Adina Roskies, an assistant professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College, discusses the limitations and potential for neuroscience in the study of free will in a talk titled Freedom Despite Mechanism at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 25, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom, Room G52, Alumni Walk.

Sponsored by the philosophy and psychology departments with support from the Mellon Innovation Fund, this lecture is open to the public at no cost.

Roskie, a member of Dartmouth’s philosophy department since 2004, has pursued a career in both philosophy and neuroscience. She simultaneously earned master’s degrees in both disciplines at the University of California, San Diego, and received a doctorate in neuroscience in 1995. From 1997 to 1999 she held the position of senior editor at the neuroscience journal Neuron.

In 1999 Roskies returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to complete a second doctorate in philosophy. Her research topics include philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and ethics. She was a member of the McDonnell Project in Neurophilosophy, a group aiming to integrate philosophical thought with neurobiological research.

Roskies recently received a fellowship by the Australian Research Council, and has worked as a visiting professor in the philosophy department at the Australian National University.

Professor of German Denis Sweet launched an experiential Short Term course in 2008 that “really deals with one’s self, one’s place in the world and one’s place in society.” He offers the life-changing course once again in Short Term 2009. See a multimedia presentation about the experiences shared by Sweet and his students in spring 2008.

View the multimedia presentation of Professor Sweet’s 2008 course.

It manifests very much in certain situations.  For example, I tend to “get Buddhist” when I lose things.  Impermanence man.  And usually I can let things go that way.  However, this year for the first time I lost something that no amount of Buddhist rationalizing could temper the sense of loss I was feeling.  The object that was lost: a fake fur stole.  Now this was a fake fur mass that one drapes around one’s neck and it creates a luxurious fur collar.  It made me feel about 75 years old and glamorous.  In short, I loved it.  But anyway, I mistakenly took this fur stole out with me to a show on a Friday night.  A tip for all Bates students: don’t bring anything you like out with you on a weekend night.  It will be gone.  And you will be sad.  Like I was when I couldn’t find my fur stole after the show.  I lamented the entire night and into the morning.  When I woke up still depressed, I decided a simple acceptance of impermanence wouldn’t cut it.  Buddhism wasn’t enough.  I needed to feel the sweet warmth of that stole around my neck, not find the Middle Way.  So I hopped in my car to drive over to the place where the concert was held for maybe it wasn’t stolen and I would find it and could move on with my life.  As I was driving there, I saw a mass of fur by the side of the road.  It was my stole!  I can’t tell you how happy I was!  I leapt out of the car and put it immediately around my neck.  It smelled a bit as I had just taken it off the ground and it had been outside all night but it was my stole.  It was great. [More...]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sweet says: “A quarter-century of teaching at Bates has shown me how adept Bates students are at articulating abstract notions in academic papers. But at the same time they remain teenagers seeking their way in life. Often, I find, there is a profound disconnect between the two. So I wanted to provide a venue for learning and for experiencing some things that are essential to the development of young people, yet which they are otherwise not getting in academic courses.”

So I am the Girl Talk of the thesis world.  I do mash-ups.  That’s my thing.  I make my living off of taking other people’s work and smushing it together into something on which I put my name (not without giving due credit of course).  But really, I am taking the thought of a 13th century Japanese Zen philosopher and comparing it with a contemporary feminist thinker of technoscience.  That’s like combining “The Hallelujah Chorus” with Missy Elliott.  And, I can groove to it.  Without getting hit in the head or knocked on the ground like the recent Girl Talk show here at Bates.

But the most interesting thing about the comparison of my thesis to mash-up music is that the critiques of both ventures are the same.  Concerning mash-up music, debates have been circulating concerning the question of whether a mash-up song should be considered new or not.  Is a mash-up song authentic?  Is it “real” music?  Or is it simply two previously written songs placed together into something that is less novel than it is a rip-off.  And what does it mean that computers are so fancy these days that any Joe-shmo can take two of his favorite songs and layer them together?  Does that count as authentic?  Or does one need to have a certain knowledge about music, about both the songs, about how sounds and beats and rhythms work together?

I face some of those similar questions in my thesis writing process.  Can what I produce be considered “original” or “new”?  What about authentic?  Am I just taking from others?

Unfortunately, because Girl Talk just needs a record deal and I need not to be torn limb from limb by feminists, I have to make sure my methods in this process are unassailable.  While thinking two songs are awesome and then having the artists approve their use works for Girl Talk I can’t exactly put that same approach into my methods: I think Dogen and Donna Haraway are awesome and their works are published so I’ll make sure to cite them properly.  That won’t fly.  I need to contextualize these authors’ thoughts in their specific historical times.  Which means I’ve read A LOT about 13th century Japan and A LOT about America post-WWII.  And what have I learned so far?  I have learned what makes what I’m doing so difficult and GirlTalk has no idea.

The problem with what I am attempting to do is that I am alive.  Yes, I’ve discussed this with my advisor, this is actually real.  The problem is that I’m alive.  How do I fix that problem and still finish my thesis?  However, this is a problem that all historians supposedly face- we’re alive and the people we’re talking about often aren’t.  So we can’t ask the Coolios for permission to use track 13.  I cant ask Dogen if he’s okay with what I’m doing because he’s dead.  And I can ask Donna Haraway- and maybe I will once I get a more solidified thesis idea but the fact of the matter is- I’m alive and Haraway’s alive and Dogen’s not and we make an odd threesome.

But I’m optimistic.  I’m learning a lot about both thinkers and the times in which they existed.  I also learned that I hate Ronald Regan.  So here I am: the mash-up philosopher who’s making friends and influencing people.  And hating on Ronald Regan.  Only with thesis.

Shhhh,
Steph

In a Bates classroom, author Denis Sweet, professor of German, is lost in "unthought."

It was Short Term 2008, the debut of my course, “Wake Up!” The rain was pouring down in the woods of southwestern Massachusetts, pattering hard on the blue tarp that I was crouched under.

It had been pouring rain like this all day. And it was cold. I hadn’t eaten, or rather, I had deliberately not eaten. I was fasting from dawn to dawn. I had put on all my clothes, including the rain gear, and had crawled into the sleeping bag to try to fend off the cold (but not to sleep; the point was to keep watch through the night and greet the first light of dawn). But every hour or so, I would struggle out of the sleeping bag and methodically peel off all the layers of clothing. I had visitors, you see, and needed to begin another hunt for fat, colorful dog ticks. After 13 I stopped counting.

What, for goodness’ sake, was going on here?

For me and the 12 Bates students scattered about in the woods who had signed up for the course, the 24-hour solo fast in the Berkshires was the intentional part. Everything else was a freebie from the unknown. And the most curious thing of all, when it was all over, I felt a genuine gratitude for all of the experience, including the cold, rain, and ticks. They had taught me something unexpected and invaluable. I’ll come back to this.

A chain of such experiential moments — the solo fast being just one of the more salient examples — stretched from one end of Short Term to the other. As far as I knew, nothing quite like “Wake Up!” had ever been tried at Bates before. It was a hybrid that wedded rigorous academic inquiry with direct, personal, unmediated experiential learning. Each of the halves reinforced the other.

In a symbolic ritual, Alice Thompson '10 of Pittsburgh, Pa., has her face washed by Kate FitzGerald '10 of Chilmark, Mass., at Bradbury Mountain State Park.

I find that we live in an intensely cerebral culture. One Buddhist thinker, when asked what the problem was for Westerners, responded simply, “Lost in thought, lost in thought.” Rather than living in the moment and paying close attention to phenomena as they occur, we often recycle habitual narratives. The stories in our heads become the “reality” we inhabit. We become lost in thought. Our day-to-day lives are characterized by what I call automatisms: deeply ingrained habits of mind that act as perceptual filters and subconscious pigeon-holers.

Buddhism calls it sleeping or sleep-walking. Waking up (hence the course title) requires a lot of attention, mindfulness, and determination, through age-old practices like daily yoga and Vipassana (insight) meditation to the solo fast.

In Vipassana, one learns to quiet the mind. In the beginning, a 20-minute session in our classroom on the second floor of Dana Chemistry was an ordeal. Thoughts, memories, desires, anticipations, worries, preoccupations jumped helter-skelter through the students’ minds (Buddhists call it “monkey mind”). Five weeks later, after a lot of practice, these same students commented that our last 20-minute sit together seemed more like five. They had grown far more centered and mindful.

We spent a week at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies engaged in a study retreat. Silence during certain hours of the day was combined with several hours of sitting and walking meditation followed by a three-hour seminar run by the Barre staff. Soon, a momentum was at work in the course, spanning the practices of furthering self-awareness, tying them into critical reflections on our relationship to nature, culminating in greater social commitment and heightened awareness of and interaction with others in the larger society.

A quarter-century of teaching at Bates has shown me how adept Bates students are at articulating abstract notions in academic papers. But at the same time they remain teenagers seeking their way in life. Often, I find, there is a profound disconnect between the two. So I wanted to provide a venue for learning and for experiencing some things that are essential to the development of young people, yet which they are otherwise not getting in academic courses.

Here’s an example. Two by two, students went into the woods to slowly, mindfully, wash the face of their partner by dipping a washcloth in the water of the little brook running there, and symbolically washing off the social kinds of masks we employ vis-à-vis each other. The ritual was a way of breaking through habit and comfort, and coming to realize that all of us bear these masks, whether we’re aware of it or not. A kind of gentleness and tenderness and awareness of oneself and the person right in front of you came to the fore.

So, is this what should I be doing as a Bates professor? Is this what I should be offering my students? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger talks about creating a situation where learning can take place. My task then, at least as I see it, is to create a situation where intense learning can take place in individuals. But this learning should also contribute to the needs of the larger democratic society, which surely requires an awake, critically aware, and engaged citizenry.

And those dog ticks I mentioned? They taught me humility, patience, limits, and the wonderful humor of the situation. A citizen needs those too.

By Dennis Sweet

Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The syllabus for Professor of German Denis Sweet’s Short Term course featured readings from, among others, Emerson (“Self-Reliance”), Thoreau (“Walking”), and Nhat Hanh (The Miracle of Mindfulness). For more course information go to http://abacus.bates.edu/~dsweet/wakeup/.

Multimedia story about Denis Sweet’s course http://www.bates.edu/x183709.xml.

Just some friends on Frye St outside a campus house

I am just getting back into blogging after a wild start to my senior year. My academic course load is really challenging this semester, but I am really happy with all of my classes. For instance, though I am a Religion major and a Philosophy minor, I registered to take an upper level History seminar on colonial America. It is a subject I wasn’t at all interested in or knew anything about. But all my friends who are History majors told me that Professor Hall was an amazing teacher. Though he was teaching a 100 level class this semester, I decided to take his 300 level seminar with only six other students. There has been tons of reading and writing assignments, but I have fallen in love with the material and the professor. That’s something special about Bates and the liberal arts experience. You don’t have to limit yourself to classes within your major, or even personal interests. And when you take classes outside of your realm of knowledge, why not sign up for the more demanding and smaller classes?

Enough about academics, let’s get to the good stuff. Coming from Kentucky, my parents and friends back home always ask me about the weather. Let’s get something clear: yes, the winters are cold. But the campus looks amazing with the changing seasons. With lots of rain this summer, the leaves are going through an amazing transformation this fall. 

-Graham

Check out these pictures some of my friends have been taking of areas on or just around the campus. These aren’t professional photos from admissions. These are really just some shots my buddies happened to snap this past week.

Ben messing around and doing some rock climbing this past weekend

Anne having a good time and sharing a laugh on the quad

Great shot of the leaves changing at a cemetery just a short walk from campus

Dan Doyle '72 and Deb Doermann Burch '72 reconnected at Reunion 1997 and began their collaboration on The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting shortly thereafter. They're seen here at their 30th Reunion in 2002.

Anyone who’s had children or been a child in the last 50 years understands that youth sports in America have evolved from neighborhood pick-up games to highly organized systems of national competition. In the process, parental involvement went from little or none to way too much.

As a result, says Dan Doyle ’72, executive director and founder of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island, overmanagement is now “the big core problem of sports parenting.”

“How many well-adjusted people do you know,” asks Doyle asks rhetorically, “who are the children of micromanaging parents?”

He believes the solution is not to retreat to the laissez-faire past but, instead, to provide sports parents with better tools. Hence The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting (Hall of Fame Press, 2008), a 475-page guidebook co-authored by Doyle and classmate Deborah Doermann Burch ’72, who may well become the tandem Dr. Spocks of raising student-athletes. In fact, the authors are at work on a second volume, dealing with persistent contemporary sports problems as specialization, performance-enhancing drugs, bullying and hazing, and fan behavior.

This volume starts off by offering a values-based philosophy of sports parenting, then follows with an overview of coaching and medical issues and approaches to specific challenges — such as playing on two teams at once. The book covers youth sports from local recreation leagues to collegiate athletics, the final third being devoted to issues related to college recruiting.

“We both could have benefited from having this book 20 or 30 years ago,” says Burch, who, following a divorce nearly a decade ago, has raised two athletic sons on her own in Durham, N.C.

Dan Doyle and his wife, Katherine, raised six children in West Hartford, Conn., where he coached the Trinity College men’s basketball team before founding the Institute for International Sport in 1986. Under the institute’s umbrella, Doyle has created, among other programs, the World Scholar-Athlete Games (the 2008 iteration featuring Colin Powell as keynote speaker), National Sportsmanship Day, and the New England Basketball Hall of Fame. He also helped Bates establish its own Scholar-Athlete Society in 2005.

So busy was Doyle with his many sports initiatives that when he began to write The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting in the early 2000s he decided he needed a collaborator. He turned to classmate Burch, with whom he’d reconnected at their 25th Bates Reunion in 1997. “I’d say we were just acquaintances as students,” she says. “He was the jock, and I was the history major.” But at that Reunion they found common ground in their shared interest and experiences around sports parenting, as Burch’s two boys, 7 and 11 at the time, were ramping up their time commitment to sports.

The collaboration brought together complementary expertise. While Doyle enjoys a reputation as one of the country’s premier sports educators, Burch has been on the front lines of sports parenting for years. An example of their collaboration is seen in one of the final chapters, “The Extraordinary Time Commitment of the Amateur Athlete.”

Burch came at the topic after researching the incredible time demands her son would face if he pursued NCAA Division I baseball. Doyle came at it from a time-management perspective after talking with the nation’s top college basketball players and coaches at his summer basketball camp. He developed a time profile of a typical Division I basketball player’s life and found that basketball takes as much as 53 hours a week in season and as much as 30 hours a week the rest of the year. Burch and Doyle conclude the chapter with this statement: “A student’s most valuable commodity is time, and your athlete must make educational decisions to prepare for a lifetime, not just the short-term bragging rights from athletic success.”

Doyle credits his Bates basketball coach, George Wigton, with instilling a sense of sports as a life lesson in self-reliance and proper decision-making. At the same time, though, Wigton didn’t cop a sports über allesattitude to his players. “He kept things in the right place,” says Doyle of his mentor Wigton, who also coached tennis at Bates. “He understood that there are things beyond basketball that are more important.”

Other formative forces were at work, too, during Doyle’s playing days. As co-captain of the Bates basketball team under Wigton, Doyle was present as a student observer at the creation of the New England Small College Athletic Conference in 1971. His sports philosophy is deeply informed by his NESCAC experience.

“Everywhere you go, NESCAC is held out as a beacon,” says Doyle. “It’s as respected a conference in terms of the student-athlete ideal as there is the United States.”

The authors’ expert understanding of NESCAC and the differences among Division I, II, and III sports comes through in the section on college recruiting. There, Doyle, who had four of his six children play college sports, and Burch, with recent sports-recruiting experience, guide parents through a process that’s complex regardless of division. Their advice is both practical (what kind of DVD to send to the coach) and philosophical, such as reasons a high-aspiring athlete might be better off aiming for less than the Division I stars.

The latter answer has to do with the opportunity cost of a Division I sports experience — such as not getting the academic preparation necessary to pursue serious graduate study — as well as misconceptions about the competitiveness of Division III.

“Many parents and high school athletes underestimate the skill level required to compete effectively in Division III,” writes Doyle, adding that some high school coaches, too, are biased toward Division I sports. The net message from Doyle and Burch is that pursuing a lower-division college can be a more balanced and rewarding option for students pursuing athletics and academics.

While the authors encourage parents to form a partnership with their children during the recruitment process, they also advice parents when to back off. Bates tennis coach Paul Gastonguay ’86, quoted on the topic of recruiting tennis players, notes that “I sometime have to educate parents that I’m much more interested in talking with [their] son or daughter. They’re the ones who are going to play for me, the ones I need to get to know.”

Parental over-management of young athletes creates challenges for coaches in both the recruiting and instructing realms, the most common one being their athletes’ lack of self-reliance — the ability to advocate for themselves, assess and address their own performances, and make the best use of their time once they arrive on campus.

“The biggest thing a coach can teach a first-year player is time management,” says Gastonguay. “The biggest thing I have to teach on the court is self-reliance. Kids coming in who are overtaught and overcoached have a hard time figuring out some very obvious things [about the way they are playing]. The more self-reliant the players are, the better we do as a team.”

“It’s all about time-management and learning self-diagnosis,” agrees Bates softball coach Gwen Lexow.

In terms of how The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting might help in this regard, Lexow says, “we need to start the process early, to have athletes take responsibility for their athletic careers at a very young age.”

Just as Doyle and Burch advocate in Chapter 2: “Parents…must allow their athlete the freedom to learn how to deal with problems without constant parental intervention.” And in an admonition italicized for emphasis, the authors speak beyond sports parenting to all parents, “Intrusive parenting stifles a child’s growing self-reliance.”

“On matters of playing time and strategy, stay out of it,” says Doyle, distilling the message of the encyclopedia to its essence. “On matters of health and ethics, you’re certainly within your rights. Every season there are going to be issues that challenge parents. Your job is to counsel your child, not to ride in on a big white horse and take care of them.”

By Edgar Allen Beem
Freelance writer Edgar Allen Beem’s most recent contribution to Bates Magazine was the story “Of Clams, Climate, and Colleagues,” about the pioneering Arctic climate research by Professor of Biology Will Ambrose.

The public is invited to attend free of charge.

The symposium will explore the Bible from literary, historical and religious perspectives. Conference organizers Robert Allison and Michael Caspi, both professors of religion, approached colleagues at many of Maine’s institutions of higher education where religion and literature are taught.

“We do have a problem nationwide where biblical scholars tend to discuss their findings with each other, but the public at large remains absent. We haven’t had a chance to explain what we’re doing.” Allison said.

By sharing their work with the public, the assembled Maine academics hope to demonstrate, according to Allison, “a sense of our obligation as scholars to the community around us to share some of our work, and to give the public a chance to question us.”

The conference will commence on Nov. 1 at 3:30 p.m., in the Benjamin E. Mays Center, with greeting remarks from President Donald W. Harward and Martha Crunkleton, dean of the faculty. The keynote address follows at 4 p.m., delivered by Susan Ackerman, associate professor of religion at Dartmouth, who will speak on Wine, Women and Song: Female Musicianship and the Vineyard Festivals of Ancient Israel.

A specialist in ancient near-Eastern history and religion, with particular focus on the relationships between the Israelite religion and religions of Israel’s neighbors, Ackerman is the author of Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (1992) and the forthcoming Warrior, Dancer, Seductress and Queen: Women in Judges and in Biblical Israel. She received her Ph.D from Harvard.

Following Ackerman’s lecture, Caspi will discuss The Narrative of Genesis 22 in Three Editions, in the Benjamin E. Mays Center at 5:15 p.m.

Sessions for the second and third days of the conference, Nov. 2 and 3, will be held in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

The Nov. 2 schedule of presentations, beginning at 9 a.m., includes:

• 9:15 a.m. – Frank K. Carner, professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, on Justice, Poetic Justice and the Resolution of Biblical Plots.
• 10:15 a.m. – Thomas R.W. Longstaff, Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies at Colby, on Sepphoris: The Ornament of the Galilee.
• 11:15 a.m. – Ann Johnston, professor of theological and religious studies at Bangor Theological Seminary, on The Isaiah Apocalypse: Vision of the Triumph of God.
• 2 p.m. – William Sayres, professor of literature at the University of Southern Maine, on Providence and Gratitude in ‘Persuasion’.
• 3 p.m. – Robert Allison, associate professor of religion at Bates and chair of Classical and Medieval Studies, on Images of light and Imagery of Ingestion: The Mysticism of the Gospel of Thomas.
• 4 p.m. – Burke O. Long, professor of religion at Bowdoin, on Scenery of Eternity: W.F. Albright and Ideas of ‘Holy Land’.
• 7 p.m. – A screening of Cecil B. DeMille’s film classic Samson and Delilah will be held in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, followed by commentary and discussion led by Irena Makarushka, associate professor of religion and department chair at Bowdoin.

The conference’s closing sessions, beginning at 9 a.m. on Nov. 3 include:

• 9:15 a.m. – John R. Wilson, professor of literature at the University of Maine, Orono, on Change the ‘The’ to ‘A’.
• 10.15 a.m. – Becky Kasper, professor of American religious history at St. Joseph’s College, on Old Testament History and the Problems of Biblical Theology.

To encourage dialogue, each scholarly presentation will be followed by questions from the audience. Conference programs have been distributed to local churches, synagogues and high schools.

Bates intends to host two additional symposia of Maine-area scholars in 1997, including Maine Remembers the Holocaust, in the spring, and God With the People, God and the People: An Interfaith Symposium, in the fall.