Official duties ended

     My official Fulbright duties end today, with the culmination of the series of faculty workshops I have been offering for members of various departments. As I have noted, these have been a highlight of my professional year here, and they have given me a unique window on the pressures and challenges facing academics in a developing country like Indonesia. Not only is success in the academic world increasingly dependent upon a knowledge of English - and not just any English, but that specialized kind of academic English that requires long-winded clauses and parenthetical references and densely packed syntactical structures - but academics in places like this have almost no ability to access current research. As my academic colleagues reading this know, to have access to academic journals requires access to several databases that keep electronic versions of those journals, and these are outrageously expensive, even for American universities. Plus academics here routinely teach 6-8 classes a semester, which of course makes research productivity prohibitive. It strikes me that the comparative advantage that US academics have over scholars in developing countries demands that we attend to this disparity. But don't be fooled by this veneer of altruism - I really just want to come back here, in whatever guise I can muster.

    Today we go on a 2 day camping trip on the south coast of Java with another family we have become friends with. I don't get to drive, sadly, but I will enjoy the ride. And on Monday we do our last Indonesian adventure out of Salatiga: a trip up a river in Borneo into one of the last refuges of the orangutan (which word comes from the Malay - or Indonesian - language, orang hutan, meaning literally forest person). Then we're back in Salatiga for a week, to panic our way through all the departure chaos.  Before we return to Bozeman, we will spend about three weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia. And then we are home, and present, if not fully accounted for. No one reading this will weep for us, I am sure, but this is a sad and exciting time in any case. I can't wait to see in person all the friends I have missed, but I don't want to leave Indonesia, either.