Roger F Malina Aug 17 2024
Context
On August 16, 2024, Dennis Kratz bumped into Roger F. Malina in a UTDallas ATEC hallway in the Edith O’Donnell Center; a discussion ensued.
Kratz is Director of the Center for Asia Studies at UTD. He mentioned that the number of Asian students in our JSOM business school was declining. The number of Chinese students are declining because of international politics. Students from India Diasporas surged right after the pandemic, but are declining particularly because India itself is re-surging which is also an emergence phenomena.
So Asian student enrollment at UTD will decline in the coming years. Let’s plan ahead.
UT Dallas just announced a few weeks ago it is creating a UTDAfrica office to increase the number of students from Africa.
IDEA
We seek to understand over the history of the university of Texas at dallas the role of diaspora’s in the universities development, and perhaps anticipate future diasporic developments.
Social Observations
a) When UTDallas was founded, it attracted mostly ‘older’ students, who came back to university to get a master’s degree or PhD, because of the lack of high tech universities in Dallas. There were no undergraduate degrees or students under the age of 25 at UTDallas for the first decades of the university.
b) ironically, we are seeing a resurgence of older students at Utdallas 70 years later, with the i) return of married people who return after raising their children ii) older professionals who find their jobs boring intellectually and use the university as a Parisian or Viennese ‘café”. This is part of our identification of “senexism’ as an emerging phenomenon for the first time in human history.
c) UTD has failed to attract local students enough to make the university profitable. This includes US students, veterans, and students from different ethnic cultures. The low number of “Latinx” and other minorities both as students and faculty is an exemplar. Other better universities in Texas, UT Austin or SMU, are the strange attractors for American students.
So:
D) Apparently a success criteria for UTD is attracting more students and increasing tuition income. Maybe we can propose how to stimulate other desirable ‘diaspora’s.
An obvious one is the growing Climate Change Diasporas. Perhaps UTD could be ahead of the curve, for once (yes that’s a critique both of climate change and my university).
Personal note:
My father’s parents were diasporic from Bohemia, now Czechia, in the 1880s to Texas. My father was born in Texas. But in 1917, after WW2, they diaspora-ed back to Bohemia, where my father started school. Then in the great depression they moved back to Texas. I grew up in Paris, then England, then USA, then Marseille and now Dallas.
SO
Perhaps we could study the cycles of diasporas and encourage re-emerging ones and encourage declining ones. Fortunately, we still need an Asia Center, since we could attract students from Mongolia, Vietnam, Tibet (I am on one Tibetan student’s PhD committee, here they come).
Earlier this year I published:
A Hybrid Professional’s duty to Migrant Ancestors
which I can republish it as ‘a hybrid professional’s duty to cyclical diasporas’
A Hybrid Professional’s duty to Migrant Ancestors
Leave a Comment / Science / By Roger Malina
Roger F. Malina, ArtSciLab, Bass School, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell
Upon reading “ A neuroscientist’s duty to Black Ancestors’ by Chandler Wright.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp0690
The concept of desirable migration is deeply embedded in my family history, and a trigger
for my first career as a space astrophysicist.
My father was Frank. J. Malina’s; his parents migrated from Central Europe, Bohemia, to
Texas in the 1880s. After WWI Led to the first creation of the Czech republic, they migrated
back to Central Europe. Then the great depression hit, and they migrated back to Brenham,
Texas.
My mother Marjorie Duckworth’s family was from the North of England, in a small village
called Elslack. My mother fled the village because of lack of privacy and motivating
employment. She joined the UK army during WWII and then migrated to Paris as part of the
Team that set up UNESCO. She did not want to work in her father’s textile mill.
My father was the first director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab but fled back to Europe at
the end of WWII motivated by the dream of the United Nations. He was accused of being a
communist by McCarthy and lost his passport and ability to do paid work. He became a
renowned artist introducing emerging technologies into art from electricity to kinetic art.
He then founded the Leonardo publications to champion the work of art that bridged
science and art and technology, and where artists just like scientists wrote about their own
work.
I took over for a while after he died, even though I had no expertise as an Editor.
Migrants often learn by doing not by diploma.
I grew up in a family where changing home locations and changing professions was natural.
My mother taught me mathematics because she had a degree in accountancy, my father
taught me to make model rockets and water wheels and curiosity-driven experimenting.
One day when I got back from elementary school, I saw my father trimming his beard onto
his painting. He said he was trying to create interesting structures. Just as his PhD advisor
Theodore Von Karman had taught him to describe patterns in turbulence using
mathematics.
My colleague Cassini Nazir has written extensively on how to train peoples curiosity
( https://unknowing.design/inviting/ ): my parents were maestros at it.
My father also explained to me that ‘one had to have a high tolerance for strange people.
We live in a culture, where I live in Texas, where migrants are often viewed with suspicion.
And people with different cultures are usually to be watched at a distance.
I research and teach at UT Dallas, where our lab champions migrants (physical and
Intellectual), but also hybridity or being in “more than one places’ at once, even amphibian (walk, swim fly). Metaphors matter as Dr Tina Qin, now a lab member again, declared in her thesis applying metaphor theory to data visualization to catch crooks more easily who have different cultural approaches to thieving.
I got my first degree, a BSc at MIT in Physics. But rapidly joined Saul Rappaport and Hale
Bradt’s https://physics.mit.edu/faculty/hale-bradt/ MIT space science lab.
I became a space scientist working for NASA at UC Berkeley, the European Space Agency
and Directed an Observatory in France. Like my father’s first career.
I currently co-operate the ArtSciLab at UTDallas (https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/ ).
Values include heterogeneity as advocated by the US National Institutes of Health (
https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/organization/crs/research-initiatives/team-science-
field-guide/collaboration-team-science-guide.pdf ).
We welcome international students, US military veterans, indigeneous Texas and a variety
of other human characteristics.
But as reminded by our lab manager Evan Acuna, we hire people on their merits not their
physical characteristics. But by having an open door approach, heterogeneity emerges
without specific action. Our notorious weekly seminar- the Watering Hole- provides a
safe place for people from different disciplines who kill each other all day, to talk and drink
water safely at the oasis that our lab can be.
Students Hiring Students White paper is now legendary; you will find it our first book
https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/asl-over-the-years/ authored by Swati Anwesha.
My colleague Laura Kim advocates being ‘blobby’ rather than fitting into one box
intellectual or geographical ( https://www.lauraonsale.com/blob.html). We are blobby.
We encourage intellectual migrancy; one lab member has an MA in Physics and is now
earning an MA in Finance. We have professional soccer, basketball, and cricket players
who transfer their sports expertise to the better operation of the lab and their own
disciplinary careers in cybersecurity and UXUI design and graphic arts.
As explained by neuroscientist Chandler Wright in his Science Past as Prologue, we
Continue in our university so that our shoulders will be prepared for the weight of future
migrants.
I feel I have a responsibility to my family and ancestors to use the privilege I have
given to enable successful migrancy , disapority and heterogeneity and hybridity.
Thank you, Chandler Wright, for helping me think aloud.