A History of Engagement:
Smith Plays an Active Part on the World Stage
By Eric Goldscheider
Whether it is shining a spotlight by using the Internet
as a key tool to direct the world’s gaze to the genocide in Darfur, studying
the horrors visited upon communities in Uganda resulting from the abduction and conscription
of child soldiers, or attending to the mental health needs of disaster victims, Smith
College faculty have a long tradition of engagement with the world’s conflict
and crisis zones. Students too are deeply involved in global affairs in such ways
as showing the connections between coffee production in Nicaragua and the legacy
of landmines and educating themselves to bring enlightened leadership to their home
countries.
New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof
had good reason to devote the majority of an effusive column two years ago on the “Heroes
of Darfur” to Smith College English professor C. Eric Reeves. It’s not
only that the scholar of Renaissance literature has established himself as one of
the most tenacious, eloquent and best-informed analysts of the horrific events in
Western Sudan. It is that Reeves was the first person to call the crisis a “genocide” in
a major publication (the Washington Post’s op-ed page) in describing what much
of the world now recognizes as a determined effort to systematically slaughter an
entire people.
Kristof’s praise of Reeves for delving headlong
into a crisis -- one that, in the late 1990s, few had heard of -- cuts to an
essential question of the human condition. All those who claim to be moral must at
some point grapple with where they draw their personal lines when it comes to looking
away from or alternatively confronting evil. Kristof’s column encapsulated
Reeves’s commitment like this:
“Perhaps the most striking distinction in the
history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don’t, but
between “bystanders” who avert their eyes and “upstanders” who
speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999.”
Smith’s history and identity as a college of
and for the world goes back to the 1930s when totalitarianism swept into Italy and
Germany. As the murderous intentions of the Nazis came incrementally into focus,
William Allan Neilson, the college’s third president, was among those who spoke
up. According to a profile published several years ago by Peter Rose, Sophia Smith
Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology, Neilson addressed a mass meeting
in Northampton in the wake of Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes and shops were ransacked
throughout Germany on November 9, 1938. “I will not stand by and be silent,” Neilson
told the gathering “I cannot be contemporary with these events and have it
said by my children that I lived through that and did nothing about it.”
Neilson’s actions going back to the early 1930s,
when dissident intellectuals in central Europe began to be persecuted, matched his
rhetoric. According to Rose, Neilson was instrumental in shaping the mission of the
Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization credited with saving 2,000 artists and
writers. He was also a founding member of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced
German [later changed to Foreign] Scholars. He used his position as president to
ease the way for several antifascists, some of whom became permanent faculty, to
find physical as well as intellectual refuge at Smith.
During his presidency from 1917 to 1939, Neilson promoted
an agenda that set the tone for an internationalist orientation at Smith. He supported
women who set up a Smith College Relief Unit in the Chateau de Grécourt in
France during the First World War where they provided help to the civilians of a
battered community. In 1925 Neilson established the country’s second junior
year abroad program, under which 32 students went to Paris.
Today, Smith not only sends nearly half of the junior
class out into the world to study abroad but also brings women from around the world
to Northampton, enrolling 203 students from 70 countries, accounting for 8 percent
of the student body.
Our commitment is really significant and the
word is out there” that Smith actively seeks out international students, says
Karen Kristof ’87, senior associate director of admission and no relation to
the columnist. The college not only recruits students abroad but is also on a directory
of institutions that give financial aid to people from around the world; says Kristof, “we
are always in a very prominent place on that list among liberal arts colleges.” Among
her duties is to administer a scholarship at Smith made possible by the Wallace H.
Coulter Foundation reserved for first-generation college students from developing
countries who are committed to returning home after pursuing studies in engineering
and the sciences at Smith.
Given the broad geographical distribution of international
students, there are always some from parts of the world that are in turmoil. Karen
Kristof recently received an e-mail from an applicant asking that her essay be held
in strict confidence because of the political repercussions it could have for her.
This year the Smith community has been especially sensitive to the emotional stress
several Kenyan students on campus are feeling due to the upheaval in that East African
country. One is sophomore class president Margaret Mongare ’10 whose single
mother and younger brother live in Nairobi, the capital.
Mongare, a premed student who plans to enroll in an
M.D.- Ph.D. program after graduating, exemplifies the talents and aspirations of
many international students. “I want to be somebody who can make a difference,” says
Mongare. “I feel personally obliged to learn as much as I can and inform myself
and go back and really, really make a difference.” Noting that the colonial
era in Africa ended only 40 years ago, Mongare says, “we are a very young community.” She
wants to be a health care leader in Kenya some day, explaining, “by health
care I don’t mean just giving people medicine, but to look for holistic approaches
that get food and clean water” to those in dire need. It grieves Mongare that
in parts of her country people have to walk as much as ten kilometers to get treated
for malaria.
Recently Mongare received word that she was one of
16 students selected from 27 campuses across the United States to be a 2008 U.S.
Goldman Sachs Global Leader through the New York-based Institute of International
Education. The students were recognized for their achievements at a luncheon at Goldman
Sachs in April.
Her experience in student government adds a significant
dimension to Mongare’s education. “It has made me a confident leader,” she
says. “Now I am looking for a new face of Africa and to be part of the team
that will steer Africa ahead and lead us to reach our potential.”
Priscah Chemeli Cheruiyot ’10, a mathematics
major who is also from Kenya, is looking forward to someday help fill the need for
actuarial scientists in her country’s insurance industry. Cheruiyot is critical
of how the current generation of politicians in Kenya has “practically divided
the country,” prompting her to want to help develop institutions that address
conflict by building cohesiveness.
Americans like Aubrey Menard ’08, a transfer student
who grew up in Western Massachusetts, also demonstrate the dedication within the
campus community to confront rather than look away from strife in the world. A high
school history teacher introduced her to the Polus Center, an organization that started
sending prosthetics to Nicaragua in 1997 to aid victims who lost limbs to landmines.
The program has expanded to include other coffee-producing countries, Menard explains,
stemming from the inadequately understood ways in which combatants have used landmines
to interfere with agricultural output and hurt economic production.
Menard, who was able to travel to Nicaragua for the
first time earlier this year with support from Smith in the form of the Ruth Dietrich
Tuttle Prize, was shocked not only by the suffering of those maimed by landmines
but also by the pervasive discrimination against people with disabilities. This winter
Menard, whose future plans include graduate study of democratic transitions in countries
that composed the former Soviet Union, organized an exhibit of photos of Central
American victims of landmines. The show, on display in the Book Arts Gallery in Neilson
Library, was called “Step by Step: Photographs From Walking Unidos.”
Several faculty members have focused their
academic careers on the world’s crisis zones and in the process become personally
committed to responding to the malevolence they encounter. Joanne Corbin, an associate
professor in the School for Social Work, went to northern Uganda in 2005 to pursue
an interest in how mental health is understood cross culturally. The pull was the
phenomenon of armed rebels abducting children and forcibly training them to take
up arms and often commit atrocities against their own people. As the fighting, which
peaked in the mid 1990s, abated, Corbin wanted to know what was happening to the
child soldiers once they returned to their communities.
“I spent five or six weeks just walking,” says
Corbin of that trip, “I did community assessments, walking up and down streets,
talking to agency directors, gathering information from local and international NGOs
and people working in the internally displaced persons camps, talking with children
who had been abducted, just gathering information from anything and everywhere.”
Corbin returned to Uganda twice, the second time to
present her findings. “The community was surprised to get a report back -- they
had never actually had one,” Corbin recalled. “They said, ‘nobody
has ever actually come back to tell us what they found.’” She is in Uganda
again this spring conducting psychosocial training with practitioners operating in
the affected communities. The five internally displaced persons camps, with populations
ranging from 4,000 to close to 25,000, are disbanding and the central government
is helping the inhabitants resettle in their home areas, according to Corbin.
Her work has led her to understand in a visceral way
that the traumas of war aren’t easily healed. The pain extends beyond those
directly afflicted, and the work of restoring psychic equanimity is bigger than treating
individuals. The conflict in Uganda “broke down village and clan structures,” says
Corbin. “It mixed villages and communities, thereby tearing apart traditional
networks.”
As a teacher, Corbin also wants to share her insights. “I’m
very interested in having students who want to learn about this work or be a part
of the research,” she says.
Joshua Miller, also a professor in the School
for Social Work, accompanied Corbin on one of her trips to Uganda because of his
interest and expertise in addressing the mental health issues of communities struggling
to rebuild in the aftermath of violent disruption. Before going into academia, Miller
was a family therapist and community organizer for two decades. Now he takes his
skills to places like Sri Lanka, where he went in the wake of the cataclysmic tsunami
at the end of 2004. He used a sabbatical leave to spend two months on the island
to do psychosocial training under the auspices of a small nongovernmental organization
called the Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation. “What became clear
when I was there,” he notes, “is that you couldn’t separate out
the impact of the civil war that’s going on from the impact of the tsunami
when you are trying to look at psycho-social needs.”
In his international work Miller is very mindful that
Eurocentric mental health and psychotherapeutic models may not always be appropriate. “We
have to get into a dialogue with people about their own traditions and their own
cultural practices,” says Miller, “because a disaster doesn’t just
create trauma in individuals. It rips apart villages and societies and undermines
entire cultures.” Among the tasks Sri Lankans asked Miller to engage in was
to help find ways “to counsel people who lost children in the tsunami so they
don’t kill themselves,” he says.
These kinds of challenges have taught Miller that he
can’t rely solely on his Western training, he says. Americans need to think
about “how people from our country, trained in disaster and mental health,
can make any kind of contribution to international disasters without imposing a neo-colonial
agenda.” He is working on a book that asks these types of questions. “There
is a role for outsiders,” Miller maintains, “but there is a tension and
balance between having outsiders come in who have skills and resources, while also
not imposing their agenda on local people.”
Miller teaches a social work course each summer on
mental health responses to disasters. “I always try to make sure that there
is a real-world part of anything I do,” he says, “and that there is an
academic part where I am teaching and that there is the scholarly part where I’m
conceptualizing and writing about it.”
In addition to the individual commitments that
students and faculty at Smith make to facing and engaging with the exigencies of
crisis and conflict zones around the world, the college has a deeply ingrained tradition
of providing institutional support to individuals who feel the call to stand up and
speak out.
In March, Smith recognized Eric Reeves’ work
on Darfur with an honorary degree in a ceremony presided over by Smith President
Carol T. Christ and followed by a panel discussion of leading authorities, “Perspectives
on the Darfur Genocide.”
Reeves, professor of English language and literature,
who has been the subject of dozens of news stories and profiles, has been battling
leukemia for the past five years in addition to sounding a clarion call to the world
community to end the genocide in Western Sudan. As part of his advocacy, he has written
dozens of articles and a book (A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the
Darfur Genocide), testified before the United States Congress, given countless interviews,
read every available document on the subject, built and nurtured a network of informants
and maintained a Web site notable not only for the volume of its postings but for
the passion with which he presents tightly reasoned and thoroughly sourced material.
Reeves recently began a 4,500-word post with an admonition
that, “the international community seems unable to comprehend the overwhelming
urgency of the security crisis for civilians and humanitarians north of el-Geneina
in West Darfur.” He branded this summer’s games in Beijing the “genocide
Olympics” because of China’s ongoing material and diplomatic support
of the Sudanese government. Reeves also warned against any sense of complacency emanating
from the increased attention the crisis in Darfur is now receiving. “[D]espite
glib skepticism, genocide proceeds apace in Darfur,” he wrote, “if now
with different patterns, the means are too often terrifyingly familiar.”
Commenting on his often lonely crusade and the toll
it has taken on his personal and professional life, Reeves recently said, “The
honorary degree really feels as if it is a moment for me to say to Smith as a community
that I’ve missed you, it’s been difficult and I’m very glad to
be here to tell you that this is a place that has meant an enormous amount to me.
So this honoring is particularly meaningful. It’s Smith saying to me, ‘We
know where you’ve been.’”
Watch highlights of the ceremony honoring Eric Reeves:
www.smith.edu/news/2007-08/ereeves2.php
Listen to Eric Reeves discuss Sudan:
www.smith.edu/newsoffice/releases/EricReeves.html
Read some of Reeves’ articles:
www.sudanreeves.org |
