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The Lewis & Clark writing center offers guidance on everything from the most basic components of style and grammar to your highest aspirations to clarity, elegance, and originality.Watch Last Year’s Kick-Off Lecture
This lecture from Fall 2019 explores issues of critical thinking and encourage learning to see different sides of an argument. - EVENTSFebruary 20
59th Annual Throckmorton Lecture, Timothy Cheek on “The Power of the Past: What do China’s Communist Leaders Have in Common with Confucius?”
How is China governed? It is a question on our minds as the rule of its president Xi Jinping challenges American hopes and stokes our fears. Is it Communist? Capitalist? Confucian? Making sense of Chinese statecraft, or of how any state is governed, requires not only political analysis but also some sense of its history. This is a fundamental historiographical challenge: how can knowledge of past practice inform, deepen, or throw into question what we think we know about later and present practice? This lecture responds to these questions through the example of one mode of Chinese governance—state-sponsored, village-based, public education in civic virtues. This effort to create ideal subjects began with 11th century Confucian bureaucrats, continued in rural education programs in the 1930s, re-emerged with Mao’s ideological campaigns of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and has reappeared today in Xi Jinping’s mandatory political study sessions. In the end, we find that the past does not determine the present, but does shape its choices through inherited conditions (such as administering a nation the size of an empire), political culture, and, most significantly, the parts of historical memory China’s leaders choose to remember or repress.
Words and Numbers is located in room 404 of Miller Center on the Undergraduate Campus.
MSC: 83
email GenEd@lclark.edu
voice 503-768-7208
Director: Kundai Chirindo
Admin: Dawn Wilson
Words and Numbers
Lewis & Clark
615 S. Palatine Hill Road MSC 83
Portland OR 97219