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Houghton Welcomes New Electronic Resource Librarian

Two months ago, Houghton College welcomed new librarian, Doyin Adenuga, to campus. With a background in electronic resources and librarian studies, Adenuga’s experience made him more than qualified for the job here at Houghton.

Photo by: Nate Moore
Photo by: Nate Moore

According to Adenuga, he and his family have lived in the United States and Canada for 12 years. Before moving to the U.S. in 2004, Adenuga was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, formerly the capital city of Nigeria, where he met his now wife. He went on to study electronic technologies at Obafeni Awolowo University in Osun State, Nigeria. After marrying in Nigeria, Adenuga and his wife relocated to Wisconsin for four years at the University of Wisconsin. The transition from Nigeria to the U.S. was a cold one when the Adenuga’s arrived in the winter, but after some time, he adjusted from the 90-degree weather of home to the brutal winter temperatures in Wisconsin.

From there, Adenuga and his wife moved to Canada where he worked for a private company and earned his masters degree in library and informational studies. Before his most recent move, Adenuga and his family lived and worked in Missouri until he heard about a new position. After finding an open librarian position at Houghton College on a job search website, Doyin Adenuga applied, interviewed and accepted the position here as the electronic resources librarian.

“Doyin is a wonderful addition to our library family,” said Sharleen Holmes, Houghton Library Operations Manager. “Because of his vast experience with webpage design, one of the first tasks he was given was updating and making our library webpage more intuitive and user friendly.”

Adenuga has already made significant changes to the library technologies including the catalog, web page, and databases, according to David Stevick, Director of Libraries and Information Resources. He added that Adenuga has stepped up to the challenge of a new web page design by making a more functional, user-friendly and attractive library web page. He also maintains the electronic and E-book databases for the library and assists at the research desk.

Along with Adenuga’s skills and expertise, he has high respect for Houghton as a Christian institution. The connection between his faith and this librarian position is one of the reasons the job opening appealed to Adenuga. Holmes said, “He’s very kind, intelligent, and patient, especially with those of us who aren’t anywhere near as tech savvy as he is. His knowledge and talents round out the expertise of our librarians nicely and we feel fortunate to have him here in the library.”

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A Tale of Two Zip Codes

Tonight, along Houghton’s Genesee river banks, I cast my fishing line and hear the ghost of Charles Dickens howling – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Downstream there was a sense of the best of times. The affluent citizens of the Pittsford area kept warm in their gas-fueled homes after tending to their white-collared professional careers and driving their new BMWs through the streets of one of the most successful elite super zip towns of America.   Upstream the working class folks of Belfast were heated by the glow of a wood stove, modestly getting by driving in a late model Chevy pickup coming from their blue-collared job in one of the poorest counties in the state.  

JosephGilligan_RGBMy fictional scenario dramatizes the national economic debate called income inequality. Yet, as a whole, the two Genesee Valley towns offer a glimpse into the true root of the cause of income inequality between the new elite class and the lower middle class.  While many carelessly characterize Pittsford as greedy, selfish, and very secular, the irony is most affluent towns are following traditional American values more so than their working class counterparts.   While we have always had rich people in the US, it appears that cultural norms that once glued us together have created a chasm between the classes. In the 1950s, there weren’t super rich towns. The rich and poor lived together, worshipped together, and sent their children to the same school. Today, the rich live in super zips, also known as the zip codes with the highest per capita income and college graduations in the country; yet, the glue (i.e. education, marriage, religiosity, and community involvement) holding income classes together is coming apart.  

We know a college degree creates higher earning potential.  In Pittsford, over 70% of the population has a college degree, with a median household income north of $130,000.  In Belfast, just 12% of its citizens have a college degree and have a household median income of $40,000.  Colleges provide proficiency in a specific majors and create networking opportunities with fellow students and alumni alike to secure future jobs. Local companies recruit students who will transition quickly at their firm.  In the Genesee Valley, engineering firms recruit from Rochester Institute of Technology, hospitals will recruit nurses from St. John Fisher College and NGOs recruit at Houghton.    

Marriage is the cornerstone of our culture and creates stronger economic and social power for children.  Single family homes accounts for a third of the reason why income inequality has grown since 1979.  In Belfast, the divorce rate is nearly twice that of Pittsford.  We  have recently seen the rise of assortative mating by couples subconsciously using college degrees to screen marriage prospects such as many Ivy league alums marry other Ivy league alums.  Such clustering of educated married couples into Pittsford creates a brain drain from lower middle class towns. 

Community volunteerism helps develop what social scientist Robert Putnam calls “social capital”.  A community with high social capital is more likely to have members that volunteer in their youth sports leagues and their fire departments.  It will also be place where neighbors help a family that loses their house to a fire or an unemployed father trying to find a job.  These communities tend to have lower crime rates, better health, great public schools, and better economic growth rates.  Pittsford boosts one of the top high schools in the nation and list over 30 community events including parades, festivals, concerts, dances, and outdoor movies.  Belfast only lists five. 

Finally, there is religion.  Church organizations create nearly half of the charity and half of the volunteerism in this country.  According to psychology professor David Myers of Hope College, people that are religious tend to create a happy community and a happy community tends to be contagious.  Living in Pittsford you are 65% percent more likely to belong and attend a church than Belfast.   

In the 1960s President Johnson declared a war on poverty. More than fifty years and 22 trillion dollars later, we have not changed the poverty rate. The war was lost because many of the programs crushed our traditional values and failed to calculate human nature. Today’s war on inequality will double down on these misguided policies and expect a different result. My contention with Pittsford and the super zips isn’t their success or affluence; rather, “they don’t preach what they practice” notes Charles Murray, a social scientist 

Let us pass policy to increase equitable education through tax vouchers for private and charter schools, strengthen marriage by eliminating the marriage tax penalty, and restore good paying blue collar jobs by eliminating unnecessary regulation on construction, fracking, lumber mills, fishers, farmers and coal miners.
As I throw my fishing line into the Genesee River for the last time tonight, I think of the preaching of Jesus who said, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

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The More Things Change

For anyone over forty years of age, events in Ukraine over the past two weeks have evoked an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.  An assertive, vehemently anti-Western Russia seeking to resurrect its old sphere of influence in Eastern Europe conjures up memories of the Soviet bloc confronting NATO during the Cold War.  The Russian occupation of Crimea raises the most significant threat to global security since the end of the Cold War, and the possibility of a war among great powers is higher now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

peterIn such circumstances, small miscalculations can have vast consequences.  Western options are limited.  Neither the US nor NATO is likely to use force to stop Russia’s occupation or even annexation of Crimea.  But the risks of acquiesence are high.  Putin’s claimed right to intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians in other countries–can anyone say Sudeten Germans?–is dangerous and destabilizing.  And it is difficult to predict what Putin, or even the volatile Ukrainian government, might do next.  Were an actual war to break out between Russia and Ukraine, bringing armed Russian troops to the borders of NATO, the US and its allies would almost surely be drawn into the conflict.

Under such circumstances, it becomes important for us to understand why Russia is acting as it is.  Since the Berlin Wall fell, various theories have been advanced to explain the shape of international order in the post-Cold War world.  Several of the most influential accounts, identifying different driving variables at the root of state behavior, potentially explain Russian actions in Ukraine.

Power.  Since the end of World War II, the dominant school of thought in American foreign policy has been realism.  Realists such as Kenneth Waltz or John Mearsheimer argue that states act in pursuit of their own national interest.  That interest is shaped by the anarchical nature of the international system, in which states can ultimately rely only on their own resources for survival.  They are thus driven primarily to seek power, in order to gain security.  This does not mean that states are always aggressive; realists view states as rational actors, which can be deterred from acting in ways that would decrease their power and harm their interests.  But states are always seeking an opening.  This competitive and antagonistic vision of international order fits the Russian move into Ukraine: Vladimir Putin, sensing an opportunity to extend Russian power and the unlikelihood of an effective Western response, saw his opening and seized it.

Culture.  Perhaps the most influential account of international politics over the past fifteen years has been that offered by Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  Huntington argues that the world is divided into a number of core civilizations–among them Western, Islamic, Sinic, and Orthodox–which he defines as the largest cultural groupings toward which people feel affinity.  After a Cold War era in which conflict was primarily ideological, he argues, conflict in our new era will occur primarily along civilizational lines.  Thus we should not be surprised to see Russia, the dominant country within Orthodox civilization, confronting a Western world that it regards as increasingly encroaching upon it through actions such as EU expansion.  Nor is it surprising that Ukraine–a country divided between an Orthodox eastern half and a Catholic western half–would become a battleground in civilizational conflict.  When Putin claims the right to protect Russian minorities in other countries, he is making a typical civilizational gambit.

Ideology.  It is tempting to think that ideological conflict ended with the Cold War.  But ideological conflict can take different shapes.  Neoconservative analyst Robert Kagan has argued that instead of ideological conflict ending, it has instead re-emerged in an older form that dominated much of Western history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the struggle between freedom and authoritarianism.  The United States has always been a “dangerous nation,” Kagan says, because our example of free, democratic government, with its appeal for oppressed populations, poses by its very existence and success a threat to authoritarian governments everywhere.  European monarchs knew this in 1800, and Vladimir Putin knows it today.  So when he sees Western governments support a democratic movement to overthrow the pro-Russian Yanukovych government in Ukraine, he responds in kind, seeking to undermine the destabilizing spread of freedom and democracy on Russia’s border.

It is a sign of the current situation’s danger that all three of these theories point in the direction of continued likely conflict with Russia.  There is no more pressing, or difficult, task facing the Obama administration at present than sorting out the roles of power, culture, and ideology in the current conflict and devising a response accordingly.