Humanities & Society

The mission of Campus Life, as outlined in the Strategic Plan for Excellence in the Undergraduate Experience, is to “build and sustain an undergraduate experience of exceptional quality, where students, known by name and story, prepare themselves for lives of purpose and meaning.” At WUSTL, Campus Life is composed of three areas: Community Service Office, Danforth University Center & Event Management, and Student Involvement and Leadership.

In remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at Washington University’s Brown School will host the fifth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Recovering From the Recession, Reaching for the Future,” from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22, in Brown and Goldfarb halls. The seminar, free and open to the public, is designed for St. Louis community youth and adults interested in building wealth, repairing and maintaining good credit, purchasing a home or starting and expanding a business. 

“The Past is Alive … The Work is Not Yet Done” is the theme of Washington University in St. Louis’ 24th annual celebration honoring Martin Luther King Jr. at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 17, in Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus. Events will aslo take place at the School of Medicine, the Brown School and the School of Law.

On Jan. 12, 2010, Lora Iannotti, PhD, nutrition and public health expert at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, was in Leogane, a seaside town 18 miles west of Port au Prince, Haiti, working with local officials on improving the health of Haitian children. That’s when a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake struck the poverty-stricken country. Its epicenter, Leogane. Iannotti survived, but some 230,000 perished. Haiti was devastated; an estimated 3 million were affected by the earthquake in a country already known as the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Since last January, Iannotti, assistant professor at the Brown School, has returned to Haiti a number of times to continue her work on undernutrition and disease prevention in young children. She is back in Haiti again, one year later.

Changing words in Mark Twain’s classic book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is fine as long as the original version still is easily available for readers, says Gerald L. Early, PhD. “We change texts all the time,” Early says. “For instance, we make children’s versions of the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare.”

Reporters covering the Senate and citizens watching from the sidelines will welcome a new guide to the upcoming battle over the filibuster from one of the preeminent authorities on Congress.  Political science professor Steven S. Smith has prepared a primer outlining proposals and procedures for reforming the Senate’s rules pertaining to filibusters. Get ready for the opening of the 112th Congress and a possible showdown over the parliamentary procedure that has been used to block legislation by both parties and famously by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

A WUSTL professor’s excavation of a “gold mine of archeology” in China has been ranked as one of the top 100 science stories of 2010 by Discover magazine.

Do black leather pants qualify as a tax deduction for rock stars? Fans, musicians, journalists, researchers and anyone else interested in music can see how the courts dealt with this question and nearly any other legal issue involving the music industry at The Discography: Legal Encyclopedia of Popular Music accessible through thediscography.org. The site was created by Loren Wells, JD, musician and recent graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and is supported by the Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) at the School of Law. The site’s database — the most elaborate of its kind — covers 2,400 court opinions spanning nearly 200 years of the music industry.

The ruling by Judge Henry E. Hudson of the Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., finding the individual mandate provision of the new health-care law unconstitutional is an important ruling, but it does not settle the question, says Timothy D. McBride, PhD, health economist and associate dean for public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. McBride says that the individual mandate, while just a small piece of the health reform structure, is very important to making all of the parts of health reform work. “It is more or less like pulling on the thread of a garment, and having the whole garment come apart if this disappears,” he says.

Nutritional information has popped up on the front of food packages using a wide range of different symbols and rating systems. But without a common form or standards, there’s a risk that consumers could be confused by the new information, says Matthew Kreuter, PhD, a public health expert and professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.