Seventy-Two Words

I wrote seventy-two words.

I'm chapter 54.

CSUF Arboretum

Student receives $1,000

Published in the CSUF Daily Titan newspaper on March 20.

A new reality came barreling down on CSUF student Julia Patricia Torre, 37, when she transitioned from housewife to struggling single mother.

"I got divorced in this country," said Torre, who is originally from Mexico City. "I was a housewife and all of a sudden, I had to provide for my family. It's hard to rebuild your life. I'm trying to teach my children that education has rewards and you don't have to wait for a prince to solve your problems."

Torre, a senior, won the $1,000 Soroptimist Women's Opportunity Award. On March 17, a luncheon at the Wyndham Hotel in Fullerton allowed her to receive the award along with a certificate of commendation from the city of Fullerton and a Certificate of Congressional Recognition from Congressman Ed Royce.

"I was very excited [to win]," said Torre, an international business major. "[To me,] the award means recognition for efforts a single mom puts into school while raising kids."

The word soroptimist is a combination of sorority and optimist and can be defined as "best for women," according to the Soroptimist Web site.

The organization, Soroptimist International of the Americas, was founded in 1921 with the mission to better the lives of women and girls.

An overwhelming vote by Soroptimist members helped create the Soroptimist Women's Opportunity Award in 1972.

Born in Mexico City, Torre moved to Huntington Beach in 1993 after she met her ex-husband while working and attending college. Although she began studying for a business degree in Mexico, she started school all over again when the family moved to Miami in 1994.

She received her associate degree in business from Miami Dade Community College. At Miami Dade she graduated with honors and made the dean's list.

In 2003 Torre left her husband, worked for a year and half and then began studying again in 2005 at Golden West College in Huntington Beach. From there she transfered to CSUF.

While registering at CSUF, another low blow hit Torre. She learned the college would only accept 37 out of the 92 units she had accumulated.

"I was almost ready to go and work," Torre said.

Torre, a Huntington Beach resident, is now ready to graduate and begin the master's program in the fall.

"I want to save the [award] money for tuition for the master's program," Torre said. "I'll put it in a safe until I can pay for the first semester."

Torre's school involvement does not end simply with homework. She is also the co-vice president for the international honor society Phi Beta Delta and she recently finished an internship for the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce, which included a trip to China where she toured jade, silk and carpet factories and interviewed government officials.

"I would like to run my own business importing art from Latin American countries," Torre said. "There's a lot of art that people in this country don't know about and through art we can learn about other cultures and respect them. That's my dream."

University Police Cpl. Iris Cortes-Valle made the call to inform Torre of her accomplishment.

"Julia had us in tears at the reception," said Cortes-Valle, who is also a member of the Soroptimist International of Fullerton. "She spoke from the heart."

Cortes-Valle said that since Torre won the award for the Fullerton club, her application will be reviewed along with all of the other winners for the region. The regional winner will be awarded $3,000.

"[The organization] is about helping people, such as Julia -- somebody that's had such hardships -- and giving them an opportunity to be recognized and enable them to feel a little more confident about what they're doing," Cortes-Valle said. "I think for Julia [this] is a wonderful opportunity to be an example for other people and to say you can break that cycle."

Assistant Dean of Student Affairs in the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics Emeline Yong encouraged Torre to apply for the award.

"Julia had shared her story with me a year ago," Yong wrote in an e-mail. "Once I heard the criteria for the scholarship, I thought of Julia. I'm so happy she was chosen. She has gone through a lot in life and she deserves this type of recognition."

Animal Weekend

Anthropology department prepares for new exhibit

Published on the CSUF Daily Titan newspaper Web site on March 13.

The Anthropology department is gearing up for the arrival of a new exhibit next month and the Carl's Jr. on campus is hosting a fundraiser to help.

Students who present a flier advertising the event, which can be obtained in MH-426, will help the museum receive 25 percent of the profit from the purchase, which Carl's Jr. will donate to the new exhibit, "Ceramics of Sustenance: Elaborate Vessels of the Sawos, Papua New Guinea."

"Any cost of the food is being subtracted," anthropology major Vivian Cawthon, 23, said. "You have to hit a minimum of $500 in sales in order to qualify for the grant afterward."

Money raised will help with the cost of supplies and production of a catalog for the exhibit.

"We're not sure if we'll have the funds in order to publish the catalog," Cawthon said. "That's the big thing we need to gather money for because it's expensive to publish. I think the original price we got was $99 for the first one, then $20 for each catalog afterward."

The fundraiser, which ends Saturday, has produced about $100 so far and has provided Carl's Jr. with free advertising, according to Cawthon.

"We have quite a ways to go, but we still have some days left," Cawthon said. "Hopefully a lot of people want [to eat at] Carl's Jr."

The upcoming exhibit is fully developed, designed and promoted by Anthropology 498, the museum practicum class. It will have its grand opening on April 22 at 5 p.m. and run until June.

"It's super cool to have support from an on-campus restaurant," anthropology graduate student Jaclyn Ross, 23, said. "I've never seen that before."

Ross said the museum is an important part of CSUF because students prepare the entire exhibit.

"It's really good to have the hands-on experience," Ross said. "Plus, any student can walk by and enjoy it."

Art Brilliance Challenge Education Creativity Complexity

Published in the CSUF Daily Titan newspaper on March 12.

A metaphor comparing fish in water to humans and the collective blindness of our reality perfectly explains why Karyl Ketchum creates.

"We're the fish and ideology is the water," Ketchum, a part-time lecturer in the Women's Studies Department said. "It's impossible for the fish to analyze or even imagine water, because it's wholly immersed. The thing that being creative does may be our only way out of the fishpond, maybe it's our only way to get a critical distance and actually see the water, or see the ideology and begin to subvert it, poke at it, turn it upside down or even give it a name."

When Ketchum talks about academics and art, wisdom radiates from her hazel eyes, but when she's forced to recall memories from a childhood riddled with change, the brilliance in her eyes is replaced with an innocent stare of a little girl once lost.

Ketchum, 44, will become a full-time teacher in the fall and will head classes like Gender and Technoculure, Intercultural Women's Studies and Gender and Globalization.

She attributes her success to a series of events that led her into the arms of her adopted grandmother Francis.

"My family background is fairly complicated," Ketchum said. "I was born in Cleveland, Ohio to my birth mom who, at the time, was 16 years old and then I was put up for adoption."

Ketchum lived in foster care for six months before her adopted family arrived to take her to a new home in Elyria, Ohio.

"All of a sudden I have a grandmother who is one of the first women to get a Master's degree in literature," she said. "[She] ended up quoting Emily Dickinson to me and all the great women poets, along with many of the great male poets. [She] really instilled in me a love of art in all its forms."

These are aspects of life she said would have never crossed her path had she stayed with her birth family.

"I was born into a family that was incredibly poor that lived in southern Ohio, really an area that we would call Appalachia," Ketchum said. " [It had] the kind of poverty that most people can't even imagine. Most people associate this kind of poverty with third world spaces."

Her adopted father James, a retired journalist, also instilled factors within Ketchum's life, that helped shape her professionally.

She developed a love for language and learned through the power of creative thought she could create change.

"He had a really profound influence on my life," Ketchum said. "Both of them [her father and grandmother] are humanists. Both of them believe, believed in the case of my grandmother, in social justice, art and in language. I trace a lot of what I'm doing back to both of them."

The family moved to San Diego when Ketchum was 15 when her father became the managing editor of the San Diego Evening Tribune.

Ketchum graduated from Poway High School in 1982.

Although she considers her high school years to be quite boring, she did frequent the beach and develop a serious painting habit.

In the years following graduation she married her high school sweetheart, gave birth to her two daughters Britt and Hail, divorced her high school sweetheart and then re-married.

In 1994, after her grandmother passed away, they moved to Northern California.

"I was accepted to U.C. Davis," she said.

Ketchum received her Bachelors degree in art studio and women and gender studies in 1999.

She earned her Master's Degree in cultural studies in 2001 and soon after, she received her doctorate in the same discipline.

She began teaching at U.C. Davis when she entered graduate school.

"She's a terrific addition to our faculty," Renae Bredin, the program director for women's studies said. "[Ketchum] is an amazing artist and has an amazing theoretical background in terms of cultural studies theory, feminist theory, post modernist theory, and that's a rare combination."

Student feedback like "amazing" and "extremely compelling" funnel back to Bredin regarding Ketchum's teaching.

"[Students] feel like they come out of classes having learned more than they imagined they would have learned," Bredin said. "She has a depth of understanding that transcends boundaries. She's not only an artist and she's not only a theorist, she's both at the same time, which in terms of the kind of work she does, the research she does and the combination between that and her art, is very rare - very unusual."

This is Ketchum's third semester at Cal State Fullerton.

"The Women's Studies Department at Cal State Fullerton actually decided they wanted to include a cultural studies emphasis in their program," Ketchum said. "So what that means for me, is that my background in cultural studies and my passion for art making, in all its different forms, is really valued here. That's why this is a really perfect place for me to be."

Now that Ketchum has obtained full-time status, she will move from her cubicle into an office, but more importantly, she will continue to participate in an ongoing conversation within cultural studies and its relationship to feminist theory.

She also wants to see more men in the classroom.

Radio-TV-Film major Robert Regalado can't imagine taking a women's studies class only because his major restricts extra time from his schedule.

"If I had extra time I would consider it," Regalado said in a recent interview.

"I think there's a real problem with thinking that women's studies is all about male bashing," Ketchum said. "I think that still lingers, that idea and it's so outdated. It's not at all what it's about. It's like the fish thing. It's all of us getting that critical distance."

Ketchum said she wants her students to grasp the notion that they can make sense of the world by critically deconstructing and reassembling it in a way that makes sense so they can navigate it mindfully and not blindly.

Also, she said she wants students to get a sense of who they are in the world and understand the responsibilities of being educated.

"To be at the university is a tremendous privilege," Ketchum said. "That privilege, as all privilege does, confers a great deal of responsibility. Not just the responsibility to go out and get a job and make money, but a responsibility to share that knowledge and a responsibility to live mindfully."

'Evil, Evil Woman' speaks at CSUF

Published in the CSUF Daily Titan newspaper on March 10.

The Women's Studies Department kicked off Women's History Month with a lecture by evolution proponent Barbara Forrest in the Titan Student Union, Pavilion C.

The lecture, "Evil, Evil Woman: What it was like to be the only female witness in the Dover Intelligent Design trial," focused on Forrest's experiences during the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, in which Dover High School board members in Pennsylvania attempted to integrate intelligent design into ninth-grade biology classes.

"People are fascinated by the trial and they want to hear about it," Forrest wrote in an e-mail. "So I get invitations [to speak]."

The Liberal Studies Student Association originally picked Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, to speak during its annual Liberal Studies Week.

"During these events, we try to highlight speakers or films that exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of liberal studies," said Jim Hofmann, the chairman of the liberal studies department at Cal State Fullerton. "[Forrest's] research on the sources and activities of the intelligent design movement requires knowledge of constitutional law, comparative religion and philosophy as well as various aspects of evolutionary science."

One particular aspect Hofmann wanted students to learn from Forrest's lecture was the understanding of where the intelligent design movement fits in with promoting anti-evolutionary agendas in the public school system.

"[Forrest] will be able to give them a detailed account of how this movement is funded by a Seattle-based think tank called the Discovery Institute," Hofmann wrote in an e-mail. "Students will also learn about some of the legal tactics used by advocates of intelligent design and why these tactics failed in the Dover trial."

Starla Gonzales, 26, a Liberal Studies Student Association representative for the Associated Students Inc., presented a proposal to ASI and succeeded in obtaining a $1,700 honorarium to have Forrest visit the campus.

"I'm going into the teaching profession and I think she's a really important figure in the issue of separation of church and state," Gonzales said. "I think intelligent design, or creationism, shouldn't be taught in schools. I grew up going to a private school and learned about creationism. I feel private schools is where that should be taught."

Forrest began her lecture with an explanation for why she was chosen as a witness for the trial. She co-authored a book with Paul Gross titled "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" They describe the intelligent design movement as a religious movement, or in other words, creationism, and they document the execution of the movement's strategy.

"When Paul and I published our book in January 2004, we knew eventually somewhere there would be a lawsuit," Forrest said. "So we were very careful in our documentation and in our arguments because we figured that book would be very useful and, as it turned out, it was."

Forrest's role in the Dover trial almost came to an abrupt end when the attorneys for the school board attempted to have her eliminated from the case because she didn't have scientific credentials.

"I wasn't called as a scientist, so that didn't work," Forrest said.

Forrest said the most disturbing aspect of intelligent design comes in the form of religious exclusionism and the attempt to remove the idea of separation of church and state from U.S. government. According to Forrest, the intelligent design movement is trying to use the government to implement a system guided by the religious right.

"Intelligent design isn't really about science," Forrest said. "It's about using politics to advance a religious movement that they intend to make the foundation of public policy, especially with respect to public education."

The "they" Forrest refers to is the people representing the Center for Science and Culture within the Discovery Institute. Forrest said the Center is promoting a sectarian religious agenda as a scientific program.

"They themselves have described what they are doing as a religious program," Forrest said.

Casey Luskin, an attorney and staff member for the Discovery Institute, said the Institute is a secular think tank, or a think tank not connected with religion.

"Dr. Forrest has a long history of misrepresenting the Discovery Institute and promoting blatantly false conspiracy theories about intelligent design and 'theocracy,'" Luskin wrote in an e-mail. "I do not consider her to be an accurate or reliable source when it comes to Discovery Institute or intelligent design."

Judge John Jones ruled in favor of the plaintiff Tammy Kitzmiller, the mother of two daughters attending Dover High School during the trial, on Dec. 20, 2005. Eight of the nine creationist school board members were voted out of office and had to pay $1 million in court fees, according to Forrest.

"The first and most important thing I hope people learn is that intelligent design is merely another variant of creationism, and there is virtually nothing there in any scientific sense," Forrest said. "Intelligent design has been shown over and over again by competent scientists and other scholars to be scientifically empty."

Forrest said her religious beliefs shouldn't be an issue, but she no longer hesitates saying she is not a religious person in any sense.

"I was devout for a good deal of my early life, so I certainly understand how important religion is to people," Forrest said. "However, I think Americans are coming to realize that one can live a good life morally and can function in every way without endorsing any theological doctrines."