Archive for February, 2010

Students in Associate Professor ERIC BETTINGER’s Economics of Higher Education class were treated on Tuesday to a guest lecture on higher education in Lithuania by ANDRIUS KUBILIUS, prime minister of the Republic of Lithuania.

Andrius Kubilius

Kubilius’ talk, “Innovating Lithuania,” highlighted the economic, geographic and educational assets of the country, the largest and most populous of the Baltic states. Since joining the European Union (EU) in 2004, Lithuania has been one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, but also one of the hardest hit by the recent global recession. About 40 percent of its people have some degree of higher education, says Kubilius, double the EU-15 average.

Students asked Kubilius questions about issues that ranged from the growing challenges Lithuania faces in subsidizing higher education to the effects of globalization to issues of equity and access to higher education institutions.

Kubilius’ stop at Stanford was part of a week-long visit to the Bay Area, New York and Washington to promote Lithuanian business and investment opportunities among leaders of U.S. high-tech and IT companies.

—Amy Yuen, School of Education

Two coeds discussing dating at lunch in the CoHo last week:
“My mom’s so happy. From now on, everybody I bring home will be from Stanford.”

PETER A. STURROCK, professor emeritus of applied physics, has written an autobiographical account of his life as a “conventional scientist” with an unconventional interest in the paranormal.

In A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist, Sturrock recounts the watershed event that propelled him to spend a lifetime studying unorthodox phenomena. On an ordinary autumn day in 1947, Sturrock, then a student studying mathematics at Cambridge University, spied a mysterious round bright-white object moving south along the horizon near the Gog Magog Hills of England. The sighting occurred not long after the Roswell incident had ignited a firestorm in the United States, and Sturrock secretly began to wonder if there was some truth to the idea of UFOs – calling his experience “a profound disturbance to my scientific well-being.”

Sturrock went on to lead a distinguished career as an astrophysicist at Stanford, where he served as director of the Institute for Plasma Research and deputy director of the Center for Space Science and Astrophysics. His book, which examines subjects ranging from extraterrestrial life to reincarnation, attempts to challenge the prevailing attitudes of modern scientists and academics by engaging questions ordinarily dismissed as outlandish or illegitimate – reminding readers that current scientific models of reality are ever fluctuating.

“I have noticed that, when confronted with a new phenomenon … scientists tend to bypass discussion of the evidence in favor of theoretical considerations,” Sturrock writes. “Anomalies should be the life blood of science.”

—Aimee Miles, Stanford News Service intern

Just before 8 a.m. Friday morning, Stanford students began a solemn processional toward the lawn in front of Hillel. Their peaceful gathering, called “Stanford United,” was to be a show of force against the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, a group that sustains itself by launching public attacks against the gay community, the Jewish community and other targets of their agenda of hate and intolerance.

After a visit to Gunn High School in Palo Alto earlier in the morning, five Westboro demonstrators made their way to Stanford and stood with hateful picket signs on the corner of Mayfield Avenue and Campus Drive. Stanford United was about 1,000 strong and included students representing dozens of organizations and individuals from every corner of the campus.

During one powerful moment, a student stood in front of the BOB residence and began playing “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. Parting to allow him to make his way across the street to the front of the crowd at Hillel, the crowd joined him in song. During the gathering, Talisman performed a few pieces, and the Stanford group joined in singing “We Shall Overcome,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

Talisman also performed a song that was inspired by a pledge written for the occasion, which the students recited in unison. (See box.)

After the Westboro picketers left, many students remained for a celebration of community led by the Stanford Band, the Dollies and the Tree.

The tires on the Westboro group’s rented minivan were slashed, after they failed to park in the secure area that campus police had designated for them. The Department of Public Safety is investigating that incident. (The picketers had been followed to campus by a group of counter-demonstrators from elsewhere.)

After their 25 minutes at Stanford, the Westboro group planned to head to six more venues in San Francisco. This week, they plan to visit more high school and college campuses in Northern California.

ADINA DANZIG EPELMAN, executive director of Hillel at Stanford, said the diversity represented on the Hillel lawn was the vision of JOE GETTINGER, president of the Jewish Student Association.

Even though Westboro is “so fringe that they are inconsequential, they represent something that does exist,” and that’s why the organizers planned the gathering so that Stanford United participants had their backs to the Westboro group, Danzig Epelman said. “The hope for today was to create an experience that will inspire us all to work toward a more inclusive and accepting world. The idea of the pledge was to assert that we affirm common values across diverse communities. We recognize that we have to join with our neighbors and fight the hate that comes to our door and theirs, and we all need to commit ourselves to work toward reducing the pain and injustice that exist in our world as a result of hate.”