Princeton University

Description: In recent years we have seen our national security landscape shift before our eyes; especially following the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the country’s response. But to truly understand “modern history/current events” such as our prosecution of the War on Terror, the creation and role of a Department of Homeland Security, issues such as warrantless wiretapping and extraterritorial detention, we must reach back in history and review how our Constitutional Democracy has reacted during times of either real or perceived threat to its security. A Primary question – does the protection of civil liberties adversely impact National Security?

 

There is an ageless tension between National Security and Liberties, including many arguments discussing their trade-offs. The course is designed to examine this question through the lens of US historical encounters with perceived or real threats and how the democracy responded to enhance security. Was security enhanced? Did liberty suffer? Did the pendulum swing too far? Our focus will largely be on the First and Fourth Amendments as yardsticks of the Democracy’s health. Key historic events; from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Espionage Act and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans will give us some of our answers. We will then see that practices initiated post 9/11 were not “new”, but natural government reactions as it reaches out to protect national security based on claims of earlier successes.

 

The other key thread woven through our study will be the role of intelligence in a constitutional democracy. Why was the USA the last modern democracy to establish a peacetime intelligence service? Issues of secrecy are paramount and add to both sides of the debate in which we will engage- is secrecy compatible with our democracy; or simply a necessary evil as one seeks to protect the nation? Are sufficient safeguards in place to provide oversight to the intelligence activities in which we must engage? Are issues such as Privacy and Freedom of Information respected and defended? Has their fate shifted with the times.... or administrations? Their survival, however, is assured.

 

The plot thickens as we include the behavior of the 3 branches of government in our drama and their roles with respect to intelligence as well as their responsibilities to the democracy. Do we have examples of an over-reaching executive and should we be concerned? What benefits or risks attend such behavior? Ethical issues, such as questions regarding covert action and elements of the prosecution of the War on Terror must be raised.

 

Finally, we will examine the largest reorganization of the US government since WWII in the context of our Constitutional Democracy, national security and intelligence as a response to 9/11. Did we get it right? Is the PATRIOT ACT as evil as some contend? Read it in class and decide for yourself. How has the Obama Administration responded to the Intelligence and National Security framework that it inherited? Could changes made by the current administration undo National Security safeguards put in place by the prior Administration? How has President Obama engaged controversial issues left by his predecessor: increased secrecy, alleged torture, Guantanamo and others. Join this course and join the debate to ageless, but relevant, questions.

 

First Lecture will focus on the establishment of the US Intelligence Community within our Constitutional Democracy, the motivation for its creation, Pearl Harbor, including the foundational statutes and reforms that would remain in place through the Cold War and only be altered by another surprise attack on the US: September 11, 2001. We will examine the Intelligence Community’s early years culminating with the turbulent times of the civil rights movement, Viet Nam and the attendant scandals and fallout domestically. We will review key statutes, practices, successes and failures. During this timeframe we see the Executive enamored of covert action, Congress abdicating its role as overseer and an uninformed public.

 

Second Lecture will examine the US Law Enforcement and Intelligence Communities exceeding their charters in the name of National Security. Abuses will be brought to light and we will discuss how the Constitutional Democracy attempted a “course correction”: The Church and Pike Commissions. The role of the executive and Legislative branches will come into play significantly. What could be considered as one of the “failures” leading to 9/11 was put in place during this period. We will see the price paid for “liberty over security” as the pendulum swung in response to revelations of domestic spying. For those reading the news, this will sound familiar and we will return to the topic in our Fourth Lecture.

 

Third Lecture will review the Intelligence Community’s role and evolution during the remainder of the Cold War, shifts in threats including proliferation, terrorism and global organized crime and the US response. Key elements of oversight gain traction through legislation. This is a convenient time to review our concerns regarding classified information and freedom of the press and impact of leaks. This period witnesses a recognition of the “People’s Right to Know” and right to privacy on several fronts. We will examine the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the latter governing wiretapping and eavesdropping. As you anticipate, we have not heard the last of FISA.

 

Fourth Lecture will analyze the Government’s response to the end of the Cold War and to 9/11 in terms of its need for a national security/intelligence apparatus, reforms put in place and a review of their respective successes or failures. Issues such as tools and techniques to fight the War on Terror will be discussed while keeping our eyes on the Constitutional Democracy. Has the controversial PATRIOT ACT enhanced security in a manner that justifies its perceived impact on civil liberties? Was the President “right” to authorize NSA to conduct wiretapping without legal (FISA) warrants? Do we blame the press for leaking the program or laud it for enhancing public debate. Finally, we will move to issues and challenges inherited by the Obama Administration.

 

Friday, September 25, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, October 2, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, October 9, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, October 16, 2009, 11 am -12:30 pm

 

Location:  To Be Determined

 

Other Information: Diane Snyder has 25 years experience as an intelligence officer and has worked in every major field available to an intelligence professional: as a scientist, analyst, technical operations officer, and advisor on statutory interpretations of various intelligence authorities. In 1995 she became the first CIA officer-in-Residence at Princeton University and is currently in the Department of Politics, Ms. Snyder pursued a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics. Her curriculum at Princeton focuses on the functioning of intelligence in a constitutional democracy and the relationship of intelligence to policymaking, law enforcement and national security. She was Senior Technical Representative to the Arms Control Intelligence Staff in Vienna during 1990-92 and held a diplomatic post as the United States’ Scientific Advisor to the International Science and Technology Center, Moscow, during 1998-2000. Early in her career at the CIA, she directed cutting-edge research and development and delivered the first artificial intelligence system to the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. In 1989, Ms. Snyder was recognized by former Secretary of State James Baker for her contribution to a highly sensitive project involving diplomatic security. Professor Snyder’s experience also includes service as Director of Research, David Sarnoff Research Center and Senior Intelligence Analyst at The RAND Corporation.

 

Description: The subject of this course is the design of medieval manuscripts, which comprises such topics as their format, layout, script, decoration, illustration, and bindings. Throughout the Middle Ages, the makers of medieval manuscripts experimented, sometimes flamboyantly, with all the components of their design, reconfiguring the book in startlingly original ways. The thesis of these lectures is that radical innovations in medieval book design are invariably about meaning: that books and prominent elements of book design define and articulate some of the profoundest concerns and beliefs of their patrons, makers and users, hence the title, “The Shape of Meaning in Medieval Books.” The three lectures treat developments concentrated particularly in the early, the high and the late Middle Ages, which I have characterized with the headings “Word, Diagram and Picture.” At issue are fundamental questions concerning such matters as the nature of the Word of God, the institutional Church’s understanding of the essential order of the universe, and changing relationships between word and image, art and experience, artifice and different orders of reality in the late Middle Ages. Problems of this magnitude provoked monks and other theologians, scribes, painters and others involved in the production of illuminated manuscripts to re-think the nature of the book and its component parts -- in effect, to come up with new conceptions of the book and the word, and new ways to embellish both through decoration and illustration, which is to say, to transform and re-invent the elements and the syntax of the hand-produced book. Focusing on many of the greatest and best-known medieval manuscripts, the classes are intended to introduce a diverse audience to major themes in the history of thought during the Middle Ages, to the changing relationships between word and image during this period of a millennium, and to the role of the arts in giving form to these ideas.

 

Class 1, which has the title “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the word,” from the opening words of St. John’s Gospel), treats the early Middle Ages, when books were radically reconfigured in order to give material form to the notions, central to a Christian view of the universe, that Scripture is divine in substance and reference, and that God acts and reveals the history and meaning of the universe through the Word (in his account of the Incarnation, St. John speaks of “the word made flesh”). In this class I consider the principal design innovations which enabled the makers of biblical and liturgical books from the early Middle Ages to convey the majesty, power, mystery, and sanctity of Scriptural language in arrestingly direct visual form.

 

Class 2 which has the title “Diagrams: The Architecture of Thought and Meaning,” I turn from the Word to the Diagram, from the early to the high Middle Ages, that is, from the period of the Christianization of Western Europe to a later period, when the established institutional Church was concerned to define and articulate its notions of the scheme of things. I explore many of the profound ways in which the makers of medieval manuscripts employed diagrams and principles of diagrammatic order to make new claims about the physical, historical, philosophical and moral order of the universe, all notions that were central to the beliefs, the belief systems, and the concerns of the institutional church.

 

Class 3, entitled “Picturing Meaning,” considers the impact of pictures and pictorial ideas on the design of medieval manuscripts during the late Middle Ages and the ways these developments concern meaning. By the late Middle Ages Christian belief and practice were reformulated to address a diverse and growing audience in an increasingly urban society. Christian truths were to be embraced now by experience as well as by belief, and in a striking embodiment of the adage “seeing is believing,” pictures and pictorial ideas came to have novel prominence as a means of guiding the users of medieval manuscripts to the leaps of thought and imagination deemed necessary to achieve a new and deepened appreciation of the character of the sacred and the mysteries of the faith. All of the elements of the book were radically, indeed flamboyantly, reconfigured during this period as the shapes of some manuscripts became a kind of image; script sometimes became decoration or one of several illusionistically treated elements or fields on the page; and decoration and illustration were intermixed in diverse and frequently witty fashions. The same painters who creatively broke down the barriers between the different components of the book eventually addressed the ultimate pictorial barrier, namely, that between the work of art and its beholder. In their works, illusionistic painting became a vital means of dissolving the boundaries between art and life, which is to say, that it made novel demands on viewers’ consciousness of the nature of works of art and of their relation to them.

 

Class 4 we move from lectures and projected images to examine actual medieval manuscripts. The last class is conceived as a workshop to introduce participants to the materials and methods of manuscript production, the physical and aesthetic characteristics of hand-produced, medieval books.

Friday, October 23, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, October 30, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, November 6, 2009, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Friday, November 13, 2009, 11 am -12:30 pm

 

Location: To Be Determined

 

Other information: James H. Marrow is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Princeton University and Honorary Keeper of Illuminated Manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, England). He is a specialist in late medieval art chiefly from northern Europe, with particular interest in illuminated manuscripts and questions of meaning in works of religious art. Widely published in these fields, he has also organized or contributed to major exhibitions of medieval manuscripts in the USA, Europe, and Australia. A member of the Visiting Committees of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, The Morgan Library and Museum, he is also a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the President of the Medieval Manuscript Society.