By Kelly O'Brien

Shanghai Museum.
Painting of Tanyangzi

Tanyangzi was a fascinating figure. Born in 1557 in China, she showed an early affinity for the Taoist religious practice of the day and developed a precocious devotion to the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin. As an adolescent, she stopped eating as her wedding day approached; she told her worried parents that deities were bringing her food during the night. After her fiancé died before their wedding, she asked her parents to consider her a widow and allow her to live in her own space in the family compound. Reluctantly, this was granted, and Tanyangzi, barely 17 years old, committed herself to religious study and teaching.

Soon she developed her own group of followers, who believed in precepts she said would lead to immortality: love and respect ruler and parents, prohibit and stop lewdness and killing, pity and cherish orphans and widows, tolerate insult, cherish frugality and be modest in your enjoyment of wealth, honor and respect words, don't discuss people's faults, don't harbor unorthodox books and finally, don't follow unorthodox teachers who are outside the Tao or who advocate certain sexual practices.

Ultimately, on the ninth day of the ninth month in 1580, at the age of 23, Tanyangzi literally ascended heavenward, attaining immortality. Documents from the era state this event was witnessed by some 100,000 people.

No wonder Waltner was hooked. Her research led her to a biography of Tanyangzi written by her father and another disciple shortly after her ascension. It was widely distributed and very popular, so much so that local government officials brought charges against the two men for spreading non-Confucian ideas. For hundreds of years, this biography and various letters written by her followers were all that was known about Tanyangzi and her teachings. But then a few years ago a friend of Waltner's was doing research in Beijing's Palace Museum. While researching the painter You Qiu, she came across a catalogue reference to You's painting of a woman with a collection of 51 letters attached to it. The subject of the painting was none other than Tanyangzi, and the letters were her own.

In the late Ming Dynasty it was common practice to collect and publish the letters written by notable men. Collecting women's writings was comparatively rare, and the collection of Tanyangzi's writings is the largest-known collection by a single woman in the 16th century. But what makes the find even more fascinating is that her own writings can be compared against the biography written by her father and disciple.

Palace Museum, Beijing.
One of the letters written by
Tanyangzi.

Waltner says a lot of people are at first surprised that a woman in Ming Dynasty China could be so venerated as a religious leader. In fact, Taoism has a tradition of young women transmitting texts to men, and Tanyangzi had many men of her father's generation as her followers. Westerners need only look to Christianity to see comparisons to female saints, who were not so different than Tanyangzi. "We are comfortable with female saints because we have always known about them," Waltner says.

The significance of the letters may boil down to what they tell us of the world surrounding Tanyangzi. "They show the flexibility of the 16th century Chinese intellectuals--that they were seriously interested in a woman visionary," says Waltner. "And they show us ways in which a young woman commanded authority."

Whether or not Tanyangzi actually did ascend heavenward in front of 100,000 people, she has attained a certain immortality; she lives on through her letters and biography, which today instruct scholars about the life of a Ming Dynasty woman.

Moving house often entails rediscovering things you forgot you owned. As Andrea Berlin was setting up our archaeology lab after our move to Nicholson Hall, she unboxed a mystery. She was unpacking the contents of the teaching collection assembled by William McDonald, professor of classics and archaeology from 1948 to 1980. This collection was stored in scores of ballet-shoe boxes, of 1950s and 1960s vintage. Among the potsherds, coins, and other artifacts was a clay cone inscribed in cuneiform. Andrea gave me the cone, saying, “Look what I found.” After all, I’m a cuneiformist, so presumably I could read it. (Spin and rotate the cone to see it from different sides.)

But this cone gave me trouble. First, its surface was scratched and gouged, partly obliterating numerous signs. Second, I usually read cuneiform tablets from the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE, but clay cones like this were used for a type of royal inscriptions on building foundations primarily during earlier periods, in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE. Handwriting changes over the centuries, and so does the language of writing. For me, then, reading this cone was like the average literate English speaker trying to read something from Christopher Columbus’s time—or even Charlemagne. I couldn’t even know how old the cone was, until I could read it. A label glued on its base said , “Cuneform [sic] document. Mesopotamian. Time of Moses. Bovey Collection. Goldstein.” That was no help—when did the writer of the label think the time of Moses was?

Finally, one afternoon sunlight beaming in my office window revealed the first line: the royal name Naram-Sin. No way, I thought—this couldn’t be Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon of Akkad (c. 2300 BCE), creator of the world’s first empire! For one thing, his scribes wrote in Akkadian, but the cone was inscribed in Sumerian. (After the fall of Akkad, scribes resumed using Sumerian for royal inscriptions.)

There were two later and less important Naram-Sins: a king of Ashur, and a king of the trans-Tigridian city of Eshnunna, who both ruled in the 19th century BCE. Could it be one of them? No, Naram-Sin of Ashur was excluded, since royal inscriptions from early 2nd millennium Ashur were not written on cones and not in Sumerian. As for his namesake at Eshnunna, I couldn’t find “king of Eshnunna,” or the like, anywhere on the cone; nor could I recognize much else in the text. I put the cone aside for the time being.

In August, I examined the cone again. I compared it to the known inscriptions of the Naram-Sins and their contemporaries, which have been collected and edited by Douglas Frayne and A. Kirk Grayson. Meanwhile, I began to make a copy of the text, sign by sign, scratch by scratch. The cone matched nothing from any of the Naram-Sins, though bits of the text matched bits of other royal inscriptions. For example, halfway around it I could read “He built his royal palace.” Well, of course, that’s what I thought he did! But it was comforting to see this clearly stated on the clay, since I still wasn’t certain how to read the rest.

Indeed, I almost wondered whether this cone was a forgery. “Naram-Sin ... gobbledygook ... built his royal palace ... jabber-jabber-jabber”–the object looked ancient, but the text on it did not quite compute. This Naram-Sin was neither the king of Akkad, the king of Ashur, nor the king of Eshnunna. There was no other known king named Naram-Sin, and no one but kings had cones inscribed for them. I had to consult with an expert in the relevant periods and text genres, so I e-mailed a copy to Douglas Frayne in Toronto.

The following day Doug called me back, pretty excited. The cone turns out to bear an inscription of Naram-Sin, king of Uruk, previously unknown! Together on the phone we worked out most of the text by comparing it with other royal inscriptions from the same time. We decided that our newly discovered Naram-Sin probably reigned just before Sin-kashid, a minor but well-attested king who ruled Uruk about when Hammurabi’s great-grandfather ruled Babylon (early to mid-19th century BCE). In fact, three inscriptions of Sin-kashid are in local collections, one at the Science Museum of Minnesota and two in the University Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books in the Elmer L. Andersen Library.

Our Naram-Sin can hardly have ruled Uruk very long, or surely more than one record would have survived from his reign. Perhaps he got as far as laying the foundations of the palace and having this one single cone inscription drafted to record the construction, before Sin-kashid usurped the throne as well as the palace. Or perhaps–just possibly–a scribe made it all up, while practicing at his job writing royal inscriptions. We may never know, unless another text attesting Naram-Sin, king of Uruk, turns up, maybe in another shoebox no one has opened since it was packed away back in the 20th century CE... Read Part 2

Readers of last year’s newsletter will remember the story of an inscribed clay cone discovered in a shoebox, and how the cuneiform text of the cone commemorated a previously unknown Mesopotamian king: Naram-Sin of Uruk, who probably reigned sometime in the 19th century BCE. It turns out the story has a sequel.

A fragment of an artifact bearing the very same text as our cone was excavated at Uruk almost a century ago. This fragment, found during the German archaeological expedition to Uruk in 1912-1913, had been photographed in the field and taken to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, but it had never been published because it doesn’t preserve enough of the text to be understood without a duplicate or another inscription mentioning the same king.

The discovery that the text of the Uruk fragment matches that of the CNES cone was made possible by Jack Sasson of Vanderbilt University, who circulated my newsletter article about the CNES cone on his e-mail list, where it was seen by Eckart Frahm of Yale University, who remembered having been shown a photo of the unpublished fragment by Margarete van Ess, who leads the Uruk excavation project of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Orient-Abteilung) in Berlin.

The artifact that was found at Uruk is a fragment of the round head of a clay “nail.” Ours is an intact, though battered, headless clay cone. Whereas the inscription on the CNES cone is written carelessly, the inscription on the Uruk fragment is written in a neat, calligraphic hand.

In ancient Mesopotamia, when kings sponsored buildings, they normally had their construction work recorded in inscriptions, which could take various forms, including clay tablets, nails, cones, and so forth. Clay nails (or “cones”) were inscribed on the head and the shaft, while headless cones were inscribed only on the shaft.

Typically, headless cones as well as clay tablets were made by the dozen. Each was inscribed with the same text and buried in the foundations of the building they commemorated–rather like a time capsule—so that when new construction took place on the same site, the old inscriptions would be found and the ruler would be remembered. Clay nails appear instead to have been placed in the building’s walls, with their heads sticking out where they would be visible and their inscriptions could be read–like cornerstones on modern buildings. The illustrations show, in a schematic way, how these two different types of inscriptions might have been placed in the structure of a building.

What does our cone, and its fragmentary duplicate, say? Some text is missing or illegible in both exemplars, but here is how the 20-line inscription goes:

“Naram-Sin, shepherd who makes abundance for Uruk, king ... good ... for his land:
When (the gods) An and Inanna granted me the kingship of Uruk, at that time, by my mighty weapon, ... ... (thus-and-such a place) I captured ... ... (and) I built my royal palace.

During my reign, 3 kor of barley, 12 minas of wool, 10 minas of copper, (or) 3 seah of sesame oil cost 1 shekel of silver, at the going rate in my land.

The sons and daughters of Uruk returned home(?) and the “word” (= case?) of the orphan and the widow was glad.”

The content of this short text is fairly standard and it adds little to our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. It doesn’t even tell us very much about this Naram-Sin who became king of Uruk by the grace of the gods, though it is interesting that he touts the good economy that supposedly prevailed under his rule. And too little of the Uruk fragment is preserved to restore more than a few signs in the damaged text of the CNES cone.

Nevertheless it is significant that a duplicate of the CNES cone inscription is extant, that it was found at Uruk, and that it was inscribed in a different hand. The existence of two exemplars, in different forms and written in different handwriting, and the fact that one of the two was actually excavated at the site of Uruk, confirms that there really was a king named Naram-Sin who ruled Uruk, if ever so briefly, and that he really did start construction of his palace there.

How did Naram-Sin acquire the throne of Uruk, how did he lose it, and how did he disappear almost completely from history? None of his contemporaries or successors mentions him in any known text. But he shared an illustrious name (that of the renowned grandson of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled four centuries earlier) with two near-contemporary kings, the long-ruling Naram-Sin of Ashur and the ambitious Naram-Sin of Eshnunna.

And his statement about low prices reappears in the inscriptions of the king who may have bumped him from the throne, Sin-kashid. The latter identified himself not only as king of Uruk but as king of the Amnanum, a prominent Amorite lineage group, and he affiliated himself through marriage with the royal house of Babylon. If we are right to place our Naram-Sin on the throne of Uruk immediately before the better-known Sin-kashid, perhaps we get a glimpse into the equivalent of “party politics” in southern Mesopotamia during the century preceding Hammurabi.

Ask the average American what Scandinavians look like, and you're bound to get an answer like this: "Tall, blond, blue eyes." But ask associate professor Monika Žagar that question, and she'll tell you a more complicated story.

Žagar's latest research focuses on an aspect of Scandinavian culture that doesn't fit our stereotypes: the growing population of Scandinavian adoptees from non-European countries. With few children available for domestic adoption in Scandinavia, couples looking to adopt are turning to Asia or Central and South America. Over time, this trend has created a new generation of Nordic citizens who don't look anything like their peers.

It's a phenomenon that would hardly be news in the United States, given our long history of, and struggles with, multiculturalism. But despite Scandinavian countries' long-standing reputation as model societies--with their brag-worthy comprehensive welfare system, universal health care, and women's rights--when it comes to multiculturalism, they're less adept. As a value, Scandinavian countries embrace equality, but in reality, they've had very little exposure to diversity.

It's for that reason that life as a foreign-born adoptee in a Scandinavian family can be tricky. For instance, explains Žagar, "because of their looks, many adoptees experience an extreme discrepancy between their feeling of being Danish or Norwegian and how their environment sees them, as being Guatemalan, Korean, Indian, or otherwise foreign." So, Žagar wonders, what does that mean for the adoptees' sense of Scandinavian identity? And what does it mean for Scandinavia's cultural identity?

While some scholars might look to historical documents or sociological surveys to answer those questions, Žagar is drawn to a different vessel for cultural interpretation: literature. In a class she taught in fall 2006 called Adoption Imagined and Experienced, as well as in her research, Žagar says she focuses "first on how adoption has been represented in literature historically, and second, what is being published right now by adoptive parents and adoptees." In fall 2007, she is teaching an honors course on the topic. The texts she chooses, as she explains in the class syllabus, "offer a portrait of a complex and ambiguous experience."

While Žagar's academic career has not always focused on adoption issues, it has always been driven by this question of ambiguity within the Scandinavian experience. So it's no wonder that her other research passion is a Scandinavian author whose work and personality have blurred the boldest of boundaries.

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, the subject of Žagar's book Knut Hamsun: Imagining Race and Gender in Modernity, which is slated to be published in 2008, owes his fame to two primary aspects of his life and career. The first is his literary prowess, based on the remarkable success of novels such as Hunger, published in 1890, and The Growth of the Soil (1917); the latter won him the Nobel Prize. He was, not surprisingly, one of the most admired living novelists of his time-- until he became a well-documented supporter of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II. Expressions of this support included writing a series of pro-Fascist articles, praising Hitler, and giving his Nobel Prize medal to notorious Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

This contradiction--between the Hamsun worthy of admiration and the Hamsun who would eventually be tried for treason--fascinates Žagar. Her work examines the variety of ways that modern readers choose to either excuse Hamsun's behavior or condemn his work because of it. Some of Hamsun's apologists claim that he was old and unaware of what he was doing; others say he was a literary genius whose politics were immaterial. Still others refuse to teach his literary works at all. As a researcher and a teacher, though, Žagar isn't out to canonize Hamsun's accomplishments or decry his political fouls. She wants, instead, to use his work to understand the complex array of ideas and forces circulating in early and mid 20th century Scandinavia.

"I don't believe that art can be isolated from our social, political, economic, and cultural values," she says. "The relationship between literature and social experiences is complex and intricate, and one can easily slide into simplifications. So when I teach I try to emphasize precisely the process of how an author translates an everyday experience into a unique artistic expression."

The thread linking foreign-born adoptees and Nazi novelists may seem tenuous to the untrained eye but for Žagar, they both present opportunities for appreciating the complexity and ambiguity in Scandinavian culture. "Let's not forget that one of the goals of the Third Reich was racial purity, to get rid of diversity," she says. As a scholar, Žagar is driven to go beyond the surface of a given topic to discover the nuances that make it both complicated and uniquely human.

In the case of Hamsun, that means she's not willing to generate a tidy answer about whether we should or should not let him off the hook. As for the literature of adoptees in Scandinavia, it means she strives to discover what the Scandinavian experience means for citizens whose sense of cultural belonging isn't a taken-for-granted part of the package.

Reflecting upon how the debate about Hamsun's work has played out over the years, Žagar comments, "It's a fact of life that history gets rewritten." It's up to scholars like her to turn a statement like that into questions.

About Monika Žagar

Education: Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley (Scandinavian studies)

Recent project: Co-organized a conference titled "Norway, World War II and the Holocaust" in April 2007 with the U of M's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

What initially drew her to Scandinavia: The linguistic challenge and the region's distinct literary tradition. Also, it shares a lot of good qualities--such as "equal access to social, medical, and cultural institutions"--with Yugoslavia.

Where the field of Scandinavian studies is headed: More integration of multicultural perspectives--along with more focus on literature, she hopes!

What's on her nightstand: "Lots of books around me right now; which one I read depends on the time of day and my mood.

"In Slovenian, The Triumph of the Rats (my translation) by Dekleva, a novel about the Slovenian doctor and playwright Slavko Grum, who studied medicine in Vienna around the turn of the last century. I've also reread The Turks Are Already Here! (my approximate translation), a book about Turkish raids into the western part of the Balkans during the 15th and 16th centuries, by Simoniti. These are just for fun.

"Also for fun but more work-related: I am reading a collection of feminist and philosophical essays on adoption, Adoption Matters, a collection of short stories by adoptees and adoptive parents.

"And because I, at the moment, live in a truly green and ecologically clean and balanced region [in Slovenia], The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan also offers lots of food for thought."

Developing good economic policy is a subtle art. It necessitates pulling together the right minds with the proper training, and providing an environment that focuses effort but allows freedom to innovate. At its best, the environment will be a nexus between theorists and policymakers where the flow of ideas sharpens both. In Minneapolis, that creative process is at work in a partnership between the Department of Economics at the U and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

For over a quarter of a century, economists and economics graduate students have shuttled back and forth between the Federal Reserve bank in downtown Minneapolis and the economics department on the West Bank. The physical commute is hardly a mile, but over the years these economists have spanned conceptual ground from early papers on rational expectations to current debates over international trade.

The Minneapolis partnership has been remarkably fertile, both in the development of economic theory and in moving that theory into the public arena. While it might be viewed as a simple exchange of expertise, at a deeper level the relationship is one of mutual transformation, a partial merging of interests and identity that has led, fundamentally, to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Seeds of collaboration

The bank provides modest stipends and assistance to students and professors, as well as the invaluable research commodities of time, space, and silence. "It's the kind of place," recalls Lee Ohanian, a former U of M associate professor and Fed visitor, now at UCLA, "where you can walk in the door at 8 o'clock on a Monday morning, decide you want to spend the next eight hours on uninterrupted research, and be able to do it. That makes all the difference in the world."

In return, University scholars collaborate with staff economists at the Fed, focus on current policy questions, discuss macro theory with bank officials, and contribute to ongoing debates over the future direction of monetary and fiscal policy. The substantial overlap has borne fruit in the form of research focusing directly and indirectly on Fed policy questions.

Seeds of revolution

Kareken brought in Neil Wallace, Thomas Muench, and Thomas Sargent, all University economists at the time. A year into the work, the group received a draft of a paper from a colleague, economist (and future Nobel laureate) Robert Lucas. "It was a difficult paper," Wallace recalls, "very different from things I was used to reading. ... [And] I knew that it cut away the underpinnings of what we'd been doing."

Indeed it did. Lucas' work was a fundamental critique of economic modeling. The effects of changes in economic policy couldn't be accurately predicted on the basis of past behavior, Lucas argued, because changing the rules of the economic game alters the behavior of players in the game.

This theory of "rational expectations" was a powerful criticism of conventional macroeconomics, and in the spring of 1973, the U/Fed research team scrapped its model-building. "We were stunned into terminating our long-standing Minneapolis Fed research project," Sargent later wrote. And the researchers immersed themselves in rational expectations, generating a flurry of academic papers that would later be termed a theoretical "revolution."

But without the University's link to the Federal Reserve, theory might not have informed practice for decades. "The literature on rational expectations began well before our partnership did," notes Arthur Rolnick (Right), senior vice president and director of research at the Minneapolis Fed, and himself a U of M Ph.D. ('73). "But it likely would not have gotten into the policy arena as quickly as it did if this research weren't going on here, if it had been left in the universities." Minneapolis Fed officers brought the idea to Federal Reserve meetings and it slowly began to influence Fed policymaking.

Beyond expectations

The celaboration of real business cycle analysis by former University Regents professor and Fed adviser Edward Prescott provided the dynamic general equilibrium model that is now standard macro methodology. Tim Kehoe, a University economist and Fed scholar, also played a major role in developing these models. And time inconsistency theory developed by Prescott, V.V. Chari, Finn Kydland, and Patrick Kehoe--all current or former professors at the University and advisers to the Fed--helps guide current central bank commitments to low inflation. In 2004, Prescott and Kydland shared the Nobel prize in economics for their work on time inconsistency policy and real business cycles.

U/Fed economists continue to develop cutting edge theory. For example, Sam Kortum, a U professor and Fed visitor, is developing pioneering models of international trade; his research won a prestigious Frisch Medal last year for its innovative econometric work. U faculty members Michele Boldrin, Larry Jones, and Mariacristina De Nardi, all visitors at the Fed, have just issued a paper examining the links between fertility and social security, suggesting that government pension programs may reduce childbearing by decreasing the need for support from one's children in old age.

Theories like these are honed each summer in Minneapolis at the annual macroeconomic workshop jointly sponsored by the Fed and the U--yet another facet of the partnership--which draws economists from around the world to try out new ideas or continue old debates. At this year's workshop, Fed senior economist Ellen McGrattan (yes, she teaches at the U as well) will revisit VARs, along with collaborators V.V. Chari and Pat Kehoe, arguing that while they may be valuable for economic forecasting, they have severe drawbacks when used for making monetary policy or for understanding the actual structural relationships of an economy.

Indeed, economists who have been part of the partnership stress that the Fed's real world problems provide focus for University theoretical work. "Economics lives on applied problems," notes Thomas Sargent, now at New York University. "In terms of infusing the macro part of the department with interesting policy questions, [the bank] is just a gold mine."

And it clearly isn't a one-way street. "There have been immense benefits to the management of the bank," says Sargent, whose own paper on VARs was also presented at the U/Fed macro workshop. "The bank president gains access to worldclass macroeconomists that he can talk to on a day-to-day basis, just by walking down the hall."

Of course, it's not only economists and policymakers who benefit. The graduate students who share in the collaboration are also exposed not only to the the research facilities of the Fed but also to the thorny realities of Fed policymaking and the rigor of frequent "bag lunch seminars," at which working papers-- including some by students--are critiqued in a process that, to the uninitiated, looks like a gauntlet with equations.

"A lot of what the students get from being at the Fed, aside from good food and a nice view of the Mississippi," jokes Rolnick, "is exposure to applying economics. Economic theory and research come alive here because we use them every day on policy questions. Moreover, students get to interact regularly with some of the world's best economists here at the Fed. When students sit elbowto- elbow in the cafeteria with Nobel laureates and future laureates, it inevitably stimulates ideas, inspires work, and builds relationships that last a lifetime."

The future

As Rolnick comments, "The key to the Minneapolis Fed's influence on national policy issues is our longstanding partnership with the U of M economics department. For over 30 years, [this partnership has] resulted in major breakthroughs in macroeconomic and monetary theories that have had important implications for how a central bank should pursue its objectives."

Where will this partnership stand in a decade? From the University's perspective, the collaboration should endure. "If the Fed weren't in Minneapolis," says David Metzen, U of M Regent, "if this relationship didn't exist, the University would be all the poorer for it. This is precisely how government, business, and education ought to work together."

The Fed remains committed as well, and Rolnick is optimistic: "Five years ago I thought it couldn't get better, and it has."

Art Rolnick didn’t set out to be a maverick. He didn’t even set out to be an economist.

But after nearly 40 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, this 62-year-old senior vice-president and director of research and University of Minnesota alumnus has become both — an economist who has challenged “common sense” government policies (like public funding for sports stadiums) and has become a vocal advocate for innovative programs to increase access to early childhood education.

Interested in mathematics early on, Rolnick decided the field was too theoretical.

“I started out in math at Wayne State University but ended up in economics,” he says. “When I entered the Ph.D. economics program at the U of M in 1967, I was told that it was a very rigorous program. I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not. It was hard and demanding but it paid off. It made me a much better economist.

“The Minnesota model is that your arguments have to be very rigorous before you come out with a policy statement,” he explains. “The program pushes you to use theory to its ultimate end. It isn’t simply looking at data and making up stories. You have to be much more careful in the questions that you ask.”

Rolnick, who arrived at the Fed in 1970, says he was heavily influenced by economic giants in the department like Neil Wallace, Tom Sargent, and Chris Sims. But it was Walter Heller who convinced him that economists could play a powerful role in shaping public policy. (Heller was a top economic adviser to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and helped LBJ develop the Great Society and the War on Poverty.)

“At the time, it started me thinking,” Rolnick says. “I realized then that economists may be able to make a significant contribution. That was an eye-opener for me. I could apply economics to real world situations.”

Rolnick first came to both local and national attention in the early 1990s with a paper that criticized states for spending billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies competing with each other to attract and retain businesses.

At the time, Northwest Airlines was asking the state for millions of dollars in subsidies to build a new maintenance facility in Duluth. Absent that commitment, the company implied, it would move operations to Detroit. Rolnick felt such competition was a “zero sum game”; such competitive maneuvers didn’t create new jobs so much as move them from one city to another. The public earned no return on their investment, he says.

Minnesota eventually issued nearly $50 million in state bonds to finance construction of the maintenance facility. But the carrier closed it down when its mechanics went on strike in August 2005. The airline filed for bankruptcy a month later.

“This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” says Rolnick, who has since become a strong opponent of using public money to build new stadiums for the Vikings and the Twins. “You are a private company. If this was such a good investment, go out and get some private funding. Why are you coming to the public?”

The idea of a “public return” has guided Rolnick’s thinking throughout his career. How could the state spend its money in a way that would produce the greatest good for all of its citizens? To attract businesses and create jobs, he’s argued, the state is better off investing in roads, education, and health care, because such quality-of-life investments yield a well-trained and productive workforce.

“Build the human capital and they will come,” Rolnick says. “If you want sustainable economic growth, that’s the way to do it. If you build a sports stadium, it sure looks like economic development. But stadiums are quiet most of the time. Who’s got the best school systems? The most productive workforce? That’s what attracts the businesses.”

Rolnick has put those views to work again with his high-profile effort to promote early childhood education. In the past, getting kids ready for kindergarten was seen mostly as a moral issue, not an economic one. But Rolnick prepared a paper demonstrating that a $20,000, two-year investment in early childhood education per at-risk child produced an inflationadjusted 16 percent return for the public, easily beating the stock market and sports stadiums, he says. That’s because those kids go on to become better students, get better jobs with good pay, and, more importantly, stay out of trouble. That, in turn, means less crime and less drain on public resources.

The paper became a sensation. At the invitation of Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida, Rolnick was the keynote speaker at the National Governors Association in 2003. He has given speeches on the subject to the prime minister of Turkey, the Saudi royal family, and the queen of Jordan.

“I think the economic argument did it,” Rolnick says. “Nobody quite put it that way before. Let’s look at it as an economic return and compare investing in at-risk kids, scholarships, and job training to building sports stadiums and auto factories. It convinced a lot of business people. Companies have to worry about the quality of the workforce, crime in their communities, the quality of life when they recruit employees from their base.”

These days, Rolnick is working on a $30 million pilot program in St. Paul that will provide pregnant mothers with a nurse to advise them on everything from nutrition to parenting skills. Once the child turns three, he or she receives an annual $10,000 scholarship to get ready for kindergarten. Early childhood programs will have to compete for the money and students.

“You can argue that all of the training I got from the U, thinking long and hard how this is going to work, made all of this possible,” Rolnick says. “You have to constantly test ideas in the field. It’s the Minnesota school of thought. You’ve got to be rigorous, vet ideas through best academic theory and practice, and make sure ideas are well thought through.”

by Danny Lachance

Most people know the unwritten rule. When you sit down next to a stranger on a bus, you might say hello and, if you are feeling particularly bold, make light conversation—an inncous comment or two about the weather or the recent performance of a local sports team.

But for someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, interactions with strangers can be different. “People with TBI might start with the light chit-chat and then suddenly find themselves telling a stranger about their injury and about the personal problems they’re having," says associate professor Mary Kennedy.

Whereas a normally functioning adult would size up the situation on the spot and say, “Gee, this isn’t appropriate," Kennedy says, a person with a TBI will sometimes self disclose past the point of her discussion partner’s comfort.

Or the opposite can happen. Following a TBI, those who used to recount their days to loved ones in intricate detail over dinner start giving one-word answers to questions. Just as details, elaboration, and extended reflections—the stuff of intimacy—can inappropriately appear in some injured people’s conversations with strangers, for others they can evaporate from interactions with loved ones.

The importance of self-regulation

But at another level that has only recently gained much attention from those who study brain injuries, our brains are engaged in the act of self-regulating. We’re not just selecting words; we’re thinking about whether the words are the most accurate and whether they’ve been understood by our listener. We’re not just storing a fact in memory; we’re thinking about how good our memory is and what strategies we need to use to make sure the memory sticks. We’re not just deciding what we want to say; we’re thinking about whether what we’re saying is appropriate for the social context.

To emphasize the element of self-awareness involved, researchers refer to these as “meta" processes. So, for instance, we each have a memory that stores and retrieves our experiences. But we each also have a metamemory, an awareness of the act of storing and retrieving experiences.

These “meta" abilities are attributed to activity in the frontal lobes, the part of the brain most typically injured in a TBI. The consequences of injury to this self-regulating part of the brain are serious. If you don’t remember how you remember, you’re likely to keep forgetting; likewise, if you don’t think about how you’re speaking, you’re likely to remain incomprehensible, Kennedy says. It’s like driving a car without a dashboard. Without a speedometer or warning lights, you’re likely to go too fast or too slow or to drive when smoke is coming out of your engine.

Jogging your metamemory

Peer feedback can be invaluable, she says. “Group therapy is really helpful for people with TBI because they get feedback from their peers about how they did in a particular situation, and the feedback is sometimes more effective when they hear it from someone who isn’t their therapist, someone they see in a different role," she explains. In therapy sessions, then, peers take over the role once played by metamemory or metalanguage, helping clients with TBI to evaluate their own faculties on a moment-by-moment basis.

“Errorless environments" are also beneficial, Kennedy says. For people struggling to monitor the clarity of their speech, coaching that is immediate is likely to improve self-awareness. “Rather than having clients do a trial-and-error approach," in which the clients might stumble while reading an entire passage aloud before getting feedback from the clinician, “we set up a situation in which they can be error-free or nearly error-free by giving them prompts, cues, written support, whatever it takes to make sure that they’re completing the task error-free," she says.

Kennedy points to a client who had been taught by numerous therapists in the past how to speak loudly and slowly. Both her speech and her short-term memory were severely impaired. She was aware of her speech and memory problems but did not know when or how to use compensatory strategies for either problem. Her problem wasn’t with her ability to speak loudly and slowly, but with her meta-ability, her ability to keep in mind the imperatives to speak slowly and loudly and to use these strategies at the right times.

“She was reading sentences." Kenndy says. “We wrote ‘Talk slower and louder’ on a card that we placed in front of her. And then, as she indeed talked louder and slower, as she remained errorless, we removed the card and substituted more subtle forms of feedback."

An emotional future

An imbalance of emotion may work against self-regulation. “It’s almost like our mind gets hijacked by our emotion." Kennedy says. “There’s lots of evidence in the neuroscience literature that shows that when the emotional component of the frontal lobes is being activated, the cognitive part of the brain is not activated."

It's still an untested theory, but Kennedy is hoping to design studies that will help clinicians and researchers better understand just how emotion affects self-regulation in tasks like remembering and speaking and what clinicians can do to maximize its benefits and minimize its liabilities.

A former clinician herself, Kennedy knows how important effective research can be for clients. "When I was a clinician, I was struck by an absence of research findings that I could apply in therapy for individuals with brain injury. Now as a researcher, I understand the challenges of designing a sound study that also answers clinically relevant questions. It's when those two goals are met that we can really figure out what kinds of strategies and feedback will enhance the cognitive, memory, and communication abilities of those with brain injury."

by Danny Lachance

Yang Zhang’s mother was probably committing a crime when she taught him, at the age of five, some basic English phrases—“My name is Yang" and “The pot is under the table." China, where he grew up, was closed then, and instructing children in a language as emblematic of the West as English was forbidden.

But Zhang doesn’t remember a sense of trepidation in learning English so furtively. He remembers, instead, feeling immense curiosity.

“I grew up in the countryside," he says. “We didn’t have television. English was like a different world.” He felt a sense of awe, he says, when he realized that these foreign sounds were, for others, as natural as breathing. He marveled at the way that English speakers could add phrases to the ends of their sentences ad infinitum and still remain grammatically correct—a linguistic feature that was very different in his native language.

That sense of wonderment has endured. Almost 30 years later, Zhang continues to ponder the mysteries of human language acquisition and production. These days, however, he’s doing so with state-of-the-art lab equipment, research assistants, and sophisticated experiments designed to reveal the way language functions in the brains of everyone from Japanese infants to Finnish adults.

Warped sensibilities

No theory has been more compelling and controversial in explaining how language develops in the brain than Noam Chomsky’s.

Language, Chomsky theorized, is seeded in our genes. Thanks to our DNA, the structures of our brains already contain a universal grammar and phonetics— certain rules about what sounds can combine to form words or how words can combine to form sentences—to which all languages, despite their immense variation, must conform.

When we are infants, Chomsky has argued, the sounds of our native language, swirling around in the atmosphere, trigger a particular pattern from the range of possible patterns allowed for by the universal grammar and phonetics. As our language faculties grow, a kind of specialization takes place. The pattern, or language, that has been selected by our environment grows and flourishes.

But for Zhang and his former adviser Patricia Kuhl (Ph.D., ’73), a luminary in the field, Chomsky’s theory seemed to be missing something important. They sensed that Chomsky’s theory was underestimating the effect of the environment on language acquisition. “We don’t dispute that there’s a genetic predisposition for language. But what exactly is being picked up by the infants from the environment is the question," Zhang explains.

Take, for instance, our ability to distinguish and produce sounds. Spoken Japanese, for instance, doesn’t contain the sounds /r/ and /l/ as spoken English does. As a result, by the time they are adults, untrained Japanese speakers cannot distinguish between the two sounds when they hear them. That’s why nonnative English speakers whose first language is Japanese often mispronounce and misspell a word like lollypop.

In a now-famous study, Kuhl demonstrated that the ability to distinguish between native language sounds is gained as early as the first year of life. Japanese and American infants were exposed to sounds both indigenous to and absent from their native language. At seven months, American and Japanese babies were equally good at recognizing the distinction between the English sounds /r/ and /l/. But at 11 months, American infants were significantly more likely to recognize the distinction between these sounds than Japanese infants were; American infants’ ability to tell /r/ from /l/ increased over time, while Japanese infants’ ability to distinguish those sounds decreased.

Ambient language, Kuhl and Zhang agree, plays a much larger role than simply selecting one pattern among many that are latent in our brains. Sounds unique to a language appear to be mapped onto the brain over time, and mapping, in turn, makes the sounds easier to recognize and, eventually, produce. In a way, language warps our brains, reshaping them in ways that go beyond simply calling on what is already there.

Babbling may be part of this warping process. “Babies can’t avoid babbling," Zhang notes. “They can’t avoid imitating whatever is given to them in the environment if it sounds like their native language or whatever their mother or father is trying to speak to them. They’re trying to imitate."

And by imitating, babies are rehearsing, listening to, and then encoding the distinction between sounds, a distinction they will eventually need in order to distinguish words from one another. “More or less, children are teaching themselves in this way. Their mind is actively involved," Zhang says.

Muddled Multitasking?

Zhang’s current work is dedicated to understanding more precisely how the brain processes ambient language. With this information, he hopes, researchers will be able to identify exactly why the language-related symptoms of autism and dyslexia occur. That knowledge, in turn, may become the basis for successful treatments or cures.

Zhang hopes to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the brain’s processing of nonlinguistic (or paralinguistic) qualities of language sounds, like the timbre and pitch of a voice, and its processing of those same sounds’ linguistic qualities, like syllables and sentences. In a recent study, he tested the relation between our ability to identify the (paralinguistic) gender of a speaker and our ability to distinguish between different syllables. He connected subjects to noninvasive electrophysiological equipment that could measure the frequency and location of their brainwaves, and then exposed them to linguistic sounds.

He found that when he asked the subjects to identify the gender of the speaker, gamma waves appeared in a specific region of the brain in ways particular to the gender of the voice the subjects were hearing. When he asked subjects to focus on the kinds of native language syllables being spoken to them, though, their brain activity shifted: waves of a different frequency appeared in a different region of the brain. Zhang also found that we are much more accurate at recognizing gender than syllables, suggesting that gender recognition is a more primitive, primary process.

By mapping these differences, Zhang hopes to bring us one step closer to understanding how and where the brain processes the large amount of information that is thrown at it all at once. Since these processes occur separately, each requires the allocation of resources in the brain. And they have the potential to interact with one another.

“The brain has a very sophisticated way of dealing with different types of linguistic and paralinguistic information," Zhang says. That sophistication and complexity enables us to do what other animals cannot do. But it may also become a liability; greater complexity taxes the brain more and introduces more points in the process where things can potentially go awry. For those with language disabilities, Zhang hypothesizes, the more primitive ability to recognize gender differences may siphon resources from or interfere with the more advanced ability to recognize syllables.

“For children with autism, voice and gender recognition may interfere with their ability to recognize words," he says.

It’s only a hypothesis at this point—one that needs to be tested by extensive comparative studies of normal and language- disordered populations. But Zhang is convinced that researchers aren’t paying enough attention to the way that the processing of paralinguistic sounds may affect children’s acquisition and production of language.

“It’s not just about the message itself," he says. “It’s about the speaker, too."

A History of Innovation

Dr. Kuhl presented the keynote address to honor Shevlin Hall’s 101st year in April 2007. During her visit Dr. Kuhl received the Outstanding Achievement award in recognition of her exceptional career and profound contributions. This is the most distinguished award given to alumni of the University of Minnesota.

by Emily Sohn

In an ideal world, classrooms are peaceful places where all students pay attention to the teacher, raise their hands to ask questions, and listen to each other’s comments.

Few classrooms are like that, however, and it’s not because rambunctious students are goofing off. Often, the room’s construction is to blame. Or nearby traffic, outdated heating and air-conditioning units, the scraping of chairs on hard floors. Add to that thin walls and ceilings, and you’ve got echo-filled classrooms that spell trouble for young learners, says Peggy Nelson, an associate professor who specializes in audiology. “In noisy rooms, kids make more noise," Nelson explains. “It’s kind of a snowball," one that is especially problematic because hearing is an essential part of learning.

Nelson has spent her career studying the effects of both external and internal impairments to hearing on classroom learning. As she started diagnosing children with sensorineural hearing loss at the beginning of her career at Kansas State University about 25 years ago, she quickly realized that children who have difficulty hearing face unique learning challenges. “Hearing loss cuts you off from people and from incidental kinds of conversations," Nelson says. As a result, children with hearing loss don’t pick up new vocabulary just by overhearing adults talk. And because they don’t know what they are missing, they don’t know what questions to ask—another kind of snowball effect.

What’s more, children with hearing loss often have trouble behaving in social situations. And studies show that they’re not as good at reading as other children. “It’s a huge problem," Nelson says. On any given day, as many as 15 percent of school-age children, or more than a million U.S. elementary students, have trouble hearing, mostly from middle ear problems or ear infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The link between troubled hearing and troubled learning is so strong that Nelson started to suspect that too many students were missing out at school. “In watching these kids even with slight amounts of hearing loss struggle with communication," Nelson says, “I wondered what happens in schools where communication isn’t perfect."

In 1998, then at the University of Maryland, Nelson began measuring sound levels in empty urban, rural, and suburban classrooms around the country as part of a task force for the Acoustical Society of America. Some classrooms registered at a peaceful 30 decibels (dB), but others reached levels of more than 65 dB, about as loud as a roaring highway. “A teacher has to shout to be heard above that," Nelson says.

Children with hearing loss aren’t the only ones suffering from noisy classrooms, Nelson says. Even when their ears are fine, tests show that young children in particular have difficulty separating important sounds—like a teacher’s voice—from background noise, such as a nearby highway. The human brain doesn’t develop adult-like hearing skills, which enable more refined differentiation of sounds, until the mid-teenage years. Selecting and focusing on the right stimulus—the teacher’s voice, for instance—just doesn’t happen naturally for many children. Children with learning disabilities and speech difficulties especially have trouble learning in noisy situations, as do children with attention deficit disorders. “They’re in this swamp of sound and sight and tactile stimuli," says Daniel Shaw (M.A., ’96), a speech language pathologist at Jefferson Community School, a K-8 school in Minneapolis.

In 2001 Shaw called Nelson to see if she would help him gauge the impact of background noise on Jefferson’s students. Many of the school’s classrooms overlook a playground and busy Hennepin Avenue. As part of a series of experiments, the researchers presented second graders with lists of words that differed by just one sound, such as “ball" and “call," or “hot" and “heat." With no background noise, the young students performed well, Shaw says. Scores dropped when background noise was added, and students who spoke English as a second language took the biggest hit. More than half of Jefferson’s students are native Spanish speakers, Shaw says, which means that a majority of children are struggling simply because they can’t hear well enough.

Nelson’s award-winning research has contributed to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quieter rooms may lead to better performance. When a major airport changed locations in Germany, Nelson says, students in schools near the new airport starting scoring worse on vocabulary and reading tests. Students at schools near the old airport, on the other hand, starting doing better when the airplane noise was gone.

Teachers also stand to benefit from acoustic adjustments. “Teachers are so used to vocal strain," says Shaw, that they’re not even cued into the pain until it’s gone. Three second-grade teachers who tested microphones realized quickly how much they’d been straining their voices, shouting to be heard above the din. Said one, “I don’t believe how much better I feel after only one day."

Acoustic standards for tomorrow's classrooms

A perfect example is Burroughs Community school in South Minneapolis. As part of a major renovation in 2003, the elementary school added extra-quiet climate control systems, sloping ceilings that carry sound but not echoes, and angled walls that avoid the sound-bouncing effects of hard, parallel surfaces. Sound-absorbing ceiling tiles, well-insulated windows and doors, and thicker walls next to extra-loud spaces all dampen the carrying capacity of exuberant young voices in the building, which was also moved further away from a busy neighboring street.

With the ANSI guidelines in place, future schools can be made hearing-friendly at the blueprint stage, Nelson hopes. “I hope to achieve much better awareness of these issues so that schools are naturally built with good acoustical design," she says. “Builders, planners, and architects have not thought of acoustics near the top of the list in the past. I hope it will become more of a priority."