University of Miami - Ibis Yearbook (Coral Gables, FL)

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President Stanford ' s Trip to Turliey a homecoming THb sun was the reason for my presence in Turkey . . . I had been invited to kick off the international symposium on solar energy . . . f s our Turkish Airlines plane circled to land at the old seaport of Izmir (Smyrna to the Greeks) on a flight from Zurich, I looked enthusiasti- cally out at the parched hills rising abruptly from the Ae- gean to form the Anatolian plateau that stretches nearly a thousand miles to the Russian border beyond Kars. The changes were immediately obvious, a better standard of living, more automobiles, more land under cultivation, more industrial goods, and more, many more people in the big cities of Ankara and Izmir. But the connection with the past was equally obvious; the sad wail of the classical Tur- kish music that accosted our eardrums from the taxi radio on the way from the airport; the three heavily laden camels on the road north of Izmir; the marvelous shiskebob and dolma that titillate any palate; the minarets that puncture the landscape, emphasizing the eternal human quest for extra-human support and in- spiration; and the fierce, ferocious sun searing the Ae- gean coast and upward to Ankara and beyond. In fact, the sun was the rea- son for my presence in Tur- key. The Clean Energy Re- search Institute of the Univer- sity ' s School of Engineering and Environmental Design had assisted the Turkish Uni- versity of the Aegean, with United Nations sponsorship and support, in organizing an international symposium on solar energy fundamentals and applications. I had been invited to kick off the confer- ence with a welcome address. Although the official lan- guage of the conference was English to accommodate rep- resentatives from all Middle Eastern countries, I plunged deeply into my memory well to come up with several sen- tences in Turkish. The interest of the United Nations was two fold; to support the confer- ence for the good it would produce in desseminating the latest information about solar research and technology; and to bring back to Turkey those distinguished Turkish scien- tists and engineers from Europe and North America to give their fellow countrymen the benefit of their insights into how solar energy of the Middle East could be 14 ACADEMICS exploited. One of these Tur- kish engineers is Dr. Nejat Veziroglu, Director of the Clean Energy Research Insti- tute. The touch of his lead- ership was upon the confer- ence at every turn. He also demonstrated another advan- tage in having Turks come back to confer with Turkish scientists and professors. They can speak with a candor that would be inappropriate for foreigners. Dr. Veziroglu, for example, got headlines in all the Turkish newspapers when he advocated, at a press conference, that the Turkish government should give up it ' s operation of the state to- bacco monopoly, turn it over to private industry to run more efficiently, and concern itself with activities, like edu- cation, with more advantage to the needs of developing Turkey. Our trip to Turkey had begun with a stopover in Paris. The great city of haute couture was overrun with de- nims. Every French man or woman under thirty was sporting blue jeans. The Grande Dame of the Seine herself seemed to have caught the contagion of denim insouciance and in- formality. From Paris we flew to the Riviera to linger a few days at La Leopolda, the unbelievably beautiful villa belonging to Colonel C. Michael Paul, a Palm Beach patron of our Lowe Museum. The villa had been constructed by King Leopold of Belgium; hence its name. It was La Leopolda that the old ballet movie Red Shoes was filmed. We visited other UM art patrons and climbed through the old province town of Blot. But Blot is young compared to ancient Ephesus, located thirty miles south of Izmir. There we marveled at the civilization that had appeared, disappeared, and reappeared like threads in a loom, some- times giving off a bright color and other times a darker hue. Ephesus had always inter- ested me as the locale of an incident described in the Book of Acts. Paul had intro- duced the new religion to the Ephesians. The silversmiths, led by Demetrius, wildly ob- jected to his preaching that was interfering with their sale of silver idols. They rushed into the open air theater yel- ling Great is Diana of the Ephesians! At that point the town clerk, one of my fav- orite characters, stood up and quieted the mob by urging them to take their complaints to the courts, in other words, not to take the law into their own hands. I thrilled at the ruins of the silversmith stalls, the Temple of Diana, and the theater. The Theater at Per- gamum, about the same dis- tance north of Izmir, is even more dramatic, the steepest in the ancient world, capable of seating ten thousand spec- tators. I was especially inter- ested in nearby Asklepieion, the renowned medical center. Patients came for the treat- ment drinking the salubrious waters of the sacred spring, taking warm baths, and being encouraged to think pleasant thoughts. But the library at Per- gamum interested me most. It ravaled Queen Cleopatra ' s great library at Alexandria. In fact, when the Alexandrian Library burned, Mark Antony ordere d half of the library at Pergamum sent to Alexandria to compensate in part for Cleopatra ' s loss. Our real Turkish homecom- ing was in Ankara. There we renewed friendships with our next door neighbors, visited with friends on the faculty of the University of Ankara, and prowled through the shops of the old bazaar atop the Ank- ara citadel. It was this citadel that Ataturk chose as the cap- ital of the new Turkish repub- lic in 1923. Istanbul, or Con- stantinople, was too iden- tified, as Ataturk thought, with Sultan rule, and had to be re- placed with a new symbol for the republic. We were in Ankara when Markarios, the President of Cyprus, died. This event sparked a lot of speculation about the eventual fate of Cyprus. One thing I am sure of, the Turks will never permit unification of the whole island with Greece, as the Greek government sought a few years ago. It will insist on sep- erate status for the Turkish minority. Perhaps partition of the island is inevitable. Twenty years ago Turkey was perhaps the greatest friend the United States had in the Middle East. Today, with the congressional ban on arms shipments resulting from the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the Turco-American friend- ship has lost its luster; how- ever, it can be polished again. The economic condition of Turkey today would be worse if it were not for the foreign exchange provided by the millions of Turkish nationals who are working in Western Europe, doing the dirty, me- nial tasks of many nations. In 1973 in West Germany alone there were 1.9 million Turkish workers plus 2 million depen- dents. The figure is lower today with the European re- cession. On the flight from Ankara to Frankfurt, again on a Turkish Airlines plane, I was practically the only foreigner aboard. We were surrounded on the DC-10 by a horde of workers and their families re- turning to Europe from a vaca- tion at home. The plane was truly a flying Ellis Island. Many wives wore highly colored kerchiefs and balloon pands; belongings were tied in every conceivable kind of bundle from skin to cloth to suit- cases. The security check at the Ankara Airport revealed that one Turk ' s suitcase was stuffed full of fresh beans and peppers. It was a marvelous smell when he opened it up. Processing incurable nos- talgia for places I have loved, I rented a car at the Frankfurt Airport and sped to my old Alma Mater, the University of Heidelberg. I visited the old castle again by twilight and paused at the spot where Boethe had stood when he sketched the fallen tower as a young man of twenty-nine in 1779. By then he had been working on Faust for four years. He finished it in 1825. My happiness on being back in Heidelberg was tempered by the appearance once again of M arxist and other slogans students had scrawled over the walls inside and outside the main university building. I then visited my own Shangri-La on the Euro- pean continent — the Black Forest. Here man and nature have signed a non-aggression pact. The clean little cities de- corated with flower pots and the manicured hillsides all bespeak an industriousness that is typical of the nation. West Germany is fairly reek- ing with prosperity, so it seems from my superficial survey. Even Black Forest peasants sport two shiney autos standing in front of the farmhouse, not to mention TV aerials everywhere. I think I saw one car that seemed more than two years old. But just as I was sad in Heidel-

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r o z All Geology majors are required to successfully complete a four to six week course in practical field work. Until 1974, Miami students had to enroll in one of several other universities which offered this specialty, mostly in the western regions of the United States. In May 1975 the UM Geology department inaugurated its own annual field course. Because UM specializes in Caribbean research, Guatemala was chosen as the training ground. It was a good choice. Within a reasonably small geographic area, almost all major geologic features are available for study — and they ' re active! In March 1976, 22,000 people were killed in a major earthquake generated by movement along the northern plate boundary. In the three weeks of field study, students are subjected to many experiences, language differences, climate change, physical discomfort and long hours. The effort, however, is rewarded with an intense variety of accomplishments, a few which are alluded to in the accompanying pictures. Live volcanoes, caverns, ancient lost cities, jungle reconnassance, and dyssentery filled the days of the student. II The Geology Department emphasizes research. The incorporation of complex and sophistocated laboratories distinguishes this department and gives the undergraduate an opportunity to research and teach in special programs. Included in the laboratories are isotopic and geochemical facilities to determine radioactive ages by radiocarbon and potassium-argon dating. Oxygen isotopic ratios allow the determination of paleo-temperatures (climates of past times and prediction of future climates.) The inclusion of undergraduates in special research courses and programs has evolved and expanded successfully over the past four years to the point of national recognition. ACADEMICS 13

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i ' berg, so was I sad in the Black Forest, pausing to wonder liow a nation of such great thinkers and doers in nearly every phase of human en- deavor could follow an Aust- rian paperhanger to their ruin and the world ' s detriment. One day we interupted our visit with old friends in Gengenbach, a storied little city that puts a visitor back into the Middle Ages, to drive over the Rhine to Strasbourg for a visit with other friends and a long, leisurely ride into the Vosges Mountains. Now I am nearly over Miami, completing a great three weeks and writing my recol- lections of them. I feel re- freshed and renewed by expe- riences in different cultures, ready to tackle the problems that inevitably await me, which sad to observe, do not improve with age like vintage wine. President Henry King Stanford ACADEMICS 15