Notebook: April 16, 1997
Political Reality Check to Studies
Pat Schroeder, Dick Zimmer among teachers at Woodrow Wilson School this spring
At first, former New Jersey Congressman Richard Zimmer seemed outnumbered. During a panel discussion in February on the balanced-budget amendment, Zimmer's vigorous advocacy for the amendment was being refuted by former New Jersey Governor Jim Florio and dismissed by Alan Blinder '67, the Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics, as an idea that "flunks Economics 101." Even David Bradford, a professor of economics and public affairs known for his conservative views, said he could not endorse the balanced-budget amendment.
Among the audience, Zimmer's position won more support. When Florio suggested that arguments about generational equity were strictly "academic," a young man asked for a show of hands from those who believed that the Social Security system as it exists today will be around when they retire. Most did not raise a hand. "If you consider that academic," the young man said to Florio, "you have a different definition of academic than I do."
Such exchanges may be what Princeton administrators had in mind when they asked Zimmer, a Republican who represented the university community in Congress for six years, to join the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School after he lost his bid for the U.S. Senate in November.
Zimmer is part of an infusion of political practitioners who are teaching, lecturing, or offering their opinions during in-house debates at the Wilson School this spring. Another former member of Congress on campus this spring is Colorado's Patricia Schroeder, a Democrat, who has made speeches and teamed with Sara McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs, to teach a graduate course on Children, Families, and Public Policy.
Also in residence is David Windlesham, a principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, who is the Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor in the Wilson School. Lord Windlesham, the author of the three-volume Responses to Crime, is a former chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales and a former leader of the House of Lords. He is teaching an undergraduate task force titled The Politics of Gun Control in the U.S. and Britain.
And Brian Howe, a former deputy prime minister of Australia, is back in academia, where he began his career before serving in the Australian parliament for 18 years. Howe, whose public career included many achievements in social policy, has taken part in the course on Children, Families, and Public Policy as well as the gun-control task force. Both Howe and Windlesham are giving public lectures this semester, and Howe will teach his own course next year, according to Woodrow Wilson School Dean Michael Rothschild.
Bringing in practitioners who have spent much of their careers in elected or appointed office is not a new practice at the Woodrow Wilson School. The regular infusion of faculty members with perspectives from the "real world" of politics creates opportunities for other faculty to enlist them in class discussions or to engage them in debates outside of class, according to Rothschild.
Some practitioners, such as Schroeder, stay only a semester or two, while others remain longer. Schroeder will return to Washington after the semester ends to become president of the Association of American Publishers. Zimmer will continue to have a relationship with the university while practicing law locally.
Zimmer, in the balanced-budget debate, and Schroeder, in an early meeting of her class, brought to their audiences first-hand knowledge of how business occurs on Capitol Hill and how special interests can kill or alter a proposal that seems to have plenty going for it.
Schroeder and McLanahan dug into the 1991 final report from the National Commission on Children. McLanahan explained how the report's recommendations for improving children's lives would bring huge income transfers along the lines of the "allowances" offered by European countries. Schroeder, meanwhile, pointed out a significant political accomplishment: Along with the recommendations, the 1991 commission included "seven different ways to pay for them," she said.
Then she asked, "Who might oppose this?" And she noted how the funding proposals would add taxes or eliminate deductions for some powerful players: the alcohol industry, the restaurant association, and the tobacco lobby.
Students in Windlesham's task force on gun control will go to Capitol Hill themselves. The task force will meet with Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes '54 and Republican Representative James Leach '64, as well as Kent Marcus, the Justice Department official who has handled the implementation of the Brady Bill, which requires a seven-day waiting period to purchase a handgun. The experience will give students a chance to hear about the regional differences that affect each politician's vote.
The interaction between political veterans and academics informs the learning process for both students and faculty. In the poverty class, for example, McLanahan observed that President Clinton had served as a member of the National Commission on Children when he was governor of Arkansas but was the only one who did not vote on the final report. "Did he not want to appear too liberal?" McLanahan wondered. Schroeder's wry reply: "Only Bill Clinton can answer that."
Zimmer is not teaching a class this semester, but his availability on campus benefits students in other ways. He spent 20 minutes with a student journalist interested in his thoughts on how the Internet has affected democracy. (On the positive side, he said, this technology gives citizens living under totalitarianism access to information they otherwise could not obtain. On the down side, "inaccurate and accurate information have the same dignity.") His arrival has also added another conservative voice in the university community, which has a reputation for liberalism.
Schroeder hopes her stay on campus may help inspire students to work not only as policy analysts but also as office-holders who make the final decisions: "When I asked Dean Rothschild why he wanted me here, he told me that graduates have a very negative view of politics. You might as well get out in front, If you're always behind the scenes, and the person you're working for doesn't want to get out front, you just get frustrated."
-Mary Caffrey
Tigertone Killed in Florida Car Accident
Richard Modica '99 of Pleasantville, New York, was killed March 22 in a car accident near St. Augustine, Florida. He was 20 years old.
At the time of the accident, Modica and 11 other Princeton students, all members of the Tigertones, were traveling back to Princeton from Naples, Florida, after a series of concerts during spring break. The students were traveling in two vehicles: a rented recreational vehicle that was not involved in the crash and the car carrying Modica, which was rear-ended on Interstate 95, causing it to roll over and land on its roof on the shoulder of the roadway. Kelly Armendariz '99 suffered a broken pelvis in the accident. Two other students in the car were not seriously injured. The Florida Highway Patrol is investigating the accident.
Modica had been the music director of the Tigertones since December. He also founded a group called the Princeton Symphonic Wind Ensemble. Last September he performed in the Princeton University Players production of The Fantastiks. He was a member of the Orange Key Guide Service and a resident of Forbes College. He graduated from Pleasantville High School in 1995. Modica is survived by his parents, Frank and Angela of Pleasantville; a sister, Michelle; and a brother, Frank.
Faculty File: Nobelist Oe -- from the Personal to the Universal
Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature cited by the Swedish Academy for the "poetic force" of his writing, is on campus this year as a visiting lecturer in East Asian Studies and a fellow of the Humanities Council.
Oe has published some 20 novels, a series of novellas, and nine books of nonfiction, as well as essays. In his Nobel address he declared, "The fundamental method of my writing has always been to start from personal matters and then to link them with society, the state, and the world in general."
Thus, much of his literary output reflects events in his own life-notably, the birth in 1963 of his first child, a son named Hikari. The baby was born with an abnormality of the skull that would impair physical and mental development for life. Oe's bestknown novel, A Personal Matter (1964), is a bitter, darkly humorous, and finally, elevating story of a father's effort to accept his brain-damaged child.
Several months after Hikari's birth, Oe was sent by a newspaper to interview survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Speaking with these people convinced him of "the nobility of human life. I realized my new baby's life, and all life, should be honored."
This visit also produced Hiroshima Notes (1965), and established Oe as a political and social critic as well as novelist. Always a voice for the political left, he has achieved some notoriety in his own country for holding that Japan was not only a victim in World War II, but an aggressor. Oe, who says he is "committed to peace and global disarmament," has urged Japan to adopt an antinuclear stance.
Presiding over a classroom is a new experience for Oe. Last semester he taught The Writer as Artist in Modern Japan and this semester he is teaching The Representation of Japanese Intellectuals, both in Japanese. He also conducts some class discussion in English, "doing anything," he says, "that will encourage communication. I am enjoying teaching greatly. In Japan, when young people speak about literature or philosophy, the discussion is often vague, without accurate definitions of words or concepts. Here, when they speak, they define their terms." He also praises Japanese-language instruction at Princeton, saying "My students speak almost perfect Japanese, and with a very good accent."
An aspect of professorial life that has come as a happy surprise, he says, is "the very open atmosphere between students and teachers." He has been particularly gratified to observe "how free Japanese students and teachers are. Before I came, I was warned that in the U.S., Japanese students, especially women, are segregated from other students. This is simply not true."
This is not Oe's first visit to Princeton: "Five years ago I came to the Institute for Advanced Study to interview Freeman Dyson, a great thinker about peace and the nuclear age, for a Tokyo television station." He recalls that Japan's most famous physicist, 1949 Nobel Prize-winner Hideki Yukawa, had also been at the Institute.
"As a child, I begged my mother to let me go to Tokyo to study physics. I promised I would win the Nobel Prize for physics. Fifty years later, I returned to my village and said to my mother, 'See, I have kept my promise. I won the Nobel Prize.' 'No,' said my mother, who has a fine sense of humor, 'You promised it would be in physics!"
Pointing to such 20th-century writers as the late Kobo Abe, Masuji Ibuse, and Shohei Ooka, Oe says, "They created a basis for the world's appreciation of Japanese literature. I received the prize because I am still living, but it is partly their prize."
Since being at Princeton, Oe has made his presence quietly known on campus. He has given public lectures in English at the Woodrow Wilson School, the School of Architecture, the Humanities Council, and in his own department. In May, he will participate in an interdisciplinary conference on religion and imagination.
One notable event in which he figured was the November 9, 1996, concert in Richardson Auditorium of the music of his son, Hikari. In recent years, Hikari, though lacking some verbal and cognitive skills, has become a composer, with two CDs to his credit. Kenzaburo Oe introduced the program.
When it became clear that his son had a gift for music, says Oe, "I thought I would give up writing. I wrote to be a voice for Hikari, but when he found his own voice in music, I did not need to write further." Soon, however, he found, without writing, "I was a kind of hollow man. I needed to feel real again."
He finds his apartment in Princeton conducive to writing what will be his "longest work so far," a novel to be called Somersault. It concerns "a Japanese fundamentalist movement, an amalgam of Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity," says Oe. "The hero is a young man strongly influenced by European mysticism, who wants to create a Japanese mysticism."
Writing the novel, says Oe, "helps heal the darkness in my own soul. You know," he muses, "My son is named Hikari, which means 'light.' At his birth, even in my affliction, I named him 'Hikari.'
"Always, in darkness, I seek the light."
-Caroline Moseley