LehighWeek Volume 12, Issue 24

              Diving right in
Students take charge
in immersion program
See page 3
Volume 12, Issue 24
LehighWeeA:
The campus digest for innovation, news and events with SouthMountaineer
Sports Update
Three wrestlers named
All-American at NCAAs
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March 24,1999
To Taiwan for Break
Students are not the only people
who go to foreign destinations for
spring break. Art King, professor of economics and director of the international careers program,
spent his week off teaching in Taipei, Taiwan, at
Soochow University's
MBA program.
While there, he worked
with Chia Ying
(Michael) Ma, a 1995
doctoral graduate of
Lehigh, in Soochow's
MBA Program. Ma is a
professor in the school's
accounting department and one
of their MBA faculty members.
Soochow is the oldest private
university in Taiwan, having
been established at the turn of
the century. Its students are required to be
proficient in
both Mandarin and English.
"It was a
>»liPk. I good experi-
^^%      Mk I ence for the
■ St' /Mb  I students   to
practice their
Km£ English," said
King. Although the students
must be bilingual, he added, they
do not get many chances to become better speakers of English.
King taught a course on managed health care for Ma's seminar on privatization and the introduction of market forces into
the Taiwanese economy. The
first in a series of international
guest lecturers in the program,
King was followed by the director of Arizona State University's
International Business program.
This was the first time Soochow's
MBA program used visiting faculty as part of their courses.
This was not King's first experience with the island nation
located in the South China Sea.
He was the keynote speaker at
an international accounting conference held there last May.
"I normally try to do some international work, and I had previous connections with Ma,"
King said. Previously, he has
done work in the United Kingdom while on sabbatical, and in
the Czech Republic, where he
has served as the director of the
Lehigh in Prague program every
summer since 1995.
As for the program itself,
King said he may work with Ma
and Soochow's MBA program
again next year, and may make
this a regular occurrence.
-Jeffrey Bachman
Persistence pays off
Courtesy of Jennifer Conigliaro
Meeting Today's Katie Couric are senior class officers (from left, in Lehigh hat): Colleen
Griggs, Erik Sherman, Couric, Jen Conigliaro, and Maureen Johnson.
Each fall, Lehigh's senior
class begins its search for
a Commencement
speaker who will offer words of
wisdom as the students complete
four years at Lehigh. Refusing to
take no for an answer, this year's
senior class has landed Katie
Couric, co-anchor of NBC News'
Today show. 	
"Katie embodies everything
we wanted in a speaker: a well-
known, non-political person,"
said Colleen Griggs, class treasurer. "She is successful in a
male-dominated industry. She is
a news anchor at a top-rated
morning show and is the mother
of two children. She speaks to
world leaders and gives tips from
Heloise. She the ideal representative of what a person can be."
The search for a speaker began with a survey of the senior
class and followed with an invitation to Couric from President
Greg Farrington. By January,
with no definite response, the
class officers sent their own letter to Couric explaining why she
would be a good speaker and
warning her she might see them
soon.
On Feb. 19, president
Maureen Johnson, vice president Erik Sherman, Griggs and
secretary Jennifer Conigliaro
rose at 3 a.m. and drove to New
York City for the Today show.
Standing outside the studio in
the rain, they carried signs saying "Surprise, Katie, we're here!"
and "Lehigh University Class of
'99." Couric spoke with the students, but turned down their invitation.
The students persisted the
following week. After two more
phone calls from the students,
Couric again declined, saying
Lehigh's commencement was on
Memorial Day weekend, a time
she wanted to spend with her
two daughters.
Then, fate intervened.
Sherman's father, Jeffrey
Sherman, president of
Bloomingdale's, held a business
dinner, which Couric attended.
"He told her he knew Lehigh's senior class was trying to get her
for Commencement and his son
was one of the officers," said Erik
Sherman. "He ended with, 'I'll
see you again May 30.' We sent
her another letter, saying, 'We
still want you as our speaker and
we're not going to give up.'"
Finally, Couric changed her
mind.
"The cornerstone of my [commencement] message," she said,
"will be that persistence pays off,
as it clearly did in this case!"
Couric will receive an honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters degree during the ceremony.
"I applaud our students' determination, creativity and initiative," said Farrington. "They
are well on their way to becoming successful Lehigh alumni."
Couric also hosts Internight,
a live, one-hour prime-time interview program on MSNBC
Cable, and as contributing anchor on Dateline NBC. She joined
Today as its first national correspondent in 1990 and became a
co-anchor in 1991.
Couric began her career as a
desk assistant for ABC News in
Washington, D.C. in 1979, before
joining CNN as an assignment
editor in 1980. Her awards include two Emmys, an Associated
Press Award, and the Sigma
Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Feminism's many faces
"I think of feminism as fun. Of course, it's not
usually defined this way, but embedded in the
idea of fun is pleasure. Feminism asks whose
pleasures have been rendered okay by the dominant culture and whose are not okay."
Patricia Ingham, assistant professor of English, thus summed up feminism at a discussion, "What Does It Mean To Be A Feminist?:
Men and Women Speak," held on March 22.
The discussion focused on a variety of questions about feminism, including "Does feminism
tie into what you have learned at Lehigh?," "Is
it important to be a feminist?," "Why is feminism often viewed negatively by the dominant
culture?," and "How do we understand feminism intellectually?"
The ten-member panel consisted of Ingham; John
Pettegrew, assistant professor of history, and undergraduate and graduate students.
"When I was asked to be a part of this panel, I
didn't really know a lot about feminism. My major
concern has always been fighting for racial equality.
However, I discovered tBafmany of the lessons that
I teach my younger sister—to stand up for herself,
to not settle for second best—are really the lessons
of feminism as well, so I realized that I was a feminist, after all," said Molike Green '01, a marketing
major.
- The discussion was driven by audience questions
on defining feminism and on the difference between
IffiSI
Engineering up two
in magazine survey
Lehigh's P.C. Rossin College of
Engineering and Applied Science improved by two
notches, from 42nd to
40th, in the annual survey of graduate engineering schools in the
U.S. that was released
last week by the magazine U.S. News and
World Report.
Among practicing engineers, Lehigh ranked
32nd, while its reputation for academic quality, a measure based on
responses from engineering school deans
and deans of academic
affairs, was 43rd best
among engineering
schools.
Harvey Stenger, dean of the
engineering college, said a
school's reputation was influenced by its size.
"The bigger you are, the more
people would know you," said
Stenger. "I know people at Penn
State and Michigan personally,
but I don't know people at
schools of Lehigh's size in the
South."
The University of Michigan
was ranked third in the survey,
while Penn State finished 15th.
The survey has been conducted
by U.S. News for the past 11
years.
The top five schools in the
survey were the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Stanford
University, the Georgia Institute
of Technology and Michigan
(which tied for third), and the
University of California-Berkeley.
Besides reputation, the survey considers schools' student
selectivity, faculty resources and
research activity. Selectivity is a
measure of the academic test
scores of entering students and
the percentage of applicants accepted for enrollment, while the
criteria for faculty resources include the ratio of M.S. and Ph.D.
students to professors, the number of professors who belong to
the National Academy of Engineering, and the number of
Ph.D. degrees granted.
Lehigh graduated 41 Ph.D.s
in 1998, according to the survey,
and maintained a Ph.D. student-
to-faculty ratio of 2.1. Tho university accepted 60.6 percent of
student applicants, while its engineering professors received
$20.2 million in research funding, or an average of $263,000
per faculty member.
Please see Feminism on page 6
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