So our plan to be in Lanzhou at our partner institution Lanzhou University of Technology will not work this year (no foreigners in Gansu Province), and our international director has us on the Beijing to Hong Kong train — only a 25-hour trip. We can do that. Let’s call it quality time for our group, and an opportunity to meet other rail travelers. Our historical focus will change from Silk Roads ancient and modern to the geopolitical and economic history of a maritime entrepot, the Hong Kong of almost seven million persons. We also get to visit our partner institution in Guangzhou (The Guangdong College of Foreign Languages and Art), just a two-hour train ride after we depart HK. But only for three or four days there, though we will be able to visit some classes, spend time with their students, faculty, and administrators, and visit some key sites in GZ. More later, especially the Travel Study China Report on the ETBU website.
That’s right. Our ETBU travel study & BSM group goes to Beijing via DFW and SFO this next Monday. Our itinerary once we are there is under reconsideration — more on that later. In reading Peter Jenkins’ eighties book Across China about his trip to Tibet, Everest base camp, and China, I noticed that he passed through Lanzhou but wrote hardly a word about it! Other places warranted more print, I guess, but, then, as the coastal Chinese say, Lanzhou is so “remote”. Not any more.
Our travel study group to China is growing and coming together along with the BSM leadership — and will get ready to go during the spring semester! Our itinerary (about May 5-22): Beijing - Lanzhou - Xi’an - and then back through Beijing. The middle part in Lanzhou - about a week - gives us some great cultural exchange and interdiscipilinary experiences in history, politics, music, communications, and the general culture. We’ll look forward to seeing Mu Yongqiang, Hou Binhua, and the good friends in the international office at the Lanzhou University of Technology, too, and they will be helping us with a lot of things while we are there.
Our travel study and many other experiences will help us all to understand the Chinese past, the fascinating Chinese present (and future), and the ways they connect together — or not. That’s a good thing to do considering that we are already in what many people are referring to as the “Chinese Century”.
More later . . .
Dr. Israel Nandamudi (Political Science) and Dr. Carolyn Rester (Speech) are surveying a group of prospective student registrants for the Model United Nations spring class. They will travel to compete at MUN New York. It is true that the prospect of participating in the competition, which meets in the United Nations facilities in New York City, is a big draw for students. Equally true, though, is that the MUN program has a success record over the past few years when our teams went to MUN Chicago. It is a fine program for our students and university. Thanks to scholarship support from Academic Affairs and a great deal of hard, focused work from the faculty sponsors, this program has been a success. I hope that tradition of success continues for many years.
Things are heating up on Tiger Mountain. You might say we start hot — there’s no other option in August and September — and we cool slowly. I hope we all have some fire in the heart to get some great things done this year!
Alan Lefever and Naomi Taplin from the Texas Baptist Historical Collection were on campus this week to examine the deeper mysteries of . . . our archives in the Jarrett Library! The diagnosis was actually pretty good, and the prognosis matched: ETBU has a good start on an archive, and its reorganization under the library staff led by Cynthia Peterson will make it much more useful. With the ETBU centennial coming in 2012, getting the old records in order is important. Also important: they helped us, reminded us, that faculty, students, librarians, staff, and administrators all have a part in preserving the archival remnants of past and present, and that in itself will enhance the effectiveness of our educational programs.
Thanks for the chapel program on the ETBU Spanish-language program in Mexico–to continue each summer. Thanks, Mrs. Blanca Jenkins, Dr. Linda Prewett, and Mr. Alan Huesing for the continuing work with the program that is bringing so much benefit to our students and excitement to our Modern Languages programs.
I am an historian. So I belong to a “faith” of sorts whose adherents do not dwell in the past, as outsiders sometimes think, but who do, certainly, dwell on the facts of the past. We also dwell on the teeming interpretations of the human past, including those interpretations forced on us, and all, by the momentum of recent and contemporary events. For example, how many of us have taken a stronger interest in the history of Islam lately?
I teach courses in the history of world societies. Among the achievements most desired of any given semester is to wrest from the minds of typical American students certain errors of conception or adequacy: history repeats itself / we study history so that we can better understand the present, and so forth. My students will recognize my assertion (I hope they were listening) that history absolutely does not “repeat itself.” (more…)
Before he joined the army as a chaplain in World War II, L. L. Morriss was a very young pastor of several Texas Baptist Churches. A former student at the College of Marshall (now ETBU), during the academic year 1941-1942 at Baylor University, he had this to say about the value of journalism studies for pastors:
Because I was weary of getting out the church bulletin with a duplicating machine, I led the church to begin using the back page of The Baptist Standard for their church page. This was started February 26th. Bear in mind I was continuing to carry my load at Baylor and drive back and forth from my preaching appointments. While at Baylor I had taken a course on journalism under Professor Burckhart. It was one of the most refreshing courses I took because it was practical and pointed out the need of pastors having the right relationship with newspapers and how to write articles for the paper and get them printed. This course has been a great help to me through the years. I would say that any pastor needs to have the right relationship with the local paper and he will get a lot of publicity and can promote his church.
[Excerpt from Dr. L. L. Morriss' web biography, in progress.]
All Right!!!!!
Our Model United Nations team this year, led by Dr. Israel Nandamudi and Mrs. Jennifer Hoover to Chicago for the AMUN conference, had another great experience. It was good, too, to see that The Marshall News Messenger ran a front-page story (Saturday, December 9) on the trip. This year Dr. Frank Lower, who retired this past spring, came back to help the team prepare for the conference argument procedures before their departure for Chicago. This is a wonderful program for ETBU students, and I appreciate Dr. Nandamudi for his leadership. In spring 2008 we hope to see ETBU MUN at the United Nations for the New York City conference — it will be on the class schedule that spring, and for now there is plenty of time to prepare. Again, congratulations to the faculty and the team; we look forward to MUN development in future years.