impact: colfa in the community

Flying Under the Radar

Harriett romo and the reach of research

Alumni Profile: Mona Lowe

art for all

REDEFINING the art of the argument

study abroad: every step was an awakening

Research Assistants

the fragile power of memory

Origin of a new species

Francisco Durand

If the Rotary Club had needed a speaker, Isaac Newton, professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, would have been a wretched choice. Newton was a genius, but he was also an obsessive scholar so intent on his work that he often forgot to sleep. According to Humphrey Newton, his assistant and a distant relative:

“I never saw him take any Recreation or Pastime, either in Riding out to take the Air, Walking, Bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours
lost that was not spent in his Studies, to which he kept so close that he seldom left his Chamber. ”

Sir Isaac did occasionally venture out to a classroom, but, unkempt and distracted, he lectured to the walls and a shrinking roster. Yet, any university worthy of the name would trade a dozen football recruits for one brilliant Newton. It would also cherish Margaret Mead, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Elie Wiesel, and Toni Morrison—public intellectuals for whom the planet is an extension of the classroom.

Though professors are performers, performance assumes varied forms. Some shy sages make precious contributions in ways that, at least immediately, are evident only to their students and other specialists.

“A professor,” declared poet W.H. Auden, “is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.” Years later, we remain haunted by those sleep talkers. But for some professors, all the world’s a stage, and you don’t need opera glasses to watch them in action. As vital as it is to advance the state of knowledge through monographs designed for the eyes of other scholars, some professors, treating publication as a way to stretch the lecture hall, also make frequent appearances in newspapers and popular magazines. Many of the programs, professors and students of UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts leave a vivid imprint far beyond blue books and the pages of scholarly journals.

Courses in accounting, aerobic fitness and mechanical engineering provide useful skills in some of UTSA’s other colleges. However, COLFA is, along with the College of Sciences, the very soul of the university, the place where fundamental questions about identity, knowledge, mind, culture, language and power are confronted. An anagram of focal, COLFA is the focus for the kind of thinking that defines a genuinely educated human being. Though only 6,000 students at a time major in any of the college’s 11 departments, courses in history, language, literature, the arts and the social sciences that are required of every undergraduate exert a profound and enduring influence on many thousands more.

It is hard for anyone who has taught a few years in COLFA to wander into a bank, supermarket or movie theater without encountering alumni—dentists, teachers, soldiers, accountants, contractors, lawyers, restaurateurs, radiologists, journalists. And many gratefully recount how a course from COLFA changed a life.

Many can read a menu or even Proust because of language courses offered in the college. Among my own former students, job titles include judge, poet, CEO, radio announcer, filmmaker, physician, professor, dog groomer, flight attendant, critic, musician and TV anchor. Crucial research into Pindaric odes, chromatic perception and Comanche ethnogeography might go unnoticed beyond the groves of academe. Major archaeologists tend to labor in obscurity unless, like Richard E.W. Adams, they happen to uncover a spectacular Mayan ruin. However, COLFA also makes its presence felt within the general public, among people who will never take another exam not administered by a physician.

The European Film Festival, for example, is such a hot event that fire codes have required turning away the audience overflow. Cosponsored by COLFA, it presents exceptional works from several countries as well as spirited panel discussions.

Each fall, actors from the London Stage—five itinerant British thespians—mount the stage at the UTSA Recital Hall to mesmerize capacity crowds. Each actor takes on four or five parts in a bravura production of one of Shakespeare’s plays.

No one can dispute the national prowess of the UTSA Debate Team, sponsored by our Department of Communication, whose students also compete successfully in the Battle of Flowers Oratory Contest.

Since performance is part of the very mission of UTSA’s Department of Music, San Antonians are more likely to be familiar with COLFA’s musicians than with the college’s philosophers (unless they attend the annual UTSA Philosophy Symposium in February) or its Spanish faculty (unless they read the online magazine La Palabra). The Department of Music sponsors about 200 public concerts, recitals, operas and workshops throughout the year.

A faculty meeting can almost double for a rehearsal of the San Antonio Symphony, since so many symphony musicians (including violist Allyson Dawkins, cellist Kenneth Freudigman, violinist Mary Ellen Goree, clarinetist Stephanie Key, bassoonist Ron Noble, trumpeter Jan Roller, hornist Peter Rubins, percussionist Sherry Rubins, bassist Steve Zeserman, and cellist Dan Zollars) also teach at UTSA.

Several of their colleagues, including guitarist Matthew Dunne, flautist Rita Linard, soprano Catherine Nix, soprano Linda Poetschke, and clarinetist Ily Shterenberg, are prominent soloists or members of various chamber ensembles. UTSA’s Robert Rustowicz is the founder and conductor of the San Antonio Wind Symphony, and John Silantien leads the San Antonio Mastersingers.

Studio courses offered by the Depart-ment of Music ensure the continuing vitality of the art, but so do the summer music programs offered to hundreds of area children —band camp, flute camp, choir camp and the Summer Institute for Piano and Strings. So, too, does the Composers Alliance of San Antonio, founded by UTSA’s David Heuser. If COLFA ceased to exist, the concert halls of South Texas would be muffled.

COLFA’s contributions to the visual arts of San Antonio are similarly lavish.

The Department of Art and Art History operates two of the city’s most important exhibition venues, the UTSA Art Gallery at the 1604 Campus and the UTSA Satellite Space located in the Blue Star Arts Complex. UTSA faculty, including Ronald Binks, Ken Little, Constance Lowe, Neil Maurer and Kent Rush, as well as professors emeriti James Broderick and Charles Field, are among the area’s most accomplished artists. Their work as well as work by some of their former students shows up in galleries and museums throughout the world.

Except in a few enlightened households, humanities scholars, like anthropologists, geographers and sociologists, are rarely household names. However, some of the eminences—including R.W.B. Lewis, Jacques Barzun, Cherrie Moraga, Sandra M. Gilbert and Houston Baker—brought to campus as Brackenridge visiting lecturers, have attracted large, enthusiastic audiences. So have the poets and fiction writers (among them, Denise Levertov, Ed Hirsch, Ernest Gaines, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Howard, Alberto Ríos and Tobias Wolff) who have come to UTSA to give public readings of their work.

One of the liveliest events in COLFA’s calendar is WordFest, which is an annual
celebration of writing by students and faculty. Sagebrush Review publishes and publicizes the best poetry and fiction by UTSA students. Work by faculty members Wendy Barker, Norma Cantú, Bonnie Lyons, Ben Olguín and David Vance appears in some of the leading magazines in the country and is presented in public readings locally, nationally and internationally by the authors themselves. The innovative new doctoral program in English is rapidly acquiring an international reputation.

Any thoughts about COLFA’s place in the community must begin by acknowledging that each of us belongs to many communities. COLFA faculty are prominently involved in many civic activities, and student interns can be found at local museums, radio stations and government agencies.

Through dozens of Fulbrights, Partners of the Americas appointments, and other international exchanges, faculty contribute to the global community, as do students in study abroad programs in Mexico, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain.

Through books, articles and conferences, the Department of History makes its mark in the community of historians, including the community of specialists in American history, Asian history, women’s history and Russian history.

Félix D. Alamaráz Jr. addresses another community when he ventures forth to museums, libraries and civic organizations to present his interactive impersonation of Sam Houston. The entire department serves a community beyond its offices and classrooms by sponsoring the annual San Antonio Regional History Fair.

It is customary to gauge an institution’s importance to a community in economic terms.

In those terms, the advent of Toyota in San Antonio was greeted with rapture and incentives. If I were an economist, I would try to calculate COLFA’s impact as a generator of revenue and jobs. Surely, the region’s supply of professionals in advertising, journalism and public relations has been enhanced by the work of the Department of Communication.

The mental health professions are bolstered by programs in the Department of Psychology. Every department in COLFA has contributed to the quantity and quality of local teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school. A college of liberal and fine arts is more than a depot for hire education. If, as Socrates insisted, the unexamined life is not worth living, examining our lives through the prisms of sociology, linguistics, geography, anthropology and the other disciplines of COLFA establishes and enhances their worth. While it is hyperbolic to claim that without COLFA our lives are worthless, they would surely be diminished.

According to the Department of Labor, the average American holds 11 different jobs in four different careers throughout a lifetime. Training, then, becomes less practical than education. If the assignments keep changing, it is wiser to learn how to think than how to perform particular tasks.

“Education,” observed Albert Einstein, “is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” I long ago forgot specific information passed on by professors of philosophy, history, psychology and classics. But what lingers are the ways of being in the world, the habits of heart and mind. Those are COLFA’s most precious contributions.

Late in a brilliantly productive career, Charles Darwin, whose undergraduate record at Cambridge was lackluster, regretted a void in his life. “I have tried to read Shakespeare lately, and found it is so intolerably dull that it has nauseated me,” he complained in his autobiography. “I have also lost my taste for pictures or music.” Darwin might have benefited from COLFA, which counts many older students on its rosters.

Study of the liberal and fine arts exercises both cerebral hemispheres, but Darwin specifically lamented the fact that he had not learned to cultivate literature, music and painting: “If I have to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the part of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Happy is the community that is strengthened by investment in the arts, humanities and social sciences. We do not have to live our lives again to relish how COLFA enriches the ones we already have.

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How do we tell of UTSA’s successes? How do we tell of the challenges the future holds for the university? The challenges of an ever-increasing enrollment? Or of the fine undergraduate and graduate programs, which demand more be spent on research?

While having lunch with my reading club, I happened to mention that UTSA is now larger than Texas Tech. This is a group of 30, well-informed, articulate, intellectual women, many of whom are former educators. They responded with surprise, almost shock. For a moment, no one sitting at my table spoke. They just looked at me. These are native San Antonians, committed to community service and educational endeavors—the very people one would expect to know what’s happening at UTSA. Two of us do. Betty Halff served with me under the leadership of UTSA President Ricardo Romo and San Antonio banker Tom Frost, on UTSA’s Silver to Gold Committee for future planning this past year.

In response to my statement, which seemed to cause disbelief, one woman asked, “Is this because of the Hispanic population in San Antonio?” Another said, “I thought it was a commuter school just for students from San Antonio.” I was pleased to give them a brief update about what’s happening at UTSA in 2007. However, I couldn’t help but think that UTSA is the elephant flying under San Antonio’s radar screen. How did this happen? And more importantly, how do we get the story out to San Antonio, to Texas and beyond?

Educators, be they university professors or public school teachers, are usually good communicators, but they’re not so good at promoting their institutions of learning. This brings me to my connection to UTSA. I serve on the Advisory Council to the College of Liberal and Fine Arts. This group gives input and helps to raise funds for specific programs, projects and scholarships for the various departments within this college. Several COLFA members also served on the Silver to Gold Committee. Serving on the council has been an education for me. I have not only learned about UTSA, this educational giant (that’s growing) in the midst of our city, I’ve become an advocate on its behalf—a believer in what its future holds.

I remember when UTSA began. It was so far outside the city many asked, “Why was it located way out there?” People weren’t sure exactly where Loop 1604 was in the ’80s. They wondered how it was going to attract San Antonio’s inner-city scholars for whom, most thought, it was created.

Unfortunately, that’s still the mindset of many today. They don’t realize the city has grown far beyond the UTSA campus. Some didn’t know where the campus was in the first place and still don’t. Many citizens don’t know much, if anything, about the Downtown Campus or even where it’s located. They don’t know that the Institute of Texan Cultures is part of UTSA or that there are UTSA exhibit areas in the Blue Star Arts Complex downtown. They don’t know how many graduate programs are a part of the university, or that there are university residence halls for students, including out-of-town students with high SAT scores and high GPAs who make up a significant part of UTSA’s student enrollment. And they definitely aren’t aware of what a fine faculty UTSA is privileged to have. UTSA—the elephant flying under the radar.

Now, how do we tell of UTSA’s successes? How do we tell of the challenges the future holds for the university? The challenges of an ever-increasing enrollment? Or of the fine undergraduate and graduate programs, which demand more be spent on research? Or of UTSA’s increasingly fine reputation among other universities and within the UT System? How do we tell UTSA’s success story?

This was the point of much discussion as part of the Silver to Gold meetings this past year. And there were many suggestions for ways to make the community more aware that UTSA is fast becoming a premier university. These suggestions included developing a NCAA Division 1 football team, involving the media more in telling the UTSA story, hiring a public relations firm to develop a media blitz about UTSA, developing more connections with the business community, and seeking more grant funding for research opportunities, which in turn would attract an even higher group of quality faculty and students.

As part of COLFA, dedicated San Antonio citizens began organizing fundraising projects, promoting UTSA within their spheres of interest and networking to tell UTSA’s success story.

Maybe I’m impatient. Maybe the only way for UTSA’s successes to become well known is by one small step at a time. But I don’t want it to be like that. I want to blaze it all over the city and the state that UTSA is a great university.

So, what are your suggestions to make this happen? How do we get this big and great university to fly smack across the radar screen, and never under it again?

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Since coming to UTSA in 1999, Dr. Harriett Romo has received more than $5.5 million to fund research projects locally, regionally and internationally. As an associate professor of sociology at UTSA, Romo teaches classes on race and ethnic relations, the border, and the sociology of childhood and education.

Romo began her teaching career in Nicaragua over 40 years ago. “I had always wanted to travel and never had any money to do it,” she explains. After spending a year teaching in Nicaragua, she got married and moved to Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, she spent a few years teaching fifth grade in an inner-city school, an experience that has defined her research. “It was a year after the Watts riots,” she recalls. “Many of the children I had in my class were very low-income immigrant children and African American children. The last year I taught in L.A., I had 48 students who were not reading above a second-grade level. You could see the kids were very bright, and you could see the frustration and the barriers that had been created. It made me think about what was happening and why. Those children had a lot of potential, and they just couldn’t reach it. Seeing that makes you want to help them.”

Since then, Romo has dedicated much of her research to the areas of education, biculturalism and the advancement of the community. She is the lead investigator at UTSA for the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Project, supported by the National Science Foundation. The project is a partnership with the University of Washington, Stanford University and the Stanford Research Institute that allows researchers to study how learning occurs in formal and informal bilingual settings.

Romo and the other investigators followed 50 bilingual babies from the age of 6 months. The children were observed in the lab and in their homes. Their families were observed as well. “We went into the homes to interview the families about their transnational experiences,” Romo explains. The babies are now 24 months old, and 28 of them remain in the program.

As part of the study, brain imaging was initially conducted on the babies, and each month the babies’ responses to different English and Spanish words were tested in a lab. The lab tests were followed by home visits, an element Romo believes is especially critical. “It’s important to see them in their homes, where they’re much more relaxed and verbal,” she says. The study will continue until the children reach preschool.

Harriett Romo gives children from the Navarro Academy a preview of college life with a tour of UTSA’s Downtown Campus.

As director of the UTSA Mexico Center, Romo also focuses on UTSA’s relationship with Mexico to promote interdisciplinary collaboration for research, projects and service activities. She also is director of the Bank of America Child and Adolescent Policy Research Institute (capri), which trains kindergarten teachers to use literacy activities in the classroom and focuses on increasing educational opportunities for low-income Hispanic families
in San Antonio.

“I think sociologists do have a responsibility toward their community,” she says. “I think that because we are sociologists and we’re interested in institutions, society, social groups, and race and ethnic relations … the work we do has an impact on communities and it helps us better understand our community.”

The Head Start Summer Institute is one of the ways Romo has had an impact on the San Antonio community. With the help of a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Romo created the institute, which pays tuition, fees and books for teachers at four Head Start agencies to help them get their associate or bachelor’s degrees. The courses are offered in the summer and allow participants to earn up to 12 hours of college credit.

“The Head Start teacher project is allowing teachers who work with the lowest income children—and who probably themselves came from similar backgrounds and never had an opportunity to go to college—to go back to school and obtain their degrees,” Romo says.

Romo’s efforts to promote education reached some of San Antonio’s youngest children in 2004. Romo received a $584,972 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which allowed UTSA to collaborate with the San Antonio Independent School District to build the Early Childhood Development Center at the Navarro Academy on San Antonio’s West Side. The center serves 80 children per year and is also a laboratory school for UTSA. A portion of the school’s available slots are reserved for UTSA students who need child care and live on the West Side, a culturally rich but economically poor area of the city.

Romo also received a separate grant to renovate the Cardenas Center, a child development facility that serves the Edgewood Independent School District. Romo is working with administrators in the district to improve the center and make it more effective.

With these and other programs, Romo has devoted much of her time to enhancing teaching methods, literacy and educational development. “I’m definitely committed to making sure other students have the same opportunity because the college degree can really make a difference in your life,” she says.

And this passion is something she hopes to pass on to her students. That’s why she recruits them to take part in community projects. “I’m always looking for talented students, and I think it gives them a really good experience to participate in these projects,” says Romo.

Among the students Romo has recently enjoyed working with are Marcia Rodriguez, who is helping with the bilingual baby project; Sophia Ortiz, who coordinates the Head Start Summer Institute; and Allison Elmer, who is working on the federally funded Early Reading First Project. “They’re excellent,” Romo says. “They’ve been very helpful, and they’re really good researchers.”

As the largest public university in the city, UTSA has a responsibility to give the people of San Antonio an understanding and awareness of what is or is not working in their own community, Romo says.

“San Antonio is … the perfect laboratory for my research; that’s why I like being downtown. I feel like we’re in an urban lab,” she says.

Romo’s upcoming research includes projects concerning water issues on the border, and she recently submitted a proposal to study upper-income immigrants and their adolescent children. She is also looking forward to the release of a book she co-authored with UTSA sociology faculty member Dr. Raquel Marquez. The book is a collection of articles about families on the border, titled Transformations of Las Familias on the U.S.-Mexico Border.

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Editor’s note: In this second article in our series about the value of a liberal arts education, Lowe shares how her literature degree has translated into huge business success.

All education is ignited by a passion for knowledge. For Mona Lowe, the path to knowledge was paved with books. In second grade, she finished all the books in her classroom’s small library. Since then, her lifelong love of literature, philosophy and art has propelled her to success in the business world.

She is the president and a partner of Reata Property Management Inc., a commercial real estate management company that currently manages a portfolio of more than 3 million square feet. The company was started in 2001 by Lowe and four of her colleagues from Trammell Crow Company, one of the nation’s prominent commercial real estate firms, where she spent 12 years.

She grew up in San Antonio and enrolled at UTSA. She decided to major in literature at a time when most parents and counselors often advised students to get a “practical” degree. Reasoning that the purpose of college is to master critical thinking, she believed that the critical thinking required to analyze literature is as complex and organized as a math approach or a business approach. Looking back, she said she is grateful that her parents, William and Luz McMunn, always supported her decisions in college and beyond.

After college, she worked for a commercial interior design firm in California. From there, youthful ambition and intellectual curiosity took her to the urban scene of New York City, where her strong writing ability and aptitude for accounting landed her a business writing job with top firm Salomon Brothers. But her biggest opportunity came when she returned to Texas. After receiving no response from the large companies she approached, she accepted a position in accounts payable for a real estate developer.

When one of the big companies finally made her an offer, she decided it was time to turn in her resignation. The move prompted a note left on her desk that read, “Go see the president.” Until then, she didn’t realize he even knew who she was.

“I went in there and he very frankly told me, ‘You can’t leave. You have a wonderful mind and excellent writing skills. Just pick a job in any department in this company, and you can have it.’ I give him due credit for recognizing my talent and launching me into the wonderful field of commercial real estate.”

Today, she sits in a spacious office, each wall transformed by art pieces she loves. On a bookshelf not far from her desk sits a small picture of herself with friend and UTSA English professor Steven Kellman.

Along with her partners, Lowe strives to create an environment at Reata where people can be as productive as possible and she values their diverse talents. “I’m definitely a proponent of intellectual cross-pollination,” she says. “It truly works.” And it shows. Their company is expanding and the employees are light-hearted and enthusiastic.

Lowe can personally attest to the fact that liberal arts majors are needed in the business arena. “A liberal arts major gets the corollary knowledge of life experience along with critical thinking skills. The liberal arts course study is not limited to numbers, formulas and resolutions.”

Lowe remembers preparing for an intense college semester that required her to read numerous books, but she took inspiration in realizing that “in each of those books was a story I could learn about but didn’t have to live. I was going to glean the knowledge, the philosophy, the resolution, the pain and the happiness—because those great writers shared that. That’s what makes a liberal arts major so invaluable to business. You’re either going to negotiate deals, or you’re going to create a culture for people to live in.”

She expands the belief of creating a culture by her involvement in the arts as a charter committee member for Chalk It Up, an annual sidewalk art event. She is also one of the initiators of downtown San Antonio’s monthly Houston Street Fair and Market. She is currently a board member of the Mind Science Foundation, and her next project is to help bring more public art to San Antonio.

Lowe credits her success to the people around her, and as a result, plants seeds and encourages others, especially young students. Having had the courage to chart her own course and the wisdom to seize opportunity, she emphasizes the fact that she always planned to be in business and that her liberal arts degree was a plus, not a negative. Her advice is, “If your passion is history, go for it. Fine arts and sculpture? Go for it. Do what you love, and you will find your calling in life.

“I was fueled by my passion for literature to do well and expand my horizons in every way possible. As I live now, I just try to infuse my genuine passion into whatever I do. The acquisition of knowledge and self-realization continues on and on. A liberal arts degree gives you a springboard for that. You can approach your livelihood with that aesthetic sensibility, and you
can have a good, successful life.”

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A year ago, Dr. Scott Sherer came to UTSA to serve as both an art history professor and the director of UTSA’s art galleries. It was the first time the positions had been merged, and this unique combination drew Sherer to leave his position as a professor at Kent State and return to his hometown of San Antonio.

“I really liked the idea of being able to teach and also do public work,” he says. “I’m impressed with how warm and engaging the people are here at UTSA. The students are smart and a lot of fun; they’re eager to learn and explore and be creative.”

Sherer grew up in a military family in San Antonio. After earning a bachelor of arts in architecture at Yale University, he worked briefly in graphic design and marketing. Then he went on to earn his
master’s in art history, followed by a doctorate in comparative studies in discourse and society, cultural studies and comparative literature.

His education and work have taken him to London, Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ohio. His diverse training and travels reflect his varied interests. Inquisitive by nature and passionate about art, Sherer is especially passionate about making art accessible to everyone around him.

As an art history professor, he focuses on critical theory, particularly 20th century philosophy and thought. “I’m very interested in the theories behind art—not illustrating theories and ideas, but working with visual languages,” he explains. “Art is not just artifacts and objects. It’s not just something to look at, but rather an opportunity for conversation with the object, the artist, and with others about our experience. Art is about conversation, and that’s one thing I think galleries are really good for.”

As director of the on-campus gallery and also UTSA’s Satellite Space in the Blue Star Arts Complex, Sherer has curated a wide range of interesting shows. This past summer, he co-curated Texas Uprising, an exhibit of more than 50 contemporary Texan sculptors, with indoor and outdoor installations at UTSA and throughout San Antonio. He followed that with Play and Re-Play, featuring the work of three artists from very different backgrounds. In this show, artists Nathan Dube, Suguru Hiraide and Anna Jaquez each reworked their childhood experiences to create thought-provoking pieces. Sherer addressed the passing of time in a show called Still Life in New Time and followed it with Yoko Ono Imagine Peace: Featuring John and Yoko’s Year of Peace.

In January, Sherer will open a highly anticipated show composed of contemporary Aboriginal art. Art from Texas is also gaining a lot of recognition in the art world right now, and Sherer is excited to showcase art from the region in New Art/Arte Nuevo, opening this spring.

Appreciating the variety of mediums available, Sherer seeks to showcase a wide range within the same exhibit. “Galleries are good because there are so many different kinds of expression and different kinds of material, from more traditional, old-fashioned knitting to bronze casting.” The on-campus portion of the recent show Texas Uprising included an oversized beach ball made of steel, tire tracks cast in bronze, a felt wall hanging shaped like a Rorschach inkblot, and light poles ringed in square bands of colorful knitting.

Sherer says that in addition to inspiring conversation, art is about the craft of producing objects that provoke thought. “One reason artists sometimes choose to leave their work untitled is because it puts the works in cultural context. It forces you to not just have a personal reaction and decide whether you like it or not, but to try to understand something without being told what to think. That’s a strategy that artists sometimes use. An untitled work is asking us to engage on the various cultural levels of an object. I’m interested in how we make meaning. One of the things that interests me is the relationship between text and image. Sometimes words communicate, but sometimes they don’t.”

By being part of the Department of Art and Art History and serving the region, UTSA’s galleries have a two-fold role. “It’s important to create interesting shows that teach culture and showcase the creativity of our students,” Sherer says. “We serve an academic function, but it’s a good place to showcase contemporary art, not just for students but also for the community.

Photos taken at the UTSA Art Gallery.

“There are commercial galleries and museums out there. Universities are a lot more fluid, because you have students showing their work, you have a lot of different shows, you have different themes, and you’re using different materials. We’re at a university that offers a liberal arts education, and part of that education includes the arts. It’s an important element of our lives.”

Sherer says he has been impressed by the dedication of UTSA students to their artwork and studies. “The diversity and complexity of their styles and themes is remarkable,” he says.

The students successfully sell their work and go on to great residencies, and in UTSA’s last juried art show, their work drew admiration from a juror from the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Sherer shares an insight about American culture that likely serves as a driving force behind his work as an art history professor and gallery director. “When Americans go abroad, they go to art museums and look at architecture, yet we tend not to do that at home. We don’t have enough of a sense of visual cultural life to even think of them here in our world. I like new media, too, but I think that we live in such a TV and movie culture. To stop and spend time with an object or thing, to spend a few moments with an idea or a theory personally or as a group … we don’t do that enough. I don’t know if I do it enough, and I do it a lot.”

“It’s important to continue to demonstrate how useful the arts really are to us,” Sherer says. “The arts preserve the vitality of our culture.”

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Debate Team members Philip DiPiazza (left), Matt Reichle

Despite its small size, UTSA’s debate team is helping to change the way debates are structured.

The UTSA debate team reached unprecedented success this year, winning sixth place in the national championship tournament of the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA).

Throughout the year, members immersed themselves in research and traveled almost 23,000 miles, defeating teams from UT Austin, Arizona State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Kansas, to name a few. They also beat teams from Michigan State, which has a national championship program, and they almost defeated Oklahoma University, the champions of this year’s CEDA tournament.

In addition, UTSA senior Matt Reichle, a 2006–2007 recipient of the Richard L. and Joanne P. Hathaway Debate Scholarship, was selected from hundreds of debaters nationwide to be part of the All-American Debate Team at the CEDA national championship.

But one thing is causing other teams in the country to take notice and even emulate UTSA’s group, and that is originality.

Challenging the standard practice of debate, Reichle and his teammate Philip DiPiazza deliver their arguments using everything from hip-hop to costumed skits.

“We’ll talk about why the way we discuss things is more important than the rules,” Reichle explains. The rules of debate dictate how many minutes each person can speak, that each debater will have a partner, and that in the middle of the debate the teams must argue the opposite stance. Everything else, according to Reichle, is open.

Reichle got into debate in high school. All the art classes were full he said, so he chose debate by default. At UTSA he met a member of the university debate team. That’s when the father of two sons decided to return to debate after discussing it with his wife. This time, however, everything was different.

“They’re expanding the concept of what an argument is,” says UTSA professor and debate coach Skip Eno. “Theater, music and movies can all present arguments. They will sing, dance and use props. But they can also do a line-by-line analysis of an argument and present evidence.”

Reichle adds, “We didn’t just say, ‘Let’s do hip-hop. We found a bunch of literature that supported what we wanted to talk about. I’m an English major who writes poetry, and turning slam poetry into a debate argument was a natural thing to do.

“For four years in high school I did what everyone else does, which is just getting a big stack of source material and reading it as fast as you can. I could do that. But this is different. It’s engaging and it makes me want to learn more.”

A thirst for knowledge is essential to UTSA’s debate team. Each member of the team does the amount of research required for a Ph.D.—in one year. At larger schools, debaters rely on graduate and doctoral students to supply all their research, says Reichle and Eno.

Reichle adds, “It’s a question of how you can change the game a little bit. We do just as much work as everyone else, and whatever the research leads us to, we find a form that goes along with the concept.”

A glimpse of the five team members in action defies all stereotypes. One team member has a half-sleeve tattoo, and another has hair past his shoulders. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, they take their turn behind the podium, reading their material a-mile-a-minute and occasionally taking an audible deep breath. Most striking is the speed—which is “like the Micro Machine guy” as Reichle says, and renders their words nearly unintelligible to the untrained ear. They practice by reading a stack of source material aloud as fast as they can for 20 minutes, and they tape and critique all their speeches, just as athletes review game tapes.

UTSA’s program is unique in that any student who’s willing to work can be on the team and actively debate, according to Reichle and Eno. They say many colleges discourage people from being on the debate team unless they’ve gone to debate camps or have been superstars on a high school team. One UTSA debater who started a debating career early is sophomore Rene Naud, who went to an academy in high school for students interested in a law career.

Beyond the podium Debate team showcases academic excellence by Roy (Skip) Eno, Director of Debate   The debate team at UTSA has been a value-added program for the university and San Antonio communities for more than 25 years.   Since 1980, UTSA students have taken advantage of the opportunity to compete in intercollegiate debate. The program allows students to employ their academically acquired skills in research, critical thinking and public speaking.   Travel across the United States for competition enables the team to meet other successful students and competitively test their argumentation skills. In the process, our students positively represent UTSA and San Antonio in front of university administrators, faculty and professionals from all over the country.   The debate team also represents UTSA and San Antonio in its commitment to academic excellence. The team provides ongoing evidence of the kind of activity expected of a first-class institution of higher learning and its surrounding supportive community.   Our students, many of them from San Antonio, go on to successful careers in legal, educational and corporate pursuits.

Unlike Reichle, who does cross-examination debate, Naud prefers to do parliamentary debate, which she describes as a layman’s debate. The topic is revealed just 15 minutes before the round begins. The four kinds of topics are policy resolution, value resolution, fact resolution and—the wild card—a metaphor topic.

The strangest topic she has argued was the metaphor, “This house would put the cart before the horse.” She and her teammate ended up winning the round on the basis that it was an idiom, not a metaphor.

As much as Naud loves the act of debate, her favorite part of debating is the friends she has made across the country. She credits debate with polishing her public speaking and says, “There are very few situations where I won’t say what I think.”

Interestingly, while many debaters go on to become lawyers, politicians or successful businesspeople, both Naud and Reichle have found their passion in the liberal arts.

Currently majoring in English, Naud is considering changing to either creative writing or philosophy. Reichle will pursue a master’s in creative writing, after which he might teach writing at UTSA and help coach the debate team.

As Reichle wraps up three years of debating for UTSA, he takes with him the lifelong friendship of his teammates and the admiration of his competitors. “I had a kid come up to me and say, ‘I’ve debated you twice, and I’ve lost to you twice, but each time I’ve learned something about life and I’ve learned something about debate. I want to be the type of debater that you are,’” he says.

“It was really humbling because there are a lot of people that I look up to, and I had to say, ‘Go watch these people—these are the people that I want to be like.’ To have someone say it changed the way they looked at the world—that was enough to justify the entire time that I’ve been here.”

Says Eno, “We’ve always had good debaters, and a good thing is happening here at UTSA. The students here support the team, and it helps the community feel good about itself. I’m so glad that UTSA has the foresight to support programs like this—it reinforces their commitment to a larger ideal.”

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It began in Florence, Italy. My first experience in Europe, and everything I saw and heard was an awakening. Within the first week of my summer trip I knew I would go back to Europe.”

So begins the travel journal of Moisés Ortiz, an art history student at UTSA. And thanks to the David Bowen Memorial Endowment for Study in Europe, Ortiz was able to return to Europe this past spring to study. Four COLFA students from various disciplines used their Bowen awards to study abroad in spring 2007, journeying to Germany, England or France. In keeping with Bowen’s hope of showing students a world beyond commercialism where history is ever present, each student returned with stories of art, nature and culture, as well as self-discovery.

Moisés Ortiz

Recalling the first few hours of his trip in his journal, Ortiz writes: “The inside [of the hotel] was like a time machine. The wood squeaked and the doors were large and heavy. I tried to imagine the stories these walls could have told. The building was dimmed and the halls were like a labyrinth of doors to other guests.”

Ortiz remembers immediately striking out from the hotel and getting lost, which is something he welcomes while traveling. He was also pleasantly surprised that he was able to use his Italian frequently, and he was impressed by the diversity of the people and how clean the streets were.

He began each day in the hotel’s 19th century revival-style dining room, where the continental breakfast was a generous spread of cold cuts, breads, fruits and cheeses. “The morning was my favorite part of the day,” he writes. “I made sure I sat by the balcony to enjoy the natural light creeping into the room, and listen to everyone talk. … Now with a full stomach, I was set for a day of long walks and deep discovery.”

With Binks leading the way, Ortiz and his classmates spent two weeks exploring the art museums and streets of Berlin. Ortiz’s favorite museum was the Pergamon, which is part of a group of museums that make up the city’s famed Museum Island. The Pergamon contains life-size reconstructions of monumental structures such as the altar of Zeus and the Ishtar gate of Babylon.

While feeding his mind with art, Ortiz also made sure to enjoy the local food, which he believes is key in getting to know a place. His request for a traditional German meal was met with a large blood sausage, kraut and potatoes, to be washed down with a Berliner Pilsner. “The sausage was interesting,” Ortiz grins, “but I enjoyed every ounce of that plate.”

Ortiz plans to travel as much as he can in the future and says, “Germany has given me a new way of seeing modernism and the history behind it. It also showed me the importance of art in a society that has a passion for growth and progress. Art and culture sit side by side with politics and the economy, and the people are very well educated and informed about the world. This was a big lesson to me not only as an art student, but also as an American.”

Evelyn Brown

Keele, England
Senior honors student Evelyn Brown spent a semester at Keele University in Keele, England. Like Ortiz, she had visited Europe before, but this was her first extended stay.

“I’m not sure I would have been able to travel, had I not received the Bowen,” she says. “David Bowen was a personal friend of Dr. Mark Allen, a brilliant [English] professor at UTSA, whom I consider to be my mentor. The Bowen Endowment has a special place in his heart. I had heard of the award through a friend, but it was at his suggestion that I was determined to apply.”

Brown chose Keele because it was the most fitting place for someone earning an English degree, granting her access to the British libraries. She enrolled in a Shakespeare class, a British culture class, and two philosophy classes, but beyond her studies, she hoped to become a more well-rounded person.

Her trip got off to a rough start with 40 hours of sleepless travel and the discovery that her luggage had been lost by the airline. Fortunately, things improved.

“I lived about a mile from the main campus,” she recalls. “One Sunday night, I was walking back to my dorm with about four inches of snow on the ground. I’ve spent very little time in snow in my life, so I decided to go up to the church graveyard on top of the hill in Keele Village and wander about for a bit, with the bells striking midnight. It’s a bit of an odd story, but that night is something that will always stay with me. It was beautiful—the starlight shining on the snow by that church. That’s how I’ll always think of England.”

Reflecting on her journey, Brown says, “It changed the way I saw myself and my future, and I’m still in the process. I have been unbelievably blessed. While studying abroad, I was able to travel to Greece, Portugal, Wales, and Northern and Southern Ireland. I’ve made amazing friends, and seen beautiful things I may never see again. Make the most of God’s blessings as he grants you opportunities, but be true to yourself. That’s something I’ve always known, but have only now learned.”

Aix-en-Provence, France
Jeremy Faulk, who is majoring in psychology, spent last spring studying in Aix-en-Provence, the small village where artist Cézanne was born and raised, about 20 miles north of Marseille. Faulk started planning his trip two years earlier, steadily working on his French and researching which university he’d like to attend. A year into his planning, he saw the Bowen travel award advertised on a bulletin board and immediately applied.

While in France, Faulk lived with a host family, who was also hosting two other American students and a student from Tokyo. Since French was their common language, they always spoke it when they were together and Faulk had the benefit of being fully immersed in the language.

Jeremy Faulk

During his second week there, Faulk writes, “Walking aimlessly through the closely knit avenues, I’m certain to find myself casually strolling into one of Aix’s many squares—at the center of which is usually an ancient Roman fountain or a bustling local market that is propped up and taken down three to four mornings a week with all haste and precision. Before lunch, if the market is not already taken down, I’ll buy a fruit or something fresh to eat while I look for a familiar face to have lunch with me in a small café or restaurant. I’m still a bit out of my element, but I feel that I will find my place.”

Something that helped Faulk orient himself was painting. He had worked with chalk pastels and acrylics in high school, but in France he discovered oil painting. Besides two art classes, he also took a French class and a psychology class. When he wasn’t in class or exploring with friends, he spent time soaking up the culture around him with journal in hand.

He writes, “I’m sipping un café Américain from the Chez Mus pub outside in the square. It is a flower market day and I am surrounded by all sorts of Provençal flowers, herbs, and wonderful smells. … There is a man I’ve seen before, his shirt is off but he has on a gray vest. His hair is long, curly and graying. He is touting philosophy and poems to the square, masterpieces he is certain, and then going to each table asking for money. His great love lived in Ireland, he tells the women behind me, who he has just discovered are from Ireland. He flirts, in English, ‘Look at these lovelies that make a man’s heart beat so fast.’ It works. ‘Six euros!’ he says, astonished. ‘Ms. Racoom, my first English teacher, will be proud of me today!’ He waltzes away. … The square is quieter now. I can hear the Roman column fountain now, soft. The colors pop out everywhere. A new monsieur and madame sit next to me. The monsieur has on a very bright violet sweater. The flowers fit here; there is no other vegetation in the square but this place is always alive. Someone whistles. Philosopher is back, no shoes this time. A dog makes his way through the tables, tail wagging.”

For his 20th birthday, Faulk had planned to paint the sunset from the mountain that Cézanne always painted. He missed his bus to the mountain, and spending the week in Paris had left him with 3.70 euros. While waiting two hours for the next bus, he saw a homeless man playing a drum. Faulk also plays the drums, and he asked permission to sit by the man. They spent the next two hours taking turns on the drum and occasionally conversing in French. Wearing beat-up art clothes and having only 3.70 euros in his pocket, Faulk could temporarily feel a little of what the man felt. When his bus came, Faulk left 3 euros in the man’s drum case and had just enough left for one-way bus fare. After climbing the mountain and painting the sunset, he met some students from Marseille. The next day, all enjoyed a huge festival held on the mountain.

The festival involved an annual pilgrimage of people dressed in Provençal clothing, and Faulk joined in the traditional dances and free rappelling. Afterward, his new friends from Marseille offered to drive him home.

Explaining how his time in Aix has changed him, Faulk captures the heart of the Bowen award. “I’m much more light-hearted now. When you start college, you want to get out and make a living. I’m not as worried about that as I am about finding something I like doing. I think going to France somehow pointed that out to me. And by starting to plan my trip to France so early, I realized that I can start planning things now that I want to do later. If I want to do grad school in Europe, there’s no excuse for me to not do it. I could not buy a car right now so
I could be free to do that later. I have to start making those choices now. That first step can always be taken now, and it doesn’t always mean buying a plane ticket. You can just start thinking differently.”

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As UTSA continues its path to becoming a premier public research institution, quality research assistants play a crucial role. Their support can help attract and retain the best professors, and the relationship is mutually beneficial.

Assistants are paid through a combination of program funds, grants and gifts from private sources. Each assistant receives a set of responsibilities from the professor. Some shoulder the load of ordering books and photocopying while others are more directly involved in the professor’s research.

An excellent example of how top faculty members benefit from the work of good research assistants is the relationship between John Carr-Shanahan and Dr. Rhonda Gonzales, an assistant professor of African history.

Carr-Shanahan is helping Gonzales study the social history of the Ruvu people in the region of Africa now known as Central East Tanzania. Applying linguistic techniques, Gonzales collects cognate words and studies how closely they’re related to other African languages to help determine the population migration.

Carr-Shanahan graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts in history and has a strong background in linguistics and computer programs. After completing his graduate degree, he plans to become a professor. He credits Gonzales with showing him how to get the most out of library resources and how to organize massive amounts of data, among other things.

“It’s like being paid to learn,” Carr-Shanahan says. “It’s an irreplaceable part of my training as a historian. In the classroom, you’re exposed to teaching; as an RA, it’s the real nuts and bolts—you see how books are written.”

Research assistant Greg Bradley competed nationally and won the chance to attend the summer seminar at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Bradley is now taking part in an independent study with Dr. Patrick Kelly investigating the economic, diplomatic and military relationship between the Confederacy and Mexico during the Civil War.

Bradley says, “I love digging through primary source materials in various archives, as they are the foundation for crafting the historical narrative and telling a good story.”

Being able to enjoy the work is important because good research assistants must be disciplined and self-motivated. “You can’t be afraid to work,” says Carr-Shanahan. “The professor doesn’t say, ‘Spend this many hours.’ They say, ‘Accomplish this mission,’ and ‘The only judge of quality is you.’ It’s a lot of work, but I love it.”

In return for their work, each student receives a stipend, but the nontangible benefits are even more rewarding. “Dr. Gonzales has been a very wise counsel, and she has continually coached me in my academic career,” Carr-Shanahan shares. “Talking to her really lifts my spirits. She’s been a wonderful mentor, and she talked to me about setting good goals. It’s irreplaceable—I can’t exaggerate that. It’s a long-term relationship.”

In addition to having an opportunity to learn and be mentored by a professor, a research assistant can also contribute their own expertise. Using geographic information systems, Carr-Shanahan has developed a series of six maps to plot Gonzales’ linguistic data and show the population migration.

“It takes a lot of investigative nitpicking to understand how old a word is,” Gonzales says. “The maps are innovative, and they illustrate how a protolanguage diverged into 10 languages over 2,000 years. I always consider [Carr-Shanahan’s] ideas. When he comes up with great ideas, I appreciate it. It’s a two-way relationship. It’s not just me teaching him things—he’s taught me a lot about maps.”

Another graduate research assistant involved in using technology is Elaine Wong, who has worked with English department faculty Dr. Mark Allen, Dr. Bridget Drinka and Dr. Deborah Lopez. Wong is an accomplished student whose paper “Promoting English as an International Language in the Composition Class” earned first place in its division in the COLFA Research Conference.

Wong says, “The overall experience of working with different supervisors gave me an eye-opening exposure to various fields of research in English language and literature. I was fascinated by how much technology could facilitate literary research. For instance, many early English texts, which could be found only in a few libraries in the past, have now been digitized and stored in easily accessible databases.” Wong contributed to an even more advanced project, entering data into an interactive online bibliography, which would foster collaboration among scholars  in the field.

Soomin Jung, in the Department of Art and Art History, has also benefited from working with multiple professors. Jung’s artwork deals with how modern society can so easily blend personal identity into that of a group. Her work has won recognition in five national art competitions in the U.S. and Korea, as well as the Bradley International Competition. Primarily a printmaker, Jung has learned a lot from working with faculty printmakers Professor Kent Rush and Professor Dennis Olsen. “They are really great artists and also great educators,” Jung says. “They are helping me not only develop my artwork but also build a strong foundation for my postgraduation life. I am honored to be working with both of them.”

Jung also worked as a research assistant at the Visual Resources Center for two years. Being immersed in art images, articles and videos helped Jung grow as an artist, and on the practical side, she learned how to operate all the equipment in the center. “Because I knew how to operate the equipment, I was needed a lot by faculty members and fellow students,” she says. “And you know, it feels good to be needed by lots of people and be able to help them.” 

Besides conducting research and working in resource centers, research assistants can also work off campus. Such is the case for Ana Delperdang, the graduate student who assists Dr. William McCrary, director of UTSA’s Lyric Theatre.

Thanks to the generous funding of college benefactors Charles and Charlotte Walker, Delperdang acts as the liaison between McCrary and local elementary schools in UTSA’s Opera To Go Program. The program, supported by the Opera Guild of San Antonio, teaches opera to young students, and Delperdang truly enjoys going out to the schools and helping the students prepare for their performance.

“The most rewarding part is seeing their little faces light up when they get to do something they’ve never done before,” she says. “The Walkers have been very generous, and I’m really grateful for this opportunity. It allows us to bring a wider perspective to kids, to show them something beyond sports and other activities.” Delperdang is earning a master’s degree in music and voice performance, after which she will pursue her doctorate; she hopes to teach at the university level.

Complementary work styles are also keys in making a good professor and research assistant team. As in any partnership, each member has to understand how the other one works best, and they have to be able to communicate well with each other. McCrary plans to keep working with Delperdang until she graduates, and he says, “As an assistant, [Delperdang] is one of those great finds. Her help allows me to focus on other areas, and she’s invaluable.”

Gonzales also feels grateful for how well she and Carr-Shanahan work together. “I was lucky to meet him in undergrad. We’ve known each other for about four years now, and we’ve worked together for over a year. I can’t say enough wonderful things about him.

“This is more characteristic of a research institution,” she continues. “It’s a really good example of how we need to move toward that. It’s important to find someone that you work well with. [Carr-Shanahan’s] has been a real gift to me, because he’s very independent. I can give him a tidbit, and he can add to it. I’m hoping we’ll have just as many good students in the years to come.”

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Memory is probably not the first thing to come to mind when psychology is mentioned, so it may surprise you to learn that psychologists have been involved in the scientific study of memory for well over 100 years.

Science itself has been described by the eminent biologist Stephen J. Gould as a process of turning a beautiful butterfly into a drab cocoon. Gould’s analogy was meant to capture the explanatory function of science, which often involves reducing an interesting phenomenon to more basic principles that bear little resemblance to the original phenomenon. Although my professional interests revolve around the scientific study of memory, I will not take you through the rather tedious process of reverse metamorphosis implied by Gould’s analogy. Rather the focus will remain on the butterfly, which coincidentally turns out to be a magnificent metaphor for human memory.

Butterflies are fragile creatures that nonetheless possess the power to accomplish prodigious migration. As with the butterfly, the fragility of memory is obvious. Forgetting is a constant nuisance, and just in case we lose sight of that fact, the media and other comedians happily remind us of the frailties of memory, especially those associated with age. But also like the butterfly, the fragility of memory coexists with enormous power, a fact that seems to surprise some.

I meet very few people who boast of their memory prowess. Indeed, most folks seem to consider their memories to be mediocre at best, complaining that remembering names, birthdays, grocery lists and the like is something they wish they could improve. It is as if memory were an elusive and difficult
skill acquired only by the diligent or lucky among us. This is a peculiar attitude from the standpoint of the science of memory because memory is a crucial biological process inherent to all living organisms.

Memory accomplishes the remarkable feat of conveying the past into the present. The importance of this function cannot be overstated because everything we think and do is influenced by our past. Consequently, it would be a wicked trick of nature if such a fundamentally important process were as fickle as is commonly assumed. Rather it seems to be the case that memory is a bit like a dishwasher. You rarely think about it unless it fails to work.

The Power of Memory
As an initial indication of how powerful your memory is, consider that everything you know is known through your memory. The amount of information an adult has acquired in a relatively short span of time is truly phenomenal, and we usually are able to access this information easily and in a timely fashion. That ability is your memory.

As sophisticated as they are today, no computer beats the capacity of your memory. Among other things, the contents of your memory define who you are. When you are asked to tell someone about yourself, what do you talk about? Almost always it is about your past. Losing your memory is losing yourself.
Some really good news is, that is not likely to happen. Most of us will live out our lives with memory largely intact. It is true that normal aging brings modest decreases in memory functioning, just as it does to other psychological processes such as seeing and hearing, but nothing that seriously disrupts one’s life.

According to data from the National Institutes of Health, the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, occurs in only 5 percent of the American population between the ages of 60 and 74. The percentage increases with further aging, but so do a myriad of other health problems. The fact is that debilitating memory loss is not a high probability event before death, which makes a lot of sense given the importance of memory to everything else we do.

Another powerful aspect of memory is the ease with which memory is acquired. This assertion may seem outlandish in the face of how difficult memorization can be, but stop for just a moment and think about what you did yesterday. Most of us can recreate virtually everything that happened. Now how many times
yesterday did you say to yourself, “I must remember this”? Probably not often, if at all. This example illustrates an important discovery from the science of memory: namely, remembering does not require that you try to remember. Rarely do we try to remember the things that are occurring around us. Rather what we do is try to understand and make sense of those things. As it turns out, memory for things you pay attention to and comprehend comes for free.

If remembering is so easy, why is memorizing so hard? The answer to this question is that, when memorizing by rote, we tend to use techniques that are not good for long-term retention.

People often will try to remember something by simply repeating it over and over. This works fine as long as you use the information immediately, as in retaining a telephone number long enough to enter it, but research on memory has shown that simple repetition of information is a very poor technique for long-term memory. Rote memorizing is very difficult and frustrating for most everyone.

Memory, as a biological process, did not evolve for rote memorizing any more than human arms evolved for flying, and to successfully force the process to accomplish an unnatural function is not easy. In its natural role as a recorder of meaningful perception of the events of our lives, memory is powerful and essentially effortless.

A final characteristic of the power of memory is its compelling quality. We rarely question the truth of our memory because remembering feels as if we are reliving the past. This feeling compels us to believe in the memory with total confidence in its accuracy. We will make important decisions based on it, trust the memory to guide our actions, even swear by it if necessary, because it feels so right.

It is much the same as with other feelings that we experience such as hunger or fatigue. We trust these feelings to guide appropriate action. If I feel hungry, I eat. The feeling of remembering indicates that whatever I am thinking about really did happen. Remembering is a powerfully convincing experience.

Normal Memory Failure
Then the dishwasher quits working. Whereas the power of memory goes largely unnoticed, the fragility does not.

Forgetting happens all too frequently, and it is small consolation to know that it is a normal aspect of memory operation. Most normal forgetting is caused by competition among memories, and an important implication of this fact is that the forgotten information is not lost, otherwise it could not compete.

There is no good evidence that normal forgetting is caused by total loss of the information. Just think about the times that you have forgotten something only to remember it later. You couldn’t do this if what you forgot was gone from memory.

Sometimes we blame memory when it is not its fault. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of what we claim to have forgotten was never in memory. The common case of failing to remember the names of a few people to whom you have just been introduced is an example of attention failure that we attribute to memory
failure. Often we are not really attending to the names but are thinking about something else, such as what we are going to say after the introductions. You can’t forget something that was never in memory.

At least with forgetting, you know it is happening. There is another common form of memory failure that is less familiar to you, not because you don’t fall prey to it, but because you have no feeling of failure.

To the contrary, your feeling is that you are remembering something, a feeling you trust. Sometimes, however, what you are remembering is wrong. False memory is more insidious than forgetting because you do not know that your memory is failing when you falsely remember something. The only way you can know of this memory failure is if someone convinces you that the memory is wrong.

False memory sounds like an exotic problem that might occur infrequently to a few people. In fact, psychological research has shown that false memory is a common by-product of normal mental functioning. It even applies to memories that we are very confident of, such as memories of dramatic and important events, sometimes called flashbulb memories because they seem so detailed and vivid. We now know that even these memories can be loaded with false information.

I experience a false memory of the circumstances surrounding the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. I have a memory of seeing the live television coverage of liftoff and then disaster. I have detailed memory of the room where I saw this happen. But the memory is totally wrong. I heard about the event on the car radio. Someone who knew the facts convinced me of this when I first described this memory. Even though I now know that I heard the Challenger news on the radio, I still remember seeing it happen on TV. Memory remains powerfully persuasive even when it is wrong.

This fact puts false memory at the center of an important issue of public policy. Since DNA analysis became available and admissible in court in the late 1980s, more than 200 people have been exonerated of crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced. The original conviction was based on eyewitness identification in 70 percent of these cases.

In Texas, 28 reversals have occurred, and 20 of those convictions were based on eyewitness testimony, numbers right on the national average. Nationally, these innocent people had served a total of 2,500 years in prison, and this is likely the tip of the iceberg because most crimes do not include evidence appropriate for DNA analysis. (All of this data is available from the Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org.)

You can be sure that the mistaken eyewitness testimony was given with as much confidence as I had in my memory of the Challenger incident; a prosecuting attorney is not going to offer an eyewitness who is less than completely confident in their memory. The causes of this troublesome problem are many and varied, and there is no cure beyond educating ourselves about the reality of false memory in perfectly normal people.

Catastrophic Memory Failure
Forgetting and false memory are usually no more than nuisances. Amnesia is a disaster.

Amnesic syndrome accompanies a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and always is a product of severe head injury. An important fact about amnesia is that only rarely is the memory loss complete. In some cases, memory is lost only for information acquired prior to the cause of the amnesia, leaving intact the ability to form new memories. Actually, this form of amnesia is probably more common on television than in nature, although it does happen. The more common form of amnesia is the loss of the ability to form new memories. This is generally the form of memory loss in early and middle stages of Alzheimer’s.

Try to imagine your life if you could not form new memories. Trivial questions such as “Do I own that?” or “Have I been there?” or “Did I eat?” become impossible to answer. Amnesia is totally disabling, and the amnesiac requires constant supervision. Even if only small percentages of the elderly suffer such debilitation, the world’s population is aging rapidly such that large numbers of people are going to need assistance, and this will come at considerable financial cost to society or emotional costs to families.

The rare cases of complete memory loss teach us just how central memory is to our lives and personal identity. We associate amnesia with an inability to remember the past, but we now know that total amnesia also robs one of the future.

Interviews with people suffering total amnesia have revealed that these people have no plans or goals. When asked what they intend to do after the interview, they have no answer. They say their mind is blank when they think about the future. As unimaginable as this state of consciousness is to you and me, we can understand why this happens when we realize that our plans are based in large part on the contents of our memory. Memory allows us to not only revisit the past but also to create a future.

No cure for amnesia exists, but an exciting discovery may offer some hope for at least limited rehabilitation.

As it turns out, most forms of amnesia do not stop memory from being stored. We know this because recent research has shown that the amnesiac’s behavior is affected by experiences in much the same way as are yours and mine. The difference, and it is a huge difference, is that the amnesiac can not consciously access the memory.

Dr. R. Reed Hunt joined the psychology department at UTSA in January 2006, where he directs the Adult Cognition and Memory laboratory and teaches courses on memory and cognitive psychology. He earned his B.A. from William and Mary, his M.A. from Wake Forest, and his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. Dr. Hunt taught at Dartmouth College, Furman University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In his leisure time, he tends to the 23 rose bushes left by the previous owner of his house —13th on his list of favorite things to do.

Here is a simple example: What does a densely amnesic person do the second time they hear a joke? If they have no memory, the joke should be just as funny on the second hearing, making them the perfect audience for the comedian with a limited repertoire. But that’s not what happens. The amnesiac, who may have laughed when first hearing the joke, does not do so the second time any more than you or I would. But when asked why, amnesiacs do not say that they had heard the joke, but rather attribute their response to something like the joke is stupid and not funny.

The point here is that the past experience of hearing the joke has the same effect on the amnesiac’s behavior as on that of the nonamnesiac; the joke is no longer funny, even though the past experience cannot be consciously remembered. This fact is being used to devise subtle training procedures to teach the amnesiac new skills, procedures that avoid requiring explicit memory for the training experience.

And in The End…
We all will lose our memory, but for most of us that loss will accompany death. In the meantime, we will experience frustrating and occasionally embarrassing moments when memory fails, but on the whole you can expect memory to provide you with the extraordinary ability to use your past to deal with the present and plan the future.

Most of the time you will not even be aware that you enjoy such ability because much of memory’s operation happens below the level of consciousness. Equally remarkable, however, is that we can bring elements of our past lives into our current conscious awareness. You can revisit pleasant past events and old friends who are not around. Your memory can provide an endless source of entertainment, relaxation and emotional experience, all for free. Among the more poignant quotes from literature about memory is one attributable to J.M. Barrie, Scottish author and creator of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.” Of course here in San Antonio, we can see real roses in December and use our memory so that we might have snow.
© 2007 R. Reed Hunt

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When primatologist Carolyn Ehardt went into the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania to catalog Sanje mangabeys, she never dreamed she’d come out with an entirely new species of African monkey. Nor did she imagine that during her research she’d move her base of operations from the University of Georgia to UTSA.

Illustration: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

Ehardt’s discovery of Lophocebus kipunji, the highland mangabey, was almost an accident. Her move from Georgia to Texas, on the other hand, was very deliberate. When UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts added an anthropology doctoral program in 2006, Ehardt wanted to be a part of it.

“The historical subdisciplines of anthropology are biological, archaeological, cultural and linguistic anthropology,” says Ehardt, who earned both her master’s and Ph.D. at UT Austin. “Anyone who works in any of those areas has to take environment and ecology into account to do what they do. Humans and the environment are inseparable. We always have been.

“We, as primates, are having to live in association with nonhuman primates, sharing resources, and we really need to find ways to make that communal ecology a much more workable thing.

“My specialization is within the subdiscipline of biological anthropology. And within that, I specialize in primatology. It’s what I call conservation ecology of threatened primates. It’s a way of melding the traditional subdisciplines of anthropology.”

Environmental and ecological anthropology are the basis of the doctoral program at the University of Georgia. It is a principle that appeals to Ehardt and is also the foundation of the new Ph.D. program at UTSA.

“What we did at Georgia was bring the environmental and ecological aspects of what all of us did, no matter what kind of anthropologists we were, to the fore,” she explains. “It was tremendously successful. We were able to recruit outstanding doctoral students. The last year I was there, the doctoral students alone brought in over $300,000 in funding from various sources to support their research.

“When UTSA decided to do the same thing, to focus on ecological anthropology, I found myself very interested in being a part of that. It was very appealing to think I might play some role in making that happen and making it work as well as it did at Georgia.”

One of those outstanding doctoral students Ehardt recruited is Emily Lloyd. Lloyd, along with four other graduate students studying with Ehardt, has transferred from Georgia to UTSA to continue her work.

“I chose specifically to work with Dr. Ehardt as I am most interested in primate conservation, which is her particular area of expertise,” explains Lloyd. “I was keen to work with African primates, so her project in Tanzania was really appealing.”

Lloyd adds that Ehardt helped her make numerous contacts in Tanzania and become familiar with field research conditions. “I now have a better idea of how it all ‘works’ in Tanzania. It’s important for me to know what field conditions are like and who I’ll be working with since this is where I will be working in the future.”

“When I accepted the position here,” Ehardt says, “it was to assist with producing what is really only the second department in the United States to focus its doctoral program this way on ecological anthropology, which crosscuts all those other subdisciplines and really brings us together as anthropologists in a way other departments aren’t. It gives the students an identity, and this is very valuable to up-and-coming anthropologists these days. They’re very interested in applying what they do to real-world problems.

“My students are all interested in understanding nonhuman primates so we can better conserve them. Probably 60 percent of them are threatened by habitat loss, alterations, hunting, those kinds of things.”

Ehardt’s discovery of the new mangabey happened in 2004, after she began to study the conservation status of primates and other large mammals and birds in the Udzungwa Mountains. That seven-year study prompted another in which Ehardt and her research team sought to determine the habitat requirements of the Sanje mangabey, one of the most endangered primates on the planet, numbering around 1,300.

Before they could even start their research, Ehardt and her team had to spend another year habituating the animals to their presence. With funding from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund and Primate Conservation Inc., the yearlong, close-range research project began in January 2004. Ehardt was teaching that spring at the University of Georgia and sent her research team ahead, planning to join them in Tanzania during the summer.

“I was planning on going to Africa in May,” Ehardt says, “but in March I found out I had cancer. I had to have two surgeries and radiation treatments. Now it was going to be October before I could get there.”

As if she weren’t frustrated enough, Ehardt received an e-mail from Trevor Jones, one of her research assistants, reporting that he had seen something unusual in the forest. “All I can tell you is that it’s not a Sanje mangabey,” he wrote.

Illustration: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

“He managed to get a fuzzy photo of it,” Ehardt adds. “When I saw it, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I’d never seen a monkey like that. I wrote back to him and said I was on my way.”

Against her doctors’ wishes, and accompanied by Tom Butynski, another primatologist who had worked with her on the Udzungwa surveys, Ehardt headed for Tanzania. After 10 days of searching, they spotted the new animal in the treetops on the other side of a valley.

“It was really early in the morning. There were several of them on a branch that didn’t have too many leaves, so we were able to get a really good look at them.”

Ehardt describes the scene as almost comical as she and Butynski lowered their
binoculars and simply stared at each other. “We were able to get enough of a look at them to be able to identify the major features. We knew it wasn’t anything primatologists knew about.”

The Udzungwa Mountains, once heavily forested, have been fragmented over generations, leaving pockets of dense forests known as “relic forests.” These relics contain a number of species found nowhere else in the world. Ehardt had every reason to believe her team had found the only colony of the animals on the planet. She and her assistants began working on an article for the journal Science to announce their findings.

A chance meeting over dinner changed her plans. “I had to go into Dar Es Salaam [Tanzania’s capital] for several things,” Ehardt explains. “Graeme Patterson is the assistant director for the Africa program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. They had funded my Sanje mangabey research, and he and I knew each other. He invited me to join him for dinner while I was in town. I was really torn about whether I should tell him about the new monkey. Science is very strict about not revealing anything about what it’s going to publish. If they find out you’ve told anyone else about your work, they’ll yank your article. I was really excited and wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure I should.”

Ehardt’s excitement grew when Patterson asked if Tim Davenport, director of WCS’s Southern Rift and Southern Highland Conservation Program, could join them for dinner. She swore both men to secrecy and began describing her new find.

“When I told them we’d found a new species of mangabey, Tim asked what it looked like. I told him one of the distinctive features is that the last third of the tail is solid white with a tuft on the end.

“He just put his face in his hands and shook his head,” Ehardt says, sympathetically. “I asked him what was wrong. ‘It’s not just in the Udzungwas,’ he said. ‘It’s in the southern highlands, too. We’ve been following them trying to get enough information about them to write an article for Science about a new species.’

“He showed me pictures of what he’d seen, and sure enough, it was the same thing.”

Ehardt pulled her article from Science and, after further research, co-authored a more comprehensive paper with Davenport and his team.

“It was a win-win-situation for everyone,” she says, “especially the mangabeys. Adding another endangered primate to the list shows how vital it is to conserve Tanzania’s southern highlands, [where Davenport and his team saw the new mangabey] in addition to the Udzungwa Mountains. In fact, it’s more important, given the extreme alteration and destruction of the southern highlands forests.”

Ehardt is on her way back to Africa with her research team to genetically categorize the new species, which has a world population of approximately 600, and determine its relationship to other mangabeys. She is eager to learn as much about the new species as she can before it disappears.

“We need to do much more if we’re going to be comfortable that we’re not going to destroy them,” she says. “What really drives me is to contribute to ensuring that biodiversity does exist in the future, despite the tremendous challenges facing us.”

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Born in Lima, Peru, Dr. Francisco Durand grew up in the southern city of Arequipa, at the foot of the Misti volcano, where he witnessed the dismal living conditions of the Indians and the prevailing inequality.

His father was a newspaper publisher and Durand accompanied him to political meetings and rallies, so it was no surprise that he later decided to become a sociologist and specialize in government–business relations.

At UTSA, he teaches Business/Government Relations in the Third World and Latin American Politics. Besides several books, he has written many articles published in English, Spanish and French. His 2003 book, Riqueza Económica y Pobreza Política, caused a stir in Peru when published because the business leaders he studied were not pleased with the unveiling of their methods of operation.

Q. Since you were born in Peru, I am curious to know what experiences as an immigrant have affected your outlook in life and/or your vision of the world.

A. The first and foremost factor is the cultural shock, that is, the painful discovery that your vision and ideas are not shared by many, and that other ideas and attitudes that are completely unfamiliar to you prevail in your new setting. It takes time and effort to realize the differences, and there are cases where you remain stubbornly attached to your ways of thinking. At the same time, when you travel back to your country, you suddenly realize you are not the same person. You discover in how many ways you have changed, because people you knew will immediately point out, “What happened? Now you are different.”

Thanks to all these experiences, my vision of America has broadened. Over the years, I have developed a deeper understanding of why things happen the way they happen in America and why people think and behave the way they do. However, I would also say that the distance has helped me develop a better understanding of Latin America and Peru. Consequently, I am now less passionate and more balanced. Immigrants have some advantages: since they
“do not belong,” they pay more attention to differences and can more easily make meaningful comparisons.

Q. Coming from such a different background, do you think you present an unusual perspective from your American-born colleagues on the topics you study?

A. Yes, there is something quite different in the way I look and study Latin American and Peruvian politics. I am always struggling to put things in historical perspective, and I pay much more attention to detail than my American colleagues. They are less concerned with the context and the past and can more easily concentrate only in certain factors. I also try to make arguments based on what is best for Peru, arguments that my colleagues do not feel so intensely, although, of course, there are always exceptions. I have a sense of obligation and commitment toward the object of study that is deeper and more troubling than the ones my American colleagues have.

Q. I was surprised to learn that you participated in President Alberto Fujimori’s government, taking part in the reform of Peru’s tax system. Since you have been not only an academic but also a public servant, what can you tell me is the biggest difference between one sector and the other?

A. In the early 1990s, a small window of opportunity for state reform opened during the first Fujimori government. At the beginning, I used to think and act as a scholar, but as time passed and I became more deeply involved in the decision-making process, I learned that I needed to rely more on intuition than knowledge. You really need to sharpen your instincts because the whole environment is so uncertain. One also must develop an ability to make quicker decisions. In the public sector, problems cannot wait. In the university, you have all the time in the world to ponder about processes and ideas, and you can delay decisions as much as you want.

My participation in the tax reform was an exhilarating experience because I saw an institution change. It also taught me how exceptional the circumstances were. During the second Fujimori administration [1995-2000], politics took an ugly, authoritarian turn, and even the tax administration, an institution that was fully changed and modernized, suffered the consequences and became more corrupt and arbitrary. I was again fortunate to be able to go back in 2000 and 2001 under the provisional Paniagua government once Fujimori fell, and try, once more, to fix the tax system, to clean it up. This time the task was easier than in the early 1990s because we knew both the organization and the people from the inside out. That gave us the possibility to isolate the bad apples and get support from the good elements of the organization, which is essential for successful reforms.

Q. Would you consider serving in the government again if the current president of Peru, Alan García Pérez, would ask you, although you have expressed in several articles that his first term as president [1985-1990] was a disappointment?

A. A few months ago, I was in Lima talking to a high government official, and he mentioned the possibility of working with the office of the prime minister. It surprised me since I have been very critical of his first administration, yet I did not consider the offer. Politics is very disappointing and, at least in Latin America, you never know how long you are going to last. Certainty is becoming more important in my life, although the lure of politics is always very strong even if you have so many objections.

Q. I am curious to know if your humanities education helped you when you were working in the public sector, dealing with taxes.

A. Certainly. When discussing the behavior of taxpayers, or politics (a process that many bureaucrats found puzzling), members of the board of directors or the superintendent will usually stop in the middle of a discussion and say, “what is your perspective on this as a sociologist?” My opinions were sought after because I provided a perspective of the whole that they did not have. They realized also that I could place actors and institutions in that horizon, which gave a more balanced and complete picture of the circumstances where decisions had to be made even if the consequences were unknown.

Q. Tell me about your current research project and why you are interested in that topic.

A. My current research focuses on the “capture of the state” by private interests. It is an old topic that has suddenly been considered important by the World Bank and the U.N.

I recently participated in an international call for papers, and my project on the Peruvian case was amongst those selected. So I will have a chance to further my ideas about how the state has been captured by private interests and, more importantly, demonstrate what the consequences are in terms of tax collection.

My early experience in the Peruvian tax reform helps me provide factual evidence and explain how the institutions work (or stop working, in the sense that in many cases they are paralyzed by special interests). I have to present the paper [at a] conference in Geneva, in November 2007, and I am very curious to see what kind of reactions I get since I plan to tell it as it is.

Q. How have you gone about researching this project and why do you consider it so important?

A. I realized that it was crucial to study the rich in Latin America because we knew very little about them. The business community down there is a very closed society, one that outsiders do not penetrate. In order to get to know the business leaders, I attended business conferences and wrote for business journals. As a “journalist,” I had the opportunity to interview them and, at the same time, collect data for my research.

To me it is of the utmost importance that we find ways to balance the relationship between business and government. If you take into consideration that the business elites exercise undue power, then we need to understand them and how they operate. The question is to demonstrate when, how, and through whom businesses exercise political influence and to lay bare the structure of power. Things will change and solutions can be found only if we understand the problem.

Q. Why did you choose to teach at UTSA?

A. In 1991, I had the choice to go back to Peru where my country of origin was experiencing its worst economic and social crisis in a century, or to try to teach and research somewhere else. I chose the second and decided that San Antonio and UTSA, a developing institution with good perspectives, was the best place for my family and me. I sensed UTSA was growing and that, because of its location and history, a Latin-Americanist was needed and would be quite welcomed.

Q. Do you feel San Antonio and UTSA are friendlier and more open to Latin Americans than other places and institutions?

A. Yes, indeed. Years ago, UTSA realized that they needed to focus more on Mexico and Latin America and set out to recruit more specialists in various disciplines, such as political science, anthropology and bilingual studies as well as international business, which, by the way, is also very successful. UTSA has learned to look south and has opened a Mexico Center, which is very important, and I hope that in the future the university will form an international studies center.

Q. You know that NAFTA has been very controversial in Mexico. What do you think about the free trade agreements between the Unites States and Latin American countries? Are they good for the latter?

A. There are winners and losers. The problem is that, for instance, the one with Mexico, the famous NAFTA, puts the corporations at the same level as the government with the only object being to provide security for businesses. The problem is that that kind of agreement limits sovereignty and curtails the role of government to regulate and tax them. Also, governments need to take into account everybody’s well-being, not only business interests, and treat everybody as equals. NAFTA weakens that role and ties the government’s hands.

The great failure of NAFTA is evinced by the wave of immigrants coming to the U.S., which concerns Americans so much now. The American government should have anticipated the repercussions for the USA of a treaty that doesn’t address social, labor and environmental concerns and NAFTA has come back to bite them. …

I think the NAFTA model is now over and we are moving from free trade to fair trade agreements. To give you some examples, Costa Ricans are asking for a referendum to ratify a trade agreement with the USA before signing it, and the new U.S. Congress has shown concerns about social, labor and environmental issues before approving the Peruvian and Colombian trade agreements. More people now realize that globalization means that what happens in one country has enormous consequences for the others, and more in the case of Mexico, since, as the saying goes, “when Mexico catches a cold, the USA gets pneumonia” or vice versa. We are all interconnected, especially neighbors, so the social and economic well-being of Mexico, its political stability, is of the utmost important for the USA. NAFTA has not helped transform Mexico, thus we need new policies.

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