It's an easy thing to do, spending one's days on a university campus surrounded by innumerable multiple-degree-holding professors, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and real live geniuses certified by the MacArthur Foundation. One can become blasé about credentials.

So when Richard Lariviere's CV lists degrees from the Universities of Iowa and Pennsylvania, that NEH grant, seven languages other than his native English, the directorship of UT's Center for Asian Studies, 68 publications, an endowed professorship in Asian Studies, a centennial fellowship at ICÓ, so many sites of research abroad that--after listing London, Oxford, Calcutta, Poona, Kathmandu, and Madras--he simply lists "other cities in India," the response is "Uh huh, and?" But considered individually, rather than as just one of a largely similar group, this is noticeably impressive. And even at this point in time and in this city of "Silicon Hills," Perot Systems Corporation and General Instruments Company, among others, have come to this professor of Sanskrit for his knowledge and expertise.

Lariviere was born in Chicago and raised in Marshaltown, Iowa, the proverbial town of 25,000 where "everybody knew everybody." His father is retired from a natural gas company, and his mother is, he says, "a professional mother. She's not retired."

Lariviere went on to earn his BA in the history of religions from the University of Iowa before he moved to Penn for his PhD because it was, at the time, the best school for Asian Studies, he says. Lariviere stresses the historical context of the ranking because he believes that UT Austin now lays claim to that distinction. He came to the University in 1982 and four years later became director of the Center for Asian Studies. National recognition of the center soon followed. It was his first stab at educational administration, a vocation that has been giving him a somewhat stiffer test since September 1, 1999. That is when he left his job as associate vice president for international programs and took over as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. An added complication came earlier in the spring with the arrest of 10 UT students six weeks before Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson announced Lariviere's appointment. The students had been sitting in at the college's main office in protest of the delay in naming a director of the proposed Asian-American Studies program. Lariviere headed the search committee for the director, and the committee's nominee was rejected by then dean ad interim Judith Langlois.

Though he's had a few opportunities to leave UT and become a full-time consultant and general subcontinent sounding board, Lariviere has turned them down. "I've been in school since I was five," he says. "I'm an academic." And that is what he would like to remain.

Your BA is in the history of religions. Do you come from a religious background, or is that a purely intellectual interest?

Well, I grew up in a religious environment, but that really wasn't what motivated my study. What I was interested in, fairly early on in my undergraduate days, was the interaction between law, religion, and society. It's always fascinated me how it is that we allow ourselves to be so controlled by things like legal pronouncements or religious pronouncements. It's really interesting, to me at least, how you can simply put up a sign and control people's behavior. "No Standing," "Don't Park Here," and people don't park there, just because the sign says so. They don't know what the authority is, necessarily, behind it. There is some vague sense that you might be punished if you were there, but the punishment is not clear. Even the likelihood of the punishment is not clear. It's just a really interesting thing.

And so I studied two traditions where this interaction of law, religion, and society were really strong: Judaica and the Hindu tradition. Once I got my degree, I opted to continue to study the Hindu tradition. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, which, at the time, was the best program in the country for that sort of thing.

Well, like every newly minted PhD, I was looking for an academic job, and I was extremely lucky. I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities--the kind of grant that they don't give anymore--that supported me for four years. It was spectacular. NEH and the SSRC (Social Science Research Council) and the American Council of Learned Societies, all three agencies gave me a grant to research a book. It allowed me to go to India for a year, to England for a year, and then back to the states for two years. I was very lucky to get a grant like that at such an early stage in my career. At the end of it I took an appointment at the University of Iowa for two years where I taught every other semester. It was at the end of that, that I came to Texas in 1982.

Didn't know a single thing about Austin. I had never been here before I came down for the job interview. And I loved it. I came from Iowa City in February, I remember it vividly. And there were six inches of ice on the ground--not snow, but ice. Driving from my apartment to the airport, which was many, many miles, the car's thermostat never got off dead cold. My wife and I came to Austin, and there were people swimming in Barton Springs. I never realized that in February in anywhere in North America it could be as comfortable as it was in Austin. So we liked Austin immediately, and we still like it.

I think that the most important thing that we can do to make sense of daily lives is to be exposed to dramatically different lives. And, because of the homogenous nature of American society, that almost always comes from traveling abroad. Have you been abroad?

I studied in England for a summer, but I've moved and traveled around the U.S. quite a bit.

Yeah, but McDonald's is McDonald's. The evening news is always the evening news. But if you get back to your experiences in Oxford, even though we share so much with that culture, you spend an enormous amount of time comparing the minutiae of daily life to your own. They drive on the wrong side of the street; they always say thank you when they get off elevators. Why do they do that? You know, this kind of stuff. Even though those examples are trite, what it does is cause you to be aware of and to continually examine the way you conduct your own life--you personally, your culture, your larger culture. And you can't really have access to that unless you know the language of the people you encounter. So just on a very, very personal level, knowing the language introduces you to a culture that's different than your own. That helps you to understand who you are. And I'm going to reveal something to you that's very personal . . .

That is what we do here at the University. Especially in the College of Liberal Arts, where this is our stock in trade. We examine what it means to be a human being. And that is the most interesting, compelling question that there is. I don't care who you talk to, how dedicated they might be to their profession or their area of study, whatever. There's one thing that's more interesting to them. And that is who they are. Who they are as individuals. The greatest engineers, the greatest scientists, the greatest physicists always sit up straight and listen when you talk about them.

And this business of being exposed to another culture is one of the most dramatic ways I know to examine who you are personally. To try to suddenly be aware of the prejudices, the biases. I don't mean racial prejudices, but the assumptions about the world we make that get jarred when you encounter another culture. So in a sort of very personal, but also in a very macro sense, this business of language is essential, in my view, to this experience.

There's also a pragmatic side to it. No one who is alive and engaged in their work today will be able to think about what they do while ignoring its place in a larger world than our parents knew. You could always think about what you did--about your career choice, about your investment strategies, your savings habits--in the context of America. You can't do that anymore. Everything you do, every choice you make, especially for students, who are planning careers and so on, has to take into account where this fits into the global scheme of things. If you choose this career path, are you placing yourself in jeopardy of working in an area that may cease to exist in North America in 10 years and be wholly exported to China? It's possible. It's happened in some industries. That kind of consciousness is something that everybody's got to have, and one of the most important things that we can convey to students as a sort of tool for preparing them for the sort of lives they're going to lead.

For some people, language in and of itself is just inherently interesting, and I understand that. But for me, it's largely a tool that gives me access to a dimension of a society or a culture that is otherwise closed. For example, my area of research takes me to India quite a lot, and, for the most part, the educated classes in India speak English. So it's possible to go to India and function quite comfortably and never know any Indian language. But some of the richest and most rewarding and most edifying experiences I've had in India have been with people who don't know English. It has given me insight into Indian society to be able to sit down with a janitor or the guard in a museum and just have a chat with them about what's important to them, what they think about political developments, and so on. And it gives you a level of understanding of the culture that's impossible without it.

It depends on how you define language versus dialect. I think the number is up to 20 official, constitutionally recognized languages.

Yeah, they keep adding new ones. For example, Sanskrit now is an official language of India. That'd be like the Italians recognizing Latin as an official language. It's not spoken by more than a handful of people. There are proportionately the same number of people who speak Sanskrit as there are people who can speak Latin. I mean, there are people who can translate a recipe for apple pie into Latin, but it's a party trick. But in India there are probably 350 languages and another 1,000 dialects of those languages, dialects that may or may not be comprehensible to one another. So it's a real polyglot situation.

We talk about India as the subcontinent, and that's really a better way to think about it than as a discrete country. In most of its history it has not been a single country. It's only been a unified country like this under three regimes: first in the 3rd century BC, the second was under the British, and the third is in independent India. And really, even under the British there were large pockets that were only nominally governed by the British, but were really governed by maharajas, who were princes of the state.

So it's really better to think of India like Europe, where you've got this wide variety of languages and dialects. Regions have languages that work so that neighbors might use one language to speak to each other across long, long distances. But if you really want to get intimate and demonstrate your familiarity with somebody, you speak a slightly different dialect. And that's the case in India. It's really like Europe in that respect.

Well, the idea of India as a country is still one that's not completely internalized by the Indian people themselves. If you asked someone in India about their identity, no one would say, "I'm an Indian." They say, "I'm a Bengali." "I'm a Punjabi." "I'm a Tamil." But no one's an Indian. It's only when they are outside of India that they become an Indian, because the assumption is that the rest of the world doesn't know where Bengal or Tamil is.

I have lived in Texas now 17 years, but I don't feel an alien here. I understand this culture. I've partaken of this culture. And that has to do with language issues. I mean, I can affect a Southern, or Texas drawl, if I get stopped for a speeding ticket. But you and I are both here; we're both residents of Texas. We vote; we pay taxes. We're Texans, in that sense. In India you're identified immediately by the language you speak. So even though you've lived all your life in New Delhi, if your mother tongue is Tamil, you're a Tamil. You're not a Punjabi. You're not a resident of Oriya. You're a Tamil.

But that's a class issue. It's even stronger in India. You can tell a lot from how people speak. Even (by how someone speaks) the official national language, Hindi, by the accent that they have.

There is one official national language. The others are officially recognized, but this is the official language--Hindi. It was done at the time of the drawing up of the Indian constitution. And it was carried by a single vote at the constitutional assembly. It's been the source of enormous political friction in the course of the last 50 years.

I really, really get a kick out of making it possible for smart people to do interesting things. And that's essentially what you do when you do academic administration well.

I've found it's possible to implement really neat ideas, and I enjoy doing that. So when people have new and exciting things that they want to do, as an institution or as a department, I take a great deal of pleasure from making it possible.

And on a personal level, I have kind of a selfish motive to do this. And that is: I don't think there's any position that places you closer to all the really neat things that people are doing in this college. If John Kappelman in the anthropology department comes up with a remarkable new tool for imaging fossils, he isn't going to come tell me about it if I'm a professor of Sanskrit. But he might come and tell me if I'm the dean. So you get to know about something that you might not otherwise. There's a hell of a lot of really neat stuff going on around here.

The center is an umbrella organization for all the faculty who have an interest in Asia, in either their research or their teaching. When I came on, it was a collection of really good faculty, but all the energy to that point had been put into placing the building blocks at UT. What was required was assembling them into a sort of coherent, cohesive unit. When we did that, we discovered that this was a far better program than anyone in the world had ever realized. The change was so noticable, that in national rankings we went from a very respectable ninth or tenth in the country to, eventually, number one in a very short period of time.

Well, I get a lot of credit for that, and that's just wrong. It was really here all along. The talent was here. The institutional support was here. Everything was really here and in place. It was a very, very good program. It's just that we hadn't really sat back and said, "Now, how do we compare?" By the time we finished, we put this program together and raised its visibility nationally through series of seminars and publications and so on. Pretty soon people said, "Hey, this really is as good a program as you can find anywhere in the country." And it still is. That's one example of making something possible for smart people. That's pretty edifying.

Once that standing had been achieved, applications from graduate students got better. People got invited to give more lectures than they had before. There was a greater consciousness of this. Better quality junior faculty wanted to be here. And so it just made it more fun to be studying India at The University of Texas.

Well I had been center director for eight years, and that's long enough for anyone to be center director. So I stepped down. I was always a full-time teacher, just gave up the administrative side. And then the AVP for international programs position was created, and I was asked if I would take it. I said yes.

It's a ridiculously broad mandate. It has to do literally with anything international at the University. It can be study abroad; that's one component. It can also be research abroad by faculty. This office is the principle instigator of a grant from USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) to improve the quality of and to help the Guatemalan legislature modernize itself. So we've got faculty and students going down there to serve in various advisory capacities. And we bring some kids up here for education. We work with legislators to provide opportunities for them to meet with their peers in North America. There's just a huge variety of international activities.

The intent of creating this office was to create one place in the administration where everybody could go to get questions answered. If I want to have an exchange with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, how do I go about it? This office facilitates it. We draw up the agreements. We make sure they get through whatever levels of bureaucracy. And it was a good thing to create this position. When I took the position, it would take roughly six months to get an agreement in place for a faculty-research exchange. Now we can do it in about a week and a half.

I would say that I've been involved. But the movement for an Asian-American Studies program has been student-driven from day one. When Bob Berdahl was president, the students petitioned him to implement a program. And, as all educational administrators do when presented with a really good idea they hadn't thought of themselves, he created a task force to study it. And I think just because he saw the word 'Asian' in my title, I was appointed head of that committee. I have no expertise in Asian-American Studies.

Well, I think the controversy isn't all that surprising. This is something, as I said, that has been driven by students right from the very beginning, and the momentum has been sustained throughout by students as well. When the search failed to find a suitable candidate, everybody was hugely disappointed. I'm talking about the committee members as much as anybody. And, as sometimes happens, disappointment got translated into anger and frustration. And . . . well, whatever happened happened. [Ed.: 10 UT students were arrested in a protest over the interim dean's decision not to hire any of the candidates as director of the newly created Asian-American Studies program.] It's very unfortunate that it happened. I don't think that it was necessary that any of this should have happened. All I can say is that I hope we can carry through on the commitments that the University has made as quickly as possible, and I feel very confident that we can.

There is an interim director, and he is serving as the chair to find a permanent director.

I was very surprised. I wasn't at the table when the decision was made to arrest them; I haven't been involved. I don't even know who was a party to the conversation. I wouldn't have arrested them. My understanding is that once this process was begun, there was a series of trap doors that everybody fell through. So that when the kids sat in, and when it came time to close the building, the University authorities, as it's been explained to me, had two options: They could either leave the kids where they were and close the building, which for a variety of reasons they didn't want to do, or they could arrest them. Those are the only two options. And once they make an arrest, then you have to go through the process of proper booking, et cetera, et cetera. Then, once that has happened, it's turned over to the county attorney for the disposition of the arrest. This is how it's been explained to me. I'm not a lawyer.

Exactly. If this were classical India, I could tell you exactly what the procedures were. I know President Faulkner has said to me, and said this publicly, that he wants the softest path possible taken. I don't know what that's going to mean. I guess it's up to the county attorney. But the county attorney has not seen fit to solicit my opinion in the matter.

If you look at virtually everything that's done in this college, all the research that's done ultimately bears on this question. Now, we may be so far removed and so technically focused, scientifically engaged, that at least temporarily we have to lift our heads up and say, "Ahh, this is why we're doing this." But the kinds of really hard-core linguistic analysis that people do with regard to neuro-linguistics and how we process the vibrations that go through the air and hit our eardrums--that we make sense of that is interesting only if you recognize that the consequence is the ability to communicate via speech and what that has meant and what that does mean to our ongoing lives.

I don't know if this has ever struck you. But it strikes me as really weird that you and I can sit here, and I can hurt you far more by the sounds I make than I can with my fists. I can go over and punch you in the arm, and it'd be shocking and annoying, but I can say things that would hurt you 10 times worse. Or I could say things that would make you feel a hundred times better than if I gave you the sweetest, most delectable thing to eat. And what a weird and interesting phenomenon that is--that I can make sounds in my throat that have that effect. And I may not even mean them. I may not even feel that you're the ugliest person in the world and your mother wears combat boots. Or you're the most wonderful guy who's walked the face of the earth. But if I say that, it has some consequence in your life. And part of the analysis of how that works is the kind of work Harvey Sussman is doing in neuro-linguistics on how owls process certain sounds. The reason he's looked at that is because there is research that is possible on the owl brain that isn't possible on the human brain. And he's made extrapolations in his work that seem to have significant implications on how human beings sort out the blather of sounds we make and extract meaning from them. And that's interesting as hell.

Let me give you an example. You and I have no trouble comprehending the sentence I just finished, in spite of the fact that it was not in conformity to the language that we think we know, because I started out by saying "youanI." I did not say: "You and I." I blended together those three words, in a phenomenon for which, in linguistics, we use a Sanskrit word called sundi; it's a shorthand really. We know what we mean. "C'mon." "Igotchya." "Whaddyawannado?" "What'sup?" These are really contractions of words that you and I, as educated people, would never spell out. We would never write "what'sup," unless we wanted to convey to the reader that there was a certain casualness to the conversation. Now, imagine the poor bastard who comes along who wants to learn English from "youanI." I mean, what a nightmare. And yet this is true in every language that's spoken anywhere as far as we know. So how is it that learners of a language, who have no experience or background to draw on, can listen to this lazy slurring you and I engage in all the time and extract from it the words "what" and "is" and "up" and invoke all of the meanings that are associated with that? It's really, really fascinating.

This is one set of questions that everybody is interested in, ultimately. I may or may not be fascinated in the latest developments in concrete. But I guarantee you that whoever is working on the latest developments in concrete is interested in what it means to be a human being. Because they are human beings, and they share that concern. Now they may not want to spend their time investigating literary structures and what they say about the people who write the literature or read the literature. That may not be of interest to them. But the larger questions that those literary researches bear on are of interest to them.

Yeah, there are a couple of things I'd love to do. We need to lower the teacher-student ratio in the college; it's impossibly high. It's an impediment to our teaching. It's an impediment to our advising. It deteriorates the experience for students. That's the number one practical goal.

And there are a couple of other practical goals. I'd like to address the issue of salary compression with faculty. It's sometimes called "the loyalty tax." That is, brand-new hires are hired at the market price. And the senior, most stellar performers, the people who are making all the great discoveries, get outside offers on a regular basis. And the University matches those in one way or another. So their salaries get adjusted. But that large group of people in the middle, who have done their work year in year out--good teachers, good research, good citizenry, et cetera--but who haven't put themselves on the outside market and are a few years removed from their hiring, they are the ones who are being squeezed. That's a tough problem to address, because there's a lot of them.

And the third thing that I'd like to address is to make sure that our support for graduate students is as competitive as it needs to be to make sure that we get the best ones here.

These are all problems that can be solved by throwing money at them.

Huge amounts of money.

It's a very important component. A lot of this money is going to have to come from the state. We can't do it all on the backs of the private sector. But neither can we expect the University to single-handedly solve all these problems. There's going to have to be a combination of private and state-appropriated money.

When the Gulf War was under way in 1991, people bought satellite dishes in India because they discovered that they could get a raw feed, a 24-hour feed from all the networks. If they could position it just right, they could follow everything that was dumped on the satellite. The Gulf is very important to India. But a dish cost about 15,000 rupees, which is a fair bit of change in India. But if you ran an extra wire to your neighbor, you could split the cost of the dish. Then it took about 20 minutes before people discovered if they ran lots of wires to lots of their neighbors and didn't ask them to pay for their whole share of the dish, but rather just pay a nominal amount per month, you could make money off these things. And overnight 50,000 cable systems grew up in India--50,000 discreet cable TV systems.

So I got together with a colleague, and we went to General Instruments Corporation, which is the largest maker of satellite TV systems in the world. We explained this phenomenon to them, and they sent their executive vice president on the next available company plane. We gave him a four-hour seminar on what was happening in India. They became very excited about this and retained our services to provide advice to them on how to get into the Indian market. And one thing led to another. I discovered that knowledge of India and knowledge of technology markets was a hot commodity. I had all the business I could have wanted. I could easily have left academia and made many, many, many times what I do now.

It was, but I discovered in that process that I'm an academic--that I like academia, that I like students, and that I like what we do here at UT Austin.

By Peter Partheymuller,
from Texas Alcalde magazine (September/October 1999)
Photographs by Robert Pandya

Links:

UT Austin:

• Richard Lariviere, Dean

• College of Liberal Arts

• Center for Asian Studies

• Department of Asian Studies

• Asian Studies Network Information Center

• UT Study Abroad Office

• Associate Vice President for International Programs

• UT International Office

• ICÓ Institute

• Executive Vice President and Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson

• John Kappelman, Department of Anthropology

• Harvey Sussman, Department of Linguistics

• The Alcalde magazine

The Handbook of Texas Online:
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online

• Electronic Data Systems