Category Archives: Faculty

Rincker Wins Prize for Research on Women in Developing Democracies

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Illinois Wesleyan University Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Meg Rincker has been honored for her collaborative research on women’s pathways to political influence in new and developing democracies.

Rincker and her colleague, Candice Ortbals of Pepperdine University, were recently awarded the 2007 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics for their ongoing research studying the effectiveness of women’s organizations in countries with authoritarian histories, including Pakistan and Chile.

“Carrie Chapman Catt was one of the most charismatic leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States,” said Rincker, who will use the $1,000 prize to continue surveys of women in Pakistan. “To receive an award in her name is a huge honor.”

The Catt prize, awarded annually for more than a decade, seeks to support research on women and politics in an ongoing effort to promote collaboration between political practitioners and academic researchers.

Student Studies Effects of Potential Alzheimer’s Drug on Rats

Illinois Wesleyan University student Andrew Tharp and Renee Countryman, assistant professor of psychology, have been conducting research related to newer pharmaceutical treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Tharp, a senior psychology major from Lake in the Hills, Ill., and Countryman are studying the effects of the drug Guanfacine on rats with induced memory deficiencies similar to Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease, a brain disorder that usually affects people age 65 and older, causes memory loss and behavioral issues associated with dementia.

A known cause of Alzheimer’s symptoms is a decrease of acetylcholine in the brain. Acetylcholine, a chemical neurotransmitter, carries messages between neurons and other cells. In order to mimic this condition in rats Tharp and Countryman administered a drug that decreases acetylcholine thereby affecting the rats’ memory.

According to Countryman, current drugs are designed to increase the level of acetylcholine in the brain by inhibiting an enzyme that normally functions to destroy any excess amounts of acetylcholine. However, as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, acetylcholine naturally becomes less available in the brain. Drugs that inhibit this enzyme eventually become ineffective when there is little or no acetylcholine left to prevent from being destroyed.

“The problem is Alzheimer’s treatments just don’t work for humans in the long-term, they may work for a short period, but they always stop working over time,” says Countryman.

The drug that Tharp and Countryman are studying, however, takes a different approach to improving memory loss by focusing on a different neurotransmitter. Guanfacine increases the levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, associated with attention and awareness. By increasing norepinephrine levels in the brain, the drug boosts attention and awareness thereby enhancing perceptions and hopefully improving memory.

Managing Multiple Medications: Nursing Study Follows Those Who Do Well

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— As the proportion of older adults rises in the United States, a growing number of patients must learn to juggle multiple medications with potentially complex dosage schedules, while also facing age-related changes that may hamper their ability to manage medication.

Millions of people in the United States gamble with their health each day by not taking prescribed medications correctly. The World Health Organization predicts only 50 percent of patients typically take medicine as prescribed.

A study by Illinois Wesleyan University nursing faculty suggests health care professionals can look at an older patient’s lifestyle to understand whether they may be successful in managing their prescriptions and needed medications.

The IWU study results, which will be published in April in Advancing in Nursing Science Quarterly, present characteristics of patients who successfully manage their medicine. “There are certain features that seem to influence whether or not someone will manage their medicine well, which we call ‘living orderly’ or ‘aging well,’” said associate professor of nursing Kathy Scherck.

Scherck along with Susan Swanlund, assistant professor of nursing, and Sharie Metcalfe and Shelia Jesek-Hale, both associate professors of nursing, studied a group of older adults in order to assess what problems they might be having managing medicine on their own. “What we found surprised us,” said Swanlund. “We found a group of people who were all successful at self-management. This presented a possible guideline for healthcare providers to note who might do well, and conversely, who might need more assistance, with medication.”

Beware? The Ides of March is Coming

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Beware! March 15 is right around the bend, and with it the infamous Ides of March. We all have heard the phrase “Beware the Ides of March,” but is the date really that threatening?

“Historically, the Ides of March was a day to settle accounts, a day when bills were due,” said Jason Moralee, assistant professor of history at Illinois Wesleyan University, who noted we usually associate the day with a settling of another kind of account – the assassination of Roman emperor Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.

According to Moralee, whose focus is ancient Rome, Caesar was the last in a line of generals who ruled the late Roman republic. “These men had used their glorious victories to carve out political power, and many thought Caesar went too far.” After squelching a civil war, Caesar had been declared Dictator Perpetuus, or perpetual dictator, and renamed monuments in honor of himself, said Moralee. “This was just too much, and those who conspired against him took up the motto libertas! or liberty.”

The fact that the assassination took place on the 15th of March could have been a symbolic “settling” of Caesar’s acts of tyranny, or it could have simply been a matter of timing. Caesar was planning on leaving for a military campaign shortly after the Ides. Moralee thinks both explanations are right – the day had symbolic and practical significance. “I always like the really practical explanations. Even historical figures generally thought in practical ways,” he said.

What’s in a Year? Leap Year Proof It’s All Relative

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Time does not really exist.

Certainly the sun rises and sets, the Earth spins, but time as we know it – chopped into months, hours and milliseconds – is a fabrication of mankind. Never are we more aware of this fact than on that rare day, February 29 of leap year.

“Leap year is one of those ways we keep the clock that we live by in sync,” said Linda French, associate professor of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University. “If we didn’t have leap years, then over decades, we would find the seasons start to drift, and instead of the first day of spring coming in at the end of March, it would come at the beginning of March.”

In other words, leap year works out the kinks in our calendar. The Earth takes about 365 days to go once around the sun – 365.24222 days to be exact. The idea of adding one more day every four years is to take care of all of those numbers past the decimal. “If you add in one day in the calendar, it catches us up so that we still have the first day of spring around March 21,” said French.

Noticing this slipping of seasons, Pope Gregory XIII decided in 1582 to revamp the old Julian calendar. His Gregorian calendar we follow today set down leap year as every four years. This, of course, included exceptions that sound a bit like the disclaimer portion of pharmaceutical ads:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year.

Chalk it up to a stubborn universe that refuses to go on Greenwich time, but in fact none of our closest celestial neighbors tend to roll by our watch. “It’s a big inconvenience, really, that no astronomical events happen commensurate with each other,” said French, who teaches students how time would be different if we judged it by a star other than the sun. “The time it takes the Earth to go around the sun and the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis simply don’t divide into each other evenly.”

Professor Pursues Rediscovery of Soviet Children’s Literature

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Illinois Wesleyan University’s Marina Balina is forging the way to a rediscovery of children’s literature written in Soviet Russia.

For years, scholars ignored children’s literature written during the Soviet regime as merely a tool of propaganda. “Seventy-five years of Soviet children’s literature should not be dismissed that easily. It’s a shame,” said Balina, the Isaac Funk Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan, who recently co-edited Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (Routlegde, 2007). Almost no books have been written about Soviet children’s literature, and the few that were looked at single authors rather than trying to analyze the complex body of texts written during this time.

With her co-author Larissa Rudova, a professor of Russian at Pomona College in California, Balina is breaking new ground with the book, which is a collection of critical articles about children’s literature in Russia both during and after Soviet rule.

Balina is familiar with the children’s literature both as scholar and from her days growing up in Soviet Russia before immigrating to the United States with her family in 1988. “Soviet Russia was not the best place to have free ideas, in fact it was a challenge to remain a free thinker in that country. But Soviet children’s literature played a unique role in creating free minds, and this fact should not be ignored,” said Balina, who noted that the entertainment value placed on children’s literature gave authors more leeway in their choice of creative expression. “It was a much freer space for Russian writers to use alternative artistic devises, such as playful poetry similar to Dr. Seuss, but their work would still be publishable and considered politically correct.”

Issues Facing Children Focus of New Global Encyclopedia

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – For Illinois Wesleyan University Professor Irving Epstein, who has studied issues involving street children, child labor and delinquency education, a society can be judged by the welfare of its children.

“Children symbolize the way in which societies interact,” said Epstein. “You can ascertain much about a society by the way its children are treated.”

Epstein enlisted his interest in the welfare of children as the general editor of a new encyclopedia that goes beyond facts and figures. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide is a six-volume set that includes essays by 174 contributors covering 126 different countries. Issues including children’s education, child labor, child abuse and neglect, play and recreation and religion are analyzed in each chapter.

“On a global level, children’s lives can be thrown away and neglected. They don’t have political capital in many societies,” said Epstein, an instructor with Illinois Wesleyan since 1996 who teaches a course on international human rights. “Even in our own society, children are the ones who are the casualties of poverty and abuse. There needs to be some accountability for how children are treated.”

Faculty Member’s Book Details American Missteps in War on Chinese Communism

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – A new book by Illinois Wesleyan University Associate Professor of History Thomas D. Lutze explores how American anti-Communism in China after World War II helped tip the middle classes to the side of the Communists, unintentionally aiding their victory.

In Lutze’s book, China’s Inevitable Revolution: Rethinking America’s Loss to the Communists, published by Palgrave-Macmillan, he argues that American support for Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek convinced the democratically-minded Chinese middle classes to align with the Communists in the late 1940s.

“Americans were taught during the Cold War that anti-Communism and pro-democracy were flip-sides of the same coin. The great irony is that in China the American effort to contain Communism actually constrained democracy,” maintained Lutze, who said the middle class saw Chiang Kai-shek as a dictator. The United States policy was to support Chiang as an anti-Communist and a friend of American interests in China; at the same time, Washington hoped to win over the liberals to bring about reform of Chiang’s one-party rule. But the two policies were contradictory. “True democrats in China abandoned the American side and threw their support to the Communists.”

The book is part of Lutze’s ongoing study of the middle class and the Chinese Communist Revolution that dates back to his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1973 and 1989. He spent time studying East Asian history and the history of U.S. foreign relations at Cornell University and at Peking University before earning his doctorate in modern Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin in 1996. His ties with Peking University (PKU) aided him in writing the book. “Thanks to colleagues at PKU, I had access to photos, archives, and interviews with middle-class liberals and leaders of China’s democratic parties who were active during the Revolution,” said Lutze.

According to Lutze, scholars have generally ignored the middle class when examining the history of the Chinese Communist Revolution. “The middle class democrats have been dismissed in retrospect,” said Lutze, “but they should be identified as a crucial political force that both Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party (CCP) needed.” It was the middle class who would solidify either the Nationalists or Communists in the cities of China, he said.

This liberal middle class of urban doctors, lawyers, educators, and businessmen held political ideals similar to that of America, and many of them were educated in America, said Lutze. “But they took democracy seriously and recognized that the Communists legitimately represented important sectors of the population. Chiang Kai-shek made it clear that the Communists, and other opposition voices, would be suppressed—and that he would enforce that decision militarily.” American support for Chiang thus translated into the curtailing of democracy and the expansion of a very unpopular civil war.

Nursing Faculty Member Awarded Fellowship

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— The Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) has awarded a Nurse Educator Fellowship to Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Nursing Connie Dennis. The competitive Fellowship is a $10,000 award recognizing those who make significant contributions to nursing education.

“It is an honor to receive the Fellowship, and signifies the importance of rewarding faculty development in the field of nursing,” said Dennis, a member of the IWU faculty since 1973. “I hope to be a strong advocate for nursing professors and undergraduate programs in nursing.”

The Fellowship is one of 15 awarded across the state, meant to supplement full-time nursing faculty salaries and to assist with professional development and continuing education expenses. Dennis plans to continue developing curriculum for nursing students in caring for people of other cultures. “I’m looking to further develop teaching strategies to promote transcultural competency in nursing,” said Dennis, who has consulted with nursing colleges in Mexico and has taught a transcultural course focusing on health care for Asian-Pacific Islanders and the use of complementary/integrative medicine.

This is the second Nurse Educator Fellowship the IBHE has granted Illinois Wesleyan in the first two years of the fellowship initiative. In 2006, Associate Professor of Nursing Sharie Metcalfe received a Fellowship. “It says a lot about Illinois Wesleyan that we are recognized for our good faculty, and our efforts to promote teaching,” said Dennis.

Professor’s Book Shines Insight on Welfare Debate

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Capitalism produces a lot of wealth, but also a significant amount of poverty, writes Illinois Wesleyan University Associate Professor of Political Science Greg Shaw in his new book, The Welfare Debate. The controversy over how to help poor people has lingered in the United States for centuries. In his book, Shaw examines the history and rhetoric that have led a stalemate in the discussion of welfare in America.

“Much of the debate over public assistance boils down to the tension between the rhetoric of the ‘good Samaritan’ – helping out one’s brothers and sisters – and that of creating dependency and being a corrupting influence on society, ” said Shaw.

An instructor with IWU since 1998, Shaw has been examining the welfare system in American since his graduate days at Columbia University, where he earned his master’s degree and doctorate in political science in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He notes that while the sides of the welfare debate are marked by some enduring continuities, some important issues have evolved over time.

In The Welfare Debate, Shaw looks at several issues, including contention over the source of relief for the poor. “There’s always been the belief that poor people should be offered help,” said Shaw, “but one of the debated questions is whether the source of that relief should come from public or private means.” Shaw points out that throughout its history, the United States has journeyed from private funding of welfare to public, back to private and to public again. “The debate has not progressed in a linear fashion,” he said.

Race is another evolving issue affecting the welfare debate, according to Shaw. “You cannot ignore the inequality of wealth along race lines,” he said, noting in 2000, the U. S. Census Bureau reported the median household net worth for non-Hispanic white families was $75,000, while for black families it was approximately $7,500. “It’s a 10-to-1 difference. Race and racism are very much with us in the way that Americans think and act about issues, including public assistance,” he said. In the book, Shaw also tackles the changing ideologies of the government’s role in the marketplace and attitudes toward motherhood.

In researching The Welfare Debate, Shaw said he enjoyed gathering the different perspectives on the debate. “To really tap into the rhetoric of the debate was intriguing – pulling from government publications, elite media such as the New Republic, mass media and historical perspectives of people living in poverty from social work interviews,” said Shaw.

Though the book offers no solutions for welfare, Shaw said he hopes to bring the debate to a wider audience. “It would be helpful for people to see the similarities of the arguments we’ve had, whether it was the early 1800s, the early 1900s or a year ago,” he said, “and how we still seem to be banging our heads against the rhetoric that is hundreds of years old.”

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