Beating a Track—to Michigan and Back Exchange Program Is a Boon for Postdocs and Profs—and Oberlin Students by Anne C. Paine May 19, 2003 For Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Timothy Van Compernolle, moving to Oberlin required quite an adjustment. A newcomer to the world of liberal arts colleges, Van Compernolle, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Kansas, was accustomed to far larger academic communities. "When I look out my window here I see so few people, except when classes are changing," he says, gazing at the view of an empty sidewalk from his first-floor office in the King Building. "It was very disconcerting at first, until I realized that there is an intellectual community here. You just can't see it walking past your office window." Van Compernolle is one of three postdoctoral fellows currently teaching at Oberlin as part of the Oberlin-Kalamazoo-University of Michigan (OKUM) exchange program. The other two fellows, Zaje Harrell and Peter Kalliney, teach in the psychology department and the English department, respectively. (Kalliney was interviewing for a permanent teaching position and was unavailable for an interview for this story.) Devised in 2001, the exchange program was the brainchild of Clayton Koppes, dean of Oberlin's College of Arts and Sciences, and James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan. Ben Schiff, professor and chair of the politics department, oversees the program on the Oberlin campus. In addition to bringing recent Ph.D. recipients to teach at Oberlin, the program provides professional development opportunities for Oberlin professors at the Ann Arbor campus. Kalamazoo College has similar arrangements with the university. For the postdocs at Oberlin, the fellowships provide two years in which to continue research, to publish, and to bolster teaching experience, all of which enhance resumes in the tight higher-education job market. Oberlin students benefit from the postdocs' fresh insights and outlooks. Van Compernolle, for example, is completing his last semester at Oberlin and has accepted a tenure-track position at the College of William and Mary, a decision that was heavily influenced by his experience here, he says. In his time at Oberlin, he has written a book review, and he expects to finish transforming his dissertation into a book manuscript before he leaves town. In teaching, he used a recently published and highly regarded new translation in his seminar on The Tale of Genji, an 11th-century work of fiction. "This must have been one of the first courses in the U.S. to use this translation," says Suzanne Gay, professor and chair of the East Asian studies department. Harrell, who specializes in health psychology, particularly substance abuse in women, is just in the second semester of her fellowship, but she's already offered a graduate-school-like experience to her psychology students. "I put together a lab group of four students last semester," she says. "This is the model used in graduate school—it's like an intellectual work group. In a larger school, this wouldn't be possible. The undergraduates would only get to meet with the graduate students, and rarely with the professors." Both have appreciated Oberlin's academic environment. "You can pretty much throw an issue out on the table and the students run with it," says Van Compernolle. "The most fascinating thing I've found is how much students here love to study Japanese premodern literature. It takes arm-twisting elsewhere to get students to study this literature, but here the students really get excited about confronting something foreign." Harrell, who did her undergraduate work at Spelman College in Atlanta, is happy to return to a liberal-arts setting. "Students here use office hours and come in to talk with you about things other than course work, about ideas. There's a much more intense intellectual exchange here—the students crave that," she says. For Oberlin professors, the OKUM program provides equally valuable opportunities, and four have participated to date. Oberlin cannot support a faculty as large as that at a research university, and frequently a professor here is the sole expert in his or her specialty. The OKUM program gives Oberlin professors access to professional colleagues with the same academic specialization, as well as to facilities and resources unavailable at Oberlin. Professor of Religion and East Asian Studies James Dobbins was Oberlin's faculty pioneer in the program. He spent several days a week in Ann Arbor during the spring 2002 semester, working in the Asian languages and cultures department. An expert in Japanese Buddhism, he was researching a handbook on Japanese Buddhist art. "I'm trying to write this handbook from a religious viewpoint rather than an art history viewpoint," Dobbins says. The book will help him bring more art into his Oberlin classes and "will help students examine Buddhist iconography and understand what it means in Buddhist beliefs and practices." In addition to using U-M's extensive East Asian library, Dobbins attended lectures and met scholars in related fields at the U-M Center for Japanese Studies. But perhaps most important, he strengthened his professional contact with U-M Professor Robert H. Scharf, a scholar of Chinese Buddhism. "When I had an idea that I wanted to bounce off someone, I'd go talk to him. He also put me on to some published materials I was not aware of," Dobbins says. Three Oberlin professors worked at U-M this semester: Lynne Bianchi (neuroscience), David Cleeton (economics), and Paula Richman (religion). Bianchi, whose research focuses on the workings of the inner ear, continued a collaboration with Kate Barald from the U-M cell and developmental biology department, Michael Uhler from the U-M biological chemistry department, and Margaret Lomax of the Kresge Hearing Institute. Their work—trying to identify a protein that promotes growth of the embryonic inner ear—is also funded by the National Institutes of Health. The collaborative project utilized the strengths of both institutions and compensated for where each falls short. Barald's lab has the resources to grow cell lines; Bianchi's lab is equipped to do preliminary tests for biological activity and biochemical analysis and has the personnel to maintain cell culture assays; and Uhler's lab has the facilities to do advanced biochemical analysis of the most promising cell lines. Cleeton's work in Ann Arbor focused on the European Union Center on the U-M campus. A specialist in international business, he attended an international economics seminar there given by Paul De Grauwe, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium and a leading expert on European monetary union, as well as a conference on enlarging the European Union. He also attended a tax conference at the U-M law school. Cleeton heads the Oberlin-in-Europe Euro Summer School, and the knowledge he gained will directly affect the material he presents in his Introduction to International Business course, taught each summer at the University of Maastricht in The Netherlands. Richman went to U-M to work on a study examining the political impact of the Ramayana in South India during the mid-20th century. The Ramayana is one of Hinduism's two preeminent epics. Her current research focuses on C. Rajagopalachari, Mohandas Gandhi's leader in the non-violence movement in South India. In January, Richman attended a lecture sponsored by the university's South Asia Center and the Institute of International Studies. The speaker, Rajmohan Gandhi, is the grandson of both Mohandas Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari. In a fortuitous turn of events, she ended up sitting next to the guest of honor at a dinner after the lecture, and they discussed her ideas and interpretations. "He had lots of direct personal experience with some of the issues I was researching, and he read my chapter and gave me very helpful comments on it," Richman says. External research is essential to professors' professional development as well as to keeping Oberlin's curriculum current, according to Dobbins. "It's just part of the practice of keeping up and bringing new knowledge and perspectives to the classroom. It's important to get away from Oberlin when we do research, so we don't just have an insular view. We bring those changing views to our students and enrich our classes," he says. Related Link: Oberlin Launches Innovative Collaboration with University of Michigan (Around the Square, June 2001 issue)