The Analects of Confucius

Pictured above are Roger Ames, of the University of Hawaii and Beijing (Peking) University and Henry Rosemont, recently retired from St. Mary's in Maryland and currently teaching part-time at Brown University. I'm sandwiched inbetween. Roger, whom I've mentioned before in the blog, is a professor of philosophy and a prolific translator and interpreter of Confucian texts. He and Henry have translated the Analects of Confucius and are working on a new Confucian translation. Chinese students entering college often don't have much academic knowledge of their own culture. The current president of Beiwai was one of Roger's students, and he brought Roger to Beiwai to lecture in English about Confucius, using the Ames and Rosemont translation as a text. I managed to snag Roger for just a short time before his lecture today, since this is our final week, and we had coffee at the BFSU Tasty Eatery, the restaurant in our building. The lecture was right next door at Yifulou, the closest walk I've had to anything so far.

The lecture was in one of their high-tech classrooms, with tiered seats, a huge mechanized screen, and a document camera, my favorite classroom technology. (ELMO is the brand made famous in the O.J. Simpson trial.) You can show anything on it and even use a piece of paper as a blackboard, although your hand shows up magnified on the screen.) Roger did the first hour, and Henry the second hour, tag-team teaching. Roger is one of the reasons I am in Beijing right now, because I was lucky enough to attend two of the Asian Studies Development Program seminars at the University of Hawaii. Several years ago NCC got a terrific grant from the Freeman Foundation for the development of Asian Studies which helped send people to ASDP seminars and other conferences. We have had a long relationship with Japan and a long tradition of teaching Japanese at NCC, but now we have an East Asian Studies major, a professor of East Asian Studies (Brian Hoffert, who accompanied students to Beiwai last year), a respectable collection of East Asian books and films, an increasingly large number of students taking Chinese, and programs like the one the students and I are part of.