Previous Issues

Trinity's Smart Neighborhood Initiative receives national award for bridging  the digital divide

Three Trinity graduates took home the gold at a March reception honoring Connecticut’s winners of the SBC National Telecommuni- cations Partnership Awards. Benjamin Todd ’97, community technology planner; Carlos Espinosa ‘96, outreach coordinator; and Victor Gonzalez, neighborhood service technician, were on hand with Linda Martinez IDP ’03, curriculum/workshop coordinator, as Trinity’s Smart Neighborhood Initiative was awarded a gold prize in recognition of its place as one of the nation’s outstanding partnerships using telecommunications technology to bridge the digital divide. The awards reception was made possible by SBC/SNET and Partners in Education, with support from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and the Office for Workforce Competitiveness.    “It’s a wonderful tip of the hat to Trinity’s Smart Neighborhood initiative,” says Joseph Muro, associate director of corporate and foundation relations. “This award puts the Smart Neighborhood Initiative on a plane with some very lofty company.”     A total of $13,000 in grants was presented to three award winners: two grand prize awards for $5,000 each and Trinity’s gold award for $3,000.     Trinity’s Smart Neighborhood Initiative is underwritten by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

TEACHING		Palagummi Sainath
		Trinity's first McGill Fellow in  International Studies

Speaking at a lecture in February, award-winning journalist Palagummi Sainath presented some compelling statistics on poverty and inequality. For example, he said, the wealthiest nation on Earth (the United States) has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. And, in the developing world, the poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted from people who did not contract the loans and who did not receive any of the money.   

These are just two examples that Sainath, Trinity’s first McGill Fellow in International Studies, presented at the First Annual McGill Lecture. Sainath, who writes for some of India’s largest newspapers and who won Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in 2000, spends two-thirds of the year in poor, rural areas. 

“When I’m covering poverty as a journalist, I go and live in the communities I’m writing about.” he says. “If I can’t see the issues through their eyes, there’s no point going and perpetuating old stereotypes about poverty.”

Challenging students

As part of his fellowship, Sainath is teaching two spring semester courses in which he encourages his students to similarly adopt more informed and empathetic perspectives. He notes, “You go to an institution of higher learning or higher education in the hope of being challenged—made to think about different things from perspectives that may seem very alien to you.”

One of Sainath’s courses, “Development, Dissent, and the Media,” explores unconventional views of development. “Rather than the top down models of development, it tries looking at everything from below, from the point of view of the person impacted by development,” says Sainath. The other course, “The Zen of McDonald’s” deals with globalization—the main currents and issues, the driving forces, the beneficiaries, and whether there can be such a thing as a healthy globalization, as opposed to the kind that deepens inequalities around the world.

International studies major Han C. Wong ’02 is taking both courses. He says Sainath “facilitates learning by challenging us to question what is around us.” Class time is often spent in discussion and debate, according to Wong. “Each student comes prepared to lead at least one class and sets the groundwork for a Socratic-method debate session after the presentation,” he explains. “We challenge each other respectfully and earnestly, and we all learn from it—including me.” Says Sainath, “Just having different opinions is not good enough for me. I’m not learning from your opinion if I don’t engage.”

Andrea Damar ’02, a double major in international studies and computer science, has found the “Development, Dissent, and the Media” class so compelling that she can’t help taking the material outside of the classroom.

“I am forever conscious of the issues we discuss in class as I debate with my friends about the effects of globalization, non-governmental organizationss, etc., and as I listen to the lectures given on campus about the WTO and such,” she says.

 This kind of engagement in world issues is just what Patricia C. and Charles H. McGill ’63 [pictured right, with Sainath] intended when they established the fellowship. Sainath is an excellent choice for the first McGill Fellow, according to Charles McGill. “My wife and I were extremely delighted with the first lecture,” he says. “We found it to be very provocative and stimulating and very much in support of our goals.”

A historian first

Though Hartford is far from the geographical and socio-economic landscapes in which he spends most of the year, Sainath is completely comfortable in the liberal arts environment. “I was studying to be a historian when I went off into journalism,” he says, “so my basic academic background is history.” Moreover, he believes that the critical thinking and questioning that drive academic learning are central to his journalism: “I would say that the tools of social science research are what make for good journalism in the first place,” he says. “And that’s academia’s contribution to good journalism. I think maybe the contribution of good journalism to academia is to make things readable and understandable and accessible to larger numbers.”

True to his training as a historian, Sainath views conflicts in today’s world in historical contexts. For example, about the turmoil in India and Pakistan today he says, “Many of the things that are happening are part of a political pattern that’s been happening for 15 to 20 years. You can be shocked by it but not necessarily surprised by it.”

As for Afghanistan, Sainath says, “The problems of the region are not going to go away with the toppling of the Taliban. One needs to look at how forces like the Taliban entrench themselves. If we understand that history, we can avoid making that mistake again.”

Sainath, who is currently working on a book about the Dalits, the “untouchables” of India’s social caste system, also notes that issues of poverty, freedom, and lack of democracy have historically been central to journalism in his country. “There’s no separation for me because journalism in India evolved around those issues. It evolved around socio-economic issues in a colonial country, dominated by a foreign power.”

Now, more than ever, he says, journalism has a role to play in a globalized world: “In a period of growing inequality and growing indifference of the elite as to how others are faring, I think the role is to keep issues of public importance at the top of the agenda.”

                                                                                                                          – Leslie Virostek