Life & Letters • Spring 2015

Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts Magazine · Spring 2015

Bridge to Somewhere Connecting STEM and the Humanities to Fix America’s Infrastructure

Depression

P. 20

Immigration

P. 24

P. 14

View Through the Student Lens The fifth annual LLILAS Benson student photography exhibit and competition featured photographs from a summer of study, both abroad in Latin America and in Latina/o communities in the United States. Thirty-three photographs comprised the exhibit, which gave a glimpse into the immersive experiences of each of the students as they balanced research, travel, field interviews, writing and the challenges of daily life during their summer study.

Whether the topic was biodiversity in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park (Kaitlin Tasker), motorcycle culture in Maceió, Brazil (Kate Layton) or Tejano bar culture in East Austin (Christina Noriega), students in a variety of disciplines ventured outside of their comfort zone to observe and learn.

ABOVE: Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park. Photo by Kaitlin Tasker, Department of Geography and the Environment.

MIDDLE: Guadalajara, Mexico, outside a hostel along a railroad route. Photo by Mariana Morante Aguirre, LLILAS. BELOW: Antigua, Guatemala. Photo by Katie Floyd, LLILAS and Plan II Honors.

Life & Letters

Contents Spring 2015 Departments 2 Dean’s Message 3 Knowledge Matters

A look at the college’s top news, research and achievements.

3 Your Turn to Do the Dishes

A new sociology study reveals what young men and women want when it comes to sharing household responsibilities.

Cover Story

14 Bridge to Somewhere Historian Erika Bsumek’s Building America course connects STEM and the humanities to address America’s failing infrastructure.

8 Campus Life

A sampling of notable happenings across campus.

10 Mission to Map

Geography senior Nathan Garza finds his path on El Camino Real.

11 Not Lost in Translation

A 15-year project leads to the first complete English translation in more than a century of the Rigveda, India’s earliest text.

Features

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Depression A closer look at how genetics and environmental stressors could provide a better understanding of mental illness and improve treatments.

13 Books 28 Q&A Meet undergraduate researcher Courtney Koepke, Rhodes scholar Sai Gourisankar and Marshall scholar Mark Jbeily.

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Borderline A surge in U.S.-Mexico border crossings in 2014 calls into question the politics, law and identity surrounding immigration.

31 Field of Dreams

Liberal Arts Honors Director Larry Carver helps UT Austin become a major contender for elite national scholarships.

33 Charles White Collection

A look at the work of Charles W. White, one of America’s most recognized African American and social realist artists of the 20th century.

ON THE COVER: Brooklyn Bridge, New York City.

Photo by © Paul Souders/WorldFoto, 6836 16th Ave NE, Sea/Corbis BACK COVER: Anthropology suite located across the skybridge from the College of Liberal Arts Building. The female and male gorilla skeletons were purchased in 1927 from Mr. F. G. Merfield, French Cameroon, Africa, for $100 and $200. Photo by Casey Dunn.

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Dean’s Message

Life & Letters The College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin publishes Life & Letters for its community of scholars, alumni and friends.

College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy L. Diehl Director of Public Affairs David A. Ochsner

Crossing Mental Boundaries

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affairs, offered the example of a former student of his (in Plan II and Middle Eastern Studies) whom he met during a recent visit to Abu Dhabi. The once shy Texas girl he remembered from his classes was now fluent in Arabic and working as an entrepreneur in the Middle East.

Suri says the student had become “an international operator in her own right, acting within the culture of her foreign residence.” She took a job in a region that “forced her to build business relationships with people who are unfamiliar and even suspicious of her background … She is not merely bridging cultures; she is living in multiple mindsets at the same time.”

He concludes that future success as an international citizen “comes in crossing the mental boundaries that matter much more than the lines on a map or a job application.”

That is why study abroad is key to a strong liberal arts education. It is through such experiential learning that our students develop the critical, creative thinking skills they will need to become the next generation of ethical leaders our world sorely needs.

Art Direction and Design Allen F. Quigley Copy Editor Adam Deutsch Contributing Writers Alicia Dietrich Michelle García Rachel Griess Emily Nielsen Contributing Photographers Raul Buitrago Sarah Lim Kirk Weddle Contributing Illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg

Visit us online at lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu Or email us at cola.alum@austin.utexas.edu Postmaster Send changes of address to: Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts 116 Inner Campus Dr., Stop G6000 Austin, TX 78712-1257 Follow us facebook.com/utliberalarts twitter.com/LiberalArtsUT youtube.com/LiberalArtsUT

Randy L. Diehl, Dean David Bruton, Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts

Printed by Horizon Printing

Photo: Emily Nielsen

The writer Lawrence Durrell once observed that travel is among the most rewarding forms of introspection, and students who study abroad bear this out.

When they leave their comfort zones and experience life and learning in another culture, they return home knowing a lot more about themselves.

Study abroad gives students context to better understand how they fit into this world. They learn how to become adaptable, to think on their feet and negotiate unfamiliar places and customs. They form strong bonds with their peers and become more engaged in academic life. It is no surprise that these students have high retention and graduation rates and go on to successful careers in many fields.

In our last issue of Life & Letters we featured Hector Cantu, an economics senior who was so inspired by a lecture from visiting Polish economist Leszek Balcerowicz that he traveled to Warsaw to work for Balcerowicz’s think tank.

Cantu worked two jobs and secured an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from our college to make the trip in the summer of 2014. As the first international student to do research at the think tank, he learned about creating policies that promote economic freedom in developing countries, and he returned to Austin with a desire to help improve economic relations among the U.S., Europe and Mexico, his home country.

In a recent Daily Texan op-ed, Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public

Editor Michelle Bryant

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Knowledge Matters

Your Turn to Do the Dishes Sociology/ Population Research

Illustration: Allen F. Quigley

BY DAVID A. OCHSNER There’s no shortage of advice for women these days about how to balance work and family — everything from becoming a supermom who can “lean in” at the workplace and do it all, to embracing the role of a fulltime homemaker.

But when given a choice, the majority of young women say they would prefer an arrangement in which work and family responsibilities are shared equally between partners. What’s more, the majority of young men also favor such an arrangement.

These are findings of a study published in the American Sociological Review, co-authored by David S. Pedulla, assistant professor of sociology at The University of Texas at Austin; and Sarah Thébaud, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

In a national survey of unmarried, childless men and women between the ages of 18 and 32, the researchers asked respondents how they would ideally structure their relationship with a future spouse or partner in terms of balancing work and family.

The study found that when the option is made available to them, the majority of respondents — regardless of gender or education level — opt for a relationship in which they would share earning and household/caregiving responsibilities equally with their partner. Additionally, the study found that if workplace policies that support work-family balance — such as subsidized child care — are in place, women are even more likely to prefer an egalitarian relationship.

“Our study provides compelling evidence that if policies such as flexible scheduling, parental leave and subsidized child care were universally in place, women would be even more likely to want an egalitarian relationship with their partner and much less likely to want to be primarily responsible for housework and child care,” says Pedulla, who is also a faculty research associate in UT Austin’s Population Research Center. “These findings offer new insights that may be useful in guiding policymakers and organizations that are interested in reducing gender inequality and improving the work and family lives of young men and women.”

These findings also shed light on the factors contributing to persistent gender inequality and the ways in which government and organizational policies could be redesigned to support people’s ideal preferences for balancing work and family life.

Most young women — and men — prefer shared household responsibilities

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Knowledge Matters

An artist’s rendering of Vintana sertichi.

Mammals of Unusual Size Anthropology UT Austin anthropologist Chris Kirk and a team of international researchers have discovered fossilized remnants of a relatively massive mammal that lived more than 66 million years ago. The team found a nearly complete cranium of the mammal Vintana sertichi, which lived alongside Late Cretaceous dinosaurs in Madagascar.

Vintana had a body mass of about 20 pounds, making it one of the largest mammals from the entire Mesozoic Era (252 to 66 million years ago). It is part of an enigmatic group of mammals called the Gondwanatheria that is known only from southern continents. Researchers had previously found only isolated teeth and jaw fragments, so the latest discovery provides the first window into the cranial anatomy of this group. The findings were published in the science journal Nature.

“It was an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often — the chance to be one of the first scientists to study the cranial anatomy of a major group of fossil mammals,” Kirk says. The analyses of Kirk and his colleagues suggest that Vintana had large eyes, a sensitive nose and good high-frequency hearing.

Zhe-Xi Luo, a leading expert on early mammalian evolution from the University of Chicago who reviewed the manuscript for Nature, hailed the Vintana fossil as “the discovery of the decade” for understanding the deep history of mammals, offering the best case of how plate tectonics and biogeography have affected animal evolution.

‘15 Minute History’ Lauded as One of the Best Podcasts of 2014 History Since its launch in July 2013, UT Austin’s “15 Minute History” has topped the iTunes U charts more than 20 times, surpassing content produced by organizations such as NASA, Smithsonian Libraries, TED and Harvard University.

Selected as one of iTunes U Best Podcasts of 2014, “15 Minute History” features short, accessible discussions from faculty members and graduate students on wideranging topics sure to intrigue any history buff and offers more than 60 episodes produced to date. Subjects are drawn from the World History and U.S. History Standards for Texas K-12 social studies courses, making them an educational resource for teachers and students.

“We at ‘15 Minute History’ are proud and honored to have been included as one of iTunes U Best Podcasts of 2014,” says Christopher Rose, who co-hosts “15 Minute History” with Joan Neuberger and is also outreach director in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a history graduate student. “We’ve had a terrific year — we have exceeded half a million downloads and have acquired nearly 60,000 subscribers.”

“15 Minute History” is a joint project of Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at UT Austin; and Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues that is produced by the Department of History.

To listen to the podcast, visit 15minutehistory.org or subscribe on iTunes.

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Vintana illustration: Luci Betti-Nash Knowledge Matters illustrations: Allen F. Quigley

Vintana had a body mass of about 20 pounds, making it one of the largest mammals from the entire Mesozoic Era.

A Gray Matter Psychology

Grand Victory

Photo: Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic

Philosophy

ABOVE: Wes Anderson (Philosophy ’90) arrives for the 2015 FOX Golden Globes party at FOX Pavilion on Jan. 11 in Beverly Hills, Calif.

BELOW: “The Grand Hotel Budapest Hotel” movie poster.

Liberal Arts alumnus Wes Anderson (Philosophy ’90) won a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy in January and also received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director for “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014). The whimsical and complex comedy earned a total of nine Academy Award nominations and took home four trophies in February for best costume design, makeup, production design and musical score.

Anderson’s previous Academy Award nominations were for “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” for Best Writing and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” for Best Animated Feature.

Set in the 1930s in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” recounts the adventures of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a concierge at a famous European hotel, and Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), the lobby boy who becomes his friend. After the mysterious death of hotel patron Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), Gustave finds himself the recipient of a priceless Renaissance painting, “Boy with Apple,” and is accused of murder. A pastry-aided prison break ensues.

A collection of brain specimens in the Department of Psychology gained worldwide media attention in December when it was reported that half of about 200 specimens were missing, including the brain of Charles Whitman, who went on a murderous shooting spree from the UT Tower in 1966.

The news reports were prompted by an article posted online in The Atlantic by Alex Hannaford, who with photographer Adam Voorhes had just published a book about the collection titled Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital.

A preliminary investigation revealed that brain specimens reported as missing were in fact properly disposed of by UT Austin environmental health and safety officials in 2002.

Faculty researchers said the specimens were in poor condition when they were received from the Austin State Hospital in the 1980s and were not suitable for research or teaching.

There was no evidence that any specimen came from Whitman. The remaining brain specimens are currently being scanned by students for research purposes.

Life & Letters

Get the latest news from the College of Liberal Arts lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu

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Knowledge Matters

Army ROTC Named Battalion of the Year

Little Words Can Mean a Lot

Military Science

The Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program was named Best ROTC Program in the Fall of 2014. UT Austin is a member of the 5th ROTC Brigade, which is made up of 36 programs at universities in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico and Arkansas.

Col. Ricardo Morales, commander of the Army’s 5th Brigade, selected Texas Army ROTC as the program doing the best job of developing America’s military leaders.

“This is a holistic award,” says Lt. Col. Travis Habhab, former chair of UT Austin’s military science department.

“Everything from our cadets, to the administration, to mentoring techniques and university support were considered. It recognizes that Texas has led the way over the past year in integrating new ideas to develop our country’s future leaders in problem solving capability and critical thinking.”

The Texas Army ROTC team also placed first in the 2014 5th Brigade Ranger Challenge Competition, which is comparable to winning a Big 12 Championship in an NCAA sport. The win qualified the team for West Point’s Sandhurst Military Skills Competition in April. Of the 275 ROTC programs throughout the country, UT Austin’s team earned one of only eight open spots in the competition.

They will compete against more than 50 teams from around the world, made up of both cadets and prior-service soldiers. This year’s challenge will introduce new tasks such as rappelling, obstacle course navigation, combat swimming (with full gear), rifle marksmanship, raft paddling and a 12-foot wall climb.

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Cadet Nicholas Corti prepares to shoot silhouettes with a paintball gun at the Brigade Ranger Challenge at Fort Hood.

The smallest, most forgettable words in admissions essays — such as the, a, to, I and they — can tell us in advance how students will perform in college, according to a new study at UT Austin that included computerized text analysis of 50,000 admissions essays written by prospective college students.

How a student uses small words, the study revealed, is related to his or her subsequent grade-point average. For example, students who heavily use the word I tend to do worse in class, and students who heavily use the words the and a do better.

“Function words allow us to assess how people are thinking more than what they are thinking about,” says James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at UT Austin and co-author of the paper.

The research shows that people who think categorically do better in college than those who don’t. Categorical thinking involves categorizing things into kinds and connecting objects and concepts in a sophisticated way.

Categorical thinking is reflected by use of articles such as the and prepositions such as on and of.

Dynamic thinkers see the world in terms of narratives, typically personal and subjective.

Dynamic thinkers use more pronouns such as I and they and more auxiliary verbs such as will and had, and these applicants ended up, on average, with lower GPAs in the study.

However, the researchers caution against the simple use of word counts in admissions decisions. “The results could be interpreted not as a failure of dynamic thinkers to do well in college,” says David Beaver, professor in the Department of Linguistics and co-author of the study, “but as a failure of college to help students add categorical thinking to their arsenal.”

The findings were published Dec. 31, 2014, in the online edition of the journal PLOS ONE. Additional researchers included Gary Lavergne, program manager in the Office of Admissions; Cindy Chung, psychology postdoctoral fellow; and Joey Frazee, a linguistics graduate student.

Photo: Promise Maino Illustrations: Allen F. Quigley

Psychology

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Understanding Autism-related Language Delays Linguistics

Photo: Annie Marks

A new study by a linguistics professor and an alumnus from UT Austin sheds light on a well-known linguistic characteristic of autistic children — their reluctance to use pronouns — paving the way for more accurate diagnostics.

Pronouns — words such as you and me in English — are difficult for children with autism, who sometimes reverse them (for example, using you to refer to oneself) or avoid them in favor of names.

Previous research attributed these pronoun hiccups to language confusion or echolalia — automatic repetition of noises or phrases. UT linguistics alumnus Aaron Shield and professor Richard P. Meier offer new theories in a first-ever study on the use of pronouns by deaf, nativesigning children with autism.

“Our work suggests that the opacity of pronouns in English and other spoken languages is not at the root of the problem,” says Shield, the study’s lead author. “We suspect, though more work is needed, that people with autism may differ in their experiences of selfhood.”

The crucial difference between signed and spoken language is that pronouns are points with the index finger toward oneself or others rather than spoken words that do not give learners any clue as to whom they refer.

Nonetheless, deaf children with autism avoided pronouns, preferring signed names.

“This research has great clinical significance for the deaf community and for educators of deaf children,” Meier says. “It helps us to better understand the linguistic markers of autism in all children, deaf or hearing, signing or speaking.”

The paper, “The Use of Sign Language Pronouns by Native-Signing Children with Autism,” was published in the online publication of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders in February 2015.

Give it a Rest Psychology

Franky Ramont Schussel, a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics’ American Sign Language program, signs I/ME (left) and YOU (right).

Scientists have already established that resting the mind, as in daydreaming, helps strengthen memories of events and retention of information, but in a new twist, UT Austin researchers have found that the right kind of mental rest and reflection can actually help boost future learning.

How our brains capture and store new information is heavily influenced by allowing our minds to rest and reflect on what we already know, according to a study co-authored by Alison Preston, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and Margaret Schlichting, a graduate student researcher. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We think replaying memories during rest makes those earlier memories stronger, not just impacting the original content, but impacting the memories to come,” Preston says.

“Nothing happens in isolation,” Preston adds. “When you are learning something new, you bring to mind all of the things you know that are related to that new information. In doing so, you embed the new information into your existing knowledge.”

Until now, many scientists assumed that prior memories are more likely to interfere with new learning. This new study shows that at least in some situations, the opposite is true.

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Knowledge Matters

Campus Life HDO Commencement Human Dimensions of Organizations

Photo: Erika Rich

Donaldo Puller, an HDO Master of Arts graduate, presents his capstone project at the poster session before the HDO’s inaugural commencement ceremony Dec. 5. HDO master’s candidates tackle a diverse range of disciplines, including psychology, drama, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and rhetoric, covering topics such as leadership, ethics, diversity, change management and decision-making.

Rebecca Solnit American Studies/ English/ Humanities Institute

Photo: Carrie Andersen

Writer, activist and public historian Rebecca Solnit spoke on campus Nov. 13 about her new book, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. The talk centered on her collection of iconic and little-known essays that travel across disciplines to discuss issues of place, the environment, revolution and the power of stories.

Celebrating Argentina

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Photo: Hannah Vickers

LLILAS Benson Internationally acclaimed tango dancers George and Jairelbhi Furlong perform for audience members at Celebrating Argentina: An Evening of Tango, Literature and Food. The Oct. 16 event explored the three facets of tango — music, lyrics and dance — through a lecture, dance class and authentic Argentine cuisine.

Life & Letters Spring 2015

CMAS-MALS Building Celebration Juan Colomina, Hermelinda Zamarripa, Charles Roeckle and Nicole Guidotti-HernĂĄndez celebrate the new CMAS and MALS offices in the Gordon-White building (formerly Geography) on Jan. 16. The building was recently renovated and expanded.

Photo: Femi Olasupo

Mexican American Latina/o Studies

PEN Literary Awards English

Courtesy of Wayne Rebhorn

English professor Wayne Rebhorn shares a moment with actress Amy Poehler at the 2014 PEN Literary Awards ceremony Nov. 11 in Los Angeles. Rebhorn received a PEN Award for his translation of Boccaccio’s The Decameron.

Texas Politics Speaker Series Government

Photo: Ryan Miller

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, sat down with Joe Straus, speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, on Feb. 11 for the Texas Politics Speaker Series. Straus discussed issues facing the 84th Texas Legislature, including public education, transportation funding, the state budget and gun legislation.

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Knowledge Matters

Mission to Map

On El Camino Real with Nathan Garza

Geography and the Environment

BY EMILY NIELSEN

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ABOVE: Garza visited the Hastings Cutoff trail during a trip to Utah where he presented at the 2014 Partnership for the National Trails System. On the right is Pilot Peak, where the Donner-Reed Party found a spring after miles of crossing the salt flats without water.

RIGHT: Garza and his dad in front of the Alamo at the end of a Boy Scout Mission Trail Hike.

Revolution (DAR) in 1918. Much of this work was featured in the new book El Camino Real De Los Tejas (Images of America).

“The DAR markers serve as the visual symbol for the trail on the ground,” Garza says. “I was able to make a map series you could use to get from marker to marker starting near Eagle Pass, Texas, and wrapping up just east of San Augustine, Texas, and into Louisiana.”

Garza is continuing his internship this year and spends about 10 hours per week working in the El Camino Real office.

Lately, he’s been working on georeferencing historical hand-drawn maps. Garza pins known markers, such as a mission church or a meeting of two rivers, to their actual geographic coordinates, which stretches and corrects the hand-drawn maps to scale.

In late October, Garza traveled to Salt Lake City for the 2014 Partnership for the National Trails System Workshop, a gathering of 70 trail system professionals from across the country. He was one of just eight interns to attend and spoke on a panel, answering questions about how to get youths more involved with national trails and their preservation.

Garza says that his internship has helped him to solidify his future plans and recognize a lifelong passion.

“It’s interesting to see people from all walks of life come together for the betterment of history and local culture,” Garza says. “It has definitely shown me that I want to go into this line of work — I’d like to be able to say I help preserve our cultural history while working with communities all over the state.”

Photos courtesy of Nathan Garza

As a boy growing up in San Antonio, Nathan Garza spent a lot of time hiking on trails.

His Boy Scout troop organized and led the Mission Trail Hike for years. Scouts from San Antonio and surrounding areas would gather at Mission Espada and begin their two-day hike to the Alamo. At the end of his first trip, Garza was rewarded with the Mission Trail Hike patch. Little did he know that years later he would become even more familiar with the paths.

“It blew my mind when I found out that the missions in San Antonio were along a stretch of El Camino Real,” Garza says. “I had come full circle, from being on the trail as a scout and learning about the history to now doing GIS mapping of the trail as a college student.”

Garza, a senior majoring in geography, is a GIS intern for El Camino Real de los Tejas, a member of the National Historic Trail Association. The trails were originally trade routes from Mexico City. They stretch across Texas and into Louisiana.

GIS stands for geographic information systems, which are a series of layers of data that help people visualize and analyze different types of information and trends. Geomorphologists can use GIS data to study things such as a river’s effect on a landscape. Demographers can use other GIS data to see who lives where and predict voting preferences in certain districts. GIS can be used by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of purposes, Garza says.

When Garza was younger, it was hard to find him without a pen and paper, sketching anything in his line of sight. He was fascinated by old maps and cartography.

“When I realized I could make digital maps for all sorts of purposes, it seemed to be the best of both worlds,” Garza says. “I could make sort of ‘utilitarian art’ that I would be proud to display, while others could use them functionally as maps.”

Garza spent most of his time at El Camino Real last summer creating county maps showing the location of the trail.

His maps also showcase trail markers placed by the Daughters of the American

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Books

Not Lost in Translation Asian Studies/ Religious Studies

Illustration: Wikipedia Commons

BY ALICIA DIETRICH Like so many big ideas, it all started over drinks — in this case, glasses of wine in New Orleans. Fifteen years later, a labor of love finally came to fruition for Joel Brereton, associate professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies, when his joint translation of India’s earliest text, the Rigveda, was finally complete.

Brereton was teaching at the University of Missouri in 1998 when UT Austin Professor Patrick Olivelle invited him and his colleague Stephanie Jamison for drinks during the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society in New Orleans. Olivelle proposed a challenge for them: Do a “quick and dirty” updated English translation of the Rigveda, the oldest extant text of India that forms part of the Veda, the formal scripture of Hinduism.

“There is a good but old German translation of the Rigveda. There is a good, mostly complete French translation, and a new German translation is now underway,” Brereton says. “But the English translation that people have been using is from the 19th century, and it was already outdated when it was published.

Moreover, that translation was written in a Victorian English, which would understandably discourage anybody interested in the text.”

That just would not do for such an important text, and Brereton and Jamison agreed that the only way for people to have access to the text was to do the translation. So they enthusiastically agreed to take on Olivelle’s “quick and dirty” challenge.

But “quick and dirty” it was not. Brereton and Jamison soon realized that the process would take longer than they’d initially realized. The Rigveda is composed of 1,028 hymns praising various gods that were designed to be recited during a ritual performance. The poems are believed to have been composed between 1500 and 1000 B.C. and were passed down orally over many generations and millennia.

“We got off to a somewhat slow start partly because we had other projects, but we also soon discovered that the text is more difficult than we had expected,” Brereton says. “And while we’d both done studies of the Rigveda, we found that to be responsible for every jot and tittle in the text and to render it in a way that makes it accessible required slow and meticulous work.”

Fifteen-year Project Introduces India’s Earliest Text to Modern Readers

In this ca. 1820 painting, Indra is depicted riding on his white elephant Airavata. Indra is the god of storms and war who leads the Deva (the gods who form and maintain heaven and the elements in Hinduism). Indra has about 250 hymns dedicated to him in the Rigveda.

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Not Lost in Translation

“We knew it was going to be a long haul, but I must say that, for both of us, this is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done and probably the most exciting thing we ever will do.”

Joel Brereton, associate professor of Asian studies and religious studies

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chair at UT Austin. But they both remained enthusiastic about the project and kept up the momentum over a sustained period.

Now that the translation is published, Brereton and Jamison are working to publish an online commentary about the text and to use that digital forum to share annotations from their research.

The digital format also allows them to update their translation and notes as scholarship on the Rigveda advances, creating a more dynamic text.

“We knew it was going to be a long haul, but I must say that, for both of us, this is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done and probably the most exciting thing we ever will do,” Brereton says. “It was incredibly engaging. So, OK, it took a long time, but it meant that I had a good time for a long time.”

The Rigveda: 3-Volume Set (Oxford University Press, May 2014) is edited and translated by Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton. It is the first complete English translation of the Rigveda in more than a century.

Photo: Emily Nielsen

Brereton and Jamison met in graduate school at Yale University, and they both studied ancient Sanskrit texts under the same professor. Brereton comes to the text from a religious studies perspective, and Jamison approaches it from a linguistics perspective.

“That turned out to be hugely advantageous to us,” Brereton says. “The Rigveda is a text that can give rise to many forms of interpretation and translation.

But at least we had a common, general perspective on the text. It’s not that we agreed on everything — it’s not that we still do agree — but we found ways of reaching accommodation with one another about how we were going to handle certain issues and problems in the text.”

Even though the translation is 1,700 pages long, there is not a single footnote in it. Brereton and Jamison made the decision to avoid using footnotes because they wanted the reader’s attention to be on the hymn itself. They wanted readers to be able to take in each hymn as a whole and not to get caught up in footnotes about archaic references and explanations.

They chose to write an introduction for each poem, explaining their interpretation, noting whether there were special problems and discussing things that they as translators found interesting. If Brereton and Jamison disagreed about some aspect of the translation, they were both able to share their notes and thoughts.

“The hymns are far more complex than I had realized when I began the project,” Brereton says.

“The poets are very clever and artful, and their use of language and play with language are much more studied than I had imagined.”

During the 15-year-long process, both Brereton and Jamison changed jobs, Brereton to The University of Texas at Austin and Jamison to the University of California, Los Angeles. They carved out time to work on the project in between their teaching responsibilities, other research projects and various other “distractions,” such as Brereton’s stint as a department

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Books Metaphysics:

Man or Citizen: Anger,

Wiley-Blackwell, Jan. 2015

By Robert Koons, professor, Department of Philosophy

Penn State University Press, April 2015

The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft

The Good Immigrants: How

The Fundamentals

and the Call of National Security PublicAffairs, Jan. 2015

By Bartholomew Sparrow, professor, Department of Government

All Edge: Inside the New

Workplace Networks

University of Chicago Press, March 2015

By Clay Spinuzzi, professor, Department of English

Word Meaning and Syntax:

Approaches to the Interface Oxford University Press, March 2015

By Stephen Wechsler, professor, Department of Linguistics

Desire in the Canterbury Tales Ohio State University Press, April 2015

By Elizabeth Scala, associate professor, Department of English

Forgiveness, and Authenticity in Rousseau

By Karen Pagani, assistant professor, Department of French and Italian

the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority Princeton University Press, April 2015

By Madeline Y. Hsu, associate professor, Departments of Asian Studies and History

Reagan: The Life Doubleday, May 2015

By H.W. Brands, professor, Department of History

Criminal Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming

Crime and Punishment

Columbia University Press, May 2015

By William R. Kelly, professor, Department of Sociology

Invisible in Austin: Life and

Labor in an American City

University of Texas Press, Sept. 2015 Edited by Javier Auyero, professor, Department of Sociology

READ MORE ABOUT BOOKS AT: ShelfLife@Texas, UT Austin’s book blog

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Bridge to Somewhere

Connecting STEM and the Humanities to Fix America’s Failing Infrastructure

By David A. Ochsner

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Photo: Shutterstock

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New River Gorge Bridge located in Fayetteville, West Virginia extends 3,030 ft. across. When it opened in 1977, it was the highest vehicular bridge in the world. It is currently the third highest bridge in the United States and the fourth longest arch bridge in the world.

he next time you get behind the wheel, consider this: The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave our major urban highways a big, fat “D” on their infrastructure report card.

A “D” on a report card usually means you’re getting grounded, and in a sense all of us who depend on highways are in danger of being grounded by a crumbling, overloaded system that gets little more than half of the $170 billion the Federal Highway Administration says is needed to fix it. That’s just the roads. For all of America’s infrastructure — including bridges, dams, airports and utilities — the ASCE gives us a D+ and says we need to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020 to significantly improve that grade.

It’s not all about money and mixing cement, however.

According to Erika Bsumek, an associate professor of history at UT Austin, one major repair should be the bridge that used to connect STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and the humanities.

That is why she launched an undergraduate history class in spring 2014 — Building America: Engineering Society and Culture, 1868-1980 — to teach humanities students how the technology surrounding them works and to teach STEM majors how history and politics shape technological advances. STEM disciplines can make a bridge stand up, but the humanities tell us why it exists.

“We have a tendency to artificially compartmentalize the world into discrete disciplines. Our classroom serves as a place to connect, rather than divide,” says Bsumek, who notes that the rift between disciplines — especially since World War II — has devalued the liberal arts and sterilized the specialized training of STEM students.

“During the 1950s and ’60s, our vision of society was shaped by the Cold War. America needed an influx of engineers to build the interstate highways and the dams and national defense systems and missile silos,” Bsumek says. “Defense spending went way up, and the engineering curriculum changed. Engineers used to be trained to be more like Renaissance men (they were mostly men), but in the name of streamlining their training, engineering programs cut out courses in the liberal arts and humanities.”

She says this development was a major concern for noted physicist Richard C. Bradley. In an address to the American Society for Engineering Education in 1962, he said engineers have an enormous responsibility because “they are more than just doers or servants of society. They are also policy setters … I hope the day may yet come when no highway or reclamation commissioner, for example, is innocent in the knowledge of ecology or of the history of other civilizations.”

Bradley’s statement led Bsumek to create the Building America class. “How do we get back to Bradley’s vision, where we think about society and population and politics and government and economy and gender and race — all of these different aspects of society, with technology as just one important subcategory?

What happens if you put engineers and historians or natural scientists and artists in a room together? They actually have a lot to say to each other.”

The solutions to our infrastructure challenges, it seems, will probably result from such group efforts involving diverse disciplines. In that sense, Bsumek’s History 317 class is a model for how our next generations might approach infrastructure challenges.

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Bridge to Somewhere

Making the Connection The first objective of the class is to draw connections, Bsumek says.

“I ask students ‘What do you have in common with each other?

You all share this planet, and you are all in this place at this exact moment. How do you draw connections between you and those around you?’”

The Building America students work in carefully chosen groups of eight, each group representing a variety of majors.

Bsumek says each major brings a different knowledge set to the table, and the students learn from one another.

“Our first class unit is on the Brooklyn Bridge. We look at issues such as the growth of urban America, the post-Civil War period, immigration, tenements. But at the same time, there is technology and innovation, economic growth and decline … the Brooklyn Bridge is a good model for how they all come together,” Bsumek says. “What does the bridge do? It connects Manhattan and Brooklyn. Why do they need to be connected at that particular time? The reasons become pretty complex and multilayered.”

The same can be said for the group projects. One group of students approached the Brooklyn Bridge from the perspective of the Divi Blasii, a medieval church in Mühlhausen, Germany.

The students not only learned that Johann Sebastian Bach was an organist in the church, but also that civil engineer John

Erika Bsumek at the Mansfield Dam located in Austin, Texas.

“We have a tendency to artificially compartmentalize the world into discrete disciplines. Our classroom serves as a place to connect, rather than divide.”

Erika Bsumek, associate professor of history

A. Roebling — designer of the Brooklyn Bridge — lived in Mühlhausen before emigrating to the U.S. The Divi Blasii’s Gothic arches were an influence on Roebling, who wanted his bridge to be equal in grandeur to a soaring cathedral. Another group observed that just as cathedrals brought together people of all classes, so too did Roebling’s bridge as a cathedral for a new age that linked formerly separated populations. But the Gothic arches gave more than beauty to the bridge; their pointed shape also provided the structural stability that allowed for minimal material use, resulting not only in a bridge that has stood for more than 130 years, but also in a landmark that continues to stir the souls of writers and poets, painters and photographers.

Other groups explored how the bridge’s anchorages and cables suggested a cathedral’s buttresses, one system using tension while the other uses compression for structural support.

Some students looked at how the suspension system gave rise to the development of the steel cable, and how this technical

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advancement connects back to the beauty we associate with suspension bridges in general. One group even tied the Brooklyn Bridge to the development of the Transcontinental Railroad.

“The students do a lot of detective work. I ask them ‘Why did people make certain living choices between 1870 and 1930?’ — and they loop it back into the Brooklyn Bridge question,” Bsumek says.

“We look at multiple causes and effects — part of it is the building and part of it is society; we are continually flipping back and forth as we examine responses to culture, the environment and technology.

“This is a serious course asking serious questions about young people and their future, to get them to look at their world in different and more complex ways,” she says. “My agenda is to ask students to think about the connections that are going to be important in their lives. It’s what Bradley was talking about — he wasn’t just talking about engineering, or a bridge or an environment; he was talking about the way education works as an infrastructure that can help us build a better society, not just

Photo: Kirk Weddle

about how we educate our engineers.”

The students also benefit from guest lecturers who discuss various aspects of infrastructure, from the history of air conditioning to sustainable design methods. Among the lecturers is Kyle Shelton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and Bsumek’s former graduate teaching assistant.

“Infrastructure needs to be viewed much more holistically and much more socially — it is socially constructed as much as anything else,” says Shelton, who guest lectures on the Interstate Highway System.

He says that to understand the infrastructure challenge, it is essential to know its origins and purpose. “To find those answers, you have to be willing to look at humanities disciplines. If you don’t recognize history, if you don’t acknowledge the roots of our infrastructural system and its shortcomings, we are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past.”

Shelton says people need to become more informed about

infrastructure, and not just assume it is merely a product of one engineer or one firm saying, “It will go here and this is what it is going to look like.”

Rather, infrastructure is socially, politically and culturally constructed over decades, he says. “No single piece of infrastructure just exists as the concrete or fiber optics. It all has to be contextualized within what allowed it to be made and paid for and what or whom it serves. If we don’t ground engineering choices in that historical context, then it becomes easy to replicate mistakes or to make decisions that don’t include as broad of a set of the population as possible.”

Grand Schemes There was a time when Americans celebrated massive infrastructure projects. In the 1930s, the New Deal provided both funds and workers for projects such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee

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Bridge to Somewhere

Aviation Bridges Dams Drinking Water Energy Hazardous Waste Inland Waterways Levees Ports Public Parks & Rec Rail Roads Schools Solid Waste Transit Wastewater

D C+ D D D+ D DDC CC+ D D BD D

Final Grade

D+

Estimated Investment Needed by 2020 $3.6 Trillion ABOVE: American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 report card. Each category was evaluated on the basis of capacity, condition, funding, future need, operation and maintenance, public safety and resilience.

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) at Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona. Rockwell was one of several artists commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1969 to depict water resource development sites throughout the American West.

Robert Moses (1888-1981), one of the most powerful urban planners in New York of the mid-20th century, with a model of his proposed Battery Bridge. Ultimately he was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan.

Glen Canyon Dam by Norman Rockwell, oil on canvas, 51 x 77 in. Rockwell conceived of the idea to add a Navajo trio perched near the canyon rim and was granted license to move Tower Butte and place it wherever he wanted.

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When Moses Parted the Bronx Few rival urban planner Robert Moses when it comes to grand schemes. As the father of New York City’s vast parkway system among other mega-projects, Moses used near-dictatorial powers in the mid-20th century to bulldoze whole neighborhoods and carve out wide swathes that became the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and so on.

Shelton says Moses is a prototypical example of planners in the 1950s and ’60s who favored cars over other types of transit and with whom politicians made decisions in concert with their close friends in land development. Ordinary citizens were rarely involved.

There were a number of unintended (and perhaps intended) consequences of this type of planning, including the division of cities along racial and economic lines and the car and truck exhaust that enveloped many cities in a sickening, yellowish-gray haze.

Another unintended consequence of the car culture is the staggering costs of maintaining and improving all of the roads on which we are now so dependent.

Illustration: Allen F. Quigley

America’s GPA

dams, New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Many of the projects were in response to the rise of the automobile and the expansion of electrification and how we adapted our landscape to their uses. The postwar years saw an even bigger commitment to car-based infrastructure with the construction of the Interstate Highway System, while rapid development in the West prompted the construction of ever more massive hydroelectric projects including Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam, which was dubbed “The Eighth Wonder of the World.”

These projects generally captured the public’s imagination and were widely celebrated in magazines, newsreels and postcards.

So why don’t we have those big projects anymore?

“The important question right now is: Why don’t we value the ones that we already have? Why don’t we value our bridges and highways and our dams — these things that get frightening grades from the ASCE? We trust that when we turn on our faucet, water will come out, and it will be healthy and clean water. We implicitly trust the bridge we cross to get to work every day,” Bsumek says.

“It’s about how our society values things. There is a cultural value and an economic value. Those two things are often pitted against each other, so bringing them into alignment is important.”

Big infrastructure projects are grand, future-oriented schemes, says Bsumek, a child of the West whose parents are both engineers and whose grandfather worked as a draftsman on the Glen Canyon Dam project. “The Interstate Highway System — that’s a grand scheme. It was about the economy, but it was also about national defense. Thinking about it shows why history is important. We need to think about these impulses — where does the vision of our society come from and who gets to decide what that vision is and what are the implications of those decisions in reality?”

The humanities also help us consider the unintended consequences of grand schemes, whether it is the dam that displaces towns, farms and wildlife, or a superhighway that bypasses a small town and shutters its main street.

“The idea of unintended consequences even permeates popular culture — the movie ‘Cars’ — that’s a great example of the unintended consequences of the Interstate Highway System,” Bsumek says. “It’s animated and a bit ridiculous, but still it’s a cool way to say ‘Remember how things used to be? Let’s think about the past, and let’s think about the future and what happened to this whole vision of America.’”

Life & Letters Spring 2015 “The reason we have so much highway infrastructure that’s so hard to maintain comes from political choices to create a landscape that is devoted to car travel,” Shelton says. “That’s why the answers are not going to come exclusively from STEM. We need to assess the system that we have, and then we need to consider how to change the future trends in ways that will be more thoughtful and sustainable. That’s a combination of policy decisions and engineering solutions informed by past experience.”

For example, Shelton says that simply widening a road is not a sustainable solution, and it is instructive to look at the historical and social aspects that lead to the failure of an engineered approach such as widening roads.

“There are very few roads in the U.S. that are not almost immediately at capacity once they are opened. It’s a perfect example of a lack of sustainability as an infrastructure choice,” he says. “It’s the principle of induced demand. Say I am living in Katy and currently taking the park-and-ride bus to Houston. Then I hear that I-10 is being widened, and so I think ‘Great, there will be less congestion’ — but so do 4,000 other drivers, and very soon the new road is congested.”

Shelton said the goal of planners should be to create a comprehensive system that gets traffic moving more freely by embracing many types of traffic infrastructure — to serve cars, mass transit, bikes and pedestrians.

“Now we see this impulse to move back downtown, so we need to account for both patterns (suburbs and downtown) while correcting historical mistakes,” Shelton says. “There are lots of transportation options that up until now have not been tried or embraced. That is the place where engineers and infrastructure professionals and planners and historians and political scientists can all work together to think about challenges as metropolitan and regional in scale. Infrastructure debates are a good venue for people

to talk about how they envision their city and their place in it.”

For that to happen, people have to stop thinking about problems as being isolated when they really are all connected, says Bsumek. She is concerned by some of the thinking that comes out of Silicon Valley that suggests something must be destroyed in order to build something else (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prime directive to his developers in 2009: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”)

“That kind of thinking doesn’t always enrich our society,” Bsumek says. “The problem isn’t how do we disrupt more things or break things into even smaller pieces and start over; rather, it’s how can we reconnect existing pieces in ways that help us see our world in a different way?” Students can become innovative problem solvers by making such connections.

She says that is why it is so important not to have all history majors or engineering majors in her class. “I try to pull from many different departments around our vast campus — then I ask the students to consider what their discipline has to bring to the table that can help us see something new about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. What were the civil engineers thinking, and what was the environmental and social impact?”

By investigating the past, says Bsumek, we begin to see all of these issues from different perspectives, not in isolation but in conjunction with one another.

“A big reason why some students dislike history is they can’t connect it to their primary discipline and, more importantly, they don’t see how it’s connected to their lives,” she says. “It seems like a bunch of dates and facts that they have to memorize, but history is exactly the opposite of that — it’s incredibly dynamic. It’s in everything you touch, everything you read, every song you hear, every bridge you drive across and every building you enter.”

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Depression

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Making Treatment Personal

By Michelle Bryant

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Illustration: Yevgenia Nayberg

or the estimated 350 million people worldwide who suffer from depression, the health consequences go far beyond “feeling down.” In fact, it is a leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people with symptoms of depression will never receive treatment, and for those diagnosed with major depression, up to half will not get better after their first treatment.

“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to identify who was going to respond to your treatment before you gave the treatment?” asks Christopher Beevers, psychology professor and director of the Institute for Mental Health Research (IMHR) at The University of Texas at Austin.

That’s the big question he’s trying to answer at the IMHR. By taking a translational research approach — applying basic research to improve health and well-being — the IMHR is using discoveries from genetics, cognitive neuroscience and animal research to better understand mental illness and improve treatments.

Beevers says one of the biggest challenges in the field of depression research is that depression comes in many forms.

Researchers at UT Austin are exploring some of the best ways to personalize treatments and some of the mechanisms that cause and maintain depression.

“You can’t just take a group of depressed people and assume that they are all the same and that they’ll respond similarly to whatever intervention you give them,” Beevers says. “There are some people who will get better on their own and some people who will remain depressed for months, even years, without intervention.

“So one of the challenges is to identify the people who are going to recover on their own and who needs interventions,” he adds. “We are still just in the early days of trying to figure this out.”

Genetic Breakthroughs Beevers says one of the biggest breakthroughs for depression research has been the rapid advancements made in the field of genetics. When the IMHR was established in 2012, researchers

were looking at a single variance within a single gene. Now the IMHR researchers are able to look at a million variations.

“We try to pick out the ones that are more likely to give us some signal,” Beevers says. “It’s amazing how quickly that area has developed and continues to develop. We can look at genetics much more comprehensively than we could even five or six years ago.”

Through the use of therapygenetics, the IMHR researchers are trying to identify who might best respond to a particular form of treatment called cognitive behavior therapy. The goal is to develop algorithms to identify people who would best respond to this type of treatment, so that they don’t have to waste time with trial and error. This can save time and money and alleviate unneeded suffering.

The IMHR brings together an interdisciplinary team including clinical psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, geneticists and statisticians. It is supported in part by the Dianne and Jerry Grammer Excellence Fund for Mental Health Research and the Judith M. Craig, Ph.D. Excellence Endowment for Mental Health Research, which helps attract some of the top research talent in the world.

Rahel Pearson, a graduate student at the IMHR from the Netherlands, works on a research team that recently demonstrated that people with a certain genetic risk factor are less likely to exhibit negative attentional bias under conditions of social support.

There is a substantial amount of literature suggesting that certain people are more likely to experience negative outcomes because of genetic factors. Only recently has there been an increased focus on the interaction between positive environments and genes.

She says some people may be more sensitive to environmental change “for better and for worse.” Susceptible people (e.g., those with certain genes) — relative to others — are more adversely affected by negative environments and are more beneficially affected by positive ones.

“Since treatment for depression can be seen as a positive environmental change, this might mean that more susceptible individuals would do better in treatment,” Pearson says. “Knowing which people are likely to benefit most from treatment allows us to better target scarce resources.”

She says that until now clinical psychologists have been

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Depression very focused on researching negative environments because they are mostly interested in the outcome that inhibits a person from adjusting to particular situations, but it’s a narrow spectrum.

“I think that looking at positive environments can help us understand why some people are more likely to develop maladaptive outcomes, and how we can promote resilience and recovery,” she says.

Pearson would like to continue to focus her research on environmental factors that are relevant for depression. In the future, she hopes to further examine how these environments — either alone or in interaction with genetic factors — are implicated in depression.

“We already know that stress is bad, and when you encounter environmental stressors, you are more likely to become depressed,” she says. “However, it seems unlikely that all environmental stressors are created equally.”

significantly longer to shift their attention away from negative information than a nondepressed person would take. That bias can be a predictor for depression and for being depressed longer.

“Rather than giving a nonspecific therapy, we are really trying to target the mechanisms that in prior work we’ve shown to be associated with depression and maintaining depression,” Beevers says.

He says this insight helps to focus the research. By manipulating those mechanisms through experimentation, he might determine which ones help people get better.

“Eventually, we’ll get to the point where we can do an assessment, get a sense of the biases they have and then pick a treatment based on that assessment,” Beevers says. “That’s where this is all headed … Up to this point, we haven’t been able to do this with pharmaceutical therapies, behavior treatments, really any form of treatment for mental health issues.”

Why Do People Remain Depressed?

Decision-making

Stressors that involve significant loss are particularly potent predictors of depression, such as becoming unemployed or divorced or losing a loved one. A loss may fuel depression, leading a person to socially withdraw, therefore maintaining his or her negative mood. It’s a negative loop that Beevers and his team of researchers are working to reverse.

“All of these things seem to precipitate depression, and then if you have this tendency to focus on the negative aspects of that loss, then that’s likely to fuel your depression and maintain it over time,” Beevers says. “How they respond to these events and what they focus on can lead to dramatically different outcomes.”

During the past 15 years of Beevers’ career, he’s done extensive psychopathology work to identify the factors — cognitive biases or processes — that maintain depression. His research explores possible ways people are thinking or interpreting events around them or their tendencies to recall things that are keeping them depressed.

For example, through the use of eye tracking technology, he and a team of researchers found that it took depressed people

The IMHR has done a number of studies showing that depressed people are less able to learn from positive information such as rewards in the environment. When depressed people make a good decision, they pay less attention to it and are less influenced by it in their future decision-making. Conversely, they are more sensitive to receiving punishments when they make mistakes.

“They are really hyper-focused when they make a mistake and adjust their decision-making much more dramatically,” Beevers says. “So they have this tendency to really pay attention to the negative information and maybe overcorrect when they make mistakes and not pay enough attention to positive information.”

Based on work with healthy individuals to improve executive function — that is, the cognitive control over how people think — the IMHR researchers designed brain-training exercises. For a month, study participants were asked to spend 15 minutes every day completing a simple math problem. They were given a positive word to remember, then another math problem — a sequence repeated six or seven times. At the end, participants were shown a matrix of words and asked to identify them in the order that they were presented.

Depressed participants tended to have more difficulty.

Beevers attributes this to less activity in parts of the brain that are involved in effortful decision-making. Emotional processing is intact, so they are sensitive to these mistakes and far less able to process rewards and integrate that into their decision-making.

“It’s actually pretty hard for most people, but what we find is depressed people in particular are pretty bad at this, but they get better as they do more of this practice,” Beevers says. “Even more importantly, we find that this can reverse decision-making deficits and enhance reward processing difficulties that they had originally. And they actually report feeling less depressed, which is the exciting part of this.”

Christopher Beevers, professor of psychology and director of the Institute for Mental Health Research

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College Students Benefit from CARE Many people may experience their first symptoms of depression during college, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. National trends suggest that more college students are seeking help at their college counseling centers for a variety of concerns including stress, depression and anxiety. UT Austin’s Counseling and Mental Health Center (CMHC) sees more than 23,000 students each year.

“This could be due to a decrease in stigma around mental

Photo: Liberal Arts ITS

“You can’t just take a group of depressed people and assume that they are all the same and that they’ll respond similarly to whatever intervention you give them.”

Life & Letters Spring 2015 health, a growing awareness of mental health resources or early identification,” says Alicia Enciso Litschi, a CARE counselor at the CMHC who serves Liberal Arts students.

The Counselor in Academic Residence (CARE) program is a new program at UT Austin that integrates counselors into academic spaces to make students feel more comfortable about seeking support.

According to an American College Health Association Survey, students identify “stress” as their biggest impediment to academic success — 51 percent of students said they felt overwhelming anxiety in the previous 12 months, and 11 percent indicated that they were diagnosed or treated for depression. Without adequate support, those students are more likely to receive low grades or drop out of college.

The CMHC offers a variety of resources for UT Austin students including short-term individual counseling, same-day walk-in crisis services and a MindBody Lab where students can explore resources for improving emotional and physical health without an appointment. It also offers group-counseling options for depression, anxiety, social connections, interpersonal communication and managing stress.

“It is normal to experience ups and downs throughout the semester — some bad days or even a rough week,” Litschi says.

“However, it is important for students to recognize if they are beginning to feel worse more frequently and for a longer period of time.

“Oftentimes, students who are experiencing depression will begin to notice that they can no longer engage in school work and things they previously enjoyed,” she adds. “That’s when it’s important for students to seek help.”

Depression can be isolating, so Litschi says the act of reaching out is an important step to getting better. That could mean receiving counseling or enlisting the support of relatives, mentors or friends.

Illustration: Allen F. Quigley

Gender and Job Authority Job authority is typically related to higher earnings, power and job security — benefits that are often associated with better physical and mental health.

However, Tetyana Pudrovska, a sociologist and faculty affiliate in the Population Research Center, found that women with job authority — responsibilities to hire, fire and influence pay — experienced an increase in depression compared with men who have job authority and women who don’t have job authority.

“Higher-status women are often exposed to overt and subtle gender discrimination and harassment,” Pudrovska says. “This strain can undermine or reverse the health benefits of job authority.”

The study, “Gender, Job Authority, and Depression,” published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, considered more than 1,300 middle-aged men and 1,500 middle-aged women.

It emphasizes broad societal factors and cultural and social forces, including unfavorable stereotypes, social isolation and resistance that make leadership excessively stressful for women.

“It is not enough to equalize structural aspects of workplace authority because the experience of exercising job authority is different for men and women,” Pudrovska says.

She notes the proliferation of books and advice during the past several years encouraging women to be more confident and ambitious and to strive for leadership and visibility.

“Many of these recommendations focus on individual behavior as if it occurs in a vacuum outside of a broader social context and structural constraints,” Pudrovska says. “The message is

CMHC Stats Counseling and Mental Health Center Facts 2012-2013

88%

CMHC clients initially considering a withdrawal reported that CMHC services helped them remain in school.

74%

CMHC clients with problems impacting their academic performance reported that counseling is helping improve academic performance toward their degree.

that it is women themselves who are responsible for their lack of authority and confidence, so the recipe for rectifying the gender imbalance is for women to change their behavior. But changing individual behavior without addressing organizational and social contexts will not bring desired outcomes.

“Women’s leadership is good for women themselves, for other workers and for productivity,” Pudrovska says. “What is not good is the fact that there are numerous manifestations of gender inequality that impose extra stress on women in leadership positions.”

She recommends policies and workplace interventions aimed at reducing exposure to stress and increasing psychosocial rewards of job authority among women. She specifically recommends addressing unique challenges, improving well-being and increasing nonpecuniary rewards of leadership and retention rates of women with job authority.

“Targeting these stressors is an important step to enhance the psychosocial benefits of higher-status jobs for women and to increase retention in leadership positions of women in current and future generations,” Pudrovska says.

By taking a closer look at gender differences in the workplace, genetics and environmental stressors, UT Austin faculty members and staffers are working to apply research into viable treatments and support.

“There is a lot of human suffering associated with depression,” Beevers says. “So if we can identify some ways in which to help alleviate that and help people return to more normal, functioning lives more quickly, that can have hugely important consequences.”

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Borderline The Politics, Law and Identity of Immigration

By Michelle GarcĂ­a

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Life & Letters Spring 2015

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Photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

emperatures hovered around the triple digits in deep South Texas when the children arrived on the U.S.-Mexico border. They traveled alone, without parents. They traveled from the faraway mountains of Guatemala and El Salvador and the depths of the world’s most violent city — San Pedro Sula in Honduras.

Their numbers grew over months until at last, news of their arrival captured the nation’s attention in June after leaked photographs showed child migrants packed into overcrowded Border Patrol detention cells. Outrage about deplorable conditions quickly morphed into lawmakers sounding the alarms of a “border crisis” and calling for the deployment of state troopers and the National Guard. In reality, it was a “crisis” foretold. Months earlier, the Obama administration announced emergency plans to cope with increasing numbers of Central American migrants.

But where others saw a spontaneous influx of migrants on the border, Nestor Rodríguez, a professor of sociology, found validation. In “famous table 2.1” of the book, Guatemala-U.S. Migration: Transforming Regions, which Rodríguez co-authored, he predicted a spike in migration. The summer arrivals, he says, “wasn’t a new experience. It was another cycle of the migration.”

His predictions along with the manuscript, however, went to the publisher before the number of children swelled to headline-grabbing levels. “I worried that my numbers looked a little

high,” he said with a laugh. For a moment, he considered inserting ranges instead. His calculations were based on the number of green card holders from Guatemala and the number of migrants reportedly apprehended by Border Patrol. Over the years, the table showed, migration ebbed and flowed, rising in the years of Guatemala’s civil war, again soon after the signing of the 1996 peace accords, then another wave and the most recent migration.

“Once the war got started and pushed people out, then the migration flow itself created its own dynamism,” says Rodríguez, who is a faculty associate in the Population Research Center.

“What we know about migration is, once started, it produces its own momentum and inertia.” Spurring the “dynamism” of migration were worsening conditions in the region including rising gang violence and rampant impunity. Several groups, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, estimated that many Central Americans qualified for asylum or other forms of protections.

After the children became news, such estimates or migration trends scarcely figured in assessing what was called a “crisis.” Politicians and the media branded the Central American migrants illegal border crossers, and the migrants — children and later mothers with their children — were swept up in domestic debates about the border, immigration and demographics. The debates ultimately informed a public policy response that included increased

Worshipers participate in a Mass along the U.S.-Mexico border wall on Feb. 22, 2015, in Tijuana, Mexico.

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border security and widespread detention. At its core, the immigration and border security debates represent permutations of American democratic principles of identity and justice with implications for political science, sociology and the law.

In January, Denise Gilman, a Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies affiliate and co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic, joined a team of attorneys and advocates in filing a lawsuit accusing the federal government of adopting a policy of mandatory detention. Migrant families with a “credible” fear of persecution, meaning they probably qualified for asylum, were denied bond and detained in newly constructed family detention centers. Previously, asylum-seekers were released pending a full hearing.

Government attorneys denied a blanket “no release” policy existed but did argue that detention served as a deterrence to counter what was termed a national security threat of mass migration. According to government statistics, of the 2,602 people booked into a family residential center in the last six months of 2014, 32 were released.

In the lawsuit, attorneys argued that denying people liberty in the name of deterrence is unconstitutional. “You are depriving this mother, this child of their liberty,” Gilman says, “not because of anything they did or anything they might do, but because of something that some prospective family in Central America might do in terms of their decision to migrate.”

Far more than a migration issue, detention as a means of deterrence, says Gilman, strikes at the core of deeply held beliefs that inspired the birth of the nation. “Liberty is central to our whole constitutional structure and self-image as Americans,” she says. “I think when you start carving into liberty ... that really calls

“You can go and wear camouflage and have guns and think you are reliving this past of being a soldier because we have constructed the border as this military space.”

Harel Shapira, assistant professor of sociology

A Minuteman patrols a 23-mile stretch of border between Douglas and Naco, Ariz.

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into question the whole liberty core, so it’s very dangerous for our civil liberties, civil rights and human rights.”

The legal challenge followed months of reported cases of abuse documented by Gilman and co-director Barbara Hines, who have encountered cases of denial of medical care, substandard conditions and sexual abuse. “There’s definitely a dehumanizing aspect of all this,” she says. “It’s hard for me to understand how they can do what they’re doing without engaging in some dehumanization of the actual realities of the people affected.”

To Alfonso Gonzales, a political scientist in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the answer lies within the nation’s racial dynamics. “Cultural and ideological processes in our society rationalize the production of violence against brown bodies,” he says.

In his book Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State, Gonzales argues that immigration issues are debated and formulated within an “anti-migrant hegemony,” which he says “naturalizes the idea that we should adopt novel authoritarian solutions to ‘immigration crisis’ not just in state but in civil society...” Such attitudes, he writes, permeate the media, intellectual institutions and civil society to become the unspoken, unquestioned paradigm for detention and migrant policy.

As a result, says Gonzales, lawmakers and advocates operate within a good-immigrant/bad-immigrant binary that leaves untouched policing policies or hardline positions to the border, regardless of levels of migration. Such a binary, he says, explains why the Obama administration expanded family detention centers and increased spending on border security — for the “bad immigrants” — while offering legal protections for undocumented immigrants, particularly those brought to the U.S. as children.

For his new book, Dead on Arrival: Mexican and Central American Asylum Claims and Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Gonzales builds on his research to analyze the government’s handling of recent asylum claims. Would-be refugees, he says, confront a cultural context that likens migrants to illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists. “As long as we buy that type of state discourse,” he says, “we consent to the violence.” Shifting debates, he says, reaches to the very heart of U.S. identity to challenge “who we see as insiders and who we see as outsiders.”

Exclusion, however, has informed national identity from the colonial days, says Richard Flores, senior associate dean for academic affairs. “American culture is fundamentally based on difference. If there is something innate in the way we create identity vis-à-vis someone else, the American experience has been dripping with power, whether that power is based on race, gender or other kinds of differences.”

With time, identity and culture become linked to symbols that reinforce differences, such as the Alamo and the border, says Flores, who is the author of Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Those symbols are loaded with two powerful purposes: to affirm our place in the world and further ideological positions.

In recent years, one group has come to represent the potent fusion of the border’s symbolic power, identity and ideology — the Minutemen. To some, the Minutemen are a band of vigilantes.

To others, they are civilian patrols doing their part to secure the border. For his book, Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America, Harel Shapira camped out and patrolled the border with the Minutemen to construct an ethnographic study of a “social movement” and its expression in nonelectoral politics. “I originally went to talk to the Minutemen thinking this was going to be a very clear expression of right-wing beliefs.” Things quickly got messy.

Shapira, an assistant professor of sociology and an associate

Photo: AP Photo/Matt York

Borderline

in the Population Research Center, came away with some insights, some unsurprising to people who follow border issues. “First, to be clear, the Minutemen are racists,” he says.

“That said, they are not simply racists. They are a lot more than that.” The Minutemen project, he discovered, satisfies a yearning for identity and a desire for meaning and purpose.

“What they were after was less about enforcing immigration policy than it was reliving an older life they had,” he says. A typical Minuteman is a white male in his 60s, middle class and a military veteran.

On the border, ideology and culture are channeled together to create an exclusionary and xenophobic “microworld.” From within their world, with the border as the setting, they Salvadoran immigrant Stefany Marjorie, 8, watches as a U.S. Border Patrol agent records family find a community for enacting a militaristic information on July 24, 2014, in Mission, Texas. past. “You can go and wear camouflage and have guns and think you are reliving this past of being a soldier because we have constructed the border as this military space,” Shapira says.

The birth of the Minutemen in 2004 coincided with a buildup of border security that involves unmanned aircraft, armed gunboats and a massive deployment of Border Patrol agents. The federal government spends more money on immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Critics often refer to the combination of hardware and personnel as “militarization of the border.”

It’s a term that inspires consternation from C.J. Alvarez, a historian in the Department for Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies. In his forthcoming book, The Shape of the Border: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 1848, Alvarez reaches into history to trace the domestic use of the military on the border from the 19th century to the present. Seen across time, the current deployment of federal law enforcement, which falls under civilian rather than military control, pales in comparison to the deployment of 160,000 soldiers along the border in 1917.

The rhetoric, he says, also obscures the view of policing in Mexico. “One of my problems with the rhetorical critique of ‘miliDenise Gilman, Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies affiliate tarization,’” he says, “is a total ignorance of actual militarization and co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic on the Mexican side.”

During the past eight years, the Mexican government has mounted a large-scale campaign involving federal police and In his affidavit to the court in the case, Nestor Rodríguez troops in the name of fighting organized crime or drug smuggling argued against the effectiveness of detention by drawing from a organizations. The military campaign, which was backed by the powerful but often missing factor in the migration equation — U.S. government, also resulted in increased bilateral law enforcehuman bonds. “Central Americans, like populations elsewhere,” ment efforts. he wrote, “have strong intergenerational family and institutional Vast swaths of Mexican territory, including along the attachments in their settings and are not predisposed to migrate U.S.-Mexico border, now fall under military policing, includen masse simply because they hear that someone bonded out or ing villages and towns. Alvarez says in a country with a history was released from detention.” of military officers occupying political leadership, the current In the coming months, Border Patrol officials and advocates deployment raises questions about the future and shape of anticipate another influx of Central American migration. As democracy in Mexico. migrants approach the physical U.S.-Mexico border, says Flores, He says border policing extends far beyond migration and their arrival challenges the people within the U.S. boundaries to smuggling. It reflects the policing traditions of each country, the confront the borders of their minds that are rife with symbolism, delicate balance of civil-military traditions that is bedrock to the identity and ideology. political formation and concept of democracy in each country.

“If you really think about the rhetoric of the United States — On Feb. 20, a federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled democracy, pull yourself up by your bootstraps — in practice, we that a critical aspect of the Obama administration’s border policlook down on those people who are here for democratic reasons or ing strategy to cope with the arrival of Central American families who are from lower classes,” Flores says. Will the nation’s response was unconstitutional. The decision in the lawsuit filed by Gilman transcend the symbolism that equates the border with a war zone and others means that thousands of women and children seeking and migrants with criminals? Or will they see another iteration of asylum will be released from detention. a deeply embedded American story?

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

“You are depriving this mother, this child of their liberty, not because of anything they did or anything they might do, but because of something that some prospective family in Central America might do in terms of their decision to migrate.”

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INTERVIEWS BY EMILY NIELSEN PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAUL BUITRAGO

Diagnosing Disease Faster Courtney Koepke is a Plan II Honors and biomedical engineering junior from Austin, Texas. She works as an undergraduate research assistant at UT Austin’s Laboratory of Biomaterials, Drug Delivery and Bionanotechnology.

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What made you want to be a research assistant?

As a freshman entering college, I didn’t know much about research or understand the important role research plays in the continual advancement of society. At the beginning of my sophomore year, Nicholas Peppas spoke in one of my classes as a guest lecturer. I was intrigued by his work, so I went home and looked into the research being conducted in his lab. As I read some of the lab’s recent publications, I realized I wanted to be a part of the research being conducted and part of a group of individuals truly aspiring to change the world. The rest, as they say, is history.

What have you been working on?

My research focuses on plastic antibodies as a recognition element for disease because, over time, naturally occurring antibodies become unstable and useless for recognition. The goal of my research is to create a diagnostic tool to recognize protein biomarkers for disease. Using plastic antibodies as the recognition element in a diagnostic tool would allow for quicker and easier diagnosis of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, leukemia and meningitis.

Why is undergraduate research important?

I think research plays an important role for undergraduates as a tool for discovery. The motivating idea behind research is the discovery of new knowledge, which drives innovation and improvement in all areas of society. Being a part of that societal improvement and something bigger than oneself is something every undergraduate student can benefit from. Furthermore, research can assist undergraduates in self-discovery and allow them to uncover their strengths and weaknesses as well as likes and dislikes at an early stage.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?

I’m proud of the work my teammates and I did on an app called “Audiometry Made Easy.” I am the president of an organization called Texas Engineering World Health, which aims to create more equitable global health through medical technology innovation. Last year, my team and I worked to create a free application that could provide an audiometry test to assess hearing loss, especially in the developing world where a normal audiometer is an expensive and widely unavailable device. Our app is available on the Google Play store and has received feedback from people around the world.

How has being a liberal arts and Plan II Honors student influenced you?

One of the most significant ways being in Plan II Honors has affected my life is the exposure to a vast array of students from varying backgrounds. The culture encompasses a plethora of diverse opinions and areas of expertise that have challenged me and expanded my worldview.

Taking classes such as world literature and philosophy has helped me mature intellectually in ways my science and engineering classes never could have. These liberal arts classes have forced me to question society and how it’s structured, as well as humanity and what our duty to it is as individuals.

What is your advice to incoming students?

Follow your passions wherever they may take you.

There’s a class, group or activity for every interest here at UT, so there’s no reason not to pursue your dreams.

Photos: Raul Buitrago

Q&A

Life & Letters Spring 2015

Fighting the World’s Fight Sai Gourisankar is a Plan II Honors and chemical engineering senior from Fort Worth, Texas. He is a recipient of the 2015 Rhodes scholarship, as well as being a Dedman distinguished scholar, a Goldwater scholar and an Astronaut Foundation scholar.

What does winning a Rhodes scholarship mean to you?

It enables me to study at Oxford University in Britain with some of the brightest minds in the world. It means connecting with students who bring diverse perspectives to study not only the sciences, but also the humanities at the highest levels. I’m excited by the opportunity to learn from and contribute to a community of scholars, all of whom share a commitment to “fight the world’s fight,” in Cecil Rhodes’ words.

Who did you tell first?

I told my parents first, then my faculty advisers and finally close friends. My parents were extremely proud of me — somewhat to my embarrassment, they told all their friends and our extended family in India. My dad, who I told first and is normally very stoic, actually cried.

What are you most proud of from your time at UT? In my research group we are engineering nanotechnology to target cancer cells for diagnosis and therapy.

Our research could lead to a new paradigm of care in which earlier tumors are detected more effectively, leading to lower costs as well as less damaging treatment.

Our team includes chemical engineering Professors Tom Truskett and Keith Johnston, as well as Dr. Oleg Gang at Brookhaven National Labs and biomedical engineering Professor Kostia Sokolov at MD Anderson.

Can you tell us about your published work?

I've co-authored four publications. The first was on a different project in high school, in the New Journal of Chemistry. We developed an environmentally friendly synthesis of an organic solvent. The next three were on the nanotechnology project I described earlier: one in ACS Nano, one in Journal of the American Chemical Society and one in Journal of Physical Chemistry C. How do chemical engineering and liberal arts complement each other?

The liberal arts curriculum allows me to pursue passions outside of engineering, such as history and economics. These subjects give context to the scientific work done within engineering. The Plan II program has made me more open-minded about the role of science in society. It introduces me to ideas, interests and passions that I can pursue throughout my life.

Chemical engineering gives me technical competency to physically make something useful for society.

What are your plans after graduation?

At Oxford, I’ll be studying mathematics and physics for two years. After that, I want to return to the U.S. and pursue a graduate degree in chemical engineering to be used toward an academic research career.

I’m also part of Texas 4000, and I’ll be biking from Austin to Alaska this summer to raise cancer awareness and money for cancer research initiatives.

What advice would you give to incoming students?

Even as great as our academic departments at UT are, coursework can only teach you so much. It’s more important to learn how to learn than merely to seek knowledge.

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Promoting National Security Mark Jbeily is a Plan II Honors and Naval ROTC senior from Austin, Texas. He is a recipient of the 2015 British Marshall scholarship, which will fund his pursuit of a Master of Philosophy in international relations at the University of Oxford. Jbeily is also a Naval ROTC battalion commander, a Bill Archer fellow and a Truman scholarship finalist.

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What does winning a Marshall scholarship mean to you?

It is truly an honor. I see it as an opportunity to continue studying national security and better understanding the character of our international system. By studying in England, I also hope to promote greater understanding between our countries because of the shared security challenges we face.

When did you know you wanted to be a part of the NROTC? I decided during my senior year of high school, soon after being accepted into Plan II. Although I am the first in my family to serve, the military has always fascinated me. As a young boy, I looked up to role models like Adm. Bobby Inman and Gen. Colin Powell. There was even a character on “The West Wing,� my all-time favorite TV show, named Adm. Percy Fitzwallace who I particularly admired. I knew I wanted to be like these men, and the first step was earning a commission as an officer in the Navy.

Why is studying the liberal arts important?

The liberal arts have prepared me to challenge conventional thinking as a leader. The liberal education I received in Plan II honed my thinking and gave depth to my knowledge. Through a broad curriculum, small group courses taught me to challenge conventional thinking and my own assumptions. Plan II professors like Adm. Inman pushed me to think deeply about national security while also acting as mentors.

Complementing my studies, training as a midshipman in the Naval ROTC program was a daily opportunity to apply these concepts. What emerged was a creative tension between the free-flowing, innovative ideas of Plan II and the real-world, strategic concerns of an operational military unit.

You studied Arabic in Morocco in the summer of 2013. What was that like?

Though I have traveled to the Middle East before (my family is from Lebanon), Moroccan culture was still foreign. The most interesting experience was being in Morocco during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. I participated in the daily fast, which was very challenging in the 100+ degree heat. Being part of Ramadan gave me insights into Islamic culture that I never could have gotten without experiencing it firsthand.

For example, because everyone fasts during the day and rests to save energy, the city comes alive at night as people eat and drink with their families and friends.

What are your goals for the future?

At Oxford, I hope to continue my studies in national security policymaking by researching the National Security Council and its influence on the strategic planning process. After completing my degree, I will attend U.S. Navy flight school to complete training as a naval aviator. As an officer, I will apply the lessons I learned at UT and Oxford to promote American security interests abroad.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned at UT? Relationships matter. The peers, professors and mentors I have had at UT have defined my undergraduate experience. None of the opportunities I have been able to pursue would have been possible without their steadfast guidance and support.

Photo: Raul Buitrago

Q&A

Field of Dreams College of Liberal Arts

Larry Carver’s Got a Marshall on First, a Truman on Second and a Rhodes on Third

Photo: Sarah Lim

BY EMILY NIELSEN It’s been more than 20 years since Larry Carver began working with UT Austin students applying for the nation’s most prestigious graduate school fellowships, and he can still tell you the names of all the nominees from memory.

It’s a long list — one that includes more than 100 finalists and 44 winners.

“For me to work with these very gifted students, it makes me a better person,” says Carver, who holds the Doyle Professorship in Western Civilization and serves as director of Liberal Arts Honors. “It’s certainly brought a great deal of joy into my life. When I look back at the various things I’m proud of at the university, this is certainly one of them very high on my list.”

Under Carver’s tutelage, UT Austin has become one of the nation’s fiercest competitors for elite scholarships such as the Gates Cambridge scholarship, Beinecke scholarship, Truman scholarship, British

Marshall scholarship and Rhodes scholarship. His impact is immeasurable. In his 42 years at the university, he has worn so many hats that he jokes the only one left has a wide brim and a “T” stamped across it.

“I’ve had a lot of different jobs at the university. I was assistant to the chancellor, associate dean, assistant to President Livingston, acting director of admissions,” Carver says. “The job I’d really like is — when Augie Garrido steps down — I’d like to be acting coach of the baseball team. I think that’d be terrific.

I’ve got a great passion for baseball.”

The College of Liberal Arts shouldn’t be too worried about losing one of its most exuberant educators to the baseball diamond, however. Carver discovered early on that even if things don’t turn out exactly as planned, they have a way of working out.

“I really see my job as being a coach,” he says.

“When I was growing up, I always thought I’d be one

Larry Carver, director of Liberal Arts Honors and the Doyle Professor in Western Civilization, stands on the UFCU Disch–Falk Field.

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— I was an avid athlete in high school and played a little bit of college baseball. And in some sense that’s what I became. It’s just a different kind of coaching — coaching academics rather than coaching athletics.

“It’s not a bad way of thinking about your relationship with the students and what you’re trying to get them to do,” he adds. “You’re assessing their abilities, and where they are and what they might be able to do if they did this or improved that.”

Mark Jbeily, a Plan II senior, is a student with whom Carver has worked closely during the past few years. He is a 2015 Marshall scholar and a 2014 Truman finalist.

“Dr. Carver has long been a mentor and friend to me,” Jbeily says. “His passion for learning is infectious, and he is always willing to take the time to have a great conversation about anything.

“He settles for nothing less than excellence” Jbeily adds. “Working with him has pushed me to never settle for anything but my best. Even if I had not been named a Marshall scholar, I would have been very grateful for all the help and guidance he gave me throughout the process. He pushed me to think deeply about how I can use my talents and passion in service of others.”

If Carver had to play favorites, he says he’d have to pick the Truman scholarship. Since he took over the university’s Truman committee, UT Austin students have won it 18 times, putting the university second in the nation among state universities.

“That’s the scholarship that’s really dear to my heart, because it’s who we are as Americans,” Carver says. “It’s about young people who want to go into public service. There are about 60 awarded each year across the nation, and it’s a very arduous application, so you really are working with the student over a 6-month period trying to get the application right.”

Students who apply for national fellowships with Carver’s assistance get an experience that’s life changing no matter the outcome. With one-on-one writing revision sessions, in-person interview coaching and exemplary letters of recommendation, they pick up skills that help them throughout their professional lives. Not to mention the sense of direction they gain by seriously discussing the paths they want their lives to take after graduation.

Having a liberal arts education is a key ingredient to competing for a national fellowship, according to Carver. Of the 44 winners during his tenure, 40 had liberal arts backgrounds.

“Liberal Arts is really the engine that fuels this,” Carver says. “The ability to write is so important. The ability to articulate your goals in a very clear fashion.

That really strong liberal arts background and having a broad vision of society and society’s needs, coupled with an expertise is just hugely, hugely important.

“Even the students who don’t win — they learn so much going through the process,” Carver says. “It’s almost like a miniature liberal arts education for them, because they’re trying to figure out who they are, what’s important in their lives, what they really want to do and how to articulate that in the most powerful way possible.

“It’s education at its best,” he adds. “I think it’s really important for the university. Is everybody going

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to win a Rhodes scholarship? No. Should all of our students aspire to be a Rhodes scholar? Yes!” Because Carver spends so much time with the nominees, he writes their official endorsement letters from the university. It’s a delicate balance to strike. He must represent each student in a way that represents his or her strengths without seeming too hyperbolic.

Over the years, Carver’s careful work has paid off, and the scholarship foundations have taken note.

“They know that The University of Texas is not going to nominate someone who can’t win, so there’s a kind of integrity that you build over time,” Carver says.

“They know when you write a letter of recommendation that you really mean it.”

The passion and effort Carver puts into his coaching hasn’t gone unnoticed by other schools. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — a chief rival — once called Carver. They were curious about how UT Austin has achieved so much success — what was Carver’s budget? How big was his supporting staff? He just laughed and told them he didn’t have either.

“Dr. Carver sets high standards for himself and others,” Jbeily says. “He pours himself into these applications so students grow no matter what the outcome. He is simultaneously a teacher, a critic, a cheerleader and a friend. And for that, UT is very lucky to have him.”

Larry Carver speaks with Liberal Arts Honors students Elizabeth Gerberich (Latin American studies and anthropology), Jackson Miller (French and classical archaeology) and Charley Binkow (history) in his office in the College of Liberal Arts Building.

Photo: Emily Nielsen

Field of Dreams

Photos courtesty of Blanton Museum of Art

Charles White Collection Charles W. White (1918-1979) is one of America’s most recognized African American and social realist artists of the 20th century. White worked in a figurative style, championing social justice by portraying the heroism of common people. He produced paintings on canvas, but he is best known for his monumental drawings and printmaking. He mentored numerous artists, many of whom have become important contemporary artists. In addition, White was a professor at the prestigious Otis College of Art and Design, where he chaired the Drawing Department. His works are in the collections of major museums and libraries around the world.

UT Austin recently received a significant collection of White’s artwork from Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon — both distinguished advocates for children and social justice. She is a physician and professor, and he is the Richard March Hoe Professor Emeritus of education and psychology at Columbia University. They are the parents of Edmund T. Gordon, the founding chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department. In December 2014, the newly renovated and expanded Geography Building was renamed the Gordon-White Building to honor the significant social, educational and cultural contributions of the Gordon and White families.

ABOVE: Homage to Sterling Brown, 1972 Oil on canvas, 40 x 59 in.

Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon Family Collection BELOW: We’ve Been Believers, 1949 Lithograph, 11 x 10 in.

Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon Family Collection

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