Letter from the Director: Columbus Day
Columbus Day - At Columbia, Columbus Day passes uneventfully, which we find only somewhat ironic: ISERP opens as it does on any given Monday, and students crowd the elevators en route to their next class. In other parts of the world, however, Columbus Day is more interesting. Over much of Latin America, the day is observed as Da De La Raza, or, "Race Day." Race Day celebrates not Christopher Columbus but some of the … "meetings"… of the Spanish and the indigenous populations, which resulted in the creation of a new "mestizo race." For the Spanish, it is Fiesta Nacional de España, "National Holiday of Spain," a day of imperial celebration. Hugo Chavez has renamed the holiday Dia de la Resistencia Indigena, the Day of Indigenous Resistance.
The shuffling of officially celebrated heritages that is Columbus Day is much like the past month at ISERP. Many of our centers and projects changed homes. The expansion and contraction of research programs roughly dictates our allocation of space, but nothing is perfect. This fall, we made room to welcome the Revson Fellowship into our cadre of programs and to support the expansion of the Andrew Rundle-Kathy Neckerman project on the built environment and obesity. These moves, however, represent merely a small portion of the activity and flow of people that occurs most intensely at the start of the academic year.
Among this bustle has been a transition of core staff at ISERP. Our business manager, Marlyne Thomas, left at the start of the academic year, as did Lisa Ballard, who for two years was the public face of ISERP. Others have moved on to pursue degrees, including Alison Binkowski, now at SIPA, Susanna Fisch, now at the Fletcher School, and Sylvia Wu, who is enrolled in a PhD program in History at Harvard. In their place, we welcome a remarkable crew of new staff (bios on page 5). We are also pleased to congratulate Betsy Arias in receiving her associateÂ's degree this summer. She joins the many ISERP employees who have earned degrees while working with us, a facet of ISERP that makes us all extremely proud.
These highly educated staff members have taken the lead in proposing ways to improve ISERP. Recent suggestions that have found their way into the suggestion box range from "more bagel breakfasts" (we don't currently have any) to "mandatory Iyengar workouts," and my personal favorite, "switch jobs for a day." As I confronted writing this note, I thought that was an especially good idea. Then I realized I would actually have to work.
We are coming into the election season. Even if only for the mid-term, the outcome matters. In the coming weeks before the election, we hope to organize a few small informal conversations featuring ISERP fellows whose work focuses on tangible problems—pregnancy and STDs, the death penalty, health insurance, scientific discovery, environmental risk, fear, confidence, and trust—with an eye towards understanding what is at stake. We hope to continue thinking about how we can effectively link the best scientific understandings to current debates in politics as we move towards the 2008 elections. Nothing is more important at this time than showing that social science evidence counts for something, for whatever our political views, the beautiful thing about the academy is that we have commitment to serious scholarship, as versus the junk science of ideologues and fanatics who use the rhetoric of science to conjure up "facts." This commitment is possible because of institutions like ISERP—institutions that work across the seam of multiple issues to produce basic knowledge. We may not be as "sexy" as the single-issue organizations that litter the landscape, but we are—by virtue of the multiplicity of voices within our community—stronger. For that, we thank all those who make this possible.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
