cab67
cab67's JournalThe clay Gilgamesh tablet at the Museum of the Bible - thoughts of a museum collections worker.
Earlier today, we learned that a clay tablet containing part of the ancient Epic of Gigamesh held at the Museum of the Bible, founded by the Hobby Lobby people, was smuggled illegally out of Iraq and must be turned over for repatriation.
This came with a lot of comments to the effect that such things belong in the countries where they were found.
I agree, in principle. But as someone who has spent his entire career working in museum collections, I want to explain why “it belongs where it was found” isn’t always such a simple thing.
First, some acknowledgments:
Acknowledgment 1: this case involves not just principle, but law. If a specimen is illegally taken somewhere, it needs to go back, and those responsible for the illegal exportation and sale/purchase of the object should be punished. Simple as that.
Acknowledgment 2: I’m a paleontologist and herpetologist whose direct work includes neither human artifacts nor human remains. The issues surrounding these are somewhat different from those surrounding non-human remains – there are levels of cultural sensitivity I don’t generally encounter, except in the abstract. And although all fields of natural history reflected imperial attitudes historically, they were arguably more acute when man-made artifacts or human remains (bones, mummies, etc.) were involved.
That being said, I actively collaborate with paleoanthropologists. In grad school, my partner at the time worked on an archaeological site that became the source of protest. One of my closest friends at the large midwestern museum where I did my post-doc was the liaison responsible for repatriating Indigenous American materials to the tribes from which they came. (This meant I once met the grandson of a Cheyenne warrior who fought at Little Bighorn. It was an educational experience I will never forget.). So although I’m not directly involved in archaeological issues, neither am I ignorant of them.
So here’s what I think –
It was very common, at least until the mid-20th century, for natural and cultural objects from the developing world to end up in European or American museums. Most of my work these days is on the evolution of crocodiles in East Africa over the past 20 to 25 million years. This means I visit lots of museums in Africa, but it also means time spent in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and other capitals of the old European empires. Fossil and modern crocodile specimens collected in the former colonies often ended up back in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the US).
Does this reflect imperialistic attitudes toward other people? In part, yes. The idea that the people living where they were found might want to play a role in their preservation and study was rarely, if ever, taken into account.
Moreover, some of the expeditions that collected the material included racist justification. For example – the American Museum of Natural History in New York led several expeditions to what are now Mongolia and north-central China during the 1920’s. These are famed for having discovered the first nests of dinosaur eggs. They also discovered some of the dinosaurs the general public might know about, including Velociraptor, though it only became widely known when Jurassic Park came out in 1992. But the actual purpose of the expeditions was to find human ancestors.
The rationale here wasn't entirely racist. One of the curators, William Diller Matthew, believed all mammalian groups had Asian origins, and that humans would be no different. He was working from a theoretical framework that suggested close links between North American and Eurasian animals, with the likeliest dispersal corridor being the Bering Land Bridge. But one of the museum higher-ups, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was another matter – he dismissed an African origin as unacceptable because of its racial implications. As he saw it, our ancestors had to be Asian because an African origin (from black people) would be beneath him.
It gets far worse when cultural materials and human remains are part of the equation. It can legitimately be said that modern archaeology arose from what would now be described as grave robbing. Indigenous graves in North America were routinely dug up, and their contents were routinely shipped off to New York, Chicago, Washington, or Pittsburgh, among many others. Anthropology shares some of this; it wasn't rare for the bones of Indigenous Americans or African Americans to be collected for study. That these were the ancestors of living human beings who didn’t want their relatives exhumed, much less treated as mere objects and put on display in a far-away museum, never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind at the time. It was an atrocity that we still trying to make right.
But as a museum collections worker, I have to point out that imperialism and racism were not the only reasons these things were done.
In many cases, specimens were shipped back to the cities not because they were seen as treasures of the empire, but because no museum existed anywhere near where the materials were collected. “Keep them where they’re found” loses some of its punch if there’s no facility on hand to properly care for the materials in perpetuity, assuming that’s what we agree to do.
(This is why fossils from South America were looted to a far lesser extent than from other parts of the world. There have been natural history museums on that continent since the 19th century. Not saying things were never removed improperly – only that it was less frequent.)
Moreover, much of it was done at a time when travel was far more expensive and time-consuming than now. A scientist studying biological or paleontological specimens from what is now Indonesia would find it far easier to visit London or Leiden than Batavia (present-day Jakarta). It was also considerably more dangerous - much of this was done before antibiotics or antimalarial drugs, for example, or even before anyone knew what actually caused tropical diseases. And since the colonial territories generally didn’t have the kind of educational system set up to train professional scientists who could work on the material locally, it made sense to send the specimens to the scientists.
I’m not saying removing the material was morally right – only that it was often logistically rational, given the assumption that these items were going to contribute to scientific knowledge.
The present situation in former colonies is uneven. Some now have world-class museums with modern conservation facilities, and they are staffed by professional scientists who are from those countries. In many cases, the specimens - especially some of the fossils - are considered national treasures. I can say from direct observation that “Lucy,” an Australopithecus afarensis skeleton from the Afar region of Ethiopia, is kept under better security in Addis Ababa than the US Constitution is in DC.
But that’s not always the case. I’ve been to museums in those parts of the world that give new meaning to the word "squalid." Pest and climate control are nonexistent, staffing is uneven and driven more by politics than expertise, and the facilities are so poorly funded that much of the work is done on a volunteer basis. Museum records may not have been computerized, and the catalog books are slowly deteriorating. Over time, specimens that aren't lost or damaged lose their scientific value.
A few years ago, the main part of the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro burned to the ground. It was caused by an aging electrical system. Everyone knew it needed a major upgrade, but the museum was never given enough support to address the problem, nor was it given the support to photograph or copy some of the most vulnerable material. Nearly all of its collections were lost.
I took this loss personally. I’d visited those collections. Some of the material I studied is now gone. (Indeed, I may have been the last person to study some of these fossils.) I watched curators – some of them personal friends – dash into the fire in a futile effort to save specimens, notes, data sets, and anything else they could grab in their arms.
"Keep them where they were found" and "keep them safe in perpetuity, so all can learn from them" do not always lead to the same conclusion. It's one thing if we're dealing with objects looted from a grave with direct links to a modern community, but not necessarily if cultural links to the present day are more tenuous, or if the specimens have no particular cultural significance in the first place.
There are massive gray areas here. Kinnewick Man is a good example of the issue. In 1996, the skeletal remains of a man who died about 9000 years ago were found in what is now the state of Washington. The material is unusual for its great age and completeness, and early work suggested physical features more typical of ethnic groups living outside North America. Together, these made Kinnewick Man central to figuring out how and when people began to settle the Western Hemisphere. We know Indigenous groups in the Americas moved around quite a lot over the millennia, and that the tribes encountered in a given location by European explorers weren't necessarily the tribes one would have encountered in previous centuries. There was thus no scientific reason to expect Kinnewick Man was directly ancestral to anyone in an Indigenous community known to have lived there during historical times. But according to the belief system of the Indigenous tribe that claimed that land, the tribe was created right in that place. To them, Kinnewick Man was one of their ancestors pretty much by definition. This left anthropologists with a serious dilemma - how to balance respect for the rights and beliefs of people who had every right to not trust scientists with the compelling scientific argument that careful study of Kinnewick Man might shed a powerful light on a critical phase of human history, all while treating the remains with reverence.
I can only say this - I'm glad I wasn't involved.
I'm not trying to be arrogant or imperialist here - I'm merely stating the complexity of the real situation.
(Acknowledgment 3 – not all squalid museums are in the developing world. I’ve seen some horrible examples right here in the US. And disasters like the fire in Rio can happen anywhere. The Second World War devastated many European cities, causing many important museums to be damaged or destroyed. The original specimen of Spinosaurus, for example, was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. To this day, the exterior of the Humboldt Museum in Berlin is pock-marked with divots from Russian and German bullets. In 1995, the curator at the Naturkundemuseum in Stuttgart continually pointed me to one or another place where “one of your bombs” hit the museum. I kept my mouth shut, not explaining that [1] that was decades before I was born, [2] you guys started it, and [3] I did my homework and know that the bombs hit at night, meaning it was a British bombing raid. The US bombed during the day.)
Indeed, this has become a reason to support the argument that spreading materials around to different museums can be a good thng, even if it means taking them out of the home countries. That way, a disaster befalling one museum doesn’t result in a universal loss. It also supports the notion that efforts to duplicate should be given priority. That the insects and mammals at the museum in Rio were lost is bad, but they can be replicated. The audio recordings of indigenous people speaking languages that are now extinct, and which were never copied, can not.
Just thought I’d share a few thoughts. Yes, fossils and artifacts should be kept within their regional context, and they should be repatriated whenever possible. But there are other variables that should be considered. And in this case, although I fully support returning the clay tablet to Iraq as a matter of both principle and law, I worry that it isn’t the wisest practical decision, given how unstable the region is.
Currently reading Burroughs et al., Forget the Alamo
It's definitely worth reading. I learned about the Alamo as a kid in the Northeast, and heard plenty more when I lived in Austin for graduate school. But I'd also read books like James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, who put the struggle over Texas in the broader context of expanding territory where slavery was legal.
I learned from my father, who served in Vietnam, that one can honor the service of someone even if one thinks the cause was wrong. So I can see some of the Alamo defenders as courageous, can acknowledge that not all of them were pro-slavery activists (indeed, some were abolitionists), and can understand that Texas was one of several regions in Mexico that tried to gain independence because of the federal government's instability, and yet still understand that the main push within the US for annexing Texas came from the South and was based on free state-slave state politics.
Anyway - Forget the Alamo is a good book. Although it talks about the siege, it's really about how the event came to be mythologized in the US as an example of American fortitude and righteousness against oppression, and how it (and the Texian revolution as a whole) came to be isolated from political struggles in both the US (slavery) and Mexico (instability).
I wanted to reach out to the authors, but don't have their email addresses. It's because I wanted to share the picture below with them.
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I took it in the Bay of Pigs area of Cuba about 10 years ago. I was there as part of a group working on the natural history and conservation of Cuban crocodiles, but I did get to see some of the surrounding region. I had a great time.
Cubans call the Bay of Pigs incident the Battle of Playa Girón, after the closest town to where it happened. There's a museum there about the battle; I wasn't able to visit, but I saw two WW2 surplus relics given by the US and USSR to their sides in the conflict - a Sherman tank facing down a T-34. (The Sherman tank would have stood little chance, if any.)
There's a billboard near the museum that describes the Battle of Playa Girón as the site of the "first defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America."
Every year, I talk about the Cuban crocodile project because I got excellent photos of nesting behavior in the species. (Crocodylian nesting behavior is surprisingly bird-like. They protect their nests and hatchlings with great vigor.) And when I do, I show them this picture.
My only comment? That the people killed at the Alamo would probably disagree with the billboard's assertion that Playa Girón was the site of the first defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America.
I hope to visit that museum when I go back, whenever that is. And I have to go back - I never saw a bee hummingbird. (A local birder tried to find one, but no such bird showed up. But in the space of 5 minutes or so, he showed us the two species of owl found only in Cuba. And we saw some Cuban todies. The Cuban trogons were also great, but they almost don't count, since they're so common down there.)
Travels with a bear.
If I could digress from politics for a moment:
As I’ve probably mentioned before, I work on the evolution of crocodylians - living and extinct alligators, crocodiles, and their close relatives - for a living. One consequence is the need to visit museum collections to look at modern skeletal specimens and fossils. And because crocodylians have lived pretty much everywhere over the past 80 million years – they’re known from as far north as Ellesmere Island in rocks about 45 million years in age, for example – this means going pretty much everywhere.
Life would be much simpler if people would just mail their crocodylians to me. For one reason or another, they won’t. So I go to them.
In 2019, I travelled to East Africa for 8 weeks. I’ve done extended trips like this before, but this was different – I now had a 3-year-old daughter. This would be hard for her. (Hard for her mother and me, too.).
So I asked my sister for advice. Her husband served in the US Navy, and like others in their community, they faced extended absences of one parent while they had small children. How did they deal with it?
She gave me several suggestions. Out of them, my wife/her mother and I came up with a solution: we’d go to Build-A-Bear and have two teddy bears made. One would stay with our daughter, and the other would come with me. I would then have pictures taken of the bear every day, sometimes with me, and text them to my wife, who would show them to our daughter.
We put great ceremony into the bear generation process. Build-A-Bear puts a “heart” of sorts in the bear before adding stuffing, both my daughter and I blew on the heart before its insertion. When we got home, we chose one of the t-shirts she’d outgrown and put it on the bear.
(I kinda hoped they'd hook the bear to a couple of power cables and throw a big switch, but it wasn't quite so dramatic as that.)
I did manage to get pictures nearly every day, though I couldn’t actually send them every day – believe it or not, there was an attempted coup in one of the countries (Ethiopia) during my visit, and most WiFi was shut down for several days.
I tried to expand the level of inspiration by asking my colleagues to sometimes pose with the bear. Some of these were US- or Europe-based scientists visiting the same facilities, and others were scientists from the host institutions. I made an effort to include women and people of color – it’s critical to show young girls that fields such as science are not just for white cis-gender males. Most found it charming, though I suspect I’d get in serious trouble if the photo I took with the director of one of these museums with the bear was ever made public.
It worked. My daughter was sad I was gone, but she always felt connected. She’d see the pictures in the morning before heading to day care (by which time it was afternoon for me), and would tell all of her friends about them.
I just returned on Monday from my first international research trip since the pandemic began – this time to Germany and Italy. My daughter is now 5, and I wasn’t going to be gone for nearly as long (just shy of two weeks), but I decided to keep doing it. I might keep doing it in perpetuity – it’s kinda become a thing for us.
I suspect by the time I retire, I’ll be known as the fellow who’s always keeping an eye on the time for bear o’clock as much as a crocodylian systematist. And I’m cool with that.
Here are some of the photos. I’m not including photos showing my colleagues – only the bear and, in some cases, yours truly.
Waiting for the flight to Addis Ababa, 2019:
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Bale Mountains, south of Addis, 2019:
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With some Somali ostriches, Middle Awash NP, 2019:
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Middle Awash NP, 2019; there are crocodiles in the river behind us, but I don’t think you can see them:
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Outside the paleo (palaeo?) collections area at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, 2019:
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Lions near Nairobi, 2019:
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Getting caffeinated before hitting the collections, Kampala, 2019:
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Working with fossils, Stuttgart, 2021:
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Train between Stuttgart and Tübingen, 2021:
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Post-research drinks, Rome, 2021:
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Roman Forum, 2021:
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Wondering where the gladiators all went, 2021:
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Why I don't think Trump will ever really be prosecuted.
It's not merely a matter of "rich people always get off." They too often do, but not always.
Nor is it a matter of not being able to assemble an impartial jury - though that's going to be a major effort in and of itself.
Nor is it even because his lawyers can get this dragged out until long after he goes toes-up on us. (And if they did, they could still go after his estate, which would cut his children off at the knees since they're not capable of getting actual jobs. Trump, or his lawyers at any rate, know this.)
It's because I don't think he's competent to stand trial.
Seriously - have you listened to his recent public statements? The cognitive decline is accelerating. This, on top of the mental illness he's had since at least early adulthood, is likely to keep him out of a courtroom.
From a purely objective viewpoint, he can't participate in his own defense.
My thoughts, anyway.
some birds from Jones Beach, Long Island
We were visiting my in-laws, and I was able to get away to bird nearby Jones Beach and area. Most of the beaches were closed for the weekend (they were holding an air show), and the weather was lousy for much of the time, but I did see some things.
piping plover
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willet
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semipalmated sandpiper
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American oystercatcher
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This one - there's something about terns that defies my ability to identify them. Empids? Ammodram sparrows? Old World Warblers? Neotropical kingbirds? I can do those. But terns? I think they're emitting some sort of psychic energy that messes with my normal bird ID skill. So I've got it ID'd as a Forster's, but could be convinced that it's a common. Thoughts?
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Thinking of Dad (and others whose sacrifice was kept quiet)
My Dad served in the Navy in the early 1960's. He'd started college on a hockey scholarship, but evidently wasn't ready for college yet, so he enlisted.
It wasn't until I was in my teens that he acknowledged he'd served in Vietnam. It was around the time the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in DC, and there were marches in most US cities; he desperately wanted to join the march in nearby New York City, but couldn't, and it tore him up.
Here's the thing, though - I know almost nothing about his experience. He took nearly all of it to his grave. I only know that he was with a team sent in to do surveillance work, and he was the only one to come out alive. And the names of those who didn't are not on the Wall in DC.
He'd grown up fluent in French - his family is all from Quebec. Pretty much all communications between Hanoi and Moscow were in French, which is probably why he was sent there in the first place, even though he was originally trained in underwater demolitions.
I don't know how many people he was with. He was evidently captured, but was never listed as a POW, probably because this happened before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. That he was tortured was betrayed by his inability to hold his middle three fingers up as most people do to indicate the number 3; he had to hold up his last three fingers, as though he as signalling "OK."
He came out of it with a drinking problem, but he also came away with an internal strength I'll never understand. He gave up drinking completely when his diabetes was diagnosed. He faced amputations following from diabetes, and later a terminal cancer diagnosis, with a far more even resolve than any human should be able to muster. I have to think he took the good and the bad out of that experience.
Later, I came to learn about the Vietnam War. I struggled with the disparity between war whose cause was not entirely just and my father's participation in it. I learned that one can honor the service of one who wore the uniform without necessarily agreeing with the cause - a lesson I took to heart when protesting the Iraq War.
There are the heroes we know about, and the heroes we don't.
open letter to people starting college this fall.
As some of you know, I teach at a university. This includes a large-enrollment class for non-science majors in the fall and more advanced classes in the spring.
I just received yet another email that prompts me to compose this missive, as I'll explain below.
Being a first-year student is exhilarating. It can also be terrifying. You might be far from home for the first time. You might be the first member of your family to attend college. You might have been a stand-out in high school, but now you're surrounded by other stand-outs from other high schools. It's intimidating. You don't have Mom and/or Dad to keep your nose to the grindstone, and some aspects of being a college student - enrolling in classes, for example - are downright labyrinthine. And if you're a student of color on a majority-white campus, you'll be facing racist attitudes that remain in spite of everything we're doing to combat them.
So some general advice:
1. (This was prompted by an email exchange with an incoming student this morning - and it's one of too many such exchanges I've had.) Be careful with assumptions, and always ask before acting. Exceptions can't always be made.
This morning, I got an email from an incoming first-year student. He wanted to confirm that the lectures for my class are being recorded. I responded that although they're on-line (which I very deeply dislike), they aren't pre-recorded. They're what we call "synchronous" - that is, you have to watch them live, no different from if you were taking an in-person lecture course.
This was followed by a request for accommodation because the student has another commitment when lecture is in session.
In other words, the student enrolled in a course he can't actually attend. This was based on the faulty assumption that "online" meant "recorded."
I've encountered all kinds of bad assumptions. They can take a quiz late, even though I said there wouldn't be make-ups? Bad assumption. That a grade is not a goal to be achieved, but a commodity to be negotiated? Bad assumption. That the exam will look exactly as you imagine it will? Very bad assumption. And so it goes.
I know it's a hassle to take the final exam toward the end of finals week. That doesn't mean we're cool with you taking it early because it's convenient.
My ex used to teach a lab that met on Fridays at 4:30. There were quizzes every week. During the first week of class, she had to tell her students that "My parents already paid for the plane ticket leaving that day" would not be accepted as a reason to miss lab on the Friday before Thanksgiving break.
Seriously - ask BEFORE you act. It saves everyone a lot of heartache.
2. Keep your life as simple as possible.
Extracurricular activities expand your horizons and can help you find a community far from home, but it's easy to get roped in too deeply. Overloading yourself with such things reduces the amount of time you have for your homework and studying.
This is why I encourage on-campus living when it's available for first-year students. It keeps life simple.
I'm not saying one should live a monastic existence and ignore the rest of the world. But you'll still be getting your footing during your first year, so don't overdo it.
3. Save everything.
I once had a student approach me after classes were over, wondering why she got a C in my class. She was sure she'd be in solid B range. I pointed out that her final exam and one of her midterms were indeed in the 80's, but her other midterm was a 38. That, I explained, dragged her grade down. "But I didn't get a 38," she replied, "I got an 83!" She showed me her exam, and sure enough, she did. The moron (most likely me) who entered the grades into the spreadsheet typed them in backward. It happens, and mistakes like this are easily corrected - and this is made easier if you can show your professor what you actually got.
Seriously - treat your homework assignments, quizzes, exams, and whatnot like receipts.
4. Keep your family posted about your classroom commitments.
If someone's planning a family event, it wouldn't hurt if they knew when your exams are scheduled.
5. Always contact an instructor before missing something, and always get some sort of proof for the reason.
I've run in to all kinds of legitimate reasons to miss a class or an exam. Illness is the most common, but students have also come to me with job interviews, court dates, funerals, other major family events (weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, confirmations, baptisms, milestone anniversaries), problems with transportation (car broke down, missed bus), or a University-related commitment (sporting event, field trip for another course, etc.).
Getting a doctor's note for an illness is easy enough, but it should be possible to document pretty much any good reason to miss class - including a funeral. I, for one, would never ask for documentation that a student had to attend a funeral. But I know professors who do - and generally, it's not all that hard to get. If you can't bring in an obituary, most funeral homes and houses of worship are willing to provide a letter acknowledging your presence at a funeral service at their facility. (These used to be necessary when airlines offered lower "bereavement" rates for last-minute travel.)
If you don't know whether your reason for missing an exam is legitimate, just ask. Often, it is. Sometimes, it isn't - but we can't help you if you assume it was and act accordingly. (Want to miss the exam because a relative is having a birthday party? Unless someone is turning 100, or is terminally ill and won't see the birthday after this one, I'm reluctant to grant an excuse.)
(And before I'm attacked for being hard-ass, please bear in mind - arranging a make-up exam really is an imposition. On our campus, instructors are responsible for scheduling exams for students who need extra time or some other accommodation for a learning disability - and the number of student will such accommodations sometimes hits 5 or 10 percent. For a class of 200 students, that's 10 or 20 students who need accommodation. And that's on top of those who were in a wedding, got sick, or had a family emergency. We're happy to help out when it's necessary, but still, we're being asked to find a time and a place where the instructor and student can meet for a 1 to 2 hour block. That means juggling schedules. If we say "no," it's not because we're mean-spirited - it's because we're trying to manage a complex situation.]
6. Get to know your instructors.
This is arguably more important later in your college career, but it doesn't hurt stop by during office hours. That's what they're for.
This is good not only because you'll understand the material better by asking questions early and often, but because it helps us get to know you. Believe me - it's a lot easier to write a letter of recommendation if I know something about the student beyond his or her exam scores.
I've also seen that students who come to know their professors tend to be asked to participate in research or creative projects. That looks really good on your resume, and it makes you better at what you do anyway. They also sometimes feel less isolated. We professors are no longer the terrifying experts who look down on their students - we're people.
7. Know when to pull back.
Life happens. A lot of students encounter mental or emotional problems they may not have anticipated, or the problems they already have might be exacerbated. You might feel isolated on campus. You might be overwhelmed with difficult classes. You may be trying to balance your classes with a job or the needs of a small child. Your financial situation may change. You, or a loved one, may be facing a very serious physical illness that requires much of your attention.
Sometimes, the best solution is to drop some or all of your classes. Staying in for the sake of completing the semester might be counterproductive if you bomb your classes. Do you want to graduate on time, or with a respectable GPA? Sometimes, these are mutually incompatible.
I'm not saying you should just drop out of school when things get tough. It's always going to be difficult. Besides, dropping below a certain number of credit hours can jeopardize your financial aid. But in consultation with academic advisors and perhaps a mental health professional, dropping one or two courses might not always be a bad idea.
8. Know when to ask for help, and find out where it can be found.
The problems I mentioned above were extra-widespread last year. The world seemed to be collapsing around us - we were facing a pandemic; cities around the country hosted protests that, at times, encountered violence; and voters were being asked to decide whether to vote for a human being or a pallid host to some sort of hairy orange organism to lead the country.
And I know this impacted my students because they told me. Usually, out of a group of 200, I get one or two reaching out to tell me they've missed some assignments because they're having a rough time. Last year, it was more like 15 or 20 of them. Some were students of color who felt the pressure of racism like never before. Others were failing to thrive academically in the on-line system imposed on us by the pandemic. It was bad.
We get it. All of us were students, and many of us needed help at times. That includes me.
There is no dishonor in asking for help, and there are places to find it. Most campuses have some sort of student counseling center - that, or they'll have resources to help you find a professional counselor. They're not there as window dressing - they're there because people need them.
Creating a sense of belonging can go a long way toward alleviating some of the pressure and stress of being a first-year college student. This is why I advise against overdoing it with extracurricular activities - not against avoiding them altogether.
Anyway - some free advice none of you asked for. College will be one of the most formative experiences of your life. Get as much
Something too many Israelis (and Americans) fail to realize...
Getting population statistics for Israel and the Occupied Territories is tricky, because it's not always clear who's being counted. Does the Jewish population listed for Israel include the West Bank settlements? That's one example.
But based on the best statistics I can find, there are currently about 6.6 million Jewish citizens in Israel. That includes the West Bank. They're not going anywhere.
There are about 1.8 million Arabs in the borders of Israel recognized by the UN (i.e. excluding the West Bank and Gaza), the majority of whom are Muslim Palestinians. They're not going anywhere.
That means that the Israeli government has jurisdiction over a population that is about 75% Jewish. This allows Israel to maintain its identity as a Jewish state.
There are a lot of people, in Israel and elsewhere (most especially the US), who want to see Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel already claims to have annexed the Golan Heights; the Trump Administration made the mistake of recognizing this, something I hope Biden can correct.
In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there are about 4.5 million Palestinian Arabs. They, too, aren't going anywhere.
If Israel annexes these territories, its Jewish population would drop to around 50 percent of the total.
It would then have a decision to make - to be a democracy, or to be a Jewish state. If only half of the population is Jewish, it can't be both.
At this point, I think both sides carry much of the blame for the current violence. It hurts me to say this, too - I've been to Israel a couple of times and have valued friends and colleagues there. Moreover, my wife and her family are Jewish, and some of her elder relatives survived the Holocaust - so they have strong opinions I cannot and will not challenge, no matter how I feel about the politics of the moment.
The Palestinian Authority has to take control of it militant factions. Otherwise, Israel will have to defend itself. I also think the Israelis should get rid of the right-wing nationalists who won't compromise on anything - otherwise, grievances on the part of Palestinians will remain to fester, giving extremism fertile ground to flourish.
I'm tired of living like this, and I don't really have that right.
I'm on one of the administrative committees at the college where I work. At our weekly (virtual) meeting this morning, the first topic of discussion was the Chauvin trial.
My public university is in a comparatively small Midwestern college town (not in Minnesota). We attract some diversity because of the university, but the surrounding area is overwhelmingly white, which limits enrollments from students of color. And yet over the summer, at least one of the BLM protests here became very large and ended up tear-gassed.
So our discussion this morning is over what the university will do should the trial end with an acquittal. There will be multiple statements released by different officials, from the president through the provost and down to the deans' offices, with some department heads probably joining in. These statements are already being drafted.
They have to be drafted carefully; the community around the university is progressive, but the state as a whole, as reflected by the governor and state legislature, follows a very different and decidedly rightward path. As long as we rely on the legislature for funding, we have to balance expressing objection to the obvious injustice an acquittal would represent with not coming across as institutionally partisan or reactionary. But we can't stay absolutely silent if the community around us unravels.
Meanwhile, a few miles south of me (I'm living in a different state most of the time because of the pandemic), the National Guard has already been deployed.
I'm tired of this shit. We as a country have never really dealt with the fundamental racial disparities throughout our system. It's gotten so bad that when an opportunity arises to make things right, even by a little bit, it's fumbled. And I have to worry about whether my building on campus might be damaged by a crowd that includes many of my friends. I have to worry about my friends working downtown, either back home near the university or here; will they encounter violence from people using the protests as an excuse to riot? From the police? From the National Guard?
And you know what? I have no business feeling this way. Not really, anyway. I'm a white heterosexual cis-male. I'm a walking billboard for what unintentional white privilege looks like. I get tired of things because I'm worried a riot might break out many miles from where I sit; African American teenagers get tired of being wary of every police officer they encounter, knowing there's a greater likelihood that they'll be shot ton the false theory that they're armed. I worry that the riots will disrupt my travel and make my community look bad; people of color have to worry about how - not whether, but how - their ethnic background will hold them back every day.
When I was a kid, my parents had the "police talk" with me. The police are our friends, I was told. If we're in trouble, if we're lost or something, we look for a police officer for help. We can trust them. Every other kid in my suburban neighborhood got the same talk. I was never told that the police might kill me if they mistook me for a criminal, or if they mistook my wallet for a Smith and Wesson.
So I look at the fact that I'm worried about how this will end almost as a point of shame. I'm safe where I am. I'm doing everything I can to promote equity and inclusion, both at my institution and in my field, so I can at least pretend I'm part of the solution, but why should I worry when my life isn't in any real jeopardy?
So I consciously try to direct my worry where it belongs - to my many friends of color, to my LGBTQ friends, to my friends who are immigrants, and - yes - to my friends in law enforcement, all of whom really are trying hard to rebuild the trust that should exist between every citizen and the police. I work to direct it to their families. It's really all I can do.
I try to turn my worry into real empathy - the kind that promotes positive change.
just wanted to say this.
"I'm old fashioned" and "that's how I was raised."
I'm tired of hearing these excuses for bigoted behavior.
I can understand that being brought up in an environment where racism was openly expressed might impress some racist attitudes on you. "That's how I was raised" would thus be a reasonable explanation for racist behavior. But it isn't an excuse. The second clause shouldn't be "so you're just going to have to deal with it;" it's "but I'm working to do better."
It's never been clear to me from which era those who claim to be "old fashioned" came. Racism and bigotry have been widely understood as character flaws for all 53 years I've resided on this planet. Although bigotry has sometimes been tolerated, it hasn't been extolled much. And though we're all apt to look with nostalgia at the world of our youth, that shouldn't keep us from understanding that progress, overall, has been a good thing.
Just my thoughts. I've run into more than one bigot over the past several weeks who tried to weasel out of his or her predicament by referring to the past as though it's a good thing.
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