More lost and found history

I have transcribed two articles I did for the Lansing Star in 1976. The Star was a community newspaper in the Lansing/East Lansing, Michigan area published in the 1970s. The first issue of the Star came out I believe in the spring of 1974, and ran through the rest of the decade and into the 1980s. I worked with it from 1974 to 1978; I'm not sure when it stopped publication. The Star succeeded a paper called Joint Issue from earlier in the 70s, the name Joint Issue played on the fact that it was, well, an early 70s community/underground newspaper, and a merger of two other newspapers (Red Apple News? and something else -- before my time).

Both articles look at Michigan State University's international projects. The first article, "MSU Overseas: The Ugly Academic" uses MSU's Vietnam project from the 1950s and early 1960s as backdrop, and mostly rants about then-current projects in Brazil and Iran. The second article, "The Ugly Academic: MSU in South Korea" gives the same treatment to a then-current project with the South Korean goverment. As the articles make obvious, those countries were run by very different governments then: Brazil by a military junta; Iran by a Shah installed by the CIA and a close U.S. ally; South Korea by a dictatorship.

The articles are what they are. I like the outrage expressed in them, but they are a peculiar form of journalism. Looking back on them today, I wish they had more about the actual projects.

The South Korea project is especially interesting. MSU was using computer models to help South Korea re-organize its agricultural sector to free up workers for its growing industrial economy. England did it by enclosures; the Soviet Union did it via collectivization; South Korea managed it with computer models from MSU, though I don't know what form it took on the farm.

jd