Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sherry Cox, Clinical Professor of Biomedical and Diagnostic Sciences, University of Tennessee

In my work as a veterinary pharmacologist, I never know exactly what I’m going to get when I open my email. It could be a request from a veterinarian asking my team to determine the concentration of a drug to treat the shell of a turtle infected with fungal disease. Or it could be an inquiry from a researcher wondering whether we can help them figure out the dose of antacid they should give goats and sheep with ulcers.

In one email, a veterinarian wanted to know whether we could determine the concentration of an extended-release antibiotic in tigers to determine how to best treat them. Figuring this out would make the difference between trying to give a sick tiger a pill every 12 hours – a difficult task – or a shot once a month.

At our veterinary pharmacology lab, my colleagues and I analyze drug levels in animals from zoos and aquariums nationwide, from tiny mice to majestic elephants and from penguins to farm animals. Whether it’s a dolphin with an infection or a tiger in pain, we help veterinarians determine the right treatment, including how much medicine is best for each animal.

Here’s a peek behind the scenes to experience a day in the life of a veterinary pharmacologist, and what it takes to ensure these creatures get the care they need to thrive.

Beluga milk and antibiotics

One day, I received an email from an aquarium asking whether my team and I could determine the concentration of an antibiotic in milk – specifically beluga whale milk.

Beluga whales live in cold waters throughout the Arctic and are extremely sociable mammals that hunt and migrate together in pods. They are recognized for their distinctive white color and are known as the “canaries of the sea” for the wide variety of sounds they make. Whales like the beluga are at the top of the food chain and play an important role in the overall health of the marine environment. However, these animals are threatened by extinction. There are roughly 150,000 beluga whales left in the world today, and certain populations are considered endangered.

The aquarium reached out to us as part of their research on the factors threatening the sustainability of belugas in the wild and what steps can be taken to protect them. The team there works with animals both in human care and in their natural habitats to improve husbandry methods, understanding of the underwater world and the conservation of aquatic life.

We agreed to try to extract the drug from the milk. However, we first needed a sample of whale’s milk. So, the first question: How do you get milk from a whale? Through my decades of working in this field, my team has studied samples from a wide range of species, but this was the first time someone asked us to analyze whale’s milk.

Unfortunately, I never did find out how they actually got the sample. But I cannot imagine it was easy. The sample we received reminded us of a thick buttermilk, very clumpy with a little bit of a blue tint.

The milk sample they gave us came from a whale with an infection who was also nursing a calf. The veterinarians wanted to know whether the antibiotic was crossing into the milk, indicating that the calf may have been exposed to the drug.

Each chemical compound requires its own unique process to extract from a particular sample type. This extraction can range from one to 15 steps and can take from one to six hours to perform. After we devised a method and procedure to extract the antibiotic from milk, we set to analyzing the sample.

We found the presence of drug in the sample, which meant the nursing calf was getting exposed to antibiotic from its mother’s milk. This posed health risks to the calf, including disruption to its gut microbiome that could lead to a weakened immune system, increased susceptibility to infections and antibiotic resistance.

Making a treatment plan

Now that the aquarium knew the beluga milk contained the antibiotic, it could devise a treatment plan. Beluga calves are dependent on nursing for the first year of life until their teeth emerge. So stopping the calf from drinking its mother’s milk wasn’t an option.

When prescribing antibiotics, a veterinarian needs to carefully consider the potential risks and benefits to both the nursing mother and her offspring. The goal is to provide effective treatment for the parent while minimizing the risk of harm to the offspring.

In order to determine whether the nursing calf was at risk, the veterinarian wanted to determine the concentration of antibiotic in the calf.

To measure how much antibiotic the calf was ingesting from the milk, the aquarium sent us a plasma sample from the calf to analyze. While we did find measurable amounts of the drug in the sample, there was not enough to cause harm to the calf.

With this information, the veterinarian decided to continue to give the mother the antibiotic. The veterinarian gave our team samples from both the mother and the calf to continue monitoring the drug concentrations.

Effectively treating animals

For many animals, there is limited information available to guide clinicians when deciding treatment plans. Many dosage regimens are extrapolated from animals with different physiologies and metabolisms compared to the animal receiving the drug. What might cure one species might kill another.

Evaluating how safe and effective a drug is for a particular species is essential to not only properly treat and prevent disease but also to relieve pain. The research we do provides needed information on appropriate doses in vulnerable species for which there is no scientific data available.

I find the work we do rewarding because we provide information to so many veterinarians to help them take care of remarkable creatures great and small.

Sherry Cox does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Calling in the animal drug detectives − helping veterinarians help beluga whales, goats and all creatures big and small – https://theconversation.com/calling-in-the-animal-drug-detectives-helping-veterinarians-help-beluga-whales-goats-and-all-creatures-big-and-small-265430

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Rebecca Vega Thurber, Professor of Ecology Evolution and Marine Biology; Director of the Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara

Before 2013, divers on North America’s west coast rarely saw purple sea urchins. The spiky animals, which are voracious kelp eaters,- were a favorite food of the coast’s iconic sunflower sea stars. The giant sea stars, recognizable for their many arms, kept the urchin population in check, with the help of sea otters, lobsters and some large fishes.

That balance allowed the local kelp forests to flourish, providing food and protection for young fish and other sea life.

Then, in 2013, recreational divers began noticing gruesomely dissolving sea star corpses and living sea stars that were writhing and twisting, their arms dropping and literally walking away. It was the beginning of a sea star wasting disease outbreak that would nearly wipe out all the sunflower sea stars along the coast.

Their disappearance, combined with a massive marine heat wave called “the blob,” set off a cascade of catastrophic ecological changes that turned these kelp biodiverse hot spots into vast sea urchin barrens, devoid of almost any other species.

This disaster also encouraged human innovation, however. The result has brought an unexpected boost for the local fisheries and restaurants through the development of a new culinary delight, and questions about how best to help kelp forests, and the US$500 billion in economic value they provide, recover for the future.

Losing sea stars disrupted an entire ecosystem

I am the director of the Marine Science Institute in Santa Barbara, California, one of the areas severely hit by the loss of sea stars.

From sea star wasting disease, more than 90% of the sunflower sea stars died along the entirety of North America’s west coast, from Baja to Alaska. In only the first five years of the outbreak, sea star wasting disease become one of the largest epidemics to hit a marine species. By 2017, sunflower sea stars, Pycnopodia helianthoide, were rarely found south of Washington state.

For over a decade, the cause of the devastation was a mystery, until recently, when my colleagues traced sea star wasting disease to a highly infectious vibrio bacteria. Today, sea star wasting disease has spread widely, even as far as Antarctica.

As sea stars disappeared, the purple sea urchin population exploded, increasing an astonishing 10,000% from 2014 to 2022.

The urchins ate through kelp forests. The resulting loss of kelp canopy and the understory foliage below it reverberated across the whole ecosystem, affecting the tiniest of zooplankton and giants like gray whales, all of which are linked in the complex kelp forest food web of who eats who.

Ecological cascades – a succession of changes across an ecosystem when habitats are disturbed – can occur when critical populations disappear or change in other significant ways.

Removing the kelp alters light levels below, leading to changes such as turf algae growth in place of filter-feeding invertebrates such as clams and scallops. Turf algae also make it harder for kelp to regrow, exacerbating the problem.

The loss of kelp also resulted in fewer mysids, a zooplankton that relies on kelp for habitat and which makes up a majority of gray whales’ diets. Thus, as urchin populations went up and kelp disappeared, gray whales also had less food.

How California learned to embrace the urchin

The loss of sunflower sea stars to wasting disease has not only altered the kelp ecosystem, but it has also altered the landscape of Pacific fisheries, potentially forever.

When I started research on purple sea urchins in 2001, there were not enough specimens in the whole of the Monterey Bay for me to collect and use for my studies. In fact, I had to order my animals from an East Coast distributor.

Mostly there were red sea urchins, Strongylocentrotus fransiscanus, highly prized for their large and delicious gonads and sold as “uni” to American and Asian markets.

But with the recent purple sea urchin boom, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a new and unexpected market on the west coast has blossomed – taking these kelp killers out of the sea and onto plates in restaurants around America.

This pivot from reds to purple urchins by fishers and the aquaculture industry took time and creativity. Purple sea urchins tend to be small and lack the rich gonads that make the reds so profitable. To adjust their flavor, texture and size, innovators turned to harvesting these animals from the sea by hand and then moving them to land-based facilities – called “urchin ranches” – where they fatten up by eating seaweeds.

The results have been remarkable. In Santa Barbara, a thriving industry now raises these animals for the culinary market, where the artisanal urchins go for $8 to $10 a pop. In one example, an abalone aquaculture program used its expertise and facility to profit from this new abundance.

Innovative ways to solve kelp decline

You might be asking yourself if we can just eat our way out of this crisis.

It’s not a new idea. The invasion of Pacific lionfish into Florida coasts, the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Caribbean was slowed down by local divers and recreational fishing groups teaming up to hunt and then market lionfish to restaurants.

It is unlikely that purple sea urchin ranching will make much of a dent in the population, but numerous projects are currently aimed at both recovering kelp forests and keeping the monetary benefits of the urchin boom flowing to the local economy simultaneously. The ingenuity to flip a bad outcome into a productive local aquaculture industry has been so popular that even state agencies are now funding local innovators to expand purple urchin ranching, assisting both the local environment and the local economy.

Scientists, state agencies and conservation groups are working on sunflower sea star restoration efforts and kelp recovery programs, and are considering other ways to reduce the urchin population.

One option is to increase otter populations in places like Northern California and Oregon, where they were once abundant. Otters can eat upward of 10,000 urchins per year. But the approach is controversial in Southern California. A similar conservation effort failed before, and there are concerns about the effects a bigger otter population would have on local fisheries, including the now-depleted black abalone.

So where do we go from here?

As the world’s appetite for farmed seafood has expanded, groups like Urchinomics and their investors are using this edible calamity to promote kelp restoration, create jobs and boost local economies.

In a way, sea star wasting disease and the precipitous kelp declines inadvertently created a mutually beneficial alignment of conservation, local artisanal fishing and land-based aquaculture.

In the long term, additional marine heat waves, like the one occurring in 2025, and their associated marine diseases and subsequent habitat losses, require global actions to reduce climate change. Future outbreaks like sea star wasting disease are almost certain to emerge.

Yet, it has also been found that some of the harms of urchin population growth can be lessened when sections of ocean are protected. For example, in some California marine protected areas where urchin predator diversity was high, the impacts of sea star wasting disease and its ecological cascade were reduced. In other words, in areas where there was limited fishing, as sea star numbers dropped, the urchin population was at least partially kept in check by those legally protected predators.

This finding suggests that along with global carbon reductions, local conservation and human innovations – like those bringing purple uni to our plates – can help prevent some ecological cascades that harm our increasingly threatened marine resources.

Rebecca Vega Thurber does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How sea star wasting disease transformed the West Coast’s ecology and economy – https://theconversation.com/how-sea-star-wasting-disease-transformed-the-west-coasts-ecology-and-economy-263253

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David Ikenberry, Professor of Finance, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder

For years, I’ve puzzled over a question that seems to defy common sense: If stock markets are hitting records and tech innovation seems endless, why aren’t companies pouring money back into new projects?

Yes, they’re still investing – but the pace of business spending is slower than you’d expect, especially outside of AI.

And if you’ve noticed headlines about sluggish business spending even as corporate profits soar, you’re not alone. It’s a puzzle that’s confounded economists, policymakers and investors for decades. Back in 1975, U.S. public companies reinvested an average of 25 cents for every dollar on their balance sheets. Today, that figure is closer to 12 cents.

In other words, corporate America is flush with cash, but it’s surprisingly stingy about reinvesting in its own future. What happened?

I’m an economist, and my colleague Gustavo Grullon and I recently published a study in the Journal of Finance that turns the field’s conventional wisdom on its head. Our research suggests the issue isn’t cautious executives or jittery markets – it’s about how economists have historically measured companies’ incentives to invest in the first place.

Asking the wrong Q

For decades, economists have relied on a simple but appealing ratio – Tobin’s Q, named after the famous economist James Tobin – to gauge whether companies should ramp up investment.

They calculate this by dividing a company’s market value – what it would take to purchase the firm outright with cash – by its replacement value, or how much it would cost to rebuild the company from scratch. The result is called “Q.” The higher the Q, the theory goes, the more incentive executives have to invest.

But reality hasn’t conformed to fit the theory. Over the past half-century, Tobin’s Q has gone up, yet investment rates have gone down sharply.

Why the disconnect? Our research points to one key culprit: excess capacity. Many U.S. companies already have more factories, machines or service capability than they can use. By not correcting for this issue, the traditional Tobin’s Q will overstate the incentive that companies have to grow.

To see this, consider a commercial real estate company that owns a portfolio of office buildings. In recent years, with the rise of e-commerce and remote work, many of their properties have been running well below capacity. Now suppose a few new tenants start paying rent and begin absorbing a portion of that empty space. Stock prices will rise in response to seeing these new cash flows, which in turn will lead Q to rise.

Traditionally, this increase in Q would suggest that it’s a good time to invest in new buildings – but the reality is quite different with idle capacity still in the system. Why pour money into building another office tower if existing ones still have empty floors?

This key idea is that what matters isn’t the average value of all assets – it’s the marginal value of adding one more dollar of investment. And because capacity utilization has been steadily eroding over the past half-century, many firms see little reason to invest.

That last point may come as a surprise, but the U.S. economy, with all its factories and offices, isn’t nearly as abuzz with activity as it was after, say, World War II. Today, many sectors operate well below full throttle. This growing slack in the system over time helps explain why companies have pulled back on their rate of investment, even as profits and market values climb.

Why has capacity utilization fallen so much over the past half-century? It’s not entirely clear, but what economists call “structural economic rigidities” – things such as regulatory hurdles, labor market frictions or shifts in cost structure – seem to be part of the answer. These factors can drag businesses into a state of chronic underuse, especially after recessions.

Why it matters

This isn’t just an academic debate. The implications are profound, whether you closely follow Wall Street or just enjoy armchair economic policy debates. For one thing, this dynamic might help explain why tax cuts haven’t spurred investment the way supporters have hoped.

Take the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and introduced full expensing for equipment investments. Supporters promised a wave of new investment.

But when my colleague and I looked at the numbers, we found the opposite. In the four years before the tax cuts, publicly traded U.S. firms had an aggregate investment rate, including intangibles, of 13.9%. In the four years after the tax cut, the average investment rate fell to 12.4% – in other words, no evidence of a bump.

Where did those liberated cash flows go? Instead of plowing this newfound cash after the tax cuts into new projects, many companies funneled it into stock buybacks and dividends.

In retrospect, this makes sense. If a company has excess capacity, the incentive to invest should be more muted, even if new machines are suddenly cheaper thanks to tax breaks. If the demand isn’t there, why buy them?

Even with the most generous tax incentives, the core challenge remains: You can’t force-feed investment into an economy already swimming in excess capacity. If companies don’t see real, scalable demand, tax breaks alone aren’t likely to unlock a new era of business spending.

That doesn’t mean tax policy doesn’t matter – it does, especially for smaller firms with real growth prospects. But for the large, well-established firms that make up the lion’s share of the economy, the bigger challenge is demand. Rather than trying to stimulate even more investment, policymakers should prioritize understanding why demand is sagging relative to supply and reducing economic rigidities where they can. That way, the capacity generated by new investment has somewhere useful to go.

David Ikenberry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why aren’t companies speeding up investment? A new theory offers an answer to an economic paradox – https://theconversation.com/why-arent-companies-speeding-up-investment-a-new-theory-offers-an-answer-to-an-economic-paradox-260661

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

An AI-generated image of Charlie Kirk embracing Jesus. Another of Kirk posing with angel wings and halo. Then there’s the one of Kirk standing with George Floyd at the gates of heaven.

When prominent political or cultural figures die in the U.S., the remembrance of their life often veers into hagiography. And that’s what’s been happening since the gruesome killing of conservative activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

The word hagiography comes from the Christian tradition of writing about saints’ lives, but the practice often spills into secular politics and media, falling under the umbrella of what’s called, in sociology, the “sacralization of politics.” Assassinations and violent deaths, in particular, tend to be interpreted in sacred terms: The person becomes a secular martyr who made a heroic sacrifice. They are portrayed as morally righteous and spiritually pure.

This is, to some degree, a natural part of mourning. But taking a closer look at why this happens – and how the internet accelerates it – offers some important insights into politics in the U.S. today.

From presidents to protest leaders

The construction of Ronald Reagan’s postpresidential image is a prime example of this process.

After his presidency, Republican leaders steadily polished his memory into a symbol of conservative triumph, downplaying scandals such as Iran-Contra or Reagan’s early skepticism of civil rights. Today, Reagan is remembered less as a complex politician and more as a saint of free markets and patriotism.

Among liberals, Martin Luther King Jr. experienced a comparable transformation, though it took a different form. King’s critiques of capitalism, militarism and structural racism are often downplayed in most mainstream remembrances, leaving behind a softer image of peaceful dreamer. The annual holiday, scores of street renamings and public murals honor him, but they also tame his legacy into a universally palatable story of unity.

Even more contested figures such as John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln show the same pattern. Their assassinations were followed by waves of mourning that elevated them into near-mythic status.

Decades after Kennedy’s death, his portrait hung in the homes of many American Catholics, often adjacent to religious iconography such as Virgin Mary statuettes. Lincoln, meanwhile, became a kind of civic saint: His memorial in Washington, D.C., looks like a temple, with words from his speeches etched into the walls.

Why it happens and what it means

The hagiography of public figures serves several purposes. It taps into deep human needs, helping grieving communities manage loss by providing moral clarity in the face of chaos.

It also allows political movements to consolidate power by sanctifying their leaders and discouraging dissent. And it reassures followers that their cause is righteous – even cosmic.

In a polarized environment, the elevation of a figure into a saint does more than honor the individual. It turns a political struggle into a sacred one. If you see someone as a martyr, then opposition to their movement is not merely disagreement, it is desecration. In this sense, hagiography is not simply about remembering the dead: It mobilizes the living.

But there are risks. Once someone is framed as a saint, criticism becomes taboo. The more sacralized a figure, the harder it becomes to discuss their flaws, mistakes or controversial actions. Hagiography flattens history and narrows democratic debate.

After Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022, for example, public mourning in the U.K. and abroad quickly elevated her legacy into a symbol of stability and continuity, with mass tributes, viral imagery and global ceremonies transforming a complex reign into a simplified story of devotion and service.

It also fuels polarization. If one side’s leader is a martyr, then the other side must be villainous. The framing is simple but powerful.

In Kirk’s case, many of his supporters described him as a truth seeker whose death underscored a deeper moral message. At Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, President Donald Trump called him a “martyr for American freedom.” On social media, Turning Point USA and Kirk’s official X account described him as “America’s greatest martyr to free speech.”

In doing so, they elevated his death as symbolic of larger battles over censorship. By emphasizing the fact that he died while simply speaking, they also reinforced the idea that liberals and the left are more likely to resort to violence to silence their ideological enemies, even as evidence shows otherwise.

The digital supercharge

Treating public figures like saints is not new, but the speed and scale of the process is. Over the past two decades, social media has turned hagiography from a slow cultural drift into a rapid-fire production cycle.

Memes, livestreams and hashtags now allow anyone to canonize someone they admire. When NBA Hall-of-Famer Kobe Bryant died in 2020, social media was flooded within hours with devotional images, murals and video compilations that cast him as more than an athlete: He became a spiritual icon of perseverance.

Similarly, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the “Notorious RBG” meme ecosystem instantly expanded to include digital portraits and merchandise that cast her as a saintly defender of justice.

The same dynamics surrounded Charlie Kirk. Within hours of his assassination, memes appeared of Kirk draped in an American flag, being carried by Jesus.

In the days after his death, AI-generated audio clips of Kirk styled as “sermons” began circulating online, while supporters shared Bible verses that they claimed matched the exact timing of his passing. Together, these acts cast his death in religious terms: It wasn’t just a political assassination – it was a moment of spiritual significance.

Such clips and verses spread effortlessly across social media, where narratives about public figures can solidify within hours, often before facts are confirmed, leaving little room for nuance or investigation.

Easy-to-create memes and videos also enable ordinary users to participate in a sacralization process, making it more of a grassroots effort than something that’s imposed from the top down.

In other words, digital culture transforms what was once the slow work of monuments and textbooks into a living, flexible folk religion of culture and politics.

Toward clearer politics

Hagiography will not disappear. It meets emotional and political needs too effectively. But acknowledging its patterns helps citizens and journalists resist its distortions. The task is not to deny grief or admiration but to preserve space for nuance and accountability.

In the U.S., where religion, culture and politics frequently intertwine, recognizing that sainthood in politics is always constructed – and often strategic – can better allow people to honor loss without letting mythmaking dictate the terms of public life.

Art Jipson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Charlie Kirk and the making of an AI-generated martyr – https://theconversation.com/charlie-kirk-and-the-making-of-an-ai-generated-martyr-265834

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Darcie Price-Wallace, Visiting Scholar in Religious Studies, Northwestern University

In August 2025, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from religious institutions across India and Nepal – a record number – gathered at the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern India to take various levels of the “geshema” examination. These exams are in preparation for one day receiving the geshema degree, comparable with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The nearly four-week gathering was especially notable because until 13 years ago it was completely unavailable to women.

Now, thanks to a greater emphasis on women’s education in recent years, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are increasingly becoming teachers and abbesses. In monastic institutions and in Buddhist centers around the world, nuns are taking on leadership roles and being acknowledged for their religious scholarship, including the geshema degree.

As a scholar of religious studies and gender, I study the changing roles of women in Buddhism. While nuns were long respected in Tibetan Buddhist culture, they were historically not granted access to the same educational or leadership opportunities as monks. But that has changed, in part due to the crucial role played by the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso.

He encouraged nuns to become advanced degree holders as part of his broader goal to increase gender parity. “Biologically there is no difference between the brains of men and women and the Buddha clearly gave equal rights to men and women,” he said in 2013. In addition to nuns reciting prayers and performing rituals, he emphasized they should study classic Buddhist texts, something traditionally reserved for men.

Such guidance has helped challenge historical misconceptions about women’s intellectual abilities that undermined women’s prominence in Buddhism. Indeed, nuns are now teaching philosophy within their own nunneries at home and abroad, becoming principals of their institutions, serving as role models for other nuns and the laity, and entering long retreats – a staple of Buddhist contemplative activities on the path to awakening.

Historical roots

The Dalai Lama has resided in exile since 1959, when he fled to northern India following unrest over the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Many Tibetans followed him, and he has remained the key religious and political leader of the Tibetan community and diaspora ever since, though he officially gave up political duties in 2011 to the Tibetan government in exile.

During the Dalai Lama’s decades of leadership, improving education for the diaspora communities of Tibetans in India and Nepal has been a crucial avenue for protecting and preserving Tibetan culture, including Tibetan Buddhism.

Historically, however, the path of formal education was primarily reserved for monks. In Tibet, nuns were primarily ritual specialists, according to Buddhist studies scholars such as Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Mitra Härköken and Nicola Schneider. They performed rituals in temples and homes but rarely had the opportunity to study the Buddhist texts.

And even with the Dalai Lama’s support, developing a systematic course of study for nuns that was equivalent to monks’ curriculum was not easy, especially with only a limited number of nunneries in India and Nepal, according to Schneider’s research.

“When the nuns arrived in India, they were ill, exhausted, traumatized and impoverished,” recalled Lobsang Dechen, co-director of the nonprofit Tibetan Nuns Project, in 2023. “Many nuns had faced torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese authorities in Tibet and endured immense physical and emotional pain. The existing nunneries in the struggling Tibetan refugee community in India were already overcrowded and could not accommodate them.”

Nuns’ education prospects were also hampered by limited literacy and monks who held administrative and decision-making roles over them. The women essentially lived in “masculine institutions inhabited by nuns,” scholar Chandra Chiara Ehm argued in her ethnographic work on the Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. Ehm found monk administrators tended to endorse the Dalai Lama’s calls for gender parity in name without directly supporting nuns’ education.

A new age for educational opportunities

Increased access to education for nuns began to change in the 1980s as more Tibetan nuns migrated to India and Nepal. A network of more developed nunneries followed, such as Gaden Choling and Dolma Ling in Dharamshala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

These institutions were funded by organizations such as the Tibetan Nuns Project, part of the broader Tibetan Women’s Association that was established in Tibet in 1959 in response to the Chinese occupation. The TWA was reinstated in India with the blessing of the Dalai Lama in 1984, and the Tibetan Nuns Project was established soon thereafter to educate and support nuns in India from all Tibetan schools.

The Dalai Lama encouraged these organizations to help build nunneries, empower existing nuns and support their further education. “In the beginning when I spoke about awarding Geshema degrees, some were doubtful,” the Dalai Lama recalled in 2018. “I clearly told them that Buddha had given equal opportunity for both men and women.”

Alongside the Dalai Lama’s efforts and more Tibetan nuns coming into the diaspora in India and Nepal, several other factors helped promote women’s advancement.

Those include the advocacy and support of international organizations such as Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women, which has hosted international meetings to empower nuns and lay Buddhist women for nearly 40 years.

Within India, meanwhile, local nonprofits such as the Ladakh Nuns Association have provided opportunities for nuns to work in health care.

Reaching the highest ladder of monastic teaching

The geshema degree that nuns have been able to receive since 2012 is in the Geluk tradition, one of the four schools, or distinct branches, of Tibetan Buddhism. These degrees are the highest level of monastic training but were previously available only to men, whose degree are known as “khenpo” or “geshe.”

Candidates for the geshema degree are tested after having studied Buddhist texts. Nuns must score 75% or higher during their 17 years of study before qualifying to take the geshema examinations.

In 2016, the Dalai Lama presided over and granted 20 Tibetan nuns geshema degrees, four years after he and the Tibetan government in exile recognized the accreditation of higher degrees for nuns. Before the formal development of the geshema program, only one German nun, Kelsang Wango, had received a degree. Now, there are 73 geshemas.

After the Geluk school began granting geshema degrees, nuns within the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism – Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu – also began pursuing advanced degrees in India and Nepal. Within these other three branches, nuns carry the title of “khenmo,” which like the geshema qualifies them to teach the renowned Buddhist scriptures. In 2022, the Dalai Lama offered blessings to the new khenmo, who received their titles in the Sakya school.

All told, nuns are changing the course for Tibetan Buddhist women – and have had an ally in the Dalai Lama.

As the numbers of women at the highest echelons of learning continue to grow, women will likewise expand their ability to take leadership roles in their monastic and lay communities – helping to improve other nuns’ education and protecting Tibetan culture in the process.

Darcie Price-Wallace received funding from a Fulbright Grant for her dissertation research.

– ref. Tibetan Buddhist nuns are getting advanced degrees − and the Dalai Lama played a major role in that shift – https://theconversation.com/tibetan-buddhist-nuns-are-getting-advanced-degrees-and-the-dalai-lama-played-a-major-role-in-that-shift-261824