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"We talked of engagements and situations when he had great
success and when we had great success," Petersen recalls. "We
saturated those areas and they had tremendous casualties that we
never knew about. I probed him about his tactics. "On a number of occasions, he'd say, 'I don't know if you're aware of the damage you did to us at various times.' I'd ask, 'How did you slip through?' In many cases they didn't. They stayed. They just kept quiet. They wouldn't fire back. We thought no one was there. But they were. And then when we'd get in helicopters to be extracted, they'd open fire on us. "It was tremendous carnage--awful on both sides," says Petersen. "During those 210 days, I had 16 company commanders for four rifle companies, not because any were relieved, but because they either were killed or seriously wounded." The morning after their dinner meeting, General Vi took Petersen to see a local military museum that featured equipment that had been captured from American troops: rifles, pistols, holsters, radios, belts, cantines, ammo pouches. "It was from us! From our unit," says Petersen. Given the anti-war sentiment that persisted for so many years in the U.S., Petersen has only recently felt comfortable talking about his extraordinarily distinguished military career: two tours of duty in Vietnam, 80 parachute jumps (15 in Vietnam as a captain in a Green Beret unit), and awards and decorations that include two Silver Stars, four Legions of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Bronze Star for Valor. --Neil A. Grauer '69
The "minstrel show" promulgated
My, how far we haven't come. Though the days of actors in
blackface may be long gone, the minstrel show lives on in
American entertainment, according to Spike Lee. The acclaimed
film director (Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Summer of Sam),
who is unrelenting in his treatment of race issues, spoke to a
standing-room-only crowd in Homewood's Shriver Hall in November
as part of the Milton S. Eisenhower
Symposium: "Unfinished Business: Addressing Race, Class, and
Gender at the Turn of the Millennium."
Lee said that both blacks and whites promulgate the "minstrel
show" in which blacks are degraded. Lee took as a current example
The Legend of Bagger Vance, a movie in which Will Smith
(whom Lee admits he does like as a person) plays a mysterious
black visitor to 1930s Georgia, a racially tense time and place,
to say the very least. Lee said, "You come from a higher place,
you come down to Earth with all this injustice and you try to
teach Matt Damon a golf swing? It's the same happy slave." --
By Barbara J. Kiviat '01
An expanded presence in China
With interest in China's role in world affairs ever growing,
Hopkins has launched an Institute for International Research in
Nanjing to draw researchers from across the university and the
nation to study political, social, and economic changes in
China.
The institute, part of the
Hopkins-Nanjing
Center, provides a research base for faculty within China, a
rare commodity in the state-controlled higher education system.
"Initially, the focus will be on social sciences," says Paula
Burger, Hopkins vice provost for academic affairs and
international programs. "But we will also have research
opportunities to look at questions of environmental policy and
other issues."
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The Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which is run by
Hopkins's Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in cooperation with
Nanjing University, was founded more than a decade ago to foster
relations and educational exchange between Chinese and Western
students. To celebrate the opening of the research institute at Hopkins's graduate certificate program in Nanjing, President William Brody in late October paid a visit to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. He was joined by SAIS Dean Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Ambassador to China Joseph Prueher, and other guests, including leaders of corporations that donate to the center and The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, who led a discussion on globalization. Also on their travel itinerary: a rural educational tour of the Guizhou Province, including a village elementary school; the Huangguoshu waterfalls (the largest in China); the Guiyang Tourism School, a public-private vocational school that trains young people for tourism jobs; a mountain golf course and the Maotai distillery; and various Long March sites, including the home where Mao Zedong slept as Nationalist war planes dropped bombs. --Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson
Q&A
Hopkins sociology
professors Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle have conducted one
of the longest-running sociological surveys in the country--the
Beginning School Study. Starting in 1982, they interviewed 800
Baltimore area first-graders about their academic experiences at
school and at home. Nearly 18 years later, they were able to get
back in touch with 80 percent of those students. Now in the midst
of analyzing data, they expect to release research results in the
next year or so. They hope to do a final interview cycle when the
group turns 30. Over the years, they have reported various
findings. Among the most prominent: disadvantaged students are
more likely to lose academic ground, especially in reading, over
the summer months when compared to upper-income students. We
spoke with Alexander one morning about the issue of social
promotion and summer school as possible solutions to the summer
achievement gap and high school dropout rates.
Is there any merit to holding a child back to repeat a
grade?
Alexander: The social science literature has created a dismal
picture of grade retention: repeating a year has been seen as
strongly stigmatizing, and students have identified with failure.
But we saw very little evidence of this when we looked at first
grade through middle school. In general, our kids were doing
better academically after they were held back than they were
before. They got a boost in performance and in terms of attitude
toward self and school.
But students who repeated a grade in our study still seem to be
at a higher risk of dropping out of school. They seem to be so
far behind that the bounce they get that year doesn't fix the
problem. But neither does social promotion--if they are not
performing up to grade level one year, there is little cause to
think they will move on to the next grade and perform up to
grade. We need to look at another way to deal with the issue.
Neither social promotion nor repeating a grade is a very
effective intervention to help struggling children.
What alternatives would you suggest?
One of the obvious things to do is to keep them from falling
behind. Serious problems begin as early as the first grade.
Clearly for these kids the preparation for school is not serving
them well. Students in low-income households in high-poverty
areas are not getting the kind of stimulation and richness of
education in their lives outside of school. Pre-school programs
can prepare readiness. And full-day kindergarten programs
help.Those kinds of supplemental experiences need to be required
on an ongoing basis.
What about summer school as an alternative?
It's better to do summer school ahead of time. A lot of large
city school systems institute mandatory summer school for
children who fall behind; Chicago has done that, but it's done by
the third grade and by the third grade their fate is sealed,
practically. [We need] to find ways of making summer school not
punitive, so that students see the value of what they are doing
and want to participate. It needs to be a rigorous academic
program that emphasizes reading, and has students go to the
library, to museums, and do organized sports that have
entertainment value. We think the best way is to try to make
summer school fun. --Interview by Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson
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FEBRUARY 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
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