LehighWeek Volume 13, Issue 17

              From Ukraine to Lehigh
Student fills his plate
with economics, Asian
studies
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Volume 13, Issue 17
LehighVfefc
The campus digest for innovation, news and events
South Mountaineer
Wrestling  squad,  at
11-2, is ranked 12th in
nation
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January 19, 2000
Pedestrian
safety on
Taylor Street
Do you know the speed limit on
campus roads? It's only 15 mph,
which many motorists apparently don't realize, even after new
15-mph speed limit signs were
posted on campus last semester.
Concern about pedestrian
safety is on the rise. In the past
year, three accidents have occurred on Taylor Street, including one in which a professor was
injured crossing Taylor in front
of Rauch Business Center.
Areas of particular concern on
Taylor are the pedestrian crossings by Rauch, Taylor Gym and
the Newman Center. Last spring
when the University Police conducted a speed awareness campaign on Taylor Street with a radar gun, some vehicles were
clocked in excess of 55 mph traveling down the hill that starts
near Lamberton Hall, passes
Taylor Gym and comes to a stop
at Packer Avenue.
John Smeaton, vice provost
for student affairs, Tony
Corallo, associate vice president
for facilities services and campus planning; Ed Shupp, chief
of campus police, and Chris
Christian, director of transportation services, met recently to discuss what could be done in the long
and short term to improve safety.
"We've all heard stories about
close calls on Taylor Street," said
Smeaton. "We don't want to wait
until there is a fatal accident to
do something." He added that the
primary concern is the speed of
vehicles. With the completion of
Memorial Walkway, there are
now more pedestrians crossing
Taylor Street by the gym. Another problem is delivery vehicles parking on Taylor, which
other vehicles must then go
around, adding to the congestion.
Sasaki and Associates, the
consulting group working on the
new campus master plan, has
been asked to take a look at Taylor Street and recommend permanent traffic safety improvements.
Meanwhile, Joe Sterrett, executive director of athletics, and
Mary Lynn Breiner, coordinator in the business dean's office,
were asked to identify vendors and
service providers who regularly
park on Taylor. These individuals
have been asked to park elsewhere
while making deliveries.
Drivers have been asked to
slow down on campus roads and
not to park, even briefly, on Taylor Street by the gym or Rauch.
Police will be increasing enforcement of traffic safety rules on
Taylor, particularly speed control, careless driving and parking in a no-parking zone. They will
conduct another safety awareness
campaign this semester.
Please See SAFETY, Page 6
Photo by Robert Walch
Richard D. Kaplan '65, who led a series of workshops on creativity on Monday, challenged
faculty and students to try to solve "The Pony" and other puzzles by Sam Lloyd (b. 1840),
considered America's greatest puzzle maker. (See story, right)
Freshman seminar inspires student
to attend South African college
A course Elizabeth Klicker' 01
took as a freshman led her halfway around the world and
changed her future.
Klicker, of Tyngsboro, Mass.,
initially enrolled as a pre-med
biology major. But a freshman
seminar, "The Politics of Self
Respect," taught by Robin
Dillon, associate professor of
philosophy, turned her on to new
ways of looking at the world.
"We studied self-respect from
the point of view of philosophers
such as Immanuel Kant," says
Klicker. "We read books like Up
From Slavery and The Color
Purple. I learned that self-respect is so important to your development, and so devastating if
it's lost. And the experience of
other people, especially people
who were oppressed, really fascinates me.
"Prof. Dillon was a great
teacher," Klicker says. "For the
first time, I was learning history
from a different point of view,
Afro-centric, not Euro-centric."
After the freshman seminar,
Klicker took more courses in
Lehigh's Africana studies department and became the first to
declare a major in the field since
the university began offering it
as a major program last fall.
Hoping to work for educational
reform in developing countries,
Klicker chose a minor in education.
After completing her bachelor's,
she plans to pursue a master's in
education from Lehigh.
Photo Courtesy of Liz Klicker
Elizabeth Klicker '01, who studied last fall in South Africa,
greets Zulu children in the country's Natal province.
To complement her Africana
studies, Klicker recently studied
last fall at the University of Na-
tal-Pietermaritzburg in Natal,
South Africa, which is home to
most of the Zulu population of
South Africa.
Her classes were in English,
but Klicker took a practical Zulu
language course, which enabled
her to communicate with the local population. One of her favorite experiences was visiting her
Zulu teacher's family in a rural
community.
"These are people that may
not have shoes or running water,
yet they generously hosted our
entire class for the day, teaching
us about their culture," she says.
Over weekends and breaks,
Klicker played tourist, visiting
Cape Town, which is about a two-
hour plane ride, and hiking and
camping in South Africa's game
reserves.
When classes ended in. November, she visited schools in the
country to gather information for
her independent research project.
"I was able to see first-hand situations of issues I will be writing
about concerning present-day issues in education and educational reform in South Africa,"
she says.
The schools in Natal, says
Klicker, are overcrowded, with up
to 80 students to a teacher. Many
The creative way
Step outside your box, past the
paradigms that define your routine. Shake off traditional ways of
doing things. Wriggle free of logic
and see how creative you can be.
If you believe yours is not a creative "personality type," Richard
D. Kaplan '65, founder of Kaplan
Creativity Services Inc., urges you
to reconsider.
Kaplan spent Monday teaching
a seminar on creativity to faculty
and students from chemical engineering and other departments in
the PC. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.
He gave them puzzles, simple
and complex, including one whose
object is to connect nine dots in a
grid with the fewest possible number of straight lines.
He told them that Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali, in order to get in touch
with their subconscious, where
creativity originates, fell asleep
seated, holding steel balls. When
the balls dropped and wakened
them, they recorded their
thoughts and dreams.
And Kaplan reminded his audience in Sinclair Auditorium that
before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, 28 other researchers had noticed that mold killed
bacteria but concluded nothing, so
perturbed were they that their
experiment had been upset.
Creativity, Kaplan said, is the
generation of a useful new idea.
Innovation is the implementation
of a useful new idea.
Every person is innately creative, Kaplan said. Many of us resist this notion, especially engineers, whose "psychological hallmark," he said, "is their critical
nature."
Creativity is a function of psychology, environment and techniques, Kaplan said. A willingness
— or permission from one's sponsor — to take risks is important.
The generation of many ideas
(even if most prove useless) is
helpful. And serendipity, which
Kaplan defined as "good fortune
when faced with a prepared
mind," might always be waiting
around the next corner.
Intelligence is no prerequisite
for creativity, Kaplan said. Characterized by what psychologists
call "the need to be right," intelligent people are often too easily
satisfied by the first solution they
come up with.
Similarly, a logical mind, instead of stalking a new idea, often
retreats to an established paradigm. The discovery of sulfa drugs
early in the 1900s, for example,
occurred only after textile workers suggested, improbably, that if
azo dye could color clothes it might
also kill the bacteria that were
causing simple wounds to turn
into fatal infections.
Israel Wachs, professor of
Please See SEMINAR, Page 3 Please See THINK, Page 2
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