Io Triumphe! Fall-Winter 2017-18

Io Triumphe!

THE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS OF ALBION COLLEGE

FALL-WINTER 2017-18

FACING CHALLENGES WITH VITAL PERSPECTIVE FROM THE COLLEGE YEARS VOL. LXXXII, NO. 2

Nate Kozycki, ’19, earned All-America status in the 100-yard butterfly at the NCAA Division III Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships in March. Albion finished 13th at the national meet, which came on the heels of the Britons’ first MIAA title since 1971. Photo: Conway Photography

Contents

FALL-WINTER 2017-18

Features AN ALBION STORY Roohia, ’18, is unyielding, unflappable, and undeniably making Albion her own.

Plus: Albion’s international team

12

UNDAUNTED VISION Legally blind since birth, recent Ph.D. Drew Hasley, ’07, is making his mark in the field of genetics.

18

HIS PLAYBOOK FOR LIFE No matter the scheme thrown at him, Darrell Williams, ’77, knows his Albion friends are always there.

22

TIRELESS FOCUS 26 Amy Elaine Wakeland, ’91, the first lady of Los Angeles, has always relied on more than a drive or fighting instinct to succeed.

A CLOSING CHAPTER 30 Two alumnae, a mother and her daughter, discuss the departure from campus of Zeta Tau Alpha’s Beta Tau chapter 50 years ago.

18

Departments BRITON BITS ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS

26

3 34

ALBIONOTES 38 THE BACK PAGE

2 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

48

12

22

BRITON BITS

The Value in What We Do Thanksgiving Day is my target date for having dinner with all new students. I have been doing this for about 15 years. That’s a lot of dinners and a lot of students. With 515 first-year students, this fall was the busiest my dining room has ever been.

After dinner the students sit with me on the floor and talk about their college experience—their first days, weeks, or months. I ask them to tell me something they have learned that wasn’t from a textbook. Or, I ask them to tell me something they have learned that they wouldn’t have learned if they had taken the same courses at a large university.

In essence, I try to engage them in a conversation about our value proposition.

The initial answers are predictable. Students talk of learning time-management skills. They talk about having to get themselves up in the morning. They might talk about discovering that they actually like history or biology or anthropology. All good answers. But not quite what I am hoping to hear. Clearly, they haven’t yet learned to read minds.

Usually, I can count on someone providing a “liberal arts” answer. They are learning to think outside the box. They are becoming careful readers. They are finding connections between the content of different courses. These are great answers and give me confidence that they are getting good value for their tuition payments.

But I keep prodding until someone mentions that they are learning that their classmates have interesting things to say.

By the end of the first month, many of our students can describe the experience of

strongly disagreeing with the comments of a classmate and then, upon listening and reflecting, finding agreement. They came to college expecting to learn how to persuade; they are excited to discover the value of being persuaded.

This observation students make after such a short time at Albion reminds me of the importance of colleges like ours. For our country to thrive, our democratic systems need to be healthy. At the heart of these systems is the belief that collective wisdom is a more fruitful guide than individual opinion. There is great value in learning to listen and reflect and then sometimes change one’s mind. It is important to be persuasive. It is equally important to understand that those whose opinion is different than ours may have a better idea.

country or even a different country are often the most enlightening.

Given the political polarization in our society, and given the fact that our students are products of our society, it is not surprising that it takes more than a few weeks for students to acknowledge that those from the opposite end of the liberal-conservative spectrum have a role in constructive debate.

It doesn’t take long for students to discover the value of diversity and inclusion, except when it comes to diversity and inclusion of political opinion. But it is important for Albion College and for America that we take on this greater challenge.

Mauri Ditzler President

When our students watch 24-hour cable news or immerse themselves in social media, they observe what is labeled as debate. But if that is their only exposure to debate, they miss the concept that, in a democracy, debate is a tool for discovering ideas and formulating new approaches to old problems. Fortunately, this is one of the things that students tell me they are learning at Albion.

If our after-dinner session ends here, I consider it worthwhile. But sometimes students extend the conversation by describing the excitement of discovering that they learn the most from those with whom they expected to have the greatest disagreement. Classmates of a different race or religion or from a different part of the

The Class of 2021 gathered for a group photo in front of Kresge Gymnasium back in August.

The College’s largest entering class since 2005 helped boost overall enrollment to 1,568 this fall.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 3

BRITON BITS

Philadelphia Freedom Over the course of 50 years, The Philadelphia Center has provided thousands of college students (including dozens from Albion) with a compelling semester of off-campus study— highlighted by a significant and meaningful internship with a top-flight employer—in one of the country’s largest, most diverse, and most historic cities.

Launched in 1967 by the Great Lakes Colleges Association, The Philadelphia Center (TPC) remains firmly rooted with the GLCA and its member colleges. Now, a new chapter of that partnership has begun, as Albion College officially became the administrator of the program this fall.

Located in the heart of Center City and less than a mile from Independence Hall, TPC offers fall- and spring-semester programs consisting of two courses and a 32-hour-per-week, for-credit internship. An eight-week summer session includes one course and an internship.

In all, TPC has built relationships with more than 900 companies, nonprofit organizations, and government entities throughout the greater Philadelphia area,

4 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

and has offered experiential learning opportunities to more than 6,800 students from 90 colleges and 50 countries.

“For many of our students who completed a semester through The Philadelphia Center, it remains a highlight of their Albion experience as alumni,” says President Mauri Ditzler, adding that the College’s deeper association with TPC is an important development. “Our new, direct connection to Philadelphia and the Northeast Corridor will result in more people in more places learning about and becoming familiar with Albion College.”

In recent years, Albion students participating in TPC have completed internships at executive placement firm Korn Ferry International, the Philadelphia City Controller’s Office, and Penn Medicine’s Brain and Behavior Lab through the University of Pennsylvania.

For one alumna, her semester in Philly meant so much that she has stayed connected to the Center as a member of the TPC Friends Board.

“The Philadelphia Center was a changing point in not only my academic life but also my professional and personal life,” says Ryan

Arey, ’11, who completed a marketing and event-planning internship at the Radisson Plaza Warwick and later returned to the city and received her master’s in higher education administration from Penn. She is currently working in Washington, D.C., as the recruitment and marketing coordinator for the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management.

“Growing up in a small town and attending Albion College, I never gave much thought to living in a big city,” Arey says. “However, after my experience with TPC and learning to navigate a big urban area, I knew that I wanted to return to a major city after Albion. Before TPC, I would have never broken out of my shell and taken such a leap of faith. I learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in new situations, and that is a life skill that has helped me advance my education and career.”

Learn more about The Philadelphia Center at tpc.edu.

HISTORIAN AND STORYTELLER

Let the Good Times Roll WHERE’S THE BEST PLACE TO GET SUSHI IN ALBION? THE LIBRARY, OF COURSE. Over the summer an additional takeaway food station was installed in the Cutler Commons area of Stockwell-Mudd Libraries, adjacent to Read Between the Grinds café and the popular bridge study space connecting the two buildings. The most talked about food offering: sushi, and it’s not even close.

According to Pat Miller, director of operations for Bon Appétit, the College’s dining-services partner, more than 200 fresh packages of nine types of sushi are prepared twice per day by trained chefs from Sushi Kabar, a growing Royal Oak-based company that primarily sells through supermarket kiosks. Both the chefs and the Baldwin Hall kitchen facilities have gone through an extensive FDA screening process to ensure the highest quality and that safety requirements are met.

If the success persists, Albion hopes to expand the line further. “I’m so happy about having sushi,” says Laurel McGerty, ’19. “This is just another thing Albion’s done to improve campus.”

—Anna Watson, ’19

Best-selling novelist Ken Follett once said, “World War II is the greatest drama in human history … I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.”

Count Chris Blaker, ’14, as one of those writers.

“In his first year, Chris told the Marine Corps story of his grandfather who served in the Pacific,” says history professor Wesley Dick, who had Blaker in his America in Crisis class about the war. “That was just the beginning. Chris had found his passion for World War II history.”

Dick would go on to advise Blaker over four years—on summer research projects, Elkin R. Isaac Student Research Symposium presentations, a Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program thesis, and even a 2014 Io Triumphe! feature article, all pertaining to World War II. Today, Blaker is features editor of Michigan History, the bimonthly magazine published by the Historical Society of Michigan with a readership of nearly 100,000. And his

wealth of research on his alma mater in the early 1940s came together in a new way in the magazine’s September/October issue, in an article titled, “A Collegiate Home Front: Albion College in World War II.” The effort also presented an opportunity to work once again with Dick as well as Justin Seidler, the College archivist.

“It was an enormous pleasure working with Wes and Justin to tell the story of Albion College during the war,” says Blaker, who received an M.A. in American history in 2016 from Oakland University, where his studies and writings extended into Marine Corps years in Vietnam and Afghanistan. “Seeing the article in its present form offers a wonderful culmination of more than four years of work on this project, and I’m so pleased to have had the opportunity to share this important story with those who feel every bit as closely connected to Albion as we do.”

The issue is available via back-order through the Historical Society of Michigan. Visit hsmichigan.org or call 800/366-3703.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 5

BRITON BITS

Albion 24/7 2,000

pairs of safety glasses were distributed leading up to the Astronomy Club’s Great American Solar Eclipse event August 21, which drew hundreds of visitors to the Quad.

HEARD ON CAMPUS “Those kids showed me how to love anyone and to forget about the hard things in life and just smile.”

—Anna Moore, ’19, who worked with local eighth through 10th graders this summer and fall as part of Albion’s Big Read Youth Leadership Program (albionbigread.org)

6 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

Andrew Bill, ’20, became Albion’s

1

st

All-American in men’s cross country with his 39th-place finish at the NCAA Division III national meet.

6

French cinematic works, brought to town as part of a grant-supported film festival, were shown in November at the Bohm Theatre to help celebrate 20 years of a rewarding Sister City relationship between the City of Albion and Albion College and Noisy-leRoi and Bailly, France.

The Michigan Department of Transportation estimates

176,000

paver bricks were installed during the latter phases of the massive downtown Superior Street rebuilding project.

A highly anticipated extension of the Albion River Trail, totaling 1.2 miles and providing a key link to larger regional routes, officially opened on September 16.

1,684 volleyball digs is the current Albion career record, and Monica Shuk, ’19, has one more season to add to it. The accounting major and Gerstacker Institute member was named MIAA Defensive Player of the Year in leading the Britons to the 2017 league tournament.

“This is my second year being a co-captain for the hunt seat team. Coming to Albion I said I wanted to be one of the captains, and I was able to do it!”

“Before Albion I rode saddle seat. Learning to ride a completely different discipline took a lot of work, but it has definitely been worth it.”

“Applying to medical schools makes it a pretty intense schedule, but being able to go to the barn and destress has really been a blessing.”

“I would love to go into anesthetics because I have followed an anesthesiologist a lot and think the work is very interesting and meaningful.”

KEEPING IT ALL IN STEP “Horses are a huge part of my life.”

Brighton native Megan Reilly, ’18, is quick to add: “I’ve always been around them and can’t imagine my life without them.”

Athlete Advisory Committee. The Alpha Xi Delta member also studied abroad in Barcelona, Spain, in summer 2016.

The biology major and Spanish minor won her first high-point award at a show this fall for the Albion equestrian hunt seat team. Between hours studying and riding, Reilly is a leader on campus— as president of Mortar Board; VP of Alpha Epsilon Delta, the health preprofessional honor society; and the equestrian team’s representative on the Student-

“Going to Albion allowed me to continue my passion for horses while staying on my medical-school path,” Reilly says. “That’s not possible at a lot of schools, especially ones with equestrian programs like ours.”

Meet Albion’s new equestrian director, Andrea Wells— visit albion.edu/iotriumphe.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 7

BRITON BITS

Where Leadership Blooms

BIG ISSUES, BIG STAGE Robert Joerg, ’19, was one of only eight American students invited to attend The New York Times Athens Democracy Forum in September. In all, 23 student delegates—from Global Liberal Arts Alliance member institutions in 12 countries—gathered in Greece for five days and worked alongside former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, foreign ministers from Sweden and Kenya, global business leaders, and human rights activists to advise various UN programs.

Courtney Meyer, ’11, continues to see firsthand how becoming a leader isn’t a culmination, but the start of a new phase of growth.

Twelve years ago, as a high school sophomore, she participated in Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership’s annual Michigan Seminar at Michigan State University. “I was involved in quite a lot of things,” says the Prudenville native, “but I had a confidence issue, which tends to be common.”

Created by the actor in 1958, HOBY has inspired thousands of young people worldwide to make a difference and become catalysts for positive change in their home, school, workplace, and community.

And Meyer, who has long been drawn toward the issue of malnutrition, gained such powerful experiences and friendships over those three

8 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

days in 2005 that she felt the urge to stay connected with the organization. She has served HOBY in a variety of volunteer roles for more than a decade, including during her time at Albion.

In the last year, those ties have intertwined. Meyer recently became chairwoman of the 150-student Michigan Seminar and this past summer arranged to have Albion College host the event. “There is a lot of leadership development and service learning that happens on the campus, and we had such a wonderful experience,” says the Ford Institute and Honors graduate who majored in economics and management and international studies.

In what is a broadening initiative for the College, HOBY was one of four new camps among the 32 held on campus last summer, according to

Valerie Franzen, director of conference services. “I can’t say enough about Valerie and the Conference Services team,” adds Meyer (above left, with a HOBY colleague). “They spoiled us! We’ve found a wonderful home.”

In the spring, HOBY all but becomes a second fulltime job for Meyer, who has tackled malnutrition as a communication specialist at New York-based nongovernmental organization Helen Keller International.

“I’m a 28-year-old young professional, so to be able to develop even more experience through HOBY—managing budgets and volunteers, public speaking—it’s really taught me so much,” she says. “It’s the greatest privilege to be able to influence people’s lives the way other people influenced mine.”

With a student from India’s FLAME University, Joerg (below left, speaking with former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd) co-edited a white paper on climate change that will be presented to the UN Global Development program. “The ability to network was incredible, as was the opportunity to be exposed to perspectives from across the world,” notes Joerg, a political science major and Ford Institute and Honors Program member from Fremont, Ohio. “The student delegates were able to express the youth perspective and the importance of involving youth in addressing the world’s pressing problems.”

Ebb and Flow The sight of a butterfly in her mailbox garden in early November told Melissa Bichl Sturgis, ’82, that, just maybe, life would eventually return to something approaching normal.

“The first sign of life in my garden since the flood took over my house and yard August 29,” she wrote in an email. “I treasure this little creature. It means we’re on the mend.”

And it’s another step in the right direction after those disastrous days when Hurricane Harvey crashed into the Houston, Texas, area. It’s an event that will reverberate forever for Sturgis and her family, who live in Kingwood, north of downtown, and which was directly in the storm’s path.

“We were like caged lions, honestly,” Sturgis says. “We were just waiting. I had on my wellies

and a rain jacket and I checked the water levels. We saw the water rising. At 10 o’clock at night, the water really started creeping up the driveway and got to the front door. It was then that I realized we were really in trouble.”

At the height of the storm, she sat at the top of the stairs with her 16-year-old dog, Maggie, and watched helplessly as her possessions were destroyed.

“Things were crashing down below. It was just so surreal,” Sturgis says, adding that the water rose as high as 43 inches. “There were lots of fish and snakes. There was an alligator in my neighbor’s yard. It was like Wild Kingdom.”

Following a rescue by the volunteer group known as the Cajun Navy, the cleanup, slow and sometimes heartbreaking, has been the toughest part.

“It’s little things; treasures to me that maybe some think are silly, but I can’t ever replace those,” Sturgis explains as she runs through a list in her mind: homemade Christmas ornaments from her kids, items prized by her grandmother, and even her Albion diploma. “People say, ‘You’re so strong,’ but sometimes I don’t feel strong. I’m resilient; this is just another adventure, I guess, but not one we wanted.”

Sturgis adds that she was overwhelmed by the outreach of many people, including long-ago Albion friends she hadn’t heard from in years. “We’ve received donations of clothing, cleaning supplies, and so much more,” she wrote in an early September email. “Without the love and compassion of many Albion alums, we’d still be lost.”

Helping Texans Recover TJ Sanders, ’17, was just finishing orientation and training when Hurricane Harvey created his first FEMA Corps assignment.

After six weeks working in Corpus Christi and living aboard the USS Lexington, Sanders has been in Beaumont the last three months going door-to-door assisting residents with the mountains of paperwork required for insurance claims, municipal permits, federal aid, and more.

“In college, you get a problem-solving activity and if you get it wrong it’s no big deal,” Sanders says. Now, “if I get it wrong,

that family might end up living in a leaky home until they find someone else who can help them. That just can’t happen.”

The communication studies grad, now starting a post in Florida, adds: “Tau Kappa Epsilon’s motto is ‘Better men for a better world,’ and I think about that saying a lot.

I’ve been living in a tent with 100 other guys, I’ve worn steel-toe boots and a full uniform in 100 degrees with 80 percent humidity and walked for miles. This job isn’t easy, but helping my fellow Americans, there’s nothing to complain about.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 9

BRITON BITS

REACHING A CRESCENDO An alumni couple provides the foundation for the future Vitek Center for Musical Arts.

Richard and Marilyn Vitek, ’56 ’56, have shared their lives together for more than 60 years.

Part of that sharing has come in the form of years-long generosity to their alma mater.

Now, the couple is celebrating the timelessness and universality of music through their largest gift to the College. The Viteks have formally made a significant monetary commitment that will result in the Richard and Marilyn Vitek Center for Musical Arts, to be located near the corner of Ingham and Cass streets, just south of Goodrich Chapel.

The gift will cover half of the anticipated costs of the project.

Architects for program planning are currently being evaluated, and groundbreaking could begin as early as fall 2018.

“The Vitek Center will transform the study and performance of music at Albion College for years to come, thanks to Richard and Marilyn’s most generous gift,” says President Mauri Ditzler.

“This building, which will sit along our pathway to downtown, will be an ideal setting for musical offerings by our students and faculty as well as from artists locally and regionally.”

Music Department faculty have been researching recent similar projects at both small colleges and large universities to determine an ideal array of features and specifications for

10 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

Florida residents and 1956 Albion alums Richard and Marilyn Vitek visited campus in October, shortly after the College shared news of their gift.

the new building. “Our music professors are finding inspiration and ideas in many ways and in many places,” says Provost Marc Roy. “The process has been enlightening, a bit revealing and, admittedly, rather fun.”

Richard Vitek and Marilyn Young met during their freshman year on campus and were married two weeks after their graduation.

Richard, whose degree is in chemistry, pursued research after graduate school, including at the Atomic Energy Commission and with the Advanced Research Project Agency for the space program. He later started the first of several entrepreneurial businesses he would own, including Hartland, Wisconsinbased Fotodyne, which was the first company dedicated to the manufacture and marketing of laboratory and scientific

instruments for the separation, visualization, and analysis of DNA. Marilyn, whose degree is in home economics, grew up in a musical family, singing in choirs and in church and regularly attending operas through high school.

She fondly recalls “Mr. Dave”— legendary Albion professor David Strickler—and is excited about the thought of the Music Department relocating from its current home on the basement level of Goodrich.

“To have a music building, and a special place that they can call their home, should make for a much more interesting adventure to a lot of young people,” Marilyn says. “I think we struck the right chord.”

The Viteks, who have given consistently to the College over many years, have increased the tempo of their gifts of late.

More than a decade ago they funded the technology teaching auditorium (Norris 102) in the Science Complex. They also created endowed scholarships in chemistry and biology. Since 2015, the couple’s gifts have renovated and reimagined a dormant greenhouse in Olin Hall into what is now the Young Greenhouse and Marilyn Young Vitek Atrium Study Lounge; launched a new endowment benefiting the College’s Foundation for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity; and purchased equipment and supplies for the Chemistry, Biology, and Physics departments. They have also given a pair of original 1970s works from American landscape painter Robert William Wood to the Art and Art History Department.

“We were encouraged to keep giving more,” says Richard, adding about the direction toward music, “The more we thought about it, we said, ‘You know, it makes sense, because music is the language of the universe.’ The choice that the campus helped us with was a good one. The music building is a special gift that we thought would be, really, a needed thing for the campus and for the students. It’s not for us; it’s for them.”

Albion College is continuing its fundraising effort for the Richard and Marilyn Vitek Center for Musical Arts. To learn more, call 517/629-0446 or email advancement@albion.edu.

Two Minutes with . . .

ALLI HARNISH

The assistant professor of anthropology is in her fifth year at Albion.

Io Triumphe!: Did you always want to be an anthropologist?

understand your students became involved as well?

Harnish: Looking back, it seemed that was the direction I was heading in all along.

As an undergrad [at Western Kentucky University] I declared as a biology major and worked all four years in the microbiology lab. At the same time, I took a lot of history classes because I’ve always been interested in history. I studied abroad for two summers and couldn’t shake the growing interest I had in the social sciences. I finally made my way into anthropology because I wanted to study everything.

You can be a specialist in human biology and study human culture and history, and think about the ways those inform each other.

My students in the Native North America class, in order to understand this concept that was essential to the course—the idea of settler colonialism—they did their own research and went to a City Council meeting where they said, “Here’s who Lewis Cass was,” and then, “Let us tell you about a Native American who might be more deserving of a street name.”

The Council was intrigued, but in practice, logistically, it’s really difficult, since you’re talking about changing people’s street addresses. My intention was more to ignite the conversation, because it occurred to me that very few people realize who Lewis Cass was.

Earlier this year, radio listeners in Detroit voted to learn more about a question you posed to WDET’s CuriosiD program about Lewis Cass, and why so many places in Michigan are named after him.

(Cass, who was governor of Michigan Territory and held Cabinet positions under two presidents, was instrumental in the colonization of Native American lands and the removal and relocation of tribes.) I

Meanwhile, you happen to live on East Cass Street, one of the first to take advantage of the College’s Harrington Neighborhood initiative for faculty and staff. The effort has been recognized by the Michigan Municipal League. What has that experience been like?

I wouldn’t have been quite ready to buy a house but for this opportunity. Over the years the College had acquired

several properties, so now the City benefits because we have a number of properties going back on the tax rolls, and in terms of home values it’s good for the neighbors, too. And there have been plenty of moments of interaction with students in the first couple of months, either while I’m walking to or from campus or while I’m sitting on the porch and they’re passing by.

You organize a Halloween-night Michael Jackson “Thriller” zombie dance on the Quad, and it’s tied to your First-Year Seminar exploring zombies and monsters. What’s the root of that interest?

I like community, this is the most popular music video of all time, and there is scholarly, scientific research to suggest that nothing brings humans together quite like music and dance. It just so happens that we’re in the middle of a cultural moment where zombies appear to be this unifying force, as strange as it may be. I think monsters are a wonderful artifact for investigating and understanding the human experience.

Beyond dance moves, what do you like most about teaching and working with students?

Alli Harnish, standing in front of her home, is a cultural anthropologist specializing in rural livelihoods, international development, and human-environment relations. Her research, which has been externally supported by the Fulbright program and the National Science Foundation, explores the gender and age dimensions of development-induced migration, environmental change, and wildlife management in Zambia.

I like being able to connect them to the big ideas and the resources, the literature and the conferences … I want to feed and nurture and support their unique ideas and interests. Anthropology often offers a nice little glue for students to bring seemingly disparate interests together.

Interview by John Perney. Find links to more about WDET’s CuriosiD, the Harrington Neighborhood, and the “Thriller” dance at albion.edu/iotriumphe.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 11

S. MEYERS PHOTO

12 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

ALL STUDENTS BRING ONE TO CAMPUS AND DEVELOP IT FURTHER IN THE SHORT TIME THEY ARE HERE. Meet Roohia, ’18. She is unyielding, unflappable, undeniably making Albion her own, and unsure about what lies ahead after graduation.

By Chuck Carlson The first terrorist attack she remembers came in 2004, when she was 10 years old.

She remembers because it was in the first month of the Islamic calendar, called Muharram, which means “forbidden.”

It commemorates the life of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, when Shia Muslims, and more specifically the Hazara sect of the Shia, retell the glorious stories of Islam.

But in 2004, in Quetta, Pakistan, a city

that is home to more than 1 million Muslims and beset by sectarian division and centuries of bloody history, the purpose of Muharram was forgotten.

Or ignored. Maybe both.

On the 10th day of Muharram, called Ashura, terror rained down on the procession of Shia Muslims through the streets.

Three men from a banned Pakistani terrorist group (with likely ties to the Taliban) threw grenades and opened up with automatic-weapons fire, killing nearly 50 people and injuring 100 more.

All of the victims were Hazara.

One of those injured was her uncle, who was shot three times but recovered.

“It was a bad day, an awful day,” she says. “It gave us a sense of fear. We lost neighbors and friends. We knew all these people. Terror became a part of our lives.”

She pauses.

“The Taliban thinks Shia are infidels and if you kill infidels, you go to heaven,” she says. “Things haven’t been peaceful.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 13

“I used to think Quetta was a small town until I got to Albion,” says Roohia, a sociology major whose fall-semester course load included qualitative research, introduction to public service, introduction to theatre art, and astronomy.

Raised in a World of Conflict Her name is Roohia. Growing up in Pakistan, last names aren’t needed, so even as a senior at Albion College she is simply Roohia, who has plans to graduate in the spring with a degree in sociology and a concentration in public policy.

In Persian, Roohia means “courageous,” a name she was given by her father, but she says she doesn’t know about being especially courageous.

“But I am opinionated,” she says.

“I get that from my dad. I also get my negotiating skill from my mom. She solves problems and I try to do that, too.”

She is already looking to her future beyond Albion, though she’s not exactly sure what form it will take, when it will come together, or how she’ll make it happen.

14 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

But she will. She knows that.

Indeed, everyone who comes into contact with Roohia see something special in her. She is still only 23 but looks at the world through the eyes of someone far older. Maybe it’s because of what she has seen, what she has experienced, and what the world has presented to her.

“She’s one of those takeadvantage-of-the-opportunity people,” says Kathy Stroud.

The two first met in 2009, when Roohia came to the U.S. at age 15 as part of a State Department exchange program known as Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study. She was then placed with Stroud through another program, Youth for Understanding, and attended Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for nine months.

Seven years later, their relationship would help Roohia select Albion College. (Kathy’s

husband, Joe Stroud, had been editor of the Detroit Free Press for 25 years before retiring in 1998 and becoming director of Albion’s Gerald R. Ford Institute for Leadership in Public Policy and Service. He died of a heart attack in 2002.)

When Kathy accepted two students from Youth for Understanding in ’09—the other was a Buddhist student from Thailand—the trio connected almost immediately, but it was Roohia who made a particular impression.

“I was taken by her from the beginning,” Stroud says. “It was her attitude and her smile. We went to Disney World and Cedar Point, and the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and she seemed to get it and understand everything. I told her, ‘You’re wise beyond your years.’ She won me over without trying.”

She recalls when Roohia asked to attend the Strouds’ youth meeting

at their Methodist church. When a member of the group asked her why she came, she said simply that maybe this would help her learn more about her God. “She’s an amazing young woman,” says Anna Gladstone, ’06, Stroud’s daughter who is now a familypractice doctor in Detroit. “She was 16 and more mature than some of the 20-somethings I knew from college.”

But after the school year ended, Roohia returned to Pakistan.

“That was hard at the end of the year because we had to send her back,” Gladstone remembers. “Her family is from Quetta and there were a lot of random bombings.

We were worried about her when she went back.”

Maybe by design or perhaps by necessity, Roohia developed her maturity from her parents as well as from her older sister, two younger brothers, and a collection

Roohia was drawn to Albion because she was familiar with Michigan—and because she had Kathy and Anna.

“She’s like my American mom,” says Roohia, who still talks with Kathy almost weekly. “She worries about me.”

Anna jokes: “Mom always says Roohia is the daughter she never had.”

Quetta, a city of 1 million people in north-central Pakistan, is roughly a two-hour drive from the Afghanistan border.

of uncles, aunts, and cousins, some 20 in all, who grew up and lived in the same home in Quetta.

“As a child I thought it was awful,” Roohia says. “But as I grew up I knew it was more important to concentrate on other people and that helped me do that. We learned to be a support system for each other.”

They lived a comfortable, if not necessarily stable, life in Quetta because Roohia’s dad was a vocal, strident politician in the opposition party. That was bad enough. But being a member of the minority Hazara was worse.

During her college prep schooling, Roohia recalls local officials entering her classroom and canceling classes, sometimes for days on end, for reasons no one ever explained. Events like that had become part of her everyday life—she had come to expect it, acknowledging that the Hazara have suffered considerably under Sunni rule. (Shia comprise

an estimated 5 to 20 percent of Pakistan’s population.) In recent years, at least 1,300 have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded in Quetta alone.

According to some estimates, the casualties regionally, across borders, total 20,000.

stretching back to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.

“It’s an ethnic cleansing,” Roohia says matter-of-factly. But she adds, ”You know, terrorism is part of your life, but not the whole life.

It wasn’t going to intimidate us.”

“I want to see it,” she says. “I want to see the places my dad talks about.”

Coming to Albion It’s roughly 130 kilometers (80 miles) from Quetta to the Afghanistan border, and another 110 to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and capital of the former Sunni-fundamentalist Taliban regime. Roohia’s grandparents still have a farm in the war-torn country but they moved away years ago to shield their children, including Roohia’s father, from the violence that has been endemic there for decades,

And while Roohia, her two brothers, and her sister have lived in Quetta their whole lives, she’s always wanted to visit Afghanistan.

But not yet. Not now. Afghanistan remains a violent, unpredictable place and is still heavily influenced by the Taliban, which continues to wage its country-wide insurgency.

And just as her grandparents shielded her mom and dad, Roohia’s parents insisted that she find a refuge from the strife in Pakistan.

She waded through the Pakistani bureaucracy to take and pass the proper tests, and secured transportation and a student visa for the chance to study in America.

And while she had been accepted by a number of colleges, she looked to Kathy Stroud for guidance.

And one night in 2016, as a car pulled into Kathy’s driveway in Ann Arbor, out popped the smiling Roohia, who had made the circuitous journey from Lahore, Pakistan, through Doha, Qatar, to London to Chicago, where a friend had picked her up.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Stroud recalls. “I knew she was coming but I didn’t know when.”

“My room still looked the same from 2009,” Roohia remembers.

She moved to Albion, and began settling in, a few days later. She was slotted as a first-year student even though she had the credits from her schooling in Pakistan to be a junior.

It took a semester to figure it out but, eventually, Roohia got her junior status. “I just knocked on a lot of doors,” she says. “Every day.”

She adds with a laugh: “I used to think Quetta was a small town until I got to Albion.” But it has suited her well and she has given new meaning to the phrase “getting involved.”

Roohia is a member of the Ford Institute and, along with carrying a four-course load this fall that includes astronomy, qualitative

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 15

Roohia and other members of the College’s Muslim Student Association gathered for an event at the President’s Home during the fall semester. She has taken on leadership roles in a number of campus organizations at Albion.

nation’s capital intrigues Roohia, and a future there isn’t out of the question.

Meanwhile, she has maintained a strong, almost maternal, relationship with Stroud and has sought her advice on what should come next.

research, and introduction to theatre art, she is president of the Muslim Student Association, alumni relations coordinator for Mortar Board, and vice president of off-campus activities for Union Board. And she still occasionally serves as a campus tour guide.

She also volunteers through the Student Volunteer Board as part of her Ford commitment, and institute Director Patrick McLean, who also teaches her in his Introduction to Public Service course, has been impressed with what he’s seen. What stands out?

“Definitely her maturity,” he says.

“She’s intellectually curious and she really wants to learn. She’s always the kind of student you want in your class.”

If that weren’t enough, Roohia also works 20 hours a week as an associate for Betsy Morley, director of international recruitment in the Admission Office. “It gets a little overwhelming sometimes,” Roohia says. “But my mom raised us to have pride in whatever we do.”

Says Morley: “She’s inspired me with her maturity, organizational skills, and eagerness. The first thing you notice is her smile, and she’s a problem solver and she finds options to things that I didn’t even think of.”

16 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

Looking to the Future Roohia is on course to graduate in the spring but admits that while the ambition is there to complete what she started, the finances may not be.

As an international student, she is not eligible to receive scholarship offers that are available to other students. She has student loans, and her job wages allow her to stay above water. But she admits to worrying about the future.

“The goal right now is to think short term,” she says.

Last summer Roohia worked in the College’s Institutional Advancement office, cataloguing a history of campus buildings for use by engagement officers and alumni. Later in the summer, she went to Washington, D.C., and worked in the quality assurance and grants department for Youth for Understanding, the same group that placed her with the Stroud family.

She was struck by the energy and power of D.C. and, with her knowledge of language, especially her proficiency with Dari, when she heard the CIA needed specialists in Dari, she offered her services.

“They said, ‘Sorry, we only take U.S. citizens,’” she says. Still, the

Kathy has suggested graduate school. “She has a five- or six-year student visa and she’s only used two years,” she says. Then she adds, “I’m still trying to teach her how to swim and to drive.”

Roohia still visits her second family when she can. “Roohia has been home a couple of times since she’s been at Albion,” Anna Gladstone says. “She’s great with our son (three-year-old JD, whose father is Carl Gladstone, ’01). She’s just a joyous, friendly presence. He immediately warmed up to her. He always says, ‘Play with me Roo-e.’”

lot about where she’s going and what she wants to do,” the Ford director says. “She has a passion for working with kids and with literacy. She’s used a liberal arts curriculum and is trying to find out from that where she lands. But she’s always trying to learn.”

Something in Roohia’s DNA suggests she’ll figure it out soon enough. She’s seen and experienced too much not to realize that the world, as it is and as it could be, needs everyone like her.

She also knows Albion has provided her with the template, and that the rest, as she always expected, is up to her.

“Whatever she ends up doing, she’ll do great things,” Anna says.

“The politicians there make it easier to get out of school than to stay in,” she says. “There’s no help in Pakistan for parents who want to send their kids to school. There’s always a part of me that goes back to teaching in a classroom.”

Roohia did not go home to Pakistan for winter break, and while that was tough for her (“Literally half of my cousins are getting married this winter,” she says), she knew remaining in Albion and trying to work was first and foremost. She is exploring internships as well and, with the help of Skip Zabel in Albion’s Office of Student Financial Services, was able to secure a $1,000 scholarship from the Court Street United Methodist Church in Flint to help with the spring semester.

Then she turns as wistful as a 23-year-old can be.

In the end, she believes she will find a way to make it all work out.

“There are times it’s easier to look 10 years down the road,” she says.

“Others, it’s what am I going to do tonight?”

“I might end up with a lot of student loans and not go home until I pay those off, but I’ve come so far,” she says. “I’ve traveled all around the world to get this done.

Leaving now just wouldn’t make any sense.”

In the end, Roohia may return to Pakistan to teach or, perhaps, follow her father’s lead and go into politics.

McLean has seen a glimpse of who she can be. “She’s talked a

BETSY MORLEY AND CRISTEN CASEY ARE KEY CONTACTS FOR THE COLLEGE’S INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS.

By Chuck Carlson They may be relatively new to Albion College, but Cristen Casey and Betsy Morley are anything but beginners when it comes to international education.

Indeed, when it comes to identifying, recruiting, and, eventually, convincing students from around the world to attend Albion, Casey and Morley collectively bring more than 35 years of experience.

Casey started in July as director of the Center for International Education and Off-Campus Programs, replacing the retired Debra Peterson. Morley came to Albion in December 2016 as the Office of Admission’s director for international recruitment. In a sense, it is Morley’s job to span the globe to find the students and get them to Albion, and it’s Casey’s to make sure they have the comfort level, support system, and tools to succeed once they arrive on campus.

And while both understand it’s more complicated than that, it has proven to be a good starting point as the two look to firm up Albion’s place in the increasingly turbulent and competitive climate of international education. “We’re two pillars in the students’ support system,” Casey says.

Albion’s international program is getting a jump start after a year that saw both of these key positions change hands.

Morley wasted little time, traveling to India after barely two months on the job to recruit students. She recently returned from another lengthy recruiting trip that took her to Nepal, Pakistan, and Vietnam as well as a conference in Thailand.

She also went on another trip to China and Mongolia.

Two international students started at Albion this fall, both from Mongolia. Of the 35 international students currently enrolled, seven are from Mongolia, and other home countries include China, Costa Rica, England, Peru, and Russia.

Morley and Casey, in consultation with Vice President for Enrollment Management Steve Klein, see an opportunity to expand the international student body dramatically. They believe a goal of 100 students one day is realistic and sustainable. “It will be baby

steps,” says Morley, who came from Ohio University, “but we’re having good conversations and it will be building.”

“One of the most impactful ways to support international student recruitment is for each of us to provide an exceptional Albion student experience,” Casey adds.

“Then current international students share our reputation with their peers, friends, and families abroad.”

The key, though, is to get the students to consider Albion, which Morley says is a challenging prospect, given the current political climate in the U.S. “I probably got asked about it at least once a week on the road,” she recalls. “They’d ask, ‘Will I be safe and welcomed on campus? Do the American students really want us there?’”

As it turns out, more international students of late, concerned about issues of visas and comfort, are considering Canada for college.

Yet, for those who do come to Albion, Casey is convinced they’ll have an experience they can carry with them for a lifetime.

She learned that from nearly 20 years of international programming leadership at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she fostered and guided an international student population

Cristen Casey (left) and Betsy Morley that made up 25 percent of the overall enrollment of 26,000.

But as a Kalamazoo College graduate who majored in French literature and international and area studies, Casey was ready for something different. “Ever since I graduated from Kalamazoo, my goal was to work at a liberal arts school,” she says.

And while her scope is perhaps a little smaller, it is no less ambitious.

“I see great opportunity here,” Casey says. “Both Betsy and I are eager to collaborate more with faculty, with students, and with each other.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 17

JEFF MILLER/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

18 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

USING FIERCE INTELLECT, WRY HUMOR, AND TENACIOUS EFFORT, DREW HASLEY, ’07, LEGALLY BLIND SINCE BIRTH, HAS EXCELLED BOTH IN THE FIELD OF GENETICS AND BEYOND IT.

By Erin Peterson Andrew Hasley would like to get one thing out of the way before we start: he doesn’t think he’s that impressive.

Yes, it’s true that he recently completed a Ph.D. in genetics. It’s true that he landed grant funding and launched a pilot test for a variation of an evolution teaching tool. And it’s also true that he played complex violin parts in the Albion College Symphony Orchestra for four years. By ear.

It is, on its face, a remarkable résumé.

That said, Hasley also knows what you might think when you see him out in

the world with his thick glasses, his white cane, or his guide dog, Shade: Inspirational. Impressive.

Those words—that idea—make him uncomfortable.

He’s happy to tell you why. But let’s start from the beginning.

A Mindset Built for Success The reason Hasley has the glasses, the cane, and the guide dog is that he was born with Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a rare condition that left him with only a tiny sliver of vision. It’s more or less what others might see if they looked at the world through a drinking straw.

Hasley was just three when his parents learned of his condition. Yet instead of accepting the diagnosis with resignation— along with the idea of a more limited life for their son—they engaged. They went to the library and dug into the research.

They worked closely with the teachers at his school and with administrators in the school district. They made every effort to ensure that he had the same chance of getting a good education as every student in his class, even if the process of getting it looked a little different.

And it did look different. “Instead of learning cursive, they brought an Apple IIe to the classroom and I learned how to type,” Hasley says. “I learned to read braille at the same time I learned to read print.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 19

a frank conversation with Pam Schwartz, the center’s director, who acknowledged that her office would have to do some preparation to work with him most effectively. “She didn’t pretend it would be a piece of cake, but she didn’t seem terrified, either,” he recalls.

Hasley says he was learning to type when other grade-school students were learning cursive.

Hasley, who had grown up in Arizona and Colorado, also liked the idea of living in Michigan, close to many extended family members. “I had a network of people there I could fall back on if I needed to,” he says. “Folks who could bail me out of jail, that sort of thing.”

It may have taken hours of extra time every day, but he learned to do essentially everything as well as his fully sighted peers. “Well,” he says dryly, “maybe not tennis.”

Perhaps more important than any individual technical skill or set of facts that Hasley mastered during those early years was the unending work he had to do to advocate for himself. By first grade, Hasley was attending the individualized education plan meetings in which his parents and teachers developed his academic goals. He knew his parents’ expectations were high for him, so he couldn’t shrink from challenges when school got tough. “I had to come out and say: ‘This is what I need,’” he recalls.

He used that same skill to suss out which college might be best for him as he entered his final years of high school. At that point, he suspected he might

20 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

pursue biology—he thought he might like to be a veterinarian.

At every college he considered, he asked how everyone could work together to make a great education possible for him.

It wasn’t an easy choice, he admits: At larger schools, offices for students with disabilities offered countless bells and whistles: braille embossers, software licenses for assistive technologies campus-wide, and testimonials from half a dozen other students with similar challenges who succeeded. The flip side? “The smallest class during your first year might be 50 students, if you’re lucky,” he sighs.

When he visited Albion, he quickly understood that the Learning Support Center wouldn’t have the most technology or experience with students like him. But what swayed him was their willingness to make a genuine effort. He remembers

Once he arrived, it was no joking matter: Hasley made an right away impact in the classroom.

Molly Scheel, then a biology professor at Albion (she’s now at Indiana University), noticed his intellectual spark when he took her cell and molecular biology course as a first-year student.

The pair worked together at the beginning of the semester to determine how he could best participate in group lab work, and he was an immediate standout.

“Although Drew couldn’t visualize my slides like other students, he listened very intently,” she recalls.

“His inquisitive nature made him a natural researcher, and I knew that we needed to figure out a way for him to have a research experience at Albion.”

They did. Scheel had received a National Institutes of Health grant for some of her research, and Drew spent the summer examining DNA sequencing of genes linked to nervous system development.

At the end of the summer, Hasley presented his work at the Society for Developmental Biology’s national conference.

Drew’s advisor, Dan Skean, recalls not just Hasley’s intellectual aptitude, but the tenacity and confidence he brought to his work.

“Drew seemed fearless in taking on the challenges of courses that involved significant microscopy,” the professor says. One solution— using a microscope camera and plugging it into a 17-inch television to get a larger image—proved useful not just for Hasley, but for his classmates, too.

Outside of the classroom, Hasley played in Albion’s orchestra all four years. He learned the pieces by ear, often pulling up a recording of an arrangement from the Naxos Music Library database and listening until he could play his part by heart.

Beyond that, he says, he was a typical college student. “I played video games on an old Sega Genesis system with friends until three in the morning and went to Taco Bell in Jackson.”

Ph.D. Progression After he graduated from Albion— both he and his guide dog at the time, Fletcher, received diplomas for their efforts—Ha sley went on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He set his sights, figuratively, on a Ph.D. in genetics.

Over the course of several years, Hasley did a series of projects for his doctorate that examined genes in an array of different organisms at different stages of development. “They all center on this problem of [progression]” he says. You have a single cell, then you have a group of cells, then sometime later you have this thing that walks and talks like a duck. How does that work?”

MUCH MORE THAN A RESOURCE While Hasley’s Ph.D. research did include some “wet work”— handling biological materials such as fish embryos, for example— Hasley trained his undergraduate researchers to support him.

“They needed to be my hands and eyes,” he explains. “It required a lot of troubleshooting to get high-quality material, but that meant we really had to communicate well, and I had to teach them well.” From there, Hasley performed computational analysis, working with large data sets to find patterns and sift through the numerical noise.

When Hasley received his doctorate in 2016, he became the university’s first person who is legally blind to achieve the distinction in genetics. Some believe he may be just the second blind Ph.D. in all of the biological sciences at UW-Madison.

Hasley was glad to land his Ph.D. but admits the fanfare, which included a detailed profile on the University’s website, seemed over the top. “There are 40,000 Ph.Ds in this city,” he says. “On some level, what I’ve done isn’t particularly amazing. I like that some kid might hear about my story and realize that they can do it, too, but I don’t want it to seem like getting a Ph.D. is almost impossible.”

Which bring us back to people who think he’s impressive. Or inspirational.

When Hasley says he’s uncomfortable that people are impressed by his achievements, it’s not that he’s not proud of them.

He just wishes they weren’t quite so uncommon. He wishes that the world were designed just a little bit better so that people who don’t

have perfect vision, or the usual level of mobility, or the typical level of cognition, could still reach their potential. “Someday, I want a visually impaired person getting a Ph.D. in genetics to be boring and uninteresting,” he says.

Branching Out That desire for a world where more people can participate and excel in the sciences is one reason why he is developing teaching tools that make it easier for everyone—not just those with specific disabilities—to learn complex scientific ideas. The concept that propels this effort, Universal Design for Learning, is a set of principles that help give individuals of a much wider range of abilities a better chance to learn.

For the past few years, he has teamed up with Kristin Jenkins, executive director of the nonprofit biology education organization BioQUEST. The pair received grant funding to adapt an evolution game called The Great Clade Race that is already out in the world. The game traditionally uses cards, stamps, and drawings to help high school and undergraduate students learn how to read a phylogenetic tree, which is a branching diagram that shows evolutionary relationships among species based on their characteristics.

The game is effective, but it’s tough for students who are visually impaired—or anyone who doesn’t learn easily through images—to grasp the concepts it teaches. To fix that problem, Hasley and Jenkins have swapped out the visual pieces for tactile ones. The adapted game uses yarn, clips, and tokens to show different relationships.

Not long ago, the duo’s approach was pilot-tested in an Oklahoma classroom, and early data suggest that the adapted game works at least as well as the original version.

Hasley is thrilled that it may allow more students to dip their toes into science and see if it’s right for them. “It’s not that I want to develop an activity for blind kids,” he says. “That’ll never get used. I want to develop an activity that happens to work for blind kids, too.”

It’s the kind of activity that might just drive the next kid—the one who learns a little differently from his or her classmates—to get excited about science and pursue it in a meaningful way. More than anything else, Hasley wants to see lots of people who look very different from one another achieving at the highest levels in their fields.

And it’s why he plans to continue in genetics—he’s currently doing postdoctoral work in Wisconsin’s Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine program.

As much as he loves designing educational tools, Hasley says he also wants to keep his hands in the research that has fascinated him for years.

Albion’s Learning Support Center helps students get the support they need.

Making the transition from high school to college academic work is challenging for many students. For those with disabilities, that jump can be even tougher, says Nick Mourning, ’05, a learning specialist for the College’s Learning Support Center (LSC).

“We all learn differently,” he says. “Here at the LSC, we help students with disabilities come up with a plan for them to be successful.” Last year alone, the office supported more than 110 students who have disabilities.

That help spans the spectrum. It includes providing extra time for exams, distraction-reduced spaces, and permission to record lectures.

It may also include assistive technology such as text-to-speech programs, enlarged text- or brailleformatted course materials, and note-taker services. For issues that haven’t come up in the past, Albion stays connected with other college disability-services offices to learn best practices and devise innovative solutions.

As Mourning describes it, a key part of the LSC’s job is to give students the tools and support they need. “We want to level the playing field,” he says. —EP

It’s there—through his work— where he’d like to stand out. And it’s where he’d like many others like him to excel, too. “I’d love to live in a world where everybody with a disability grows up and can be seen in every sphere.”

It’s an idea that even he might admit is inspirational.

Erin Peterson is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Nick Mourning, ’05, majored in English with a secondary education concentration, minoring in speech and theatre. He joined the LSC in 2014.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 21

22 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

NO MATTER THE SCHEME THROWN AT HIM, DARRELL WILLIAMS, ’77, KNOWS THAT THE FRIENDS HE MADE AT ALBION WILL ALWAYS BE THERE.

By Chuck Carlson Darrell Williams, ’77, remembers both dates all too well.

“December 5, 2015 and May 11, 2017,” he says, reciting them without hesitation.

After all, you don’t forget dates like those.

The first date was when he learned that the nodule near his right nipple that had annoyed him for weeks was actually breast cancer.

The second was when he came home from his dental practice in Detroit, sat on the couch and couldn’t move. That’s

when his wife of 35 years, Yolanda Toran Williams, ’77, took him to the hospital and it was determined that he was having a heart attack.

Scared and confused each time, Darrell Williams still had the presence of mind to do what he always did—rely on the people he had always relied on.

So he made phone calls. The first was to Angela Copeland, ’78, a longtime friend before, during, and after Albion College who had dealt with and beaten cancer herself in 2001. The second went to an old college football teammate and close friend, Mike Stiltner, ’77.

And each time, his friends responded the same way, the way Williams knew they would. “We’re there for you.” The friends that have always been there are still there. Always.

Most important, they said what he needed to hear most: “You’ll be all right.”

That’s been a theme running through the lives of Darrell and Yolanda, who met as freshmen at Albion, became part of a group that has stayed together for years and, when the going got tough, knew where to turn.

“It’s a dynamic that just works,” Darrell says.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 23

Darrell smiles at the memory.

“My conversation with God was, ‘Couldn’t we have done something else?’” he says. “I remember they said I had to have a mammogram and I thought, ‘What guy needs a mammogram?’”

Darrell Williams (right) with Rick Otis, ’77 (left), and Kevin Schaefer, ’77, during Albion’s undefeated 1976 football season.

‘They’re Family’ It was never easy for Darrell Williams. But he fought through four years of everything that Albion threw at him—from rigorous academics to juggling athletics and college life to dealing with the issues of being just one of a handful of African American students on campus in the mid-1970s.

“There are so many memories,” says Yolanda, who transferred from Albion to Marygrove College after her sophomore year but has kept lifelong friends. “So many good memories. I met Darrell here and he’s the love of my life. These are people I call my Albion friends, but they’re more than friends.

They’re family.”

“I didn’t ace anything but I was a hard worker,” says Darrell, an Inkster, Michigan, native who was convinced to go to Albion by his uncle, Dr. Regnal Jones, who told him the pre-med program would suit him and that he would also get a chance to continue playing football.

Darrell went on to the University of Detroit where he studied dentistry.

Yolanda was with him and shortly after his graduation, in May 1982, they were married. They have a daughter, Erin, a graduate of Grand Valley State University, and a son, Ryan, a 2006 Albion alumnus.

The couple continues to keep the school, the people, and the experiences close to their hearts.

“I was going to major in chemistry until I took chemistry,” Williams readily admits. “I said, ‘This is not happening.’”

“Once you’re here, you’re here for life,” Yolanda says.

He would go on to major in psychology and play three years as a linebacker for the football team, including on the 1976 squad that went 9-0 but never got the chance to go to the postseason.

“The time I was here it was a battle,” he says. “But after you leave, those people who know about Albion, when you say, ‘I went to Albion,’ they look at you and say, ‘I know about Albion.’”

24 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

Trials and Tribulations Angela Copeland got her phone call while she was working at the post office. Darrell had left a message and she knew something was wrong because Darrell never called and he certainly never left messages.

“He said, ‘I got a crazy diagnosis today,’” Angela recalls. “He said, ‘I have breast cancer. How can I have breast cancer?’ And I said, ‘If I can have it, you can have it.’ And he laughed.”

But Copeland, who had been a high school classmate of Yolanda’s in Detroit and graduated from Albion with degrees in sociology and English, was there to tell him everything he wanted and needed to know.

“She’d say, ‘These are the questions you need to ask,’” Darrell says. “I called her and I’m crying and she says, ‘You’re going to be all right.

There’s a fight to this, but you’re going to be all right.’”

Angela was part of that group of 30 or so African American students on a campus of some 1,700 students. They would gather in the Afro American Union (today’s Black Student Alliance) house, nicknamed “The Lodge,” and which was located where the Mae Harrison Karro Student Residential Village now stands.

Often it was Darrell’s parents, Troy and Shirley, who would drive over bringing food for weekly Sunday dinners for the group.

“I made Albion what I needed it to be,” Angela says. “It was hard, but you got out of it what you needed to get out of it.”

Angela and Darrell were resident assistants at Wesley Hall and worked together often. She also worked with him on passing the required English competency writing test.

“We worked through that until I knew he had it,” she says. “He took

the test and he was fine. Those are the kinds of things we did for each other. We couldn’t let any of us fail because then we all failed.”

And that was reciprocal.

When Copeland had her cancer surgery and was set to start chemotherapy, her 15-year-old daughter, Erica, suffered a brain aneurysm and was in a coma for a month. Darrell and Yolanda were frequent visitors at the hospital to check on Erica.

“They visited her and I was secondary,” Copeland says. “That’s the way it needed to be.”

Erica and Angela recovered, and so did Darrell, though he did require a mastectomy that removed a portion of his chest.

He pauses and nods to Yolanda.

“Angie and this young lady here got me through,” he says simply.

First-Year Experiences The initial phone call after Williams’ heart attack went to Mike Stiltner, his “go-to guy.”

For years, that guy had been Kevin Schaefer, ’77, a football tri-captain who died unexpectedly in March from a heart attack at age 60.

“I called Mike and said, ‘With Kevin gone, you’re it,’” Darrell says. “He came right away. In the hospital I was lying in the bed and heard this strong, quiet voice: ‘What are you doing in here?’”

Stiltner recalls how they became friends so many years ago.

“It’s our freshman year and it’s at the end of one of those three-

a-day football practices,” he says.

“Now I went to an all-white high school and he went to an all-black high school and we’re at the far end of the field and there are some parents standing there, including Mr. Williams, Darrell’s dad. Darrell says, ‘Hey, there’s my dad,’ and I said, ‘Where?’ He looks at me and says, ‘Are you kidding me?’ because he thought it was a racial thing.

But I said, ‘Darrell, you have to understand, I can’t see three feet in front of me without my glasses.’

He started laughing and from there we’ve been friends forever.”

So it was with the 1976 football team. Though Williams was one of perhaps four African Americans on the team, race was never an issue. “Not once,” Darrell says.

“This was a brotherhood. It was a case of ‘I’m going to help you and you’re going to help me.’”

Adds Stiltner: “It wasn’t something we thought about. We looked at everyone as a football player. And once you put a helmet on you can’t see color.”

That’s not to say there weren’t issues. Williams recalls how, on more than one occasion, he was questioned at the front desk in his dorm complex and asked

where he was going. “I said I was going to my room,” says Darrell, adding that he may have been “a little militant” in those days and sometimes challenged the status quo. “They had to call security.”

Yolanda recalls that her first-year roommate had never seen a black person before. “When I came to Albion, I expected some issues,” she says. “She wanted to touch my hair and she asked how I washed my hair. It was strange.”

She also remembers an incident in the bookstore. “There was a guy standing behind me in line and he decided he could touch my rear,” she says. “I turned around and hit him with a book. No one ever did that again.”

Ambus Harper, ’74, was a senior on the football team when Williams was a freshman. He took the youngster under his wing.

“I think he spent more time in my apartment than he did in his dorm room,” says Harper, who admitted that as one of the few African Americans on the team it was sometimes difficult for him. “But I wanted Darrell and the other black players to know what it was like and I wanted to make it easier for them.”

“We’re all we had,” Yolanda says.

“That’s why we’re close now.”

It’s especially true with the members of the 1976 football team, which even today knows it left work undone.

Developing a Brotherhood The seniors on that team remember how they survived new coach Frank Joranko’s three-aday practices in 1973. They grew close in the cauldron of athletic competition. They learned the game, they learned about life, and they learned about each other.

And those lessons have spanned the decades.

The Britons ran the table in ’76, going 9-0 and destroying nearly everyone they played, shutting out their first three opponents and giving up just 49 points all season while scoring 282. But due to the rules of the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which saw postseason play as a distraction from the main goal of education, Albion did not get a chance to prove itself as the best team in NCAA Division III, which everyone on that team knew it was.

The next year, the rules changed and MIAA teams were eligible to compete in the postseason. The ’76 core had moved on, though, to the next phase of their lives. But they never forgot each other.

Williams (right) with Fred Boggan, ’78, Alvin Bonds, ’78, and James Haskins, ’78 (left to right).

They get together whenever, and wherever, they can. Distance and miles are just numbers for this group of guys who, almost without fail and sometimes in unison, refer to themselves as a “brotherhood.”

There have been trips to Colorado and Pennsylvania to watch a former teammate (Ron Vanderlinden, ’78) coach in the Division I ranks. They’ve also met in Ann Arbor and East Lansing on football Saturdays, and there have also been trips “up north” where they sit by a lake and recall some of the best times they ever had.

In December 1994, the crew rented a 40-foot RV and traveled to Salem, Virginia, to see Albion defeat Washington & Jefferson for the national championship. “The stories from that?” Darrell says with a laugh. “Oh, buddy.”

“We’ve had lifelong bonds,” says Dave Abbott, ’77, a 1976 tri-captain.

“Let’s put it that way. We’re still friends 40 years later, and the bond is strong because of our experience at Albion.”

Both Darrell and Yolanda Williams believe Albion helped make them who they are. And the friends they made have helped keep them who they are. “I love Albion and I love the campus and I love the city,” Yolanda says. “Albion prepared you for the real world.”

Darrell has recovered from his heart attack, thanks to a stent that was implanted, and he continues serving patients through his dental practice in Detroit. After graduating from Marygrove, Yolanda went on to work in the Detroit and Southfield school systems. They make every Albion Homecoming when they can, and when there’s another football-team field trip, Darrell rarely misses it.

He says it again.

“It’s a brotherhood.”

And everything really is all right.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 25

Amy Elaine Wakeland became the first lady of Los Angeles, California, in 2013.

26 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

IT’S MORE THAN A DRIVE OR A FIGHTING INSTINCT. FROM HER COUNTLESS HOURS OF WORK TO HELP PAY FOR COLLEGE TO HER BOUNDLESS ADVOCACY FOR FAMILIES, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, AMY ELAINE WAKELAND, ’91, THE FIRST LADY OF L.A., HAS AN INNATE SENSE FOR ASSESSING A SITUATION, HOMING IN ON A COURSE OF ACTION, AND EARNESTLY MOVING FORWARD.

By John Perney “It’s odd that I should remember most vividly a seemingly mundane moment,” says Mary Collar, professor of English, about one of her students from more than 25 years ago, Amy Elaine Wakeland, ’91.

Collar, who would go on to write a letter of recommendation for what would be Wakeland’s successful Rhodes Scholarship application, recalls the end of a class discussion on feminist criticism in her Literary Theory course.

“I made a theoretical point that I’d garnered from the very best of the first feminist historians, a point that usually

walked right past the students,” Collar says. “Amy remarked that she’d never had that idea, and because I’d begun to know Amy, I could see immediately that she’d found the idea empowering.”

But from that brief, fairly typical classroom exchange, Collar picked up something more from the English major and public policy minor, who had arrived at Albion from Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis after what she describes as “challenging economic circumstances growing up.” Her mother was a single parent for most of her early childhood, Wakeland explains, and her large family was hit hard by the early 1980s recession.

Collar continues: “The scene was unremarkable—many of the other students packing up and exiting, one or two listening in. Even as only this one student was processing an idea that would affect her subsequent thought and work, she was cloaked in ordinariness. She’d even taken responsibility for not having had the idea, though it seemed to me that she should have encountered the thought previously. And right there is why I think the moment has stuck: I’ve never known anyone else so willingly claim full responsibility for her life and thought. One of the strong women in Amy’s family deserves the credit for that education.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 27

A Four-Letter Word Work. It’s simply a part of Wakeland’s makeup, practically a genetic trait. And she’s arguably never worked harder than now, in what is typically a ceremonial role as mayoral spouse.

“I’m their most active volunteer, I like to say,” admits Wakeland, referencing the administration of her husband, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was elected to a second term earlier this year.

Going back to 2001, when Garcetti was voted to L.A.’s City Council, Wakeland’s public-facing efforts have included everything from combating sexual and domestic violence, empowering women and girls, and addressing veteran homelessness (an initiative championed by former first lady Michelle Obama), to developing pocket parks in neighborhoods with little green space, creating more jobs for city youth, and even launching L.A.’s drought education campaign.

In October, amid the many high-profile sexual harassment and assault allegations coming to light in the news, Wakeland shared in the Los Angeles Times staggering city statistics linking sexual abuse to homelessness and incarceration, and referenced

28 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

L.A.’s efforts to expand its Domestic Abuse Response Team (DART). Following up on that op-ed, she explains, “When you have mental-health and socialservice professionals riding along with or behind sworn officers who are responding to sexual-assault or domestic-violence calls, survivors have immediate access to information about the services available to them, such as where to find emergency shelter and how to file a restraining order.

Without the services provided by the DART program, survivors remain at great risk.”

Wakeland’s work is often hands-on, her sleeves rolled up in details and data amid a constant conversation with constituents, leaders, and experts. Her approach to work, and life, had time to take root, and flourish, at Albion College.

“As much as Albion was a small, idyllic place where people paid attention to a student who was willing to work hard, it also allowed the social activist in me to get engaged,” Wakeland says.

The Albion Opportunity Forgive the Franklin Central valedictorian if she still carries around a little bit of that Ivy League what-if. That said, while

a classmate got into Dartmouth College, “Albion was a great shot, straight up [Interstate] 69 from my house. I could get back there in a day if I needed to,” Wakeland says, adding that along with keeping her search closer to home, she eventually chose Albion because she picked up on the feelings of anonymity one can sometimes feel on a larger university campus. And because, of course, the numbers worked out—at least as best as they could.

“I was very cognizant when I entered college that I needed to finish college, for survival,” Wakeland says. There isn’t an ounce of drama behind that statement. “I understood the seriousness of the opportunities that I had been given. I was, I think, more serious than others because I felt I needed to be.”

She immersed herself in the Gerald R. Ford Institute for Leadership in Public Policy and Service as well as The Pleiad, and found mentors and friends in Mary Collar, Jim Cook (English professor emeritus), Jim Diedrick (a longtime English professor, now at Agnes Scott College), and Kim Tunnicliff (the late Ford director).

She would go on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, and she still readily recalls the extra effort, outside of

her studies, it took to get there: the back-to-back day-care and Waffle House full-time jobs the summer before her first year; jobs every semester break; the maximum 20 hours a week on campus, much of it with Campus Safety (she was a dispatcher, then promoted to a parking supervisor); and even more hours occasionally editing professors’ writings. She remembers it all.

“The truth is I had to work too much to be able to go to college,” Wakeland says. She mentions there is growing evidence that combining a full college course load with more than 10 or 12 hours of work per week has a negative impact on academic performance.

“Because of that experience, I was under the weather a lot, I was tired a lot. I probably didn’t perform as well academically as I could have.

But I was determined not to dig myself into debt too extremely when I was in college, because I had no experience with how I would get out of that debt.”

Yet there is a larger point Wakeland wants to make.

“I did not know many people in college whose experiences were similar to mine,” she says, “but the more of life that I have led, the more I have come to realize how

my experience is much more the norm than the exception to the norm. Yes, my family struggled, and when I was younger it felt unusual. But I care more about what that taught me in terms of relating to the very large number of American families who struggle like that today, than I do about that personal experience.”

Evolution of a Leader Through the Ford Institute, Wakeland completed an internship with the Community Action Agency in Battle Creek. Heading up the agency at the time was Mark Schauer, ’84, the future congressman and Michigan gubernatorial nominee. She stayed on for a year following her graduation, engaging herself in the most practical of issues, such as helping single-parent women and pregnant teens return to school or find employment; restoring cut-off utilities for low-income families, including heat in the winter months; and teaching after-school classes that urged teens to take seriously the possible complications of early sexual activity.

Eventually, applying for the Rhodes, which had lingered in Wakeland’s mind, moved front and center, partly because of the fastapproaching age limit and partly

because of the “crushing debt” that surely would come with law school.

The rest, as they say, is history. Not surprisingly, Wakeland’s world in 1993 expanded, and changed, quickly. She met her future husband, also a Rhodes Scholar, on the flight to London. And while she was based at the University of Oxford’s Wadham College, her advocacy-focused graduate work enabled her to travel, including to South Africa shortly after the country’s first free elections following the apartheid era.

By the turn of the century, she was well into making a new life for herself—and, more importantly, making an impact—in America’s second-largest city. Among the growing number of people who began to take note was an Albion alumnus, Jess Womack, ’65. The longtime legal executive for Atlantic Richfield and retired general counsel and inspector general of the Los Angeles Unified School District once had the opportunity to visit Wakeland and Eric Garcetti at their home for a policy conversation about the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, one of the main entities behind the ongoing pocket-park initiative. The meeting stuck.

“I have observed Amy during her years as a modern, 21st-century first

lady handle those responsibilities exceedingly well,” Womack says.

“She spearheads, champions, and advocates for issues that are important to her and reflect her professional background. And she obtains results.”

Of course, the success of her husband’s mayoralty is one of those issues as well. As the fall months progressed, it became clear that Garcetti is, at the least, beginning to show an open curiosity about national aspirations down the road (a November article in The New York Times explores the notion in depth). But wherever those thoughts may lead in time, they won’t necessarily alter the scope and trajectory of Wakeland’s work.

On one level, “L.A. is doing well,” she says. “It’s economically growing, its job base is growing, we have more tourists here than we’ve ever had before, we have more students studying here than we’ve ever had before. It’s a great example of how a healthy, diverse, immigrant-friendly economy is in everyone’s financial benefit.”

On another, broader level, however, beyond the city limits, “I don’t believe we’re living in a place that is currently fair to families who are willing to work hard on behalf

From preceding page, left to right: Amy Elaine Wakeland and Eric Garcetti first met as Rhodes Scholars in 1993.

With Wakeland and daughter Maya alongside, Garcetti takes the oath of office to begin his second term as mayor of Los Angeles, California, on July 1, 2017.

Wakeland (foreground right) stands with Gloria Steinem and 100 students from the Los Angeles Unified School District in a November 2015 Q&A event as part of Mayor Garcetti’s ongoing Women in Leadership Series. The event was held at Getty House, the mayoral residence.

Wakeland (right) at the 2017 Thanksgiving luncheon at Getty House. of their children,” says Wakeland, herself a mother of one (she and Garcetti are foster parents). “I believe that a country with such extraordinary wealth can do more to make life easier and more fair for Americans who are working hard to raise their families. People should not be in a situation where they cannot afford basics like healthcare and education. We have to find a way to be more decent, as a society, to those who want to make the world better for our kids.”

Katelyn Nolan, ’17, contributed to this story.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 29

Libby Crabb Wahlstrom, ’04, and her mom, Cathy Ford Crabb, ’67.

30 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

TWO ALBION ALUMNAE, A MOTHER AND HER DAUGHTER, REVISIT A PAGE FROM THE COLLEGE’S HISTORY—A PAGE ABOUT FRIENDSHIP, PRINCIPLE, AND A SORORITY’S DEPARTURE FROM CAMPUS. The whole thing concluded 50 years ago.

Only 50 years ago.

On November 20, 1967, the Beta Tau chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha, established at Albion College nearly 40 years prior, ceased operations. According to the College, the sorority’s national office was not in compliance with the College’s anti-discrimination policy.

The issue centered around the chapter’s pledging, in fall 1966, of an African American student.

The episode played out over more than a year and at its end drew national media attention, in part because presidential daughter Lynda Bird Johnson, a recent college graduate who was to be married in the White House the following month, was a member of ZTA.

Not everyone involved is keen on revisiting the half-century-old story.

Indeed, few names are shared here; accounts of the latter-stage events as they unfolded can be found in archive issues of The Pleiad (found at archive. albion.edu, within Digital Collections).

One member of the final class of Beta Tau graduates, Cathy Ford Crabb, ’67, believes it is important and vital not only to remember what occurred but to retell it, especially to younger generations of the Albion family in what is another particularly polarized social period of U.S. history. Crabb, who taught in Grand Rapids Public Schools for many years, recently shared her recollections with her daughter, Libby Crabb Wahlstrom, ’04, a member of Kappa Delta sorority. Their conversation, lightly edited, follows.

Libby: Tell me a little bit about your Albion experience. What brought you to the College?

Cathy: I came to Albion in the fall of 1963. My parents (Richard and Patricia Ford, ’41 ’43) both went to Albion and I knew how important the school had been to them. Many of my hometown friends were only interested in the bigger universities. My parents suggested that I at least start at Albion and then transfer after a couple of years if I wanted to. Of course, I got to campus and was hooked.

Libby: You pledged the Beta Tau chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha. What made you want to pledge that house? What was your experience like with those women?

Cathy: My sorority was going to be fun.

I knew that. My mother had pledged a

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 31

The former Zeta Tau Alpha lodge on Jackson Street (above, in a 1967 Jackson Citizen Patriot story) is the James Welton House today (left), named for Albion College’s first African American alumnus (Class of 1904) and home of the Black Student Alliance.

sorority, Kappa Delta, when she was at Albion in 1941, and she really enjoyed it. I began to get to know some upperclassmen on campus and learned that they were Zetas. I liked that the women in Zeta were smart and friendly and unpretentious, and several of them really made me laugh. It was the perfect fit for me.

Libby: The house was next to the Kappa Delta lodge, right?

Cathy: Yes, Zeta was in the little white house next to the KD lodge.

It was one of the original sorority houses on campus. It sat at the end of a small street (Jackson Street), which was quiet until the sororities all had their meetings on the same night.

Libby: I’ve heard you tell the Zeta story through the years. You lived it, after all. And I’ve also heard other versions of it from other

32 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

people. It seems like people don’t always have the story right. Can you start at the beginning?

Cathy: My senior year—the fall of 1966—the underclassmen in our chapter became friends with a young woman they wanted to rush. We invited her to join Zeta and she accepted. We were vaguely aware at the time that Zetas nationally had no African American members, but once the national office of Zeta Tau Alpha became aware that Beta Tau was pledging a woman of color, they very quickly said we couldn’t activate her. The chapter members were startled, and then angry. Pledging this friend was the moral thing to do, and we weren’t going to un-invite someone. The members insisted that we be allowed to treat this new pledge the way we had always treated pledges, and then to activate her when the time came.

Renee Pollock Fleming (’68) was the president of the sorority at that time. She fielded calls and visits from the national ZTA organization, from parents and alums, and she said “no” to multiple requests for media interviews. The young woman we were pledging really tried to stay out of the limelight; she just wanted to be part of the group.

Renee handled all of this outside “noise” very well. She was levelheaded and articulate. She also did her best to shield the group from most of this negativity. But after dealing with this for weeks, it began to affect her studies. She talked to her academic advisor, Dr. James Cook (’54, professor emeritus of English), who was sympathetic and incredibly supportive. He affirmed the work that she’d done, and the way the chapter had handled things, and then he told her to go back to being a student. He said that

it was time to hand this over to the College for help.

Libby: What happened from there? What did the College do?

Cathy: Now here’s the important part. Renee went straight from her advisor’s office to the administration building. She spoke with the dean of academic affairs, who was also fully supportive of her and the chapter’s efforts. In fact, the faculty and the administration at Albion College were nothing but supportive.

Because the College had an anti-discrimination policy, the administration could be very clear with the national Zeta Tau Alpha. In order to be an organization on Albion’s campus, Zeta had to comply with the antidiscrimination policy. If they didn’t activate our friend, Zeta would be in violation of this policy.

Sorority Is Warned On Bias Rule Special to the Free Press

ALBION — Albion College threatened Wednesday to ban a national sorority from campus unless it lifts punishment imposed on its Albion chapter.

Albion’s president, Louis Norris, said Zeta Tau Alpha, which has about 49,000 members and 106 chapters across the country, has until Nov. 17 to lift a one-year suspension it placed on its Albion chapter Oct. 22.

the national office would revoke our charter. Which they did. By the fall of 1967, the College had given Zeta Tau Alpha a choice: do not discriminate, or leave our campus. The national leaders chose to leave campus. They revoked our charter that fall. The younger women in the chapter regrouped as a local sorority, which is really hard on a campus with national sororities. The group dissolved in 1970, and the Zeta Tau Alpha years ended at Albion College.

Libby: You and your friends were 21 and 22 years old. I can’t imagine what it must have been like trying to process all of this.

Cathy: The chapter president and the officers really tried to keep the seriousness of the situation from the rest of us. Well into 1967, I don’t think the campus even really knew what was happening.

The faculty knew, and the administration knew, but it wasn’t widespread. I guess that’s a little more doable in the days before the internet and social media.

The Albion/ZTA story made regional and national news as it neared and reached its conclusion.

From top: Part of a Detroit Free Press clip shortly before the chapter’s closure; an item in The New York Times the day after the closure announcement.

The other Beta Tau pledges refused to be activated without this young woman. To the national Zeta organization, that meant we were a chapter without any new people. If we didn’t stop our plan, essentially by uninviting our friend, then

It’s important to note that this was not some major Civil Rights statement, at least as we understood it at the time. We didn’t set out to be an example.

We were simply a group of women who wanted our friend to join our sorority. As a friend and sorority sister told me recently, we all felt like we were standing on principle and self-respect. We were just being fair.

Libby: How has this experience stuck with you? How has it impacted your life?

Cathy: We have to take something from this experience. If we don’t

examine it, and recognize how it’s been a part of shaping our lives, it’s just an anecdote. All politics is personal. During the 1960s, I wasn’t protesting in the South or attending Civil Rights rallies. I was a young woman from a small town who was suddenly part of this particular collective experience.

It seemed so simple. We knew this woman. We liked her. We wanted her to be a part of our sorority. It was hard to see why that was such a big deal.

Libby: I’m your daughter and an Albion alumna, and I’ve heard of Zeta leaving the campus abruptly, and not just from you. I know you’ve been frustrated by the retelling of this story though the years. But what made you want to tell it now? In this context?

Cathy: The story of the ending of Zeta Tau Alpha sorority at Albion College has been kicking around for years in a form similar to this: “Oh, yeah, Zeta Tau Alpha. That’s the sorority that the College kicked off campus. They were nice girls. Too bad.”

Let’s be clear: the College never “kicked us off.” Zeta Tau Alpha chose to leave. I’ve heard this story misrepresented for many years. Often it’s people who want to place the blame on the College, which isn’t at all true. The College was nothing but supportive throughout the entire process.

The College gave Zeta Tau Alpha’s national leadership a choice, and they made the decision to close the chapter.

So why now? Bits and pieces of the Zeta story have been part of the College mythology ever since the sorority left campus in 1967. Those who were involved

graduated and moved on. The institutional memory faded. The details were lost.

This is my 50th reunion year. That milestone stirs up its own set of memories and remembrances. As it happens, our pledge class was the last group of freshmen to be pledged and activated as Beta Tau Zetas and finish our college years as Zetas. Those of us who lived this particular experience are the ones still able to put it all together.

Our love of Albion increased the importance of accurately telling this part of the story. It became our responsibility to do that.

ZETA TAU ALPHA RESPONDS Io Triumphe! contacted the national office of Zeta Tau Alpha, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, and invited the organization to be represented in this story.

Zeta Tau Alpha shared the following statement: “The circumstances at Albion occurred during a tumultuous time, not only in our organization’s history, but also in our country’s history. We value every opportunity to reflect on troubling events in our past, as they serve as a way to remind ourselves of how far we’ve come, and to remain steadfast in our commitment to inclusivity and progress moving forward. Today, ZTA’s Membership Policy encourages women to embrace one another for their differences, and our sisterhood strives to reflect the diversity of the campuses on which we are present.”

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 33

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS

PROUD CONNECTIONS

From boats to ballparks, Albion pride was palpable this summer and fall in a variety of settings. For upcoming outings, visit albion.edu/alumni/events.

1 | July in Chicago: Austin Baidas, ’92, hosted 71 members of the Albion family—alums, incoming students and their families, current students, faculty, and staff on a rooftop in Wrigleyville.

1

2

2 | July in New York: Alumni and friends enjoyed a boat cruise around New York Harbor.

3 | July in Lansing: It was a perfect summer evening for Lugnuts baseball.

4 | August in Chicago: Tigers road trip! Hugh Beattie, ’75, Mike Hall, ’11, and Stephanie Beattie Hall, ’11, caught Detroit in action vs. the White Sox.

3

4

5 | September in Denver: A great Albion turnout for Rockies baseball at Coors Field, hosted by team executive Hal Roth, ’72.

6 | September in Macomb County: Over 80 Brits and their families enjoyed a day of fall fun at Blake’s Apple Orchard.

Special thanks to Dave Blake, ’11!

5

7

34 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

6

8

7 | September in Grand Rapids: More than 40 alums combined networking with door prizes and art during an ArtPrize happy hour at Aperitivo.

8 | September on Mackinac Island: Board of Trustees Chair Don Sheets, ’82, Rev. Faith Fowler, ’81, and Angela Scott Sheets, ’82, were among the guests at Albion College’s Grand Getaway at Grand Hotel, where Love and Leadership was the theme for the eighth annual event. Thank you, as always, to Dan Musser III, ’86!

BritConnect Have you lost track of your classmates? Have you ever wondered if other Albion alumni live in your area, or even work in your field?

If so, we can help! Introducing BritConnect, our all-new alumni directory, coming soon!

Link with a Chapter Albion College alumni chapters recently took root in Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Bay Area. More are in the planning stages. Visit albion.edu/alumnichapters and learn how easy, rewarding, and fun it is to participate in a chapter—or even start one—near you!

Flying into or out of DTW soon?

Look for Albion College on the video monitors inside Detroit Metro Airport on the way to the gate or baggage claim!

Light Up Your State!

On Thursday, March 22, 2018, we would like our alumni to get together in all 50 states to celebrate Albion College and its founding in 1835.

You can find Britons close to you using BritConnect, our new online alumni directory tool.

As of December 1, social mixers in 17 states were already scheduled, with more in the works. Be sure to visit advance.albion.edu/ everywhere to RSVP or to host an event in your area. We will be sharing your events via social media, so we hope to hear from Britons nationwide (and beyond). Happy Birthday, Albion!

For answers to questions about Albion Everywhere! call 517/629-1835.

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 35

Oct. 20 & 21

#AlbionHomecoming

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION NEWS

FEELING RIGHT AT HOME Beloved traditions and exciting additions, not to mention beautiful late-October weather (sunny skies, low-70s temps), combined to make for a memorable Homecoming 2017. Along with the photos here, look through more than 150 additional shots from the weekend at flickr.com/ albioncollege/albums, and circle the dates for Homecoming 2018: October 5-6. Io Triumphe!

1 | Bonciel L. Griffin-Burress, ’97, shared her story of building a successful career in dentistry and business as part of BRITx Talks. She was one of four alumni to participate in the new, TEDxstyle event in the downtown Ludington Center. Find a link to a video playlist of all four Talks at albion.edu/iotriumphe.

2 | The 1971 MIAA champion men’s swimming and diving team was among the 2017 inductees into the Albion Athletic Hall of Fame. Pictured, front row, left to right: John McLaughlin, ’73, Clark Bisbee, ’71, Donald Porter, ’71, Mark VanderKaay, ’74, and John Karazim, ’73; back row, left to right: Robert Kosnik, ’74, Jim Everett, ’74, and Dale Lockwood, ’71.

3 | The College and community came together at the Ludington Center for the unveiling and dedication of a painting

by Michael Dixon (back row, center), associate professor of art. The work was commissioned by the Class of 2017 as its senior class gift.

4 | Members of the 2017 Homecoming Court. Front row, left to right: Alena Farooq, ’18, Chaz Hopkins, ’18, Jodie Bosheers, ’18, and Wendi Wang, ’18; back row, left to right: Sean Barlett, ’19, Genevieve Marheineke, ’18, Anna Miller, ’18, and Kaileigh Krupp, ’18.

5 | More than 40 acts from across Michigan jammed and played setlists all over campus and downtown as part of Walk the Beat, promoting live music and local businesses. Accompanying raffles

helped purchase musical instruments and lessons for children in the Albion community. Visit walkthebeat.org/albion.

6 | Graduates from 1957 met for a 60-year reunion in Baldwin Hall. From left to right: Paul Scheibner, Carolyn Carr Christ, Ed Jenkins, Jo Ann Britton Cline, Robert Probst, Mary Jane Pond McCrory, Stephanie Culver Witt, ’59, Gilbert Witt, and Joel Leenaars.

7 | Class of 1967 alumni held their 50th reunion dinner at Schuler’s in Marshall and took a group photo across the street.

Attending the event, in alphabetical order: Jill DeShon Alsop, John Bannow, Cash Beechler, Susanne Blackford Beechler, Stephen Belcher, George Betz, Charles Curry, Ted Curtis, Doug Falan, Carol Smith Friss, Greg Gordon, Robert Haist, R. Bruce Harper, Richard Harris, Bill Hershey, John Hipskind, Allen Horstman, Nancy Crocker Horstman, Diane Overton Housel, Dawn Scheffner Jones, Bill Knox, Sharon Stough Krumrei, David Landsburg, Jim Lau, Nancy Bogenes Lau, Barbara Augustson Leighton, Kirk Leighton, Marcia DuVal Lile, Judy Lehman Lokey, Frederick McEldowney, Chuck McKenzie, William McMullin, Bruce Miller, David Miller, Peter Mitchell, Frederick Neumann, John Peterman, Lynn Rehn, Judy Stafford Rifenberg, David Ringer, Nancy Brown Ross, Charles Schenck, Shirley Jackson Schenck, John Sebastian, Nancy Harrison Sergeant, Kate Shindel, Helen Cole Shotton, Bonnie Keeler Smith, Marsha Cobb Smith, Thomas Thompson, Douglas Tobin, Al Tweedy, Suzanne Tyree VanBramer, Janet Adler Waldron, and Kay Getschman Withers.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Fall-Winter 2017-18 | 37

THE BACK PAGE

Forever Flickering A long-lost College artifact is rediscovered, shining its light on the power of knowledge. And marketing.

By John Perney The message on my screen seemed to say it all.

“You found the Lamp of Learning?!”

No, I hadn’t completed an advanced level of some quest game. (The question mark made that clear enough.) It was an email from Justin Seidler, Albion College’s archivist.

And there was more: “This is truly a momentous occasion.” Well, if you put it that way …

And so began—through conversations, news clippings, and even an old film—a reverse quest of sorts, with roots in antiquity and traversing several of the world’s great cities. Or, perhaps a bit more straightforwardly, just another walk back through time that makes working at this college so fascinating.

The email originated from my Institutional Advancement colleague Amy Everhart Perry, ’08, who forwarded a message from her friend Elizabeth Laswell Schefsky, ’09.

Turns out an acquaintance of Schefsky’s (who didn’t attend Albion) saw the object at a May estate sale in Okemos and purchased it for her for $55. (She was a hard bargainer; it was listed for $110.)

On June 4, 1966, Jack Goodnow, ’66, spoke about his unique end-of-senior-year experience from the Kresge Gymnasium steps. The Lamp of Learning he brought on the trip is on a separate podium; a second lamp (right) made by ceramics professor Richard Leach is now in College Archives and was on display at Homecoming 2017.

It came with some photocopied Pleiad articles describing the unlikely journey of Jack Goodnow, ’66. So unlikely, in fact, that folks at the College knew about his trip before he did.

“I was sitting in a Julian Rammelkamp history class,” Goodnow told me recently, “and Bob Hyatt, senior class president, was sitting next to me, and he said, ‘Jack, are you looking forward to going around the world?’ And I replied, ‘As soon as I get back from the moon, sure.’ He said, ‘Seriously, we have to go to the Development Office after class because you leave in two weeks.”

The CliffsNotes version of what transpired 51 years ago goes something like this:

48 | Albion College Io Triumphe!

The College sought to improve campus lighting and connected with Southeastern Michigan Gas Company (Port Huronbased SEMCO today) on a plan to install 200 new gas-lit lamps around campus.

Around this time, the College had begun its second century of awarding the fouryear liberal arts bachelor’s degree, and before anyone could say Lux Fiat … poof, an idea sparked. Not long afterward, the English and history major and Student Senate president embarked on a 16day, College-crafted tour of academic goodwill—with a lamp created by art professor Richard Leach—that featured stops in San Francisco, Tokyo, Athens, Rome, London, and Paris, before returning to Albion for a celebration event the night before Goodnow’s graduation.

“I talked to all my professors and they all said this was great, go, and don’t worry about your finals. It was a whirlwind, a surreal experience,” remembers Goodnow, who today lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, after enjoying a successful career in banking. He recalls the key ceremonial moment in Athens when a torch lit at the Acropolis couldn’t fit inside Albion’s Lamp of Learning. “A Greek photographer came up and gave me a flick of his Bic to light my lamp. And that’s how it took place.”

The story of the trip, and of the lamp, soon faded into memory, especially when Goodnow’s lamp shattered mere weeks after his graduation. But Leach (who died in 2000) had made a second lamp; yet as years stretched into decades it had essentially disappeared. Or so it was believed.

So who had it all this time? We don’t know for sure, but Perry discovered that it was the estate sale of Herbert Jones, vice president of college relations from 1962-68. Was the whole thing his idea as well? While that’s also uncertain, Seidler did unearth a March 1966 letter from Jones to a peer at DePauw University, which contained this gem: “It is premature to announce some public relations plans that we have in mind for the lighting of these facilities, but we do expect to have a lot of fun in this endeavor.”

Io Triumphe!

EDITOR John Perney CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Chuck Carlson, Erin Peterson, Libby Crabb Wahlstrom, ’04, Anna Watson, ’19, Jake Weber CLASS NOTES WRITERS Tyler Eyster, ’20, Kim Fisher, Cameron Voss, ’20, Jake Weber, Kathryn Wright, ’19 DESIGNER Katherine Mueting Hibbs MARKETING/COMMUNICATIONS John Thompson, Chuck Carlson, Brian Coon, Matt Ray, Eric Westmoreland Io Triumphe! is published twice annually by the Office of Marketing and Communications. It is distributed free to alumni and friends of the College.

Letters to the editor may be sent to: Office of Marketing and Communications Albion College 611 E. Porter Street Albion, MI 49224 communications@albion.edu www.albion.edu ABOUT OUR NAME The unusual name for this publication comes from a yell written by members of the Class of 1900. The beginning words of the yell, “Io Triumphe!,” were probably borrowed from the poems of the Roman writer Horace.

MAKE YOUR IMPACT TODAY, AND IN THE FUTURE.

In 1936, the alumni of Albion College voted to name their magazine after the yell, which by then had become a College tradition.

For years, Albion’s incoming students have learned these lines by heart: Io Triumphe! Io Triumphe!

Haben swaben rebecca le animor Whoop te whoop te sheller de-vere De-boom de ral de-i de-pa— Hooneka henaka whack a whack A-hob dob balde bora bolde bara Con slomade hob dob rah!

Al-bi-on Rah! FIND MORE ONLINE: www.albion.edu

Connect with students, faculty, staff, and alumni through Albion College’s social media channels.

You can change the lives of many future Britons by planning a gift to Albion College today. Our development staff makes giving from your estate a simple process and will ensure your gift provides you with meaningful benefits.

Interested in making a more immediate difference? A scholarship gift allows you to see your generosity at work with current students, and can begin now!

Help create an even brighter tomorrow for our students — contact our Development Office today.

517/629-0446 | advancement@albion.edu | albion.edu/giving

Office of Marketing and Communications 611 East Porter Street Albion, MI 49224

T H U R S DAY, M A R C H 2 2 , 2 0 1 8

We want to be everywhere!

Join alums in your state for a social mixer on the College’s birthday. If an event isn’t already scheduled near you, create one! Be sure to follow all the festivities on social media.

See page 35 for more on Albion Everywhere!