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Professor to give last lecture before retiring from Linfield

Posted by :jprokop On : April 30, 2013
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Eugene Gilden, professor of psychology, will be giving his last lecture about what he hopes the most important thing students learned from his classes was at 7 p.m. May 2 in T.J. Day Hall room 219.

The lecture will be partially autobiographical, as Gilden discusses how his interests started while he was an undergraduate student, how those interests influenced him and how different events contributed to those topics.

Gilden will also be focusing on social psychology and its affects on everyday life.

“The major thing that I’m interested in, and I think that I have explored some, is the way that very subtle kinds of influence turn out to be quite powerful in our lives,” Gilden said. “While human beings do have agency [and] some level of free will, we are a lot more influenced by things that we’re unaware of.”

Gilden has given numerous lectures before, but he finds it “nerve-wracking” to give this final lecture because it is a different type of audience, he said.

He won’t have time to establish a relationship with the audience, which he thinks is important when giving a lecture.

When asked to do the lecture, he was given wide latitude to talk about anything he wanted to, Gilden said.

Because of this, he has no idea if the audience will enjoy his final lecture, but he is still excited to see how students and faculty respond.

“Now all I have to do is execute it,” Gilden said.

 

Samantha Sigler/News editor

Samanthar Sigler can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com.

 

Professor discusses uses of multimedia journalism

Posted by :jprokop On : March 29, 2013
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A Penn State professor visited Linfield on March 19 to lecture about the continued importance of good writing and reporting in multimedia journalism.

Professor Russell Frank centered his lecture on a dynamic story published in December by The New York Times titled “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.”

Frank said the reaction to the story was overwhelmingly positive, with some people wondering if this type of multimedia story was the future of journalism.

“This story caused a sensation,” Frank said.

The “Snow Fall” story, written by John Branch, is about an avalanche at Stevens Pass in Washington in 2010. The story included embedded videos, slideshows and motion graphics.

But Frank’s lecture did not focus on the multimedia or aesthetic aspects of the story. Instead, he used the story as an example for the importance of good journalistic research and writing.

“We have to write beautifully and gather information…the easiest thing to do for a reader is to stop reading,” Frank said.

Frank found the praise for “Snow Fall” merited, but he also thought it was strange that many reactions to the story suggested this was the first type of multimedia and interactive story ever published.

To counter this sentiment, Frank proceeded to draw attention to the “Blackhawk Down” story written by Mark Bowden in 1997 for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The story increased the Philadelphia Inquirer’s circulation by 20,000 during the month it was published, and Bowden parlayed the success into a book and a 2001 Hollywood movie of the same name.

Bowden’s story had embedded audio and links to video as well, and this story was published more than 15 years ago, when the Internet was far from what it is today.

Frank noted that the writing in “Snow Fall” was excellent, and far more aesthetically beautiful and technologically advanced. However, the “Blackhawk Down” story was incredible for its writing, just like all good long-form stories. Frank closed his lecture with this point, and said journalists should continue to focus on writing as much as possible because of its continued importance.

When asked after the lecture as to why “Snow Fall” was published this way, rather than a story about a larger event or theme, Frank reminded the audience that the story is dramatic, and dramatic stories are popular.

He acknowledged the importance of this question in relation to long-form journalism, because of the need to spend resources wisely as newsrooms face harsh budget issues, predicting future events that will be possible long-form stories is not possible.

Frank was a newspaper reporter and editor for 12 years before his career at Penn State University. In addition to teaching journalism at Penn State, Frank is the education chairman on the board of directors of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and writes about journalism ethics, literary journalism and Internet folklore.

Tyler Bradley/Sports columnist

Tyler Bradley can be reached at linfieldreviewsports@gmail.com.

Professor shares insight into ‘why we war’

Posted by :jprokop On : March 27, 2013
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A guest lecturer and professor discussed why humans tend to cluster together in groups, also known as friend groups, communities and countries during a lecture on the biology behind why we war March 18 in Ice Auditorium.

Doctor Jeff Victoroff, associate professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at University of Southern California, said we do this as people to survive. He gave an example of early humans working in groups to take down wooly mammoths.

As he continued on with his lecture he elaborated on how we instinctually feel about others who aren’t in our groups.

“The creatures that will help me survive are my group,” Victoroff said. “Everyone else is a threat.”

We know this to be true from a lime mold called Dictyoselim Discoidem, which lives on the sea floor. Many of these amoebas have a gene called csA that can be detected by others of the same species. When food is in short supply the amoebas with the gene come together to form a slug group, in which 80 percent of the amoebas will survive. Those without the gene, who are different from the group, are excluded and will die of starvation.

Humans don’t have such a gene that can be recognized by everyone, but we do have traits that help us belong to groups.

To be in a group, we must appear trustworthy, and there are two ways to be trustworthy: in-born or acquired.

In-born trustworthiness is our chemical make up, our skin color and other things of that nature, aspects we cannot control. Acquired trustworthiness is our appearance, our behavior and our beliefs.

Once we have become trustworthy to the group, we start trusting the others who are in this group. Once this association has occurred, our brain creates a chemical called Oxytocin, making us feel this trustworthiness.

The reason we go to war is a two-part answer: We want to prove our trustworthiness and are threatened by others who aren’t in our group.

The ultimate way to prove our trustworthiness is through altruism. Altruism is essentially the willingness to die for one’s group. Those who perform this act are more likely to be genealogically fit, and continue on with their family tree.

Sex is often a motivator to go to war. Soldiers have the idea that they will be more sexually attractive by joining the military, and thus continuing on through their offspring.

Today, this connection still goes through our brain, but may not be the best way for many.

“This may have been perfect in the stone age,” Victoroff said. “But not in our diverse culture today.”

Chris Haddeland/Senior reporter

Chris Haddeland can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com.

Speaker tells story of unlikely friendship, love

Posted by :jprokop On : March 21, 2013
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Guest speaker Frederick Tubach shares with Linfield and McMinnville community members a story of friendship, showing how people can grow and overcome hardships during his lecture “The Legacy of War: Story as Bridge, Liberation and Transformation” on March 12.

Olivia Marovich/Staff writer
Guest speaker Frederick Tubach shares with Linfield and McMinnville community members a story of friendship, showing how people can grow and overcome hardships during his lecture “The Legacy of War: Story as Bridge, Liberation and Transformation” on March 12.

Connecting the personal stories from people affected by war is one of the ways guest speaker Frederick Tubach believes that we can grow as a civilization and overcome extreme hardships.“Bernie and I were just two individuals, who happened to come from different sides of the Holocaust,” Tubach said when he visited Linfield on March 12.

Tubach and “Bernie,” Bernat Rosner, wrote the book “An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust” about their childhoods during the Nazi occupation.

Tubach was born in California in 1930 to German parents, and after the death of his mother, his family moved back to Germany where he spent his childhood in the midst of World War II. Rosner is a Hungarian Jew who grew up at the same time as Tubach, but under different circumstances.

“As he recited his story to me, he sounded like a lawyer,” recalls Tubach of Rosner’s detachment from his past. Rosner was sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp at the height of Hitler’s Holocaust, a genocide in which he lost his entire family.

“Bernie said that religious thoughts did not help,” Tubach said of his friend’s process of dealing with the memories of one of the most notorious Nazi death camps. “He did reconnect on some level, but he was never a firm believer again.”

After returning to Germany, Tubach’s father joined the Nazi Party and fought for the Germans during the war, while Tubach stayed home with his stepmother and her family.

“The Nazi’s attempted to obliterate the value of the individual life for what they believed was the higher good,” Tubach said.

As a member of the Nazi Youth Camp during his childhood, Tubach remembers his childhood as a time of confusion and contradiction under the Nazi regime. Years later, when he discovered the truth of what happened during those years, he found it “incomprehensible.”

“This was not the war I experienced as a child and teenager, but I came to understand it as an adult,” Tubach said. “A genocide had happened in the middle of Europe, but I did not realize it until the Americans arrived. They put up a poster of the Warsaw Ghetto to show us ‘what we Germans had done.’”

To reconcile his childhood memories with the war he learned about as an adult, Tubach believes that there are two ways to experience any conflict.

“There is a war of personal experience and there is war as a grand design,” Tubach said. “I saw war through the eyes of women— mothers for sons, wives for husbands, sisters for brothers.”

After returning to America and renouncing his German citizenship, Tubach attended the University of California at Berkeley and later became a professor. Attempting to put the past behind him, it was not until his wife ran into an old friend and decided to have her and her Hungarian-born husband over for dinner.

“It is such an American story,” Tubach joked of his chance meeting with Rosner. The two began a friendship based on sharing their stories from their time in Europe.

“World War II was two generations behind us. However, the past still weighed so heavily on our minds.”

Thirteen years into their friendship, the two decided to write a book about their pasts.

“The story offers no solution, but the hope that one day more bridge stories will emerge in conflicts like Israel and Palestine, the Sunni and the Shiite, India and Pakistan,” Tubach said of his book.

Tubach’s visit is part of the PLACE: Legacies of War lecture series at Linfield, which will host a number of events this semester.

Olivia Marovich/Staff writer

Olivia Marovich can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com.

Professor shares research findings on media

Posted by :jprokop On : March 21, 2013
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Joel Ray/Senior photographer Michael Huntsberger, assistant professor of mass communication, spoke with students and faculty about community media in the 21st century on March 13 in Riley Hall.

Joel Ray/Senior photographer
Michael Huntsberger, assistant professor of mass communication, spoke with students and faculty about community media in the 21st century on March 13 in Riley Hall.

Media is moving into the future and a Linfield professor has experienced the changes along the way.

Michael Huntsberger, assistant professor of mass communication taught an audience about the three sectors of mass media during  a March 13 lecture in Riley Hall.

Huntsberger was in the communications business long before he was a professor at Linfield College and was able to share firsthand experiences with audience members. His first experience in media was when he started as a freelancer in 1980 in community radio.

After receiving a faculty development grant in fall 2011, Huntsberger began a long term research project studying how community media has changed and evolved to a participatory media in the 21st century.  At the onset of the lecture, Huntsberger explained that the work he has done on the project so far is still in its preliminary stages.

One of the main themes that spread throughout the lecture was how the eight mass media trends have changed and evolved in the 21st century. Over time, these trends have changed to encompass media users more directly. One key change that Huntsberger noted is that users are able to change the flow of news because of technology like the iPhone.

“I decide for me what news is. My definition of news can be completely different from yours,” Huntsberger said.

There are three sectors of mass media: commercial, public service and community. Each of these have certain areas of specialty when it comes to how they broadcast, but as with most media in the 21st century, the lines between the three are starting to blur.

Most of Huntsberger’s research has been in the community media sector. According to Huntsberger, community media is about giving citizens the opportunity to form a connection with each other. A main reason this occurs is because of the core belief that community members volunteer to create their own content.

While Huntsberger is still compiling qualitative data through original case studies, he has been able to draw some initial conclusions about community media.

Through observations and initial research, Huntsberger has found that the service goals of community media strive to provide people with cultural dissemination, language preservation, community development and civic engagement opportunities.

These four opportunities will play a key role in the next stages of his research, especially the preservation of minority languages. He hopes to present his findings in 2014 at a conference in Tokyo.

Various members of the Linfield community noted before and after the lecture that many members of the Department of Mass Communication have given talks this semester.

Senior Nic Miles, a mass communication major, feels he has benefited from being able to learn from the mass communication-based lectures this spring.

“The department is on a roll with lectures. It is refreshing hearing multiple lectures from multiple professors about a topic we study every day,” Miles said.

Julian Adoff/Multimedia editor

Julian Adoff can be reached at linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com.

Professor hosts lecture against animals as mascots

Posted by :jprokop On : December 3, 2012
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Joel Ray/Senior photographer

Joan Forry, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, discussed with students the colleges that use live animals as mascots, and why students should instead find a different way to represent themselves.

On Nov. 29, Joan Forry, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, presented her academic lecture “Against Animals as Sports Team Mascots.”

Forry received her undergraduate degree from Heidelberg University, home of the Student Princes, and received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Temple University, which has the mascot Hooter the Owl, in 2008.

Forry’s lecture asked the question: “How many colleges and universities have mascots?” and “How many animal mascots are used?”

There are 33 live animal mascots in the
Division-I schools of the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference alone. For the purposes of her lecture, Forry focused primarily on Louisiana State University’s live animal mascot, Mike the Tiger.

“I’ve been interested in animal ethics for a while,” Forry said. “What drew me to the topic was Mike the Tiger. I’ve been following it for a while.”

The first Mike the Tiger was purchased for $750 in 1935 from the Little Rock Zoo. Fans used to be encouraged to pound on the cage to make him roar, but the school was asked to cease after complaints of animal cruelty. After, there were reports of the Tiger being poked with an electric cattle prod to make him roar, which was also shut down.

In the early 2000s, during the age of Mike the Fifth, LSU was ordered to improve his environment on campus. In 2005, a $3 million habitat was built on LSU’s grounds.

The problem with live animal mascots is that the animals might go through direct harm, which she defined as “individual animals that receive inhumane treatment” and indirect harm, which is “symbolic harm through misunderstanding and misrepresentation.” However, according to Forry, “It’s not entirely clear what constitutes harm.”

One example of explicit harm toward animals in the name of athletics was when an unnamed high school in Iowa that was playing against the “Golden Eagles” spray painted a chicken gold and had the young athletes stomp it to death to inspire school spirit.

“I don’t have it entirely fleshed out,” Forry said when asked about the argument against costumed animal mascots. “I think it depends on the body of knowledge that surrounds the mascots. There might be some kind of misrepresentation.”

“Most mascots are offensive somehow,” Forry said when asked about other mascots. “So, we should find another way to represent ourselves.”

Paige Jurgensen

Staff writer

Paige Jurgensen can be reached at
linfieldreviewnews@gmail.com.