preprofessional attitudes among the college-bound, liberal arts
colleges are in an optimal position to engage students in the study of
the humanities.

Factors
other than careerism, however, pose significant and potentially more
long-term problems for the humanities, even at liberal arts colleges;
the very styles of learning which seem best suited for today's
students are not those of the typical humanities course. Humanities
are text based, but our students, we fear, are losing the ability to
read. The impairment of literacy — and hence verbal expression —
becomes an impediment not only in the reading of texts but also in the
interchange of ideas, both oral and written, that is fundamental to
the teaching of texts. Furthermore, a study by Charles Schroeder
indicates that more than half of today's students perform best in a
learning situation characterized by “direct, concrete experience,
moderate-to-high degrees of structure, and a linear approach to
learning.” Three-quarters of faculty, on the other hand, prefer
the global to the particular; are stimulated by the realm of concepts,
ideas, and abstractions; and assume that students, like themselves,
need a high degree of autonomy in their work. The implications for the
humanities seem especially significant. No matter how many active and
cooperative learning projects we invent, much of our students'
learning must come through reading, a slow and solitary act, and much
of our discussion must involve ideas and abstractions.

The
mismatch of student learning styles and disciplinary methods in the
text-based humanities is apparent in the difficulty humanities faculty
and students have in benefiting from the current enthusiasm for
undergraduate research. Indeed, active, hands-on learning, with
faculty and students working closely together, and not infrequently
publishing together, is well suited to the sciences. The social
sciences, too, with their emphases on data collection and
manipulation, present to students opportunities of discovery and
active learning in collaboration with faculty. In the humanities,
however, although many students do serious work on senior projects and
theses, and although this work entails meetings and discussions with
the advisor, most of it is done alone, in reading, taking notes, and
writing, and there is seldom external funding available to support
either faculty or students. Furthermore, most seniors in humanities
are not able to produce original work because their language skills
are inadequate or they do not have sufficient literary, philosophical,
historical, or theoretical background. I do not wish to denigrate the
achievements of humanities students or faculty; many of us have had
wonderful intellectual experiences workings with students on their
senior theses, and many students have found the experience
transformative. But the appeal is not to the scientific method of
active discovery that is the model for student learning and
undergraduate research today.

CURRICULUM

…Certainly,
the curricula in the humanities have changed since the 1960s, and the
increased discussion of literary theory and the politics of
multiculturalism, the causes of most controversy, have contributed to
this. Most noticeable is the tremendous increase in course offerings
with a shift in course descriptions away from period or genre to
thematic topics, the inclusion of interdepartmental and
interdisciplinary programs, a globalization of the curriculum, and the
proliferation of course offerings pertaining to minority populations,
ethnic group, and women and gender-related issues.

The
increased number of courses has made the designation of general
education or core requirements a more contentious issue — an issue
that often thwarts the development of general education curricula
themselves. This situation is the result both of a changing world and
of an uncertainty about priorities in teaching the humanities. First,
in an environment that is increasingly multicultural and global in
orientation and experience and in which knowledge is expanding in all
areas, it is difficult to set dates or geographical boundaries on the
content of the humanities, or to ignore the interactions between the
curriculum and the changing social, moral, political, and economic
structures of society. Just as the introduction of French at Union in
1796 and its deletion in 1802 reflected social and political
realities, so do current topics and emphases. Today enrollments are
soaring nationally in Spanish and Chinese — both of which have both a
pragmatic appeal and an immediacy for our students — while those in
Russian, French, and German are either barely maintaining their hold
or falling. Greater numbers of women and minorities are attending
colleges, and courses that address their concerns and locate them
within the intellectual conversation are flourishing. Second, today's
students expect to study the humanities as a way to discover the
“other,” as well as to uncover shared values.
Finally, we cannot with any degree of intellectual honesty
refuse to recognize the existence of new methodologies for studying
texts any more than we can refuse to recognize new techniques in
science.

The
inevitability of curricular change in a changing world appears to have
uncoupled three obligations that motivate many humanities faculty. The
first is to teach students those works that we regard as significant
in our field, the works that have created our disciplinary traditions
and, in many cases, our intellectual environment; the second is to
teach ways of reading or methods of interpretation that will enable
our students to make reasoned aesthetic, philosophical, or political
judgements about texts; the third is to engage students through
consideration of verbal and visual texts in an exploration of
universal human questions and concerns. If humanists truly believe
what they profess — that study in the humanities is an essential
element in the creation of “educated
persons,” that it is important for the development of individuals
apart from their professional training, that it enables people to lead
their lives with understanding of themselves and others, with rational
purpose and sympathetic response — they must take general education
curricula or distribution requirements seriously, for they have been
and will continue to be the way most liberal arts college students
encounter the humanities….Humanists, therefore, must put aside their
distaste for teaching students who are in classes because they are
required and find ways to engage them in these subjects and lead them
to recognize their importance. They must also put aside the arguments
over content that frequently prevent the implementation of general
education courses in the humanities, and create coherence in the
discussion that arises from inclusiveness. It is not, according to
Astin's research, the formal curricular content and structure that
determine how students approach and how faculty deliver general
education courses, but the extent to which students interact with
student peers, and the extent to which students interact with faculty.
These are the types of interactions that can be fostered in the
discussion format of humanities classrooms in small liberal arts
colleges and which can attract students to our disciplines….

UNION'S
STRENGTH

Union
illustrates the resilience of the humanities. The school has a strong
and unabashedly professional engineering program, a long history of
strength in the sciences, and did not become coeducational until 1970. Yet both the “Humanities Orientation” Astin
identifies with liberal arts college and the power of a general
education program to attract more students to the humanities are
demonstrated in our enrollment patterns. The curriculum, a modified
core introduced in 1988-89 that promotes the idea that context is
necessary for understanding, requires that, in addition to a Freshman
Preceptorial, all students enroll in an Ancient, European or American
“History Sequence.” Within each sequence, students take two
history surveys and two aligned courses, one of which must be in
literature. In addition, students must take three language courses, or
three courses dealing with a non-western culture, or participate in a
term abroad. Many of these courses are also in the humanities. Significant enrollment increases that can be directly
attributed to the GenEd program have occurred in history, classics,
and modern languages. The overall increase in humanities enrollments
is 10 percent. Furthermore, since the introduction of the GenEd
program, majors in the humanities (including history), which had
fallen to a low of 14 percent in 1988, have risen to 21 percent.

In
the conclusion of Aristophanes's Clouds, Pheidipides, who eventually
learned the technique of clever argument, attempts to convince
Strepsiades that it is proper for the son to beat the father.
Strepsiades, not surprisingly, rejects the new-fangled learning and
gods and falls upon Socrates' school with ax and torch. Although
vigorous attacks upon new methodologies are not unknown among
humanists today, the use of brute force obviously undermines our tenet
that studying the humanities encourages us to act with rational
purpose and to enter into understandings with others that acknowledge
difference while reaching for a commonality. Consequently, we must find our inspiration not in the Clouds,
but nearer at hand — even, I dare propose, in the current situation
of the humanities at liberal arts colleges. We can note the slowly
increasing number of students in our courses, the positive effects
that general education programs can have on majors, the excitement and
interest generated by new texts and approaches, and, most importantly,
the persistent belief of a number of students in liberal arts colleges
that it is important to study the humanities.

Nevertheless,
we must continue to make our case for the humanities not only to the
public but also to our colleagues in other disciplines. We must
realize that the preprofessionalism of the students mirrors our own
careerism, and must through our own attitudes reassert and sustain for
all students the significance of the humanities. The strong presence of the humanities in general education
programs is one means of doing this. General education acts as a prism
for the goals of the humanities; through a multiplicity of formats, it
introduces students to a conversation that encourages young people to
formulate a conception of the good that transcends their specific, if
honorable, utilitarian ends, and begins for them the process of
answering and re-answering the questions that confound us. And it is in the discussion of verbal and visual texts in the
humanities classrooms of liberal arts colleges that the potential for
this sort of learning most obviously resides.

Posted on Aug 1, 1999

For
many years, Lance Spallholz ’69 did not know he was a deltiologist.

The
term refers to individuals who collect postcards, and Spallholz came
across it one day as he was looking through Web sites, gathering
information about his hobby.

For
more than a dozen years, Spallholz has been a dedicated and
specialized postcard collector. His area of interest is Union College,
and he has about eighty postcards that show the College from 1906
through the 1920s. He is fascinated with the postcards because both
the pictures on the front and the messages on the back are so
evocative of a bygone era.

“Back
then, there was very little private photography, and there was no
color photography,” he says. “So this was how people saw the
world.”

Many
of the postcards were handpainted in Germany, and it is obvious, from
the multitude of ways the Nott Memorial is colored, that the
illustrators never saw the building.

Just
as interesting and nostalgic are the messages. One postcard of the
Nott Memorial carries the message, “Here is one of the great
buildings where many great men have received their learning.” On
a 1908 postcard of South College the sender wrote, “X marks
Harry’s room where we are having a fun time, but too strenuous for
me.” Another postcard of South College says, “If your father
had a good memory, he could tell you what a good time he had
here.” And on another: “Hard luck, Milton. Nothing but rain
up here.”

“Lots
of people didn’t have phones, so many of the messages were of the
‘Hope to get up this weekend’ variety that today would be
e-mail,” Spallholz says. “It was a fairly cheap way to stay
in touch.”

Spallholz
began to collect the postcards on visits he and his wife, Norma, made
to antique shops. As she looked for furniture for their house, he
began looking through the bins of postcards. He has found Union
postcards as far away as Maryland, where he paid fifty cents for a
card of South College.

His
interest in Union postcards is a natural. His grandfather, an uncle,
two great-uncles, and his daughter, Julianna, also graduated from the
College; he and Norma met in the Rathskeller and were married in
Memorial Chapel; and he has been a computer science instructor at
Union since 1985, when he left high school teaching to teach UNIX
systems management, applications programming, and computer languages
to Union students.

Not
surprisingly, given his profession, Spallholz has created a Web page
containing images of his postcards (http://tardis.union.edu/~spallhol/postcards).
He says he doesn’t know how many different Union scenes appeared on
postcards and would be happy to hear from alumni who come across a
Union card.

His
hobby, he says, is one of sentiment. “I don’t think the cards
have much monetary value, but I like the little messages. To those
people, they were very important. And now they’re gone.”