"Making Connections" by Eva J. Pell (September 1999)
Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. That’s one of the most important lessons I try to impart to my students. It’s a rule that has defined my own career, guiding me into some uncomfortable positions out of which have emerged some really exciting directions for my work.
"The Transformation" by Lynne Goodstein (January 1999)
In my second year at the City University of New York, I participated in a graduate student research conference and was transformed. Before my talk, I was a student. Afterward, I was a researcher.
"Women’s Health" by Nancy Marie Brown (May 1998)
The four of us like to lunch. We hit the buffet about once a month, where the potato freak among us can have her fill and the other, who’s perpetually dieting, won’t shame us by ordering "steamed vegetables, no sauce," and I can have two helpings of dessert, if I please, one chocolate, one not, with my two pots of hot tea. We eat, a lot or a little, according to our natures, and we talk: a lot. Always we talk a lot.
"In Up to the Elbows" by Dana Bauer (September 1998)
My father is a chemist. Growing up, I only had vague notions of what he did during his long hours in lab. "I’m up to my elbows in ink," he would joke. It wasn’t until college, when a boyfriend of mine tried to spark a dinner-table conversation, that I learned the details of my father’s research. The short version: he makes ink for ink-jet printers. But when he explained his work, his eyes grew wide with intensity and he pounded the table. I never knew. While writing for this magazine, I met undergraduates who are just as excited about their research.
"Our Place in the Universe" by Nancy Marie Brown (September 1997)
The hour before sunrise I find best for writing. Roll out of bed, shrug into a cardigan, stumble to the kitchen to light the kettle--give or take a quarter hour, I’ll be at my desk by five, one hand clutching a hot cup of tea, the other tapping a mechanical pencil or, more often in the last year or so as the technology has grown familiar, waggling the trackpoint of a laptop, while the cold and the quiet and the black mirror of the window await the dance of words. One morning last March my routine was interrupted.
"How TV Talkshows Deconstruct Society" by Vicki Abt (March 1996)
If social order is not a given, if it is not encoded in our DNA, then to some extent we are always in the process of producing "virtual realities," some more functional than others. Habits, routines, and institutions are the patterns that create the "world taken for granted." Knowledge of how to behave is contained in cultural scripts that are themselves products of human interaction and communication about the nature of "reality." Shame, guilt, embarrassment are controlling feelings that arise from "speaking the unspeakable" and from violating cultural taboos. Society is a result of its boundaries, of what it will and won’t allow.
"World as Garden, Garden as Self" by Charlotte Holmes (June 1996)
I am a gardener, deep into spring in my third garden, which came to me from its 98-year-old creator when we bought her house last summer. For nearly 70 years, it was Maisie’s garden: it’s been mine for only a few months. The Irish writer Penelope Hobhouse says that "Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent," and, as near as anyone recollects, Maisie was "absent" for about ten years before the stewardship of her garden was transferred to me.
"Have a Plan" by David Shirley (December 1992)
When I look back on a certain incident in my graduate school career, I am amazed by my own behavior. Yet this incident, with its sequel, captures the essentials of graduate education.
"Redefining Research" by Nancy Marie Brown (March 1992)
Master Teacher John Buck was described in our September issue as "known for exciting students" yet "more concerned with how students excite him." We aspire to a similar relationship with our readers.
"Another Reason for Research" by Charles Fergus (December 1991)
In 1980, as a staff writer for Research/Penn State, I walked into Manfred Keune’s office in Burrowes Building. I had no idea our interview would launch me on a project that would take 11 years to complete Ñ a project that would send me to the National Archives in Washington, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Indiana University in Bloomington, and a score of Indian reservations in the West, including a trek to the site where Sitting Bull was killed and where I stumbled onto, and was made a guest at, a Sioux sun dance.
"From the Editor" by Nancy Marie Brown (September 1991)
A letter we received in March began: "It is with both hesitation and sorrow that I call to your attention what I regard as a serious lapse of judgment in the last issue of Research/Penn State."
"On the Profusion of Research Publications" by Larry D. Spence (June 1991)
There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no mythology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusion too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.
"The Mac" by Barbara Anderson-Siebert (September 1990)
I’m not going to be polite about this: I hate computers. I choose the word, "hate," deliberately, knowing it is unacademic. It is a wild word, but it suits my feelings perfectly. To my colleagues in English who warn against offending my audience, I say this: Sometimes a screamis the best rhetorical strategy.
"In the Steps of a Civil War Great-grandfather" by Harlan Berger (June 1989)
The article in our March issue about Civil War historian Gary Gallagher included the story of my great-grandfather William H. Stubbs. Readers searching their Civil War roots have asked how I gathered the Stubbs background.
"From the Editor" by Nancy Marie Brown (December 1988)
When we think of college, most people envision ranks of students diligently taking notes, the startled laughter having just settled out of the air after the professor, a historian of the Middle East, had burst into the lecture hall in a caftan and cried the Islamic call to worship like an apprentice mullah.
"The Face of Heaven" by John Balaban (March 1988)
Di ra mot ngay, ve mot sang khon, goes the Vietnamese proverb: "Go out one day, return with a basket full of wisdom."
"From the Editors" by Nancy Marie Brown (March 1986)
"The University is based on necessary and wrong separations. Your magazine should be an antidote to that."
"Looking at the Global System" by Charles L. Hosler (December 1984)
The entire earth — land, ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere — is a dynamic and interactive system. The parts of the system have been studied, but when we are dealing with acid rain, the red tide, forest growth, groundwater contamination, the depletion of stratospheric ozone, or the greenhouse effect, the interconnected nature of earth, water, and air demands a more holistic approach than has yet been attempted.
"Death of the Word" by Michael H. Begnal (September 1983)
The primary cultural struggle in the 21st century will pit the image against the word.
"How the World Obeys Language" by S. Leonard Rubinstein (September 1982)
When a newborn baby looks out a window, what does it see? It has no apparatus by which to clump together an infinite number of details, package that clump, and dismiss it.
Mouth illustration by James Collins.
