The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 82, No. 27, Ed. 1 Friday, April 28, 1995 Page: 5 of 20
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NEWS
THE RICE THRESHER FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 1995 5
Sociology class survey will continue without 'Post'
by Felisa Yang
The folding of The Houston Post
has meant a partial loss of funding
for the annual Houston Area Survey.
However, Professor of Sociology
Stephen Klineberg, also the creator
and director of the survey, insists
that the cut will have no adverse
effects on the program.
The survey, associated with the
Sociology 496 seminar, will continue
without the support of the Post.
Klineberg said it is an "annual sys-
tematic, scientific survey of a repre-
sentative sample of Harris County
residents."
Two-thirds of the questions are
repeated every year while the re-
maining one-third are formulated by
students in the class, he said. Key
themes change annually and have
included crime, welfare, education
and ethnic relations.
"[The folding of the Post] will
have very little impact on the survey,
but it is a loss for the city," said
Klineberg. "It [the demise of the
Post] was inevitable because people
are not reading newspapers. It's part
of the information revolution."
He cited television and the
Internet as alternatives people are
choosing to newspapers.
The survey took off in 1982, with
all of the $ 100,000 in funding coming
from the Brown Innovative Teach-
ing Award, which any faculty mem-
ber can apply for. The award is a
grant given to professors involved in
innovative teaching projects, accord-
ing to Klineberg.
Both the Post and The Houston
Chronicle covered the survey in its
initial year. However, for the past 13
years, the Post has had a monopoly
on first-print rights. The choice of
the Post over the Chronicle was one
of pure chance. In an effort to galva-
nize support for the project in 1983,
Klineberg turned to a friend who
was a reporter at the Post.
This connection resulted in an
agreement between Klineberg and
the Post. In exchange for monetary
support of the survey, the Post would
receive world-wide, first publication
rights. Klineberg guaranteed the
Post that "they would be given the
information to print as soon as it was
available while [he] reserves the
right to see and correfct the articles
before they appear in print."
KHOU-TV (Channel 11) has a
similar agreement with Klineberg.
This year, the Post,and Channel 11
both contributed $6,000 to the sur-
vey.
The money from these two
groups goes to cover the cost of the
basic survey. Additional grants from
other companies, including South-
western Bell Telephone and Fiesta
Mart Inc. go to cover the cost of
additional oversampling and the
publication of "Houston's Ethnic
Community," the annual report by
Klineberg on the survey findings.
In addition, this year marks the
inception of the first-ever survey of
the Asian-American community in
Houston. The cost of this program
will be over $100,000, half of which
is coming from the Asian commu-
nity and the other half from major
corporations, including Conoco and
Nations Bank.
Lack of funding in the initial years
of the survey meant that the entire
project was undertaken by Klineberg
and his students.
"The big success of the course
for that year was the accomplish-
ment of the interviews. There was
no time to do analysis of the data or
research reports," Klineberg said.
We didn't have money to pay pro-
fessional interviewers. That class
that year is one to which subsequent
classes owe a major debt of grati-
tude," he said..
The class had to come up with all
the survey questions and conduct
all of the actual interviews. Now most
of the actual surveying is done by a
local company called Telesurveys of
Texas, which also trains the students
in the technicalities of conducting
interviews. But Klineberg points out
that all surveys since that first year
have built upon those initial results.
Students participate by "shaping"
the themes of the survey, conduct-
ing pilot interviews to test the ques-
tions and doing 10 tol5 actual inter-
views. The final project for the class
is individual reports and statistical
analysis of a particular aspect of the
survey.
"It wasn't easy and it wasn't fun,
but it was a good experience," said
Gali Anaise, a junior at Sid
Richardson College and member of
the Soci 496 class.
"It made us feel not like
undergrads because we worked re-
ally closely with Klineberg, and we
were out there doing research,"
Anaise said.
Will Rice College junior Andy Bott
said, "It [the class] forces you to
take a big interest in it, because
you're doing the phone calls, writ-
ing the questions. It totally becomes
a project of the class. It draws you
in."
Lovett College sophomore
Michelle Klem said, "It's an incred-
ible class. I've learned more in there
than in any other class."
"It's extremely hands-on, what
real sociologists do," she said.
Klineberg is not worried about
funding. He feels that there is enough
interest and support from other cor-
porations and organizations to cover
the loss from the Post.
"It's fair to say [the survey] has
become an institution ... no other
city has such a database. The most
interesting thing has been system-
atically talking to [a] sample of Har-
ris County residents and asking
them, 'How do you see the world?'
and watching the world change over
the 14 years [of the survey],"
Klineberg said.
"The two major-transformations
have beeiVthe ethnic transformation
of the population and the founda-
tions of the city economy, coming
out of the oil economy of the Indus-
trial Age into the information
economy.
"We have also seen an increasing
acceptance of the new roles of
women, a growing recognition of
the critical role of education and an
increasing concern about the global
environment."
Although he has not approached
the Chronicle about taking over the
Post's role, he "can't imagine that
the Chronicle wouldn't want to."
Professor wins award to write about 'History, Memory, Community'
Edith Wyschogrod wins prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship Award to address 'death event' concept in forthcoming book
by Joel Hardi
Among the recently-announced
recipients of the coveted John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship Awards is
Religious Studies Professor Edith
Wyschogrod.
Her project, tentatively entitled
"History, Memory and Community
after Auschwitz," is a broadly-based
philosophical work which will ex-
plore the intertwined relationship
that exists between historical narra-
tive, personal memory and commu-
nity.
Wyschogrod's proposal was one
of only 152 accepted out of 2,856
applications for Guggenheim Fellow-
ships. This year's Fellowship awards
total $4,272,000, but individual
awards, based on the budget require-
ments of each project, are kept se-
cret.
Auschwitz, according to
Wyschogrod, is the low point of the
•death event," an amalgam of the
events of mass annihilation — geno-
cide, nuclear and chemical war —
that have struck humanity in the
ife
Professor Edith Wyschogrod
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twentieth century.
She first dealt with the concept of
a "death event" in a previous book,
Spirit in Ashes. History and memory
'How are we to construe
memory in our timeV
—Edith Wyschogrod
Religious studies professor
both determine how we construe
the "death event," which in turn radi-
cally shapes our history and memory.
The role of personal memory in a
modern world of instant information
is one question Wyschogrod
handles.
She plans to delve into the roots
of neurophysical models of memory
and the fundamental questions of
cognitive science, with the goal of
recontextualizing those
models for the real world. "How are
we to construe memory in our time?"
she asks.
Wyschogrod views history pri-
marily as the process of creating
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narrative out of cold fact. "Facts are
not isolated atoms," she explained.
"Facts are strung together in such a
way, and we want to look at the
process of stringing."
She placed emphasis on the
highly ethical task of the historian,
describing it as "very subtle, very
significant."
She also recognized the impact
narrative interpretation of facts can
have when there is a lack of real,
face-to-face contact between peoples.
"If you demonize, through his-
torical narrative, some community,
you bear a certain responsibility for
that because you are throwing that
into the contemporary world as a
portrayal of fact."
Community results from the col-
lective synthesis of history and
memory, with implications for both.
Wyschogrod plans to answer the
question, "How does a community
carry its history forward?" by con-
centrating on the way in which ha-
treds are imbedded in its narratives.
As a religious studies professor,
she sees religion as being implicitly
bound up in history, memory and
community. "You can't get away from
religion in this country; it is abso-
lutely central to our understanding
of the narratives we tell: the abortion
narratives, the euthanasia narra-
tives."
She cited the group implicated in
the recent bombing in Oklahoma
City ashaving a communal narrative
that "piggybacked" on Waco, on "a
religious community that had a cer-
tain apocalyptic understanding of
contemporary life."
She explained that even if the
bombers do not invoke religious dis-
course, their connection to Waco
means that they were affected, in
part, by Waco's religious signifi-
cance.
Wyschogrod, who has been a
professor at Rice for three years,
emphasized that her project requires
more than just sitting and thinking.
She plans on a lot of reading, and
her research could take her any-
where from the Rice psychology de-
partment to Eastern Europe or pos-
sibly Japan, sites of the Holocaust
and the world's only nuclear attacks,
respectively.
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Klein, Charles & Rao, Vivek. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 82, No. 27, Ed. 1 Friday, April 28, 1995, newspaper, April 28, 1995; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth246512/m1/5/?rotate=90: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.