Meetings and exhibition

Hello today,
At first some words about yesterday because I had my program out of the other group. In the morning, Ruth picked me up at 7:30 am at the dormitory. She accompanied me to a building at the UC-campus to meet Dorothy Air. Dorothy is responsible, also like me, for contacts between the university and companies, so that the contact could be helpful, but I assumed what shall I talk with her from 8 am until 3 pm, but it was completely different what I thought.

At 8 am began a meeting of the "Community engagement council" of the UC. This is like in Germany a strategy commission of the university that discusses the vision and the next steps of the university development. Very interesting, but too long (80 min), was the presentation of the keynote speaker Prof. Barbara Holland about "Engagement at the University of Cincinnati - Principles and Strategies". She was from Sydney, and the presentation was given via telephone conference and the Powerpoint via CITRIX. Very interesting for me was the following discussion because I mentioned that the processes are everywhere the same. Like in Ilmenau, the council has been meeting for 5 years. They are people from the administration, and they are discussing for lots of time the meaning of words and the difference between commitment, engagement and service orientation, how they could transfer this information to the university staff, and what would be the impact. We had to leave this meeting at 11 am because the next meeting was waiting at Blue Ash. This was a lunch meeting at the Hilton.

The planning committee, the so called "Blue Ash Life Sciences Collaborative" discussed the preparation of a Life Science Symposium at the beginning of November. Also this meeting was was in a very well known atmosphere. Even two months before the symposium, a very large committee spends the time to begin to think about what and when and especially with whom they want to do something (like at home).

After this meeting, I went with Dorothy to her office at CincyTechUSA, and she explained the work of this organisation, where she works at half of her job. She recommended several meetings and keynote presentations, which we could take part in the next time.

Today we were in Columbus in the Ohio State University. It is the biggest university in the USA with 62,000 students. The grounds of the university were wide with parks and impressive buildings. I have never seen such a giant recreation center. The library was very impressive as well. I think a public building with stairs made of of glass is only possible in America.

The exhibition of the Berlin Wall was made by students of the University of Paderborn in Germany. There were shown photos made by them. These photos were a result of a student's work, in which they tried to find out the places from old photos in the present. Most of them were photos with an artistic touch. They were interesting, but nothing special and to less historical debate. More interesting was another photo exhibition with the title "Local Time". The photographer Stephan Koppelkamm made photos from buildings in the former GDR in 1990 and a second time in 2000, and the photos were compared. It is a little bit crazy to go to the USA to see an exhibition of our home country.

The question about the "walls in the heads" today is not so easy to respond to. I think the fall of the Berlin Wall was 20 years ago. Certainly you have in the German language the words "Ossie" and "Wessie" still now, from someone who has never been to the other part of the country. I also met here people, who told me, when I reported about our trips to Chicago or New York, that they had never been there. Some information young people get from their parents, but for most of them, this historical event will be like any other in history, like World War II or slavery here that we learned about in the Freedom Center. In our group, we have half from the West, and the other half from East Germany, but I cannot discover a difference in the behaviour from the point of regional background. In the past, I worked, and right now I am working with, a lot of people who came from the former western part of Germany. My impression is that the people assess each other according to character or expertise, may be appearance, but this is the same thing all over the world.

On the way back the visit of a big outlet center was "superfluous" - because a lot of money could have been saved without this stop. :-) But many thanks to Debbie for her patience.

To be continued..
Bye for today!