Black student activism at the University of Pennsylvania is the topic of a new book by Wayne Glasker, an associate professor of history at the Camden campus. "Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African-American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990" (University of Massachusetts Press)examines the ramifications of the university's decision in the 1960s to increase its black enrollment.

In exploring the struggles and successes of black students and the debates over such issues as integration, assimilation and black nationalism, Glasker tells a larger story of race in our culture and a societal evolution that continues today.

Glasker, who directs the African-American studies program at Camden, says the book stemmed from his own experiences as an undergraduate and graduate student at Penn in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the social unrest of the 1960s had died down, Glasker says he "observed continuing protest and activism by African-American students," in spite of a national attitude that "contrasted the revolutionary black student movement of the 1960s with the bourgeois students of the ‘me generation' who had ‘sold out' to capitalist materialism."

While Penn made the conscious decision to re-examine its admissions policies in 1966 to explicitly embrace diversity and multiculturalism, the number of matriculated black students increased slowly until 1969 when a sit-in to protest the university's expansion into the predominantly black surrounding community dramatically accelerated the process of admitting more black students. Between September 1968 and 1969, the number of black matriculants grew from 62 to 150.

Many of these new students came from inner-city public high schools and had vastly different backgrounds and outlooks from their mostly affluent white classmates. Not surprisingly, the next 10 years at Penn were contentious ones, as black students chose agitation over assimilation and lobbied successfully for campus resources that met their needs, including a Black Student League, an Afro-American studies program and a residence hall for students interested in black culture.

Glasker says that these students should not be viewed as separatists, but as bicultural. Nor was this phenomenon unique to Penn. "They sought to preserve their own distinctive ethnic culture, identity and heritage while pursuing economic upward mobility. But upward mobility and cultural assimilation are not the same thing. They aspired to upward mobility without assimilation."

Make your children aware of the natural world around them. Their healthy development, their happiness, and possibly their lives may depend on the awareness of nature that you awaken in them."

That advice, borrowed from the Talmud, is contained in a new book, "Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology" (Oxford University Press), by David Ehrenfeld, professor of biology in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Cook College. The title, he says, reminds readers that "there is no need to drown in the sea of materialism and bad technology that surrounds us."

An awareness of nature and its importance to our progeny is the central theme running through the book's 35 chapters, each of which appeared as "Raritan Letters," a column Ehrenfeld has written for Orion magazine since 1989. The Orion Society's mission is to inform, inspire and engage individuals and grassroots organizations across North America in becoming a significant cultural force for healing nature and community.

Discussing the book on the Cook campus, the biologist warned that "we are losing in this country our relationship to the land, to the nature that is outside. Every-thing is centered around the computer; everything is centered indoors. I don't think the country can survive that practice much longer."

In his book, Ehrenfeld outlines some of the fears that dominate the 21st century: human overpopulation, disruption of natural habitats, loss of species, depletion of critical resources, pollution, the resurgence of diseases, the growing power of multinational corporations and an increasing concentration of wealth.

His message is clear: Unless we stop denying these real threats by pretending there is no problem or by simply adapting to a diminished universe, we may be doomed.

"Orwell talks about this; it isn't just my idea," he says. "People are getting used to the lowering of taste and the loss of standards, which is very dangerous. Like being around a bad smell — after a while, you don't notice it. This is a terrible threat to our society that we don't notice the changes that have occurred."

While adaptation is "usually a healthy and necessary process," there is a point at which "the hidden cost of adaptation gets too high," he concludes. Among those things to which we are adapting too readily are:

rapid, planned obsolescence
less personal contact with others
the TV (and computer) screen as the source of much of our news, entertainment and companionship
less courtesy and consideration from others
a relentless erosion of our privacy
a removal of nature from our lives.

What can we do about this? Perhaps like a Human Rights Watch, he suggests, we need an "Adaptation Watch to warn us of dangerous lapses of taste and to remind us of truly self-interested, community-fostering behaviors that we are losing."

Our readiness to declare obsolescence is a particular danger, he says. "Obsolescence today implies much more than the simple recognition of what is new. It demands the absolute rejection of the old, as if the new were only validated and confirmed by the denigration of everything that came before it."

When this concept threatens endangered species, our environment and quality of life, Ehrenfeld really gets worried:

"To call something obsolete boasts an omniscience we do not possess, a reckless disregard for the deep currents of history and biology, and a supremely dangerous refusal to look at the lasting scars our technology is gashing across our planet and our souls," he maintains.

Ehrenfeld suggests that preserving things for the future may have gone out of style. "We have developed a flair for squandering that would be the envy of even the most accomplished wastrel. Show us something that our children and grandchildren will need for their survival, and we will find a way to spend it or ruin it, even if the spending and ruining require much effort."

Not just oil, coal, helium and scarce metals, but also items we used to take for granted including soil, fresh water, clean air, open space, trees and fish in the sea are things we are throwing away, according to Ehrenfeld.

"In the last half-century alone, we have initiated one of the major extinctions of species and habitats in the history of life on earth and the consequences of this are overwhelming. Ultimately, what we are doing is paving the way for our own extinction.

"All over the world the consequences of ethnic strain, overpopulation and the tremendously unbalanced consumption of resources by one country is not going to go away. Thus it is critical to take the energy and resources we have left and create a system that conserves them and renews them," Ehrenfeld says.

A new book co-edited by John Wall, an assistant professor of religion at the Camden campus and an associate with the Rutgers– Camden Center for Children and Childhood Studies, responds to recent evidence that "marriage is on the whole good for the partners involved, their children and society."

In the book's 14 essays, various scholars — including David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers' National Marriage Project — explore "how the professions should approach marriage in today's world of high divorce, cohabitation and nonmarital births" in light of evidence that marriage may provide greater emotional and financial security, more and better sex, and improved physical health and longevity.

The goal of "Marriage, Health, and the Professions: If Marriage is Good for You, What Does This Mean for Law, Medicine, Ministry, Therapy and Business?" (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) "is to excite new debate about the various professions' responsibilities and obligations toward marriage as such, given that we live in a time when marriage as an institution is undergoing a profound crisis in its meaning and purposes," Wall writes.

Library Journal says the "book is addressed specifically to students and practitioners of five professions — law, medicine, ministry, therapy and business — but it may also be read profitably by anyone with a lively interest in marriage and how its religious nature may serve to benefit human community."

Wall, whose research interests include religious and philosophical ethics, studies issues related to marriage and children. He calls marriage the "M word" in our culture. "Talking about marriage is hard to do; it's a touchy subject."

He attributes this touchiness, in part, to the traditional, exaggerated split between liberal and conservative ideas about marriage. While conservatives have generally taken a cultural, family-values approach, viewing marriage along narrowly Victorian lines, liberals have focused more on issues of marital choice and economics.

"Conservatives are not concerned enough about gender equality," Wall says, "and liberals have not been sensitive enough to the value of stable marriages for children, or for that matter, partners and society as a whole. The interesting question is, can professionals and policy-makers understand marriage in new ways that do not repeat the mistakes of the past?"

Wall is optimistic. "An opportunity exists in our present situation to understand better the myriad ways marriage can be supported and children protected by communities, religious organizations, workplaces, health professions and the state," he asserts.

Perhaps nowhere in the American public policy arena are the politics more contentious or the outcomes more profound than in the realm of immigration control. Since the country's founding, Americans have celebrated their immigrant past while disagreeing vehemently over the economic and social impact of future newcomers. These discussions have often resulted in legislation governing who would be allowed into the United States and who would be excluded.

Explaining the opening and closing of the gates in our "nation of immigrants" is the central concern of the new book "Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America" (Princeton University Press) by Daniel J. Tichenor, assistant professor of political science in New Brunswick.

Tichenor concedes that this research was quite personal. "One set of grandparents — German Lutherans — came here for economic reasons, to escape rural poverty," he says. "The other side of the family — Hungarian Jews — fled religious persecution and spent most of the Holocaust years trying to get family members out of Europe. The barriers they encountered made it clear to me before I started this book that American immigration control was a complicated story about power."

As Tichenor illustrates, power, at various times, has been wielded by a variety of strange bedfellows: Democrats–Republicans; liberals-conservatives; business-labor; political "elites"–ethnic caucuses. There have been seemingly countless alliances formed during various periods since the 1870s to affect immigration policy.

As a result, policies were not always consistent. While public policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s was formulated to bar Jews and some Southern and Eastern Europeans, other groups were welcomed, Tichenor's research reveals. During the New Deal and World War II years, the Bracero Program facilitated entry of guest workers from the Caribbean and Latin America, who were important for agricultural interests. The 1945 War Brides Act allowed for the immigration of foreign-born spouses and children of U.S. military personnel.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Displaced Persons Act (1948) and the Refugee Relief Act (1953) facilitated admission of European refugees and the 1957 Refugee-Escapee Act granted special status to refugees fleeing communist regimes. At the same time, the Internal Security Act (1950) and the Immigration and Naturalization Act (1952) expanded grounds for both exclusion and deportation, including those based on political activities and ideology, and established an alien registry.

During the last 40 years, the U.S. immigration system has encouraged diverse and large-scale immigration, especially by Asians and Latinos. More recently, however, the post-Sept. 11 climate has led to detaining large numbers of young men of Middle Eastern extraction, without specific charges.

"Immigrant groups routinely have been targeted by local, state and national governments during wartime and national security jitters," Tichenor says. "The detention and internment of Japanese- Americans and Japanese aliens during World War II remain among our government's darkest acts. The treatment of Middle Eastern newcomers comes nowhere near that of the Japanese-American citizens and resident aliens, but it does remind us that the rights of noncitizens are almost always vulnerable during national security crises."

Tichenor concludes, "Whether restrictive or expansive, our attitudes and actions concerning immigration policy have not just had a dramatic impact on immigrants, but also have transformed the shape of American politics and social life."

Mary Segers, professor and chair of political science on the Newark campus, has spent her career studying the tumultuous relationship between religion and politics in America. Recently, she edited a new book, "Piety, Politics, and Pluralism: Religion, the Courts, and the 2000 Election" (Rowman & Littlefield), that explores this interconnectedness as it relates to the 2000 presidential election and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Oregon vs. Smith.

The first section of the book examines the role of the religious right in delivering the Republican nomination to George W. Bush, a role that ultimately played out in the U.S. Supreme Court. Segers authored three chapters for Part One, including one on the Republican Party's efforts to cultivate Catholic voters amid charges that Bush was anti-Catholic. She also explores the historic nomination of Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate.

"Bush and Gore each attempted to distance themselves from the scandals of the Clinton administration. Bush did so with the help of the Republican Party by seeking the support of the country's Catholics; Gore selected as his running mate Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn), the first Jewish vice presidential candidate in U.S. history, and an outspoken critic of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky," Segers says.

Another chapter, written by Elizabeth A. Hull, associate professor of political science in Newark, takes a closer look at the Supreme Court's decision relating to the election — and the many ethical and ideological questions it raised. Most significantly, Hull points out that the conservative right played a major role in the court's ultimate decisions. The Rehnquist majority decision, which clearly reflected the court's ideological divide, meant that George W. Bush would emerge as the victor.

"These decisions cobbled together new rules of jurisprudence that flew in the face of the court's past rulings," Hull writes. "In so doing, the court seriously threatened its institutional standing."

Part Two of the book deals with the case of Alfred Smith and Galen Black, who were terminated from their positions at a drug rehabilitation center for using peyote, a hallucinogenic that is illegal under Oregon law but is commonly used by the Native American Church for sacramental purposes. Smith and Black convinced the Oregon Supreme Court that the state drug laws violated their rights, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state court's decision.

According to Segers, the growing diversity of America poses new challenges to religious freedom. "Despite the Smith decision, a government policy of equal treatment of religion is necessary, and the principle of church-state separation is a necessary corollary to the idea of religious liberty," she maintains.