medical students should know about Nazi doctors, don't you think?

Al Filreis

Thanks to Sam Sharf, vigilant newspaper editor and former student of my course on the holocaust, for making me aware of this announcement:

University of Pennsylvania Students Participate in
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics
Rachel Hadler, Jin Suk Kim, and Karen Revere
Join Groundbreaking Program for Medical and Law Students

New York, NY — Rachel Hadler, Jim Suk Kim, and Karen Revere, medical students in the class of 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania, are among the 30 students chosen by the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics to participate in its inaugural two week program in New York, Berlin, and Poland for law and medical school students. Fifteen students were chosen from each field. The FASPE programs instruct students on the contemporary ethical issues facing their professions — using the Holocaust and the conduct of their professions in Nazi Germany as a framework for study.

FASPE’s goal is to provide tomorrow’s professional leaders with opportunities to increase their awareness and preparedness for the ethical issues they will confront as professionals. By educating students about the causes of the Holocaust and promoting their awareness of contemporary related issues, FASPE seeks to prevent future collaboration in genocide, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia by professional and religious leaders.

Ms. Hadler said, “The extent to which the ideal of the nameless, faceless, even irrelevant subject remains in our research is frightening….” Mr. Kim said, “The ethics of medicine are so closely intertwined with humanism. Humanism in medical ethics is what allows us to become the true healers for our patients.” Ms. Revere added, “It is uncomfortable to examine our own research methods against those of the Nazis. …to observe that a slippery slope exists, and to urge that we remain ever-conscious of its dangers.”

June 18, 2010

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.