In a ” Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent’s research on attitudes toward crime and punishment got a shoutout — and a ringing endorsement — from the week’s guest, author and scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young.

The podcast’s host, Shankar Vedantam, who received an honorary degree from �ֲ���ý in 2023, was interviewing Young, a professor of political science and communication at the University of Delaware, about how our widely-ranging capacity for ambiguity impacts our lives. This psychological trait, Vedantam said, “plays a surprisingly large role in shaping our behavior, perspectives, even our political beliefs.” 

One of the traits that relates to the human capacity for uncertainty is a “high need for cognition,” an area Sargent has studied. This isn’t about intelligence, but more about an individual’s need to think, which connects to their openness to uncertainty, or life’s gray areas. 

About halfway through the interview, when Vedantam asked Young how our political beliefs might be shaped by our differing levels of need for cognition, she responded that “there is some wonderful work from political psychology that looks at the trait ‘need for cognition,’” referencing how “work by Michael Sargent showed that people who were highest in need for cognition…tended to be the least supportive of highly punitive measures in response to criminals or in the context of crime.”

Young noted that Sargent found that “people higher in need for cognition were probably more motivated to consider more complex ways of attributing responsibility for why individuals would have engaged in these criminal acts in the first place.”

In other words, said Young, “a high need for cognition allows people to think beyond simple causal mechanisms of bad-person-does-bad-thing and to think perhaps more systemically about other factors that may have been responsible for that criminal act in the first place.”

After this shoutout on the popular podcast (Hidden Brain is estimated to be downloaded 2 to 3 million times a week), �ֲ���ý News checked in with Sargent to find out more.

�ֲ���ý News: Young took a more extensive look at your research in her 2019 book Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the U.S. (Her most recent book is Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation, released in 2023.) Have the two of you ever crossed paths, outside of bibliography?

Michael Sargent: I don’t know her, and it was a total, pleasant surprise to learn that she cited my work, especially because she described the work with perfect accuracy.

BN: That study of yours, “,” was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2004. Can you give a little background on how it came about? 

MS: This was a case of serendipity — some very good luck. I had actually collected some survey data for an unrelated purpose, and had included the need for cognition questions and the questions measuring punitiveness as filler items. In other words, their sole purpose was to disguise the focus of the study. I just decided to explore the data, and discovered that there was a negative correlation: as need for cognition went up, punitiveness went down.

Naturally, my next impulse was to collect data in a new sample to try to replicate the effect, so I could be relatively sure that the first finding wasn’t just a fluke. To my delight, the effect replicated, and it replicated once again in a third study that also shed light on why the need for cognition was having the effect it seemed to have. 

As I explain in the article, attributional complexity seems to be the mechanism. People high in need for cognition seem to gravitate toward relatively complex explanations for phenomena they observe, and the tendency to explain criminal action in complex terms, such as in terms of societal influence, tends to reduce one’s motivation to impose severe punishment.

As for how the article ended up in PSPB, that’s another example of good luck. I was going to submit it to a less selective journal, but I showed a draft of the manuscript to one of my former professors from graduate school — Jon Krosnick — and Jon advised me to aim higher and go for PSPB. 

“Someone who is high in need for cognition is more likely to invest time in cognitively-demanding tasks, such as The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and to do so even when they don’t have to.”

I’m lucky he gave me that advice, as the article was obviously accepted, and it’s probably gotten more exposure at that outlet than it would have otherwise. It’s a reminder that it pays to be lucky — lucky enough to have wise colleagues with whom one can consult. And it pays to be sure to consult with them.

BN: What’s your best translation for the term “high need for cognition” — is it really about enjoying thinking/contemplating? 

MS: Need for cognition describes an individual’s cognitive motivation. It describes how much, or how little, a person enjoys engaging in effortful thought. Someone who is high in need for cognition is more likely to invest time in cognitively-demanding tasks, such as The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and to do so even when they don’t have to, than someone low in the need for cognition.

Importantly, need for cognition is not descriptive of someone’s intelligence. Intelligence is about cognitive ability, but need for cognition is about cognitive motivation. To illustrate, one can be high in intelligence, but low in need for cognition, meaning that one is high in cognitive ability, but one doesn’t enjoy exercising that cognitive ability. As a professor, that prospect bums me out, but it’s very real.

BN: Do you think there has been a cultural shift around high/low need for cognition in the last two decades? 

MS: That’s a great question, and it’s one to which I will plead ignorance, or at least a lack of sufficient expertise, and I’ll defer to anthropologists, or at least to bolder social psychologists than I am. But whether or not general levels of cognitive motivation have shifted, I will hazard a guess that technology has shifted in a way that adversely affects our capacity to engage in sustained, effortful thought. 

Perhaps it’s a pedestrian observation, but the fact that the typical person (at least in the industrialized world) carries a computer in their pocket or purse that can ping us multiple times a day with text messages and social media notifications, probably gets in the way of the kind of concentration that’s characteristic of high “needcogs.” Whatever kind of shift we might call that, I think it can get in the way of high needcogs being high needcogs.

BN: You were one of the official faculty hosts for honorary degree recipients in 2023 when Vedantam was at �ֲ���ý. Did you get a chance to talk brain science?

Sargent: Briefly, yes. I don’t recall what we talked about but it might have been implicit bias. 

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a competitive book review in Japanese.

Their professors’ goal: Through solid writing, get students to persuade or inform. Help them understand the course material, whether it’s mathematics, environmental studies, or history. Get them to consider their own writing mistakes, or build up to a larger project.

Your assignment: Read about these 10 professors’ all-time favorite writing assignments, which they presented to their colleagues in the fall. What’s your favorite?

Biblio Battle Project

Instructor: Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese

Course: “Advanced Japanese II”

Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda teaches a section of Beginning Japanese I. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Assignment: Each student writes a book review in Japanese, then turns that review into an oral presentation for the class. After each presentation, students discuss the book, and at the end, the participants vote for the book they most want to read. The assignment was inspired by Biblio Battles, a popular form of competition created by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan.

Why she likes the assignment: “I believe in combining writing and speaking, especially in the context of language courses, I also like to make writing assignments not only to develop writing expertise, but as a stepping stone to developing speaking. Many adult learners who learn a language in the classroom tend to develop writing before they become more comfortable in speaking.”

Op-Ed on Lead in Lewiston

Instructor: William Wallace, Lecturer in Education

Course: “The Environment and Social Justice,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: First, write a two-page essay comparing and contrasting the issue of lead paint in Lewiston-Auburn neighborhoods with the drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich. Then, write a newspaper-style op-ed about the lead paint issue, using an op-ed about the Flint water crisis as an example. 

As they geared up to turn in their final op-eds, Wallace’s students received help from, among others, Karyn Butts of the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention; former American Cultural Studies lecturer Christopher Petrella, and Lewiston Sun Journal reporter Lindsay Tice. 

Why he likes the assignment: In their course evaluations, the students “said it was one of the highlights of the semester for them, because they felt like they were learning a new skill they didn’t know before. They knew how to write, but this was a type of persuasive writing that was politically active and important to them.”

Faulty Sentence

Instructor: Myra Wright, Lecturer in English

Course: “Reading Cats & Dogs,” First-Year Seminar

Lecturer in English Myra Wright teaches a section of “The Literary Insect,” her 2017 First-Year Seminar. This fall, she taught “Reading Cats and Dogs” to first-year students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Assignment: Students submitted a one-sentence analysis of the John Keats poem “To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat” — but made sure the sentence contained one writing error the professor corrected in previous coursework. The class then discussed each sentence, complimenting each other’s writing, identifying the error, and discussing solutions.

Wright was inspired by Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill, who had told her about a similar process of identifying errors with her students.

Why she likes the assignment: “It allows me to be a real stickler but also make more friendly the work of doing excellent editing at an investigative, imaginative, and critical level.”

What Makes an Expert?

Instructor: Adriana Salerno, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Course: “Calculus I” (largely taken by non-math majors)

Assignment: Read “What Makes an Expert?” from Ken Bain’s What the Best College Students Do, then write an essay connecting the reading to your experience of taking the midterm exam. Address which example of an expert from Bain’s chapter resonated with you, the approaches to learning you take, and how you can improve your performance in the class.

Why she likes the assignment: I have so many students who are like, ‘I’m so bad at math, I’m not very good at this, I’m just here because I have to be.’ There’s a lot of that anxiety coming into a class like Calc I. This helps them think of how these experiences can be transferred to other things.  … This kind of work, understanding that writing is also thinking and processing, gets them to do certain things that are really helpful in math.”

Natural History of a Tree

Instructor: Brett Huggett, Assistant Professor of Biology

Course: “Dendrology and the Natural History of Trees”

In 2015, Julia Fisher ’16 (right) of Philadelphia and Samantha Purnell ’18 of Portland, Ore., measure a tree on the Historic Quad. Their data was part of a webpage documenting the various species of campus trees. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Assignment: Photograph and write a short essay about one campus tree species. Then, tag each tree with a small plate indicating the species name, family, and a QR code linking to a webpage with the student’s pictures and natural history essay.

Why he likes the assignment: “Writing is heavily emphasized in biology. Students are well-trained in the structure of scientific writing and the format of abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. I felt there was a niche to create a writing assignment that asked students to write for the general public and step out of the framework of the rigid scientific structure.”

Toward a Philosophy of Nonviolence

Instructor: Stacy Smith, Lecturer in the Humanities

Course: “The Roots of Nonviolence,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: Having read three texts that influenced Martin Luther King Jr. at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, write a letter to King about these texts, asking King what you want to ask him and saying what you want to say. Use King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” as a model. Alternatively, write a prose essay using as a model King’s chapter entitled “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” from his book Stride Toward Freedom.

Why she likes the assignment: “I am really interested in cultivating student voice. I feel like I was quite successful as a student, and throughout my academic career, writing in a way where I wasn’t really there. What I’m interested in at this stage of my teaching career is cultivating the ‘alive’ human being, within the student and the teacher, in an academic setting. The personal is intellectual, and the intellectual is personal. This assignment is capturing that.”

Thinking About a Research Paper

Instructor: Joe Hall, Associate Professor of History

Course: “Maine Environment and History”

Associate Professor of History Joe Hall delivers the 2018 Convocation address in August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Assignment: In no more than four pages, explain how two works are helping you think about your 20-page research paper. Put the works in dialogue with each other. The grade on the final research paper replaces the grade on this preliminary assignment, if the final paper is better. 

Why he likes the assignment: “The most useful element of the paper as a writing assignment was that it enabled me to tell all of them, because all of them needed to do this, how to use transitions to make an argument that consists of more than one piece. For a research paper, that is absolutely fundamental. Often, the single piece of advice I give my students for all of their papers is, ‘You have a really good summary of this piece and a really good summary of that piece. Tell me why they’re part of the same paper.’ That transition is where your argument is, and now you have an essay.”

Reflective Writing in Quantum Chemistry

Instructor: Lynn Mandeltort, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Course: “Quantum Chemistry” (mostly upper-level chemistry majors)

Assignment: Write two responses — a paragraph at the beginning of the semester, several pages at the end — to the strangeness of quantum theory, but also accurately describe quantum theory. “Construct concise, specific, logical prose connecting the ideas we have discussed thus far, while tying in your own experience.”

Why she likes the assignment: “In these technically based courses, students can go through the motions and give you an answer and not tell you why it matters or if that answer makes sense. What good is science then? … Writing is something you to do communicate broadly and make sure you understand something in a course like chemistry.”

Lewiston Triptych

Instructor: Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies

Course: “Lives in Place” (mostly first-year and sophomore non-majors)

Assignment: Read an essay on how nature is embedded in urban spaces, even if we don’t recognize it as nature. Draw or photograph a material object at Museum L-A in downtown Lewiston, and take a picture of “nature” in Lewiston. Caption the photograph with a quote from the essay, and write a 300-word essay that connects the museum object and the photograph, offering a reflection on nature in L-A.

Why she likes the assignment: “These are wonderful essays about Lewiston-Auburn. If there’s not enough writing about Lewiston-Auburn, maybe my students can be doing some of that writing.”

Podcast Guest Profile

Instructor: Michael Sargent, Associate Professor of Psychology

Course: “Searching for the Good Life,” First-Year Seminar

Pictured in 2014, Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent hosts a storytelling event he founded. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Assignment: To prepare for a group project involving making a podcast about an interesting person’s work, write a profile of your subject — focusing not on broad biographical details, but on specific aspects of their work. Develop one or two questions the work raises for you.

For example, students in the group interviewing a former deputy chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense wrote about such topics as a documentary film the deputy produced, women in the Department of Defense, and artificial intelligence.

Why he likes the assignment: Full disclosure, “this is not my favorite assignment,” Sargent says. “I used to have them write their own eulogy, and I’m really lucky that did not blow up in my face, at least to the best of my knowledge. I’ve dropped that assignment. I’m not taking any more chances.”

This assignment, however, was “writing in the service of some other purpose, and that made it come to life for them. They weren’t just writing for the sake of writing, valuable as it is. They were writing because they saw this as essential to help them get ready for these interviews.”

Ella Baker, a leader in the civil rights movement, understood that activism has to address many issues, according to historian, author, and activist Barbara Ransby. Systems of racism, sexism, classism, and empire intersect to create oppression.

“She really invites us to have a holistic approach to social change,” Ransby told Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent during a recent interview.

Historian, author, and activist Barbara Ransby will give the keynote address at �ֲ���ý’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance on Jan. 21.

Distinguished Professor in the departments of history, gender and women’s studies, and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ransby is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision and Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century.

In the spirit of Baker’s vision of justice and grassroots activism, Ransby will speak on intersectional feminism in the black freedom movement during her keynote address at �ֲ���ý’ annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance on Jan. 21.

Sargent, a co-chair of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Planning Committee at �ֲ���ý and host of the podcast , interviewed Ransby in December. 

Click on the player below to hear an interview with MLK Day speaker Barbara Ransby by Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent.

From Sargent’s interview, here are six insights from Ransby into issues central to MLK Day and her keynote talk, including a definition of the important social justice term “intersectionality.”

Intersectionality:

Audre Lorde, the great black lesbian organizer, who died a number of years ago, had a quote where she said, “We cannot build single-issue movements because we don’t live single-issue lives.” I think that’s a great entree to intersectionality.

The idea is that we all have multiple identities — one is not just a woman or not just an LGBTQ person or not just a black person or Latinx person. All of us have multiple identities.

A second point is not just about individual identity, but about systems, that there are systems of oppression that intersect and reinforce each other, most notably racism, sexism and patriarchy, capitalism and class inequality. All these systems intersect and build upon each other in very intricate ways.

In order to really move toward a more just society, we need a holistic approach to combating injustice that includes multiple communities and targets multiple systems of oppression.

Martin Luther King’s vision of leadership:

Sometimes we place a burden on Dr. King’s legacy that even he would not have appreciated, and that is this singular great-man version of the civil rights movement. I think he himself understood that while he took sacrifices and made contributions, it really was the work of many other people who made the movement possible and his greatness possible.

In order to really move toward a more just society, we need a holistic approach to combating injustice that includes multiple communities and targets multiple systems of oppression.

One of the lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement now is that to model the leadership that empowers grassroots people is what’s more sustainable. We saw in the 1960s a number of heroic figures, like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others, who were assassinated, and others who changed political course, and that points to the fragility of a certain model of leadership, a messianic model of leadership.

What my own scholarship and practice has been very much about is a different approach, a feminist approach, a grassroots approach — but it’s also not an approach that Dr. King would have been hostile to at all. An example that comes to mind is his acceptance speech when he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent hosts the podcast Tatter as well as regular storytelling events. Sargent is pictured here at a 2014 edition of The Corner, a storytelling event he founded. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He talked about himself and others being cast as the pilots on an airplane of justice, and he talked about remembering the ground crew without whom our journey would not have been possible. There are many eloquent metaphors that he used to talk about grassroots organizers and the masses of ordinary people who participated in what we now term the civil rights movement.

Civil rights leader Ella Baker:

Ella Baker was born in 1903 and died on her birthday in 1986 and was active in the struggle for racial and social justice throughout her life. She was active as an organizer in the 1930s in Harlem, she worked with the NAACP in the 1940s, and worked alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall and later Dr. Martin Luther King.

She’s probably best-known as the founder and mentor to the young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who of course launched the desegregation sit-ins, the desegregation rides, and Freedom Summer in 1964.

I bring Ella Baker with me wherever I go.

Ella Baker had a particular approach to organizing and to leadership. She very much emphasized bringing the most marginal members of any community to the center of social justice organizing, and she also felt like ordinary people had the power to determine the priorities within their communities and lead justice campaigns and freedom campaigns in those communities.

A mural on a wall of row houses in Philadelphia depicts, from left, Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass. The quote at top, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest,” is Ella Baker’s. The mural artist is Parris Stancell. (Tony Fischer / CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2 / via Wikimedia Commons)

She did not subscribe to the charismatic, hierarchical kind of leadership model, and she was very critical of that model as it appeared in the civil rights movement, in the black churches, and other places. She was someone who mentored two generations of activists and is not as well-known as she should be.

Why it’s important to talk about Ella Baker on MLK Day:

I like to say I bring Ella Baker with me wherever I go. She’s a good person to have on your shoulder, in spirit, to remind us of how to ground ourselves.

I think the lessons of Ella Baker are very important, not only for her teachings about leadership and accountability to grassroots communities, but also she was very much about systemic change. She said we really need to look at the entire system of injustice and not just one small part of it.

She looked at racism, she looked at sexism, she looked at war and empire, she was a critic of capitalism — so she really invites us to have a holistic approach to social change.

The Black Lives Matter movement has focused not on the more “respectable” members of the African American community, but those people who the economic system has seen as disposable or superfluous.

I think that is something that’s missing in some of the work. We can easily become fragmented or single-issue-focused in our organizing. It’s hard to hold a very large set of issues in a coalition or larger movement formation, but I think that’s the challenge that Ella Baker would have us take up.

Why racial and economic justice go hand in hand:

When we look at issues of police violence in the black community, we’re not all impacted equally. They’re not college professors and lawyers and doctors who are the primary victims of police violence and state violence in this period. In fact, we’ve seen some members of the black community achieve enormous success and wield real power.

That said, poor and working class black folks, people like Eric Garner and Tamir Rice’s family and Michael Brown’s family and others, are economically vulnerable and racially vulnerable. Understanding that intersection, if you will, between race and class is a real challenge and a lesson of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The movement has focused not on the more “respectable” members of the African American community, but those people who the economic system has seen as disposable or superfluous.

If we think of someone like Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, who was killed in an arrest effort by local police there — what was his crime? He was selling CDs out of the back of his car. Or Eric Garner, who was strangled on Staten Island — he was selling loose cigarettes to help support his family.

In both of those cases, those men were functioning in the informal economy. They were poor and working class people, and that is as much a part of their profile and their vulnerability as the fact that they were black men.

The movement has not de-emphasized their class status but really pointed to the need for economic reform and economic justice at the same time that it has demanded racial justice.

The potential for a coalition of anti-racist and labor organizers:

We have to expand our notion of labor organizing. There are very large unions that fought for workers’ rights over many years and in some ways have become somewhat distant from community struggles that exist.

Then there’s new forms of labor organizations, like around the country, that have attempted to organize undocumented workers, temporary workers, seasonal workers, etc., and groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has done really important labor organizing around the . These are nontraditional labor organizations, so I just want to make sure they’re in the mix when we talk about labor and workers issues.

There are already some kernels of connections, some building blocks that are there. We need to do more. Labor is under assault, with the recent Supreme Court decision on the . So far, public-sector unions are vulnerable, but all unions are vulnerable. I think it’s a hostile environment in many respects.

The challenge is to connect the dots, and that’s always our challenge, to line up where these movements can be connected.

Elizabeth Strout ’77, Litt.D. ’10

In Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author “articulates for her readers — albeit often circumspectly, perhaps the only way — the Gordian knot of family, binding together fear and misery, solace and love,” writes reviewer Claire Messud of The New York Times Book Review.

The setting is a hospital room, where Lucy Barton is recovering from an illness, and her estranged mother arrives for a visit.

That simple premise, The Washington Post‘s Lily King writes, generates “old-fashioned, uncomplicated” storytelling, but only at first.

Befitting the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, the novel soon becomes “smart and cagey in every way…yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”

Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent

�ֲ���ý psychology professor Michael Sargent “used to think storytelling was a bogus art form for bad comedians,” writes Down East reporter Sara Anne Donnelly.

Holding a bowl with the names of storytelling hopefuls, psychology professor Michael Sargent kicks off an edition of The Corner, an occasional storytelling event at She Doesn’t Like Guthries in Lewiston. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Not now. Sargent, the founder and ringmaster of , which offers storytelling events at She Doesn’t Like Guthries, a downtown Lewiston restaurant, “got hooked” on storytelling shows on NPR, and “wanted something like that in Lewiston. So he made it.”

In a , Sargent tells Donnelly that the experience of storytelling “makes connections sneak up on me. Suddenly I realize that I’m feeling a form of connection that was unexpected, in someone who I might never have even met before then. And it feels good.”

Peter Gault ’11 and Elise Kornack ’09

Peter Gault ’11 and Elise Kornack ’09 were named to Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 list in respective categories: , who is co-founder of an open-source literacy tool, and , co-owner of , a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brooklyn.

Quill has a double dose of �ֲ���ý talent. Ryan Novas ’11 is a co-founder and serves as operations director. Last summer, the founders offered �ֲ���ý Purposeful Work internships to Jane Spardel ’17 of Verona, N.J., and Rebeccah Bassell ’16 of Mechanicsville, Va.

In 2014, Downeast Cider’s Tyler Mosher ’11 and brothers Matt Brockman ’08 and Ross Brockman ’11 earned a nod from Forbes, as did Peter Simon ’10, co-founder of Industry City Distillery, in 2013.

Stephen Engel, associate professor of politics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Presenting a diverse group of scholars from Yale, Northwestern, the University of Maine and other institutions, �ֲ���ý College hosts the daylong conference Property: Claims to Ownership and Responsibilities of Stewardship in Multidisciplinary Perspective at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Sponsored by �ֲ���ý and the American Bar Foundation, the conference is open to the public at no cost, but seating is first-come, first-served. For more information, please contact co-organizers Stephen Engel, associate professor and chair of politics at �ֲ���ý, or Michael Sargent, associate professor of psychology, at sengel@bates.edu or msargent@bates.edu.

The conference comprises two morning panel discussions followed at midday by a plenary address exploring the potential of undergraduate legal studies in the liberal arts context. The plenary speaker is Laura Beth Nielsen, professor of sociology and director of the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University and research professor at the American Bar Foundation.

See a complete schedule, presentation abstracts and a compilation of conference presenters at .

Michael Sargent, associate professor of psychology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The nine research presenters represent the American Bar Foundation, �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin College, Chicago–Kent College of Law, the University of Maine, the University of Miami School of Law, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Virginia, and Yale Law School. Faculty from �ֲ���ý and Bowdoin will serve as discussants, facilitating fruitful exchanges between presenters and audience.

“The conference brings to �ֲ���ý original research that assesses the many meanings of property as a material, cultural and intellectual object,” says co-organizer Engel.

“The presentations will evaluate how our ideas about ownership influence, and are influenced by, our racial, ethnic and sexual identities, notions of environmental stewardship, and our sense of responsibilities for historical preservation.

“With the aim of uncovering how a foundational idea in law — property — can be newly understood when studied from distinct disciplines, this conference showcases the work of historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, economists, art historians, and literary scholars. In so doing, the conference illustrates how law and legal concepts can be fruitfully engaged within the robust interdisciplinary inquiry that is the hallmark of the liberal arts.”

The eight presentations will explore topics as disparate as:

• the impact on ocean stewardship of Marine Spatial Planning, a process for relating human activity to ocean waters (presented by �ֲ���ý professor Aslaug Asgeirsdottir);
• Black Americans’ struggle for landownership in the context of racial apartheid and capitalism in America (Andrew Kahrl, University of Virginia);
• exotic animal ownership laws (Douglas Kysar and Matt Ampleman, Yale Law School);
• and issues surrounding Penobscot Indian rights to islands in their namesake river (Micah Pawling, University of Maine).

In addition to the American Bar Foundation, sponsoring the event are these �ֲ���ý offices and academic programs:

• the Office of the President;
• the divisions of social sciences, humanities and interdisciplinary programs;
• the departments and programs of art and visual culture, economics, history, classical and medieval studies, environmental studies, African American studies, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and women and gender studies;
• and the Office of Intercultural Education.

Michael Sargent

What Lewiston needs is fewer slogans and more excellence

Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent questioning the effectiveness of cheerleading marketing campaigns, like Lewiston-Auburn’s long-running “It’s Happening Here” campaign, that try to alter a city’s reputation.

Psychology professor Michael Sargent confers with volunteer Molly Pailet ’15 of Denver, Colo., prior to an installment of The Corner, a monthly storytelling event at Guthrie’s in Lewiston. Sargent is event founder and host. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“…This community needs fewer cheerleaders singing its praises, and more people just doing the best they can to do good work,” writes Sargent, who has lived in Lewiston since 1999 and teaches a course that touches on community reputation.

What can help to change people’s perception of a city like Lewiston, he writes, is “excellence in craft.”

In other words, the goal to “cultivate a stronger, more complex and more interesting image of the community” can be achieved by focusing on “the work in the trenches that local folks are doing to advance their respective crafts…. Whatever you make or whatever you do, do it as well as you can, and find partners and mentors and do it even better. If enough people here in this community do that, people here and elsewhere will eventually notice.”

Mara Tieken

Rural schools need their own policy approach

Assistant Professor of Education Mara Tieken joined other education experts to talk about Maine rural education on the Feb. 11 edition of the

Tieken is the author of which draws on her investigation of two rural school districts in the South to explain the complex relationships between rural communities and their schools.

Education professor Mara Tieken and students visit the Edmund S. Muskie Archives to examine Lewiston school district archives, including census logs, superintendent reports and student portfolios, part of the course “Perspectives on Education.” (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Over the past several years, a number of rural Maine school districts have consolidated into large regional districts. The goal is to save money, but what can be lost is a sense of community identity.

In terms of public policy, education leaders should think about the fact that “in rural areas there is such community involvement in schools.” Policy makers should “play on that, use that and protect that,” Tieken says.

In terms of curriculum, Tieken notes the “increasing standardization” over the decades. “What’s taught in one area is very similar to what is taught in another area.”

That’s positive because it’s more equitable for students. “But there is good research showing that when a school’s curriculum is grounded in the local context, kids are more involved, the community is more involved, and there are benefits for everybody.”

Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent has received a grant of approximately $60,000 to support research into the brain’s ability to link moral principles with specific judgments.

Sargent’s grant is part of the of the University of Chicago, a worldwide scholarly project seeking to understand the nature and benefits of wisdom.

Sargent is exploring the consistency, or lack thereof, between people’s stated principles and the reasons that actually shape their moral judgments.

“Typically there’s a mismatch,” he says. “People may offer a justification for a judgment, but those won’t be the real reasons. People aren’t very good at identifying the actual operative principles that underlie their judgments.”

But, he says, some people actually do base moral judgments on their espoused moral code. “I simply want to know, what conditions have to hold in order for those two to align?”

The grant, which includes funds from the John Templeton Foundation, will support two years of research based largely on public surveys. While much of this work will be done in Maine, the grant will enable Sargent to conduct national online surveys reaching thousands of people.

The “trolley problem,” a hypothetical test case used by philosophers, is typical of the kinds of scenarios that Sargent will pose to his respondents. It goes like this:

A streetcar is hurtling out of control toward five individuals who are on the tracks. You are standing near a switch that can divert the trolley onto a side track — but there is one person on the side track. Should you flip the switch even if that one person will die?

“There’s at least a utilitarian argument to be made for throwing the switch,” Sargent says. “You throw the switch and one dies rather than five. One is less than five — it’s easy to make a case for doing that.”

But contrast the “footbridge problem.” Here the trolley is still hurtling toward the five individuals, but now you are on a footbridge overlooking the tracks. There is a man next to you who would be heavy enough to stop the trolley if he fell in its path. Should you push him?

In both cases, says Sargent, you would sacrifice one life for the sake of five. But typically, people who feel it’s appropriate to flip the switch in the first case say that in the second, it is morally wrong to push the heavy man in front of the streetcar. That distinction is typical of the discrepancies that interest Sargent.

Does the physical contact make the difference? Or is it the intentionality of an act? The so-called holds that it may be morally permissible to harm a person as long as that harm is not intended, even if it is foreseen. Pushing the fat man off the bridge would intentionally harm him, whereas flipping the switch would have the intention of saving the five and the unintended consequence of killing the one.

“Very few individuals can articulate exactly why they make that judgment,” he says. “The nub of what I want to get at is how to identify the people who can do this, or how we identify the conditions under which individuals can do this.”

In the long term, Sargent says, the implications of this research could reach beyond psychology. There’s an obvious connection with the law. “Ultimately, the hope is to be able to speak not just to moral judgment, but perhaps even legal judgment,” although making such a connection is only speculative at this point.

Sargent is one of the year’s 23 recipients of a Defining Wisdom Grant. With $2 million in funding from the Templeton Foundation, the project was created by the University of Chicago’s Arete Initiative, which explores ways to catalyze broad-based interdisciplinary research.

The three tenure recipients are assistant professor Pamela Johnson of the Department of Art and Visual Culture; associate professor John McClendon of the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies; and assistant professor Michael Sargent of the Department of Psychology.

All three live in Lewiston and have taught at �ֲ���ý since 1999.

Johnson teaches studio art media and techniques. A painter and printmaker, she has recently completed a body of more than 50 mixed-media pieces that use images from fairy tales and nature to explore themes of female identity. She has shown work in solo and group exhibitions at Maine venues including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, in Rockport, and Zero Station, Portland, as well as the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art. Her work has appeared at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., Bennington College, Vermont, and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass.

Johnson received a B.F.A. in art history at the University of Kansas, a second B.F.A. in painting at the Kansas City (Missouri) Art Institute, and her master’s at Bennington College. In 1993 and 1994, she worked as a personal assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, the noted Abstract Expressionist painter. Johnson also studied at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

McClendon teaches courses in cultural politics, African American philosophers, Africana thought and practice, theory and method in African American studies, and the role of athletics in African American culture. He is interested in the intersections of philosophy, social science and the African American experience, and particularly in African American expressions and adaptations of leftist thought.

McClendon is a widely sought-after public speaker and a prolific author. He has written diverse articles for scholarly journals, reference works and anthologies, served on the advisory board of the journal Cultural Logic, and served as editor of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. His book C.L.R. James’s Notes On Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? was published by Lexington Books in January, and he has three other book manuscripts in progress.

Before �ֲ���ý, McClendon taught in public schools and in academic settings including the University of Missouri and the University of Illinois at Champaign. He received a B.S. in black studies and political science at Central State University in Ohio, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kansas.

Sargent teaches courses in social and political psychology, research methodology, prejudice and stereotyping, and social cognition. Most of his research focuses on stereotyping and prejudice.

Sargent has written and spoken extensively on the Implicit Association Test, an instrument for measuring attitudes and responses that individuals are either incapable of recognizing in themselves or unwilling to report honestly. He has also written and spoken on issues of race in police work and the legal system.

Before �ֲ���ý, he taught at the Ohio State University. Sargent received his B.A. in psychology at Hendrix College in Arkansas, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Ohio State.