PERSPECTIVES 2004 starts Tuesday.  The first three days of events will be
held in the Tennessee Room of the University Center, the faculty-student
panel will be held in the Raccoon Mountain Room of the University Center.


Dr. Paul B. Courtright, professor of religion at Emory University and
author of the controversial book Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of
Beginnings will be the kickoff speaker for PERSPECTIVES 2004, The Raymond
B. Witt Lecture Series.  The theme of PERSPECTIVES 2004 will be America and
the New World Order.

Courtright will discuss "Notes from New Delhi:  America through Indian
Eyes,"  on Tuesday, January 20 at 9:25 a.m.  All PERSPECTIVES events will
be held in the UTC University Center. Parking is available at Engel
Stadium, where campus visitors can ride the free Carta shuttle to the
University Center.

Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings was originally released in
1985, and recently released again with a new cover in 2001.  The sexual
themes explored in the book and the cover, which depicts a nude Lord
Ganesa, prompted a petition by a member of the Hindu Students' Council at
the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.  It demanded the "author and
publisher to give an unequivocal apology to the Hindus" and asked that the
publisher immediately withdraw the book from circulation.  Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers withdrew the book from the market in India.

Courtright received his B.A. from Grinnell College, M.Div. from Yale, and
Ph.D. from Princeton. He had taught previously at Williams College and the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His teaching interests focus on
religions of South Asia, particularly Hinduism; religious change in
nineteenth century India, and the history of the study of religion.

On Wednesday, January 21, 10 a.m., G. Evans Witt, principal, CEO of
Princeton Survey Research Associates will discuss "America's Place in the
World."

Princeton Survey Research offers innovative research design, data
collection, and data analysis.  Surveys are conducted by telephone, mail,
personal interview and online.  Associates have extensive experience
interviewing corporate executives, government officials and influential
journalists.  Their research capabilities include in-depth analyses of news
media coverage of ongoing policy issues in the print and broadcast media.

"Why Middle Easterners Do Not Like Us" will be the topic of Dr. Arthur
Knoll, professor of history at The University of the South.  Knoll will
speak at 10:50 a.m. on  Thursday, January 22.

Knoll joined the faculty of The University of the South in Sewanee, TN, in
1970, and served as chairman of the Department of History from 1971-1976.
Knoll teaches African and Middle Eastern history at the University. He is a
graduate of Bates College (B.A.), New York University (M.A.) and Yale
University where he received the Ph.D. in 1964.  Knoll has also done
postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he was a
three-time Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. His teaching specialty is
European imperialism in Africa, a topic on which he has written a book
entitled Togo Under Imperial Germany: A Case History in Colonial Rule
(1978). His most recent work, of which he is general editor, is Germans in
the Tropics: Essays in Colonial Rule (1987).  He has written extensively
for the op-ed page of the Chattanooga Times.  In the summer of 2003 he
submitted "Utilizing Terrorism."

In January 1993, Knoll became the first recipient of the David E. Underdown
Chair in Modern European History. He was also a James Still Fellow at the
University of Kentucky in the summer of 1993. His last National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Institute was at the Mansfield Center, University
of Montana, June and July 1995; it was entitled "America's Wars in Asia: A
Cultural Approach."

In June 2000 Knoll was chosen by the Associated Colleges of the South as
one of three representatives for a study tour in Turkey to help initiate a
Global Partners' Program there.

A UTC faculty and student panel discussion titled The New American World
Order will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, January 23.  Dr. Bob Swansbrough,
Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences will moderate a discussion of foreign
students' and faculty observations of American life.