Weissman’s College Talk Podcast– Episode 12 Prof. Eugene Marlow
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Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
Not that many people are capable of excelling in two apparently different professions at the same time. Or at least that’s the assumption in today’s world, when it seems that specialization is the way to go if you want to succeed. Yet, from time to time, we encounter people who are exceptions to the rule.
One of those exceptions is Dr. Eugene Marlow. Even his academic background shows how versatile he can be. He holds a master’s degree in music composition from Hunter College in New York and a doctorate in media studies from New York University.
He was born in London, England, but do not be fooled by that. He does not have a British accent. “I was born into a musical family: my father was a violinist and violist and even played mandolin for a time. He was a composer and arranger towards the end of his life. He was also in the string section of the Frank Sinatra orchestra. My mother studied opera, my grandfather on my father’s side was a cellist, my grandfather on my mother’s side was a cantor and sang opera. So, if you open up my veins, little quarter notes are gonna come out; music is absolutely in my DNA,” he says.
Marlow also has deep roots in journalism. “It happened by accident. When I was twenty, my uncle from England invited me to come over and spend the summer of 1963 with him in England and in the south of France as well. At the time, there was a lot of talk around the world and in the United States about the ‘ugly American.’ I was sitting in a restaurant with my aunt in Cannes, and an American southerner had an attitude and demeanor towards a woman that made me think, ‘This is the ugly American they’re talking about.’”
When he came back to the U.S., he approached the local newspaper, The Riverdale Press, and wrote about this experience in what would become his first published article. “I’ve just continued writing since then. I’ve written several books, written a lot of articles. The music and the articles are not so much composition and journalism as they are different kinds of writing. The notes and the text really go hand in hand,” says Marlow.
Marlow is today a professor in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York.
His writing experience includes stints as a military historian for the Air Force during the Vietnam era, a corporate communications specialist through the video production route, a news editor on trade publications on mass merchandising in New York City and then he ended up at Citibank coproducing a weekly news show using video technology. “That’s how I really got into the video production and the radio production business as well, as it turns out. I ended up in the public relations department at Citibank and then at Prudential Insurance and then at Union Carbide for about seven years. I set up their worldwide video communications network.”
Despite this multifaceted life, he says that he has attempted to spend his life “trying to be authentic at being myself and exploring whatever I was born with, and fortunately I was born with several ways to go, and I attempted to integrate them. I have to say, since I’ve come to Baruch, I’ve been able to integrate all of those things, because I teach Journalism courses in music. At Baruch I’m involved in the Hinton Jazz series, so I’m really able to be myself here,” says Marlow.
Among the things he teaches his students is how information delivery has moved into dangerous territory. “If you read something in the newspaper or in a magazine, there’s much greater depth there.
The unfortunate thing is that we now live in the age of the tweet, where the limit is 140 characters, and everything is short and quick. I think part of the problem with journalism today is that the Internet is making it worse, that people are not getting the kind of in-depth analysis that is really required for a strong democratic process.”
He is also concerned about the way this development is influencing the political process. “The populism that we’re seeing in Europe with Brexit and in Germany and other parts of the world has now come home to roost in the United States. I’m calling it a retreat from the future, and it’s gonna last a while.”
For music he has also developed the capability to play everything from jazz to popular music to classical. “The notes are all the same. Middle C is still middle C, whether it’s classical or jazz or Latin jazz. When you’re writing jazz or you’re writing classical, it’s just a different kind of sensibility, a different kind of a feel. I’ve found myself doing some classical things in a big band piece, and I’ve found myself doing some jazz things in a classical piece,” Marlow continued.
Further, he thinks that the lines between styles have blurred. “The 21st century is not about either classical or jazz or pop; it’s really about world music, so all of these things are being put into the same mix.”
He does not mind performing pieces that have been performed by dozens of other artists. “It’s really about arranging possibilities. If a piece is in 4/4, can it be done in 3/4 time? If it’s an up-tempo piece can it be done as a ballad? And so on. I discover that we can do something as a semi-swing in a blues style because I changed the chords. It’s really just exploring the possibilities.”
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Marlow Has Music and Journalism in His DNA
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This is a video on the upcoming book about the history of the Weissman School of Arts and Science at Baruch College
Weissman School of Arts and Sciences: The Book from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
This is the video version of a radio interview for the show “College Talk” by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. with historian Dr. Katherine Pence on different issues about history as a subject.
The story behind history from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
This video blog is about a panel discussion that took place at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College about the Syrian conflict. This event was organized by the Department of Political Science.
There is trouble in Syria from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
This is the video version of a radio interview by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. with Dr. Gary Hentzi for the show “College Talk” about Daniel Defoe and other English writers.
On Daniel Defoe and other writers from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
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Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
Most people when talking about diversity think of matters revolving around race and gender, and while those are obvious and important topics, the fact of the matter is that the definition of diversity is much larger.
Today diversity is seen in two dimensions. The first one is what is called inherent diversity, the diversity that is beyond people’s control. Obviously, these issues include race and gender, but also include national origin, age, sexual orientation, disability, religious affiliation and socioeconomic status. Certainly, you can change your religious affiliation or socioeconomic status over time, but being raised in a particular religion or under certain economic conditions does give one a different perspective in life.
The second dimension may be less evident, but can be equally important when it comes to job performance. It is called acquired diversity and consists of aspects of one’s life such as cultural fluency, generational savviness, gender smarts, social media skills, cross-functional knowledge, global mindset, language skills and military experience. These are characteristics that are the result of both formal education and life experiences.
Imagine for a moment that you run an engineering firm that has four white males who all graduated from Georgia Tech, one of the top engineering schools in the country.
All those four engineers came from a middle-class family whose parents had gone to college. Now you have the opportunity to hire another engineer who happens to be a minority candidate. Yet, that candidate not only is male, but also comes from a middle-class family and is the son of college-educated parents who also graduated from Georgia Tech. Even if you choose to hire him, you are adding little diversity to your team because that new person is likely to think in very similar ways to the rest of the people already in place.
You may think that such that this really doesn’t matter. After all, you are bringing in a qualified person who most likely will get along well with other people and also brings in racial diversity. What is wrong with that?
Most people don’t realize that a lot of big progress made by humanity has come about by people who think differently from one another – not just look different. That is true even in fields that seem pretty straight from academic viewpoints, such as science. Here are some good examples.
Gregor Mendel is recognized as the father of genetics. He entered the Augustinian order because his family was too poor to afford an education for him. Because the Augustinians supplied teachers to the Austrian schools he was sent to the University of Vienna to study mathematics and physical sciences. While he obtained a very good education in both broad fields, he never trained specifically in biology. Yet, when he started to do his experiments with peas at the Brno monastery in what is today the Czech Republic, his mathematical training allowed him to visualize ratios in the characteristics that were being inherited by the plants he was cultivating. That led him to present and publish in 1865 the hereditary laws for which he is famous today.
Despite the fact that the journal in which he published his ideas was well known at that time (Transactions of the Natural History of Brno) and that he sent his papers to prominent botanists of his time, these naturalists had no training in mathematics and did not understand what he was trying to demonstrate.
It wasn’t until 1900 – 35 years after his research was published –for his work to be recognized by the scientific community. Here is a very good example of someone with an entirely different intellectual toolbox making a revolutionary contribution to science in an area that was not his.
Another similar example involves plate tectonics. Alfred Wegener was a trained meteorologist who could not avoid, while looking at a world map, noticing that the continents fit together as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Using some meteorological data, he proposed in 1912 the idea that all the continents were originally just one that had broken up in pieces, generating the shapes of today’s landmasses. His idea was ridiculed by most fellow scientists of his time, and it took more than a half century to be recognized as correct and acknowledged as one of the most important findings in geological sciences of the 20th century, and all brought by a meteorologist.
Another case is that of Emily Martin. For many decades, biologists believed that sperm competed among themselves to be first to reach the female egg. Martin was not biologist, but rather a social anthropologist who was trained to discover how culture influences our beliefs, even our scientific beliefs.
She challenged the idea of the egg being passive and the sperm being aggressive, which is part of the cultural bias we have toward gender generally. And she was correct. Later research proved that sperm are actually weak, necessitating the need for hundreds of millions of them to fertilize the egg.
The conclusion? We need people with different backgrounds – let’s call it “intellectual diversity” – to produce important breakthroughs. So, yes, many times it takes an outsider to generate progress for humanity.
Those of us in higher education should learn from history and use these examples as a precautionary tale. When hiring new faculty for our college departments we should look carefully for people who are different from those who are already at work, people who are not intellectual clones of ourselves. And that goes far beyond the obvious issues of gender and race.
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Diversity More than Race, Gender in Higher Education
Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
Although English is spoken around the world and is considered the main means of communication in commerce, science, and many other fields, the language has humble origins and a complicated story.
With roots in the southern part of England, drawing from French, German, and Scandinavian languages, English began to spread around the world as the British began colonizing. First it was Wales, then Scotland, Ireland, Australia, the United States, South Africa, India, and elsewhere around the globe.
Dr. Mary McGlynn studies the different forms of English. “There were places that had a native language, like the Caribbean, and then their original languages were replaced or English became the lingua franca; we speak of those places as Anglophone because the speak English,” says McGlynn.
A native of Lubbock, Texas, she came to New York City after getting a bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Her idea when coming to the Big Apple was to study English at Columbia University and that was when she had her first experience of feeling like a foreigner.
“When I came up to New York, I had the experience of sitting in a classroom on my very first day of graduate school; everybody’s doing the introductions, and as I open my mouth to speak, despite not having a very strong accent, I said the word ‘y’all,’ and I could see everybody around the table react,” says McGlynn.
For her that was an eye-opening experience. “There was something about that feeling of your language making you ‘other,’ something that’s invisible when you’re quiet but visible when you speak, that got me very interested particularly in pronunciation, dialect and how that is represented on the page, and that was added to this Irish tradition of experimentation.”
After obtaining two masters and one doctorate degree from Columbia University, she became a world expert in Anglophone culture. “I was always interested in Irish literature from the first moment I read James Joyce. I knew that this was something that I needed to spend time with. Because very often people who are writing dialect fiction are taken to be scribes who are just transcribing what they hear, whereas an experimental tradition is trying something new,” says she.
McGlynn is now an Associate Professor in the Department of English in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York and one wonders how the millennials who attend her classes feel about these issues.
“I’ve taught an entire course on the modern short novel that’s all Scottish novels, and you think, ‘you’re not of this heritage, you don’t know about this place;’ and I think there is such a tendency to believe that area studies are supposed to be a place where you study your own culture, but the students at Baruch have a broader perspective than that,” she says.
“If you ever watched TV shows that are set in different parts of the British Isles,” continues McGlynn, “you see that some of the accents can be very hard to understand for people who are from somewhere else, and sometimes they’ll even be subtitled. Some of that is about pronunciation, and some of it is about real linguistic difference.”
The way we employ language is also a way to showcase authenticity. “The first reaction I have is that I feel the ability of beautiful language to take my breath away comes most from texts where people are writing with a consciousness of their position as somehow on the margin.”
Thus, it is not surprising that her favorite American author is William Faulkner, who wrote from the position of a Southern writer. “Many times great literature actually comes from people who are writing on the peripheries and not from the supposed seats of canonical power.”
She is particularly interested in how English evolved in Ireland and what that means in terms of culture and politics. “I’m teaching an Irish film class. My students do oral presentations after watching horrible Irish movies, things that use Irish characters as stereotypes, and it is something that you can trace really through the entire history of American and British films.”
Many of her students represent multiple cultures. “I don’t think they feel as limited: ‘Oh because I’m Dominican I’m going to take a class in Hispanic studies.’ There’s an openness to explore these things, and also they’re very interested in the colonial analogies. One of the things we see throughout Irish films is the persistent attempt to equate Irish culture and African American culture. So I have a number of students in my class this semester who have become quite interested in the problems with that analogy and the way it doesn’t really work.”
McGlynn is currently working on two different book projects. One is about Irish fiction since the economic crisis and particularly the way that the form of these novels responds to the economic situation. The other is about old detective fiction, an idea she developed while reading that genre during her leisure time.
“I noticed in a lot of British detective novels a discourse of class that looked more to me like the way we talk about class in the United States, this effort to erase class and not talk about it in this very entrenched sense that the British have tended to do over the generations, and you can start to see this even in the 1920’s. And so what I started to look at was the way that the idea of meritocracy starts to replace aristocracy in the British Isles in the 20th century in the detective fiction and in the figure of the detective in particular.”
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McGlynn Studies, Teaches Different Forms of the English Language