From William Barnes, PhD Department of Biology Although not well-traveled by most robust measures, I have been around a long time, and taken advantage of some opportunities to live or visit in other countries, at least briefly. Since testimony has been invited, here is a portion of mine about the value of living and studying abroad. In 1967 my college crew won the Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia (sort of the DII national championship at the time). We were invited to row in the Ratzeburg Invitational Regatta against the German crew which would win the Olympic gold the next year. There were also international-level crews from Denmark, Finland, Cornell, and others I can’t remember. We got absolutely KILLED, but what has stuck with me just as much as that race, which certainly brought my ego back down to the ground, is the town of Ratzeburg itself. As I remember it, we were put up in the old town, which looked exactly like the ancient towns in the Grimm’s Brothers fairy tales, off-center wood and stucco buildings, with small leaded glass windows, tilting into the street. You almost expected Puss-in-Boots to come swaggering out of an alley! The Germans were wonderful people. We had a great time in a local beer garden one evening, drinking apfelsaft at the traditional long wood trestle tables. I seem to remember the young women serving beer in St. Pauli Girl style; I wish I remembered more than that! I even got a chance to inflict my C-grade German from high school on one of the shopkeepers, who was vastly amused. I think the gift from such experiences is the intellectual curiosity about things that arises from once having seen them. I know that I know little about European history, but from what little I do know, I have been able to put people - the Romanovs, Rasputin, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Empress of India, into my lectures about X-linked genetic diseases. I know that my student evaluations have suffered significantly for straying away from “factual biology” on this and numerous other occasions, but also that, for the better students, it has reinforced the Liberal Education efforts of my colleagues in the Humanities. In 1978-79, I went to Swansea Wales as a visiting grad student, and was incredibly fortunate to be offered a Research Demonstrator position for a year. As everyone knows, Wales has been a battleground for millennia, between the Welsh and the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and finally the Plantagenet kings of England (and the fight isn’t over yet!). We visited almost every Roman fort and Norman castle in Wales. I particularly remember standing on the battlements of Conwy Castle, with the walled town to my back, the ruins of the Great Hall to my right and the estuary in front, with seagulls flashing white against a radiant blue sky, riding the salt winds. I have seen only two things so beautiful since …. One was standing at the top of a ski lift in Banff looking down on a cloud layer as it marched up the valley below, leaving the bare granite peaks untouched; better than the Alps, but that is another story. The other was sailing on Long Island Sound with my Dad, reaching on a crisp northwesterly breeze between the Dumplings and Race Point Light off Fishers Island. Edward Hopper and Homer Winslow did well, and William Merritt Chase might have come closest, but they never fully captured that combination of wind, spray, salt and light. Perhaps nothing but all five senses can. An argument for living travel if ever there was one. The stereotype of British people is that they are cool and distant. I never saw that. The people in our lab would drift in around 9:00. At 10:30 everyone would break for morning coffee, smoke cigarettes, and natter until about 11:00 about the dirty laundry behind the latest articles, or the dirty laundry of whoever wasn’t sitting there (I can remember being scandalized about what “randy Sylvia” was really up to). Another hour or so of experiments, and the Grad students would go to lunch, and then have a pint and play darts at the student union (British students can hold their liquor much more reliably than Americans). By 1:30, we were back at the lab benches until 3:30 when everyone gathered again for afternoon tea and more cigarettes. On Fridays we would add to this a visit to one or another of the local pubs for a couple of pints and more cigarettes before going home. It actually reads better than it was, but still it was pretty good. My wife and I lived in a small flat above a Dentist’s office with no heating except for an ineffective gas fire in the living room. The kitchen had nothing, and the bedroom had a small electric space heater. If we wanted a bath (no shower), we had to wait until all the patients were gone at the end of the day so we could use the practice’s w.c. on the floor below. Even then, there was only a 5-gallon water heater, so we had to supplement with a teakettle of boiling water! I was 32 years old, and it was a very long way from Reinhard Village! Swansea is in southern Wales, so the climate is mild enough that palm trees can survive in the public gardens, but it does get cold enough for an inch or so of slushy snow on occasion. With so little heat, and drafty old windows, the only way we could keep warm was to go to bed at 7:00 under two thick quilts; it is no accident that my oldest son was conceived there! People who only believe whatever they are told about socialized medicine, and only by those talking heads they already agree with, think the British system is terrible. Now, 30 years later in America, I can say from personal experience that neither of my daughters-in-law received anything like the pre-natal care that we did in Wales in 1979. And after the baby came home, he and my wife were visited at home, every day, by a Public Health Nurse and it cost us nothing! And we were poor immigrants! I feel like a welfare queen for saying it. I don’t believe it is any accident that the U.S. infant mortality rate, at one of the latest counts, was greater than in 34 other countries world-wide. Using numbers to support conclusions seems to be quite out of favor this season, but another way of saying this is that there are 40,375 full-term American babies who die every year, who would have lived under the system of socialized medicine in Sweden. Looking at your culture from the outside can impel you to consider some inconvenient truths which are otherwise too easy to bury under tribal sophistry (it suddenly occurs to me that it might not be such a bad idea to embed a few Arts and Humanities faculty in STEM departments, and vice-versa). If it is true that the best Liberal Education is about developing a sophisticated bullshit meter, then Study Abroad must surely be the #1 best practice. In my opinion, no college or university which cannot make it possible for at least ⅓ of its students to study abroad can honestly claim to offer a liberal education. We had only a dorm-size refrigerator, so my wife had to walk to the butchers, the green-grocers, the fish-market, etc. every day. At that time, many people still did not own cars, so these little clusters of shops were usually quite close by. When she first began coming in with our son, each of the shopkeepers would press a 50p piece into the palm of the “little American” because silver was good luck for a baby. It has been said, and I believe it, that the morality of a society is reflected in the way they treat their children, their old people, and their poor. Both of my grandfathers were small business-men, I grew up in a small business, and went to work full-time in the summers when I was 13. I like to think I can understand and respect hard-nosed reality, and of course nobody who knows me will dispute that I am also a stiff-necked moralist. What I saw from my year in Wales was how much more morality than exists in American society today, is quite practical indeed, even in a far less affluent society than we have at this moment. In contrast, the ugliest time I have ever spent was a pestilential year in El Paso Texas, when I was a PFC in the army, learning how to nuke the Soviet bear bombers if they ever came across the arctic to nuke Philly - but that is another story also. It was all red dust and scorched rock, like living in Mordor. There, a typical Saturday night entertainment might be drinking cases of Bud in the back of a pick-up truck. If somebody had a motorcycle, we could watch him demonstrate his skills by herding a Jack-Rabbit around and around through the sage brush until it died, gasping of terror and exhaustion. Or we could go across the Rio Grande to the seamy underbelly of El Paso, otherwise known as Juarez. My wife and I did that one time and were followed doggedly by a young boy asking us if we wanted to get married. When we finally told him that we already were, he asked, without missing a beat, “So you wanna get divorced?” Even the women were tough. A group from our class was getting semi-quietly drunk in a bar one night. As Heroic Defenders of Christian America, we were ignoring their rather overt importunings for the most part, but …... the next thing we knew, one of them had punched out a buddy, given him a bloody nose and split his lip, over a business disagreement (obviously we weren’t the marines!). Perhaps unsurprisingly, my feelings about “American Exceptionalism” are nuanced and a bit ironic. Even so, there is only one adjective to describe the skies and clouds during spring dust season in the desert - and that is biblical. I have purchased a few paintings, but have never seen an artist who could really do justice to those soaring orange parapets at sunset with their full majesty (bear in mind that I am only a Professor, and my price range is limited). In my view, the only one who has really reached that pinnacle is George Lucas in his portrayal of Llando Calrhissian’s Cloud City in Star Wars II (or whatever), or Beldar’s return to Remulak in the Coneheads movie. To wind down, I don’t think British society is all good, or American society all bad. But the differences between two cultures are glaring when you step out of your own, and compare it with another from the outside. It becomes immediately obvious which uniquely American values must be preserved, but also how much we could make our own country better. That is REAL patriotism and so I argue to my Biotechnology advisees that Study Abroad is the greatest patriotic duty they have.
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 00:07:22 +0000
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