INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

Rallying Together

ALI REZA ALEMOZAFAR says it would be “counterproductive” for the United States to exclude students from countries that are thought to support terrorism.

“I’ve talked with students from Iran, and I’ve talked with people from Iran who are not students,” says the third-year graduate student in chemical engineering. “And the students are the truly open-minded members of their society, who really want to learn and to change things. If we kick them out, they can’t come here to learn about Western democracy and philosophy and take it back to their country.”

Alemozafar, a U.S. citizen of Iranian heritage, helped to organize a November rally in White Plaza to protest a proposal (since withdrawn) by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, ’55, for a six-month moratorium on visas for students from Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. The following day, the California State Assembly’s committee on higher education met at Stanford’s Bechtel International Center for an informational hearing about student visas. The Golden State enrolls 74,000 international students in its colleges and universities and was caught in the national spotlight in the aftermath of September 11, when federal authorities learned that one of the 19 hijackers had entered the United States on a student visa to study in California.

Since then, the U.S. government has compiled a list of some 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 who have entered the country on nonimmigrant visas since January 2000. Although there are no official estimates of how many students are on that list, a survey last fall by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers revealed that the the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Immigration and Naturalization Service had contacted administrators on more than 200 campuses, asking questions about students.

Although one Stanford student, a U.S. citizen, agreed to be interviewed by the FBI, registrar Roger Printup says he hasn’t gotten any official calls—yet. “I have not been contacted by any agency for private information, and I have not been asked for any lists of students by country of origin or by ethnicity. I haven’t even received requests for names of Middle Eastern students majoring in aerospace engineering, which is what I thought we might get.”

Printup and other administrators are working hard to support the 2,381 graduate students and 332 undergraduates who make up the international student population at Stanford. “Since September 11, we’re concerned about students being targeted without any basis in fact, and concerned about assumptions being made because of where they come from, their religion or the color of their skin,” Printup says. “‘Looks suspicious to me’ isn’t good enough.”

Under the terms of the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, colleges are required only to provide federal agencies with the kind of information found in a campus telephone directory—name, address, phone number, major. If federal authorities want to ask the University additional questions about a student’s courses, grades or what he wrote on an admissions application, a subpoena has to be issued by a California state court. “Unless a person has what the law refers to as a legitimate educational interest, like a faculty member or adviser, student records are private,” Printup says.

Representatives from Stanford and the University of California met with Feinstein last fall, and she soon withdrew her visa proposal. Nevertheless, many international students stayed on campus over winter break rather than return to their home countries and risk not being able to return. A student may continue his studies with an expired visa stamp in his passport, but if he leaves the United States, he cannot re-enter without a new visa.

Although international students account for only 2 percent of the foreign nationals who enter the country every year, Bechtel Center director John Pearson says he fears INS agents may “overreact” to increasing criticism from Congress by requesting more interviews with students. So Pearson advises students to carry the phone number of a hotline set up by the American Civil Liberties Union, and he has offered to host and sit in on any interviews students agree to have with federal officials.

Pending congressional legislation would require colleges and universities to report on international students who do not show up for classes, and Pearson thinks that’s “entirely reasonable.” But he recalls the Cold War years, when FBI agents frequently canvassed campuses in search of information about scholars from the Soviet Union, and says he knows that students can develop mistrust of centers like Bechtel. “So there’s a sense of uncertainty about our relationship with our students, and they must feel comfortable that we are advisers, as opposed to agents of the INS.”

TECHNOLOGY

The Little Laboratory that Could

PICTURE A TYPICAL HIGH SCHOOL chemistry lab: desks pushed together to form makeshift tables; rows of Bunsen burners next to beakers, vials and Erlenmeyer flasks; students bumping elbows as they wait to see what happens when they combine x drops of sodium hydroxide with y drops of hydrochloric acid.

What if it were possible to compress that laboratory into an area as small as a coin? Couldn’t experiments then be conducted much more neatly and economically?

This is the question electrical engineering professor Lambertus Hesselink posed a decade ago. Last year, he unveiled four shoebox-size, robotically controlled laboratories that people from across the world use to conduct optics and thermodynamics experiments, issuing commands to the labs over the Internet. Within the next few years, Hesselink hopes to shrink chemistry labs to the size of a dime.

Although Hesselink’s brainchild is quite an engineering feat, the science behind it is simple: mixing 10 milliliters of one solution with 20 milliliters of another produces exactly the same result as mixing together microscopic amounts—as long as the solutions are maintained in the same ratio. In optics and thermodynamics, the same concept holds true. The only reason labs are large is to allow humans to manage. “Your fingers need to manipulate instruments, you need room to move, and so on,” says Hesselink.

“If you take that human interface out and use sensing devices to interact with the equipment, you can then make that equipment as small as you like,” he says. The result: labs that are “smaller, faster, cheaper and easier to use.”

Researchers issue commands to the labs through a website, and tiny cameras capture and magnify the experiments. “It’s kind of like e-mail,” explains Hesselink, who has co-founded a company with two graduate students to explore this technology. “You still need human interaction, but you can manage it remotely and painlessly.”

The little labs are also cost-effective. Because they can be stacked on top of one another and because their integrated equipment is reliable, Hesselink estimates they are 50 to 100 times cheaper than traditional laboratories. They can run round-the-clock experiments for researchers from different time zones, and will someday allow experts to access rare, high-end equipment from the other side of the world.

At the moment, the four shoebox-size labs in Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems are performing experiments for Hesselink’s own students and Dutch high schoolers. But Hesselink is most enthusiastic about his youngest potential customers. “At [the elementary school] level, there is little money to maintain equipment and set it up,” he says. “As a result, few kids actually get exposed to science.” If schools could purchase inexpensive labs on a dime, however, they “could easily have different labs that are very small, that students could use from home or at school and get excited about science.” It seems fitting: miniature labs for miniature scientists.

EXTRACURRICULARS

'A Real Labor of Love'

WHEN THERE'S EVEN a light breeze, Jean d’Aire and Andrieu d’Andres get soaked by the Rainbirds.

Two of Auguste Rodin’s six Burghers of Calais, the bronze figures stand particularly close to in-ground irrigation nozzles in Memorial Court. When the wind in the Quad shifts and whips the spray around, the two gentlemen get an extra rinse.

“Look at the back of this guy,” Asa Mittman says, pointing to a mostly shiny calf. “The trouble is that the sprinkler’s mineral deposits don’t really come off unless you heat and re-form the protective wax.”

As head of the three-member outdoor sculpture maintenance crew, Mittman is a master of nonionic detergents and chelating solutions. A graduate student in art history, he has been cleaning and helping to protect the University’s collection of more than 100 outdoor artworks for three years. Mittman keeps an eye out for damage to stainless-steel pieces like Alexander Calder’s The Falcon, which is a frequent “hole” for frisbee-golf tournaments. And he knows when someone has tried to crab-walk up the inside of Richard Serra’s concave Call Me Ishmael: “It’s made of Cor-Ten steel, which may look impervious but is really extremely delicate and takes impressions very easily. It will hold a foot stripe for years, until the corrosion process slowly takes over.”

As Mittman and fellow PhD student Hsuan Tsen toweled off the Burghers on a recent morning and wrapped them in blankets to guard against airborne abrasives from nearby construction work, passersby kept stopping to ask questions. The pair handed out campus maps of outdoor sculptures and kept up a running commentary about the various paste waxes and coatings they use to repel moisture, insects, pollen, dirt and oil from visitors’ hands.

While errant frisbees leave plastic smudges in their wake, iron lawnmower blades and weed whackers can “seed” stainless-steel sculptures, permitting rust to take hold. So along with the hoses, solvents and ladders packed in their orange electric cart, the students also carry clippers to do on-the-spot preventive trimming when they see grass sprouting up.

“Our students understand the problems from close up, and they also come to have particular favorites,” says Susan Roberts-Manganelli, manager of collections, exhibitions and conservation at the Cantor Arts Center and supervisor of the maintenance crew. She recalls the year of the gypsy-moth infestation in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden next to Roble Hall, when she and crew members used tweezers to pick buckets of caterpillars out of carved eye sockets and mouths. “A student who lived in Roble would go out each night and pull the worms off ‘her’ sculptures,” Roberts-Manganelli says. “That was a real labor of love.”

Cardinal Numbers

Distance, in miles, from Branner Hall to the Burghers of Calais in Memorial Court: 0.4

Distance, in miles, from Branner Hall to the burgers at Taxi’s on University Avenue: 1.9

Price of a Cardinal burger on campus at the Treehouse: $4.95

Price of an Angus cheeseburger at Spago: $11

Spago pizzas that include caviar as a topping: 1

Opportunities in 2001 to see Mister Roberts on screen at a Palo Alto theater: 3

Opportunities to see Julia Roberts: 0

Sources: Treehouse, Spago, Stanford Theatre, Aquarius, Palo Alto Square Theater

PHILOSOPHY

Giving 'Car Talk' Some Competition

STANFORD HAS ITS OWN Click and Clack—and they’re hoping for air time.

“Philosophy Talk”—their proposed radio program—is “kind of like [National Public Radio’s] ‘Car Talk,’ except philosophy’s simpler,” says Professor John Perry.

“And more culturally relevant,” says Ken Taylor, his philosophy department colleague and aspiring co-host.

Perry: “Besides, who cares about automatic transmissions?”

Taylor: “Cars just pollute our culture. Whereas philosophy can enliven it.”

Perry: “And we’ll have some controversial topics: Is death really bad? Does tenure make sense?”

Taylor: “We want to enliven and entertain. We think philosophical discourse is a great way of thinking. Most people’s idea of debate is horrible things on TV like Crossfire, where people shout at each other and their arguments are mostly ad hominem . . .”

Perry: “. . . and stupid.”

Taylor: “And stupid. And we think there’s a populace out there who would like serious discussion. So I’m the straight man, and he’s the funny one. I’m also the intense, passionate, cool one.”

Perry: “Ken could be funny on TV, but on radio . . . I just don’t know.”

And so it goes deep in the recesses of Building 90, home to a department known nationally for its strength in the philosophy of language, mind, science, action and logic and the history of 18th- and 19th-century philosophy.

“We’re also known as the department that took the ‘anal’ out of ‘analytical,’” Perry suggests.

“He doesn’t mean it,” Taylor cautions. “Do you, John?”

“You’re right. We put the ‘func’ back in ‘dysfunctional.’”

But then Perry’s been here longer—since 1974—and Taylor has been learning his lines only since 1995. As chair, Taylor has overseen a remarkable rebuilding of the department. Because of several failed tenure cases, retirements, departures of senior faculty and the death of professor Wilbur Knorr in 1997, the philosophy department by 1998 was suffering from what Taylor calls “seriously depleted ranks.” The remaining faculty went on retreat that year and determined to recruit the best senior philosophers they could find. During winter 1999, they made several successful offers.

“In Michael Friedman and Allen Wood, we have two of the greatest Kant scholars in the English-speaking world,” Taylor says. “It’s also the case,” Perry adds, “that every generation has its Socrates figure—somebody who everyone knows is a wonderful philosopher, but who publishes very little—and this generation’s Socrates has settled here and teaches for us: David Hills.”

With the department replenished, faculty members are pursuing research with enthusiasm. Perry and Taylor have been contemplating the problems of their specialty, the philosophy of language and mind.

“Philosophy of language is concerned a lot with ‘How possibly . . . ?’ questions,” Taylor says. “How possibly do we make these noises or inscriptions that tell us things about how the world is or was? How do these noises achieve the power they have, and how do they give us windows into one another’s mind—telling us, for example, that John believes that Aristotle suffered from hives?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious, judging from the Greek syntax of his lesser-known writings,” Perry responds. “But Ken and I both feel that philosophy of language is magic—it’s a fairly controversial theory, but we’re developing it. And we also think there are really small people who sit on top of the words and tell us what to say.”

The unrehearsed routines are a hint of what could air on “Philosophy Talk”—the title not only of their hoped-for radio show but also of a continuing-studies course that will debut this spring. The pilot program Perry and Taylor have sent to a Bay Area producer features conversations with well-known contemporary philosophers as well as man-on-the-street interviews in downtown Palo Alto.

“Of course, we’d really like the show to debut on [student station] KZSU, but I can never find the studio,” Perry says. “I follow directions carefully, but I keep ending up in a men’s room in Memorial Auditorium.”

FRESHMEN

Helping Nontraditional Students Find Their Way

AS A FRESHMAN, Sara Grace King felt sort of included in undergraduate life.

Married and living in the graduate student enclave of Escondido Village, King was one of Stanford’s approximately 100 “nontraditional” undergrads, including students who live with domestic partners, children or parents. She was officially affiliated with Wilbur Hall’s Junipero dorm, where she was assigned to an academic advising group and where she and her husband, Lucas, were encouraged to take part in social events. But it was tough to really be part of things there. “We would go to Junipero a lot, but people rarely came to our apartment,” King recalls. “I realized I was missing out on the kinds of things that happen when you’re all hanging out in the hall late at night and someone says, ‘Let’s go for pizza.’”

King began discussing her disappointments with director of residential education Jane Camarillo, and—to her surprise—talked herself into the newly created position of head peer academic coordinator for Escondido Village. This fall, King trained with the 30 other coordinators, who are assigned to freshman dorms, and she now has taken four nontraditional freshmen under her wing. And although she can help them decipher the course catalog or drop a class, she spends more time ensuring that they’ve developed a social network.

Two of King’s fledgling four, Mirrielees residents Mabrookah Heneidi and Rania Eltom, asked to live in a campus apartment. As Muslims, Heneidi and Eltom pray five times each day, do ablutions before each prayer and cover themselves in front of men to whom they are not related. They do not smoke, drink or date. “We don’t separate ourselves from our religion, and a freshman dorm would not be very conducive to our practices,” Heneidi says. Instead of hanging out with freshmen at their affiliated dorm, whom Heneidi finds a bit “rowdy and off-the-wall,” they are making friends and finding their way through contacts in the Muslim and black student communities.

“And that’s all I really do—make sure they’re being taken care of,” says King, who checks in by e-mail every few weeks. “I just want to know they have a place where they feel they belong.”

MEDICINE

A Matter of Life and Death

LAVERA CRAWLEY first witnessed end-of-life care as a medical student in Tennessee more than 20 years ago. An elderly African-American woman’s heart stopped. Health care workers, including Crawley, rushed into the woman’s hospital room and began CPR. The patient survived the physical trauma of chest compressions only to have her heart stop again—this time for good. “It was the sort of death everyone fears,” Crawley remembers.

It struck Crawley that no one had talked with the woman about the kind of death she wanted. Medically, Crawley says, “that was what was done.”

Since 1997, Crawley has worked to ensure that end-of-life care for African-Americans is available and appropriate. A physician-lecturer at the Medical Center, she recently was named executive director of the Initiative to Improve Palliative Care for African-Americans, a collaboration by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Harlem Palliative Care Network and Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics. In January, she organized a national conference on palliative care in New York that attracted 1,200 health care providers, philanthropists and African-American leaders.

Many African-American patients and their advocates focus on obtaining access to high-technology treatments, Crawley has found. Part of her project is to redefine quality care for African-Americans to encompass both curative care and, when appropriate, palliative and hospice care.

Crawley’s larger effort, however, is to study how African-Americans respond to current practices in end-of-life care. She has found that although socioeconomic status is a significant factor in people’s views of death and dying, race, too, plays a role. African-Americans, for example, have a tradition of resisting death, Crawley says. This sense of struggle—apparently rooted in the legacy of slavery and in strong ties to Christianity—leads some to decline hospice care.

Although Crawley and her family accepted hospice care for her dying mother in 1989, Crawley says they viewed life and death differently from some of her mother’s non-African-American caregivers. One nurse suggested her mother did not have quality of life anymore. But Crawley had a different view. “I saw her legacy,” she says. “I saw the vibrant person she was.”

Campus Notebook

Working Toward a ‘Living Wage’ Policy
After discussions with concerned students, University administrators have begun to develop a “living wage” policy, President John Hennessy announced February 7. Under the policy, which follows guidelines adopted by the city of San Jose and is expected to go into effect this summer or fall, workers who are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement and who receive medical benefits will be paid at least $10.10 per hour; those without benefits will earn a minimum of $11.35 an hour. The policy will apply to permanent University employees and to employees who perform tasks that could be done by Stanford employees and are hired under subcontracts worth more than $100,000 and lasting at least one year. A similar plan is under review at the Medical Center.

Being Neighborly
Student musical performances. A nondenominational service in Memorial Church. An exhibit of research under way at Jasper Ridge. Free car seat safety checks. Youth Olympics. The opening of a recently discovered time capsule Jane Stanford planted in the Quad. They’ll all be part of Stanford’s first Community Day, a free, daylong open house on April 7. Administrators hope the event, held in conjunction with the University’s annual Founders’ Day, will strengthen Stanford’s relations with neighboring cities.

Once Again, It’s Fraternity Row
In late January, the office of residential education announced that it would award additional Row houses to fraternities for the first time in more than 30 years. Phi Kappa Psi will move into 592 Mayfield next fall, and Sigma Nu will receive its house, 557 Mayfield, the following year. Unless an organization forfeits a house in the meantime, by fall 2003, the University will have reached its 25 percent cap on Greek housing along the Row. At that time, seven of Stanford’s 16 recognized fraternities and three of its eight sororities will be residential.

For Stanford Hospital, a New CEO
In April, Martha H. Marsh will take the helm of Stanford Hospital and Clinics. The new president and chief executive officer comes to Stanford with more than 23 years of experience in health care, most recently as director of the UC-Davis Heath Care System. “These are challenging times for all academic medical centers,” says University President John Hennessy. “Martha Marsh is a skilled leader with the ability to make the critical decisions that will help the Medical Center continue to provide excellent patient care while achieving financial stability.” Marsh succeeds Malinda Mitchell, MS ’85, who retired in May after 26 years with the hospital.

Tuition’s Up—But Not as Much
The Board of Trustees set tuition rates for the 2002-03 school year in its February meeting. Undergraduate tuition, room and board will go up by $1,663, or 4.9 percent, to $35,884—less than last year’s increase of $1,749. The Graduate School of Business will see the highest tuition hike: 7.9 percent; all other graduate programs will cost 5 percent more. Citing this year’s “difficult economic climate,” board chair Isaac Stein, JD/MBA ’72, said the trustees were “very conscious of the financial burden placed on students and their families.”

For Commencement Speaker, Former Provost Rice
National security adviser and former University provost Condoleezza Rice is expected to talk about the aftermath of September 11 as the invited speaker at Stanford’s 111th Commencement on June 16. Noting that she occupies “a central place on the world stage,” University President John Hennessy says Rice also “has a long-standing relationship with the University and a deep loyalty to its students, faculty and staff.” Rice, on leave as a professor of political science and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, joined the Stanford faculty in 1981 and served as provost from 1993 to 1999.

Help with the Math Homework—For Parents
What do prom dresses, school lunches and baseball statistics have in common? Plenty, according to teaching associate professor of education Shelley Goldman. Parents can use all three to help their middle school children with math. In collaboration with WestEd, a nonprofit agency, Goldman has embarked on a five-year project to show parents how often they use math in their everyday lives—and how they can teach their children to do the same. It consists of hands-on workshops, a parent resource guide and a television special that will air this summer. Parental involvement in a child’s education typically drops off during the middle school years, Goldman says, “just when math starts getting hard.”

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web
Futurists, entrepreneurs, academics and computer pioneers gathered at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in December to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. web server. With encouragement from Tim Berners-Lee, who had set up the world’s first server in Switzerland, SLAC physicist Paul Kunz and his colleagues made a bibliographic database of 300,000 physics references available worldwide in 1991. Berners-Lee demonstrated it to an international group of more than 200 physicists, and “people went home from this meeting telling their colleagues of a new way to access [the database],” Kunz told Stanford Report. “It was called the World Wide Web, and it was great.”

Inquiring Minds

BACK TO BASICS: How did life first evolve on Earth? According to Stanford professor of geophysics Norman Sleep, over and over and over again. Sleep hypothesizes that between 4.5 and 3.8 billion years ago, a series of infrequent but large asteroid impacts repeatedly decimated fledgling life on Earth. Only the hardiest subterranean heat-loving microbes survived—or maybe nothing did. In that case, Sleep says, perhaps life on Earth can be traced to invaders from Mars that traveled here on asteroids—Martian bacteria, that is.

THE NEXT WAVE: An improved form of minimally invasive breast cancer treatment may be on its way. Greig C. Scott, a research associate in electrical engineering, has received a grant from the Whitaker Foundation to refine a technique that reduces tumors using radio waves. He plans to combine the treatment with magnetic resonance imaging, improving doctors’ ability to visualize tumors and allowing them to target cancer cells without heating up healthy tissue. If successful, the technique will likely allow physicians to treat larger tumors than they now can with minimally invasive methods.

SIGH OF RELIEF: The 15 million people in the United States with asthma may soon be able to breathe a little easier. Researchers at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and at Stanford, led by pediatrics research professor Rosemarie DeKruyff, have identified a gene family that appears critical to the development of the disease in mice. This group of genes, known as the Tim family, is also linked to hepatitis A, which may help explain why infection with hepatitis A protects against asthma. The researchers are now investigating whether the Tim family is connected to the development of asthma in humans. The discovery may have implications for asthma treatment and diagnosis.

ETHICS

Getting Past the Politics

FIVE YEARS AFTER Dolly the sheep made her debut in Scotland, a Massachusetts biotech firm announced in November that it had cloned human embryos. Well, sort of. It turned out the handful of cells died within hours and were never viable sources of embryonic stem cells—the versatile and controversial cells that can produce any kind of human tissue and, researchers believe, could someday be used to manufacture replacement organs and cure genetic diseases. But the headlines set off a political firestorm, and, at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, the phone of senior research scholar Mildred Cho, PhD ’92, has been ringing ever since.

Stanford: Did the news from Advanced Cell Technology catch the bioethics community by surprise?

One of the biggest issues surrounding the firm’s announcement is the fact that there’s no regulatory mechanism to deal with a U.S. company doing cloning. I think there’s the potential for us to not know what’s going on in a lot of private companies because they’re able to keep trade secrets and so can control the flow of information.

Scientists largely agree that embryonic stem cells are needed for research, yet the House of Representatives passed a bill last summer that would ban cloning—for both reproduction and research. What does that say to you?

What’s disturbing is that the stem-cell question is ultimately [treated as] a political question, and that actions will always be based more on politics than ethics. The political framework will be a discussion about the right to life on one side, and about the rights of industry to conduct research on the other.

You’re often asked to review draft legislation on the state and national levels. What do you bring to the table?

A lot of policy-makers are necessarily focused on short-term implications, and what we at the center can add is some sense of the long-term implications or potential social changes. For example, how do you think about people as humans if you allow them to be created in order to create organs for other people?

The biotech industry has come of age only in the last 20 years, right?

The interface with industry is a relatively new phenomenon for medicine and biology, and I’m interested in the question of whether biotech, pharmaceutical or health-related companies have different moral obligations than other parts of the private sector. And if you’re working at an academic institution and are also the founder of a company, the lines definitely get blurred.

How do you plan to stay ahead of future surprises?

By trying to anticipate more and be more proactive. The great thing about being on a campus like Stanford is that we can have close ties with people in engineering and biology and the social sciences. We can learn what they’re thinking about, not just what they’ve already done.

SEMINAR ROOM

Pondering Tough Questions with Madame Boyi

THEY PRACTICALLY touch elbows at the seminar table as they hunch over their copies of a slim volume that has dozens of accent aigu marks per page. Eight undergraduates in majors that range from comparative literature to mechanical engineering are citing Sartre and Proust, and commenting on nostalgie, autobiographie and Afrique as their professeur raises the big questions.

“What is literature?” Madame Boyi asks, posing the query in mellifluous French. “What is the entire truth?”

The book that lies open around the table is a 1952 novel that was an immediate hit with French critics. L’Enfant noir, by African writer Laye Camara, recounts the story of a young Guinean boy’s life as he leaves his village to attend high school in a big city, then leaves his country to attend university in Paris.

“It gives us a good image of the early days of colonization and contact with France,” Elisabeth Boyi says to her students in French 133: Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean. “We can see it in the transition for the boy from the traditional into the context of modernity.”

An internationally recognized specialist in francophone literature, Boyi is an associate professor of French and comparative literature. Born in Zaire and schooled in France, Belgium, Spain and Italy, she is fluent in nine European and African languages and has a working knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. Boyi came to Stanford in 1995, after teaching at Duke University and Haverford College.

Boyi says her course is a first glimpse of francophone literature for most who enroll. Because class discussions are conducted in French and the novels can be challenging to read, prospective students often want to test the linguistic waters before signing up. “They ask, ‘Do you think I will make it?’ and I say, ‘Well, you are the only one to know,’” Boyi says. “I tell them to come to one or two sessions to see the level of the course, and then they can decide.’”

Many of those who stay have clearly defined research interests, and some, like senior Lauren Osofsky, have taken previous courses with Boyi. “She’s very warm and approachable as a person, and that translates into her teaching,” says Osofsky, a product design major who is minoring in French and physics and is researching the effects of the Algerian war on French society. “Because she’s from Africa, it’s a unique opportunity to study with someone who actually has firsthand knowledge of the subject.”

Each time she teaches the course, Boyi chooses four novels that convey the changes in francophone Africa and the French Caribbean that have resulted from colonization and the Atlantic slave trade. The works often examine how new identities have been constructed, particularly by women, and Boyi selects novels on the basis of their vivid writing, imagery and structure. “Even though we are learning about culture and society, I have to take aesthetic components into consideration, and I also have to pick books I like,” she says.

The question that surfaced in a recent class discussion of L’Enfant noir was whether the book was a true autobiography or a work of fiction. Was the author also the narrator—une vraie personne? Did his memories of his childhood, his moments de nostalgie, ring true? Was the story almost too good, too inspiring—une histoire de grandir?

In fact, says Boyi, her students hit upon the same issues as African readers. “The book won a literary prize and was celebrated by French critics in the days when African writers were almost nonexistent,” she says. “But some African critics have been rather negative, saying, ‘How come he’s talking about his childhood in such a beautiful, idyllic way, and there is no word about the mental and physical violence that comes with colonization?’” There may not be an easy answer, but Boyi and her students will struggle with the question.

EDUCATION

Teaching Arkansas Children Well

ELAINE, ARK., is in the heart of Mississippi Delta country, where the land is made lush by the nearby river. It is also in one of the poorest counties in the United States. Storefronts are abandoned and crumbling. There is no movie theater or public library, not even a McDonald’s. The schools, most dating back to the days of segregation, have leaky roofs, broken windows and antiquated computer equipment—Apple IIe’s and old DOS systems. For the last couple of years, half the students have scored in the 25th percentile on standardized tests.

David Fetterman’s job is to bring the world to them.

Fetterman, a consulting professor of education at Stanford, last fall completed the first phase of a program designed to boost the technology skills of students and administrators in the state’s distressed school districts. Working with Charity Smith, assistant director of the Arkansas Department of Education, Fetterman spent two days in Little Rock training students to conduct web searches, create home pages and set up videoconferences. His aim is to develop a cadre of students who can return to their districts and teach those same skills to instructors and administrators, who could then provide virtual classroom offerings in subjects not available in the schools.

For Fetterman, MA ’77, MA ’79, PhD ’81, the contrast between Silicon Valley’s tech-savvy students and those from rural Arkansas was stark. “They’ve never been out of the town they are in,” Fetterman says of his Arkansas pupils. Through the lens of a webcam, he led them to the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and the ruins of the World Trade Center. “This was a big trip for them. Their eyes were wide open.”

The 15 students chosen for the program weren’t necessarily the top students from each school, but all are interested in technology. Smith believes that having the kids train the adults will ensure follow-through. “Unless there is a catalyst on campus to continuously get involved in these things, they won’t always happen,” she says.

Fetterman will return to Arkansas each month this spring to reconnect with the first group of students and administrators. He plans to start with a fresh crop next fall. He is also working with a Stanford PhD student, Carrie Penner, MA ’97, to raise money for improving equipment and infrastructure.

Fetterman thinks the project already is producing results. One student trained last fall said that until he learned to use the Internet, he had no idea what lay beyond his little town. “Is this what you teach in college?” he asked Fetterman. When the professor said yes, the young man responded: “Then I am going.”

For more: www.stanford.edu/~davidf/

IN PRINT

Of Professors and Property

MOST FIRST-YEAR law students spend their time parsing the rule against perpetuities or trying to figure out what res ipsa loquitur really means.

Corynne McSherry wrote a book.

A refined version of her doctoral dissertation in communication at UC-San Diego, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001) presents snapshots of recent cases and debates. At a time when both universities and intellectual property law are undergoing dramatic changes, McSherry writes, “the university’s traditional service mission, once construed as an obligation to provide tools for public decision making, has been substantially redefined to mean the transfer of university research from academia to the market via patenting and licensing.” And she suggests that the new vision of scientific work is “a far cry from the open, ethical community of scholarship in which many scholars prefer to imagine they participate.”

McSherry interviewed more than 100 tenured professors, recent PhDs and graduate students, and looked at disputes around the country about ownership of websites and of lectures taped for distance-learning broadcasts. She found that many professors embrace the idea of spelling out rights and signing contracts: “Property ownership offers a kind of comfort in a world where many faculty see traditional prerogatives disappearing.”

Although McSherry, now a third-year student, is headed for a career as an intellectual property litigator, she clearly cares about the evolving campus climate. “I would like faculty, students and administrators to have conversations together to try to develop policies that promote the circulation of academic work,” she says. “They shouldn’t be conversations about drawing little pieces of the pie, but about figuring out what’s the best way to keep getting what they’ve produced out to the most people possible.”

PASSIONS

The Cooking Protégé

JUNIOR MICHAEL OSOFSKY'S résumé includes an award-winning study of death row workers in Louisiana, the deputy chairmanship of the ASSU Undergraduate Senate—and expertise preparing pan-seared breast of duck.

Osofsky started cooking at age 10, when he asked his mother to buy Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking at the mall. “I started playing around with a couple of recipes,” says the New Orleans native. “I made Asian ginger shrimp dumplings with a soy dipping sauce as an appetizer. For an entrée, I went with a black pepper-seared yellowfin tuna with a tortilla sauce and cilantro salsa, and a banana cream pie with caramel drizzlings for dessert,” he continues. “The dessert was my brother’s favorite.”

Impressed by their son’s interest, Osofsky’s parents took him to dinner at Emeril’s eponymous restaurant—and told the celebrated Louisiana chef of their son’s fascination with his cookbook. Emeril Lagasse invited Osofsky to see the kitchen the next Saturday. “I didn’t believe him,” Osofsky says, but he went anyway. “It was overwhelming. You have this energetic chef who is always yelling.”

Emeril invited him to return the next week—and the next. “I started to work as his apprentice. I worked side by side with him,” Osofsky says.

“I saw a sparkle in his eye,” Emeril explains. At the restaurant, Osofsky learned how to craft his signature style. “He would cook dishes for his family and transform what he learned to his own interpretation,” Emeril says. “He learned a new path in life—cooking—and how it is all about people.”

In 1999, Osofsky garnered Louisiana high school chef-of-the-year honors—and turned down Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts to attend Stanford. On the Farm, he has helped the head chef in Florence Moore create low-fat recipes, redesigned the menu for the Mexican-food eatery at Tresidder and cooked for his friends— including a meal of sunflower seed-crusted panéed chicken, roasted Yukon gold potatoes and bananas Foster for a freshman dormmate and his date.

“I want cooking to be part of my life, but not the central part,” says Osofsky, who is majoring in psychology and plans to go to graduate school. “Emeril told me to go get a full education.” As always, Osofsky listened.

—Nancy Farghalli, ’97, MA ’98