Otterbein University Digital Commons @ Otterbein Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal Current Otterbein Journals Spring 2006 Otterbein Aegis Spring 2006 Otterbein Aegis Otterbein University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/aegis_humanity Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Otterbein Aegis, "Otterbein Aegis Spring 2006" (2006). Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal. 9. https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/aegis_humanity/9 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Current Otterbein Journals at Digital Commons @ Otterbein. It has been accepted for inclusion in Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Otterbein. For more information, please contact [email protected]. s p r i n g 2 0 0 6 Otterbein College Humanities Journal Aegis: The Otterbein College Humanities Journal Statement of Editorial Policy A journal designed to catalyze a deeper critical appreciation of the humanities at Otterbein College, Aegis seeks scholarly essays and book reviews that advance the presence and values of the humanities on campus and beyond. In accord with the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) definition of the humanities, Aegis will consider scholarly essays and book reviews in the following disciplines: history; philosophy; languages; linguistics; literature; archeology; jurisprudence; the history, theory, and criticism of the arts; ethics; and comparative religion. Essays and reviews of books in the social sciences that are historical or philosophical in approach—or that involve questions of interpretation or criticism traditionally in the humanities—will also be eligible for publication in Aegis. Aegis will also consider essays and reviews of books that use the disciplines of the humanities to interpret, analyze, or assess science and technology. Essays should be between 10-20 pages—in twelve point type, double-spaced, and in Times New Roman font with standard one-inch margins. This includes pages devoted to notes and/or works cited pages. Book reviews should be between 4-8 pages—in twelve point type, double-spaced, in Times New Roman font with standard one-inch margins. Aegis is committed to nonsexist language and to wording free of hostile overtones. Aegis will appear annually during the first week of May of each calendar year. Essays and book reviews will be received on a rolling basis. The deadline for the coming year’s edition shall be the second Friday of Winter Quarter. Essays and book reviews received after this date will be considered for the following year’s edition—even if the writer is in the final year of his/her study at Otterbein. aegis 2006 Submissions, prepared according either to the MLA Style Manual or The Chicago Manual of Style, should be sent in duplicate and addressed to Paul Eisenstein, Faculty Advisor, Aegis, 227 Towers Hall, Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio, 43081. If you are submitting through the U.S. Mail and wish for one copy of your submission to be returned, please include a self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage. Authors’ names should not appear on submitted essays; instead, submissions should be accompanied by a cover sheet, on which appear the author’s name, address, and the title of the 3 essay. All essays accepted for publication will need eventually to be submitted on hard diskette in Microsoft Word. Aegis: Editorial Board Editors: Michelle Yost and J. T. Craig Board Members: Christina Amato Adam Cottrell Jennifer Roberts Cassi Smith Jen Wall Cover Art: Michelle Yost (of Stonehenge) Advisor: Dr. Paul Eisenstein Students interested in serving on Aegis’ Editorial Board for the 2006-2007 school year should contact Dr. Paul Eisenstein at [email protected]. contents Editor’s Introduction 5 Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities 9 Articles Two Essays on Socrates An Examination of Richard Kraut’s Liberalization of Socrates’ Political 13 Philosophy • J. T. Craig Would King Drink the Hemlock?: Socrates’ Views on King • Larsa Ramsini 29 The Not-So “Invisible Hand”: America’s Role in Haiti’s Endemic Poverty • Christina Amato 35 Philosophizing Disgrace: Anatomy and Analysis of Dylan’s “Hard Rain” 45 • Adam Cottrel A Priest of the Portrait as a Young Man: The Path to Stephen Dedalus’s Artistic 52 Baptism • Adam Cottrel The Moral Dilemma of Atomic Warfare • Edward Gunn 59 Jaingxi Elementary School Explosion: A Look at Human Rights Abuse 74 in China • Rhonda Maynard A Woman’s Religion: How Ann Lee Broke Through the Patriarchy • Jen Roberts 82 Art of Revolution • Jen Wall 88 Hirohito: Dunce or Duplicitous Leader? • Michelle Yost 96 Book Reviews The Body of Brooklyn • Jennifer Roberts 104 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order • Zach Reat 106 Collapse • Cassi Smith 108 Teacher Man • Christina Amato 110 China Inc. • J. T. Craig 112 In Brief 114 Contributors 120 Editors’ Introduction Michelle Yost and J. T. Craig It is a pleasure to bring you the third edition of Aegis, Otterbein’s Humanities jour- nal. We have enjoyed providing a forum that embraces a wide spectrum of ideas in which our peers can share. Academic work cannot exist within a vacuum; we need to share our theories and research, and in turn draw on others, so that our work is well-rounded and relevant to this increasingly interdisciplinary world. One of the underlying themes in every scholarly field, is the intellectual honesty of one’s work. The scholarship involved in the humanities is especially dependent on academic honesty, because of the volume and breadth of sources that one can find, and usurp, as one’s own. An individual might be tempted to say there is a problem with students and faculty pla- giarizing the work of others, but that far from being pervasive, this is just a problem confined to academia and to scholarship; it is not one indicative or carried over into other aspects of life. But this claim would be wrong. Intellectual dishonesty is not only a major problem in academia, but is rampant in politics, in governmental and private bureaucracies, in corpora- tions, and in just about every other aspect of life. The theft and use of others ideas, along with adamant denials about the falsity of one’s ideas and work is indicative of a disease, like cancer, that starts at one point (scholarship, perhaps, though we would find this point of origin aegis 2006 debatable) and then races through the cultural bloodstream, permeating all major parts until it has become the norm, and not the exception, to be dishonest. Like many societal problems, the beginnings of intellectual dishonesty seem innocu- ous, almost innocent. In academia, both as a student and as a professor, there is pressure to 5 produce (or, perhaps on the part of many students, there is a view of the college experience as a means to an end – the degree in this case being merely a credential). It is this drive to be unique and to get ahead (careerism) that leads to small slips in academic integrity. It might begin with cutting and pasting sentences from journals, or online sources without a citation – after all, it is only one sentence. From there, it is easy to fabricate a source of information – after all, the professor wants too many sources, and there are other classes that need atten- tion. It is these seemingly small things in conjunction with the pressure and exploitation of our entrepreneurial culture that leads to essay sites on the web, the buying and selling of academic editors work, or going so far as to hiring someone to write a specific paper for you (at ten dollars per page). In fact, there have been moves made by professors and universities to curb this trend, by creating web sites that are, essentially, large student databases that can check a particular paper against thousands of other documents, papers, journals, etc. And this movement has led to student bodies using their Senate to invalidate that practice. As Chantal Brushett, president of the students union at Nova Scotia University, states: “Students go to university for a higher education. They don’t go to be involved in a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt.”1 While this problem addresses student intellectual dishonesty, it does not address the issue of how professors are being monitored. We can see that the problem has jumped from being widely perceived as a “student-only” problem, to infecting professional academics (as evidenced by plagiarism in works by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lawrence Tribe, and Stephen Ambrose) and our society as a whole(see Jayson Blair’s work for the New York Times, or James Frye’s “fictionalized” non-fiction book) . Even in institutions such as Columbia and Harvard – which is where elite intellectual work supposedly takes place – it is apparent that a culture of dishonesty has infiltrated the system. For example, this is a quote from Mark Slouka, a former professor at Columbia and current chair of the creative writing program at Chicago University, about the pervasiveness of intellectual dishonesty at Columbia, whose problems include: Master’s theses that are routinely passed despite the fact that the level of writing exhibited in them is remedial at best and virtually illiterate at worst, tenure-track hires of close personal friends of the chair who have, quite literally, not a single publication credit to their names and who are hired over candidates with two and three books – resulting in a situation in which students often have more experience and publications than their instructors, and an institutional culture in which those who have done nothing for 10 aegis 2006 or 15 years hire others like themselves in order to make their own lack of accomplishment less visible and, for the same reason, discriminate against those who are active in their fields.2 While the above passage is not about plagiarism in the purest sense, it points out the lengths to which others within academia go to preserve or advance their careers – in this instance cro- nyism appears to be the manifestation of the disease of intellectual dishonesty.