2015-2016 Professorial Lectures
A largely chronological parade of failures, flops, frustrations, blunders, miscalculations, missteps, oversights, surprises and goofs while researching mutation, morphology and growth in Neurospora crassa.
Early Christian Views of Mental Health and Their Influence on Contemporary Western Thought
Jim Nelson, Ph.D.
(Department of Psychology)
Mental illness has been recognized as a problem since classical Greek and Roman times. During the classical period, three worldviews offered a foundation for different visions of mental health. The sacred worldview of Homeric times saw mental disturbance as coming from powerful outside forces of a divine or spiritual nature. The medical worldview of writers like Galen saw mental illness as a function of bodily imbalance. Finally, the philosophical worldview of Platonic and Stoic authors was broadly moral in its orientation and explanations. With the advent of Christianity, a number of writers were able to effect a kind of synthesis of these worldviews, a holistic vision of mental health that discussed the somatic, psychological, behavioral and spiritual aspects of psychopathology and its cure. However, many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers challenged this synthesis, making it difficult to address mental health issues in a holistic fashion. These problems could be overcome with a significant shift in our attitude toward mental health problems and their remediation.
Observations on Ethnicity and Ancestry in the United States, 2010-2012
Jon Kilpinen, Ph.D.
(Department of Meteorology)
A wealth of data from the 2010 U.S. Census and estimates from the 2012 American Community Survey provide us with important insights on race, ethnicity, and ancestry.
County-level maps of these data show signs of the growing dominance of minority ethnic areas, especially majority-minority counties, as well as the regional persistence of many ancestry groups such as Finns and Cajuns. These maps also demonstrate the expansion and diversification of Hispanic or Latino groups as well as the growing strength of non-European ancestry groups, including Asian identities and those claiming simply American ancestry.
This lecture will explore these changing ethnic and ancestry distributions, as well as the limitations in the Census on how we Americans identify ourselves as being in a certain ethnic or ancestry group.
Brand Damage
Curtis W. Cichowski, LL.M.
(School of Law)
Once little more than a welcome consequence of good business, brand has become the profit prerequisite. Brands have matured into economic engines. They drive market-share, they drive investment, and they drive our consumption economy.
Brand has also become the definitive corporate asset. Teams of marketers, economists, and lawyers find themselves charged with the development, growth, and protection of corporate brand and brand value.
Yet there is no recognition of brand damage as a legally recoverable harm. The purpose of this talk is to persuade us that it is time to recognize brand as a damageable asset. As with any corporate asset, clear and reliable legal protection is a necessity.
Our legal system is known as a common law system. Judicial opinions establish the law entirely on some issues and provide necessary development of the law on other issues, publishing the results to serve as precedents for future disputes. Later cases must follow these precedents unless the prior cases can be distinguished or their legal authority overruled.
However, in the mid-1970s, the United States’ judiciary abandoned these common law principles by issuing unpublished, non-precedential opinions. The production of these unpublished opinions has expanded ever since. Courts that issue them make law good only for that single time and place–the very antithesis of the common law.
This talk will examine the judiciary’s unpublished opinion practices, the legal community’s response, and whether we are witnessing the death of the common law in the United States.
Policy Experiments in Property Tax
David Herzig, LL.M.
(School of Law)
There was a long-standing belief in baseball that scouting was the best way to find major league talent. This belief was challenged by Billy Bean, made famous in the book Moneyball. What the “Moneyball” experiment proposed was using a set of data-driven studies to determine the skills that truly contributed to winning games. For example, the studies showed that on-base percentage is a better predictor of value than batting average.
The “Moneyball” concept was not really new in economic circles. Evaluating institutional decision-making processes through results has been a long tradition. What was new was the application to baseball. This concept is just as applicable to government initiatives, especially tax policy design.
Unfortunately, the tradition of most tax policy, like traditional scouting for baseball talent, is an institutional opinion based on historic anecdotal results. Very few, if any, programs are tested to determine whether conventional wisdom was an accurate predictor of the outcome. This lecture proposes, as a first step to an ultimate goal of rigorous program evaluations, tax policy experiments for inbound real estate investments.
The film director and television producer Alexander Kluge has been a major cultural figure in Germany since the 1960s. Lawyer, teacher, and literary figure, his prodigious output in varied media continues to incorporate the critical spirit of the Frankfurt School. This lecture will tell the tale of this eclectic modernist and his “cinema impure.”
It Starts with a Question: A Reflection on 15 years of Evidence-Based Librarianship
Ruth Connell, M.S
(Department of Library Science)
Most academic librarians wear many hats and work across diverse areas, especially at smaller institutions such as Valpo. Because work informs research and research informs work, Connell’s research spans many subject areas within librarianship, including social media outreach, parental policies for academic librarians, and the effects of interlibrary loan procedures on patron usage. These seemingly different research areas share a common genesis and methodology. All of them began with a question, involve data-driven research, and inform our practice on campus. This lecture will provide insight into facets of librarianship and how related research impacts Valparaiso University.
Gold Chains to Rusty Shackles: Justice and Defiance in Imperial Ethiopia
Chuck Schaefer, Ph.D.
(Department of History)
In the 1916 Battle of Segele, a select body of Ethiopian aristocrats overthrew Emperor Lidj Iyasu. They believed that the Emperor’s commitment to social and political change threatened the very fabric of Christian Orthodox Ethiopia. The battle culminated in the Emperor being led away in gold chains, a scripted ritual of shaming that demonstrated the Ethiopian understanding of forgiveness and atonement. But the Emperor abused the terms of restorative justice tied to his luxurious house arrest. His recidivism forced the verdict to be changed, resulting in his being shackled in rusty irons in a common prison.
This case demonstrates the conditionality of restorative justice. Today restorative justice is equated with “forgive and forget,” where perpetrators are granted irrevocable amnesty. But the historical application of restorative justice in Ethiopia reveals that the terms under which it was granted were never forgotten.