University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas Arches University Publications Spring 2014 Vol. 41, No. 3, Arches Spring 2014 University of Puget Sound Follow this and additional works at: https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/arches Recommended Citation University of Puget Sound, "Vol. 41, No. 3, Arches Spring 2014" (2014). Arches. 20. https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/arches/20 This Magazine is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arches by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND PEOPLE AND IDEAS FOR SPRING : ' : J ■S... ■ ihL : ... m w 1 i A i PacRim is isg mvi . 1 & I feT miM 'o', >Iai» [) 0 VJ o f l .M ■ £ [•i rs [ffliw [•i frwiwiu1 frllUKsllWiir from the president Being there I have been trying to figure out why I found She knows what you want and gets it for you, education is about. Higher education, that Her so compelling. I mean the recent Spike insofar as any powerful computer program is. Education is not about information, ulti­ Jonze movie by that title. Then I heard a could. She knows you. mately, or knowledge alone, or even ideas. It’s recording of the Beatles singing their simply An interesting twist: Our hero’s profes­ about how those things can connect you in a perfect 1960s hit single “If I Fell,” and it all sion turns out to be a copywriter for a busi­ more profound and meaningful way with the became clear to me: ness that provides an extraordinarily popular world and with other people. service. It creates customized, ghostwritten, This is why university campuses around If I give my heart to you personal handwritten letters for you (for a the world have sustained themselves and pro­ I must be sure fee) and sends them on your behalf (on your liferated and grown so dramatically through­ From the very start own personalized stationery) to your loved out human history, emerging as they did in Tljat you ones on significant occasions—birthdays, the ancient world, spreading in the Middle Would love me more than her anniversaries, Valentines days, breakups, rec­ Ages, taking on new form during the Renais­ onciliations, engagements, etc. We are led to sance, and then continuing to modernize in John and Paul understood the big differ­ believe that since such intimate writing (and the neoclassical period, the Industrial Revo­ ence between “her” and “you” when it comes by implication the capacity for sustaining lution, the Space Age, modernity and post­ to giving your heart away. “You” are the intimate relationships) has become a lost art modernity—and even into the digital era. person who is here with me at this moment. in the always-plugged-in hypertext world of It’s why college campuses are still springing “Her” refers to someone who is not, and is virtual reality, the demand for such a service up like mushrooms in developing countries not able to love me as much as you can. And is high. And our hero is very good at it. like China and India, and why we find exten­ l that’s the point about the love interest in the But he’s not so good with real people in sions of the NYU campus in places like Abu movie: The “her” of the title isn’t “you,” and real time. That’s why Samantha (Her) is so Dhabi, for example, or Carnegie Mellon in never could be. attractive to him. As an operating system, Qatar, or Boston University in Dubai. If you haven’t seen the flick, I can see she (Her) has no body. So, no heart. No A campus is not a system. It is a particular where you might find its premise incredible. strings. No hand to hold. And there’s the rub. place, where people come together to engage The story takes place in the very near future Though ubiquitous (and almost omniscient) with each other through the great ideas, art, and focuses on a pretty smart guy (maybe a in the wide world of the Web, she (Her) can’t culture, and science of the human experience little geeky) who has a pretty nice wife (from really be here, there, or anywhere. Anywhere in order to understand the past, navigate the whom he is unfortunately divorcing), and real, at least. “She” can never be “you” or like present, and conceive a future. Like a rela­ he falls in love with a newly introduced (and “you”—an embodied person experiencing tionship. The word “campus” comes from the amazingly powerful) computer operating sys­ and being shaped by events, emotions, per­ Latin for “field,” a site where people gather tem (OS1) that speaks to him with the voice ceptions, hopes, fears revelations, surprises, for a project—for agriculture, entertainment, of an angel (actually, it’s the sultry voice of smells, tastes, textures, intuitions, ideas. She competition, instruction, or even for battle. Scarlett Johansson). OSl assumes the name (Her) can get upgraded, go offline, but can Its important to be there. It always strikes me “Samantha” for her interactions with her cli­ never be fully there. The fact is, she (Her) is as curious, when doomsayers pronounce the ! ent, our hero, and he soon ends up giving his really nothing more than him, the voice of end of the brick-and-mortar college campus heart to her completely. his own desires telling him what he wants to in a digitized world, that the most elaborate It’s as if the guy falls hopelessly in love hear. You following this? “If I Fell” and Her and most expensive campuses being built with an advanced version of his iPhone. are both really about the capacity for being today are for innovative companies with Samantha turns out to be a kind of “Siri,” there—or not. names like Google and Microsoft and Face- with impeccable conversation skills and “Being there” (it seems to me) in very real book and Apple. Really. You can Google it. uncanny insight into the “user ” She quickly places and gradually becoming a fully devel­ Which brings me to the Pacific Rim. Stay perceives (and adapts herself to) your par­ oped “you” in the company of other people with me here. Many of the students who ticular preferences, your habits, your desires. like you (and unlike you) is, finally, what an come to our campus at Puget Sound leave Cover photo by Use Long '04, M A.T.'05, taken on the 2008-09 PacRim trip. it for a short time to study abroad—more than 40 percent—because they want to learn deeply about another culture. And they know that “being there” is by far the best way to do that—living with the people who have emerged from the history of a particular place, speaking their language, consuming the cui­ sine that sustains them, being enveloped in the places they consider sacred, appreciating the art that defines beauty for them, the ideas that give their lives meaning. These students under­ stand that to really know a place they need to give their heart and mind to it, by being there. Among the most distinctive of the more than 200 such opportunities our students have is the PacRim program, which takes about 25 of them to eight Asian cultures over the course of nine months. Its intense. Its life-changing. been the week before when they were there. who more foolish than I, and who more It takes their breath away. They come home The largest religious monument in the world, faithless?) to campus different people from the ones who fashioned to resemble the habitation of the Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the left us, inspired and transformed by the stories gods in the heavens, it was at once a vast objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, they live through: They might practice the palace of kings as well as the eternal home of Of the poor results of all, of the plodding ancient art of Bokh wrestling with Mongolian deities; a work of art and an act of worship; and sordid crowds I see around me, ranchers at dusk on the high steppes, fashion Buddhist and Hindu; a spectacular architec­ Of the empty and useless years of the 1,000 origami cranes in Kyoto and deliver tural marvel and an inexplicable feat of engi­ rest, with the rest me intertwined, them to Hiroshima’s peace shrine, assume the neering; a sacred religious text and a picto- The question, O me! so sad, recurring— lotus position in the Vipassana meditation graphic narrative of political conquest carved What good amid these, O me, O life? practice in Sri Lanka as smoke fills their lungs, in stone. Generations built it and sacrificed Answer. get barked at by an army of geckos in the their lives for it. Volumes have been written That you are hen ■that life exists and darkness of Borneo’s Gunung Mulu National about it. Millions of photographs depict it. identity, Park, or gasp for breath in a Buddhist temple But being there, giving your heart to it: That’s That the powerful play goes on, and you on a Himalayan mountainside miles above sea something else. It changes you. may contribute a verse. level. They are learning by being there. And As I reflect back on that trip, it reminds they are changed as a result. me of Her, of the Beatles, of the magic of a “What will your verse be?” the ad asks us When Mary and I met up with our Pac­ college campus, and of Walt Whitman, and to consider.