Life & Letters • Spring 2019

MAGAZINE FOR THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Spring 2019

BREAKTHROUGHS IN

Issue No. 32

BRAIN HEALTH We’re Closer Than You Think

P. 28

Why Save (Deadly) Objects?

By Amy Vidor and Caroline Barta Killer wallpaper. A childhood comic strip. A 10-foot portrait made of hair combs. Secret Oval Office Dictabelt recordings. These objects share one thing in common — they’re preserved in archives. Our podcast “Archival Fever” narrates the life stories of artifacts. We dive into the possibilities and problems of how we save history.

Archivists at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University face this kind of fascinating problem. Within their stacks, they have two copies of Dr. Robert Kedzie’s Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book of 19th-century arsenic-laced wallpaper. It literally can make a person feverish! Kedzie intended to raise awareness about the dangers of arsenic by sending 100 copies to libraries around Michigan. Today, handling the book requires protective gear.

Why did people hang paper on their walls that could kill them? Obsessed with the vivid “Scheele’s green” produced by copper arsenite, wealthy Victorians used it in their interior decorating. People didn’t understand the effects of arsenic decor (much like lead paint or asbestos).

It might not be to your taste, but the Victorians thought this wallpaper was “to die for.”

Why keep saving books that could kill

readers? The simplest answer is that humans are hunter-gather-hoarders. The more complicated answer is that this book describes people who valued color and beauty, much like we see home design picking a “color of the year” now. It also captures the importance of scientific advancement and advocacy through print.

Kedzie’s dangerous book paradoxically exists to prevent future tragedy.

In this season, tune in to learn about a portrait of the first self-made female millionaire Madam C.J. Walker by textile artist Sonya Clark at the Blanton Museum, or about the iconic student artwork created for protests in Paris in May 1968. Listen to our January episode on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s secret Oval Office telephone calls recorded on a Dictabelt, and our February episode on the “Frankenbooks” at the Harry Ransom Center.

ARCHIVAL FEVER

Subscribe to “Archival Fever” on iTunes, Google Play and Soundcloud, and follow us @ArchivalFever on Twitter and Instagram. Leave us a review in the iTunes store to encourage more listeners to find our show. New episodes are published on the 15th of each month.

The “Archival Fever” podcast is funded by the Humanities Media Project.

Wallpaper image from Shadows from the walls of death: facts and inferences prefacing a book of specimens of arsenical wall papers. Credit: U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections

ARSENIC AND LACE

CONTENTS SPRING 2019 2019 CASE District IV Gold Winners

College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy L. Diehl Director of Public Affairs David A. Ochsner Editor Michelle Bryant Art Direction & Design Allen F. Quigley Student Graphic Designer Eric Moe

Lili des Bellons

Copy Editor Adam Deutsch

28 COVER FEATURE

DEPARTMENTS

Breakthroughs in Brain Health

02 Dean’s Message

We’re Closer Than You Think UT Austin researchers are making rapid advancements in prevention, treatment and care.

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

24 FEATURE

18 Books

The Real Diehl

20 Events

A dean reflects on his mission.

14 BOOK FEATURE

What’s in Your Library?

A list of 150 book titles to encourage and inspire reading.

40 Q&A

Pro Bene Meritis Q&As with CBS This Morning co-host Bianna Golodryga, neurosurgeon Dr. Richard Harper and history professor Jeremi Suri.

A sampling of notable happenings in our campus community.

22 Speaking the Same Language Refugee Student Mentor Program helps community while bettering language skills.

46 Interview Meet Ann Huff Stevens, our next College of Liberal Arts dean.

Contributing Writers Rachel Griess Caroline Murray Emily Nielsen David Ochsner Alexandra Reshanov Contributing Illustrators Lili des Bellons Zach Meyer Eric Moe Contributing Photographers Brian Birzer Jason Griego Raul Buitrago Visit us online at lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu Printed by Horizon Printing Need to update your contact info?

Visit us at uyi.connect.utexas.edu/update Or email us at changinglives@austin.utexas.edu

48 Family Tree Biological anthropologists describe three species of fossil primates that were previously unknown to science.

On the cover: Illustration by Lili des Bellons. Back cover: The Warrior Chorus’ Glenn Towery at home in a room full of clocks he painted. He shares his story in the video Beyond the Battlefield. Photo by Raul Buitrago.

Follow us facebook.com/UTLiberalArts twitter.com/LiberalArtsUT instagram.com/LiberalArtsUT

LAITS Studio

DEAN’S MESSAGE

Looking to a Bright Future

2

The focus on brain health in this issue of Life & Letters is particularly compelling because our researchers are on the cusp of making dramatic breakthroughs in mental health research, cognitive neuroscience and in other areas that affect the lives of so many.

What excites me about this research is its “translational” quality — our faculty members and students are translating basic research findings into effective interventions in both our Institute for Mental Health Research (IMHR) and in the Center for Perceptual Systems (CPS).

At the IMHR, Chris Beevers and his team — including top talents from across campus in psychology, education, social work, communications and the Dell Medical School — are reinventing the way we treat mental health conditions. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 60 million adults suffer from mental health disorders.

The CPS is exploring new ways to prevent and treat brain injuries with an interdisciplinary team from neuroscience, psychology, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and speech and communication. The researchers are making advances in ocular implants that, like cochlear implants, are wired to the brain and therefore bypass damaged organs to help restore sight.

We have the green light to begin planning and construction of an addition to the Sarah M. & Charles E. Seay Building that will bring the IMHR and CPS together under one roof, creating new opportunities for collaboration.

Support the College of Liberal Arts giving.utexas.edu/supportcola

Brain health research is just one example of the learning and discovery that takes place daily across the breadth of our college in the humanities, social sciences and languages. It is work that transforms the lives of our students, and through our service mission it improves the lives of countless Texans, as well as people around the world.

The liberal arts will be in good hands as I turn over the deanship to Ann Huff Stevens this summer. Among her many accomplishments, she was the founding director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis, which works across academic disciplines to answer critical questions about poverty in our communities. A professor of economics, she is also a Texas native with roots in Corpus Christi. We are fortunate to be able to bring her back to the Lone Star State.

It has been my good fortune to work with so many talented and dedicated students, faculty and staff members, alumni and friends, and it has been an honor and privilege to serve as dean of the College of Liberal Arts, as a professor and chair in the Department of Psychology, and as a faculty member for these past 44 years at The University of Texas at Austin.

Thanks for the great ride, and Hook ’em Horns!

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

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

Copyright Eddie Adams. Eddie Adams Photographic Archive. UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

Here Comes the Song

The Personalities Behind Your Favorite Beatles Lyrics PSYCHOLOGY

By Rachel Griess

I

f Paul McCartney had written “Yesterday” based on the first words that came to his mind, the song would have sounded like a concupiscent teen singing about breakfast:

Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs…

The melody of the song, which has been broadcast on American radio more than 7 million times and holds the record as the most 3

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

recorded song in history, came to him in a dream. When he awoke, he hurried to the piano in his loft to play it, but the words didn’t come quite as easily. So, he scribbled down some simple lyrics to help commit it to memory until he later found the perfect words to pair with it:

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…

4

“The way we look at the world is reflected in our language.”

James Pennebaker

Courtesy of James Pennebaker

“The way we look at the world is reflected in our language,” says James Pennebaker, an expert in linguistic psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. “So, if I’m a young guy, looking around, eager for love, sex and attraction, it’s going to reflect in the language I use and the references I make.”

The Beatles, whose members were all around 20 years old when Beatlemania exploded onto the pop music scene, had their fair share of schoolboy fun with their lyrics. Take the song “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” a song written after McCartney witnessed two monkeys casually procreating in the middle of a path in Raipur, India; or consider the backing vocals for “Girl,” which the band deceitfully assured their producer were “dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit.”

McCartney explained the innuendos in a recent interview with GQ magazine: “It’s kind of pathetic, but actually a great thing in its pathos because it’s

something that makes you laugh.

So, what’s wrong with that?”

However, alleged references to drug use — in songs such as “Fixing a Hole” or, more popularly, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — often landed the Beatles in hot water. But their massive audience of baby boomers, many experimenting with sex and drugs at the time, never seemed to mind the references. The band spent a record 1,278 weeks on the Billboard chart, 175 of which were at No. 1.

“People are commonly influenced by songs that hit them between the ages of 14 and 22.

That’s why your parents tend to listen to ‘oldies’ music in the car,” Pennebaker adds. “The Beatles were writing about love and topics associated with coming of age. It was relevant to their generation and sounded different than music from just five years before. That’s why they had such a mass appeal.”

As they matured, the Beatles and their lyrics changed, reflecting their different experiences and reckoning with the new society that was evolving around them. “They captured it so well,” Pennebaker remembers.

More than a decade ago, Pennebaker, along with Keith Petrie at The University of Auckland and Børge Sivertsen at the University of Bergen, began researching the lyrical personalities of the Beatles, both collectively and as individual songwriters.

Between 1962 and 1970 the Beatles released more than 300 songs on 12 studio albums, 13 extended plays (EPs) and 22 singles. At the beginning of their career, the Beatles’ lyrics were full of positive emotion and references to love and sexual experiences — think “Love Me Do” (1962), “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1962), “Twist and Shout” (1963), and “All My Loving” (1963). The early songs were also very present- or future-oriented, researchers say.

“Earlier songs were characterized by a sense of immediacy, based on the usage of present tense, small words, first-person singular and low usage of articles,” Pennebaker explains.

“The use of these words highlights the degree to

which someone is living in the moment.”

But as time went on, the Beatles’ lyrics became more melancholic and psychologically distant, using more negativeemotion words. Pennebaker and his co-authors found that later Beatles songs used less-social words, which indicates less concern with social relationships.

Similarly, their use of larger words increased, signifying both intellectualization and emotional distancing.

“Along with emotional changes, their lyrics became more complex and intellectual over time,” Pennebaker says.

“While early songs were related to personal experiences and feelings, later songs were more often written about other people.”

Consider “The White Album,” which celebrated its 50th anniversary in November 2018.

Compared with previous albums, “The White Album” sounded starkly different. The Beatles had just returned from several weeks of Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, a seeming turning point in the Beatles’ lives. Each member began to branch out and explore his own interests, including John Lennon’s special love interest in Yoko Ono and budding heroin addiction.

According to the Beatles Bible, the album marked the first time the Beatles recorded songs that did not feature all of the Beatles

McCartney’s songs were far more varied and complex lyrically than Lennon’s work and often took on the perspective of others. on every track: Lennon produced “Revolution 9” with Ono and “Julia,” a tribute to his late mother, solo; McCartney’s “Wild Honey Pie,” “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Blackbird” were all recorded without other members of the band.

Separately, Lennon’s lyrics tended to look inward and focus on his own personal distress — a possible result of his traumatic upbringing, being left by both of his parents, paired with his later struggles with divorce and addiction, researchers speculate.

Lennon’s lyrics were higher in negative emotion and cognitive mechanism words, as if he were reflecting on and trying to make sense of events in his life, researchers say. Just listen to the words of the songs “Help!,” “I’m a Loser,” or “Don’t Let Me Down.”

Interestingly enough, Pennebaker adds, Lennon had a heavy influence on bandmate George Harrison’s lyrical style, as heard in “While My Guitar Gently

Weeps” and “Long Long Long.”

McCartney’s lyrics, however, kept a tighter focus on collective orientation — think, “We Can Work It Out” or “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” — with frequent use of the words “us” and “we.”

Lennon explained to David Sheff in The Playboy Interviews: “[McCartney] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”

Perhaps influenced by a more stable background and strong support from his musician father, McCartney’s songs were far more varied and complex lyrically than Lennon’s work and often took on the perspective of others, Pennebaker says. Consider the song “Blackbird,” which McCartney has said was written for black people in America amid the civil rights struggles.

5

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

6

Making History HISTORY UT Austin history professors Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Joan Neuberger were recognized by the American Historical Association for their work both in and outside the classroom.

Cañizares-Esguerra was the first professor from UT Austin to be awarded the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award for his work with graduate students; Neuberger was awarded the 2018 Herbert Feis Award for taking her lessons out of the classroom and putting them into the hands of students who are interacting and learning about the past in a whole new way.

“From Not Even Past to Thinking in Public, The Public Archive, and Behind the Tower, as well as the ‘15 Minute History’ podcast series and her Public and Digital History courses, Joan has worked tirelessly over the years to bring

Matt Valentine

Jorge CañizaresEsguerra and Joan Neuberger

Courtesy of LAITS

“In the Beatles’ repertoire there were some songs that Lennon and McCartney agree are complete collaborations,” Pennebaker says. “If you study the lyrics of those songs, you’ll find they are completely different than either one of their individual styles. Their collective mind was much more positive and focused on the present.”

Pennebaker’s observation seems to be one that McCartney finds most gratifying. In his interview with GQ, McCartney said: “One of the nice things about music is that you know that a lot of people listening to you are going to take seriously what you say in the song. So, I’m very proud of the fact that the Beatles’ output is always really pretty positive. It’s all really ʻlet it be.’

So, it’s hopefully a good message.

I particularly like that.”

There’s no denying: The Beatles were the rock heard round the world, from Liverpool to Los Angeles. Each member of the Fab Four brought something unique to the Beatles’ sound, allowing them to captivate audiences with messages of love, sex, anger, chaos and confusion against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, harshening race and gender tensions and a rise of the hippie counterculture movement. Still today, they are defined by their creativity and celebrated for their undying influence, “Here, There and Everywhere.”

history to a larger public,” says history department chair Jacqueline Jones, who holds the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History. “The Feis Award recognizes the creativity, hard work and technological sophistication she brings to all these efforts.”

As the editor of multiple public history websites and professor of innovative digital humanities courses, Neuberger has been instrumental in making history scholarship accessible to public audiences and establishing the fields of public and digital history as foundational to history education.

Cañizares-Esguerra has taught in the history department since 2005 and teaches courses about colonial Latin America. He finds the subject authorizes “all sorts of assumptions about Latin America” and focuses his teaching on challenging and upsetting these deep-seated assumptions, inverting their narratives and expectations.

“My only agenda is to bring the best out of every student, gently but firmly pushing them into new, daring, conceptual territories that they themselves probably never thought possible,” says Cañizares-Esguerra. “As they dig deeper into their passions and grow confident in their skills, I am transformed myself. I learn.

I explore new fields that I would otherwise have never explored on my own.”

PLAN II Austin Ligon, a co-founder of CarMax and venture investor, will create a $1.2 million endowment through his estate for the future success of the university’s Plan II Honors Program.

Prior to this gift, Ligon created a million-dollar study abroad fund for Plan II that allowed more than 500 students to take their studies internationally to new learning environments. The purpose of his most recent gift, however, is not so pointed.

Recognizing the importance of planning for the future, Ligon created the endowment to be used at the discretion of the Plan II director for the changing needs of the program in years to come.

Ligon, who graduated from Plan II in 1973 and earned a master’s in economics in 1978, credits much of his success and world view to the honors program, which allowed him to build his own curriculum and see the world through different cultural lenses.

“Like Austin, we believe that the best way to understand the world we live in, and indeed the best way to understand ourselves, is through the often challenging experience of new cultures, new perspectives and new ways of thinking,” says Plan II director Alexandra Wettlaufer in an interview with Texas Leader

Wyatt McSpadden

Planning Ahead

magazine. “His legacy gift of an unrestricted excellence fund in Plan II will allow us to continue to expand our students’ boundaries beyond the familiar, preparing them as leaders of an increasingly global world. We are enormously grateful to him for his long-term commitment to Plan II and for his inspiring vision.”

Seeing 2020 GOVERNMENT The National Science Foundation has awarded a $6.6 million grant to researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to examine voter participation and decision-making in the next presidential election for the 2020 American National Election

Austin Ligon

Study (NES).

The study is the longestrunning election survey project in the world, having been conducted for every presidential election since 1948. At a time when cellphones and collapsing response rates have made quality probability sampling increasingly difficult, the face-to-face design of the NES is widely considered the gold standard for those seeking to understand public opinion and voting behavior.

“Everyone who studies elections and voting is familiar with the National Election Study,” says UT Austin government professor Daron Shaw. “Much of what we know about political behavior — especially with respect to campaigns and elections — draws on NES surveys.

The challenge we face is to honor the time series and continuity of the project while also developing appropriate new instrumentation and exploring innovative data acquisition techniques.”

Shaw will serve as the associate principal investigator of the study while government graduate student Lindsay Dun will serve as the lead graduate research assistant. Partnership in the study represents the crown jewel in the government department’s burgeoning presence in the field of survey research, including the more than 30 state surveys Shaw has conducted with Texas Politics Project director James Henson and The Texas Tribune.

7

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

“This is more than simply an opportunity to shape a valuable resource in the study of voting and participation,” Shaw says.

“Adding the NES to the other polling resources we have here makes us one of the pre-eminent places in the world to study and practice survey research.”

SOCIOLOGY, POPULATION RESEARCH CENTER In spring 2015, a Zika virus outbreak struck Brazil, making it the first report of locally acquired Zika in the Americas. Four years later, researchers are still studying its consequences, particularly those on women’s reproductive health and unborn children, who, if infected, are at a greater risk of being born with the neurological disorder microcephaly and other congenital syndromes.

To understand how women in Brazil have responded to this heightened risk, the National Institutes of Health awarded a $3.5 million grant to UT Austin sociologist Letícia Marteleto for a five-year, longitudinal study.

“Brazil has not had a longitudinal survey on women’s reproductive health ever. So, I hope to bring knowledge to how 8

“Brazil has not had a longitudinal survey on women’s reproductive health ever. So, I hope to bring knowledge to how people deal with these sorts of health shocks.”

Letícia Marteleto

Eric Moe

Tracking Zika in Brazil

people deal with these sorts of health shocks,” Marteleto says.

Prior to receiving the award, Marteleto found in her preliminary research that women’s responses to the health crisis varied greatly based on their socioeconomic status. This is due to the fact that avoiding or terminating a pregnancy are the only options to guarantee a child will not be born with microcephaly —

options that are more attainable for those of higher socioeconomic status, Marteleto explains.

Other factors influencing women’s responses could include the region where they are living — the Northeast’s higher temperatures, stagnant water and sanitation problems pose a greater risk — as well as the information women are receiving — mosquito and pregnancy prevention information is widespread, but other risks, such as sexual transmission of the disease, are not well communicated, Marteleto adds.

“There are multiple layers to peel back: class inequality, gender, and I suspect race also plays a role,” Marteleto says. “There’s a lot more than five years’ worth of research ahead of me.”

Eric

Moe

Trolling the U.S. PSYCHOLOGY More than two years after the 2016 presidential election, the United States is still piecing together Russia’s propaganda-filled interference and manipulations of U.S. political conversations on social media.

“From a basic democratic perspective, it is absolutely critical for us to know whether the entire premise of the country itself has been tampered with,” says UT Austin psychology postdoctoral researcher Ryan L. Boyd.

He and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research analyzed Facebook ads and Twitter troll accounts run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), seeking to determine how people with

differing political ideologies were targeted and pitted against one another through this “largely unsophisticated and low-budget” operation. Their study was publicly released as a white paper in October.

Researchers found that IRA-paid ads aimed to target and further divide both ends of the political spectrum.

“On one side, the ads were designed to make liberals feel like all conservatives are violent racists,” Boyd explains. “On the other side, the ads were designed to make conservatives feel like all liberals are trying to take their rights away.”

Though indistinguishable to the untrained eye, IRA-created social media posts had several

Researchers found that IRA-paid ads aimed to target and further divide both ends of the political spectrum.

defining features, researchers found. Linguistic analyses revealed subtle but distinctive nonnative English patterns in the IRA accountsʼ language.

Further investigations into when and where the Russian-paid ads derived showed that little action was taken to cover up their tracks — for example, most IRA activity occurred between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Moscow Standard Time.

“They didn’t need some elaborate, highly sophisticated system to cover their tracks — this simple, blunt approach was just as effective,” Boyd says. “After all, some of these operations were going on for over four years, but we’re still sitting around trying to put the pieces together.”

9

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

The film, which was produced

by Plan II alums Maggie Burns and Zachary Heinzerling, was selected to screen at festivals across the country, including the Houston Cinema Arts Festival, Doc NYC, the SF DocFest, St. Louis International Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the Gene Siskel Film Center’s “Stranger than Fiction” documentary film series.

A Tale of Two Americas HISTORY, PLAN II Fifty years after the Fair Housing Act became law, people across the United States continue to face an uphill battle to achieve homeownership.

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas, directed by UT Austin history alumnus Giorgio Angelini, attempts to get at the root of the U.S. housing crisis, which erupted in an economic collapse a short decade ago and may do so again, he says, if policies currently catering to systematic oppression don’t change.

The film, which initially began as a photography project for Angelini while pursuing a master’s in architecture from Rice University, was inspired by his visit to an abandoned housing development in Inland Empire, California, in 2011, where he witnessed “hundreds of square miles of burnt down orange groves standing alongside half-built homes.”

“It was a palpable sense of alienation in this desolate desert wasteland, where I began to understand the relationship that commoditization was having on the way we built our homes, neighborhoods and cities,” Angelini says.

In detailing the stories of 10

Back of Mind

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas, directed by UT Austin history alumnus Giorgio Angelini, attempts to get at the root of the U.S. housing crisis.

a retired New York City police officer, an Orange County real estate agent and an aspiring real estate developer in Baltimore, the documentary ties failing housing policies and suburban development to perpetuating segregation between the wealthy and the poor, the white and the black, across the U.S. “Whether it be racist self-segregation or predatory lending practices, when you make a home’s primary purpose an accumulator of wealth rather than a builder of cultural and human experience, it tends to lead to really bad things,” Angelini says.

PSYCHOLOGY The spinal cord helps transfer information between the body and brain, controlling functions such as movement, sensation and autonomic functions, but new findings published in eNeuro show it also plays a heavy hand in the circadian system — the body’s master clock that regulates the 24-hour rhythms of every cell in the body. Knowing this, researchers say, opens the door for early recovery tactics to preserve a patient’s overall wellbeing despite injury.

To illustrate how the circadian system functions throughout the body, researchers offer this metaphor: The master circadian oscillator “clock” in the brain, which responds to light — specifically blue light — is the CEO of the body, sending information

ic

M

oe

to key biological messengers, or middle managers, that interact with one another to inform cells, or workers, how to do their jobs.

“Disruptions of the circadian system are associated with pathological outcomes ranging from metabolic disorders to increased risk for certain types of cancer,” says UT Austin pharmacy professor Laura Fonken, a co-author on the study that aimed to understand how moderate spinal cord injuries in rat models affect the flow of information.

Researchers found that circadian rhythms of hormones, body temperature and movement (together, circadian “middle managers”) were all disrupted by moderate spinal cord injuries, resulting in widespread disruption throughout the body.

However, researchers remained optimistic, noting that identifying these disruptions could make way for new recovery efforts.

“If disruption of these rhythms harms recovery after spinal cord injury, efforts to restore a patient’s routines — for example, optimizing daily schedules of meals, sleep, physical rehabilitation and bright light — could promote recovery,” says lead author and UT Austin assistant professor of psychology Andrew Gaudet. He says future studies of spinal cord injuries could inform the development of chronotherapies that use the body’s circadian rhythms.

Getting Out the Vote ENGLISH UT Austin students have a new tool to help them become better informed as voters.

BeVote, a free cellphone app that provides accurate, nonpartisan information, has been dubbed by its creators as a “Swiss army knife” for voting.

BeVote brings information to users’ fingertips, such as: •Candidates and propositions •Custom, downloadable ballots •Push notifications for early and Election Day voting •A map of Travis County polling stations for early and Election Day voting, with wait times •Social media links

“It was really important to all of us to create a nonpartisan app.”

Hannah Wojciehowski

An old-fashioned phone call led to this Digital Age innovation.

Last spring, Hannah Wojciehowski, a professor of English, and Paul Toprac, the associate director for game design and development, dialed Susan Nold, director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, to brainstorm possibilities to help engage college students in the voting process.

“It was really important to all of us to create a nonpartisan app,” Wojciehowski says. “We don’t want to tell anyone how to vote. Rather, we want to make information readily available to members of the UT community — information and other features that have never before been consolidated in one app.”

After the initial brainstorming session, Toprac worked with Kassie Barroquillo of the Strauss Institute to understand what research and data indicated about why students were not voting. With user information in hand, Toprac enlisted a group of students to work on design and programming.

BeVote launched on both Apple and Android systems in time for the 2018 midterm elections.

Courtesy of BeVote

Er

11

KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

12

ar br Li li c ub kP Yo r ew /N oe M ic Er

LINGUISTICS As the presence of social media becomes increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, sordid words, once considered shocking to express, seem to be everywhere.

“Bad” words make up approximately 0.5-0.7 percent of words used in conversational speech, with the most popular terms, such as “ass” and the f-word, considered highly versatile in their use. To understand who is using these words and how, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin

y

#WatchYourMouth

looked no further than Twitter.

In studying the topic of vulgarity and how people perceive and categorize it in different contexts, researchers emphasized how it is possible to avoid over-censorship in public forums.

“A better understanding of the role of vulgarity can lead to better and fairer models aimed at realworld applications,” says UT Austin linguistics assistant professor Junyi Li. Researchers found that vulgarity is used differently among distinct demographics.

Those who are younger, nonreligious or politically liberal tend to use vulgarity more frequently, typically using such terms to express emotion, group identity or emphasis. However, those with higher incomes or educational attainment, as well as those who identify as female, were less likely to use vulgarity.

Beyond testing their frequency, researchers sought to understand the sentiment behind these expressions and what general implications it might have on people reading such tweets.

Researchers found that removing a vulgar expression from a post resulted in different reactions from the reader than the original, unedited tweet. In some cases, removing the vulgar terms caused tweets that were originally perceived as positive expressions to flip to be perceived as negative, and vice-versa.

ECONOMICS, HEALTH AND SOCIETY, PLAN II Laura Hallas hopes that the 2019 British Marshall Scholarship helps advance her work in public health to a much larger scale.

A Plan II honors, economics and health and society senior, Hallas will receive funding from the Marshall scholarship for graduate education at both the University of Oxford, where she will pursue a Master of Science in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she will pursue a Master of Science in Public Health.

“This scholarship is an incredible honor, but I also feel a real responsibility to use this opportunity to further public health on the largest scale I can,” Hallas says. “Studying at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Oxford will equip me to deliver on that responsibility.”

As a UT Austin student, Hallas was the editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan, a member of the Texas Orange Jackets and a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship. While earning a bachelor’s degree, Hallas has also been pursuing a graduate certificate in public health from the University

Emily Nielsen

Pursuing Public Health

of Texas School of Public Health.

She held internships with The Dallas Morning News, the U.S. Department of State, Pathologists Overseas and the Dell Medical School, where she currently works in the Health Leadership Apprenticeship Program helping to address health care needs in the community.

“Laura Hallas embodies the multidisciplinary approach to education that strengthens our college,” says Randy Diehl, dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

“As one of our most ambitious student scholars, she bridges the barriers between science and the liberal arts to explore the ways in which public health can improve the lives of people around the globe.”

“This scholarship is an incredible honor, but I also feel a real responsibility to use this opportunity to further public health on the largest scale I can.”

Laura Hallas

The Marshall scholarship, now in its 65th year, is funded substantially through the government of the United Kingdom.

The scholarship is intended to “strengthen the enduring relationship between the British and American peoples, their governments and their institutions,” according to the British Marshall Scholarship website. It was founded as a tribute to the Marshall Plan, which was named for former U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall and through which the United States provided aid to rebuild Europe after World War II. Hallas is the 26th UT Austin student to receive a Marshall scholarship since its establishment in 1953.

13

BOOK FEATURE

What’s in Your Library?

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Over a period of five years (2013-18) a Faculty Committee on Influential Books discussed, debated and finally compiled a list of intellectually and culturally significant books to encourage reading by undergraduates and provide inspiration for continued reading by college alumni.

The committee benefited from student suggestions and criticism in drawing up the list that mainly represents books in literature, history, politics and philosophy, but its broader range includes the social sciences and the humanities, science and the arts.

Seminal works find their place among others notable for humor and wit and still others for an engaging read, as well as long-range intellectual benefit.

14

RECOMMENDED READING Indispensable Reading: 1,001 Books from ‘The Arabian Nights’ to Zola I.B. Tauris, Dec. 2018

By Wm. Roger Louis

15

The Faculty Committee on Influential Books included Wm. Roger Louis (committee chair), Robert H. Abzug, Randy L. Diehl, Al Martinich, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza and Steven Weinberg. □ Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart □ Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams □ The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights □ Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism □ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics □ Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale □ Augustine of Hippo, Confessions □ Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice □ Bailyn, Bernard, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution □ Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time □ Balzac, Honoré de, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories □ Bellow, Saul, Herzog □ Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox □ Bhagavad Gita □ Bible □ Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell □ Borges, Jorge, Ficciones □ Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre □ Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights □ Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita □ Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress □ Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France □ Camus, Albert, The Stranger □ Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone □ Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland □ Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote □ Chang, Jung, Wild Swans □ Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales □ Chekhov, Anton, The Cherry Orchard □ Churchill, Winston, My Early Life □ Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians □ Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness □ Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England □ Dante, Inferno □ Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species □ Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe □ Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy □ Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations □ Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov □ Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass □ Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie □ Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk □ Eliot, George, Middlemarch □ Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man □ Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth □ Faulkner, William, Light in August □ Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

□ Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary □ Forster, E. M., A Passage to India □ Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography □ Frazer, James, The Golden Bough □ Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis □ Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems □ Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, The Story of My Experiments with Truth □ García Márquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude □ Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire □ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, part 1 □ Gombrich, E. H., The Story of Art □ Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs □ Greene, Graham, The Heart of the Matter □ Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers □ Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd □ Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter □ Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises □ Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan □ Homer, Odyssey □ Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding □ Ibsen, Henrik, A Doll’s House □ James, C. L. R., The Black Jacobins □ James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady □ James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience □ Joyce, James, Dubliners □ Kafka, Franz, The Trial □ Kant, Immanuel, “Toward Perpetual Peace” □ Keynes, John Maynard, The Economic Consequences of the Peace □ Kipling, Rudyard, Kim □ Lehman, David, ed., The Oxford Book of American Poetry □ Lincoln, Abraham, Selected Speeches and Writings □ Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government □ Macaulay, Thomas Babington, The History of England from the Accession of James II □ Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince □ Mahan, Alfred Thayer, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 □ Mahfouz, Naguib, The Cairo Trilogy □ Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice □ Manzoni, Alessandro, The Betrothed □ Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto □ Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick □ Mencken, H. L., The Vintage Mencken □ Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, and Other Writings □ Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman □ Milton, John, Paradise Lost □ Moorehead, Alan, The White Nile □ Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita □ Newton, Isaac, Opticks □ Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil □ O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night

□ Orwell, George, 1984 □ Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason □ Plato, Dialogues □ Poe, Edgar Allan, Complete Stories and Poems □ Prescott, William H., History of the Conquest of Mexico □ Proust, Marcel, Swann’s Way □ Qur’an □ Rabelais, François, Gargantua and Pantagruel □ Reed, John, Ten Days That Shook the World □ Ricks, Christopher, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse □ Roth, Joseph, The Radetzky March □ Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract □ Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children □ Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy □ Said, Edward, Orientalism □ Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Roosevelt □ Shakespeare, William, Works □ Shaw, Bernard, Pygmalion □ Sheehan, Neil, A Bright Shining Lie □ Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations □ Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich □ Sophocles, Antigone □ Southern, R. W., The Making of the Middle Ages □ Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution □ Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath □ Stendhal, The Red and the Black □ Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians □ Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels □ Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome □ Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War □ Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair □ Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic □ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War □ Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America □ Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace □ Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Last Days of Hitler □ Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now □ Tuchman, Barbara, The Guns of August □ Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons □ Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” □ Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn □ Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of the Leisure Class □ Voltaire, Candide, and Other Stories □ Vonnegut, Kurt, Cat’s Cradle □ Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited □ Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism □ Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence □ Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest □ Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire □ Wilson, Edmund, To the Finland Station □ Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman □ Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow □ Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway □ Zola, Emile, The Dreyfus Affair: “J’accuse,” and Other Writings 17

BOOKS

By Lyndon K. Gill, associate professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies This book explores the queer histories of Carnival, calypso and HIV/AIDS in the Burned Alive: Giordano Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In an extension Bruno, Galileo and of Audre Lorde’s use the Inquisition of the erotic as theory Reaktion Books distributed and methodology, Gill

by University of Chicago turns to lesbian/gay Press, May 2018 artistry and activism as

By Alberto A. Martinez, professor, Department of History an intertwined, political-sensual-spiritual In 1600, the Roman lens through which to Inquisition condemned see self and society.

Giordano Bruno to be burned alive at the stake.

Sixteen years later, the same inquisitors investigated Galileo Galilei.

Newfound evidence links the trials of the two men, who both held cosmological views that were considered to be religious crimes.

Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment Columbia University Press, Sept. 2018

By Minou Arjomand, assistant professor, Department of English Theater requires artifice; justice demands truth.

Are these demands as Erotic Islands: Art and irreconcilable as the Activism in the Queer pejorative term “show Caribbean trial” suggests? Drawing Duke University Press, on a rich archive of June 2018 18

A sampling of new and forthcoming titles from our college community.

postwar German and American courtroom dramas, Staged weaves theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas University of Georgia Press, Oct. 2018 Edited by Daina Ramey Berry, professor, Departments of History, and African and African Diaspora Studies; and Leslie M. Harris Sexuality and Slavery places sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas, examining consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status and power.

Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of

control, exploitation and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance and defiance.

Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture Rutgers University Press, Oct. 2018 Edited by Domino Renee Perez, associate professor, Department of English; and Rachel GonzálezMartin, assistant professor, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Rather than reaffirm static conceptions of identity, authenticity, or conventional interpretations of stereotypes, these essays bridge the intertextual gap between theories of community enactment and cultural representation, focusing on race as an ideological reality.

Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster Doubleday, Nov. 2018

By H.W. Brands, professor, Department of History Brands tells the story of how America’s second generation of political giants — Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster — battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and determine the shape of American democracy.

Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place Cornell University Press, Dec. 2018

By Youjeong Oh, assistant professor, Departments of

Asian Studies, and Geography and the Environment Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Oh argues that pop culture place-selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture.

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 University of Illinois Press, Jan. 2019 Edited by Maddalena Marinari; Madeline Y. Hsu, professor, Departments of History and Asian Studies; and Maria Cristina Garcia This book explores how the political and ideological struggles of the “age of restriction” — from 1924 to 1965 — paved the way for changes that followed.

The essays examine how geopolitics, civil rights, perceptions of America’s role as a humanitarian sanctuary, and economic priorities led government officials to facilitate the entrance of specific immigrant groups.

The Garden of Leaders: Revolutionizing Higher Education Oxford University Press, Jan. 2019

By Paul Woodruff, professor, Departments of Philosophy and Classics Most universities claim to prepare their students to be leaders, but few have tailored their curricula or teaching methods to leadership.

What do leaders need to learn? Woodruff proposes a curriculum heavy in the liberal arts, taught by methods that promote independence and encourage students to lead in teamwork.

The Politics of the First World War: A Course in Game Theory and International Security Cambridge University Press, March 2019

By Scott Wolford, associate professor, Department of Government World War I is the perfect case study for teaching international relations. This book uses 13 historical puzzles to provide readers with a rigorous yet accessible training in game theory, with each chapter showing, through guided exercises, how game theoretical models can explain otherwise challenging strategic puzzles.

19

EVENTS 1 History Department’s 130th Anniversary DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY History professor Madeline Hsu celebrates the department’s 130th anniversary at the Harry Ransom Center on Nov. 10, 2018.

2 Young, Gifted & @

Risk Symposium

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS Mehraz Rahman, Plan II, marketing senior and student body vice president, speaks at the Steve Fund’s annual symposium “Young, Gifted & @Risk” on Nov. 14, 2018, at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium.

The event was co-sponsored by UT Austin.

3 Hamilton Book Awards COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS From left, The University Co-operative Society’s Michael G. Hasler, chairman of the board, and Cheryl Phifer, president and CEO; Jacqueline Jones, professor and chair of the Department of History; Daina Ramey Berry, grand prize winner; Randy Diehl, dean of the College of Liberal Arts; and Maurie McInnis, executive vice president and provost attend the Hamilton Book Awards ceremony at the Blanton Museum on Oct. 30, 2018.

20

4 Feuding Fan Dancers

Reception

DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES Author and documentary filmmaker Leslie Zemeckis, left, and American studies professor Janet Davis at the Feuding Fan Dancers book reception at the Visual Arts Center Courtyard on Oct. 25, 2018.

5 Patton Hall

Dedication

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS Bobby and Sherri Patton were guests of honor at the dedication ceremony for the Sherri and Robert L. Patton, Jr. Hall, formerly the College of Liberal Arts Building, on Sept. 14, 2018.

6 Mission to Mars DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS In February 2018, assistant professor of economics Sukjin Han served as commander of the Mission VI crew, part of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, which is located at the Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii’s big island.

It’s operated by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. Credits: 1: Brian Birzer, 2: Brian Birzer, 3: The University Co-operative Society, 4: Raul Buitrago, 5: Jerry Hayes, 6: Calum Hervieu

21

22

By Emily Nielsen | Illustration by Eric Moe Jonathan Kaplan, an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, noticed an influx of Afghan refugees at his daughter’s elementary school, which inspired him to create the Refugee Student Mentor Program (RSMP) in December 2014.

The RSMP is a partnership between UT Austin’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Austin Independent School District (AISD), providing K-12 students who are refugees from the Middle East and Central Asia with mentors while supplementing the AISD’s English as a second language (ESL) programs.

The volunteers are graduate and undergraduate students of varying fluency who have taken language courses in Arabic, Persian, or have experience with Pashto and Dari.

The mentors are proving to be valuable for refugee students adjusting to new schools and a new country.

Each week they spend up to five hours with small groups of students, acting as tutors, translators and social support, helping students with schoolwork, talking to them about their lives, and sometimes eating lunch with them.

Beginning with just 15 student volunteers, the program now has more than 50 and serves 21 AISD schools. Rama Hamarneh, a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature, has been a coordinator for the RSMP since 2016 and has watched it flourish.

“There are so many reasons the program is

important, but I really appreciate the way that it links our volunteers to the Austin community,” Hamarneh says. “It is really easy to live in a bubble when you’re in school, whether you’re a graduate or undergraduate student, and the RSMP really allows UT students to volunteer and give back to their community, while also bettering their language skills.”

Volunteers are immersed in the language they’re studying and learn dialects to which they wouldn't typically be exposed. Studying abroad can be difficult for students learning languages and dialects spoken in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, says Kaplan.

Being able to interact weekly with refugees from those countries and being exposed to the varied vocabulary of younger speakers is extremely beneficial to the fluency of student mentors.

In addition to having in-school volunteers, program director Katie Aslan says the RSMP also holds teacher training sessions on campus to help extend its reach into surrounding communities including in Pflugerville, where a large part of the refugee community has settled.

Last year, the RSMP raised more than $10,000 on Hornraiser for transportation costs, which allowed the organization to serve more high-need Austin schools that aren’t accessible by bus, something crucial to many of the student mentors who often rely on public transit.

“This program has already evolved so much,” Aslan says. “I don’t think any of us imagined that a small program in one school would expand to so many schools in just three years. We have been able to help so many more refugee students than we ever imagined because of the enthusiasm of our students and a great partnership with the school district. The flow of refugees in the Austin area fluctuates so much, and we will continue to adapt to all of these changes in order to reach the students who need us the most.”

SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE

23

Randy Diehl greets Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Rebekah Rodriguez and her family at a luncheon on May 15, 2014.

By David Ochsner Randy Diehl is a morning person. Rising at 4 a.m., he writes a few emails, catches up on his reading and takes a brisk walk before heading to campus to lead a college with 22 academic departments, three branches of the ROTC and more than 500 faculty members. Despite long days and a demanding schedule, he never seems to tire. That’s because he is on a mission.

“At the risk of appearing grandiose, I believe that what we do at UT and at other Tier One research universities is of civilizational importance,” he says. “The 24

founders of our American universities believed that the liberal arts were vital to a democracy, which rests on the shoulders of educated citizens and leaders who know the meaning of liberty and know how to exercise it wisely.”

As a professor, researcher and department chair of psychology, Diehl worked side by side with dozens of undergraduate and graduate students, exploring the mysteries of how people perceive and produce speech. His students would learn how to solve complex problems and develop critical thinking skills, but he also hoped they would develop an

unquenchable desire to keep on learning and apply what they learned to making the world a better place.

Whether they knew it or not, that was the outcome Diehl sought for every one of the tens of thousands of students who passed through the college since he became dean in 2007. Regardless of their chosen field of study, he hoped each would graduate equipped for a lifetime of learning and service to others.

Born in Freeport, Illinois, Diehl is something of a polymath in his approach to learning, a voracious reader with a particular bent toward histories. He plows

Emily Nielsen

The

REAL DIEHL

A Dean Reflects on His Mission

through massive tomes like Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul — more than a thousand pages on the life and culture of 18th century French Huguenot settlers — his eyes light up as he describes the sheer pleasure of reading such a dense and well-researched book. He has read an enormous amount of fiction as well, tracing the development of the novel from Swift to Proust to Hemingway.

(He’s currently finishing Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, puzzled that he somehow missed that one along the way.)

But Diehl also loves reading about the hard sciences, especially about advances

in astrophysics. In sum, he has a curious mind that has suited him well as dean of a college that spans so many disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and languages.

It is a job Diehl would have found unlikely when he joined the UT faculty in 1975. “If someone had predicted that I would one day become a dean, I would have loudly scoffed at the idea,” he says.

“What changed my mind? In 1995 I reluctantly agreed to serve as chair of the psychology department, and within a matter of weeks I came to understand that academic leadership can be among

the most gratifying experiences a faculty member can have.”

Diehl says what he came to appreciate — and then to love — was the opportunity to work with colleagues to advance scholarly, educational and service missions.

It is this mission-driven focus that has helped Diehl remain both resilient and optimistic during his two terms as dean. Barely a year into his deanship, the Great Recession of 2008 sent a shockwave through the U.S. economy that severely curtailed resources allotted to higher education.

“We managed to continue to recruit and retain outstanding faculty despite serious budgetary limits,” says Diehl, who credits the innovative leadership in his college as well as the unwavering support of alumni and donors for helping him continue to build excellence in the college.

“One of the joys of being a dean is reading the scholarly and educational work of faculty being considered for promotion in rank (he has personally reviewed 363 cases as dean), and there is simply no question that the quality of our faculty has improved year after year,” he says. “The percentage of successful promotion cases has continued to rise even as our standards have become ever more rigorous.”

A critical part of building an excellent faculty is recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty, and Diehl says he believes the college has made good on that commitment.

During his terms as dean, two new departments were added, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and the Department of Latina/o Studies; and first steps were taken to make the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, 25

2007

2009

2010

2011

APPOINTED DEAN DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES ESTABLISHED

LED THE UNIVERSITY’S LANDMARK TASK FORCE ON UNDERGRADUATE GRADUATION RATES

CREATED THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH AWARDS

Phil Butler

RESPONDED ON BEHALF OF UT TO CHALLENGE FROM SEVEN BREAKTHROUGH SOLUTIONS

Randy Diehl visits with graduating seniors who were honored as Dean’s Distinguished Graduates in May 2015.

26

which launched a program in LGBTQ Studies, a full-fledged department.

“Some of the most ambitious and groundbreaking scholarship at UT is taking place in these very units,” Diehl says.

Another persistent challenge has been the shortage of high-quality space to perform the college’s research and teaching missions. Diehl began to address this challenge when he was chair of the Department of Psychology, leading

the effort to build a new home for the department — the Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Building. Work is now underway for an addition to that building that will bring the groundbreaking research of the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Institute for Mental Health Research together under one roof.

During Diehl’s time as dean, the college has seen the renovation and expansion of many spaces, most notably the Gordon-White Building — which formerly housed the Department of Geography and the Environment — and is now home to Black Studies and Latino Studies.

The most significant construction project of all was a new College of Liberal Arts building that opened in 2013 and was renamed the Sherri and Robert L. Patton, Jr. Hall in 2018. Not only did it mark a transformational moment for the college — the first building on campus specifically dedicated to the liberal arts and its students — it also marked the first time a college at UT had financed its own building.

“When plans for what became Patton Hall were first being discussed, we were

2013

2014

OPENED COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS BUILDING DEPARTMENT OF MEXICAN AMERICAN & LATINA/O STUDIES ESTABLISHED

told that none of the usual funding sources for capital projects would be available. So, we decided to underwrite the project with existing college funds,” Diehl says. “This had never been done before, but we were able to pull it off with the help of generous donors. We also managed to complete the project $15 million under the original cost estimate, with 14 percent more assignable space than earlier planned — all while adhering to the highest standards of quality and sustainability.”

However, the college’s greatest accomplishment during the past 12 years, in Diehl’s estimation, is not about the buildings, but rather about defending the scholarship that takes place within their walls.

“When the mission and values of UT Austin were under attack by certain members of the Board of Regents and others, the leadership of the college joined President [Bill] Powers and members of the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education in fighting back with arguments and evidence,” Diehl recalls.

“We were successful, in particular, in refuting the claims of the so-called

2016

FIRST RANDY DIEHL PRIZE AWARDED, A MERIT-BASED SCHOLARSHIP FOR A GRADUATING SENIOR WHO COMMITS THE YEAR AFTER GRADUATION TO SERVICE FOR THE GREATER GOOD.

“The founders of our American universities believed that the liberal arts were vital to a democracy, which rests on the shoulders of educated citizens and leaders who know the meaning of liberty and know how to exercise it wisely.”

Randy Diehl

2018

CLA BUILDING RENAMED SHERRI AND ROBERT L. PATTON, JR. HALL

Seven Breakthrough Solutions, which, if implemented, would have destroyed UT Austin’s status as a Tier One research university.”

It wasn’t the first time college leadership was tapped by the university to lead a campus-wide initiative. In 2011, Diehl headed a task force to improve four-year graduation rates, prompting a number of major structural and policy changes that improved four-year graduation rates from 52 to 70 percent in a five-year period.

Under Diehl’s leadership, the college also led the university in such areas as student advising, the development of online classes and the consolidation of business services.

Although he officially retires at the end of August, Diehl will doubtless continue to rise at 4 a.m. That is what happens when you are mission-driven and a creature of the liberal arts. The desire to learn, discover and to serve never ends.

As Diehl used to tell graduates at the May commencement ceremony, “the liberal arts will give you a life that is richly lived with curiosity, passion and purpose. It will always keep you connected to the wonders of this world.”

27

BREAKTHR

BRAIN H WE’RE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK

28

ROUGHS IN

HEALTH

By Alexandra Reshanov Illustrations by Lili des Bellons

29

30

It might not seem like it when you’ve forgotten your email password for the third time in as many days, but your brain is capable of amazing things.

It can instantly process the intricate sensory inputs needed to understand the world while simultaneously conducting motor neurons to navigate these landscapes. It can read complex emotions from minute facial cues, adapt to new information and learn new skills even into old age. Sure, computers are faster at algorithm-driven calculations, but the human brain is still eons ahead when it comes to linguistic abilities, pattern recognition and creativity.

So much about how the brain works is still a mystery, but researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are making rapid advancements in prevention, treatment and care in the area of brain health.

HEALTHSPAN Andreana Haley often uses the term “healthspan” when discussing her work. As it sounds, healthspan denotes not how many years the average person will live, but rather the number of years one can expect to

Andreana Haley

spend in reasonably good health. And while it’s easier to pinpoint when death occurs than the moment when a person can no longer be described as “healthy,” it’s clear that human healthspan lags considerably behind lifespan.

In Haley’s lab, healthspan depends on brain function.

“Cognition is by far the most important determinant of quality of life and independence,” says Haley, an associate professor of psychology who began her career working with Alzheimer’s patients. While interacting with these older patients, she realized something discouraging.

“If you wait for someone to already have a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia, it’s too late,” Haley explains. “Those processes that led the brain to clinical symptoms have been going on for decades.”

Haley opted to pursue prevention instead of cure, focusing her work on individuals in midlife (ages 31

COVER FEATURE

40-60) and on identifying and changing those factors that predict problems in later life.

What does it take to keep our brains from deteriorating before we reach retirement? It turns out that cognitive health isn't maintained simply by doing word puzzles or other “mental calisthenics.” The brain is, after all, just another organ in the body. And the same habits that imperil our hearts and livers may also chip away at our gray matter.

Research has shown links between obesity and other metabolic issues in middle age and cognitive decline in later life. The exact mechanisms are not fully understood, but clogged arteries delivering insufficient blood (and thus oxygen) to the brain are one possible culprit. Thus, interventions that help prevent or delay cardiovascular disease may also improve mental outcomes. And, yes, by “interventions” I mean the dreaded diet and exercise.

Haley’s lab is working on several projects involving changes to nutrition and exercise habits of middle-age subjects, using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to measure the effects of these interventions.

Researchers aim to answer several questions: What are the neurological markers that predict cognitive decline in later life? What underlying mechanisms drive this decline? And which individuals can be helped by a particular intervention?

Haley notes that not only is the body affecting the brain, the brain is affecting the body. She says these bidirectional connections are not easy to disentangle, but they’re extremely interesting to pursue. Neurodegeneration in the brain affects cognitive function, personality and mood, but areas of the brain that control weight and appetite and blood pressure are also going to degenerate. The brain affects all of these metabolic factors, as well as the body affecting the brain.

For those who will not benefit sufficiently from lifestyle interventions, Haley may have a workaround — transcranial laser stimulation, also called low-level laser therapy. The idea is that rather than trying to increase the amount of oxygenated blood reaching the brain via behavioral changes, you bypass the 32

vasculature and stimulate energy production directly in the brain by aiming a specific wavelength of light at the region that is struggling.

The light used in research is a specific, near-infrared wavelength, and Haley is quick to remind us that only a fraction of this light will reach its target, which is why it's so important to carefully calibrate the dose.

Her lab is lucky, she points out, that the areas they want to affect lie within the frontal and temporal lobes, unblocked by hair follicles, which (even when hair is shaved) can disrupt light waves.

The transcranial laser stimulation study — which tests cognitive task performance of subjects being treated with the technique while also gathering physiological data — is still underway, so you may want

to hold off on canceling your gym membership until the results are analyzed.

Haley cautions that no single intervention will work for everyone, even within the lifestyle approaches.

“A one-size-fits-all diet is not going to be it,” she says. “There are so many genetic and environmental interactions in that realm that we’re going to have to figure out how to recommend individualized diets. It’s not going to be a ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ for everyone.”

She also notes that it isn’t necessary to eliminate cognitive decline entirely. Great strides could be made in both quality of life and health care costs by delaying its onset long enough for some lesser indignity to kill us.

“At some point,” Haley says, “we’re going to end up at the physiological end of life, and if we can push cognitive health to that point, I think we’ve done well.”

THE DIVERSITY OF DEPRESSION We talk about depression as though it is a singular entity, manifesting itself more or less identically in its victims with a progression as predictable as that of the flu. But in reality the disorder occurs in a bewildering array of configurations.

In a recent study, Chris Beevers’ lab surveyed 10,000 college students with depression about their specific symptoms. Although the survey contained only 13 questions, researchers found that 60 percent of respondents had unique combinations of symptoms.

“I was completely floored by that,” Beevers says.

“We checked it like five times because I thought we’d done it wrong in terms of computing.”

A few key symptoms such as sadness and anhedonia (the clinical term for inability to enjoy anything) were present in most patients, but the remainder of the profiles were surprisingly diverse. Think of it as one of those build-your-own-salad places. Everyone starts with lettuce, but one person might add peppers, carrots, and garbanzo beans, while another opts for hard-boiled eggs, red onions and that imitation crab stuff.

One of [Beevers’] newest projects is looking at whether smartphones can be used to spot early behavioral changes related to depression.

Chris Beevers

Beevers, a professor of psychology and director of UT’s Institute for Mental Health Research, is trying to make sense of all that diversity. Ultimately, he hopes not only to identify subgroupings of depression, but to determine which treatment options are most and least effective for patients with particular clusters of symptoms. To accomplish this, he and his colleagues are gathering large amounts of behavioral and physiological data, and then creating algorithms to predict which factors make a person more likely to respond to a particular treatment.

The main treatment Beevers studies is a nonpharmaceutical intervention called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The treatment aims to break patients of negative patterns of thought (that can perpetuate their symptoms) through practice in identifying and redirecting those thoughts. The idea isn’t necessarily to turn every loss into a win, but to step back and get a bit of perspective.

“It’s not just ‘think positively about yourself,’” Beevers says. “It’s more like ‘think more accurately.’

Just that people are open to the idea that ‘I need to pay attention to what I’m thinking because my thoughts may not always be true.’ That is, I think, one of the big lessons of CBT. ‘Don’t believe everything you think’ is kind of a good philosophy.”

As with any learned skill, getting benefits from CBT requires strenuous repetition, but the hope is that as neural circuits used in more realistic outlooks are strengthened, and those maintaining negative ruts shrink, the process becomes automatic.

CBT has well-documented success in the treatment of anxiety disorders, but its efficacy is lower when used for depression. Beevers hopes to improve outcomes by creating more customized forms of the intervention.

“I’m very interested in developing precise and specific treatments that target a specific mechanism,” he explains. “As opposed to CBT, it is kind of a broad, multifaceted treatment, and so if it does work, you often don’t know why it works.”

One possible mechanism Beevers is looking at is “self-dislike” (probably more commonly described 33

COVER FEATURE

as “self-loathing” by those actively experiencing it).

Rather than using a general version of CBT for subjects who reported this symptom, his lab is testing an intervention that specifically addresses self-dislike.

“The idea is that if we can target these really important symptoms in a population, changing those symptoms could have a cascading effects,” Beevers says. So, once the self-dislike dissipates, things such as mood and sleep may also improve.

The goal of this approach is to spare suffering patients and overwhelmed care providers the trial and error that typifies current treatment recommendations.

“There’s been a lot of discovery,” Beevers notes of his field, “but not a lot of translation.”

There’s still much research to be done before a person can walk into a clinic, complete a quick assessment and be matched to the treatment options most likely to speed recovery, but a common device may help on both data-gathering and intervention fronts — the ubiquitous smartphone.

Your phone knows quite a lot about your habits without ever looking at the content of your text messages, which Beevers assures us this technology would not do. One of his newest projects is looking at whether smartphones can be used to spot early behavioral changes related to depression. Factors such as the number of calls/texts made in a day or how many places the phone visits beyond just home and work could be used to flag deviations from normal behavior in its owner.

It’s not unlike your bank’s fraud early warning system, except that instead of scanning for dubious out-of-state purchases, the system might sound the alarm if you stopped replying to friends’ texts or skipped too many social engagements. By notifying the patient or care provider of such changes, the system could allow for an intervention to be made before things deteriorate further. This is crucial because preventing a depressive episode in someone exhibiting sub-clinical symptoms is far easier than pulling that person out of a full-blown depression.

For now, the plan is just to gather and analyze the data. But if it proves useful, the system could also 34

be designed to provide daily statistics to its users — sort of a mental health Fitbit for those who enjoy obsessing over quantifications of their activity levels.

And, who knows, keeping track of your daily mental “steps” could itself be a way to maintain emotional well-being.

THE BLINK OF AN EYE

“It’s taken millions of years of evolution to create a visual system that can do what ours can do.”

Bill Geisler

How do we perceive the world around us? How is the brain able to understand three-dimensional shapes from the two-dimensional images projected onto it?

How do we know where one object ends and another begins?

“That’s a difficult problem, and a lot of people don’t appreciate how difficult it is because it seems simple,” says Bill Geisler, who has little patience for the common analogy that our visual systems work like a camera.

“Within the blink of the eye, your brain solves all these problems,” he adds. “It seems simple because it happens so quickly, but in fact probably 35 to 40 percent of all the gray matter in your brain is devoted to just doing basic vision perception. It’s very, very sophisticated to do, and it’s very, very difficult, and it’s taken millions of years of evolution to create a visual system that can do what ours can do.”

Making things even more challenging is the fact that our intuitions about how the brain processes visual information are terrible. If researchers based their work on best guess “armchair” hypotheses, they wouldn’t get very far. This is why Geisler, a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Perceptual Systems, and his colleagues are taking a different approach. Rather than starting with the physiology of our visual systems, they are examining the environments in which those systems evolved.

This means collecting data on so-called natural scenes (i.e., everything around us) and analyzing their statistical properties. From these analyses, far better hypotheses can be formed about what the brain would need to do in order to keep us from walking into trees and the countless other seemingly easy functions it

Further down the road, the Center for Perceptual Systems may someday aid in the development of prosthetic devices that would allow people with damaged eyes (but intact visual cortexes) to see.

performs daily.

Geisler offers an illustration: If we see a shadowed figure in the distance and have to guess whether it is male or female, how would we accomplish such a task?

“Well, just knowing the statistical differences in height between males and females would help you perform it better,” he explains. Such statistical properties are all around us, and our brain observes and uses them constantly without our even being aware of these behind-the-scenes calculations.

One of the ways Geisler’s lab uncovers these statistical relationships is by using a device that takes stereoscopic photographs (comparable to what you would see through your two eyes) while also gathering measurements of the real-world camera-toobject distance for each corresponding pixel in the photo. From this data, they can run mathematical and computational analyses to determine what the “rules” might be for parsing a particular arrangement of pixels.

One innovation that emerged from their research is an application that can enlarge and sharpen photographs with less loss of quality than what Photoshop can offer. Another is an algorithm that may improve the focusing speed of low-vision aides that work by showing their wearers enhanced video of what is in front of them, and that require constant refocusing.

Cameras focus by searching until they find the lens configuration that yields the most contrast (i.e., the least blur). But the human eye snaps to the correct spot in just one try.

This is due to something called chromatic aberration, which occurs because a lens (both the eye’s lens and a camera’s lens) cannot perfectly focus all three primary wavelengths of light onto the same point.

Even when a scene is in focus, certain colors will be very slightly blurred. And when a scene is out of focus, which wavelengths are more blurred indicates whether the lens is aiming too far or too near. It is this property that our visual systems exploit to find the correct point to focus on without all the trial and error. An algorithm created by Geisler’s lab mimics this 35

COVER FEATURE

technique and may allow the cameras of low-vision aides to retain better focus when adjusting to rapidly changing scenes.

Further down the road, the Center for Perceptual Systems may someday aid in the development of prosthetic devices that would allow people with damaged eyes (but intact visual cortexes) to see. If you can predict the activity of your visual cortex to natural stimuli, it is possible to build a prosthetic device to mimic that activity, Geisler says.

Such technologies probably are not in our immediate future. Nor are they limited to vision. In theory, any activity in the brain, once understood, could be replicated with the kinds of sci-fi neural prosthetics Geisler describes. But getting to that full understanding of what is going on in the brain will take much more work.

“I think it’s important,” Geisler says, “for the public to recognize that this is not a solved problem.”

IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG MINDS Although evolution has had plenty of time to optimize how we perform visual tasks, it’s still working out the kinks in some of our more recently acquired skills.

Reading, which has only been around for about 5,000 years, is one such skill.

“The brain didn’t evolve to read,” says Jessica Church-Lang, in describing the unique challenges of written communication. “We have to take these visual mechanisms and these language mechanisms and get them to work together in a way that’s novel.”

That novelty may account for why reading difficulties are so common, affecting 10 to 15 percent of the population.

Much of assistant professor of psychology ChurchLang’s research focuses on children with reading difficulties. She is working on a study tracking the effects of educational interventions in middle school students who speak English as a second language (ESL). The multisite study, conducted by teams in Austin and Houston in conjunction with the Texas Center for 36

“The brain didn’t evolve to read.”

Jessica Church-Lang

Learning Disabilities, assesses reading improvements in these children over a two-year period of intervention, while also measuring the structural and functional brain changes that accompany them.

Church-Lang’s lab handles the functional brain data, analyzing fMRI recordings of which areas of the brain are active (and how active they are) when children with reading difficulties perform tasks, how these activity patterns change over time and how they compare with those of children who have an easier time mastering the written word.

“What this can tell us above and beyond behavioral measures is sometimes brain changes are out of pace with behavioral changes,” she says. “So it could be that brain change precedes behavioral change, and so you don’t actually see any behavioral difference yet, but you’re starting to see brain-related changes, and this could be a way to measure whether an intervention is working. It can help us understand potentially the mechanisms that are supporting the learning-related change. And that could help us target interventions.”

In the study, Church-Lang’s lab is also looking for markers of which children will benefit from a particular intervention by studying brain data from before and after said intervention. The idea is that certain differences will already exist pre-intervention and can predict how effective that intervention will be.

Because no one fix is going to address all students’ needs, it’s not so much a question of whether an intervention works; it’s for whom it will work and for whom it won’t. The ESL learners are an especially interesting group to study, according to Church-Lang, because many of the monolingual interventions used in schools may not be ideal for them.

Another reason to focus on this group is that children’s reading difficulties often go unnoticed at younger ages. During the latter half of grade school, Church-Lang says, education shifts away from reading instruction.

“The common saying is it switches from learning to read to reading to learn,” Church-Lang says.

It is at this point that students who don’t have a good handle on reading really start to struggle, but

37

COVER FEATURE

also when helping them becomes more challenging. Children have far greater neuroplasticity than adults, meaning their brains can change more rapidly in response to new information, which is why it’s easier to learn a musical instrument if you start young. As the brain matures, gaining better control over impulses, emotions and attention, that plasticity declines. It’s the trade-off of adulthood – you can sit through a two-hour movie without throwing a tantrum (though two and a half hours might be pushing it), but you can’t learn a new skill as quickly.

For this reason, Church-Lang says, “Later interventions and knowing how to do those best is even more important because a lot of kids don’t get really identified or are falling through the cracks, and so we need to have solutions for these older kids even if it’s not as easy.”

The study in bilingual struggling readers is also exciting to Church-Lang because it focuses on a population often overlooked by neuroscience.

“We’re always really grateful for families that volunteer,” she says, acknowledging the difficulties both for parents driving in from great distances and for children enduring the more tedious aspects of data collection.

“We’re trying to communicate that science can be something that everyone participates in. Because for a long time, neuroimaging was focused on kind of easy samples, which would be professors’ kids.”

Church-Lang says studying a more diverse sample is helping us understand the variability in the brain and the variety of ways that brains can function.

HOW TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THAT SPIDER “Fear is an adaptive emotion,” says associate professor of psychology Marie Monfils. “We, humans and other animals, are predisposed to be fearful of things and beings that stand to cause us harm.”

Under the right circumstances, humans can develop phobias of comically nonthreatening stuff 38

Fears helped our ancestors avoid getting eaten or poisoned by other members of the animal kingdom, but they’re more hindrance than help for many modern city dwellers.

– see koumpounophobia (fear of buttons) and pogonophobia (fear of beards) – but it’s much easier to acquire a fear of something that could have posed a danger to our species at some point in our evolution (most notably, what Monfils describes as “scary-looking critters”). Such fears helped our ancestors avoid getting eaten or poisoned by other members of the animal kingdom, but they’re more hindrance than help for many modern city dwellers.

Monfils’ lab studies both how we develop fears and how we might rid ourselves of them. One such subject is social acquisition of fear. An individual’s fears don’t always arise from traumatic experiences. A person might be afraid of airplanes because he or she endured a terrifying flight, but such a phobia could also be triggered by traveling with a parent who displays anxiety about flying, or even by reading about plane crashes on social media. Monfils’ work suggests that we’re most likely to learn fears in this way from close friends and family members. Among her current projects is a study of social acquisition of fear in rats that aims to understand whether and how this differs from social learning in general.

“We’ve identified some brain regions that appear to be specifically engaged during this form of learning, and not direct fear acquisition,” Monfils elaborates.

“Now, I want to know: Are these regions specific to social fear acquisition or social information more broadly speaking?”

To answer that question, her lab uses pairs of rats that can learn from each other. Some rats learn positive things; others learn aversions. Then, working with associate professor of psychology Joanne Lee, a cell labeling technique is used to show whether similar groups of neurons are involved in both types of learning or whether learning fear is its own special thing.

Monfils’ work with fear in animals may, in turn, help humans with their fear of animals. A collaboration with psychology professor Mike Telch is translating some of her findings into an intervention designed to improve outcomes in people spooked by snakes and spiders. This new approach combines

Monfils’ lab studies both how we develop fears and how we might rid ourselves of them.

Marie Monfils

aspects of therapies called “extinction” and “reconsolidation blockade.”

Extinction is similar to the exposure therapy approach that occasionally crops up in TV sitcom plots. The subject is exposed to the thing he fears in increasing doses, with no negative outcomes until he is finally ready to fly on an airplane or go to the top of a tall building again (at which point, hilarity ensues in the TV version). The problem with so-called extinction is that it doesn’t actually eliminate the fear memory (i.e., snakes are scary). It merely creates another memory alongside it (i.e., that time I looked at a snake photo and nothing bad happened). These two memories compete, with fear often winning and snakes becoming scary again.

Reconsolidation blockade is based on the idea that retrieved memories are malleable for several hours.

This is because each time you pull up that snakes-arescary memory, it then needs to be reconsolidated and returned to long-term storage in your brain. Certain drugs can prevent that reconsolidation by blocking the protein synthesis that enables it. That would be great if those drugs were deemed safe for use in humans, but they are not.

Monfils’ Retrieval+Extinction technique aims to retrieve a fear memory, allow enough time for it to reach that malleable state, and then introduce the extinction session.

“The idea is that rather than creating a second memory trace, extinction training would be incorporated into the initial fear memory as it reconsolidated, de facto updating it as a safe memory,” says Monfils.

“We have found that this approach is more effective, on average, than standard extinction in persistently attenuating fear memories.”

As with other scientists I spoke to, Monfils enthusiastically expounds on the wonders of the brain. And she may be the person who finally persuades me to wear a bike helmet.

“Virtually all that we do — speak, read, run, interact, love, learn — depends on our brain,” Monfils says. “While the brain is capable of significant plasticity, a brain injury can be an immense challenge from which to recover. Protect your brain!”

39

PRO BENE MERITIS The Pro Bene Meritis award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts. Since 1984, the annual award has been given to alumni, faculty members and friends of the college who are committed to the liberal arts, have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits or have participated in service related to the college. The following are interviews with the 2018 recipients.

Getting it Right Bianna Golodryga Interview by Caroline Murray Photography by Brian Birzer Education: B.A. Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies ’00, The University of Texas at Austin Hometown: Houston, Texas Bianna Golodryga is co-host of CBS This Morning. She is a New York-based correspondent for CBS News and a regular CNN contributor. In 2001, she started her television career as a CNBC bureau producer from the New York Stock Exchange, where she produced live coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She went on to become a segment producer for The Wall Street Journal Report with 40

Maria Bartiromo and then, an on-air correspondent for CNBC. Golodryga joined ABC in 2007, reporting extensively on the automobile, housing and financial crises and co-anchoring the weekend edition of Good Morning America for four years. After ABC, Golodryga began covering major financial and news stories alongside Katie Couric for Yahoo Global News. She has served on UT Austin’s Chancellor’s Council and its President’s Associates, and she is an active alumni volunteer for the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

What drew you to television news over print, radio or other formats?

I came into broadcast journalism because I was interested in business news, having

watched CNBC for years. I started my career as a producer.

What do you think the pillars of great reporting are?

A combination of trusted sourcing (and multiple sources at that), in-depth knowledge of the story and field, fact-checking and, of course, objectivity.

How do you think your degree in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies has informed your career?

How has it not? I’ve been able to utilize my educational expertise in a myriad of stories I’ve covered, ranging from business, to geopolitics, terrorism and cybersecurity.

What was your favorite class at UT Austin and why?

Dr. [Robert] Moser’s Soviet and Russian government class. His masterful storytelling combined with his passion for the subject matter made it a must-attend course.

What do you consider the most important reporting of your career?

As a producer: the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As a reporter and anchor: the Boston Marathon bombings and the 2016 election.

What books are on your nightstand?

I’ve just finished James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty and have just started to read Michael McFaul’s From Cold War to Hot Peace.

What advice would you give to aspiring journalists today?

Read everything you possibly can. Ask as many questions as you possibly can.

“Never assume to know where your reporting will lead you. Objectivity is crucial.”

Bianna Golodryga

Never assume to know where your reporting will lead you. Objectivity is crucial. And finally, being first to break a story is not nearly as important as getting it right ... especially in today’s partisan-driven news cycle.

What are your favorite memories from your time at UT Austin?

Spending time with friends on Mount Bonnell, dinners at Hula Hut and studying at Mozart’s.

Why do you think it’s important to give back to your alma mater?

I spent my most formative years here at UT. It would be extremely selfish of me if I didn’t want others to have the same experience.

Did you always want to be a journalist?

I actually stumbled into journalism. I had initially planned on having a career in finance.

What is one fact that people are always surprised to learn about you?

I’m not very good at managing our family’s finances. Thankfully I’m married to a brilliant man who is!

What is one thing you wish the American public understood better about your job as a journalist?

Having been born in a repressive regime [USSR] that censored all media, I’ve come to realize that many Americans take a free press for granted. We journalists are by no means infallible, but the great majority of us strive to do good work ... with the goal of better informing a democratic society.

41

Q&A

Telling History Jeremi Suri Interview by Caroline Murray Photography by Brian Birzer Education: B.A. History ’94, Stanford University; M.A. History ’96, Ohio University; Ph.D. History ’01, Yale University Hometown: New York, New York Jeremi Suri is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, holding the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs. He has written and edited nine books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. His most recent book, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, was widely reviewed by major publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News. He is also the recipient of the 2017-18 President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award from UT. Your latest book focuses on the history of the American presidency.

Which president did you find the most fascinating to study?

I find Franklin Roosevelt the most fascinating president. He gave millions of Americans hope in a time of profound despair, he transformed the expectations 42

of government, and he defeated some of the most threatening foreign enemies in American history. He did all of this while preserving and expanding our democracy. He is our greatest president. We have not had a great president since him.

We are overdue for another, younger Franklin Roosevelt.

What lessons do you hope students take away from your classes?

I want students to understand the importance of seeing how past choices influence our current circumstances. By identifying the past choices that shaped our current circumstances, we can begin to contemplate new opportunities to adjust and reform. Looking back allows us to imagine new futures and understand the places where opportunities for change exist. The greatest impediment to imaginative change is the tyranny of the status quo. Looking back allows us to see alternatives to the status quo. That is how productive reforms begin.

What is your teaching philosophy?

My goal is to inspire, challenge and stretch the students. I want them to work harder than ever before. I want to shake them out of their comfort zone. I want to make them think deeply and write clearly.

And I will do all the same myself. I am

just another student in the classroom.

Everyone, including me, will work harder than we have ever worked before. We will subject all views to open discussion.

Agreement is not necessary, but analytical rigor, attention to evidence and clarity of argument are essential.

What made you interested in studying history?

My parents are immigrants from India and Russia. They fled some of the worst horrors of the last century. The United States was a refuge, a savior for my family.

History has always been front-and-center in my thinking.

How does the study of history inform foreign policy decisions today?

Studying history allows us to empathize with people who live far from our society.

How do they view the world? What are their sources of insecurity and suffering?

What are their aspirations? If we cannot answer these questions about our adversaries and allies, then we are unprepared for foreign policy. American leaders and citizens must learn to live in an ever-more diverse and closely connected world.

History provides us all with an understanding of these processes and insights about how to move forward.

What is the best book you have read recently?

Richard White’s The Republic for Which it Stands. This is a big, startling history of American society during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. White’s descriptions of the Gilded Age are eerily similar to parts of our current time.

What role do the humanities play in developing leaders?

The humanities are the foundation for all leadership. Leadership starts and

“My goal is to inspire, challenge and stretch the students. I want them to work harder than ever before. I want to shake them out of their comfort zone. I want to make them think deeply and write clearly. And I will do all the same myself.�

Jeremi Suri

ends with humanistic thinking. What is the purpose of politics? What is the ethical role of the leader? How can we pursue ambitious goals while remaining conscious of our limits? These are breadand-butter humanities questions that all leaders must contemplate early and often. They are the essential components of character and wisdom. Without character and wisdom, there can be no effective and enduring leadership.

What do you wish the American public understood better about the office of the presidency?

I want Americans to understand how difficult it is for even the most effective presidents to get anything done. The office has impossible expectations. And the president is pulled in too many directions by different groups and constant crises. We need a more focused president who devotes his or her attention to the few most important issues that will determine the future of our country.

Defining those few top issues is the first and necessary step in presidential leadership. Too many presidents try to do everything, and therefore get little done.

Who has been the greatest influence in your life?

My maternal grandmother, Emily. She lived to 102. She always made everyone around her better. She was always curious. She loved life. And she survived.

What do you consider the greatest accomplishment of your life thus far?

We have two creative, smart, articulate and loving teenagers. They are talented and they are kind. They are fun and remarkably wise. They bring so much joy into our lives. And they teach me every day. Our children are easily the greatest joy in my life.

43

Q&A

Healing With Humanity Dr. Richard Harper Interview by Rachel Griess Photography by Brian Birzer Education: B.A. Plan II ’67, The University of Texas at Austin; M.D. ’78, Baylor College of Medicine Hometown: Daingerfield, Texas Dr. Richard Harper is a neurosurgeon in Houston. He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from the Plan II Honors Program before attending Baylor College of Medicine and then serving in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant in the Medical Corps. Harper has built a distinguished career as a physician for Ben Taub Hospital, Houston Methodist Hospital, Diagnostic Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, performing surgeries on people from 80 countries, training 120 neurosurgeons and even operating on past presidents. In addition to his professional achievements, Harper has served as a member of the UT System’s Chancellor’s Council, Littlefield Society and the Thomas Jefferson Center Advisory Council.

What motivated you to go to medical school after graduating from Plan II? I knew in high school that I had the capacity to go to medical school, but I didn’t want to be a biology major. So, 44

I went to Plan II based on the recommendation from my counselor who said it would allow me to study anything I wanted. For a guy like me who wants to try stuff, Plan II was perfect. The only thing that diverted me was my love for physics. But in those classes, I felt like a mule in the Kentucky Derby. I realized that there are some really smart people in this world. So, I had a choice: I could be the dumbest guy in the room or a reasonably smart doctor.

What makes a great physician?

Love for the human race. A mentor of mine who was a neurologist from South Africa loved people with neurological disease, some of which are terrible fatal diseases. But he was so fascinated with the manifestations of human life that he would just soak up every detail of their lives — even those who were dying. And for people who are dying, having someone who wants to hear their story is truly invaluable. So, that’s why I would say that the love of the human race is the No. 1 quality of a good physician. If you don’t have that, nothing else matters.

How has your liberal arts education benefited you in your medical career?

One of the reasons I have an extensive international practice is because I have a love for liberal arts and reading, reading, reading. I can sit with people from anywhere and talk about their country and their culture. When you have a great liberal arts background of reading and studying every conceivable thing, you can easily fit in with people from other cultures, and they are comfortable with you.

How did your time in the military influenced you?

The great thing about active duty military is it teaches you to command and to be commanded. There isn’t anyone who

“The love of the human race is the No. 1 quality of a good physician. If you don’t have that, nothing else matters.”

Dr. Richard Harper

doesn’t have someone over them. So, you need to learn how to deal with whomever is over you, even if that person is your wife!

What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?

Well, I’m a wood carver. Actually, my Plan II thesis was on primitive wood carving. When I was a student at UT, I would carve decorative animals onto the stocks of expensive rifles, which typically have absolutely beautiful, top-level wood.

Now, I carve much larger pieces. I’m also a near professional-level juggler. I can juggle anything and in dozens of patterns.

It’s a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s good for you physically and mentally.

I have led a pretty adventuresome life apart from surgery. If you jump at every opportunity, it’s amazing the things you can do. I’ve climbed in every big mountain range in the entire world, from Antarctica to the Himalayas. I was buried in an avalanche while 20,000 feet high in Alaska and somehow, by pure luck, survived. I have actually run across the country from coast to coast — my children used to call me Forrest Gump. And I rode a bike from Mexico to Canada, across the U.S., as well as the entire Australian continent.

Do you have a favorite memory from UT? The most amazing memory that I’ve told more than one person — in fact, I told it to (actor) Lee Majors — is standing on the observation deck of the Tower on the side that faces Guadalupe. There was a whole mass of people waiting to cross the street, and on the other side of the street was Farrah Fawcett with her beautiful blond hair. She was so unbelievably drop-dead beautiful. The crowds of people would literally part as she walked through — even the girls would stand and gape at her. She stopped people in their tracks.

45

Brian Birzer

INTERVIEW

Meet Ann Huff Stevens Our Next College of Liberal Arts Dean Interview by David Ochsner

46

Ann Huff Stevens will begin as dean of the College of Liberal Arts on July 15, 2019. Stevens comes from the University of California, Davis, and is a Texas native with roots in Corpus Christi. She is a professor of economics who has served in a variety of leadership roles, including chair of the Department of Economics, chair of the Economics Graduate Program, interim dean of the Graduate School of Management, and founding director of the Center for Poverty Research.

She earned an undergraduate degree from American University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan. Prior to her work at UC Davis, she served as a faculty member at Rutgers University and Yale University.

The value of a liberal arts education is often questioned in our society. How do you respond to skeptics?

First, for individuals educated at a top university like UT, there’s abundant evidence that liberal arts graduates are successful in the labor market, despite what some skeptics claim. Second, beyond the narrow economic benefits to individuals, liberal arts education exposes students to a wide variety of literature, history, culture and types of analysis. At its best, it exposes students to a variety of ways of thinking and learning that help them understand and contribute to society.

What do you hope liberal arts students get out of their education, and how can the liberal arts also benefit non-majors?

I really want students to be comfortable with complexity, with having to ponder different approaches to solving problems, and with taking on new types of issues and challenges. For non-majors, the liberal arts can help broaden their education and let them think about new problems, or about old problems in new ways. This makes for graduates and citizens who can adapt to new challenges not just at work, but in their communities and in the world.

Why are the liberal arts important to Texas communities and to the lives of Texans?

Texas is a diverse state with a growing, dynamic economy and a rich history. Liberal arts scholarship and education prepares students to understand and learn from history and from a variety of cultures, and prepares them to be flexible thinkers. A strong future for the state requires creative, flexible citizens and workers, and a vibrant set of liberal arts programs at UT has to be part of that future.

How did growing up a Texan inform your life?

Texans have always had their own unique ways and identity. When I first left Texas to attend college on the East Coast, to my surprise, as a Texan I was suddenly a bit exotic! That experience reminds me that family and geography and culture can affect us in ways we don’t really realize until we step away.

How did you first become interested in researching the connections between poverty and health?

Microeconomists spend a lot of time trying to disentangle cause and effect. The relationship between poverty and health is a really challenging example of a case where cause and effect are difficult to separately identify. Poverty and related conditions can cause poor health, but poor health also reduces earnings opportunities. So, this area is both extremely important to policy discussions and a classic, and challenging, problem in economics.

What is your proudest accomplishment?

Conceiving of and launching the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. It taught me how to really learn from other disciplines and work across different fields. That exposure made my own research better and, I think, offered the same advantage to lots of my colleagues and students. The community of faculty and students at the center will, I know, continue to produce great research and mentoring in years to come.

What are the essentials for a dean to be successful?

That’s probably a pretty long list! I’d start, though, with a combination of passion for thinking about the big picture to advance the college’s mission, and an ability to attend to the details of advancing that mission every day. It’s also essential for a dean to really enjoy interacting with all parts of the college community — faculty, staff, alumni and students.

How do you relax?

I love to cook, and it’s relaxing because there’s a clear process with a definite outcome at the end — that doesn’t happen every day as a researcher. And, then I get to enjoy the food with family and friends. I also love reading about, and talking, and debating about politics and policy. I joke that one day I’d like to have a reality show where I cook a meal, and as I do it I give my thoughts on the week’s politics. Not sure anyone would want to watch, but I’d have a great time filming it.

“A strong future for the state requires creative, flexible citizens and workers, and a vibrant set of liberal arts programs at UT has to be part of that future.”

Ann Huff Stevens

47

Family Tree ANTHROPOLOGY UT Austin biological anthropologists have described three species of fossil primates that were previously unknown to science. The new primates date back between 42 million and 46 million years and were residents of San Diego County at a time when southern California was cloaked in lush tropical forests.

After studying fossils collected by the late paleontologist Stephen Walsh at the San Diego Natural History Museum, UT Austin anthropology alumna Amy Atwater (’17) and anthropology professor Chris Kirk described and named three new species of omomyoid primates: Ekwiiyemakius walshi, Gunnelltarsius randalli and Brontomomys cerutti. The species ranged in size from 113 to 796 grams, with E. walshi being the smallest and B. cerutti being the largest of the discoveries.

Their descriptions were published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Kirk’s father, Austin artist and UT Austin anthropology alumnus Randwulph (’68), used the research descriptions and his signature “painting in marble” to suggest what the species may have looked like in their natural habitat. Photos by Jason Griego

48

NONPROFIT ORG. US POSTAGE

PAI D

AUSTIN, TEXAS PERMIT #391

Office of the Dean 116 Inner Campus Drive, G6000 Austin, TX 78712-1257

Beyond the Battlefield Glenn Towery, one of few African Americans to serve as quartermaster in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War, details the racism and adversity he faced on and off the ship.

His road to recovery began with art and a commitment to veteran communities. Warrior Chorus, a scholar-led workshop housed in the Department of Classics and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings together veteran communities to study classical literature as it relates to contemporary America. Photo by Raul Buitrago

youtube.com/LiberalArtsUT