Memories of a Mama: Joydeb Mukherjee

Inspired, in part, by Nels' recent "Bricolage" homage to his friend Dave Conz, we are blessed with the following guest post today from Dr. Lopa Basu, Director of the Honors College and English Professor at UW-Stout. 

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Memories of a Mama: Joydeb Mukherjee

In Bengali, the term for a maternal uncle is Mama, phonetically a repetition of Ma the word for mother.  From our earliest nursery rhymes, the intimacy of the place of a maternal uncle’s home is invoked:

Tai Tai Tai

Mamar bari jai

Mamar bari bhari moja

Doi Sandesh Khai

My rough translation:

Clap Clap Clap

We go to our Mama’s house

Mama’s house is a place of great joy

There we eat curds and sweets !

The place of the Mama and his home is a place of freedom, a suspension of the rules and disciplines of everyday school and home life, a place of uninhibited imagination and play. Today, as I write this, I remember that Mamar Bari and the Mama who had such a formative influence in my childhood and with whose death, that figurative place has ceased to exist. As long as my Mama lived, my childhood was still available to me. Today, I feel the burden of adulthood and the inability to escape into another world of imagination and play.

Bricolage

"If you don't have the right equipment for the job, you just have to make it yourself."

–MacGyver

Well, this might be the most difficult blog post for me to write yet.  My office-mate from graduate school and one of my closest friends, Dave Conz, died last week.  When something like that happens you end up thinking a lot about the person's life and what it meant, to you and to others.  Dave offered so much to this world.  He had a doctorate in sociology, a master's degree in humanities, and a bachelor's degree in aerospace studies.  He was a pilot, a motorcycle mechanic, a hobby farmer, a dancer, a welder, a drummer, a skateboarder.  He spoke German.  He made biodiesel and beer from scratch.  And so much more.  Perhaps his biggest contribution intellectually was identifying the constraints and opportunities in modern society to combine a bunch of random ideas and things together to create something extraordinary (per the MacGyver quote above- one of Dave's favorites).  In a lot of ways this is what we are trying to do with the Applied Social Science program- getting students to the point where they combine all the random things they learn in a meaningful and consequential way.  Sociologists (and others) call this "bricolage", and while there is considerable scholarship on this topic I want to take some time ruminating on it in my own way.

Debt, Growth, and the great Excel debacle of '13

Today news broke about an influential economic study being "de-bunked" on several levels, both due to some selective data decisions and also the sexier headline of a mistaken Excel code. (note, the de-bunked link above is to a more readable summary ... for economists or others in the audience that want to read the original critique, that can be found here)

The particular study in question is about a very important topic, particularly in recent policy debates:  the importance of the U.S. debt levels to the overall economy.  We have been locked into an endless cycle of debt ceiling debates, in part fueled by the conclusions of this study and so any suggestion that these findings are questionable could (and should) have major implications for how we think about debt and austerity moving forward. The original authors Reinhart and Rogoff (paper here) essentially found (or claimed to find) that countries with high levels of debt (specifically, a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90% or more) suffered from lower economic growth rates.  These findings have been widely cited by Paul Ryan and others as evidence that austerity plans to reduce the debt are vitally necessary for the health of the economy.  Such claims are now being shown to have been based on some shaky economic foundations.

Why pick on gender studies?

In another post, my colleague Chris Ferguson made excellent points about the value of higher education that goes beyond very narrow job training while still keeping in mind that education is an investment in the future (but an investment of a particular kind).  In that post, he quoted Governor Pat McCrory’s comments about his desire to use public money to fund education that trains people for jobs:

“If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

Chris pointed to the fact that gender studies is singled out but then left it aside hoping that someone would tackle it.  So, here is my two cents on that issue.

Rethinking the cost of higher education

I am late getting around to posting this, but if you follow higher education policy at all, quite a bit of attention has paid recently to the latest governor to weigh in on education reform.  North Carolina's Gov. Pat McCrory (am I the only one that has trouble pronouncing that name?) has caused quite a stir with his comments regarding the value of liberal education.

One thing you should know about citizens of North Carolina is that they take a lot of pride in their excellent universities and colleges (I'm a proud Wake Forest Alumnus, but I would also grudgingly admit that Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Davidson, Elon, NC State, etc are, if not quite as good as Wake, also top notch institutions) and so any remarks disparaging these colleges (or their basketball teams) are likely to draw backlash in the state.