Jenny Thai – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Fri, 04 May 2012 10:56:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Jenny Thai – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Weaving fiction into fact [AUDIO] https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/03/weaving-fiction-into-fact/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/03/weaving-fiction-into-fact/#respond Thu, 03 May 2012 10:02:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065303 Named "one of the nation's most influential and imaginative college professors” by Playboy, Johnson is an associate professor of English with an emphasis in creative writing. He is also a Whiting Writers’ Award recipient. His fiction has appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Paris Review and “Best American Short Stories” and Random House published his most recent novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” in January of this year.

Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. From an early age, he cultivated a probing sensibility to understanding the world around him. In his early childhood, Johnson’s favorite place was the Phoenix Zoo. His father, a zoo night watchman, would take his son out on evening excursions to see the animals. It was from these excursions that Johnson developed a growing awareness of the depth and multi-layered nature of stories.

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Adam Johnson untangles his life’s narrative

Weaving fiction into fact [AUDIO]
Under the careful supervision of tour guides, associate professor Adam Johnson tries his hand at a lecture in Pohyon Temple in Sangwon Valley. (Courtesy of Adam Johnson)

Unlike most offices in the English Department, the furniture’s centerpiece is not a heavy desk. Rather, Adam Johnson’s office is spacious, with ceiling-high bookshelves crammed with an eclectic assortment of books. Big Godzilla and dinosaur action figures — toys to amuse Johnson’s children — line the tops of the bookshelves. With the two enormous armchairs, a coffee table topped with more books and a desktop computer tucked away in a corner, Johnson’s office reflects his dedication to his two life callings: creative writing and family.

Named “one of the nation’s most influential and imaginative college professors” by Playboy, Johnson is an associate professor of English with an emphasis in creative writing. He is also a Whiting Writers’ Award recipient. His fiction has appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Paris Review and “Best American Short Stories” and Random House published his most recent novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” in January of this year.

Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. From an early age, he cultivated a probing sensibility to understanding the world around him. In his early childhood, Johnson’s favorite place was the Phoenix Zoo. His father, a zoo night watchman, would take his son out on evening excursions to see the animals. It was from these excursions that Johnson developed a growing awareness of the depth and multi-layered nature of stories.

“I developed a sense really early on that there was a behind-the-scenes to everything, that people who came to the zoo saw one zoo but my father had the keys to the back rooms where…you could see the animals in different behaviors,” Johnson said. “That had a very big influence on me as a writer, that just behind the veil of anything was a richer, truer, more human story.”

In addition to the animals he interacted with at the zoo, desert tortoises, a Cayman alligator and a seven-foot-long boa were just a few creatures that lived at home with Johnson. His memories of his early childhood days are filled with these animals.

“We had every animal you could imagine,” Johnson said. “People would leave them, intending them to go to the zoo but when someone left an African gray parrot…my dad would bring that thing home.”

Johnson’s animal adventure days were brought to a close when his parents divorced and Johnson moved to live with his mother. His mother, a psychologist struggling to establish her practice, worked long hours, leaving Johnson to roam independently. An only child and a latchkey kid, Johnson spent most of his free time wandering the alleys of the neighborhood. One of his favorite pastimes was investigating the contents of people’s dumpsters, an activity driven by his early interest in stories behind “the veil” of the everyday.

“I would look at all of the trash that was in there and I would try to figure out who lived in that house by what they threw away,” Johnson said. “Like what kind of family they were…everything seemed like a treasure to me.”

After finishing high school at age seventeen, Johnson made his foray into commercial industrial construction for several years, working on projects including an air-separation plant, the I-10 freeway and a parking garage at a mall.

“I still love concrete…that you can form and shore up this liquid and turn it into something of such permanence,” Johnson said. “I still like going by buildings in Arizona and saying, ‘Hey…it’s still there, it didn’t fall down yet.’”

Construction work also opened Johnson up to a world of new stories.

“Those jobs in the late ’80s were just filled with characters, you know, guys who were just out of jail, people on leave, people who traveled the world,” Johnson said. “[The Vietnam vets] had hair-raising and hilarious stories about their military service and stories of great compassion. These were guys that lived outside normal society, on the margins, by their own codes.”

Part Sioux, Johnson reflected on storytelling as a valued skill in his family and local community. For Johnson’s family, the truthfulness of a story was less important than conveying a certain value or essence of humanity.

“I remember that no one ever asked whether a story was true or not,” Johnson said. “They would tell tall tales and legends right up beside personal stories. One would be clearly mythical and impossible and the other very personal, but they coexisted.”

The murky boundary in Johnson’s work reflects his rejection of nonfiction and fiction as mutually exclusive.

“I think my fiction is really infused with true life and my nonfiction is infused with myth, too,” he said. “It’s hard for me to separate the two.”

In fact, Johnson’s penchant for blending fiction and fact in his writing became an obstacle during his undergraduate years at Arizona State University, where he studied journalism. Much to the exasperation of his journalism professors, Johnson had the notorious habit of creatively producing his own quotes.

“They could always tell when I lied,” Johnson said. “I always felt that there was some truth that I perceived that I could not get a quote for or verify with some facts, and so I’d make something up. I’d make up a quote that captured the experience that I felt I had.”

Johnson’s tendency to invent or exaggerate was also spurred on by his desire to augment the positive aspects of life.

“If I found a 10 dollar bill on the ground, I could go to my friends and tell them that I found twelve dollars,” he said. “It was some urge to make the good rare things in life even better somehow.”

Finding the truth-driven world of journalism too limiting a field for his wild imagination, Johnson found his life’s calling junior year when he took his first creative writing class.

“It was one of my few epiphanies in life…I just loved it,” he said. “I knew this was the missing thing.”

Writing seeped in and consumed Johnson’s day-to-day life, often overtaking his social time with friends. For Johnson though, this was not at all a high price to pay — creative writing gave him the freedom and exploration of the stories he had been fascinated with his entire life.

“Fiction, or probably just writing, allows you to be better than you are,” he said. “You spend weeks crafting this story, on your own, orchestrating it, composing it, making everything perfect.”

Although many of Johnson’s stories are infused with a bizarre blend of the supernatural and fantastical, writing fiction remains a deeply personal process for him. His first novel, “Parasites Like Us,” a story involving a dog and bird apocalypse, was influenced by Johnson’s family story in South Dakota.

Johnson’s latest novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” tells the journey of a North Korean professional kidnapper. The novel was the product of Johnson’s six years of research and drafting, which included a six-day visit to Pyongyang.

Despite the several years of research he had completed, Johnson was taken aback by the rigidity and strangeness of a country that is completely censored.

“I knew exactly what to expect there physically…but nothing can prepare you psychologically for a world without spontaneity, a world of complete order and conformity,” Johnson said.

With his linebacker build and impressive stature, Johnson stuck out in the North Korean crowd. However, he found the psychological lash of being ignored out of fear unsettling.

“I stand out visually,” he said. “One of the more unusual things they see that day, or that week…[but] they wouldn’t even look at me. The safe bet for them was to pretend that I didn’t exist. I felt transparent.”

“You really feel people weigh everything they say ahead of time for all possible consequences,” Johnson added. “You got the sense of the way the people you’ve interacted [with] have digested censorship to the degree that they are their own censors.”

The oppressive atmosphere in North Korea fueled Johnson’s desire to individualize the people, to write a tale that not only spoke of cruelty but also of compassion and love.

Johnson said that warmth and strong love from his wife and family have helped him write tales of enduring hope more easily. Speaking fondly of his wife, Johnson recalled their romantic plans to testify their absolute faith and trust in each other, involving a “secret” wedding.

“We decided to get bulletproof vests…we got a pair of Olympic Match-22 pistols, and we were going to Death Valley in the desert and my wife and I were going to shoot each other in the heart,” Johnson said.

The couple never managed to carry out their secret wedding plans as right around the planned date the infamous North Hollywood shootout — an armed confrontation between two heavily armed bank robbers and officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) — occurred. Years later, with three children in tow, the couple decided to abandon their secret wedding plans.

For Johnson, his love for writing and raising a family are linked together.

“Writing wasn’t fun, but it was fulfilling, which is what parenting turned out to be like,” Johnson said.

Despite his accomplishments, what excites Johnson more than anything is to see students craft new stories, regardless of talent or skill.

“Telling a story is such a noble endeavor that nothing, I believe, could ever be a failure,” Johnson said. “I love all stories and a story that a student is writing, drafting in manuscript form, is more rewarding than a published story. The struggle is still there; it’s still in play. They’re still discovering it. The story is still becoming itself.”

 

 

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The IHUM epic: transformation of the humanities at Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/05/the-ihum-epic/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/05/the-ihum-epic/#respond Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:02:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1062280 The Faculty Senate closed the book on the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) program by voting on March 8 in favor of replacing the program with a one-quarter “Thinking Matters” course, scheduled to launch this coming fall. Although IHUM was a quintessential fixture of the Stanford experience for recent students, it was only the latest edition in Stanford’s history of freshman liberal arts programs, an undergraduate tradition that is nearly 90 years old.

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The Faculty Senate closed the book on the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) program by voting on March 8 in favor of replacing the program with a one-quarter “Thinking Matters” course, scheduled to launch this coming fall. Although IHUM was a quintessential fixture of the Stanford experience for recent students, it was only the latest edition in Stanford’s history of freshman liberal arts programs, an undergraduate tradition that is nearly 90 years old.

The IHUM epic: transformation of the humanities at Stanford
(SERENITY NGUYEN/The Stanford Daily)

Pioneering liberal arts

For the first three decades following the University’s founding in 1891, there was no freshman liberal arts core program in place. In 1920, a yearlong course, The Problems of Citizenship, became a requirement for all freshmen.

Partly influenced by the passage of the 19th Amendment, The Problems of Citizenship course endeavored to teach students the necessary skills to become informed citizens cognizant of their political environments. Topics on the syllabus included Citizenship in a Democratic World and Scientific Method and Attitude. In addition to weekly lectures taught by faculty from various departments, students also had one-on-one sessions with the instructors.

The Problem of Citizenship program lasted until 1934, when dwindling student interest and shaky faculty support led to its termination.

The golden age of the Great Books

Unlike its predecessor, The History of Western Civilization program (Western Civ) , launched in 1935, was taught only by the History Department. Based on the Great Books programs of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, Western Civ was a single-track, three-quarter course that used a core list of fifteen “Great Books” to trace the development of European thought from the classical age to modernity. The course reflected a trend in American universities to rediscover European roots and affirm new prominence in global politics after the chaotic confusion and loss of identity during the decades following World War I.

Western Civ was an immensely well-received program and lasted well into the 1960s. Although the course was antiquated in the sense that its reading list was composed of works by white European males, many alumni have cited the program as one of the best academic experiences they had at Stanford.

“It helped me become a historian,” said John Reider, ’67 Ph.D. ’83, former senior associate director of admission at Stanford and former Structured Liberal Education (SLE) director. “Many people of my ancient era look back on the course with great fondness.”

Challenging western thought: a humanities free-for-all

Swept up by the volatile political atmosphere that propelled campus disturbances in the latter half of the 1960s, Western Civ, along with many other liberal arts program requirements at other American universities, succumbed to the pressure of protesting students and faculty who condemned the antiquated rigidity of a structured liberal arts program. The dominating rationale was that students could only flourish if they were free from the constraints of specific requirements.

“The reigning idea among Stanford students was that everything was equal and students should determine what they needed to know,” Reider said. “The world was their oyster. The faculty was very happy with that because they could teach what they wanted to teach.”

Beginning in 1969, there was no liberal arts requirement to bind Stanford students. Where course selection outside their majors of study was concerned, students were given only a loose set of requirements and mostly left to their own devices on how to complete them.

A return to structure: from Western Culture to a different CIV

In the middle of the ’70s, it became clear to Stanford faculty that the courses students chose outside of their major disciplines were more than often haphazard and collectively lacked unity. In an attempt to remedy the situation by establishing a new set of liberal arts requirements, a new Western Culture requirement was introduced. Western Culture was a course that aimed to renew the University’s commitment to Western intellectual thought and tradition.

While the material in Western Culture shared many similarities with Western Civ, what set Western Culture apart from its predecessor was its multiple-emphases structure, a compromise between the single-track nature of Western Civ and the total absence of tracks in the ’70s. Western Culture included eight different tracks created by different departments to cater to a diversity of student intellectual interests. While tracks such as Literature and Arts stuck more closely to European intellectual tradition, other tracks such as Values, Technology, Science and Society offered reading material that emphasized the role of technology and science, which appealed to the engineering-inclined.

Given the choice to select from a set of academic tracks, Western Culture initially showed promise for success. Yet the course was crippled by the program’s lack of a coherent reading list. Although each individual track had its own tailored reading list, in an effort to maintain the semblance of a common reading experience, the Western Culture program required all tracks to also follow a list of core texts. The imposition of a core reading list proved difficult as many tracks, particularly the Values, Technology, and Science track, could not coherently incorporate the core texts into the lessons.

At the same time, the student population experienced a demographic shift resulting in an increased presence of minority groups, including African-American, Asian and Latino students.

Disturbed by the Euro-centric nature of the tracks, the Black Student Union, later joined by campus feminists and other minority groups, spoke out against racism and sexism in the Western Culture curriculum.

“The Western culture program as it is presently structured around a core list and an outdated philosophy of the West being Greece, Europe, and Euro-America is wrong,” said Bill King, chairman of the Black Student Union in his 1988 address to the Faculty Senate. “And worse, it hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.”

Western Culture was replaced by Culture, Ideas and Values (CIV). While retaining the multi-track structure of Western Culture, the CIV track reading lists were diversified to include representative works from women and ethnic minorities alongside some traditional readings. More importantly, the core reading list binding all tracks together was dropped.

The birth of IHUM

Surprisingly, CIV, in comparison to its predecessors, was a relatively short-lived program. The Commission on Undergraduate Education study in 1994 revealed that many students found that the tracks were too diverse — not only in content, but also in workload and grading policy. Professors also felt that there were too many books to cover in a single year.

Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) gradually replaced CIV in the late 1990s, the University’s tonic to clarify the CIV curriculum. The number of books designated for each track was reduced and tracks were modified to center around the universality of ideas. According to the IHUM website, IHUM courses dealt with the “issues, themes, ideas and values of human identity and existence,” rather than following a traditional canon.

SLE, the “Great Books” haven

While the main freshman liberal arts sequences have cycled through several incarnations, one residentially based program for freshmen has endured the test of time. Unlike IHUM and its predecessors, the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program has remained largely unchanged since its founding. SLE developed from an evening seminar series titled “Social Thoughts and Institutions,” in which professors and students from various departments, as equals, read and discussed Great Books.

SLE became a fully-fledged residential program in 1974. With only minor modifications to its Great Books reading list, SLE’s Great Books approach has been rated consistently high in student evaluations. The self-selecting nature of SLE, which freshmen opt into in place of IHUM, is one of the main contributors to the program’s enduring success.

“It’s very simple — they were voluntary,” Reider said. “They wanted to be there.”

Thinking Matters and diversification of the humanities

Although the findings of the 2011 Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) on the lukewarm student enthusiasm toward the IHUM program may be a recent development, the student voices speaking out against the constraint of requirements echo the spirit of the ’60s, when pressure from students to direct their own liberal arts experiences was the strongest.

Thinking Matters, a one-quarter course slated to replace the three-quarter IHUM program starting in the academic year 2012-2013, came from a SUES recommendation to increase the freedom freshmen, particularly those enrolled in major programs with high unit requirements, will have to explore courses outside their major fields of study.

Thinking Matters will also break from the traditional mold of humanities instruction with its development of innovative course themes. Proposed topics include Brain, Behavior and Evolution; Energy; Evil; and The Physics of One. Many of these courses will draw upon a diverse variety of disciplines, including those not traditionally studied alongside the humanities.

As reported by The Daily in March, the Faculty Senate approved the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (C-USP) report supporting the SUES recommendation on March 8.

Given the speed with which the Faculty Senate approved Thinking Matters — only two months after the SUES recommendation — some faculty are skeptical of the success of the proposed course, or view the amorphous, multi-disciplinary suggested course topics as a sign of the atrophying presence of the humanities at Stanford.

“It wasn’t really that broken,” said Greg Watkins, assistant director of SLE. “The evaluations of IHUM from students were quite favorable, more favorable than student reputation. What the University has caved into is the demand for choice.”

“Not that there’s something wrong with that but students were feeling the yoke of that requirement,” Watkins added. “I feel that it’s like giving up on taking responsibility for teaching in the humanities and requiring our students a certain level of education.”

Other faculty members however are more optimistic, seeing Thinking Matters as a means of reviving declining student interest in the humanities.

“I think it’s plausible for us to speculate that the humanities in the future will no longer be a burdensome requirement that everyone has to go through but it will be one among many different opportunities,” said Russell Berman, director of the IHUM and Introductory Seminars programs. “I say that if we are concerned that students will no longer take humanities, we should just be more imaginative in the kind of humanities courses that we offer.”

The IHUM epic: transformation of the humanities at Stanford
(DURAN ALVAREZ/The Stanford Daily)

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Saving the ‘fuzzy’ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/10/20/saving-the-fuzzy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/10/20/saving-the-fuzzy/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:02:58 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1050742 Techie or fuzzy? It’s a deceptively innocent question, but on a campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the voices of the humanities can easily be lost in the technical buzz and clamor of industry.

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Saving the ‘fuzzy’
(AUBRIE LEE/The Stanford Daily)

Techie or fuzzy? It’s a deceptively innocent question, but on a campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the voices of the humanities can easily be lost in the technical buzz and clamor of industry.

According to Debra Satz, senior associate dean for the humanities and the arts, the decline in humanities enrollment has been a long and enduring trend; and Stanford programs are determined to reverse the trend.

The steady decline in the humanities can be traced back to as far as the 1960s and 70s. For Stanford, the 60s were the golden age for humanities — more than a third of the students majored in the area. Fifty years later, while enrollment for science and engineering classes have grown tremendously, humanities enrollment continues to slip.

“About 17 percent of students at Stanford major in the humanities,” Satz wrote in an email to The Daily. “We have a declining number of students taking classes in the humanities beyond the mandated requirements like IHUM.”

Stanford’s flagging numbers in the humanities are an anomaly in the United States. According to a survey conducted by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the number of humanities bachelor’s degrees has actually experienced healthy growth over the last decade after experiencing a slight depression.

Some argue that the strength of the humanities — at least in the eyes of the public — is simply dwarfed in comparison to the gargantuan science and engineering departments.

“Stanford has an image problem,” said professor of classics Richard Martin. “People think of it as MIT West, so those who are interested in medieval history or Islamic studies don’t apply here.”

One factor contributing to the perception of Stanford as “the holy land of technology” — so dubbed by medieval history professor Philippe Buc — may come from the relatively small percentage of admits interested in the humanities.

The cultivation of a “techie”-driven reputation, in theory, results in a self-selecting applicant pool that leans heavily toward science and engineering.

“About the same number of our incoming admits say that they are interested in the humanities,” Satz said. “Our applicant pool looks roughly like our admit pool in terms of humanities interest.”

On top of having only a modest number of humanities-inclined incoming students, humanities departments are also faced with the all-familiar force of parental pressure to pick the “right” major.

“I’ve seen firsthand the kind of culture that quickly develops…the peer and parental pressure that pushes students into supposedly ‘vocational’ majors,” wrote English Department Chair Gavin Jones in an email to The Daily.

Given that the lifetime earnings of science and engineering majors are significantly higher than those of humanities majors, the desire for financial stability is not completely unfounded. But Martin warns students against drawing the conclusion that a humanities degree is equitable to financial self-destruction.

“We need to wean people from the idea that humanities are not useful,” Martin said. “You can do a liberal arts degree and still get a job. And I don’t mean like working in a library or going to grad school and wasting five years of your life.”

With declining student interest, humanities departments have been forced to adopt a number of strategies to defend the value of their respective fields and market them to students.

“Professors don’t like to deal with the idea of having to market their field,” Martin said. “But humanities are pushed into that position. We’re fighting an anti-intellectual and vocational mentality.”

Classics has been one of the few humanities departments that have experienced a slow but steady growth, at least partially thanks to aggressive advertising and a strong presence in IHUM and freshman Introductory Seminars. Classics also invested a significant amount of time developing an appealing curriculum. It includes a series of entry-level classes such as classical mythology, which are designed to attract a broad range of students, and brings in senior faculty members to teach classes with low enrollment.

“The hardest sell is Intro to Greek, which usually attracts 15 to 20 students,” Martin said. “We support their interest — they’re getting our most seasoned professors.”

Other departments, such as Comparative Literature, have adopted similar tactics in an effort to make their respective fields more salient to an increasingly technology-oriented society.

For instance, Amir Eshel, chair of undergraduate studies, comparative literature will be teaching a seminar titled “Narrative and Ethics,” which will look at not only traditional forms of literature but also films, television shows and video games as mediums for exploring storytelling.

“The insight we gained in humanities over millennia…we can apply those skills to look at shows like ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ or ‘Dexter’ or ‘The Wire,’” Eshel said. “These shows touch upon issues like drug addiction, role of the media, corruption — issues that are very relevant to this world.”

Other departments are also working to throw off the assumption that humanities are entrenched in the past.

For instance, the Department of History has developed a series of interdisciplinary tracks specially designed to guide students’ academic interests towards a specific career path. Their newest track, “Global Affairs and World History,” is geared toward students who seek to apply their history studies towards a career in government, business and non-governmental organizations.

“Acquiring deep knowledge about multiple parts of the globe, learning to ask probing questions and construct arguments, evaluating evidence and writing and speaking effectively are all timeless skills in a globalizing world,” wrote History Department Chair Karen Wigen in an email to The Daily.

With the advancements in technology leading to globalization, humanities departments also see an opportunity to take the skillsets their students develop and apply them in a more pragmatic setting.

“[Societies] change and develop, but we’re constantly going back to the languages,” said Gabriella Safran, chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL). “Students need real literacy and real fluency. Students need to understand just how important it is to become multilingual and global citizens.”

Confronted with declining enrollment in foreign language classes beyond the second year, the DLCL launched a new program that will provide funding to any students majoring or minoring in any department under the DLCL to go abroad and conduct research, a move that Safran hopes will encourage students to take more advanced language classes.

“Our mission is to get half of Stanford students to minor in a modern language,” she said.

Other departments such as English are optimistic that restructuring and developing new curriculum will bolster student enthusiasm while showcasing its versatility in other disciplines.

“We can’t wave a magic wand,” Jones said. “But we can think about offering a course on Harry Potter, or on new media, or on environmental writing, or in the medical humanities.”

The concerted efforts of the humanities departments to add a fresh and interdisciplinary focus to their curriculums will hopefully dispel the pervasive conception that the Stanford students’ academic interests are bifurcated into either the humanities or engineering.

The fuzzy-techie divide is “a myth that’s been made real,” Martin said. “Not only is it really demeaning to ‘the fuzzy side,’ but it’s just an excuse for one side not to [have anything to] do with the other.”

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Transports prompt policy review https://stanforddaily.com/2011/10/04/castro-to-reconsider-nso-row-house-alcohol-policy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/10/04/castro-to-reconsider-nso-row-house-alcohol-policy/#respond Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:25:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1050369 The Alcohol Advisory Board plans to re-examine the Row houses’ exemption to the New Student Orientation (NSO) alcohol policy, according to Ralph Castro, director of the newly formed Office of Alcohol Policy and Education (OAPE). This review comes after alcohol transports occurred during this year’s NSO week.

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The Alcohol Advisory Board plans to re-examine the Row houses’ exemption to the New Student Orientation (NSO) alcohol policy, according to Ralph Castro, director of the newly formed Office of Alcohol Policy and Education (OAPE). This review comes after alcohol transports occurred during this year’s NSO week.

According to the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) Bulletin, at least two alcohol transports occurred during the NSO period.

For the past several years during NSO, typically considered a “dry week,” Row houses received a dispensation from Residential Education’s Row Office to host parties serving alcohol, on several conditions, according to the Alcohol@Stanford website. For example, houses’ parties must be kept in house and quiet and each house is limited to a maximum of two parties for each house’s respective residents only. The policy also prohibits hard alcohol and requires that food and Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages (EANABs) be provided, according to the Alcohol@Stanford website.

The policy also requires that all in-house parties be registered by Row Residence Management staff members through myGroups@Stanford and approved by the Office of Student Activities at least three days in advance. Extra measures are taken by Row housing staff to ensure that the proposed parties do not violate University regulations.

According to Castro, the Row houses’ exemption from NSO’s strict, dry policy was introduced several years ago after a student representative from the Row petitioned to the Alcohol Advisory Board to change the NSO campus-wide alcohol ban, arguing that it was “difficult” and impractical for Row housing staff to curtail residents of drinking age who want to socialize and use alcohol during NSO.

“The Advisory Board looked at the issue and granted the Row houses an exception to the NSO policy,” Castro said.

The Alcohol Advisory Board informed new Row staff of the dispensation this September during Resident Assistant (RA) training.

“We definitely try to meet the demands as much as we can,” said Gil Shotan, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) RA. “We realize it’s a very sensitive situation. The freshmen are still new and their parents are still around. We definitely try our best to avoid causing any sort of problems for the University.”

While RAs are present during party planning sessions for the NSO in-house parties, they do not initiate or lead these events.

“As RAs, we just go through the session, to know about the process to help mediate and advise the community managers,” Shotan said. “We’re actually not allowed to register parties.”

“It used to be really, really strict,” Shotan added, referring to the years before the NSO Row house exemption. “[The Row houses] are trusted to be responsible, to handle such events, even during such a sensitive period as NSO.”

Castro emphasized the importance that Row residents adhere to the NSO regulations, cautioning that Row houses that fail to comply may lose the privilege to host in-house parties during NSO.

“You abuse it, you lose it,” Castro said. “We did have some issues last year that were isolated to certain groups, and we dealt with those groups through our existing processes.”

“The Row managers had a meeting with Zac Sargeant, where they found that there was a transport,” Shotan said. “We don’t know if it was some Stanford student, or if it even happened at a Stanford party. I also heard rumors that it might have been a non-Stanford student.”

Row student manager Zac Sargeant and Castro declined to comment on specifics.

“At this time, I can’t comment on those [incidents],” Castro said. “At some point in the next few weeks, members of the [Alcohol Advisory] Board will come together to discuss what happened during that time period, what were the circumstances and make a determination on whether or not that exemption to the policy will occur next year.”

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School of Ed profs brief Capitol Hill on education reform https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/29/school-of-ed-profs-brief-capitol-hill-on-education-reform/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/29/school-of-ed-profs-brief-capitol-hill-on-education-reform/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:08:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1050230 At a Sept. 14 Capitol Hill briefing, School of Education professors Linda Darling-Hammond and Edward H. Haertel, among other leading education researchers, presented their findings on a central concern in federal and state policy -- how teacher performance should be evaluated.

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At a Sept. 14 Capitol Hill briefing, School of Education professors Linda Darling-Hammond and Edward H. Haertel, among other leading education researchers, presented their findings on a central concern in federal and state policy  —  how teacher performance should be evaluated.

School of Ed profs brief Capitol Hill on education reform
School of education professor Linda Darling-Hammond delivers the keynote address at an education forum in 2008. (Stanford Daily File Photo)

One popular type of teacher evaluation is the value-added method (VAM) system, which uses statistical methods to measure gains in student achievement. The VAM system measures changes in student test scores over time, while taking into account other factors that are found to influence achievement.

According to Haertel, who also serves as chair of the National Research Council Board on Testing and Assessment, one major flaw of the VAM system is that it gives policymakers the illusion of a “quick fix” for improving student performance by identifying teachers’ level of competency through their VAM scores.

“There’s a hope that [problems will be solved] by funding poor teachers that need to either be given some remedial assistance or discouraged from continuing to teach,” Haertel said. “I’ve not been surprised that these models have been caught on and have been so popular among policymakers.”

Surprisingly, the problem with the VAM system is not with its reliance of standardized testing scores, he continued.

“It’s not the tests, per se,” Haertel said. “It’s easy to say we need better tests, but that has been tried again and again. The tests we have are pretty good at what they do.”

Because the VAM system does not account for factors such as the amount of teacher infrastructural support, class sizes and individual student learning needs, an important side-effect of the system is an increase in competition between teachers to perform well. This side effect may result in teacher neglect of the population of students who may need the most help, such as low-income students from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

“We create incentives with these value-added systems with teachers who try to avoid students who might do poorly on the tests or students who might not make rapid gains in the test scores,” Haertel said.

The VAM system’s measurement of teacher effectiveness has proven unstable and unreliable. One study showed that out of teachers who scored in the bottom 20 percent of rankings in one year, only 20 to 30 percent had similar ratings the next year. These results suggest that teacher evaluations should focus more on measuring and expanding professional development.

“We need both professional development and accountability, and right now, the equation is out of balance,” Haertel said. “We have much more focus on accountability and much less on giving teachers the resources they need to develop skills and do a better job of accomplishing their work.”

Darling-Hammond proposed alternatives to the VAM system, calling for performance-based assessments and standards-based evaluations. This alternative system will combine evaluations on different fronts in different mediums into a portfolio that reliably tracks the teacher’s growth in his or her teaching craft.

“It’s a pretty big job to assemble that evidence, which has to be scored by trained evaluators to produce a reliable score,” Darling-Hammond said. “That kind of evaluation can be done at certain key junctures, such as when you first enter the teaching profession, during tenure-based decisions, at evaluations where teachers can become mentor teachers  .  .  .  it is a very time-consuming and rigorous process.”

Despite the cost of implementing a more stringent teacher evaluation system, Darling-Hammond is optimistic that policymakers will be more enthusiastic about seeking teacher evaluation assessments that are more reflective of teacher effectiveness.

“There’s an appetite in investing [in] teacher evaluation,” Darling-Hammond said. “These value-added models are themselves quite costly, though they don’t actually end up being very reliable, stable or valid.”

“If you want to improve teaching, making investments in these programs that provide solid evaluation and more teacher assistance, it will probably prove to be less expensive and more productive,” she added.

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Stanford experts weigh in on Libya https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/20/stanford-experts-weigh-in-on-libya/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/20/stanford-experts-weigh-in-on-libya/#respond Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:52:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1049984 After months of stalemate fighting, rebel forces overran pro-Gaddafi forces in August's Battle of Tripoli. With the defeat of Gaddafi loyalists, the end of the military dictator's 42-year rule of Libya is near. Despite the Transitional National Council (TNC)'s eagerness to establish a functional government, Libya's road to recovery from its authoritarian regime will be a rocky one, Stanford professors say.

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Stanford experts weigh in on Libya
(OLLIE KHAKWANI/The Stanford Daily)

After months of stalemate fighting, rebel forces overran pro-Gaddafi forces in August’s Battle of Tripoli. With the defeat of Gaddafi loyalists, the end of the military dictator’s 42-year rule of Libya is near. Despite the Transitional National Council (TNC)’s eagerness to establish a functional government, Libya’s road to recovery from its authoritarian regime will be a rocky one, Stanford professors say.

“It’s too soon to tell, but I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). “It will depend on what comes after, whether a more decent form of government emerges.”

Hoover fellow Kori Schake, a specialist in national security strategy, is also optimistic about Libya’s future. She praised the TNC’s impressive track record in creating an effective, temporary government as well as its response to humanitarian needs.

“The new leadership of Libya is making smart choices,” Schake said. “They have discouraged reprisals. They’ve done a good job in taking over cities and quickly addressing infrastructural needs … they did a terrific job in getting aid rolling for medicine and water.”

While the TNC’s efficiency as a governing body during wartime shows promise for its capacity to function as a stable and fair government, several factors hinder the TNC’s projected potential.

Among the challenges facing the TNC is the absence of a united body representing the interests of Libya’s numerous tribal groups. Gaddafi’s rule divided Libyan leadership along tribal and regional lines. Without the camaraderie of wartime rebellion, the chance of civil war outbreak between rebel factions is high.

“The TNC is making all the right statements about inclusiveness,” Schake said. “But it’s really hard to do in practice. For 40 years, Libyan rule has been divided among different parts of the country … Even within Tripoli, the military has not yet been under a unified, complete authority.”

In the wake of Gaddafi’s defeat, the diversity of tribal groups may spark a “policy of vengeance,” according to Diamond.

“It’s a fluid and challenging time,” Diamond said. “The leaders of the TNC are acutely aware in principle that they need to build a broad base of support, to create a new and inclusive political-social order, but whether they can completely restrain the fiery impulse for revenge among the tribes — it’s unclear.”

While civil war among the rebel groups remains a looming possibility, the likelihood of immediate conflict may be less likely than some political scientists speculate, other scholars say.

“There will be something of a honeymoon period where the TNC has a chance to get things going,” wrote James Fearon, professor of political science, in an email to The Daily. “But serious tensions may develop the longer it takes to get to elections, as those people and groups who fear that they are farthest from the center of transitional government may increasingly worry about getting shut out.”

There is a time crunch-induced pressure to establish a democracy and to hold fair elections, a process that will take at least two years, Diamond said. However, the transition from dictatorship to democracy is a slow, arduous one.

“You’re not going to go from over 40 years of extreme ideological, controlling dictatorship to democracy overnight,” Diamond added. “There needs to be dialogue and consultation for the drafting of a constitution. Maybe in a few years, you’d have the rudiments of a democracy.”

Schake emphasized the importance of not rushing election implementation, especially before political and civil rights have been established.
“Elections aren’t meaningful until there is freedom of association and of press, the freedom to form political parties,” Schake said.

While the TNC’s projected timeline sets the first elections to be held in 22 months, the democratic legitimacy of these elections will be difficult to assess.

“We will see a somewhat fair first election within the next two years, probably sooner … followed by a government that will almost inevitably prove disappointing to most Libyans because expectations are usually impossibly high,” Fearon said.

In spite of the numerous challenges the TNC faces in establishing democracy in Libya, its adamant refusal to accept foreign aid is viewed positively by many of the scholars interviewed for this article as a testament of the nation’s resolve to take initiative.

“Avoid the mistakes of Iraq … the United States’ imposing presence in shaping the emergence of their democracy created a huge crutch in their political legitimacy,” Diamond said.  “If [Libya] has domestic ownership and authority of [its] emerging democratic order, it would appear to be a more legitimate and stable democracy.”

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Company culture shock https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/20/company-culture-shock/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/09/20/company-culture-shock/#respond Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:01:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1049965 The precious time when students indulge in the stupor of warm weather and drink the ambrosia of relaxation -- the lull of summertime, for many, is a chance to wind down, an escape from the hectic pace of problem sets, papers and exams. Some students, however, choose to walk the path less traveled -- a summer immersed in Asia’s corporate culture.

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The precious time when students indulge in the stupor of warm weather and drink the ambrosia of relaxation–the lull of summertime, for many, is a chance to wind down, an escape from the hectic pace of problem sets, papers and exams.

Some students, however, choose to walk the path less traveled–a summer immersed in Asia’s corporate culture.

The Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) offers summer internship opportunities in Asia open to all Stanford undergraduates. The internships allow students a chance for a deeper immersion in the local language and culture while working in a corporate environment.

Since many of the internships either require participants to possess a certain level of foreign language proficiency or are located in English-speaking workplaces, the language barrier is minimized. For many students, it was not so much the language that was a challenge but adjusting to the local culture and brisk professionalism of the workplace.

“The subway culture [in Beijing] was something to get used to,” said Katie Zhou ’13, who worked as a graphic designer at Leyou, a specialty retailer for maternity and baby products in China. “People aren’t as friendly. You don’t say hi or acknowledge them. You had to push and shove, and be more aggressive to get to where you had to be.”

There is no time for slacking off or procrastination at work, which typically starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m. Student interns are assigned large and demanding projects that not only put their skills to the test, but often force them to learn new ones.

Ethan Saeta ’13 and Grace Kwan ’14, interns at True Run Media, were given the daunting task of creating a running Chinese school-finder website completely from scratch in 10 weeks.

“We were supposed to make it so that it would have all the international schools in China, both in English and Chinese, so you could compare these schools in terms of money, location, that kind of thing,” Saeta said. “The problem was that neither of us had ever done anything web development wise. So we were trying to make and learn at the same time.”

Although the two ended up moving on to a different project in the second half of the internship–visiting local restaurants, clubs and bars and writing reviews on them–Saeta emphasized the value of the opportunity to tackle a difficult project.

“It definitely highlighted how much I needed to learn,” Saeta said, who anticipates taking four computer science classes this fall. “It made me realize how crazy those services like Google are. The implementation of something that seems so simple–making a clickable button, for example–was astoundingly difficult.”

Adapting to a work culture that places a strong emphasis on hierarchy was another skill that students had to add to their repertoire.

“One challenge I had was adjusting to Korean work culture, which puts much emphasis on hierarchy; whereas I am more familiar with American work notions like meritocracy and pragmatism,” Haiy Le ’12 wrote in an email to The Daily.

Le interned at the Asia-Pacific Center of Education for International Understanding (UNESCO-APCEIU).

“There [were] some moments when I had to keep my frustration in check when dealing with the bureaucracy and a lot of red tape that comes with working in an intergovernmental organization.”

“But then again, there are some benefits, like when my boss usually offered to pay for my meals,” Le added.

Many felt the satisfaction of finishing a project is well worth the frenetic, headache-inducing tempo of work.

“It was very furious,” Zhou said. “My department was under a lot of pressure, but I will miss opportunities to contribute to a company and to see my work as something tangible.”

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Study identifies protein that shrinks brain lesions in stroke victims https://stanforddaily.com/2011/07/28/study-identifies-protein-that-shrinks-brain-lesions-in-stroke-victims/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/07/28/study-identifies-protein-that-shrinks-brain-lesions-in-stroke-victims/#respond Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:05:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1049618 Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine published a study earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that revealed alpha-B-crystallin, a naturally occurring protein, significantly shrank the size of stroke-induced lesions in the brains of laboratory mice and mitigated the destructiveness of the inflammatory response that follows the stroke.

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Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine published a study earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that revealed alpha-B-crystallin, a naturally occurring protein, significantly shrank the size of stroke-induced lesions in the brains of laboratory mice and mitigated the destructiveness of the inflammatory response that follows the stroke.

The study, conducted by Dr. Gary Steinberg PhD. ’79 M.D. ‘80, director of Stanford’s Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences and neurology professor Dr. Lawrence Steinman, is a follow-up on an earlier study published in Nature in 2007 that showed how alpha-B-crystallin reduces brain damage caused by multiple sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune brain disease.

Alpha-B-crystallin is an important structural protein found in the eye’s lens. It is regularly produced in the heart. When other tissues undergo stress–for example, when a stroke deprives the brain of oxygen–this triggers alpha-B-crystallin production, the body’s natural defense to limit the inflammatory activity.

“The brain, when it’s injured, doesn’t roll over and play dead,” Steinman said. “It fights back by producing protective molecules; one of those molecules is alpha-B-crystallin. Since we’ve seen how the presence of alpha-B-crystallin plays an active role in the brain’s healing response to a stroke, we wanted to see if administering more of it could increase its effect.”

Senior authors Steinberg and Steinman, along with postdoctoral scholar Ahmet Arac and Sara Brownwell M.A. ’11 Ph.D. ’13, employed knockouts–mice bioengineered to lack the ability to produce alpha-b-crystallin–to investigate the level of efficacy the protein has in reducing stroke lesions.

“We temporarily blocked off one of the arteries,” Steinberg said. “We do it by opening the carotid artery, inserting a thread that’s about the size of the artery and temporarily block the blood flow to induce a stroke.”

There were two groups of mice: the knockouts and the wild types, mice that contained the gene to produce alpha-B-crystallin.

After inducing the strokes, the mice from both groups were monitored for up to a week, their recovery time measured with the use of a neurologic scale, which ranges from zero to 28. Zero is a full recovery and 28 is the lowest level of neurologic functioning.

“For seven categories, we score them from zero to four,” Steinberg said. “We test for lots of things. We test for body symmetry–is it asymmetric in that it’s favoring one side more than the other? We test for its gait–see if there’s any limping or staggering. We measure their ability to climb 45 degrees and also test circling behavior–whether or not it’s swaying–and whisker response.”

Twelve hours after the stroke, the wild types scored around 12 while the knockouts were at 14. The results, according to Steinberg, were not statistically significant. However, seven days later, the wild types scored around four while the knockouts scored around eight, a statistically significant difference that sheds light on the body’s natural recovery.

“The stroke evolves, but neurologic function actually improves,” Steinberg said. “This is because there’s some natural recovery the body performs. In this case, the wild types recovered quicker than the knockouts.”

The study presents a promising start to finding a drug that will treat not only the stroke but the post-stress inflammatory response. TPA, the current government-approved stroke drug, is limited in its effectiveness in that while it breaks up clots, it does not treat the inflammatory aftershock caused by dead tissue and toxins.

There is still much work to be done including further investigation into the efficacy and safety of alpha-B-crystallin administration before the protein can eventually be brought into clinical trials.

“We’d like to have [the experiment] reproduced and verified,” Steinberg said. “Some other questions we want to look at are whether or not there’s benefit from the protein after 24 hours as well as figuring out the level of dosage necessary to achieve efficacy. You’d be surprised how many therapeutic treatments, while successful in the lab, may not be successful in clinical trials.”

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Q&A with new School of Ed Dean Claude Steele https://stanforddaily.com/2011/06/30/qa-with-new-school-of-ed-dean-claude-steele/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/06/30/qa-with-new-school-of-ed-dean-claude-steele/#respond Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:02:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1049261 After two years as Columbia University provost, renowned social psychologist Claude Steele will return to Stanford as dean of the School of Education, succeeding current Dean Deborah Stipek on September 1.

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After two years as Columbia University provost, renowned social psychologist Claude Steele will return to Stanford as dean of the School of Education, succeeding current Dean Deborah Stipek on September 1.

Steele served as a professor of psychology at Stanford from 1991 to 2009. He was also the director of the Center of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research focuses on the individual psychological experience in domains such as such as stereotype threat, a social process that can drastically affect the experiences and performances of people belonging to negatively stereotyped groups.

The Stanford Daily spoke with Steele over the phone regarding his new position.

Q&A with new School of Ed Dean Claude Steele
(Courtesy of Columbia University)

Claude Steele (CS): In a letter I wrote to my colleagues, I state that it “was far from an easy decision–perhaps the most difficult of my career…the decision to accept the Stanford offer came down to a difficult-to-pass-up opportunity to play a role in the field of education at this critical time in our nation’s history.”

TSD: What are you looking forward to most regarding your return to the Farm?

CS: A chance to learn about and from that School, to learn about the issues of educational issues and policies [and about] translating social science and psychological research to educational issues and social problems. It’s a really rich environment, and there are really great colleagues there.

TSD: What are some of the challenges you see in the School of Education, and how do you aim to address them?

CS: Just learning about the School, that’s my first challenge. I hope to talk to the people in the search committee. Stanford has a really great faculty. They’re very interested in seeing a closer intellectual community, so I suspect that’s something that’s going to be a priority–trying to form that sense of community. There’s also an emphasis to make [the School of Education] a strong focus of strong intellectual activity on campus–a real center.

TSD: Could you talk a little about your experience as provost at Columbia? What did you take away with there?

CS: Being provost is a really amazing job. You get to manage the university. You learn how the university works financially, what are the important things in maintaining their quality, what resources you have available to ensure that quality is maintained and maximizing them. It’s a privilege of a job to have that vantage point…The School of Education at Stanford is already a very good school, so the first thing is to do no harm.

TSD: What are some of the biggest issues in education? Which are the most urgent?

CS: Education is one of the hotter topics in society right now: how to educate our population really well, to have education that makes us a competitive society. How do you have a system that delivers that kind of education to all of our students? There are various theories out there. Democratization of access to education–that’s very important.

TSD:How do you feel about your transition from pure social sciences research to a program that is more interdisciplinary and policy focused?

CS:It’s nice to worry less about basic social science and more about applying those concepts to larger societal issues. It’s a very natural thing to move from the Psychology Department to the School of Education. I’m very comfortable in interdisciplinary settings. When you spend your life in the social sciences, at some point, you want to see how those social science concepts play out in the real world, and so it’s really exciting to come back.

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Gastrointestinal research provides food for thought https://stanforddaily.com/2011/05/17/gastrointestinal-research-provides-food-for-thought/ https://stanforddaily.com/2011/05/17/gastrointestinal-research-provides-food-for-thought/#respond Tue, 17 May 2011 10:04:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1048606 A paper published in PLoS One last week by researchers from the School of Medicine reveals that short-term digestive problems early in life may increase one’s risk for depression and other psychological problems. Standing counter to previously held medical assumptions, the new findings suggest that human psychological conditions may be the consequence -- not the cause -- of gastrointestinal disorders.

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A paper published in PLoS One last week by researchers from the School of Medicine reveals that short-term digestive problems early in life may increase one’s risk for depression and other psychological problems. Standing counter to previously held medical assumptions, the new findings suggest that human psychological conditions may be the consequence — not the cause — of gastrointestinal disorders.

Medicine professor Pankaj Pasricha, chief of gastroenterology and hepatology, spearheaded the study. In collaboration with research associate Liansheng Liu and other colleagues at Stanford, UC-San Francisco and the University of Kansas, Pasricha began tracing the psychological symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome and functional dyspepsia.

“A characteristic feature of disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome or functional dyspepsia is their association with psychological problems such as anxiety or depression,” Pasricha wrote in an email to The Daily. “The current thinking generally is that the latter cause or exacerbate gastrointestinal symptoms.

“We sought an alternative explanation, namely that gastrointestinal problems cause depression and anxiety. Thus, both long-lasting pain and psychological problems can result from a single cause, gastric irritation, if it occurs in vulnerable individuals.”

According to Pasricha, the gut has its own nervous system — one that is connected to the brain by nerves such as the vagus nerve but operates “relatively independently.” It is this complex communication system that is responsible for changes in the gut getting sent directly to the brain.

Using developmental models of gastrointestinal illness, products of more than a decade’s worth of construction, Pasricha and his colleagues unearthed the time connection between age and intestinal vulnerability. The long-term impact of the digestive irritation is largely dependent on not only the genetic makeup of the patient but also its early onset during development, when the internal organs are especially sensitive.

“As an example, we have produced a model of irritable bowel syndrome in adult rats that results from neonatal irritation of the colon as well,” Pasricha said. “So there is something vulnerable in the nervous system during this period of life that renders the animal susceptible to other insults and causes long-lasting changes.”

In this particular study, researchers followed a procedure in which they subjected 10-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats to mild gastric irritation via oral doses of 0.1-percent idoacetamide, an alkylating agent. Such treatment resulted in temporary inflammation as well as a brief period of hypersensitivity after the inflammation healed.

Some eight to 10 weeks later, the rats were tested with sucrose preference. Forced swimming tests were used to examine depression-like behavior. Elevated plus maze (EPM), open field and light-dark box tests were used to assess anxiety behaviors.

The results were striking. The rats that experienced early gastric problems were much more likely than the control rats to exhibit depressed and anxious behaviors. These behaviors manifested themselves in decreased consumption of sugar water, less active swimming in warm water and a tendency to stay in the dark areas during the maze test.

The treated rats also exhibited higher than normal levels of the stress hormones corticosterone and corticotrophin as well as an increased resting level of corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), a hormone linked with depression in humans and other animals. According to Pasricha, the treatment interferes with the development of the central nervous system. The signaling from the gut to the brain permanently changes its function to induce anxiety and depression in the animals.

Moreover, blocking the rats’ sense of perception with the addition of a drug did not cause any significant change in their behavior. This indicates that the treated rats were not responding to any current pain. However, inhibiting the release of CRF dramatically reduced depression- and anxiety-like behavior, even in the rats that had initially experienced gastric irritation.

Having found the causal link in the vagus nerve between the gut and the nervous system, Pasricha is now investigating the specific mechanisms that govern this phenomenon.

“We are now exploring the molecules that are involved in signaling between the gut and the brain and the role of nerves such as the vagus that may be mediating these changes,” Pasricha said. “There are lots of questions to be asked, and we hope that this research will open up some new perspectives on depression and anxiety and the relationship to gastrointestinal disorders. There has been a lot of speculation linking autism to gastrointestinal disease.”

Research regarding the link between the nervous and gastrointestinal systems has opened up new realms of possibilities for novel treatments and approaches. Electrical modulation of the vagus nerve, a method patented by Cyberonics, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat stimulation for several years.

Pasricha alluded to other scientists who have proposed theories on this linkage.

“Others have espoused theories around this connection. Pierre Pallardy, the French alternative therapist, is certain that the roots of depression lie in the stomach,” Pasricha said. “In his 2007 book ‘Gut Instinct: What Your Stomach Is Trying to Tell You,’ he outlines his belief in the power of the stomach to cause or cure a wide range of physical and mental ailments. Whether our research validates this or not is open to question, but [it] certainly gives food for thought.”

 

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