Winter 2001-2002
From the editor
As this issue of CLA Today goes to press, we're still reeling from September 11. Whatever we believe is our nation's proper course of action in these perilous times, we are united in our grief-not only over the loss of thousands of lives, but over the bursting of that precious but fragile bubble of presumed American invulnerability.
On campus, as elsewhere that day, people gathered, hushed and horrified, around TVs, radios, and computer monitors. Over my vacation retreat on Lake Superior's North Shore, the morning sky was bluer even than the sky over Manhattan; and the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, even Minneapolis's IDS Tower, seemed a world away.
That far-away world popped my bright blue bubble in the most unlikely of places, a small cafe in Tofte, Minn. There I found tourists and locals, young people and old, hikers and airstreamers, most of them far removed from their daily routines, staring transfixed at a flickering TV screen, where the signature twin towers of that magnificent and stalwart New York skyline burst into flames over, and over, and over... and then cascaded like charred cracker crumbs into the streets below.
"It's like a movie," someone whispered. "It's unbelievable," said another. Many held their hands over their mouths--a gesture psychologists say is a universal expression of shock.
The "movie" already had a title: "America Under Attack." And it had a soundtrack and logo. And instant commentary. No need to channel flip. Every network was broadcasting the same endless loop of horrific reality bytes, edited for heart-stopping dramatic impact.
Of course it was not a movie. And the mediagenic horror delivered into our living rooms with such ghastly urgency was just the beginning. This was not an isolated calamity but a historical, and historic, tidal wave, washing away everything we knew and forever changing our psychological, cultural, and political landscape. We couldn't just grieve and move on, because what died that day was our vision of a world that was safe and and reasonably secure, if not inviolable. Refracted in the edited-for-TV world that inscribed its searing images indelibly into our consciousness, that world would die a thousand more deaths before all was said and done.
As I headed south on 35W, friends and colleagues were turning to each other for support, and turning their grief, fear, and hunger for knowledge into opportunities for teaching and learning. They were sharing information, groping toward understanding, finding some measure of solace in the knowledge that is, after all, a kind of power.
They were, in short, doing what College of Liberal Arts (CLA) people do every day, but now with laser-like focus: searching for answers in the annals of philosophy and history, in texts both ancient and modern, spanning East to West: in the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead; in the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter; in the words and images of people from New York to Beijing, Tel Aviv to Kabul; and in disciplines across CLA.
That effort would be led, as always, by our remarkable faculty. They, and their students, are what this issue is about.
Andrea Berlin, Classical and Near Eastern Studies, tells stories of daily life
Fernando Arenas, Spanish and Portuguese, knows the importance of a multi-cultural education
Elaine Tyler May, American Studies, lives and teaches history
Eric Weitz, History, answers call to U
Daniel Kelliher, Political Science, gets personal
Madelon Sprengnether, English and Creative Writing, scholar meets storyteller
Thomas Rose, Art, invokes architecture and memory through sculpture
Patricia Frazier, Psychology, finds hope in tragedy