Letter from the Director

Dear Friends,

As you’ll see in this year in review, the 2022-23 academic year was excellent for our efforts to educate about Asia. In particular, the Liu Institute hosted brilliant speakers at our signature events in the spring.

After a five-year hiatus, we held our Asia Leadership Forum on March 21, 2023, with guest speaker Maria Ressa, a Filipino and American journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for reporting on abuses of power and fake news in the Philippines. Notre Dame Law Professor Diane Desierto, a Liu Institute faculty fellow and international human rights attorney, moderated the event.

A month later, esteemed Buddhist philosophy scholar Jay Garfield was our first in-person speaker for our Justice and Asia Distinguished Lecture on April 13, 2023. Mike Zhao, a Liu Institute faculty fellow and assistant professor of philosophy, moderated the discussion.

Both speakers delivered important messages on how to consider the problems of our world and how we might respond to them.

Ressa, who is known internationally for standing up to dictators and corruption, cautioned young people about looking for meaning in scrolling through social media and urged them to determine their values early in life to help them discern how they will respond to challenges. “You have to make it clear because we human beings have a wonderful ability to rationalize everything … You have to draw the line first before you can hold the line.”

Garfield urged his audience to pay attention to structural violence and to work to dismantle it as Buddhist doctrine prescribes. “Human rights and the pursuit of justice are an upaya, a skillful means that we can use in our rhetoric and in our action to realize these values of friendship, of care, of impartiality, of sympathetic joy in our political institutions and in the modern means through which we can dismantle and replace structural violence that conditions our collective life.”

Part of the mission of the University of Notre Dame is to “create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice.” The Liu Institute was honored to contribute to the University’s mission in such a meaningful way this year, while simultaneously enhancing our community’s exposure to, and understanding of, Asian realities and Asian cultures and traditions.

The past years have seen an unprecedented increase in appointments of Asianists to the Notre Dame faculty. Also, the Liu Institute’s teaching programs in Asian Studies are attracting record numbers of students. We look forward to continuing our expansion, forging ever-closer ties between Asia and Notre Dame, and bringing nuanced and in-depth understanding of Asia to all members of our community.

 

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_{The photo at the top of the page, of the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, was taken by University photographer Barbara Johnston, who accompanied a Liu Institute-sponsored multidisciplinary research team to Japan in May 2023.}

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