July 2006 Stories

Student to Attend National Leadership Institute

Anna Kwan ’07 was born and raised in Salem, but her family is Chinese, so she grew up learning Chinese culture and speaking Cantonese and English. Yet when she studied in Beijing this past academic year, she was surprised at people’s reaction to her.

“They didn’t consider me Chinese,” she says. “Here, I’m used to people thinking I’m from China or asking me, ‘When did you come over?’ But there, after I spoke to them a little bit, they would be like, ‘Are you from Japan or Korea?’ They couldn’t tell I was Chinese.”

Granted, Kwan’s family comes from southern China, where the culture is much different from Beijing and the surrounding northern region. And people in Beijing speak Mandarin, not Kwan’s native Cantonese. Plus, Kwan had more of an American mindset, she says.

Kwan just returned from China last month, but she’ll soon hop on another plane to make her first trip to the East Coast. Kwan is one of 50 women chosen to be part of the 2006 Collegiate Women of Color Leadership Institute, which starts in August with a four-day program in Baltimore. Two Willamette students were picked for the program; the other is Elvia Mandujano ’07.

The institute, sponsored by the Foundation for Independent Higher Education and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, recruits women of color from 650 private colleges and universities nationwide. The program’s goal is to increase gender and ethnic diversity in the workplace while teaching women leadership skills. After completing their junior year, participants attend the summer institute. When they return to school in the fall, they receive a stipend to create and implement a leadership mentoring project on their campus, at a corporation or in their community. They also are paired with a mentor to help them learn more about leadership.

Kwan is a bit overwhelmed and nervous about what she’ll be doing through the institute, but she’s excited about the opportunity. And although people in Beijing may not have been able to recognize Kwan’s Chinese heritage, her culture is a major part of her life, academically and personally.

She is majoring in Chinese Studies, and she is considering education or business as possible career fields. “Seeing that China’s economy is on the rise these days, I thought maybe I could do something in that realm,” she says.

Kwan traveled to China after receiving an award from Freeman-ASIA, a program that supports American undergraduates planning to study in East or Southeast Asia. She also is in the National Society of Collegiate Scholars and recently was inducted into Willamette’s Mortar Board, a national honor society for college seniors with distinguished achievement in scholarship, leadership and service.

She also has shared her heritage with others by teaching a course on Chinese language, culture and art through Saturday Explorations, a program in which Willamette students design classes for local fifth- through eighth-grade students. The five-week program meets for two hours each Saturday on the Willamette campus. “The students wanted to learn a lot, and that was exciting,” Kwan says.

Classics Prof is a Classic

Ortwin Knorr grew up among the cobblestone streets and spires of Bremen, Germany, a city with 1,000 years of history, so perhaps it wasn’t odd that he became intrigued with old languages and secret codes. As a boy, he read enough J.R.R. Tolkien to write in “Runish,” and when he took up Latin, it was just another code to decipher.

Knorr studied Latin, English and Greek at the Altes Gymnasium, a 478-year-old high school where teachers still believed that a well-rounded education included classical languages. When he had to choose advanced placement courses, Knorr hedged his bets and signed up for a practical subject — math — along with his beloved Greek. It took him only two weeks to drop AP math for AP Latin.

The high schooler fell under the spell of the ancient Roman poets, especially Catullus, who had been sent as a teenager to study in Rome. Once there, Catullus became infatuated with a young married socialite. “His passion inspired him to write some of the most beautiful love poems in the world,” Knorr says. “When you’re 17, that is most impressive, especially when you’re sitting next to a girl you like.”

Even a 15-month stint as a draftee in the German army didn’t deter Knorr from his pursuit of languages. When Italian classes were offered, he squeezed them in, between cleaning guns, lubricating truck brakes and doing guard duty. “I still wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of my life, but I decided I might as well go with what I loved,” he says. “I went on to study classics without any hope of being employed in the field, which is something Germans don’t normally do.” Once he wrote his first paper — on Catullus — and realized he had something original to say, he knew he had found his vocation.

Happily Ever After
At Willamette, Knorr introduces students to ancient Greek and Latin, ancient epic poetry and theater, and the everyday life of Roman women. “People in antiquity thought about the same issues we face today,” he says. Women had abortions and men agonized over going to war. In Homer’s Iliad, for example, the Trojan hero Hector wonders, “Do you follow your duty even though the war you fight is a lost cause?”

In his ancient drama course, Knorr asks his students to analyze Greek and Roman comedies and compare the plot structures and jokes with Hollywood movies. “Students like the boy-gets-girl stories of Roman comedy,” he says. “They’re like modern romantic comedies with fairy tale endings. The young complain how much they’re in love and that they have no money, and the endings are completely unrealistic.”

A typical story might be: Boy falls in love with girl. His miserly old dad is against the relationship because she is either poor or seems to be a prostitute. In the end, the girl turns out to be the long-lost daughter of the fabulously rich neighbor, and so they get married and live happily every after.

Roman Laughter
“In Greco-Roman comedy there aren’t any lawyer jokes, but there are mother-in-law jokes,” Knorr says, just like today.

Sexual humor was an important component in plays, which were performed on religious holidays. Taboos were set aside, much like modern carnival. Outside of the theater, the same jokes were considered to be in bad taste. “Like us moderns, ancient Greeks and Romans were conflicted about sexuality,” Knorr says.

The lower classes — slaves, farmers, peasants and prostitutes — received the brunt of Roman humor. The more highbrow tragedies featured mythical kings, queens and semi-divine heroes. “It wasn’t until the 18th century that writers dared to portray lower-class troubles as tragic rather than laughable,” Knorr says.

Other Roman writers, like Horace in his Satires, used humor to expose people’s follies and to encourage good moral behavior. “Horace said that many people are not happy, even though they’re wealthy,” Knorr says. “They end up wanting more and more, and never use what they have. Our culture has similar faults. We live as foolishly as the Romans.”

Hitting the Books
Knorr spends his days surrounded by Roman deities and Latin lovers. He admires Latin poets for overcoming the limits of a language he perceives as somewhat harsh and inflexible. “One of my high-school teachers told me that Latin is a language of farmers, soldiers and accountants,” he says. “It didn’t initially possess a capacity for poetry.”

In high school, Knorr was more attracted to the urban chattiness and self-irony of the Greek language, but now he concentrates most of his energy on Latin authors. He has written a book on Horace’s Satires and published articles on the comedies of Terence, the writings of Greek Church fathers, and the Satires and Odes of Horace.

A recent article offers a new interpretation of one of Horace’s most famous poems, the Ship of State Ode. Knorr argues that the Ode has nothing to do with politics or the Ship of State. Rather, the ship is a metaphor for a young woman who must choose between a young lover and a mature lover. Will the young woman choose the potentially stormy sea (her passionate young lover) or the safe harbor (her older, calmer lover)? The poet-speaker, disguised as an older lover, warns the woman of the violence and unpredictability of his younger rival.

Studying classics is not without extraordinary demands. Classics is an international field, with 50 percent of the secondary literature not written in English, and so scholars need at least a rudimentary knowledge of several modern languages. At a recent conference Knorr attended, sessions were held in German, Italian and English.

Knorr’s knowledge of ancient languages means that he receives frequent requests for help with translation. He has been asked to write an epitaph for a much-loved Latin teacher in Salem, to compose a Latin inscription for a donated piano at a Medford nursing home, to find a Latin name for a lawyer’s race horse and, most recently, to translate verses based on the biblical Book of Revelations into Latin for the 2006 remake of the 1976 horror film, “The Omen.”

Knorr chairs the Classical Studies Program at Willamette. He also serves as program coordinator of the Salem branch of the Archaeological Institute of America and is helping coordinate an international conference on cultural heritage management, to be held at Willamette in October 2006.

Intelligent Design: Science, Faith or Neither?

The debate on teaching intelligent design theory in science classrooms hits close to the heart for Catherine McHugh ’07. As a Christian biology major interested in becoming a nurse practitioner, McHugh encounters the debate often.

“Growing up in the church, I guess intelligent design was something I embraced,” says McHugh, who goes by Cassie. “When I’m doing science, it’s a very spiritual experience for me. I try to bring more of a reflective judgment to that.”

With her personal beliefs and the public’s increased focus on intelligent design theory, McHugh had no trouble choosing a topic when assigned to write an essay for her religious studies class about German philosopher Immanuel Kant. “I wanted to look at the debate from a critical perspective, to find a way to reconcile the two,” she says. McHugh’s analysis resulted in a paper titled “God and Science: A Kantian Analysis of Intelligent Design Theory as Science.”

McHugh’s work won her first place this spring in the Undergraduate Student Paper Contest sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Region of AAR/SBL/ASOR, a consortium of academic groups devoted to religious and Oriental research. McHugh used Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” otherwise known as his third critique, to examine the issue. Her surprising conclusion? That any literal use of intelligent design is destructive to both science and certain types of faith.

McHugh’s paper and her explanation of Kant’s theories might make any non-philosophic scholar’s eyes glaze over. She understands that. She insists she’s not usually the type to debate complex philosophical theories, although she is minoring in religious studies and formed a group with several of her friends and religious studies professor Doug McGaughey to tackle the task of better understanding Kant’s writings.

“Philosophy is really not my forte,” she says. “I was really scared when I came into that class. When I first started reading the critiques, I think I took an hour to read each page.”

The basis of her conclusions is that it is destructive to both science and non-epistemic faith — which says there is order within nature — to say determinately an intelligent designer is the creator of the universe.

In his third critique, Kant discusses an idea called teleology, the concept that there is design in nature. McHugh concludes from Kant’s writing that intelligent design does not work as a science because it urges people to make inferences about the causes for things in nature — attributing them to an intelligent being.

However, science studies phenomenon in nature and makes connections between what people see happening and existing scientific laws or theories. People aren’t able to experience the actual laws — such as gravity, for instance; instead they observe the effects the laws have in nature. In other words, McHugh writes, people don’t have the capacity to experience the causes of things.

“To do so for intelligent design oversteps our limits in science,” she says. “But we do have to assume there is an order in nature to make discoveries and continue our scientific work.”

As for intelligent design’s relation to faith, McHugh writes that non-epistemic faith means people trust in the idea that there is a God, and are OK with not knowing for sure, according to Kant. By determinatively judging that a higher being created Earth, faith is destroyed, she writes. If faith was based on absolute knowledge, people’s lives would be determined, and they would simply be marionettes, McHugh says.

Despite McHugh’s conclusions in her paper, she says her work did not sway her strong Christian faith. She is involved in two local Christian organizations for college students, Campus Ambassadors and Ethos. “If anything, the conversations we had in the Kant class actually enhanced my understanding of God,” she says.

Algebra: When X + Y = Confusion

The United Nations, foreign aid and an empty graph are the elements perplexing a class of West Salem High School algebra students as they try to complete the word problem. Their teacher, Steve Rhine, approaches one particular student who is staring at his paper, wondering what to do.

“Use the information in the problem to figure out the rule first, and then apply the rule to the graph,” Rhine tells the student, who is leaning on his hand, struggling to make sense of numbers at 7:45 a.m.

Around the room, students try to graph the problem together. “You start at zero and you just draw the line,” one boy tells his partner. “Go up one and over two,” says another, his pencil drawing a line on the paper.

Drawing graphs, manipulating letters instead of numbers, using complex and abstract equations — generations of students have attempted these algebraic concepts. Many succeed. Others give up. Many ask the same question: Why is algebra so difficult? Rhine has asked and answered that question in his research as a School of Education professor at Willamette University.

When Letters Replace Numbers
For 11 years, Rhine taught mathematics in Los Angeles, and this spring, he brushed up on his skills with the class at West Salem High. Rhine calls algebra the “gatekeeper” math course that stands between students and the rest of their education, including college. Yet so many struggle to understand it.

Part of the problem is that with algebra, students start moving away from tangible questions where they can see with their eyes that 5 plus 4 equals 9. Rhine says that once students start using variables and tools such as the quadratic equation, the concepts become more abstract. The students start thinking equations work “magically” instead of trying to understand how or why they work.

Rhine is working on a solution, “The Teacher’s Handbook of Algebraic Thinking and Misconceptions.” He says there are many common misconceptions students have in class — such as looking at a graph and thinking it represents one thing, when it actually represents another. “The more teachers know about the misconceptions, the more they can help students learn the concepts,” Rhine says.

Using Technology
Math is just one of Rhine’s areas of research. He also is interested in technology’s impact on education and has acquired two separate million-dollar grants to improve the use of technology in Oregon classrooms. “The government has spent billions and billions of dollars for technology in schools, and we are always hearing stories of the items gathering dust,” he says.

Rhine directed one grant from the U.S. Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to use Technology program, or PT3. The three-year grant funded the Oregon Technology in Education Network, or OTEN, a group of six Oregon universities working to help teachers successfully use technology in the classroom.

Through the grant, students at Willamette’s School of Education can access a technology library at the University that allows them to take items such as laptops or wireless routers to the elementary and secondary schools where they are student-teaching. They also learn how to write grants to obtain the technology they want in their own classrooms when they become teachers. Rhine edited and wrote part of a book titled “Integrated Technologies, Innovative Learning: Insights from the PT3 Program,” which highlights successful technology projects across the country.

The second grant — through Teacher Quality Enhancement, from the U.S. Department of Education — helps the OTEN colleges develop better placements of their students in schools that support and are comfortable with technology use.

More than Just PowerPoint
Rhine says multimedia presentations in classrooms fulfill an important need for students: having more ways to represent what they know. Technology can be a great way for students to communicate their understanding and learn ideas in non-traditional ways, Rhine says — if it is used effectively, with a good educational basis.

Simply having students make flashy PowerPoint presentations isn’t enough; the presentations need to focus on real, relevant content. Without it, “the students had fun, they’re interested, they’re more engaged, but they learn nothing,” Rhine says.

Back in his West Salem algebra class, Rhine has limited his technology for the day to the old-style overhead projector. He actively works his way around the room, making sure each student is on task and trying to help any who appear confused. He knows the importance of this class for the students’ academic future. “So many students give up on math because they say, ‘It just doesn’t make sense to me.’ We have to help students understand things better and not mystify them.”

How Do You Spell Phthisis? Ask Bill Long

“Expressing life through words is only one way to get at and exposit meaning in the universe, but it is a good way for many people to begin to understand reality. … I am convinced that the real roots of creative thought lie in understanding the building blocks of our thoughts, which are the words we select in which to encase our ideas.” — Bill Long, Willamette University law professor, in one of the 1,900 essays on his Web site

Bill Long has taken three trips to the National Senior Spelling Bee, placing second during his first two attempts and winning third at this summer’s competition in June. He has spelled seemingly impossible words like “xebec” and “phthisis” in front of an audience, and he has read all 1,459 pages of the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition.

But ask the Willamette College of Law visiting professor about his hobby, and he’ll tell you he’s not a speller — he’s a wordsmith. A speller is someone concerned only with how every word is spelled, he says. A wordsmith wants to know what the word means, how it developed, where it came from, how it has changed. Long carries pages of yellow legal paper covered with scribbled lists of words, ones that piqued his interest while he was reading the dictionary. “I’ll come to a word and go, ‘That looks so fascinating. I’ve got to check that out.’ It becomes a way to complete my appreciation of the world, to learn what people call things.”

His tone turns philosophical as he continues, pointing to the Latin and Greek dictionaries he uses when he is studying a word’s origin. “I make the lists, and then I get lost in the dictionaries. Then I write essays on them.”

Essays, indeed. Long started a Web site in 1994 to catalog and share his writings on words and his other interests: Shakespeare, law, the Bible’s Book of Job, his travels. He now has more than 1,900 essays on the site, and typically adds about two more each day. Many take on serious topics, sharing some of his innermost thoughts.

But many others keep a light-hearted tone, like an essay he wrote on the prefix “sph,” which begins: “Let’s look at this exercise today as if we were having a block party. Neighbors don’t necessarily have anything in common; they work different places, are often of different political and religious affiliations and keep different hours. Yet, sometimes they come out of their homes and even share a beer or hot dog. So, let’s explore a few (not all) of the words in the ‘SPH’ neighborhood.”

Dictionary in Hand
Long approaches his word studies with a sense of humor and is attracted to “fun” words, he says — ones with interesting origins or that are derived from words with different meanings. Like vomitory (a passageway into an amphitheater) or uncorseted (to be uninhibited). He has written several essays on words that he finds amusing or interesting but that won’t appear in the National Senior Spelling Bee because they are too “gross” or they make people squeamish. For the latter, he writes: “All of [these] have the same suffix — ectomy — which means a cutting or slicing. While we take great delight in carving roasts or slicing cheese, not many of us want to spend much time thinking about slicing off vital organs. Hence, our squeamishness. But I am fascinated with ‘cutting’ terms.”

Long spends numerous hours reading his dictionaries to prepare for the bee, which is sponsored by the Wyoming chapter of AARP and is open to people age 50 and older. The bee starts with a written round of 100 words, followed by an oral round for the top 16 spellers.

It’s not exactly the same as the well-known bee for youths — the seniors sit at tables during the oral round, rather than dramatically standing on a stage in front of an audience — but competitors really get into it, Long says. “There is applause at times when someone gets a word that people didn’t know, or one they’re glad they didn’t get. The organizers try to make it more casual, saying ‘We’re seniors.’ But they’re all competitive. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t competitive.”

In fact, this year’s winner, computer programmer Hal Prince, told Long that he had carefully studied the professor’s online blog to figure out how to beat him. “He figured out that I was more of a wordsmith than a speller, and he could beat me because he’s a pure speller,” Long says. “I guess that’s the downside of having a blog. If people are really interested, they can figure you out.”

The final word to trip up Long this year was tryptophan, an essential amino acid distributed in protein. He replaced the “y” with an “i.” Now, he spells the word with ease. “You never forget how to spell the words you miss,” he says.

Man of Many Interests
Teaching law is Long’s fourth career. He recalls that at age 17, he thought he wanted to study law or religion. He initially chose the latter. Long was a religion professor at Reed College in Portland in the 1980s, and indulged in his love of writing for a year by crafting editorials for The Oregonian newspaper. Then he switched careers and became a Presbyterian pastor. “In the mid-90s, I just sort of lost interest in it,” he says. “I found that my interest in law, which I had at 17, had returned.”

After teaching history and government for six years at a small college in Kansas, Long returned to Oregon and attended Willamette law school, graduating in 1999. His first law job was at Stoel Rives LLP, a large and well-known Portland firm. In 2003, he left the firm for Willamette, and now he teaches insurance law, sales law and jurisprudence.

At heart he is a lover of words, history and using his mind to work through issues, so Long sees his transition to law as a natural one. “Law is just making a case based on chronology. To be a good lawyer means you want to work things out verbally,” he says. “Here I am at 54, and I have a lot of interests — law, religion, words. I’m sort of a general humanist, I guess you could say.”

Miranda Rake: All You Need Is Love

Kant discussed God, freedom, aesthetics and morality, but he didn’t say a word about love, which puzzled recent graduate Miranda Rake ’06. The religious studies major pored over his writings and took a stab at what the German philosopher might have said, had he addressed the topic.

“Kant is so dense,” she says. “You think you know it, and you do, but then you forget.” In spite of Kant’s elusiveness, Rake managed to catch his drift. Her 21-page Kant paper took top student honors at a conference sponsored by the Pacific Northwest region of AAR/SBL/ASOR — a consortium of academic groups devoted to religious and Oriental research.

Rake’s paper, “On Love and Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment,” theorizes that we not only live by faith, we love by faith as well. Love, she writes, requires leaps of faith, and romantic love is much more complex, involving a degree of choice and requiring a much greater leap. We need to trust that the other person shares our capacity for love.

Genuine love, Rake writes, cultivates a respect for the other person as a free being and accepts the other person as an end in him or herself, not as a means to an end. When that goal is achieved, love has transformative power. “Love holds within it the ability to illuminate our highest vocation as a human,” she writes. In other words, loving and being loved can make you a better person.

Rake wandered into her major serendipitously. “I came to religious studies as an alternative to philosophy’s lack of grounding,” she says. A religious studies course with Professor Doug McGaughey helped her see that religion is grounded in everyday life. “People live these things out. If you’re Buddhist, you go to the temple and burn incense at the shrine.”

Rake now heads a youth program with her Episcopalian congregation and has joined a task force that looks at how to attract young people. “The church is aging and shrinking,” she says.

She once struggled with her own commitment. “My grandpa died and I kept telling my little sister that grandpa had gone to heaven. And then I thought, ‘Gosh, where do I really think grandpa is?’” She ended up taking a short break from the church of her childhood.

Rake’s University courses have given her spiritual life new depth. “Religion is first and foremost a personal, spiritual thing, but I feel like the intellectual exploration of religion enhances the emotional side,” she says. She combined academic studies with travel through Africa and Asia to see the varieties of cultural and religious expression, and has come to agree with Professor McGaughey. “As far as religious beliefs, we all have more similarities than differences.”

You Majored in What?
Now that Rake has graduated, questions of belief have been replaced by a more immediate question: What in the world does one do with a degree in religious studies?

Actually, the larger question is how she will balance her seemingly disparate passions — writing, food and religion (not to mention the years of ballet and acting).

Rake got a taste of journalism when she interned at Portland Monthly Magazine, writing food, dance and theatre reviews. She edited and wrote for the Collegian, Willamette’s student newspaper, and she wants to continue her love affair with words, perhaps as a food writer.

Or as a scholar, looking at connections between food and religion. “Food creates community,” she says. “Like religion, it brings people together and provides a way for them to experience their heritage. My grandma baked pumpkin pies, and I bake them two generations later.” She also thinks food plays a symbolic role in religion, from the bread and wine of the Christian sacrament to food offerings left for Hindu deities.

Food is personal for Rake. “I love food. I love to cook and bake. When I’m stressed out — if it’s really bad — I’ll make a layer cake.” She devours gourmet food magazines and can get lost in the eight shelves of gastronomic books at Powells.

But the details will come later. Rake’s immediate plan is not to have a plan. She’ll explore Europe this summer, pick up some free-lance writing if possible, bake roast chicken and her grandmother’s pumpkin pie, and eventually enroll in divinity school or a food studies program that will allow her to discover and write about the religious, historical and nutritional aspects of food.

Perhaps the path ahead is best described in her award-winning paper. “Ultimately, we’re making our own leaps in trying to be true to our own humanity — reaching for our best selves.”