President Ed Ray presents OSU undergraduate Matthew Holland with a check for next year’s tuition. Holland won a diversity essay contest earlier this year for “This is My OSU: A Destination of Choice.” Holland is an English major. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

Inspired by his philosophy class, Ethics of Diversity and his professor, Lani Roberts, he says that “from slavery to suffrage to civil rights, the road ahead is not as long as it once was, and we must do our part today,”

Holland, a fifth-year English major, entered the “This is My OSU: A Destination of Choice” diversity essay contest during winter term and spoke passionately about the need for all OSU students to take classes such as Ethics of Diversity.

The contest was created by the Office of Community and Diversity to demonstrate a campus commitment to diversity and to get student input on diversity efforts. It invited OSU students to submit a one-page essay outlining their best idea for making OSU a destination of choice for people who are committed to diversity and inclusion.

The term “Destination of Choice” came from one of President Ray’s University Day speeches and the “This is My OSU” slogan was created by the University Advancement office.

“As we move forward on our ambitious diversity agenda, it is clear that we cannot do everything, and we have to develop priorities,” said Director of the Office of Community and Diversity Terryl Ross. “Student voice is our true north. This essay contest has generated some great ideas.”

The contest yielded 101 essays. The identities of the writers were kept anonymous and 37 students, staff and faculty read the essays. Each essay was read by at least five different people. The top five essays were presented to the campus for “American Idol” style on-line voting in May. President Ed Ray, who served as one of the readers, was impressed with many of the essays.

“I’m glad to see that so many people from different backgrounds took time to participate in the contest,” Ray said. “We are looking forward to implementing some of these creative ideas.”

Holland will graduate in Fall 2010, after studying abroad in Chile this fall. After graduation he plans to attend Marine Officer Candidate School and perhaps graduate or law school.

Holland appreciates that OSU is interested in what students have to say, and encourages others to reach past their comfort zone and get to know people and experiences that are different from their own. He encourages others to embrace the opportunity to take Ethics of Diversity and other classes from OSU’s nationally recognized Difference Power and Discrimination program.

You can read Holland’s award winning essay and those of the other finalists at http://oregonstate.edu/diversity/.The Office of Community and Diversity is seeking participants in an “Ethics of Diversity” class which will be taught by Lani Roberts M-Th, 10 a.m.-noon, Aug. 3-Aug. 27. This class is being offered to all OSU faculty and staff, free of charge, as a follow-up to the “This is My OSU: A Destination of Choice” diversity contest. If you are interested in participating, please contact Corrine Gerig at 54-1-737-4381 or Corrine.Gerig@oregonstate.edu by July 24. Thirty people are needed to conduct this class. Space is limited, participants will be selected on a first come, first served basis.

~ Diane Davis

Linus Pauling, Nobel prize winner who used to teach at OSU, was a big fan of humor. (archival image courtesy of OSU archives)

“We have a lot of humor in the English department,” said Kerry Ahearn, associate professor and chair. “We’re all children of Mark Twain and Tina Fey here – Mrs. Twain notwithstanding.”

Teaching an appreciation of the humor in literature, he says, is a difficult task.

“I think comedy is like good silver – if you handle it much, it starts to tarnish,” he said. “In general, scholarship to my mind usually kills humor. I risked this many times, as when I’ve taught Twain and even Faulkner – who can be screamingly funny. I’ve killed Twain for decades. Twain, who saw pork-barrel politics and wrote, ‘Let’s say I’m an idiot. Let’s say I’m a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.’”

Ahearn said comedy is something to be prized.

“I tell students, ‘If you find great comedy, send it to me.’ Because writing humor is so hard – you can’t be a pretender. Hundreds have written tragedies. Comedy is infinitely more rare.”

Tracy Daugherty, distinguished professor of English, recently published “Hiding Man,” a biography of author Donald Barthelme, whom Daugherty says was “very much a humorist.”

“The most important thing about comedy is timing,” Daugherty says. “One thing I did was analyze the rhythm of Barthelme’s sentences. For humor, a sentence can’t be too long, or you lose the joke. If it’s too short, a reader doesn’t have time for the joke to register… Humor is Barthelme’s mode of seriousness – a way of slipping in very important ideas.”

Daugherty finds that teaching students about humor isn’t always easy.

“So much depends on context. If you’re teaching literature, reading works from several decades ago can be problematic: students may not get the humor when they don’t understand the context. For instance, I was teaching ‘Libra’ by DeLillo. In a passage about newspaper coverage of the JFK assassination, he showed how so many articles were about what Jackie was wearing. I wanted students to catch the absurdity. But one student came up to me after class and asked ‘Is that really how Kennedy died – he was shot?’”

Even when the topic of a course isn’t humor-related, throwing in a few jokes sometimes helps a professor relate to students.
“Humor is critical to my outreach and education work towards healthy aging,” said Sharon Johnson, associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Health and Human Sciences.

Her courses, presentations, monthly cable TV show and weekly online and print column depend on humor to get the information across. And in addition, she helps people understand the dynamics of humor.

“I am always looking for a light-hearted approach. When people laugh, they start breathing better. And when they breathe better, they are cognitively more receptive to the information I’m giving.”

Johnson also has a full presentation titled “Laughter – the Healing Power.” In it, she analyzes and demonstrates types of humor: parody, satire, slapstick, nonsense, black, dry, puns and sarcasm. She presents various theories on what makes us laugh, and why.

“I get invitations to speak to organizations of community-dwelling older adults. When I list my possible topics, they usually want the one about laughter – especially lately in these economic times.”

Jon Lewis of English focuses on film and cultural studies, including comedy in film. In fact, his dissertation was on comedy in film. He said it’s hard to talk about what’s funny in an analytic way.

“The minute you start to investigate, it kind of destroys it,” he said. So instead, he places comedy within a historical framework.
“For instance, in silent film the humor is completely crude,” he said. “There’s Chaplain selling hotdogs from a cart on the street: the comedy is sexual, physical, plays on stereotypes – when America was even more puritanical than now. Comedy is always an attack on propriety.”

Today’s humor has its own rude edge.

“Looking at humor in film now – there’s the whole gross-out thing, like in ‘Something About Mary,’ and ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ We live in such a rude culture that those films really had to go far. There’s the popularity of the Jackass films for teens – guys who are sort of stunt men do outrageous, physically unbelievable gags – like someone going into a porta-potty that gets knocked over and dragged down the hill. It’s hysterical in a way.”

Many comedies released during the Depression were about the rich and ridiculous.

“They show that even if you have money, you aren’t necessarily happy – which is a message the rest of us like to hear.” Lewis said. “Comeuppance for the rich and powerful, and someone like Chaplain coming out on top.”

Lewis and other OSU faculty said that teaching someone how to be funny is perhaps the hardest part of addressing humor in the classroom.

Charlotte Headrick, associate chair of Speech Communication who teachers and directs in the Theatre Arts program, likes to quote the actor Edmund Kean to her students: “Dying is easy; comedy is difficult.”

OSU’s Theatre Arts Program meets the challenge of humor head-on. Headrick exuberantly lists its choices of productions of comedy, past, present and future.

“Where do I begin?,” she says. “We devoted one entire season to A World of Comedy in 1999-2000, producing an Irish, an American, a Russian and a French comedy.”

In comedy, as in life, timing can be everything.

“We try to teach students to hold for laughs,” Headrick said. “That means when the audience reacts to humor, the actor should not keep talking, so people don’t miss the next line. The actor should stay in character, wait, and come back with energy.”
In his scholarship, Marion O. Rossi, associate professor, director and acting coach in the University Theatre and director of JumpstART in the department of art, said comedy actually addresses a basic need.

“Comedy is simply the artistic version of the basic human need for humor. Humor is not just about laughter,” he said. “It’s about coping with pain and desire and loss and difference – and the joyous release we feel when we laugh at life’s vicissitudes rather than succumb to them. The connection between humor and pain is so visceral that sometimes we laugh so hard we cry and, more often, we laugh even as we weep.”

Though no OSU scientist is currently measuring, weighing or charting laughter, humor is alive in laboratories and in the field. The Linus Pauling Institute’s researchers and staff are serious, of course, in their focus on micronutrients in promoting health and preventing and treating disease. Yet they are inspired by not only the scientific genius of Linus Pauling, but also his sense of humor.

“He was a funny person,” recalled Steve Lawson, administrative officer, who worked directly with Pauling. “In his famous lectures about vitamin C and health, he would often begin by holding up a vial containing 13 grams of C, saying ‘This is how much C a goat’s body synthesizes each day.’ Then he’d hold up a vial that looked almost empty, saying ‘This is how much the Food and Nutrition Board says we need. I think that a goat knows more about nutrition than does the Board!’”

The LPI crew is known for incorporating humor into their days. “Mainly impromptu– most of it not memorable!,” Lawson said.

“Much of it is irony. And in the stress of trying to get grant applications out by the deadlines, you’ll hear black humor about losing funding.”

Adrian Gombart, also of LPI and an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics, considers humor essential for scientists.

“Research can be long and hard, and a lot of it doesn’t go the way you want,” he says. “With all the technical hurdles, and hypothesis-changing, maybe only 10 percent of what we do gets published. So a good sense of humor and an optimistic attitude really go a long way toward success.”

He studies the effects of vitamin D, which some researchers are looking at regarding brain function and moods – but Gombart’s focus is on the immune system.

“I do make sure I have plenty of D,” he says. “And I try to surround myself with people who have a good sense of humor. Far Side cartoons are popular in labs. Someone put on our door this anonymous quote: ‘It may look like we aren’t doing anything, but at the cellular level we are really quite busy.’”

~ Jana Zvibleman

Halstead’s fervor for Lawrence would soon turn out to shape her future.

Carmen Halstead found a lot of support from Neil Davison of OSU's English department. (photo: Jim Folts)

Halstead enrolled in one of Neil Davison’s upper-level modern literature classes after noticing Lawrence’s name on the syllabus. Not long after the class began, however, Davison announced he was dropping Lawrence due to time constraints.

“Carmen immediately came to my office,” Davison recalled. “She told me how disappointed she was and that the whole reason she took the course was to study Lawrence.”

Halstead’s zealous lobbying on Lawrence’s behalf worked. “Thankfully, it turned out we did study Lawrence,” Davison said.

Halstead took her interest in Lawrence beyond the classroom setting. For a class assignment, Halstead wrote an essay highlighting one of Lawrence’s best-known works, Women and Love. That essay evolved, with Davison’s encouragement, into a thesis that won a 2006 research award from the Valley Library.

“I camped out in the stacks for a month,” Halstead said. “I thought it was awesome that I could study [Lawrence] in such a specific way; looking at the female unconscious as it relates to men, especially in his erotic texts.”

In her thesis, Halstead analyzed Lawrence in relation to the “somewhat tumultuous foundation upon which his work rests” (Halstead, 2006). She stretched beyond character development to look at other factors of Lawrence’s appeal, including his “complexity of theory” and “[reflection] of the modernist mentality” and the way in which these aspects of his literature relate to the “major feminist misreading of [his work]” (Halstead, 2006).

“While pop culture history has labeled him scandalous and immoral, he remains for some truth seekers a brilliant, inspirational philosopher,” Halstead’s thesis concluded.

Through Davison’s class and his guidance on her thesis, Halstead was able to harness her literary research talents and discover the direction of her dreams.

“I had no idea there were people who devote their whole lives to studying Lawrence,” Halstead said. “Professor Davison told me ‘if this is what you really want, then this is how you get there’.”

After graduating in June, Halstead began applying for graduate programs. While she may become a professor of English literature, it may take some time before Halstead fully recognizes her professional path – but she believes she is on her way.

“Having someone there to constantly support me and who not only recognizes all of the hard work that I’ve done but really believes that I can go further is wonderful,” Halstead said. “It has done a lot for my education. You can’t always see that by looking at the transcript.”

For Davison, nurturing Halstead’s academic passion has been “the great reward of teaching. Every once in awhile, you get an undergraduate who is intently focused,” he said. “The greatest moment for a teacher is to see that his student has outshined them, and knowing that they contributed to that.”

Finally, Halstead has a piece of advice for other students: “If there’s something you’re really passionate about, don’t let the instructor pull it from the syllabus.”

~ by Tara Pistorese

“Mentors” is a regular feature of LIFE@OSU. Along with LIFE/Work, In the Classroom, OSU Around Oregon, and especially Commentary, we encourage submissions and suggestions of articles that would be of interest to the staff and faculty of Oregon State University. Send them to lifeatosu@oregonstate.edu. Also, comment on this and other stories already appearing in our web edition. Just click on the “comment” link at the end of each piece. Thank you. — Editor