rutgers-university-faculty

"A relentless battler against conservative, unscientific economic orthodoxy"

"After his doctorate, the situation created by the decline of McCarthyism and the rise of the civil-rights and antiwar movements allowed Eichner and other mainstream economists to emerge as heterodox economists in the United States and even secure an academic position."

"His path led him to the conviction that the typical enterprise in 20th century capitalism is oligopolistic, with a clear separation between management and ownership."

"The post-Keynesian and institutionalist traditions have lost one of their most creative theorists and fervent supporters"

"Remember that, as a sociologist, your focus is on social interaction—i.e., not on the biological or psychological processes of the actors, but on their and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes."

"... one seems forced to conclude that a disproportionally large number of the nation's "pockets of poverty" are found in rural-farm areas."

"Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career."

"Because of unprecedented increases in , the structure has been transformed. Linkages among family members have been prolonged, and the surviving generations in a family have increased in number and complexity. Today's kinship structure (which has no parallel in history) can be viewed in a new way: as a latent web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close family relationships. These relationships are no longer prescribed as strict obligations, but must be earned—created and recreated by family members over their lives. Such changes in the structure and dynamics of family relationships raise many questions and issues for students of the family including the development of special research approaches needed to understand the complexity of these relationships and the nature of older people's family relationships in the future."

"Today's social structures and norms are the vestigial remains of the nineteenth-century, when most people died before their work was finished or their last child had left home. Age 65 was established as the criterion for —yet age 65 is still used in many countries under today's utterly changed conditions of longevity."

"Possibly overshadowed by Matilda’s many public accomplishments is her service as a teacher and mentor at and , and the dedication and accomplishments of some of her students and menses to the study of aging and the life course, especially Anne Foner, Marilyn Johnson, and Kathleen Bond. She built a modern sociology-anthropology department at and was named the Daniel B. Fayerweather Professor of Political Economy and Sociology in 1975; in 1996 the building housing the department was named in her honor, and she received honorary doctoral degrees from (1972), Rutgers (1983), (1994), and the (1997)."

"In 1979 at the age of 68, Matilda embarked on a 20-year career at the (NIA) of the (NIH). The NIA’s founding director, , and the NIH Director, , invited Matilda to establish the NIA’s granting program on Social and Behavioral Research (SBR) as well as to guide the expansion and integration of these disciplines throughout the NIH. During her first year at the NIA, she and Kathleen Bond (one of her former graduate students) developed and implemented a multidisciplinary vision for research on aging that integrated the aging of individuals into societal structures. This program emphasized the influence of social structures on the lives of individuals (Matilda exclaimed often, “People don’t grow up and grow old in laboratories—they grow up and grow old in changing societies.”) and the lives of individuals on social structures. This vision extended to the biological sciences, for Matilda recognized the need for a biopsychosocial understanding. The publication of this blueprint as a NIH program announcement set the course of NIA’s program and influences its direction even to this day."

"Interviewing individual group members separately affords privacy and encourages all members to answer. Respondents may be more frank if that others in the group will not hear what they say (thereby removing the possibility of group sanctions). This may be the best way of obtaining responses from individuals with lower positions (younger, lower , e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation."

"The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.”"

"The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism."

"It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that scholars of Late Antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East have consigned Mandaeans to an oubliette for much of the past century, on the grounds that they are too cryptic, too late, too weird, and far too disassociated from the other peoples who have primarily served as the subjects for their own research. I hope to have demonstrated we have done ourselves and our subjects a disservice by failing to integrate a rich and valuable source into our own narratives of the history of these times and places, which are therefore even more deficient and incomplete for this oversight. Mandaic is certainly not part of the standard repertoire of scholars working upon Late Antiquity, and not even of those working upon the Sasanian Empire, and while it is probably unreasonable to expect that it might someday join Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian among the other languages within that repertoire, I am nonetheless convinced that Mandaean texts such as this one [the Book of Kings] will prove indispensable for elucidating some of the mysteries that attend the study of this period and region."

"Mandaeism, of course, is not merely a scholarly construct, cobbled together from a few spare texts discovered in an archive somewhere, but the body of practices and the belief system of some tens of thousands of souls across Iraq, Iran, and a global diaspora, a living faith community—with all that that entails in its fractal complexity. Therefore, Mandaeans and Mandaean texts alike often tax our abilities to discuss them in a nuanced manner that does justice to this complexity, particularly in light of the fact that nearly all of us who address their textual production do so solely in relation to the works of these other adjacent communities, at wildly different times and in different places, from the first millennium BCE to the early centuries of the Islamic era, and from Palestine to Iran."

"From the start, these preconceptions and expectations have set in motion a perennial cycle of fascination and disappointment with Mandaeans, whose scholarly representations sometimes bear little relation to them. Most of the scholarship on Mandaeans analyses their history and literature exclusively as an adjunct to those of other communities, and generally after it has been broken down into its constituent parts by means of philology. The consequence is that Mandaeism is something like the elephant in the parable of the blind men and an elephant, but only after it has been butchered, processed, and repurposed for the benefit of a broader consumer base: here are some piano keys carved from its teeth, there is a handbag stitched together from its skin, here is a hairbrush made from the hair of its tail, there is a drum covered with the skin of its ear, here is a rubbish bin made from its foot. More than anything else, this cycle of fascination and disappointment is driven by the manifest futility of trying to reconstruct anything like an elephant from the products of these processes."

"To this day, Mandaeism remains a kind of blank canvas upon which we project our own interests, even as we struggle to determine whether they are relevant to the questions we ask of them. In keeping with the truism that we seldom see things as they are but rather as we are. we are seldom disappointed in this regard. Assyriologists often perceive them as survivals of the ancient Mesopotamian cults, Iranists frequently characterize them as an Iranian religion in Semitic dress, and Jews, Christians, Muslims, and their scholars generally discover aspects of themselves within them. If Mandaeans have one superpower, it is their remarkable capacity to reflect the subjectivity of their scholarly interlocutors back upon us. Thus, the copious literature on Mandaeans can simultaneously reflect their status as ancient Mesopotamian pagans, Johannine Baptists, pre-, proto-, and post-Manichaeans, Jewish-Christian Nazoreans, post-Islamic Sabians, and of course Gnostics, however we may define them."

"In conclusion, we must acknowledge that the texts before us are the product of a living and evolving tradition, composed, redacted, transmitted, and continuously interpreted and re-interpreted, across countless unknown generations. Much like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, what we call “Mandaeism” is at all times and in all places the dynamic expression of individuals and communities of practice—including, one might add, the community of scholars who study them. All our efforts at analyzing religions rely as much upon the texts before us as upon our own “imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” and if I have dwelled more upon the latter than the former in these concluding remarks, it is only because a healthy degree of skepticism towards and self-awareness of these analytical acts should be the foremost object of any historian of these religions. Texts such as the Book of John are not isolated epigraphic remains, any more than Mandaeans are fossils, and therefore any approach that attempts to collapse the former into a single chronotope or privilege a specific social, religious, and historical moment out of the entire span of Mandaean history is inherently defective. Such approaches are as misguided and limited as the application of palaeontological methodology to living wildlife communities would be."

"I have a different take, which I learned from Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller and author of the bestselling leadership book Everybody Matters."

"Our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves. Our bodies change our minds."

"I introduced my AP Physics students to power posing last spring. One student in particular was always so nervous during assessments and therefore her test scores did not represent her abilities at all. We all know that old saying about correlation and causation — and this was no scientific study — but from that day forward that student power posed before every physics test and her grades went from high 'C's and low 'B's to where she belonged — in the mid to lower 'A's. I'm convinced that power posing helped her even if it is difficult to prove."

"First, we have to define power: social or formal power is control over other people, their choices, their outcomes, and control of resources and decisions that affect other people,"

"To have control over our own internal resources – so skills, knowledge, emotional intelligence, empathy – activates the behavioral approach system,” Cuddy notes. “It makes us more optimistic, able to take risks, create and be cognitively agile, courageous and even willing to protect or stand up for others when necessary. I think there’s a much greater focus on that kind of power today than there was 10 years ago."

"I still see men using body language that conveys dominance rather than confidence, “Feet too far apart, speaking too loudly, looking as if they’re trying to control, not connect with, the audience. And that just doesn’t work."

"Effective body language conveys a combination of confidence (not dominance) and trustworthiness, "It tells people, 'I'm comfortable and I’m worth listening to,' and also, 'I respect you and I'm interested in learning about you and earning your trust.' It's body language that's less choreographed, less scripted and more responsive to what's happening in the present."

"The 'bold, confident' leader as someone who never asks for help, who has all the answers, who shows little emotion or compassion – they're a thing of the past,"

"A person's ability to be bold enough to take some personal risks and confident in a genuine, grounded way will, in my opinion, always be helpful to them in getting in the door and being heard."

"What 'boldness' and 'confidence' mean for leaders in the workplace has, to the benefit of everyone, evolved in the last decade, and even more so in the last few years, given the COVID-19 pandemic."

"I love working with the World Business Forum [...] I find the participants uniquely engaged and optimistic – they’re really happy to be there and always eager to understand and apply what they’re learning about."

"He's a phenomenally successful leader and he does that not by focusing on recruiting new people, but by genuinely, compassionately taking care of and rewarding the people who are already working for him. He always tells me, "It's not about getting the right people on the bus; it’s about having a safe bus, and making sure that the person driving the bus – the leader – knows how to take the people to a better place.'""

"They're less tolerant of and more likely to reject abusive workplace situations [...] If employers want to keep good people, they're going to have to ask their employees what works for them and actually listen and adapt to their answers."

"It's this sense of company-wide empowerment that has the potential to take your business to new heights [...] We should strive to help everyone in our places of work to feel more powerful, because it tends to bring out the best in us."

"Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal Emperor (r. 1658-1707), is perhaps the most despised of India’s medieval Muslim rulers. People cite various alleged “facts” about Aurangzeb’s reign to support their contemporary condemnation, few of which are true. For instance, contrary to widespread belief, Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of Hindu temples. He did not perpetrate anything approximating a genocide of Hindus. He did not instigate a large-scale conversion program that offered millions of Hindu the choice of Islam or the sword."

"Audrey Truschke has engaged in what would in any other context be called genocide denial and Holocaust revisionism. But because her hatred is against Hindus, Rutgers doesn't care. It's a flagrant and vile "standard"."

"The political power equation that facilitates the partisan anti-scholarly conduct of your camp will not last forever. One day it will become feasible to do academic research on the strange phenomenon that an entire academic and mediatic guild has systematically disinformed the public about the communal situation in India, consistently for decades. Your own whitewash of Aurangzeb will serve as a significant piece of evidence."

"More dubiously, some have proposed that Aurangzeb’s alleged austerity was a fatal flaw. For instance, Jadunath Sarkar, who did more scholarly work than anybody else in the twentieth century on Aurangzeb, put it thus in his dramatic style: “[in Aurangzeb’s reign] the Mughal crescent rounded to fulness [sic] and then began to wane visibly.” Jadunath Sarkar spelled out his vision of Aurangzeb in his many books on the man, including the five-volume History of Aurangzib. The final tome begins, “The life of Aurangzib was one long tragedy,—a story of man battling in vain against an invisible but inexorable Fate, a tale of how the strongest human endeavor was baffled by the forces of the age.” For Sarkar, Aurangzeb was a tragic figure."

"Modern historians estimate that 15 to 20 percent of Bengal's population died during the 1769-1770 famine, a starkly different outcome than after earlier failed harvests. For example, 1737 and 1738 witnessed poor harvests in Bengal, but the Mughals and local rulers helped alleviate conditions by buying grain, making loans, and permitting late revenue payments. In contrast, thirty years later, the British did none of those things and, in fact, still tried to collect revenue from starving farmers."

"Let us note finally that on this issue, Audrey’s book is representative of a wider concern to whitewash Aurangzeb. In their all-out war on Hinduism and specific Hindu ideas, the South Asia scholars tend to practise Groupthink; there is rarely anything original, they only outdo each other in how daring they can make their own articulation of ever the same position.... To sum up, the presently-discussed thesis by Audrey Truschke comes to add to the numbers of what formally look like studies in history, but effectively are meant as strikes in the ongoing battle against self-respecting Hinduism."

"The British oversaw - and contributed through inaction to - dozens of famines during two centuries of colonial rule, culminating in the 1943 famine (also in Bengal) that cost two millions Indian their lives."

"Shivaji’s return to insurgency was devastating for the Mughals. Beginning in 1670 Shivaji plundered Surat and other places repeatedly."

"Over the centuries, many commentators have spread the myth of the bigoted, evil Aurangzeb on the basis of shockingly thin evidence. Many false ideas still mar popular memory of Aurangzeb, including that he massacred millions of Hindus and destroyed thousands of temples. Neither of these commonly believed “facts” is supported by historical evidence, although some scholars have attempted, usually in bad faith, to provide an alleged basis for such tall tales. More common than bald-faced lies, however, have been biased interpretations of cherry-picked episodes selected with the unabashed goal of supporting a foregone rebuke of Aurangzeb."

"Thinking today about Sambhaji, a seventeenth-century Maratha ruler who, by the end of his life, had alienated many supporters through brutal and miscalculated tactics. Seems that those who honor him may honor his legacy too. #Sambhaji"

"For anyone unfamiliar with these episodes, in Valmiki's telling (I'm loosely translating here): During the agnipariksha, Sita basically tells Rama he's a misogynist pig and uncouth. During the golden deer incident, Sita accuses Lakshmana of lusting after her and setting up Rama."

"Could this reaction against the personal by [analytic] philosophers … be, at bottom, one of fear? … Are … bright people … blindly afraid of their own precarious identity and unspeakable vulnerability as particular bodily beings?"

"Philosophy is not exactly science, [analytic philosophers] think, but it must resemble science in its style and mood of detachment: its appearance of being without any particular person’s or any particular group’s biases."

"Once, Socrates was a sort of patron saint of philosophers. It was understood that philosophy was a way of questioning, musing, ruminating, living—a way of being a person."

"… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self."

"[William] James observed that if one who desires self-knowledge takes exclusively a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate view of oneself, one has already prejudiced what one can be, and, of course, what one can know of oneself."