ISP in the USA

Visits to the United States are a common item on the busy agendas of the ISP directors and faculty members. These trips are a manifestation of the Seminar's fundamental belief in the vital role played by deliberate, personal action to affect change in the world. Reinhold Wagnleitner, a professor at the University of Salzburg and a perennial faculty member of the ISP sessions, will be revisiting the United States once again to give his celebrated lecture entitled "Jazz: the Classical Music of Globalisation". Wagnleitner is an esteemed commentator on American history and an avid jazz enthusiast, and each of these passions is on display in his presentation, which neatly demonstrates the transnational cultural exchange exemplified by jazz music. In earlier iterations of this performance, which has been described by multiple audiences as an exercise in "infotainment," Wagnleitner has assayed lecture in conjunction with his brother Gunter and alternately with pianist Tom McDermott, who is featured in the current national tour.

The format of the presentation is intentionally simple, such that the creativity and import of its message are highlighted. Wagnleitner will conduct a survey of the history of jazz music, with particular reference to its spirit of rebellion, its potential as a tool of unification, and its global appeal. McDermott's performances of thematically relevant jazz pieces pepper the lecture, which, combined with Wagnleitner's flair for showmanship, serves to supplement the archetypically dense university lecture with a unique emotional appeal.

Wagnleitner will also showcase another of his keynote lectures, entitled "The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance". This piece is decidedly of a more formal bent, as it provides a broad compilation of and commentary on some extra-national views of the United States. A thoroughly researched production, this presentation includes some startling statistical figures, provocative news items, poignant interview statements, insightful pop culture materials, and a massive amount of otherwise disparate information which correlates with the topic of the United States' tumultuous image over the past decade.

The information listed below is of three kinds. First, an outline of the tour dates and sites can be found, along with the type of lecture that will be given on that occasion. Following that list is a brief directory which contains the contact persons at each respective institution. Any interest in attending a performance, including further questions and reservation requests, should be directed to those listed. Finally, there are several links that will direct you to additional information on Wagnleitner, including his website and recent book regarding jazz music. Comments to this blog entry will also be answered promptly in order to facilitate anyone interested in attending one of the dates on the tour. The Seminar extends its warmest congratulations and best wishes to both Reinhold Wagnleitner and Tom McDermott, as they embark on yet another exciting trip around the United States!

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List of tour dates:

2 February 2009
Tarrant County College District South Campus, Fort Worth, Texas

“The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance"

3 February 2009
Tarrant County College District North East Campus, Fort Worth, Texas
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

5 February 2009
Houston Community College, Texas
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

5 February 2009

Houston Community College, Texas

“The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance”

10 February 2009
Santa Monica College Main Campus, Santa Monica, California
“The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance”

10 February 2009
Santa Monica College Performing Arts Campus, Santa Monica, California
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

11 February 2009
Santa Monica College; Main Stage Theater, Santa Monica, California
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

12 February 2009
San José State University, Salzburg Program
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

16 February 2009
San José State University, Salzburg Program
“The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance”

18 February 2009
Richland College, Dallas
“Satchmo Meets Amadeus” featuring Tom McDermott

18 February 2009
Richland College, Dallas
“The United States of America and the World: Views from a Distance”

19 February 2009
Richland College, Dallas
Informance: “Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization” featuring Tom McDermott

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For more information or for ticket inquiries, please contact:

Tarrant County Community College

CAROLYN.CARNEY@tccd.edu; JANE.HARPER@tccd.edu;

Houston Community College
kent.mcgaughy@hccs.edu; linda.cook@hccs.edu

Santa Monica College
NEVEAU_JUDY@smc.edu;

San José State University
reckmeyer@sbcglobal.net

Richland College
stevem@dcccd.edu; GNapoles@dcccd.edu;

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Additional Resources:

Book: Satchmo Meets Amadeus by Reinhold Wagnleitner

Website: Satchmo Meets Amadeus by Reinhold Wagnleitner

Visit Us: Reinhold Wagnleitner

Tom McDermott

Salzburg Global Seminar

D. Travis Campbell

Every New Dawn

Since November of last year, Mr. Steven Salyer and Mr. Edward Mortimer have contributed their time and efforts to crafting several blog entries which have aimed at inspiring a dialogue around the new American president. I feel as if I have so many hopes for this new administration, that a short comment would sound rushed and would exhaust the reader. But while I refrained from comment on those two posts, I do believe that the prompt is well-taken. Below is a post imported from my personal blog, regarding some thoughts on the impending inauguration of a new leader, and hopefully, of a different prospect for my future.

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"I am not asking you to believe in my ability to bring about 

real change. I am asking you to believe in yours." 

--Barack Obama

The first hours of the day always start out the same. Externally, there is always a bit of a haze, because the light has been shut out for a long while, and the sky is just being allowed to breathe again. Things begin to wake up again, to stretch their arms and to blink their sleep-stung eyes, and to extract themselves from their lethargy. There is a burst of color now, where there was once only opaque streetlight, or darkness. And now, once again, there are options. Internally, some transitions are taking place, but the most important ones are in secret. Getting out of bed because the light is breaking the curtain, everyone can see that happening. But what is different about this day in particular, when it is set against all the other early mornings which have come before it? If the calendar simply flips and another dawn comes, the day skirts away from you without notice or consideration, and then the light speeds away, then you have lost something dear and uncommon: a new chance.

Today is the occasion of the inauguration of Barack Obama, or, as most people seem to conceive of it, it is the last day that George Bush will hold office in the United States. It has been my experience that the reaction is categorically positive, but even so, there is a tremendous amount of gradation. I have spoken to some people who seem to feel that the switch can be nothing but positive, and yet are wary that the promises which have been made far exceed the degree and the quantity that will be possible in the near future. Some people are optimistic about the new president as a person, but are not confident that he, even in concert with other governmental leaders, can rectify the drastic situation in which find ourselves economically and politically. Yet others still profess total faith that Obama will rebuilt and steady the great ship which has been steered astray, torn at by the choppy sea and wrecked upon ancient boulders. For my part, I am not sure that I buy into any of these viewpoints, but that is my general position as a skeptic. I am neither sure that the drive behind any of these beliefs truly matters, considering the sort of world that I would favor. 

The concept of America as the dominant power--or maybe even as a world power--is obsolete. It is laughable, quite literally, when politicians talk about restoring the United States to supremacy: that rhetoric holds absolutely no weight with the academics I have met here, who suggest unwaveringly that the arrogance and blindness of our governmental leaders is the exact reason that what they say will happen, will not. Communitarianism and continent-nations in the vein of the EU are coming, and it is simply embarrassing: the assertion that a nation with nearly one-thousand military bases, the third-lowest opinion rating, an atrocious economy, the 15th best access to high-speed internet, and a pitiful healthcare crisis will be restored because we have the liberal thinking sufficient to have elected a black man to be president. With the global economic downturn and the morass in the Middle East, both of which are commonly linked to a negative perception of America specifically, the incredible animosity that most of the world otherwise feels towards our nation is immediately evident as an American abroad. A bar fight erupted in Old Town, and the Austrian student I was chatting with mentioned, upon hearing one of the combatants yelling in a Slavic language, "I'm surprised he's not American." Two students from the Fachhochschule asked me if Bush was kidding about not having decided about evolution, and then looked at each other uncomfortably when I apologized for him. It seems as if almost everyone else in the world is uneasy having the United States around.

And the academy knows it. Several of the presentations that we have seen so far have showcased some staggering statistics about the image of America in Europe and Asia. The surveys revealed that those asked cared more for North Korea and Russia than for the United States; they believed that the second biggest shame of the Bush administration, and second leading contributor to a negative view of the United States, is the response to Hurricane Katrina; they voted 97.7% for Obama in a global internet poll, while 52% of Americans did. Incidentally, Guantanamo Bay, and the immaterial policies that echo that physical structure, seem to be third. It is not the case, that the American public is doing direct harm to these people who express ardently anti-American sentiments. But look at the statistics. In that global poll, McCain only carried four nations: the Sudan, the DRC, Cuba, and Iran. The United States, based on percentage of votership, would be fifth on this list. This is the crisis, not the strength of our dollar or the morale of the consumer. It is not that we have no power, it is that we have no companions.

But a new dawn breaks, as it tends to, just when things are in their darkest hue. I do not believe that a new presidency and a new year will mean a new prominence. I believe that a change means a chance, and that perhaps the most important first step is a disintegration of the vision that we project on the conditions in the world. Enough with the obsession about being the last best hope for protecting human rights: we are not that. Abandon the notion that we are deserve or achieve full spectrum dominance, politically: we have failed. The good news, though, is that these statuses are wholly irrelevant in the face of challenges that we must address together. A hegemonic attitude is a reversion, and it confounds us. Let us not permit this day to flight before our eyes; I implore you, on behalf of a youth which has a desperate hope for the success of its shared future: let us blink ourselves awake, take the new dawn into our hands, and make this occasion worthy of positive note in our collective memory.

D. Travis Campbell

The Great Shift

The first plenary session of ISP 29 provided some background information about education theory, and about university responses to the shifts in economics and social stressors. I did not know much about higher education as a field of study before arriving in Salzburg, but given my five-year career as a citizen of the California State University system, I considered myself to be qualified to speak about it experientially, and to analyze the lag between producing a problem and identifying it, between identifying it and lumbering to fix it; and moreover, the synapse between the theory and the application is sometimes so incredibly wide, that it rivals the gorge between recognition and rectification. During my term at San Jose State University, I had the fortunate opportunity to participate on a very few faculty-strong panels, to work closely with individual faculty members on academic pursuits, and to provoke some conversation regarding the often unseen bits of university politics: the committees. But I never got to flick on the light and peer around the pedagogical room. I wonder--and wonder is the only verb whose meaning I might pick, because we undergrads are not allowed to know how most decisions on campus are made--how often professors and deans stay static on their theories of higher education simply because choosing to change would be too much work. Certainly, there is a bounty of examples evident to students which make us say to each other, Why does no one address this? How can it be that they cannot see this imbalance or the other, this deficiency, that flaw? And if they can hear, why don't they listen?

Tish Emerson, who lectured on the nature of university politics, mentioned quite poignantly that "moving from the edges to the center doesn't just change you, it changes the center." In context, Emerson seemed to be charging the university faculty in attendance with actively engaging the groups who currently rest on the "fringes" of the institution. As the conversation around developing this archetype of "student as global citizen" begins to build momentum and to take a discernible shape, this mandate is an important one to keep in mind. After all, it seems to me that if there is a fringe, we must infer that there is some group that is less welcome and perhaps included less often than others. And if we exclude some types some of the time, how, then, can we consider ourselves to be global citizens? This prescription seems to be self-evident to me, and it met with general affirmation from each of the audience members; it was certainly worth making public, so that the idea remains in the forefront and acts as a lens through which to scrutinize the projects that each university will produce.

But surely, when the term "fringe" comes about, we cannot settle for thinking that this is a reference to one economic class or religious sect or cultural background; it is not a term that necessarily recalls an academic discipline or sexual orientation, a language or belief or a custom or any other political stripe. I fall into the traditionally empowered set of virtually every classification, so I am certainly not in a position to complain about personal disenfranchisement. But in my experience, when the university is the setting, sometimes the "fringe" group is the students themselves. 

The awkward part for students, I feel, is that much of the important activity takes place behind a sort of administrative curtain, which shrouds from student input all of those decisions which will result in drastic changes to student life. It was my tiny experience that I had a voice, that its use was encouraged, and that its quality was nurtured. But many of my peers, who eventually became frustrated by the confusing maze that can be university bureaucratic procedure, simply grew tired of using that voice to affect any sort of change on our own behalf. I very often felt that I could raise a concern, but that it was as if I was talking into a pillow: the hum of my concern was inaudible, and it went unheeded. I realize that as struggling undergraduates, we may not be able to provide sharp and critical commentary on the university's current or proposed pedagogy, but we are certainly able to tell how the decisions that the faculty make are affecting our days on campus, the quality of our degrees, and our general satisfaction with the institution. It is manifest that we, the students, have neither the training nor the experience to be able to make high-level decisions, but should we not have input? If the administrators are to take Emerson's advice, perhaps the first step would be something of an inventory of all major panels to whom it is charged to make influential policy decisions, and to then examine how much input students are able to offer to the panels; or alternatively, take account of how many of the staple committees in academic affairs or student affairs are chaired by faculty who are champions of student affection, instead of an administrator with whom no student can identify? I just loved my experience at San Jose State. The degree of diversity that I experienced there, culturally and ideologically, was fantastic. My most fervent wish for that institution--and any like it--is that future students will be able to reflect on their tenures, and feel that they were mixed into the center, a part of what the university was.

D. Travis Campbell

Our Fireside Chat

"...and so we beat on, boats against the current,
borne ceaselessly back into the past..."
--F.S. Fitzgerald

After the welcome reception, a group of the academic insomniacs at the Seminar gathered near the fireplace in the Great Hall. A welcome break from the usual grind which mostly takes place in front of a computer, this chat, which turned into a four-hour demi-debate mostly about international politics. I wish I had a more exact means of recording the content so that my review of the event would have some context, but burying my face in a computer or a moleskin would have sort of an effect opposite from the one I was glad to have achieved.

For the majority of the night, I was the only recent undergraduate student; a few of my colleagues are currently pursuing masters degrees in Europe, so their extended insight stood as a pleasant supplement to my own. Others, who had been or are currently professors, have such a comprehensive knowledge of world events and global political stressors that they seem to speak in a unique language. Interestingly, I heard a great deal of recollection and criticism of historical circumstance, which was often mitigated by an analysis of the way in which those events--and even people, mirrored, and in some cases--foreshadowed, ones that we currently face.

One idea, presented originally by my direct boss and brilliantly creative thinker David Goldman, kept resurfacing. It sounded Orwellian to me, but the scrutiny that the ardent student historian provided proved the archetype to be historically tenable, and hardly just a literary device. Whereas in the past the United States (and to some extent, Europe) had an enemy with a illuminable visage--that is, that it has generally been the case that we could point to a picture of who our enemy is, what he looks like, those issues which he holds to be important and true--the current administration and indeed world now face several respective enemies which are either intangible or or undefinable. An attempt to describe exactly which sorts of things we are fighting politically, for example, seems to be like trying to capture a morning fog with a butterfly net. This is to say nothing of our often maligned military pursuits, our confusing--and for me, virtually incomprehensible!--economic peril, and more broadly, our philosophical positions as ethical agents who must lead as well as apologize.

Another of the men in our group, Reinhold Wagnleitner, who is a perennial ISP faculty, American studies scholar, prime historian, and native Austrian, talked a great deal about the difference between the culture in the United States regarding voting for an issues or a candidate versus the idea that "the Europeans" have of how Americans actually think about those things. For example, he recalled, that even in a conservative Austria, there was a great deal of shock--followed closely by terror, I would imagine--in 2004 when Bush was re-elected. Reinhold outlined that the European electorate would never imagine that an American electorate would consider issues such as abortion rights, gay rights, and so-called "family values" when voting for a commander-in-chief. These are, conversely, the exact issues on which Bush ran his moderately successful platform for re-election; unimportant were his failure in Iraq and largely with any international government relations, his ignorance regarding climate control and environmental concerns, and his confounding stubbornness around the area of rational intellectual process versus stark religious adherence.

Another of the men and perhaps one of my chief mentors academically was Jochen Fried, a scholar whose repute exceeds even my aspiration. The words that the man chooses to use seem to be selected without effort but with great exactitude, and one of these words was "boldness". Jochen used the term to describe a hypothetical strategy which he and I, lone vocal islands in a group of eight, believed Obama may pursue: drop the wars in the Middle East, adopt a bit of an conscious isolationist strategy, and effectively declare to those unsettled and restless nations, "Fine, then: you deal with it, and consider us now left out". In my thinking, our interest in the countries with which we do not currently enjoy very diplomatic relations would now be fundamentally reactionary, in terms of foreign policy: we are willing when they are, any aggression will be addressed post hoc, and otherwise, we are now otherwise occupied with issues which are more likely to benefit from our concern with them (considering further that our isolation is also an acknowledgement that we are not wanted, and that we should therefore refrain from interference where we are not welcome).

I followed with a speculation that was mentioned as radical, a term which is generally a good check that I've made a comment worth making. Jochen, I saw, smiled at several points during offerings such as these. In considering the breadth of challenges that face us, I suggested that we might have fallen victim to an iteration of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. In other words, whereas a traditional false dilemma fallacy posits that there are only two solutions to a problem which has many, and then condemns one of the solutions so that the speaker's alternative is portrayed as the only favorable course, this manifestation of the pesky fallacy creates the illusion that there are two alternatives which are pursuable and result-bearing, when in fact there is only one: to address one of the many impending issues that affects human beings categorically. These, which I suggested we might think of as meta-issues, would have a greater potential to yield results, or, conceived differently, absolutely must yield a result lest some sort of drastic and devastating change come about. Upon pursuing a solution to one of these meta-issues, we might, through our posture or our rhetoric, demonstrate: do you see the way in which we, the superpowers in this small world, are working on your behalf as well as ours? And we may challenge: now, what is it that you are protesting? Against whom do you now fight, and should you? It is this sort of realignment of the nexus of goals and ideology that will necessarily undermine any Nietzschean slave mentality aimed at tearing down the nations which control world processes, and similarly, will embolden any country or people whatsoever to achieve something which has not before been conceived: to fight alongside one another out of need, to imagine self-defense as confederacy with present enemies, because the goal has been changed.

D. Travis Campbell

ISP 29 and 30 Overview

The strand of the Salzburg Global Seminar which currently employs me is called the International Study Program, hereafter referred to as ISP. The 29th constellation of this program convened this January 6-13th, and was comprised of faculty and administrators from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and members of the Appalachian College Association (ACA). A year prior, they had been charged with the project of transforming their campuses into sites of global citizenship; this meeting signified the second time that they had assembled their teams at the Seminar in order to forward their talks. For the next twelve months, those teams, which are supported by grants from the Mellon Fellow Community Initiative, will do the work that I imagine as the necessary evil related to many tasks at university: the often sluggish process of paring down plans, garnering assets and stakeholders, and most importantly, securing the approval of their trustees and planning boards, such that these global citizenship programs are irreversible.  

In order to guide them a bit at this stage of their conceptualization, we offered six plenary sessions of various persuasions. The details of those sessions, along with some commentary of them, will be the subject of many of my impending blogs.

The institutions included in that first cohort are:

Bennett College for Women (HBCU)

Brevard College (ACA)

Clark Atlanta University (HBCU)

Dillard University (HBCU)

Ferrum College (ACA)

Fisk University (HBCU)

King College (ACA)

Lees-McRae College (ACA)

Mars Hill College (ACA)

Morehouse College (HBCU)

Spelman College (HBCU)

University of Charleston (ACA)

Warren Wilson College (ACA)

West Virginia Wesleyan College (ACA) 

Xavier University of Louisiana (HBCU)

This week--indeed, the process that is unfolding around me at the present, while I update you here--is called ISP 30. The focus of this congregation is identical, but serves to broaden the reach and underscore the mission established by the institutions invited for ISP 29. In this iteration of the ISP, 12 entirely new schools from the HBCU and ACA systems have sent faculty who are now just beginning to learn about the theory and strategy behind conceptualizing a university program related to globalization or international studies. All told, ISPs 29 and 30 will have hosted nearly 100 faculty, staff, and administrators from 27 different schools; each institution has a unique goal and plan, but several of them appear to be interested in acting as a confederate in order to make maximum use of financial and institutional resources during this time of pecuniary instability. 

The second cohort:

Alderson-Broaddus College (ACA)

Bethune-Cookman College (HBCU)

Bluefield College (HBCU)

Carson-Newman College (ACA)

David & Elkins College (ACA)

Emory & Henry College (ACA)

Howard University (HBCU)

North Carolina Central University (HBCU)

Shaw University (HBCU, will attend in 2010)

Tusculum College (ACA)

University of the District of Columbia (HBCU)

Wheeling Jesuit University (ACA)

As a student, I am very pleased to hear that professors and presidents care so much about addressing a much maligned area of many university curriculums, and I am encouraged by the progress that has been made toward that end. When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, I was sometimes overwhelmed by the feeling that there was no one outside of the student body itself who truly cared about the wishes and interests that were so dear to the students who attended the university. My impression was often that faculty were so busy with research or with tenure-track pursuits, that they often snubbed efforts that I made to get to know them, to travel to other local universities and to take advantage of their resources, or to otherwise broaden the scope of possibilities afforded to us as fervent members of the academy. These ISP sessions give me the acute impression that there is a simmering intent to establish this sort of connection with students, and what is more, that it has an orientation: I heard many times that faculty wanted to create something that was both fresh and enduring, because they had the distinct notion that their versions of this sort of program had the power to change students' lives. Such was the investment in their voices that I was frequently moved during their presentations; but more lingering still is the feeling of hope that I have, that in a decade or more, the plans which have been developed here will be steadfast monoliths on each campus, which will allow for inter-institutional and inter-national collaboration on scale which, as it blooms, grows ever more vital.

If you are interested in learning a bit more about the distribution of these schools, we have created a Google map with each of the 27 institutions represented. To the left of this map, the schools are listed again, each with a hyperlink to its own webpage. The orange points are participants from ISP 29, while the blue points represent those invited for ISP 30.

D. Travis Campbell

A Fond Hello

The breadth of influence that a person has remains hopelessly tiny, if each of us commits only to whisper quietly to his peers from atop a unique and distant pillar. For all the rustle of activity in the world, and all of the obfuscation created by the errors of history and conflicts of the present, there is no response which can find its legs and gather velocity, unless we act in balanced confederacy against the problems that are manifest before us. As an aspiring writer in the areas of philosophy and international law, I intuit that these are truths which I believe because, in some way, I must: in order to believe that there is hope for change, I must also believe that there is a means to affect it. It is my humble impression that this blog is founded tacitly upon that principle, and it is with this approach in mind that I am honored to contribute.

By way of introduction, I am currently an intern for the International Study Program (ISP) at the Salzburg Global Seminar, and I have been asked to chronicle the events of ISPs 29 and 30, as well as other proceedings of the Seminar. It is my great pleasure to invite you to read both my posts, which are intentionally personal, and to monitor the posts made by my dedicated colleagues. I implore anew each reader follow along on this blog, but also to comment, and thus to give a voice to a viewpoint which would otherwise be screamed in solitude, alone and abandoned on its solitary pillar: permit this blog to be your connection to each other, to this process, and to our shared future. 

D. Travis Campbell

Countdown to Inauguration Day

Dear Salzburg Fellows around the world,

Greetings and Happy New Year!

Eight weeks have gone by since Session 458 - The US in the World: New Strategies for Engagement - was together in Salzburg, and in less than two weeks President Obama will be making his inaugural address.

I hope most of you have seen, and I know many of you have joined, the conversation about US foreign policy which Stephen Salyer launched from Salzburg on November 14. (http://salzburgglobal.blogspot.com/2008/11/salzburg-on-capitol-hill-join.html)

If so, you will know about the briefing we gave to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington on November 19, and the memo and video based on your work which we presented to that and other audiences. The above links will refresh your memory, as will this cartoon sent in by Volha Charnysh which I think beautifully captures its spirit.



Of course a lot has happened in those eight weeks – including a lot more depressing economic news, and the even more depressing conflict in Gaza with its terrible human cost. The challenges facing the new US president on January 20th and after seem if anything even more formidable and more urgent than they did in November.

Therefore I am writing now to invite you all to send in your updated suggestions for President Obama's first acts in office, from the economic stimulus package, to a possible statement on Guantanamo, to the war in Gaza or whatever you believe is most urgent. Please enter those thoughts in the comments section we have created for this purpose. We will then compile them into a news item which we will post on our main website and send to all the influential policy-makers whom we have access to.

I look forward eagerly to reading what you have to say.

Edward Mortimer
Senior Vice-President & Chief Programme Officer
Salzburg Global Seminar