UpFront
Excerpts, Exhibits, Explorations, Ephemera
A Square Gets His Mind Blown | Where Stories End, Where Stories Begin
And the Number One Reason to Avoid Doom and Gloom . . . | Bookshelf
UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations
Rock Star Economist | Beware the Underdog | When the Shirt Hit the Fans | Briefs
PROFile: Michael Dreiling | Michael Posner Honored with National Medal of Science
A Square Gets His Mind Blown
Is it a meditation on visions, visionaries, and, perhaps, even God; a wry critique of Victorian England; a playful—but useful—introduction to non-Euclidean geometry and the dizzying idea of dimensions; or all of these? Whatever it is, the slim volume titled Flatland has captivated readers for more than 125 years with its mind-blowing tale of interdimensional travel and the tragic conflict between those who can and cannot transcend established ideas. Lila Marz Harper, Ph.D. ’96, a senior lecturer in the Department of English at Central Washington University, has edited a new edition of the book (Broadview Editions, 2010) and written a carefully annotated forty-three-page introduction, excerpted here.
Edwin Abbott’s Flatland may be one of the most unclassifiable works of literature ever published. While it is acknowledged to be a classic of early science fiction, a work of Victorian social satire, and a religious allegory, it also presents, through its introduction to higher dimensions, an important contribution to the development of an area of mathematics that was eventually merged into non-Euclidean geometry. Flatland is an unusually effective work that spans disciplines and challenges divisional categories. Since its publication in 1884, the book’s popularity has continued today as its readers have embraced it as science fiction, popular science, and metaphysics.
Working from the groundwork of philosophical issues raised by Plato’s Republic, Flatland merges social satire and geometry to produce a novel situated in two-dimensional space, a believable world populated by memorable inhabitants whose geometric shapes designate their positions in a complex social structure, one that bears some resemblance to the Victorian class structure.
The subtitle of Flatland—A Romance of Many Dimensions—refers not only to the physical dimensions covered in the book, but also to the many levels of interpretation from which the book can be approached. On one level, Flatland reflects Abbott’s pedagogical ability to illuminate difficult subjects, and it is valued by teachers of mathematics because it has proved to be an effective way to introduce students to the concepts of higher dimensions. Abbott himself was a member of the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching (AIGT), the earliest British association devoted to the teaching of an academic discipline. Beginning in the 1870s, the AIGT challenged those who wished to limit the teaching of mathematics to Euclidean deduction and to what could be empirically demonstrated. In England, exams based on a thorough knowledge of Euclid’s Elements were used as part of the entrance and advancement processes for military and government institutions; therefore, there was strong resistance to any change in the schools’ mathematics curriculum. Additionally, such scientists as T. H. Huxley insisted that mathematical education was merely a deductive exercise, useful only in exercising mental faculties such as training in how to think. This position, however, was not acceptable to mathematicians of the nineteenth century, when the field was rebuilt on new logical foundations that went beyond what was easily visualized. Attempts to revise Euclid so as to make it easier for students to understand and to prepare students for less intuitively understood concepts led to a “textbook war,” as traditionalists resisted any modification of Euclid. . . .
The realization that Euclidean geometry was not the only geometry possible was quite controversial in the late nineteenth century, and as Flatland gave its readers a clear image of the fourth dimension, it led the way to the concept of hyperspace and space-time (where the fourth dimension is a time function), concepts important to understanding Einstein’s space-time continuum in his 1915 general theory of relativity. . . .
[I]n the 1870s, when the AIGT sought to revise a curriculum that was heavily based on Euclid’s Elements, they had the foresight to see that new developments in mathematical research would require a different approach to the teaching of mathematics in England. By the 1850s, while other countries used a range of geometry textbooks, the English curriculum was committed to Euclid, so much so that between 1800 and 1850, 214 editions of Euclid’s geometry were published. Discussions of the use of Euclid in the classroom became one of those causes célèbres created when a pedagogical issue becomes, under the influence of media attention, a representative of some basic element of national character or identity; this debate was not limited to academic publications, and it became surprisingly intense and personal as it was covered in the magazines of the day. One anonymous 1868 review (actually by Augustus De Morgan) of a new geometry textbook by James Wilson, published in The Athenaeum, declared that Euclid would not be replaced since “the old geometry is a very English subject . . . .” Attacks on the primacy of Euclid in the teaching of mathematics continued up until the turn of the century, as Bertrand Russell criticized the consistency of the logic of the Elements in his 1902 essay “The Teaching of Euclid.”
Flatland reflects this pedagogical concern. The book has been a strong influence on the teaching of mathematics, as it encourages mathematical speculation and refutes the limitations placed on mathematics by others who would demand that the study of mathematics reflect the physical world. Thus, Flatland, in its consideration of how perception could be shaped by our sense of space, looks forward to later developments in theoretical mathematics by encouraging the use of imagination in exploring new mathematical territory. As a result, nearly all popular books dealing with higher-dimensional geometry or relativity begin by introducing Abbott’s narrator, the Square, as a means of illustrating physical problems with perception.
To comprehend how much our perceptions are shaped by our physical space, all we have to do is to eavesdrop from our omniscient position in three dimensions to the goings on in Abbott’s two-dimensional world. Indeed, our relationship to Flatland’s two-dimensional society—we are able to see more than the inhabitants, yet not be seen ourselves—is very similar to the relationship between a reader and a novel.
Additionally, the inhabitants of Flatland are not truly alien; it is easy to identify with their emotions and behavior. The engaging characterization of Flatland’s inhabitants is noted in Banesh Hoffmann’s description, published in his introduction to the 1952 Dover edition:
The inhabitants of Flatland are sentient beings, troubled by our troubles and moved by our emotions. Flat they may be physically, but their characters are well-rounded. They are our kin, our own flesh and blood. We romp with them in Flatland. And romping, we suddenly find ourselves looking anew at our own humdrum world with the wide-eyed wonder of youth.
Abbott’s ability to create believable, understandable characters who hold our attention, while still maintaining a physically alien world, makes Flatland successful.
Where Stories End, Where Stories Begin
A chance encounter with a Basque shepherd on a lonely road in eastern Oregon—an event that, seen through the keen eye of H. L. Davis (1894–1960) tells a far larger story. Sometimes called “the Northwest’s Mark Twain,” Davis is the region’s only winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1935 novel Honey in the Horn. Davis’s best writing—stories, essays, poems, letters, and excerpts from his most famous novels—are collected in Davis Country: H. L. Davis’s Northwest, edited by Brian Booth ’58 and Glen Love, UO professor emeritus of English. The excerpt below is taken from an essay titled “Oregon,” first published in Holiday magazine in 1953.
...All the Great Basin is high country. The altitude of the flatlands around Picture Rock Pass is over 4,000 feet, and the mountains are twice that. In the short timber northeast of Picture Rock Pass are mule deer; to the southeast, around Hart Mountain, there are antelope. In between, lying under the huge hundred-mile length of mountain scarp known as the Abert Rim, is a chain of big alkali lakes—Silver Lake, Summer Lake, Abert Lake, Goose Lake. Some are over thirty miles long. During cycles of scant rainfall, they are dry beds of white alkali, as they were during the 1930s, and in 1858 when Lieutenant Philip H. Sheridan camped in the area on some obscure Indian campaign. When the cycle turns, they run full of water again, as they are beginning to do now. The water is too alkaline for any use except as scenery, and Abert Lake has a pronounced odor, but it is pleasanter to live with than the dust clouds, and the uselessness seems a small thing when the great flocks of wild ducks and geese and black-headed trumpeter swans begin to come down on it in their northward migration every spring.
There is something wild and freakish and exaggerated about this entire lake region in the spring. The colors are unimaginably vivid: deep blues, ferocious greens, blinding whites. Mallard ducks bob serenely on mud puddles a few feet from the road, indifferent to everybody. Sheep and wild geese are scattered out in a grass meadow together, cropping the grass side by side in a spirit of complete tolerance. Horses and cattle stand knee-deep in a roadside marsh, their heads submerged to the eyes, pasturing the growth of grass underneath the water. A tractor plowing a field moves through a cloud of white Mormon sea gulls, little sharp-winged creatures, no bigger than pigeons and as tame, following the fresh-turned furrow in search of worms. A flock of white snow geese turning in the high sunlight after the earth has gone into shadow looks like an explosion of silver.
The black-headed swans trumpeting sound like a thousand French taxi horns all going at once. If you happen to be close when they come down, the gigantic wings sinking past into the shadows will scare the life out of you. It is no wonder that the Indians of this country spent so much of their time starting new religions.
. . . Frenchglen, Steens Mountains. Nobody hears much about the Steens Mountains. They are near the southeastern corner of the state, a 10,000-foot wall separating the Great Basin on the west from the tributaries of the Snake River on the east. There is a wild-game refuge in a creek valley along the western rim, with antelope and pheasants and flocks of wild ducks and geese scattered all through it.
. . . The little lake high up in the mountains looked about as it did when we used to ride up over an old wagon road in the late summer to fish for speckled trout. It was small, not over a quarter of a mile long, and not shown on most maps at all. The thickets of dwarf cottonwood around it had not grown or dwindled, the water was rough and dark and piercingly cold, and the remains of old snowdrifts in the gullies back of it still had the curiously regular shapes that looked, at a little distance, like spires and towers and gables in a white town. There was no town anywhere near; the closest was over a hundred miles away. It looked as quiet as it always had at sundown—the dark water, the ghostly cottonwoods, the scrub willows along the bank, a few scrawny flowers spotting the coarse grass. About dark, a wind came up, and it began to rain and kept it up all night. By morning it had eased up a little, but the wind was stronger and it was spitting sleet. Being snowed in, in such a place, was not a tempting prospect. I loaded the soggy camp rig into the car, turned it around gingerly in the mud, and headed out.
There was a sheep camp in the cottonwoods at the head of the lake where the road turned down the mountain. The camp tender was striking camp to pull out, the tent hanging limp on the ridgepole and flapping cumbrously when the wind struck it, the pack mules standing humped against the grains of sleet and gouts of foam from the lake that kept pelting them. The sheep were already on the way out; they were jammed so close together down the road that it was impossible to get the car into it. I stopped, and the herder called his dog and went ahead to clear a lane through them.
It was slow work trying to crowd them off into the cottonwood thicket and there was open ground beyond, so I waved to him to drive them on through to where they would have room to spread out. He nodded, and came back to stir up the tail-enders. It was not a big herd; three hundred, maybe, mostly old ewes, hardly enough for two full-grown men to be spending their time on. He got the tail-enders started, and stood back and dropped the cottonwood branch he had been urging them along with. I expected him to say something, but he looked away, watching the dog round up a few stragglers. He was about forty, heavy-boned and slow-looking and bashful, as if he was trying to avoid being spoken to. It struck me what the reason might be, and I took a chance on it.
“De Vascondaga, verdad?” I said.
That was it. He had been trying to dodge around admitting that he didn’t know English. A good many Basque sheepherders in that country didn’t.
“Si, Vizcaya,” he said. “Aldeano de Zarauz.”
Vizcaya was one of the Basque provinces. Vascondaga was the collective name for all of them. He was from the country adjoining some town named Zarauz.
“Hace mucho?” I said.
“Dos anos,” he said. “Mas o menos.”
He was not being exactly cooperative. I would have given a good deal to be able to sling a sentence or two of Euskera at him, just to see him jump, but wishing did no good. Spanish was the best I could manage. I tried a change of subject.
“It is slow moving a camp with pack mules,” I said.
“We work with what we have,” he said.
There didn’t seem much left to say on that. I tried the weather.
“Que tiempo malo,” I said.
“Hay cosas peores,” he said. “There are worse things.” He was loosening up a little.
He had something specific in mind, I thought. If he had been over here only two years—“You saw the Civil War in Spain?”
He nodded, and took a deep breath. “Nobody sees all of a war. I saw people shot. I saw our house burned. My father was shot. I didn’t see that, but I saw enough.”
“You are desterrado?” I said. It was a polite expression the Spaniards used for a political refugee. It meant some thing like exile.
“A little,” he said. Then he took it back. “No. I am not desterrado. This is my country, here. It is the only one I need.”
His handful of lumbering old ewes plodded down the open slope in the wind. The mules flinched and humped uneasily as a blast rattled sleet against them. Some torn leaves from the cottonwoods skimmed past.
“Some people would call it bleak,” I said. “Weather as cold as this.”
“Nobody can know what is good until he has seen what is bad,” he said. “Some people don’t know. I do.”
He went to help the camp tender with the packs. I drove out of the cottonwoods and through the sheep and on down the mountain. It was Oregon, all right: the place where stories begin that end somewhere else. It has no history of its own, only endings of histories from other places; it has no complete lives, only beginnings. There are worse things.
And the Number One Reason
to Avoid Doom and Gloom . . .
A top scientist for a top conservation organization reflects on global warming . . . and realizes that “We have done a spectacular job of demoralizing and depressing people.” Among the depressed and demoralized is funnyman David Letterman, who had M. A. Sanjayan ’89, M.S. ’91, a lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy, as a guest on his late-night television program. Sanjayan reflected on the experience in an article titled “And the Number One Reason to Avoid Doom and Gloom . . .” in the Winter 2009 issue of Nature Conservancy magazine. Reprinted by permission of The Nature Conservancy. Copyright 2009.
David Letterman seemed depressed. His first question to me, right out of the gate, set the tone for the evening: “Is there anything positive to report?”
I had been preparing for this interview for weeks. Though I had done some live television before, late-night TV was in another league. As an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, my dorm mates and I ended evenings with Track Town Pizza and Letterman. Now, twenty years later, in the historic Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, with a live audience that included my parents, it was me in the hot seat.
I wanted to tell Letterman about the adventures I had had working for The Nature Conservancy. Maybe he would ask me about catching sharks by hand or about finding new species in the Solomon Islands. I have the best job in conservation, and I was excited to share my world with millions of viewers. On his desk I could see some of these ideas, printed by the show’s producers in bold letters on a blue cue card. But Letterman barely glanced down. Instead, he pummeled me with grim, pointed questions about the fate of the planet, which he predicted was on the verge of “turning into a smoking cinder.”
I could feel beads of sweat starting to form.
In hindsight, Letterman’s bleak outlook should not have been unexpected. He had heard the environmentalists’ message. We in the conservation movement have done a spectacular job of demoralizing and depressing people. The rhetoric that helped kick-start the modern movement in the late ’70s and early ’80s was useful for getting people’s attention but terrible for harnessing it to do something positive. And now, what Letterman was really saying to me was simple: You have convinced me, a comedian, that the world is doomed.
If we are to create a movement that inspires people to action, we must present a better way forward. And despite all I have seen, I still believe in the power of humans, in our inventive spirit. We, for example, have reversed the fortunes of endangered species like wolves, something unthinkable a few decades ago. I remember the first time I camped in Yellowstone National Park. It was 1989, and nowhere could you hope to even hear the howl of wolves. Today, I expect to encounter wolves on every visit. Meanwhile, the climate-change debate has managed to unite more nations around one issue—an environmental issue—than perhaps any other since the call to end apartheid.
I tell Letterman, sure, I wish we had started all this twenty years ago when the climate science became evident, but that doesn’t mean we should delay now. And I say that if the wager is between humans solving or ignoring the crisis, I bet on humans solving it. Otherwise, there won’t be anyone around to collect on the bet. That gets a rousing applause.
But Letterman remains skeptical. When the scientist is more optimistic than the comedian, I know we have blown our messaging about the state of the planet.
We put a man on the moon in less than a decade, Letterman tells me, because we thought the Russians were going to do it first. “Fear is a great motivator,” he asserts.
Perhaps, but when I think about our message, it’s not fear that comes to mind—it’s resigned depression. And that never got anyone out of bed.
Watch Sanjayan interview on Late Show with David Letterman:
Expanded Bookshelf
Selected new books written by UO faculty members and alumni and received at the Oregon Quarterly office. Quoted remarks are from publishers’ notes or reviews.
The American Far West in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2008) by Earl Pomeroy (1915–2005), professor emeritus of history. “His final book is nothing short of the definitive source on the modern West.”
Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal Press, 2009) by Melissa Hart, adjunct instructor of journalism and communication. “Hart’s coming-of-age memoir is a moving account of her struggle with the dichotomies of class, culture, and sexuality.”
The Witch’s Season (BookSurge Publishing, 2009) by Terry Frei ’67. “Set amid campus and national unrest, the novel takes place on the fictional [and very Eugene-like] Cascade University campus during the late 1960s,” football team members encounter triumph, controversy, and disappointment on and off the field.
Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (Beacon Press, 2008) by Thomas Norman DeWolf ’78. DeWolf’s memoir recounts the journey he and family members take in coming to terms with their ancestors’ shadows.
Looking Back: The Land at Eden’s Gate (Pediment Publishing, 2008) by Mick Scott ’64. “A hardbound coffee table–style book about the pioneering settlements of the upper Willamette Valley, the ‘Eden’ at the end of the Oregon Trail.”
Oregon Fossils, Second Edition (Oregon State University Press, 2009) by Elizabeth L. Orr, collections manager of the Condon Collection at the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and William N. Orr, professor emeritus of geology and director of the Condon Collection. “An excellent reference for classroom and library use, for researchers, and for private collectors and hobbyists.”
The Indian Who Bombed Berlin and Other Stories (Michigan State University Press, 2009) by longtime UO creative writing professor Ralph Salisbury. “Salisbury’s stories are engaging and unique. He has a distinctive approach to assembling the elements of a narrative . . . like pieces of a dream.”
Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a Fisherman’s Wife (Dancing Moon Press, 2008) by Michele Longo Eder. “The moving story of a commercial fisherman’s wife, who is both a mother and a successful attorney on the Oregon Coast. Set against the sudden loss at sea of the Eders’ oldest son, Ben [then enrolled as an undergraduate at the UO], it is a tale of indescribable sadness but also one of resilience and courage.”
Raymond Adams: A Life of Mind and Muscle (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Robert Laureno. “Beautifully illustrates the seminal role that Dr. Adams ’33, M.A. ’34, played in twentieth-century medicine.”
The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (University of Illinois Press, 2009) by Maurice Hamington, M.A. ’00, Ph.D. ’01. The book focuses “on Addams as a philosopher, a moral and political theorist . . . who transcended that tradition to emphasize the significance of gender, race, and class.”
Cheap Tricks: A Handy Guide to Saving Money and Living Life to the Fullest (Dollar Smart Books, 2009) by Judy Woods Knight ’68. “Who knows how to save money better than the wife of a member of the military? And who better to let us know the ‘cheap tricks’ learned from a lifetime of frugal living, frequent moving, and spontaneous entertaining?”
Habits of Whiteness (Indiana University Press, 2009) by Terrance MacMullan, Ph.D. ’02. “Revitalizing the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey, MacMullan shows how it is possible to reconstruct racial habits and close the gap between people.”
Lead Pencil Studio: Annie Han + Daniel Mihalyo: After (University of Washington Press, 2009) by Gary Sangster. “Documents Annie Han ’93 and Daniel Mihalyo ’94’s two-part installation and related drawings, videos, and sculpture that transformed the Boise Art Museum’s Sculpture Court and Garden into a construction-deconstruction zone.”
Our Universal Mind: Yours and Mine (PublishAmerica, 2009) by Richard Nystrom Sr. ’60. “A work to inform atheists, agnostics, and religious folks alike of their true spiritual heritage. This book will teach that everyone in this world, and perhaps in others, has an inherent, intimate connection with God.”
Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman (iUniverse, 2009) by Jill Kelly, M.A ’76, Ph.D. ’82. “An extraordinary and gallant fight out of self-destructive patterns into a life of fulfilling relationships and artistic development that is free from alcohol and the ghosts of the past.”
The Art of Exile (Bilingual Review Press, 2009) by William Archila, M.F.A. ’02. “Poet William Archila takes the reader on a poignant journey from war-ravaged El Salvador to the concrete and asphalt of Los Angeles, revealing the turmoil Central American emigrants face when they leave their homeland and seek refuge in a foreign country.”
The Yuma Reclamation Project: Irrigation, Indian Allotment, and Settlement Along the Lower Colorado River (University of Nevada Press, 2009) by Robert A. Sauder, M.A. ’69, Ph.D. ’73. “A thoughtful analysis of economic and social as well as environmental factors of the time, The Yuma Reclamation Project is sufficiently thorough to satisfy professional scholars yet accessible to readers of all backgrounds.”
World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492 by John L. Sorenson and emeritus UO geography professor Carl L. Johannessen. “Plants, diseases, and animals from America were distributed throughout the world, across the oceans before 1492. It is time for scientists, teachers, and students to reconsider their beliefs about the early history of civilization.”
UpFront
News, Notables, Innovations
Economics
Rock Star Economist
He keeps his finger on the pulse of Oregon’s economy.
It was late 2007 and the U.S. economy was roaring. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at almost 14,000, just a fraction below its all-time high, having rocketed from under 8,000 in 2003. On Monday, December 10, the Dow had tacked on yet another 100 points, but on Tuesday The Oregonian ran a startling, nearly half-page headline graphic topping its business section: “the UO index of economic indicators has fallen 2.8 percent in the past six months: a decline of more than 2 percent in a six-month period signals that a recession is likely imminent.”
The man behind the index, issued monthly, was and is University of Oregon adjunct assistant professor of economics Tim Duy (dew-ee), M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’98.
The story accompanying the headline said, “Duy’s outlook for the state struck some experts as alarmist” while others suspected that he “was the first person to voice the truth. . . A year from now, Duy . . . will be seen as a genius—or Chicken Little.”
Mensa 1, KFC 0.
Duy created the index in 2004. It combines data from seven sources, each reflecting some measure of the economy, together forming a sensitive gauge. Connect the index month to month and a trend line emerges. The indicators are U.S. consumer confidence figures and manufacturing orders, interest rate spreads, and, specific to Oregon, stats for payrolls, initial unemployment claims, residential building permits, and truck-shipped goods.
“Some indicators go up, some down,” Duy says. “How to tie them all together into one story, that is what I work the hardest at. It is like a huge mess of jigsaw puzzle pieces. The index puts them together into a coherent picture.”
Under the auspices of the UO’s Oregon Economic Forum (which he directs), Duy sends his monthly picture to six or seven hundred people—among them analysts, business owners and managers, policy wonks, and journalists. Those journalists produce stories for major media outlets statewide and greatly extend the reach of the index. “I usually have five or so interviews the day it goes out,” he says. (During the interview for this story, online stock market information and analysis service Seeking Alpha called Duy for expert comment.)
The index that generates all this attention comes from one tiny and nondescript office in Prince Lucien Campbell Hall filled with not much more than a desk, some books, a telephone and computer, family photos, and his kid’s artwork. Equally unassuming is Duy himself, a wearer of cowboy hats and boots, a lover of “both kinds of music—country and western.” He gets a kick out of having been described in various media as a liberal, a conservative, and a maverick—all in one month.
Though he sometimes finds it “a bit awkward” getting so much limelight while many economists around him toil in relative obscurity, he believes public outreach and service are vitally important for the University. “Everybody [in the department] is doing great work, many are leaders in their field,” he says, but many of his colleagues also “don’t have the time for this kind of effort, or the disposition, or are in areas where it isn’t likely to happen.” For him it is a good fit all around, and work he’s eager to do.
Part of that work is public outreach—people want to see him face to face, hear him talk, ask him questions. This makes Duy a popular speaker with business and civic groups. “I try to limit my trips out of town to one drive a week, which amounts to around 800 miles a month,” he says. He recently drove from Eugene to Bend to speak at a meeting of the City Club of Central Oregon. He stayed the night and headed to Portland in the morning to address the West Side Economic Alliance. Medford and Salem are also regular destinations. And with the addition in the last few years of three region-specific business indexes (Portland Metro, Lane County, and Central Oregon) he’s more in demand than ever.
What do these audiences want to know? “I need to be prepared for insightful questions on a wide range of macroeconomic issues. It’s very difficult to ‘wing it,’” he says. With the recession, however, he often finds himself taking questions from people whose jobs have been taken away or are at least threatened by economic forces beyond their control. “It does not give me a warm feeling, to say the least. The only consolation is that people are sophisticated. I am usually just confirming what they already know.”
Many encounters are far less weighty; he often hears, “Oh, you’re that guy.” And the nearly inevitable follow-up question: will stock X go up or down? “Happens all the time,” he says with a shake of the head and a good-humored smile on his lips (which stay zipped when asked for tips).
Duy’s focus extends far beyond Oregon. He is an active and respected blogger about the actions and policies of the Federal Reserve. He writes the Fed Watch blog that appears on fellow UO economist Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View blog. An article titled “A Readers Guide to Econo-blogs,” published this summer in The Wall Street Journal, called Economist’s View “a must-read” and “one-stop shopping for the most interesting economic news of the day.” The Journal described Duy’s Fed Watch as “smart” and said it provides “an inside look at what the Fed is actually up to and what it means to everyone else.”
After growing up in Chicago (“a typical Midwest upbringing”) with moves in his teen years to Dallas and Denver, he came west to attend the University of Puget Sound, earning a B.A. in economics in 1991. He also met Portlander, and future wife, Heather Walloch, J.D. ’96. Both avid backpackers, they hiked “probably every major trail and lots of minor ones” in the Olympic National Forest.
Following graduate school at Oregon, he took a job in Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Department of the Treasury as an economist in the International Affairs division. His work involved tracking monthly U.S. trade data and Japanese monetary policy as well as forecasting the U.S. trade deficit.
Duy drafted a paper that was to be discussed at a very large and, for him, very memorable meeting of Federal Reserve and treasury department bigwigs. In walked Larry Summers, then about to be named secretary of the treasury for President Clinton (and currently director of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council). When Summers turned his attention to Duy’s work, there was what seemed like an eternity before the esteemed economist declared the paper to be a terrific bit of research and analysis. Not long later, Duy scored a half-hour meeting with top Clinton economic adviser Robert Rubin—another feather in the cap of the young economist rapidly making a name for himself.
He knew he eventually wanted to return to the Northwest—“and it was clear that path would lead through the private sector,” Duy says. So he took a position with the G7 Group, a political and economic consultancy for clients in the financial industry. There, he monitored the activities of the Federal Reserve and currency markets. He added to his list of contacts and gained more experience. Burnished résumé in hand, he got back to the Northwest, taking a position at the UO in 2002.
“The many people I met and the many connections I made in D.C. and later at G7 laid the foundation for my current work. Those connections helped establish my credibility in a world where it’s hard to gain credibility.”
His background and regular appearances in the mass media are also useful in establishing credibility with his students, he says, especially those in his economic forecasting course. “They see I’m a working practitioner, applying exactly the kinds of things I’m teaching them, practicing what I preach.”
And keeping close watch on Oregon’s economy.
—Ross West, M.F.A. ’84
CAMPUS JOURNALISM
Beware the Underdog
Edgy and irreverent, conservative and sometimes sodden, the Oregon
Commentator celebrates a quarter century of publication.
“ If the content of the Oregon Commentator offends you, you’re not alone . . . [but], if we do not permit offensive ideas to be given a forum, then we, not the Commentator, are the enemies of diversity.”
—Oregon Daily Emerald editorial
“ Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
—Mark Twain
In the opening chapter of the new book By the Barrel: 25 Years of the Oregon Commentator, publisher Timothy Dane Carbaugh writes, “The vernacular of the original Commentator was ‘college intellectual,’” a tone that soon intensified to “pissed-off college intellectual.”
“Pissed off enough to care,” says Ossie Bladine ’08, OC’s 2007–8 editor in chief, and “intelligent enough to know where the lines of moderation are,” and, in trademark OC fashion, “to test those limits at every chance.”
Here in the U.S.A., of course, such testing is protected as free speech by the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions that allow publications, as one OC writer gleefully put it, to “get away with damn near anything.”
From the very first issue (October 24, 1983) the OC delivered its relentless, bare-knuckle treatment to such targets as the ASUO and OSPIRG—seemingly most galled by perceived ASUO misappropriation of student incidental fees, charged to each enrolled student and used to support all manner of student groups and activities (including the OC). Typical OC story: “The Incidental Fee Committee, Corruption, and You.” Between 1993 and 1995, no less than thirty-five stories addressed incidental fees, each screaming bloody murder.
“What we lacked in professionalism we made up for with old-fashioned fighting spirit. . . .We were on the front lines . . . we called bullshit,” says Bladine.
While a reader skimming the sometimes expletive-laden, boozed-up prose of the magazine might confuse it for a college humor magazine (definitely parody, satire, spoofs, and lampooning aplenty), a sober ideological intensity undergirds the OC, reflected in this line from its 400-word mission statement: “We believe that the University is an important battleground in the ‘war of ideas’ and that the outcome of political battles of the future are, to a large degree, being determined on campuses today.”
That war of ideas sometimes gets ugly. In the summer of 1997, the OC office was burgled and trashed, their computer stolen; a short time later the office door was defaced with swastikas.
The OC struck back—with words not cudgels—in a piece titled “Thievery and Douchebaggery.”
The publication may have been in fullest flower a few years before the break-in, under the leadership of Owen Brennan ’95. The staff and contributors (in lean years dwindling to a mere handful of true believers) swelled to thirty-four.
“Nobody was safe from Brennan and his staff,” writes Carbaugh, “[the Incidental Fee Committee] chairs, the Black Student Union, The Student Insurgent . . . and MEChA were subject to public deconstruction by the Commentator, [which] made no bones about who they thought were wasteful, unnecessary, hypocritical, or downright stupid.”
When an issue featuring a cover story critical of MEChA mysteriously disappeared from distribution boxes in early 1994, Brennan republished the article in the next issue, under the headline “Read the Article They Don’t Want You to Read.” He also quadrupled the number of copies printed—“one for every student”—to stop any further efforts to silence the OC’s voice.
Earlier that same year Arnold Ismach, then dean of the School of Journalism and Communication, had written to congratulate Brennan and the OC: “The Commentator this year stands out as the best written, best edited, and certainly most thought-provoking journal at Oregon.”
According to Senior Editor Scott Camp ’94, Brennan was the Commentator’s “unquestioned visionary.” Testimony to his enduring influence comes from 1999–2001 editor William Beutler ’02: “I produced approximately twenty issues of the Damned Thing, about two or three of them stone classics, at least one utter garbage, and the rest somewhere in between. This is what happens when an all-volunteer staff is led by a twenty-year-old whose craziest notions are held in check only by the thought ‘Would Owen Brennan have done this?’” Indeed, WWOBD?
A low point for the OC came in 1989 when editor Paul Coughlin ’89 penned a vitriolic editorial on the “homosexual lifestyle.” (By the Barrel stresses, “the offending article was not in line with the typically libertarian-leaning editorial direction of the publication.”) As a result of the story, the ASUO attempted to cut funding for the OC, but “people started coming out of the woodwork to support us,” said Coughlin in a Register-Guard article on what had quickly morphed into a First Amendment test case. “Even people who hated our guts.”
This brouhaha, however, was nothing compared to “Bonergate.” Remember the political cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad published by a Dutch newspaper in 2005—and the deadly riots they ignited? The OC reprinted the controversial images . . . and got zilch response. Or nearly zilch; soon thereafter, the UO’s radical leftist newspaper, The Student Insurgent (once razzed by the OC as “still bitter over humankind’s continuing hegemony over the adorable forest creatures”) published its own incendiary cartoons of Jesus in, ahem, some extremely objectionable depictions—hence Bonergate. The OC posted the Insurgent’s little-noticed cartoons on the Internet. Soon conservative cable TV commentator Bill O’Reilly saw the cartoons—and went ballistic.
By this time Owen Brennan was a producer for The O’Reilly Factor program. Unable to find a spokesperson from the Insurgent willing to defend the cartoons, Brennan lined up OC editor Tyler Graf ’07.
“I was only there to stand up for the rights of the assholes who printed the images,” Graf says. “There had been so many attempts to drive the OC into the ground over the years, based on our content, that I had to stick by my guns.”
In the broadcast, O’Reilly fumes about “the old ‘freedom of speech’ dodge” and the undergraduate Graf holds his own against the famously combative interviewer (“Well, I think that’s an absurd thing to say, Bill.”).
“My point was simple,” Graf recounts. “Speech, no matter how odious, should not be silenced.”
But all high-minded theorizing and no play makes for a very dull magazine, the last thing anyone would call the OC. No-holds-barred humor helps keep readers turning pages. An example: a piece called “Student Government Drinking Game”—printed soon after an ASUO vice president had been caught stealing merchandise from the student bookstore. The game’s rules called for two drinks “for a VP caught shoplifting. A keg if that individual is run out of office. Two kegs if the individual claims their ‘resignation’ is due to racism, mean folks, and/or the military industrial complex.”
Ah yes, drinking—the magazine staff has a legendary love for the booze (“Our original plans to cover the Olympic Trials here in Eugene were thwarted by the jackbooted organizers,” wrote one disappointed OC correspondent. “Apparently you have to have ‘credentials’ and ‘not be visibly intoxicated’ to get a press pass.”). One day in 2001, after imbibing at campus-area pub Rennie’s Landing (“the [OC] office away from the office”), staffers conceived OC mascot Sudsy O’Sullivan. (“Sudsy says: ‘Being the first to throw up at the party is like crossing the finish line first. And drunk.’”) Sudsy’s life has been filled with scandalous exploits and much Sturm und Drang, leading most notably to his untimely death in May 2004 (from causes related to trying to make himself into a gigantic boilermaker), and, most remarkably, six months later, when he rose from the dead.
An OC editor once quipped there should be something offensive to every reader’s sensibilities in every issue. By this measure, the publication is most certainly a thundering success.
“Maybe one day this magazine, this carbuncle on the ass of the University, will fold,” editor emeritus C. J. Ciaramella recently reflected on the publication’s quarter-century legacy. “But ladies and gentlemen and transsexuals, today is not that day . . . As for the next twenty-five years, who can say? But if there’s one thing you should know by now, it’s this: Beware the underdog!”
—Ross West, M.F.A. ’84
[By the Barrel is available at the campus Duck Store and on the OC website, www.oregoncommentator.com]
Web Extra! Read a note from University of Oregon Dave Frohnmayer on the Oregon Commentator.
Journalism
When the Shirt Hit the Fans
Fame and fortune (and a whole lot of fun) come to students behind the “I Love My Ducks” phenomenon.
A few years back, two young guys came from North Bend to the UO to get an education, and beyond that, well . . . their plans were a wee bit fuzzy in the out years. As freshmen in the Carson Hall dormitory, they met the third musketeer; all shared a love for wordplay, fun, music, fun, and heavy doses of Duck sports. Recently, the three rocketed into the surreal hyperspace of fame, overnight sensations riding on a thudding rap beat and a heartfelt tag line that might stick around for a long, long time.
Senior journalism majors Michael Bishop, Brian McAndrew, and Jamie Slade were involved with DuckU, “the University of Oregon’s only student-produced TV show,” for which they created a number of goofy and playful music videos under the group name Supwitchugirl (a contraction of the phrase “What’s up with you, girl?”). But then something happened: the Duck football team crushed Arizona State on November 14, setting up the ultimate high-stakes Civil War game with Oregon State—for the first time in history, whichever team won would play in the Rose Bowl. Intoxicated by the scent of roses, Supwitchugirl wrote, shot, and edited “I Love My Ducks,” a deliriously catchy rap video capturing fan excitement about the year’s stunningly successful football team and exploding with Oregon pride.
“Brian edited it on Sunday,” recalls Slade, “and we posted it on YouTube Monday night. By Tuesday morning we had thousands and thousands of hits.”
Then came a phone call from the UO athletics department. There was a problem. In all their unbridled enthusiasm, Supwitchugirl had enlisted the help of the huge, cuddly, and much-loved Oregon Ducks mascot (or at least of one of the students who dress in the Duck costume), who shimmies, shakes, and waddles prominently in the video. Contractual details with Disney, however, make unauthorized use of the Duck a big fat no-no.
“So we yanked it from YouTube,” Slade says. The decision was unpopular but necessary—the media gave voice to the seeming injustice many felt at the creative young men’s heartfelt effort being squashed.
But controlling material on the Internet isn’t easy; several copies of the video appeared and streamed around the world, were linked to, recopied, reposted, and viewed ten, thirty, sixty thousand times. In the past a record might go gold or platinum; “I Love My Ducks” went viral. At last count, the video, again on YouTube, has had almost 700,000 views.
“Voice of the Ducks” Jerry Allen played the song on his radio show, bubbling, “This video is great!” UO football coach Chip Kelly played it over and over to inspire the team and invited the young men who created it to his office to tell them how much he liked their work. Big league sports reporter Dan Patrick (mentioned in the rap’s lyrics) talked about it on his website. Walking around on campus together, the three began hearing shouts of “Hey, you’re the ‘I Love My Ducks’ guys.”
“In a week we went from regular college students to a viral video sensation,” Slade says.
But the group has no advice for others who might want to emulate their success. “You don’t plan on making a viral video, it just happens,” Slade says. “It blows up. No explanation.”
And as far as all the media coverage that cast the athletics department as the heavies and Supwitchugirl as the steamrolled? Slade laughs, “The controversy was a blessing in disguise—it got us a lot of attention.”
Part of that attention came by way of Supwitchugirl’s Facebook page, which was drawing fans by the thousands. One thing the fans kept asking for was an “I Love My Ducks” T-shirt.
Supwitchugirl met with Jim Williams ’68, general manager of the Duck Store, and talked about going into the T-shirt business. A signed contract soon gave the Duck Store an exclusive deal on the shirts—to be priced at $12—and Supwitchugirl two bucks per sale. Less than forty-eight hours later, the first shirts arrived at the campus Duck Store—kelly green with blocky lettering, designed by senior digital arts major Tav Scott. The timing was perfect to take advantage of the intense excitement rapidly building for the Civil War game. “The response was overwhelming,” Williams says. “It was impossible to keep up with demand.”
The shirts sold out immediately. More shirts were ordered and more after that, all from longtime Duck Store supplier Identity by Sew On in Springfield. The shop scrambled to keep up, adding extra staff members, and extra shifts, working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.
Fueled by social media buzz and traditional media stories now focused on the wild demand for the shirts, crowds of shirt-hunters swelled at the Duck Store. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Williams recalls. “In all my thirty-eight years here, there has never been anything near this. It was my first experience of seeing firsthand the power of social media.”
The “I Love My Ducks” video (a version sans the Duck) thundered through the Autzen Stadium sound system and appeared on the jumbo screen at the December 3 Civil War game, driving fans nearly delirious. Following the UO victory (and with only twenty-some shopping days until Christmas), shirt sales skyrocketed. Orders poured in from around the country to the Duck Store’s mail-order operation, peaking at 1,000 T-shirts of all kinds per day, with ILMD by far the most popular.
The unprecedented demand quickly blew through all local stock of green shirts, and soon that of all West Coast suppliers. A run of black shirts filled in the gap until rush-ordered green shirts arrived from warehouses as far away as the East Coast.
In the weeks between the Civil War and Rose Bowl the suddenly white-hot group received numerous offers to make videos and commercials and invitations to perform. They made what was for two members (Bishop and McAndrew) a triumphant return to North Bend for a middle school performance.
“It was our Beatles moment. They were the rowdiest crowd we ever played for,” Slade laughs. “A girl in the front row was crying. We signed autographs for every kid in that school till our hands were sore.”
When the ILMD phenomenon first took off, an Oregonian story reported the group hoped to use their profits to pay for a trip to the Rose Bowl. But things had changed by late December. The UO Alumni Association now hired the group to perform at both the pep rally on Santa Monica pier and the pregame tailgate party in Pasadena—with thousands of Duck-crazed fans shouting out the chorus to what had become the team’s unofficial anthem. The group met quarterback Jeremiah Masoli (whose name is rhymed in the rap with ravioli) and other UO players. ESPN sportscaster Neil Everett ’84 sought out and congratulated the trio. “We weren’t just watching, we were part of everything,” Slade beams. “It was so fun!.”
With T-shirt sales (and now sweatshirts, hoodies, women’s-cut tops, and even tiny toddler shirts) nearing 40,000, Supwitchugirl is looking at significant profits. Each member has travel in his plans; one says he will use the windfall to retire his student loans.
The benefits of their unlikely and meteoric rise extend beyond the financial. “It was a crash course in communications law,” Slade says. “There was no grade, but a whole lot of learning.
“One other thing,” he adds with unmistakable pride. “People e-mail us from all over and say, ‘Now we’re Duck fans,’ and ‘We wish we had people like you at our university.’ That feels really good.”
—Ross West, M.F.A. ’84
IN BRIEF
SUSI ROSENBERG
Art in the Heart of Campus Anyone taking a tour of public art on the UO campus now has a new stop. Path/WEG II by sculptor Susi Rosenberg of Munich, Germany, is located in the quad near Straub Hall and the Student Recreation Center. The sculpture’s indented square columns capture Eugene’s ample rainfall. Rosenberg created the piece a decade ago while participating in an artist-in-residence program at the UO and later donated the piece to the University.
Following a stellar senior year (winning five NCAA indoor and outdoor titles), UO runner Galen Rupp ’09 was the inaugural winner of the Bowerman Award, bestowed on the top U.S. collegiate male and female track-and-field athletes.
A new website provides a one-stop overview of how the UO is reaching out to the residents and communities of Oregon—from small business clinics and high-tech collaboration to addressing issues of violence and exposing grade school kids to science. Visit AcademicOutreach.uoregon.edu/index.php.
The UO’s M.F.A. program in creative writing was ranked tenth in the nation by Poets & Writers magazine, in an analysis of the top fifty programs in the United States. The UO program also rated fifth in the magazine’s postgraduate placement category, which ranks schools based on fellowships and awards.
The UO, along with some 650 other institutions of higher education, signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a pledge to improve environmental sustainability. Turning a commitment into reality requires a plan; the UO’s Climate Action Plan is available for review and comment. Visit sustainability.uoregon.edu.
UO research funding in the first quarter of the 2009–10 fiscal year hit $69.4 million—a 60 percent increase over the record-setting first quarter of $43.4 million a year ago. The UO research funding record for an entire fiscal year is $115.3 million, set in 2007–8.
Three University of Oregon scientists—physicist and Philip H. Knight Professor of Science James E. Brau and chemistry professors Victoria J. DeRose and David R. Tyler—have been chosen as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. G. Z. Brown, Philip H. Knight Professor of Architecture and Allied Arts, has earned a lifetime achievement award from the Oregon chapter of the Association of Professional Energy Managers.
UO enrollment increased 4.1 percent this fall to an all-time record of 22,386. Total Oregon resident enrollment, including undergraduates and graduates, increased to 14,644 this fall compared to 13,881 in 2008.
PROFile
Michael Dreiling
Associate Professor of Sociology
Unlike many classrooms, where the air is stiff with silent listening and note taking, sociologist Michael Dreiling’s classroom is often filled with conversation. In fact, his students are expected to speak up in class.
To get them talking, Dreiling asks tough questions. In his American Society course, for example, he asks: “How are you both a product and a producer in this moment?” At first, the students avert their eyes, extraordinarily interested in something written in their notebooks, so Dreiling invites them to begin by simply looking around at each other and observe. “What do you see?” he asks. A few moments pass before a hand raises. Then two more. Then another. One student observes: Most of us are wearing jeans; could that make us products of fashion? What about the way we behave in various situations? another student suggests. We’re products of a specific social code. “Good,” Dreiling encourages. “What else? How are you creating this reality?” Well, a student suggests, we purchase the clothes and adhere to trends, so we both create and perpetuate the fashion cycle. Another student speaks up: The social situations that require specific behavior are all things that we created—classrooms, dog parks, or black tie functions. “Excellent thinking,” Dreiling replies. “What might this mean for us?” As students respond, they begin to understand that the answer is only part of a larger question.
Dreiling compares sociology with a jigsaw puzzle. One can identify individual patterns, or pieces, but until they are fused with others, they are just pieces. When they’re examined with and fitted into a box of other pieces, they create a larger image.
“The observations that the students make are essential,” Dreiling says. They learn to look beyond themselves and understand how individual actions can affect the big picture—society as a whole.
Their newfound critical awareness, Dreiling believes, will serve them in any area of life. “The thing I always hope for,” he says, “is that students walk away with an expanded field of perception.”
Name: Michael Dreiling
Education: B.A. ’90, University of California, Irvine; M.A. ’93 and Ph.D. ’97 University of Michigan
Teaching Experience: Graduate student instructor, teaching assistant, and lecturer at the University of Michigan, 1989–95. He joined the UO Department of Sociology as assistant professor in 1996. An associate professor since 2002, he was the sociology graduate program director 2003–8.
Awards: Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2009; two-time winner of the Rippey Innovative Teaching Award in 2005 and 2008.
Off-Campus: Dreiling spends as much time as possible outdoors with his three kids. He enjoys gardening, trail running, and water sports.
Last Word: “There are many layers to social reality. Things are not always as they seem.”
—Melissa Hoffman
Science
Michael Posner Honored with
National Medal of Science
University of Oregon emeritus professor of psychology Michael Posner was among nine recipients of the 2009 National Medal of Science, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to scientists, engineers, and inventors.
“It is a great honor for me, the areas of research in which I have been working, and the many students and collaborators who have been involved and are involved in these studies,” Posner says.
The medal’s accompanying citation reads, “For his innovative application of technology to the understanding of brain function, his incisive and accurate modeling of functional tasks, and his development of methodological and conceptual tools to help understand the mind and the development of brain networks of attention.”
How did it feel to be honored by the president at the White House ceremony, receiving the award alongside such scientific luminaries as human-genome mapper J. Craig Ventner?
“It really brought home to me how important the vast sweep of scientific areas are to each other and to the future of our country,” Posner says. “I was most appreciative that the president recognized that in his comments.”
At the October 7 East Room event, President Obama said the recipients embody “the very best of American ingenuity and inspir[e] a new generation of thinkers and innovators. Their extraordinary achievements strengthen our nation every day—not just intellectually and technologically but also economically, by helping create new industries and opportunities that others before them could never have imagined.”
Posner, who joined the UO faculty in 1965, is “a seminal figure in the whole field of cognitive neuroscience,” says Lou Moses, head of the UO psychology department. His research contributions have been widely recognized; his work—his name appears on more than 200 academic journal articles—is among the most cited in the field. “Many of his publications have become citation classics,” Moses says. In addition to the papers, Posner also coauthored the influential book Images of Mind (Scientific American Library, 1994).
“Posner’s contributions to science transcend his own discoveries. He has had profound influence,” says Rich Linton, UO vice president for research and graduate studies. “Mike’s visionary leadership has been instrumental in launching countless scholars and programs into fruitful pursuit of the relationship between mind and brain.”
For his achievements, Posner has won many major awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was named Oregon Scientist of the Year in 1995.
The National Medal of Science was created by statute in 1959 and is administered for the White House by the National Science Foundation.
View President Obama bestowing the National Medal of Science on emeritus UO psychology professor Michael Posner:
