Io Triumphe! The Magazine for Alumni and Friends of Albion College

Vol. LXXV, No. 1

‘Albion Advantage’ Takes Off 19

Linda Yonke, ’75, on School Reform 22

Matt Roush, ’78: Moving Beyond Print 25

IoTriumphe!

spring - summer

2010

T he M agazine

for

A lumni

and

Lux Fiat Albion College at 175 Years

F riends

of

A lbion C ollege

In honor of Albion College’s 175th Anniversary, you are invited to become a member of the 1835 Society.

The 1835 Society honors Albion College’s founding and heritage. As an elite group of donors, members of the 1835 Society are committed to investing $1,835 annually in a scholarship fund that recognizes hardworking students who also have financial need.

Recipients of the scholarships are engaged, thoughtful students who truly exemplify Albion’s liberal arts tradition. For most of the recipients, support from the 1835 Society enables them to pursue their education at Albion.

As a member of the 1835 Society, you will receive special recognition throughout the year.

Your membership will truly make a difference in the lives of today’s Albion students.

It is easy to join the 1835 Society!

Learn more at www.albion.edu/giving/societies.

In your communications, please note that your gift is for the 1835 Society.

• Make a gift online at www.albion.edu/givenow.

• Make a gift over the phone by calling 517/629-0347.

If you have any questions, please contact: Libby Crabb, assistant director of annual giving, at ecrabb@albion.edu or 517/629-0410.

office of institutional advancement 611 e. porter st. albion, mi 49224 517/629-0448 giving@albion.edu www.albion.edu/giving

Susan Sadler is a partner in the law firm of Dawda, Mann, Mulcahy, The Lux Fiat Society ($50,000 and above) Albion College Io Triumphe!

Society ($25,000-$49,999) and Sadler,The PLC, in Bloomfield Giving Societies The Trustees’ Society ($10,000-$24,999) Hills, Mich. She is currently a The President’s member of Albion College’sSociety Alumni($5,000-$9,999) Purple & Gold Society ($2,500-$4,999) Association The Board of Directors.

The 1835 Society ($1,835) The Briton Society ($1,000-$2,499) The Crest Society ($500-$999) The Shield Society ($100-$499) The Stockwell Society (Deferred gifts)

IoTriumphe! Staff Editor: Sarah Briggs Contributing Writers: Marian Deegan, Bobby Lee, Matthew Roush, Jake Weber Class Notes Writers: Nikole Lee, Luann Shepherd Design: Susan Carol Rowe Io Triumphe! is published twice annually by the Office of Communications, Albion College, 611 E. Porter St., Albion, MI 49224.

It is distributed free to alumni and friends of the College. The paper for this magazine contains 10% postconsumer fiber.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Office of Communications, Albion College, 611 E. Porter St., Albion, MI 49224.

World Wide Web: www.albion.edu Albion College is committed to a policy of equal opportunity and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability, as protected by law, in all educational programs and activities, admission of students, and conditions of employment.

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. Some phrases were taken from other college yells and others from a Greek play presented on campus during the period.

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!

Cover Photo by David Trumpie

D. TRUMPIE PHOTO

Web Communications: Nicole Rhoads

IoTriumphe!

spring-summer 2010 The Magazine for Alumni and Friends of Albion College

Features

13 Signature Moments On the occasion of Albion College’s 175th anniversary, alumni remember quintessential Albion moments.

22 Getting It Right To help students succeed, our schools should focus more on collaboration and less on competition, asserts educator Linda Yonke, ’75.

25 Black and White and Read All Over?

19

Journalist Matt Roush, ’78, says it’s time to embrace the changes made possible by digital technology. His own career is a case in point.

A Distinct Advantage Albion unveils a new four-year program of academic and career exploration.

Departments

2 Presidential Ponderings

(Top) Qian Wang explains her chemistry research at this year’s Isaac Student Research Symposium.

3 Briton Bits 28 Alumni Association News 34 Albionotes Spring-Summer 2010 | 1

Pres!dent!al ponder!ngs

A ‘New Normal’ Albion’s 175th anniversary—which is celebrated in the cover story for this edition of Io Triumphe!—represents a marvelous opportunity to honor Albion’s distinguished past and to look ahead to a vibrant future.

Albion College has weathered turbulent times during its history—the Great Depression and two World Wars, among them. And now new challenges have arisen, stemming from the difficult economic conditions that have beset our state and our nation.

As you know, in May the College’s Board of Trustees announced its decision to realign our faculty size with our student enrollment. This action, which has resulted in the loss of the equivalent of 15 full-time faculty positions, represents the latest stage in a series of strategic cost reductions carried out over the past two years across the College.

There’s no question that these reductions have been difficult for everyone involved.

However, the trustees believe these costcutting measures are absolutely necessary to maintain our educational and fiscal integrity over the long term. Through prudent management of our annual operations, and with the solid foundation of our $154-million endowment, Albion will remain on sound financial footing and can look forward to a more secure future.

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Today, we are seeing signs of fundamental change across the higher education landscape, as colleges and universities of all sizes respond to the current economic challenges. Higher education is approaching a “new normal” in which both staffing and curricula are being reshaped. The world is not the same as it was five years ago. The principles and practices that guided us in the past will not suffice in this transformed environment.

Higher education has always provided a critical service to our nation. However, today we in the higher education community must rethink what we offer, and at what price, if higher education is to continue as an engine of innovation and growth. We must anticipate the future needs of our society and ready our students for the careers that will emerge in a knowledgebased economy over the coming decades. At the same time, we must ensure that higher education remains affordable for talented students, regardless of their socio-economic background.

Colleges and universities may dilute their chance at excellence by trying to be “all things to all people.” We must refocus on areas of strength, set priorities, and make difficult choices about what can—and cannot—be offered. This new discipline in operations is imperative if an institution is to move from “good” to “great.”

Furthermore, we must relentlessly demand excellence in all we do.

At Albion, we are witnessing this new discipline at work. While holding fast to our liberal arts foundation, we are also devoting increased intellectual and financial resources to developing programs and opportunities that are forward-looking and that will enable our graduates to thrive on—and lead—change in their working lives and in the communities where they reside. Taking charge of our future, rather than simply reacting to the present, is exhilarating and can become a means for stimulating our imagination and acting both creatively and strategically.

As has been proven so many times before, Albion’s people—faculty, staff, students, and alumni—are both courageous and resilient. I am confident that Albion will overcome the immediate challenges we face and emerge from this period stronger, more focused, and ready to reach new heights. We stand on the shoulders of those who built Albion College over 17 decades.

We are thankful for the sturdy foundation that has been laid, appreciative of the breadth of opportunities that surround the College today, and eager to advance the prominence, visibility, and contributions of Albion in the years ahead.

Donna Randall President drandall@albion.edu

T he l ate s t n e w s a rou n d ca mpu s

Br ! to n B ! t s the Rock

S. BRIGGS PHOTO

As spring semester drew to a close, Albion students organized an Eco Swap, promoting it as “a flea market event where you can buy, sell, and trade gently used items . . . and work toward sustainability at Albion College.” The idea was to encourage reuse of dorm room furnishings, rather than sending them to the dumpster. The College’s Facilities Operations Office also organized a weeklong “e-cycling” program on campus in May for the recycling of old computers, audio/visual equipment, and other electronics.

Sustainability has been designated as the theme for all major activities, speakers, and events for the 2010-11 academic year.

The fall semester will open with a “Week of Impact,” a series of daily immersions in the sub-themes—community service, lifestyle challenge, water, food, walking, and recycling—that will continue through Earth Day in the spring. Over the course of the year, sustainability will also recur as a theme in common readings, major lectures, class projects, career fairs, and film series.

At the same time, Albion will continue to expand its sustainability efforts in dining services, building operations, and grounds management.

The College’s two annual convocations will feature speakers who have provided notable leadership in this area. Grand Rapids

Mayor George Heartwell, ’71, will offer the William K. Stoffer Lecture at Opening Convocation Aug. 26, and will reflect on the innovation that cities, including Grand Rapids, have shown in advancing sustainability. Grand Rapids was recently honored as the “most sustainable city” of its size in the nation. Environmental activist Annie Leonard will be the Calvaruso Lecturer for the 2011 Elkin R. Isaac Student Research Symposium next spring. A critic of excessive consumerism, she is best known for her animated film, The Story of Stuff.

To learn more about Albion’s sustainability efforts and the 2010-11 programming on this topic, visit: www.albion.edu/ sustainability.

B. LEE PHOTO

Sustainability Takes Center Stage in 2010-11

“Recyclemania” is just one of many national initiatives that Albion College has adopted to promote environmental conservation in recent years. The College has also signed the College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment.

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By Jake Weber Albion College has recently developed educational partnerships in France, China, and Malaysia. Reflecting the strategic plan’s emphasis on global diversity, these programs expand the scope of international exchange for Albion students, and help bring increased numbers of international students to the College.

France: Last fall, President Donna Randall signed a mobility agreement with administrators from the University of Versailles SaintQuentin (UVSQ). Along with providing exchanges for Albion and UVSQ undergraduates, the agreement opens UVSQ’s master’s program in eco-innovation (taught in English) to Albion alumni. President Randall also signed a letter of intent with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Versailles (CCIV), which should lead to development of further agreements with 16 French colleges and universities affiliated with the CCIV. These exchanges build on the

PHOTO COURTESY OF S. CONNER

Albion Signs Agreements Expanding Global Exchanges

longstanding sister city relationship that Albion maintains with Noisy-le-Roi, France.

China: With the agreement signed this past January between During a visit to China in January to formalize teaching Albion and Wenhua Middle opportunities at a secondary school in Wuhan, Debra Peterson School in Wuhan, Albion stu(second from left), director of Albion’s Center for International dents have the opportunity to Education, and Provost Susan Conner (center) met with earn academic credit teaching in Albion students Yang Chen (left) and Shu He. Shu’s father, English language and American Benzhong He, is at right. culture programs during Albion’s semester breaks. Founded by a Harvardstudents from those institutions to transfer up educated Chinese intellectual 100 years ago, to two years’ worth of study toward an Albion Wenhua Middle School is also the alma mater College degree. Lewis Cardenas, Albion’s of Yang Chen, ’10, who helped initiate the associate director of international student academic agreement. Albion has graduated recruitment, explains that the program greatly several Chinese students since the 1990s, and reduces the cost of an American education for currently has 21 Chinese students on campus. participating students. The liberal arts experiMalaysia: Higher education in Malaysia ence, not available within Malaysia’s excluis intensely focused on preparing students sively public system, is another attraction. for international success. Albion formalized The first Malaysian transfer student enrolled agreements with INTI College and Nilai at Albion last fall.

University College, easing the way for

Faculty Research Leads to New Books

By Bobby Lee The research specialties of Albion College sociologists Diana Ariza and Scott Melzer are reflected in books published in recent months.

Diana Ariza’s work, Latino/a Youth Identity and Adaptation: A Socio-Cultural Comparison of Mexican and Mexican American Students at a Predominantly White Campus, analyzes how several generations of Latinos have adapted on college campuses.

From interviews, Ariza found that Latino students from families that have lived in the United States for generations struggle more in college than students whose families just entered the country. She argues that institutions do not provide sufficient support for second- and third-generation students because they believe those students have already assimilated into the culture.

“With second- and third-generation Latinos, institutions assume that they are doing fine because they have been here long enough,” Ariza says. “Those Latinos who have recently arrived in the U.S. have an eagerness to be successful. They have this very strong work ethic, even when they come from lower income levels or when their parents had little education.”

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All Latino students still encounter challenges in higher education settings, she adds, including institutional racism, pressure to assimilate, and ignorance of Latino/a values.

Scott Melzer’s book, Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War, examines the National Rifle Association’s dramatic transformation from a recreational firearms interest group into a conservative activist organization. The change began to appear, Melzer contends, in the 1960s when gun control legislation was introduced in response to the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The predominantly male NRA members felt threatened at the same time by movements promoting women’s, civil, and gay rights, he says.

“The book reveals how men respond to threats from changes in society,” Melzer says. “Fear is a driving factor, and it has been the NRA’s most effective mobilizing tool.”

Melzer researched the book by attending NRA events, analyzing NRA materials, and interviewing members. For many, he explains, “their gun is a symbol of their freedom, and if they lose that gun they believe the country will be lost to socialism or communism.”

By Bobby Lee Albion physics professor Aaron Miller is one of the principal investigators on a project that received $900,000 in National Science Foundation funding earlier this year. The grant will support Miller development of an instrument to measure individual particles of light to do quantum computing.

Miller will work with co-researchers at the University of Virginia and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on creating high-performance transition-edge sensor superconducting photodetectors which could spur improved speed in computers.

“Quantum computing,” Miller says, “has an overarching goal of exploring an alternate model of how we do computation.”

Eventually we will reach a point where computer transistors cannot be made any smaller with current technology, he explains.

“The field of experimental quantum computing is so wide open that nobody knows what technology is going to win,” Miller says. “The best system to use to develop the quantum transistor is not yet known.”

Miller notes that quantum computing projects have received significant funding because of their implications for defense and national security.

Science and Math Students Make Their Mark Albion science and math students have reaped their share of honors recently. n Laura Pollum, ’10, has landed a Clarendon Scholarship at Oxford University where she will pursue a doctorate in physical and theoretical chemistry. Just seven percent of the applicants received the Clarendon last year. She will work under the direction of Professor Tim Softley to research cold chemical reactions.

Pollum says the main goal is to understand the physics of chemical reactions at low temperatures and extend that knowledge to chemical reactions at warmer temperatures.

She adds, “It is truly novel work, and as a researcher, you can hardly ask for more than that.”

Pollum already has an impressive record of scholarly accomplishments, having completed FURSCA-funded research on campus with Albion chemistry professor Lisa Lewis and National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates programs at the University of California, Irvine and the Graz University of Technology in Austria.

“Albion has opened a lot of doors,” Pollum says. “I have had [faculty] making sure I’m on the right track in terms of research experience and preparation for graduate school. That’s one of the things I’ve gotten at Albion that I might not have had at a bigger school.” n Ryan Stowe, ’10, will head to Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., next fall to earn a Ph.D. in organic chemistry with a focus on the synthesis of medicinally active compounds. The largest non-profit biomedical research institute in the world, Scripps “has unparalleled resources toward medicinal chemistry,” Stowe says.

In addition to the fellowship he has been awarded at Scripps, Stowe completed a research fellowship at the University of Illinois last summer.

He began his research career at Albion, working with organic chemistry professor Andrew French. “I was able to work in Dr. French’s labs on meaningful projects in organic chemistry from day one at Albion,” Stowe says. “He showed real interest in my development as a student and as a researcher.

It is that kind of faculty attention which really sets Albion apart.” n Becca Putans, ’10, was one of 14 students nationally to win an Undergraduate Student Award in Environmental Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS) this spring. Working with chemistry professor Kevin Metz, she studied how palladium nanoparticles could be applied to filtration devices for the cleanup and reuse of water.

Putans will pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin beginning this fall. n The Klein Kup has returned to Albion’s campus, after the team of Chen Chen, ’11, Mingjia Yang, ’13, and Sining Gu, ’13, emerged victorious in the Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition (LMMC) this spring. The Britons posted 90 points to hold a 19-point margin over the second-place team from Kalamazoo College.

Commencement 2010 Friends, family, faculty, and other well-wishers filled Albion’s Lomas Fieldhouse to celebrate commencement for the 382 members of the Class of 2010. Commencement speaker Doug Parker, ’84, (above right) chairman and CEO of US Airways Group and one of the airline industry’s preeminent executives, encouraged the graduates to identify their personal strengths, and combine them with effort. “I never set out to be a CEO,” he said. “What I did was work hard at different experiences, and I gravitated toward those opportunities that felt best to my heart.” He added, “Simply finding [your] gift is not sufficient. You have to open it and put it to work.” Erika Nichols spoke on behalf of the graduating class, and Charles Green announced the senior class gift, a contribution toward the landscaping of the new green space on the southeast corner of the Quad. Tim Newsted, ’78, welcomed the graduates as alumni, on behalf of the Alumni Association.

D. TRUMPIE PHOTOS

Miller Lands $900,000 NSF Grant

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The following profiles salute the six Albion faculty and academic staff members who retired this spring. All were honored with emeritus status at commencement.

Jeffrey Carrier Professor of Biology

By Sarah Briggs Jeff Carrier believes in living life large. The same passion and high energy he shows sitting astride his Harley on a cross-country ride or videotaping mating nurse sharks in the Florida Keys have been on display in Albion’s biology labs for the past 31 years.

Carrier recalls his visit to Albion as he was searching for his first college teaching job. “The first group I interviewed with was students,” he says. “No faculty. No staff. Just a group of students. I thought, if this place has the gumption to lead with its students, then I’m interested.” Offered the job, he canceled two other interviews and immediately accepted, even though it was only for a one-year appointment at the time.

Working in a location hundreds of miles from the ocean has never kept him from pursuing his research in his specialty, marine biology. Virtually every summer he has headed to the Florida Keys to continue his studies of nurse shark mating behavior.

“Ours is the first systematic field study of shark mating behavior that has ever been done,” he says. “The project started 20 years ago, and there’s still nothing out there that can compare to it.”

His groundbreaking work on shark physiology and movement patterns has led to four books, dozens of journal articles—and plenty of acclaim from his colleagues in the scientific community. But for Carrier, that’s not enough.

“We need to show people what we’re doing and what it means to them,” he says.

“If you continue to speak the language of science [only to other scientists], then you stand no chance of science being accepted by the general public. And in a time when so much around us is being influenced by developments in science and technology, public understanding of basic research is essential.”

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PHOTO COURTESY OF J. CARRIER

Beginning New Journeys Carrier’s involvement in documentaries, aired on such series as National Geographic Explorer Jeff Carrier: Life preserver (‘on location’ in Florida with former students and the Discovery Amy Hupp, ’06, and Derek Burkholder, ’04).

Channel’s Shark Week, has brought his work to a national audience and has increased president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty from 1996 to 2001. He has been public awareness of the fragility of marine recognized as Albion’s Scholar of the Year on ecosystems and the remarkable creatures that inhabit them. Since 1995, Carrier, along with two occasions. his research colleagues and students, has been Next fall Carrier will be back in the classroom on an interim basis, and on featured on 17 programs on network and Saturdays he will be behind the microphone cable television. in the football press box, carrying on the He has routinely involved students in his field announcing he has done for 30 years research, and a number of them are now following his lead, continuing behavioral studies as the “Voice of the Britons.” He’ll also be preparing the second edition of his book, The on different shark species and applying Carrier’s techniques in their research on other Biology of Sharks and Their Relatives, which in its first edition was named Outstanding marine animals.

Academic Title of 2004 by the American For Carrier, teaching is at its best out in Library Association’s Choice magazine. Once the field, and he created a marine biology field course that included an intensive experi- the book-editing is completed next spring, he says, he hopes to get back to other interests ence in his research area in the Keys.

“The field classes in Florida have been par- that he has set aside for lack of time, including wildlife photography. And no doubt he’ll ticularly important to me,” Carrier reflects, have many more hours for fly-fishing on the “because they get my students out of the Au Sable River near his cabin in northern classroom and into the real world of biology.

Michigan.

These classes have been a chance for me to share my world and my passion for the sea with them in a way I can’t in southcentral Michigan. If they can see what it means to me, then I would hope that would inspire them to develop their own passions in the same way.”

To protect the nurse shark mating grounds By Jake Weber around Dry Tortugas National Park in the Gene Cline came to philosophy almost acciKeys, Carrier proposed legislation, approved dentally, he says, after a semester in seminary in 2000, to close the underwater area of and a short time studying medieval history the park to tourist traffic during the mating in graduate school. Philosophy, he says, was season. “This was a first for an underwater a lot more challenging and fun. He arrived at preserve,” he notes, “offering protection to Albion in 1979, having done a doctoral thesis a shark species during the critical time of which also followed a rather unusual path mating.” in the philosophical world at the time—he Over the course of his career at Albion, examined similarities in how humans and Carrier has held the A. Merton Chickering other mammals respond emotionally to their Professorship in Biology and the W.W. Diehl environments, research that aligned closely Endowed Professorship and served as vice

Gene Cline

Professor of Philosophy

B. Lee PHOTO

P. SPEARS PHOTO

Gene Cline: Thinker’s thinker. with the field of ethology and the thendeveloping field of neuroscience.

Today, as a specialist in political philosophy, Cline has worked hard to make his field accessible for students, regardless of their academic interests. The point is to learn to think like a philosopher, and that comes down to carefully crafted logical analyses. “The idea,” he says, “is to make an argument simple and clear enough that anyone can see that it’s so.

Or, alternatively, to plainly see why it is not so.”

Cline’s expertise in political philosophy led him to co-develop one of Albion’s earliest and most innovative first-year seminars, on justice, taught simultaneously by faculty in four different departments.

A notoriously tough grader, Cline recalls that for many years his class average was well below 3.0. “Philosophy was always the toughest course in the humanities in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says, making it excellent preparation for graduate and professional study.

He notes that Albion’s philosophy majors fill many seats in good law schools and have recently gotten Ph.D.s in philosophy from the University of Chicago, Duke, and the University of California, San Diego.

“Philosophy intersects with the College’s strategic plan in serious ways,” he says, noting the department’s offerings include the philosophy of law, as well as biomedical, business, and environmental ethics. Philosophy also intersects with other fields, including the natural sciences, psychology, and history, he adds.

Associate director of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program in the late 1990s and director since 2006, Cline has enjoyed particular success increasing both recruitment and retention of Brown honors students.

Dave Egnatuk, ’71: Mentor and motivator.

“You’ve got to like people, you’ve got to tell the truth, and you can’t ‘sell’ a liberal arts education unless you genuinely believe in it and understand it,” he explains.

Author of the book Introducing Logic, Epistemology and Ethics: An Integrative Companion to Classical and Contemporary Readings and several articles, Cline says he hopes to publish a second book in retirement, a consilience argument examining race-related social issues. “Evidence for the theory of evolution goes from phylogenetics to embryo development to biochemistry and geology—when you get different fields that point to the same conclusion, it’s hard to say it shouldn’t be taken as a true conclusion,” Cline says, by way of explanation. “If you take the history of race and law, segregated housing, first-in/last-out labor practices, racially targeted criminal “justice”—looking across a whole series of fields, you get an argument for why black America often looks the way it does. I’m laying out this argument in the first part of my book.”

The second part of the argument—finding a solution to the problem of racial discrimination—is much more complex, and provides a great starting point for class discussions and student papers.

Cline will continue to teach in the Honors Program next fall as its interim director and plans to put student power to work on his research. That’s a strategy that has proven successful in past courses, he notes. “The material I’m working on is very much supported by the work that my terrific Albion students have done and will continue to do. It helps me to better integrate and to rethink my own work. I often learn as much from my student colleagues as they do from me.”

Looking back over his 31 years on campus, Cline says there’s no question his interaction with students in the classroom has meant the most to him. “I’ve always thought that any student who comes here and who is willing to work hard will get an education as good or better than any place I know of.

Other colleges may claim to deliver a premier liberal arts education, but it is no simple matter to match Albion’s deeply embedded 175-year-old ethos, our long history of providing liberal education in the intensely personal and engaged way that we so often do.”

David Egnatuk, ’71 Professor of Physical Education

By Bobby Lee The mentors Dave Egnatuk had when he was a student at Albion established the standard for the environment he wanted to create as he left military service in November 1974 to begin a career in teaching and coaching at the College.

Egnatuk, who grew up in a Clinton Street house just a mile from campus, never expected an opportunity to open up at his alma mater and bring him back to his hometown. But the College came calling, and he has since served as a mentor for generations of Britons during more than 35 years as professor of physical education, head coach of the men’s track and field program, assistant football coach, and longtime adviser of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.

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walk into a weight room.”

The nurturing environment was crucial as Egnatuk has navigated the high tide of success and the turbulence formed by tragedy.

In track and field, he guided Tracy Garner, ’83, John Kondelik: Perennial bookman.

Dan Pekrul, ’87, Steve Gilbert, ’93, From Gibbon to Auden by G. W. Bowersock, Tom Reason, ’94, and Nick Morgan, ’04, Education and Democracy: Re-imagining to individual NCAA Division III national Liberal Learning in America edited by Robert championships. His athletes have achieved Orrill, and (for fun) Dark Light by Randy All-America status 31 times, and he led eight Wayne White. of his teams to MIAA track and field titles.

Though he didn’t realize it at the time, During his 23 seasons as an assistant football his library career actually began during his coach, he worked with the defensive linemen undergraduate days when he served as a and was on the staff for the 1994 national page, retrieving books for patrons from the championship season. While stepping down then-closed stacks at the University of Florida as head coach for the men’s track program, library. In the ensuing years, he has seen a Egnatuk will still be working with the Briton transformation in the ways libraries operate runners as an assistant next year. that is nothing short of astonishing.

Administrators and athletes alike leaned Today, not only are individual library on his strength in the wake of the deaths catalogs available to users at the click of a of former football coach Pete Schmidt and mouse, but library collections worldwide can Hall of Fame athletes like Gilbert and Kris be accessed wherever the Internet is available.

Knobloch, ’93.

And the laborious process of poring through “Students felt good when he said, ‘It’s a the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, great day to be alive!,’” notes Frank Joranko, volume-by-volume, has given way to online ’52, the former football and baseball coach searches that deliver not just authors and and athletic director who hired Egnatuk. titles but complete texts of the articles “Students who weren’t athletes lined up to instantaneously. be in his classes. He is what Albion is about “Libraries have always been early adoptwhen it comes to mentoring students.” ers of technology,” Kondelik notes. “We’ve always looked at ways to streamline what we do.”

The real advantage of technology from a librarian’s perspective is that it allows more time for working with patrons on their research. As data of all types have become

By Sarah Briggs increasingly available online, Kondelik Reflecting on his 44-year career as a librarian explains, “information literacy” has never recently, John Kondelik quoted his favorite been more important. To be able to search adage, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” well is still both art and science. “You have to And then he added, “The journey’s not know where to look for the best information,” over—it’s beginning again.” he says, and that goes way beyond Google.

Not surprisingly, he will be taking along He and his staff at the Stockwell-Mudd many books on his retirement journey.

Libraries believe “every question from a Among the titles he plans to get to right student is a teaching moment,” and they use away are: Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, D. TRUMPIE PHOTO

When he returned to Albion in January 1975, Egnatuk believed he was just filling in for a semester. He has been reminding students of his motto, “It’s a great day to be alive!,” ever since.

“I had great mentors when I was a student here in Tom Taylor, Morley Fraser, Ike Isaac, and Bob Wikstrom, and early in my career, Frank Joranko and Char Duff. They set a high standard,” Egnatuk recalls. “The compassion and caring they had for students and student-athletes challenged me to live up to that standard.”

In following their model, Egnatuk has developed friendships with students that have lasted over the years.

“One of the great things about teaching and coaching,” he explains, “is that you get the opportunity to impact the lives of young people with your attitude and sensitivity to their needs. To provide an environment that is nurturing and to be a mentor is very rewarding.”

Egnatuk crafted the nurturing environment through creating teaching moments in everyday situations. Students recall how Egnatuk would search the headlines for stories about Billie Jean King and Jack Johnson for the Gender and Sport course or how a trip with the track and field team to Atlanta would include a visit to the Martin Luther King Center and the Andersonville, Ga., National Historic Site where 45,000 Union soldiers were confined during the Civil War. “Everything was a teaching moment,” Ben Engelter, ’98, says. “No matter where we were or what we were discussing in class, Dave never missed an opportunity to put in those teaching moments.”

Egnatuk also stressed the importance of self-image with his students, as he shared articles on how their body is an investment or on the empowerment of women.

“My No. 1 goal in my activity classes was I wanted the students to realize what an asset they have in their physical health, and they need to find time in a very hectic lifestyle as a student and as an adult to maintain it. It’s like putting money into the bank and withdrawing it later,” Egnatuk says.

“As the father of three daughters, I think I became more concerned about women students taking charge of their body,” he adds.

“It is something I’ve tried to push in terms of fitness level and feeling confident enough to

John Kondelik

Director of Libraries

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those opportunities to help students become more discriminating about the resources available to them. The staff also works closely with the faculty, and they monitor where the curriculum seems to be heading. “We see our mission as supporting the academic program,” he says. “We set our goals around that.”

Technology has become a means of stretching tight budgets. Rather than buying single subscriptions to journals today, most libraries now subscribe to online databases that include thousands of titles. From the 1,700 journal titles available in Albion’s library about a decade ago, the number has grown to over 20,000 today—and for less money per title than was spent previously.

During his 17 years as Albion’s library director, Kondelik has continually made increased access to materials a priority. In 1997, Albion was one of a handful of institutions that pioneered what eventually became the Michigan Electronic Library and MelCat, which now draws on the databases of about 200 libraries in the system. Anyone with a Michigan driver’s license can borrow materials from any of the participating libraries.

Kondelik obtained a McGregor Fund grant for loading government documents in the College’s online catalog and a Mellon Foundation grant for a collaborative education and collection development program with Hope and Kalamazoo Colleges. He also co-authored a proposal that yielded a W. K. Kellogg Foundation grant for over $1 million for College and community technology, under Albion College’s “Smart Community” initiative, and he worked with the Albion District Library to establish an innovative College-community shared system.

His stint at Albion College is the culmination of a career that took him from Eckerd College in Florida to Olivet College and later to Butler University in Indiana.

At a retirement party this spring, library staff member Claudia Diaz closed with this tribute: “John has made the library a much better place, he has made us better at our jobs, and he has enriched the College, the library, and our lives beyond our ability to adequately describe.”

Gaylord Smith: Numbers guru.

Gaylord Smith Professor of Economics and Management

By Jake Weber As was the case for many of his peers, Gaylord Smith’s career path was changed by the Vietnam War. Working as an auditor for Peat, Marwick, Mitchell, Smith was drafted as a finance clerk for the U.S. Army, an experience that led him to realize he wanted to continue his education in accounting and become a C.P.A. He already had an M.B.A., so he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Michigan State.

The program required Smith to work as a teaching assistant, and he began to realize he enjoyed the classroom environment. “It was tough, deciding to leave the business world and those big bucks,” says Smith, but teaching offered other rewards. “Making this my career was a great choice for me.”

Having attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, Smith had no thoughts of working at a small college until an alumnus friend persuaded him to apply for an opening at Albion. He joined the faculty in 1976. As it turns out, Albion has been a good fit: in 1994 Smith won both the College’s Teacher of the Year award and the United Methodist Board of Higher Education Exemplary Teacher award. During

the 2009-10 academic year, he received the Educator of the Year award from the Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants and Albion’s Putnam Award for Faculty Mentor of the Year.

Smith’s teaching career coincided with the advent of personal computing and the development of spreadsheet software.

Fascinated by the potential of the computer as both an educational and business tool, Smith began designing spreadsheet problems for his accounting students. He showed one to a representative for South-Western College Publishing Co. in the early 1980s, launching a publishing career that includes 49 workbooks and other titles to date.

Games and play, Smith asserts, may have been central to his popularity both as a teacher and a developer of educational materials. “A lot of educational software is handholding and restrictive. A wrong answer is immediately graded or corrected. And printed textbook problems come down to a single answer, and then you’re done. My philosophy has been to let students use the spreadsheet problem for aiding in decision-making. With my books, the students can go beyond the initial answer and perform ‘what-if ’ analyses with different data.”

Understanding accounting as a decisionmaking tool is critical to the students’ eventual success in business, Smith maintains. “Preparation of financial statements and reports allows decision-making with respect to business operations, investments, and risk. Accounting really is an intersection with communication theory—we’re taking the numbers that describe a company and making them meaningful for the people who are making decisions.” People with the ability to interpret the numbers in this fashion are invaluable, he says.

Smith is also committed to helping students apply their education toward community service. He founded Albion’s IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, in which aspiring accountants prepare tax returns for some 200 College and community members each year. The program is particularly aimed at those who cannot afford a tax preparation service. “This is good experience for my students,” says Smith, who reviews each return they prepare. “It also provides goodwill for the College and helps a lot of folks.”

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Smith notes that the Economics and Management Department’s liberal arts approach to education has been consistently appreciated by the business world. “I really enjoy seeing the recruiters react to our students,” he explains. “The recruiters go to business schools and see accounting students and finance students and marketing students.

We have the bare minimum of instruction in any of those areas, but our students have such a broad background as decision-makers and problem-solvers that they can compete with anybody.”

In retirement, Smith will continue writing instructional books for his publisher. And you’ll probably find him wearing the newest edition of his “Accounting Is Fun” button, recently presented by him to the Accounting Society, which he has advised for many years.

“I’ve been handing these buttons out as prizes for a long time, and I always wear one on test days,” he remarks. “I think it keeps the students and me on the same wavelength.

Accounting is fun.”

Royal Ward Professor of Theatre

By Jake Weber For much of his Albion tenure, theatre professor Royal Ward has also been the College’s organist, performing at the Festival of Lessons and Carols, Honors Convocation, and other important events. Not surprisingly, he began college as a music major—but musical talent was only part of his motivation to perform.

“I tried out for plays in high school, but I never got cast,” Ward says, explaining that it wasn’t until his senior year of high school that he managed to get onstage as an actor.

Nonetheless, he auditioned for a play his first week at MacMurray College, and by the end of the first semester, “I was a theatre major.”

Ward eventually taught theatre at MacMurray and at Hiram College, where the trustee chair was father of the actor Austin Pendleton. “If I ever said I wished we had something in the department, the next thing

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I knew, a truck would pull up and deliver it,” he says. It was a dream job, but Ward knew he wanted to finish his doctorate at the University of Michigan. His search for a college position near Ann Arbor led him to Albion’s Theatre Department in 1979. “I thought I’d finish my doctorate and move on, but I really liked the people here and the school . . . and here I am.”

Ward joined colleagues Tom Oosting and Helen Manning in teaching and running the theatre program. Versatility was key. “If Tom or Helen was directing, I’d design the set.

When I directed, Tom would design,” Ward recalls. “We supervised the shop, did the lighting, and taught a lot of overloads because we were such a small department.”

The department’s small size didn’t limit their ambitions when it came to the range of their productions, however. The faculty trio was committed to introducing their students to new and different directions that were emerging in theatre at the time.

“One of my favorite productions from that period,” Ward says, “was Wendy Wasserstein’s early play, Uncommon Women and Others. It was an all-female cast—seniors at a women’s college who were about to graduate and go out into ‘the real world,’ and their housemother who was about to retire and start the next phase of her life. I convinced Helen (who was about to retire herself ) to play the housemother, and Helen’s daughter, Lora, played one of the students.

It was the only time the two of them ever appeared together on stage, and Helen’s portrayal of the indomitable housemother was particularly touching.”

Ward also convinced his colleagues that they should produce a Shakespeare play every other year, an idea that was—and still is— distinctive. “I don’t think any other colleges produce as much Shakespeare as we do,” notes Ward, explaining that “a lot of directors step back from Shakespeare, because without the training it can be a daunting task. It takes a big cast, and to put it onstage is always difficult. But I enjoy it. I think we owe it to our students and to our audiences.” He often collaborated in these productions with Albion English professor Charles Crupi.

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Br!ton B!ts

Royal Ward: Play-maker.

Ward’s intimate understanding of Shakespeare, as a scholar and a director, led him to a long association with the Shakespeare Bulletin, a publication devoted primarily to performance-related issues. For many years Ward contributed reviews of regionally and internationally recognized programs, including Canada’s Stratford Festival and the National Shakespeare Theatre, until a new direction at Albion curtailed his time.

In 1996, Jeff Carrier, who at the time was serving as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, approached Ward to serve as the associate dean. “I told him I would do it as long as no one asked me to be the vice president and dean,” Ward recalls with a smile. Ward eventually served three years as Carrier’s associate, then held the vice presidential post from 2001 to 2008.

In this administrative role, he says, he especially enjoyed interviewing and hiring new faculty. “The faculty we hired were just extraordinary. They’re the future of the College, and I think we’re in good hands.”

short takes

Two Minutes with . . . Drew Christopher

Drew Christopher is chair and professor of psychological science at Albion.

Io Triumphe!: Your undergraduate degree is in economics and finance—how did you end up as a psychology professor?

Since 1999, you’ve published 44 journal articles, 21 of them with Albion students.

And the topics range all over the place: Protestant work ethic, authoritarianism, financial risk-taking, voting behavior, sexism. . . .

Christopher: For my second semester of college I signed up for Philosophy 101 but got placed in Psychology 101, probably because my handwriting is so bad the data entry clerk could not read it. I couldn’t get into the philosophy class after registration ended, but psychology turned out to be pretty interesting so I minored in it. It wasn’t until my senior year that my roommate pointed out that even though my major was economics and finance I spent most of my time studying and talking about psychology.

That’s when it finally hit me: I probably should look into psychology for my career.

Sometimes I entice bright students into working on my research interests by having them read background materials to see if they get excited.

But some of what I’m working on comes from what students are interested in. My second year at Albion, a student came to me with a great idea for a study on sexism. Since then, I’ve had four or five students who’ve expanded on that topic.

I work on what’s fresh at hand, and that changes with the students who are working with me. That’s why I wouldn’t want to work at a Level I research institution. If I had to do a whole lot of research in one area, I’d get bored.

Does any of your economics major apply to what you’re doing now?

You’ve won several teaching awards . . . talk a little bit about how you approach your role as teacher.

I do social psychology, which is a social science like economics, and there’s a lot more overlap than might meet the eye. Finance and accounting are not intuitive—you have to understand how people think and make decisions, so you can provide comprehensible information. Management and marketing are likewise associated with social psychology, even though marketing in particular is also starting to use neuroscience research in its scientific investigations.

Teaching students how to think, more than what to think, is important. That’s why I ask my students not just to present a conclusion but to show evidence of how they reached that conclusion. You can’t get bogged down in the minutiae of what you’re doing as a teacher, but, rather, you need to provide a bigger context of why the information is important.

When I walk into class at the start of the semester, I remind myself that this isn’t going to be every student’s favorite class, even though it might be mine. I’ll probably be more enthusiastic about 90 percent of the subject matter than the students, and for the students who want to delve deeper I can give more learning opportunities outside of class. I try to remember that the class is not the center of the students’ universe. If I act

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By Jake Weber

Honored for his teaching and research at Albion, Drew Christopher is also editor-in-chief of the American Psychological Association’s journal, Teaching of Psychology. That role keeps him in touch with the latest trends in teaching in his discipline. like I know that’s the case, I think that makes a difference, particularly to the first-year and sophomore students who are still trying to acclimate themselves to the world.

It’s about maintaining a sense of perspective.

I live my life in 14-week blocks. Nothing lasts forever, and that’s especially true in this line of work.

So you always know there’s a fresh beginning just ahead.

It sounds like you’re a philosopher after all. . . .

You know, I never did get to take that philosophy class.

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Go Br!ts!

A Matter of Identity

By Bobby Lee

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Sandra Turay was so busy this spring that she had to miss a portion of the track and field season. The Ishpeming (Mich.) native, who competes in throwing events for the Britons, was rewarded for her scholarly analysis of differences between cultures with selection as a student presenter at the National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference in Washington, D.C. in April. Turay has added to the body of Arab-American literature with a paper that addresses the key moments for several generations of a Lebanese family as they navigate their identity in America, Scotland, and Lebanon.

Her interest in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies began during a First-Year Experience trip to Puerto Rico and continued while studying abroad in Ghana.

Her semester in Africa led to a 40-page independent study project about the Fulani, an ethnic group not indigenous to Ghana. In search of a topic for her senior honors thesis, Turay turned to her stepfamily’s Lebanese roots—which were rediscovered after a phone call in the 1990s—and her research began in February 2009.

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“I remember the moment in class when ethnic studies professor Diana Ariza asked, ‘How do you identify?’” Turay says. “I’m not Lebanese, but it made me think about what ethnicity means.

I wanted to explore how things change through generations. What does being Lebanese in Scotland, or Monroe, Michigan, or in Lebanon—all within the same family line—mean?

“After talking with some family members, I found they had contact until the early ’60s,” Turay adds. “In the ’90s, a cousin—who is a professor at the University of Edinburgh—was teaching or doing research at the American University, and he looked up the name in the phone book and called and said, ‘I think we’re related.’ I had to tap into the resource after hearing about the history.”

Despite some reservations of family members, Turay used the break between semesters in December and January to visit the extended stepfamily in Scotland and Head men’s basketball coach Jody May (right) met with former 1942 MIAA honoree, Bob Lynn, ’43, when Lynn watched the Britons’ 58-48 victory over the University of La Verne, La Verne, Calif., Dec. 18, 2009. This game was the first Briton hoops contest Lynn had seen in 67 years. The team’s travel to southern California was made possible, in part, through the Michael and Peg Turner Endowment, which provides supplemental funds for educational and competition travel.

A discus specialist on the Briton track and field team, Sandra Turay has also been a strong competitor in the classroom. She was one of only a few undergraduates chosen to present their research at a national ethnic studies conference this spring. A member of the Brown Honors Program, she also wrote for the Pleiad.

Lebanon. She is working to counter stereotypes of the Middle East by accurately depicting what she saw, noting the area she visited is far less dangerous than it is portrayed on television.

“There were people who thought I was playing hopscotch with landmines,” she recalls.

Still, she found the challenges currently facing the Middle East both complicated and perplexing.

“There are some issues that are difficult,” Turay says. “There is a responsibility as a writer to explain what you experience with as much truth as possible, but readers also have a responsibility to put what they read into a larger context.”

The May graduate hopes to continue to explore the world as she is in the process of applying to join AmeriCorps.

Signature Moments In considering how to recognize Albion’s 175th anniversary

this year, we thought it was most appropriate to turn to you, our alumni, for your remembrances of quintessential Albion moments—moments that have often been life-changing.

Despite the fact that our writers span seven decades of College history, commonalities endure of friendship and family, living and learning in this special place. We hope you will identify with the experiences described here and enjoy reliving your

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own “signature moments” at Albion. — Sarah Briggs, Editor

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We were two frightened college freshmen in September

Several classmates and I were studying for an exam,

1959, standing in the hallway outside the studio door of Professor David Strickler, waiting to audition for the Albion College choir. It was only the second day on campus for both of us. Coming from opposite sides of the state of Michigan, we did not know each other but had shared (though we did not know it at the time) a love of choral music performance as high school students. There was “magic” in that first meeting. I knew that I wanted to spend more time with this dark-haired girl with the beautiful smile . . . and the feeling seemed to be mutual. She accepted my offer of a date for the freshman mixer, and neither of us ever looked back. I gave her my fraternity pin the following year and an engagement ring the year after that. We were married a few weeks after graduation. We sang together in the choir throughout our college years . . . and have been “making music” together for nearly 50 years now.

which was being held the next day in Dr. Eugene Miller’s Harlem Renaissance literature class. At about 7:45 p.m., after studying for several hours and still not fully understanding what we were studying, I called Dr. Miller at home. I told him that a few of us were studying and were not making any sense of the material. He replied, “Let me tuck my kids in bed, and I’ll be right over.” At 8 p.m. he was sitting on the floor of my dorm room reviewing the material with us. After about two hours, he said, “You’re right— this isn’t hanging together. I’ll make the exam a take-home, and you can work on it over the weekend.” All of us breathed a sigh of relief, although for me, it was a mixed blessing. My take-home exam ended up being 18 pages long. However, I will never forget how impressed I was by his selflessness, his sincere interest in our education, and his desire to see us succeed. I try to emulate his example.

James, ’63, and Tamara Transue Royle, ’63

Coletta Nelson Thomas, ’76

I was the first in our extended family in more than 30 years

It’s rare that one event in a lifetime can be such a defining moment that it changes your goals and aspirations from that point forward. The biochemistry research that I did with Dr. Chris Rohlman for my honors thesis redefined my career path. The benefit of working daily with Dr. Rohlman, along with support from many other professors in multiple departments, solidified my confidence as a researcher and led me to pursue graduate school with the eventual idea of doing medical research. While scientific research can be carried out by undergraduate students at other colleges or universities, the mentoring that Albion College enables is beyond measure, and I am grateful to have had the chance to take part in the Albion experience.

to go to college. My mother was in bad health, but she insisted on going with my dad and me the day we drove to Albion. She had not been able to go to college so was determined that I would! When she returned home to Detroit that evening, she went to bed and remained there until she died five days before my graduation.

Our family was aware that Mom might not live long enough to see my graduation ceremony in 1941, so President Seaton, being very understanding, gave me my diploma a few days ahead of time to show Mom her goal and mine had been accomplished. She fingered the diploma with care and said, “Finally a college graduate in the family.” Then she closed her eyes for the last time.

The diploma was returned to President Seaton, and I received it again at graduation the following weekend. Only at Albion could such things happen in those days! I have been part of other colleges since that time, but Albion will always have a special place in my heart.

Phyllis Wagner Gore Houghton, ’41

Michael Marvin, ’04

I had many memorable experiences at Albion that have shaped my career—although at the time I thought it was going to be a career as a music educator. I originally came to Albion on a music performance scholarship (French horn) and played in all the ensembles: the British Eighth, the orchestra, wind ensemble, brass quintet, and eventually jazz ensemble. I thought I would go off to be a band director and change the world as professors Steve Eggleston and Rick Blatti did as my directors at Albion. I experienced more music under their batons than I could ever have imagined playing in a lifetime, let alone in four years. I had attended a small rural high school that didn’t even have an orchestra.

One of my fondest memories was playing in an orchestra concert on campus under the famous composer Howard Hanson. Not only did I have the opportunity to play under his baton, but we had coffee with him after the concert! Now after 22 years as an arts manager presenting artists from around the world, I realize what an amazing moment that was to have such access to a composer of his stature.

Through the years, I have kept in touch with both Steve Eggleston and Rick Blatti. They were more than professors who cared deeply about our success as students—they became extended family.

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The two faculty members most significant to my Albion experience were English professors Mary Collar and Judy Lockyer.

At the beginning of every semester, it was the same—I would be so excited to get to the first class with one of them, and once there I would wonder, “What was I thinking? I don’t feel like doing all this reading, and they ask questions that are too hard, and there are too many papers to write.” But as the semester went on, I would remember why I loved their classes—they felt like they mattered.

And in that way, I learned something truly important—that you get out of life what you put into it. When you invest time and effort into

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something, that something takes on meaning, and your life and your world are richer for it. I also learned what I was capable of doing, and the level at which I could perform. These lessons have stayed with me, and even now I draw on them as I practice law. In fact, when preparing for my first significant argument in federal court, and I was jittery, I thought to myself, “Well, come on, you got through Literary Theory with Dr. Collar—surely you can do this.”

Susan Quinn, ’95

At times, the core requirements seemed to get in the way of what I really wanted to take at Albion. In an inspired moment, my adviser, Dr. Tom Oosting, suggested I take a philosophy course with Dr. Jack Padgett to meet one of the requirements. I was quite concerned. I didn’t think philosophy was going to appeal to me, and I was intimidated by what others had told me about the workload. But Dr. Oosting pointed out that my love of words and reasoning was a good match for the class. Well, he was so right. I absolutely loved that class, and went on to take ethics with Dr. Ned Garvin. I owe Dr. Oosting a debt of gratitude for “opening my mind”—it truly made a difference in my life.

Angela Scott Sheets, ’82

Outside of my immediate family members, football coach Pete Schmidt is the person who has had the largest influence on my life. There were many lessons that he taught his players, but the thing that has had the most lasting impact on me is to take responsibility for my actions as well as those of the people around me. If I am in a group that is going in the wrong direction, it is up to me to do something about it. We cannot sit back and expect someone else to improve our circumstances for us. All upperclassmen on Coach Schmidt’s teams were expected to be leaders because we had been taught what was expected of us by the players who came before us, and it was our responsibility to teach that to the younger players. (continued on next page) Spring-Summer 2010 | 17

Because he instilled in us that it was our responsibility to make sure that the team was ready to play on Saturdays, we took ownership of our teams. We each became responsible for our successes and failures.

It was for this reason that our football national championship in 1994 was so special. We weren’t the most talented Division III team in the country that year. Few would say that ours was the most talented team that Albion College has ever had. However, through the leadership of the senior class, our team came together like no other team that I have ever been a part of. The players had a tremendous amount of respect for each other and that showed in the way we played together.

When I think about my time playing football at Albion, I very rarely think of the games. The times that I remember the most are the times on the practice field, in the locker room, in the weight room, and in the film room with Coach Schmidt. Those were the times when we were learning to become responsible for ourselves and each other.

Kyle Klein, ’97

Living together in Susanna Wesley Hall (it was an all-women’s residence back in the ’50s) meant that we formed friendships that have lasted—and grown even richer—over the ensuing years. About 14 years ago, some of us began gathering once or twice a year to reconnect with one another, tell stories of children and grandchildren, and explore the locale where we happen to be staying. Our California destination has afforded us many interesting places for hiking and sightseeing. We also have enjoyed making evening meals for each other. It’s amazing how you begin to feel like a college student again after spending all those hours together! While we all bring our own perspectives and life experiences to these gatherings, it’s our shared history from four years at Albion that binds us together and keeps us coming back each time.

Connie Blessing Burt, ’56

My defining Albion moment was my first written examination for history professor Julian Rammelkamp. I had a conflicting event at the Ford Institute, so Dr. Rammelkamp told me I could take the exam in the evening. By reputation, Dr. Rammelkamp’s courses were rigorous, and, as a freshman taking my first set of exams, I was nervous and a bit intimidated.

After dinner, I met Dr. Rammelkamp at North Hall. I expected someone to hand me the exam paper and watch me take the test for an hour. Dr. Rammelkamp was different, much different. He showed me to his office, and sat me at his desk. He simply said to turn out the lights and lock the door when done. I asked him the time limit for writing the exam, and he said there was none.

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That moment previewed in many ways what would become a profound academic relationship and personal friendship with Dr. Rammelkamp. He trusted me fully just as he believed in my potential fully. There was no time limit on his exams, just as there was no limit on how much he would teach us (and just as sometimes it seemed there was no limit to the assigned reading for a term). He showed me a new capacity for work and learning. He even gave me summer reading lists, and, when finished, we would sit in his living room or on his sun porch and discuss the books at length.

Each of us sees a horizon. Some are fortunate to meet a giant who lifts them up to see far beyond that horizon. Dr. Rammelkamp was a legendary professor who, by his intellect and personal dedication to teaching, inspired me and many other Albion students to believe there was no limit to what we could learn or to what we could accomplish.

Jeffrey Battershall, ’86

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A Distinct

Advantage

Albion unveils a four-year program of academic and career exploration.

“[Liberal arts colleges] seek nothing less than to prepare students for extraordinary lives that will make significant contributions to the larger society. And, the results are impressive—inordinately large numbers of liberal arts graduates go on to pursue graduate degrees, make impressive contributions in the arts and the sciences, and become leaders in business, government, and non-profit organizations.”

Albion College shares wholeheartedly in these goals expressed in a Change magazine article a few years ago.

But now the College is poised to significantly change how it delivers on its promise to prepare students for fulfilling lives after graduation.

The Albion Advantage, which will officially begin with the first-year class entering this fall, represents a bold new approach to career readiness melded with a liberal arts education. Beginning in their first semester on campus, students will integrate their academic work and their career exploration, creating a comprehensive life plan that will lead them to graduation and beyond. Along the way, they will gain the professional skills and practical experience needed for career success. The program culminates in the Albion Advantage Pledge, the College’s assurance that students will have post-graduate support, such as an additional research experience, an internship, or extended career services, if desired, as they go on to pursue their life’s work.

The Albion Advantage was featured in a front-page story in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April. In the interview below, President Donna Randall talks about how the Albion Advantage will reshape our students’ educational experience.

Io Triumphe!: The Albion Advantage grew out of the College’s recent strategic planning process. What specifically drove this new initiative?

President Randall: We realized as we were developing our strategic plan that we needed to make an Albion College education more distinctive—to create our own competitive niche. There are many fine liberal arts institutions in the nation, and we needed to figure out what we could do better than these other institutions in order to distinguish Albion in a highly competitive and crowded higher education landscape. That strategic thinking led to the Albion Advantage. We envisioned this model to provide a value-added component to our students’ liberal arts education.

You’ve said that you believe the Albion Advantage is particularly compelling, given the current economic environment. Could you explain that further?

There are a number of surveys that are conducted on a regular basis to sample the opinions of first-year college students, and these can help us understand what drives

students’ college choice. One of the major surveys, from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, found that well over half—nearly 57 percent—of the first-year students responding say they place high importance on choosing a college where graduates get good jobs. What’s significant is that this is the highest percentage since this question was introduced in 1983.

This is a reflection of the times, of the economy. Other surveys have also shown that today’s college students are more focused on their future careers than perhaps many of us were when we were in college, and because of the escalating price of college they want some assurance that after they graduate there will be career opportunities out there that will be satisfying and productive.

And we’re not just hearing this from the students.

Parents are also expecting that, given their investment in their son or daughter’s education, their student will be prepared for a career. When we were developing the Albion Advantage, we were planning with this generation in mind, and we believe that this career-oriented mindset will continue for many years into the future.

Albion is being responsive to the students’ and society’s needs.

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What are the elements of the Albion Advantage that make it distinctive in comparison to career preparation programs at other institutions?

The Albion Advantage is not an either-or choice. A lot of people ask, “Are you providing a liberal arts education or career preparation for students?” What Albion is doing is providing a liberal arts education and a career readiness focus. We are helping students prepare for their careers, building on the liberal arts foundation.

We’re doing this in a very thoughtful, intentional, and strategic fashion. Some institutions are pure liberal arts; some simply do career preparation. What Albion is doing is blending the liberal arts and career readiness throughout our four-year program.

We are looking at career readiness as a process that students begin in their first semester on campus, and it’s integrated with their academic planning right through their last semester as seniors—with careful academic and career advising by faculty and staff.

Facilitated by an electronic portfolio, students will reflect on and synthesize their learning throughout their years on campus, ensuring both quality and depth in the connections students are making.

We believe that under the Albion Advantage we will be giving students the skills and experience they need to be successful after graduation, and we are backing that up with a pledge to assist them after graduation, should they need that. While the pledge begins with the first-year class entering this coming fall, our upperclass students will also have access to the career services and experiential learning offered to the first-years. All of our students will be encouraged to take advantage of career development opportunities.

What will be the role of our Institutes going forward?

Institutes are an integral part of the Albion Advantage.

We intend to enhance them and provide increased staffing to better serve our students. The Institutes will help formulate future-oriented career tracks. One of the exciting things about the Institutes is that they will be charged to look to the future and anticipate where the new careers are going to be in the coming years. We need to prepare our students not just for life right after graduation but for their career changes later on. The Institutes can help students prepare for those future careers, and provide the knowledge and skills students will need to succeed in those careers. We will be creating Institute advisory committees composed of faculty, staff, alumni, and leading professionals in related fields. We will be asking these committees to help us 20 | Io Triumphe!

be visionary—and help us translate their ideas into the preparation we are offering students.

The Institutes will also be the home of many of the experiential learning opportunities that we will provide to students. We believe that giving students an opportunity to experience what it means to be a professional in a given area is very valuable. We want our students to see whether there’s a fit between their evolving interests and a particular career. Their experiential education will also set them apart from their peers who may not have hands-on experience. Employers and graduate school admissions officers tell us that this is a key characteristic of successful applicants.

Will the College’s liberal arts focus change under the Albion Advantage?

Albion College has provided an exceptional liberal arts education for 175 years. We fully intend to continue to do that. However, under the Albion Advantage, students will have the opportunity to combine that with career readiness, enabling them to better articulate their learning and preparedness to employers and graduate schools. Albion has integrated professional preparation into the liberal arts for decades. We’ve done this primarily through the Institutes, but there are many places on campus that offer students experiential learning opportunities. The Albion Advantage represents an enhancement of that approach.

One of the distinctive things about the Albion Advantage is that the four-year model seeks to reach every student who wants to participate in this program on our campus. We want to ensure that all students can explore careers and start doing that in their first year. Some students are very focused when they come here—they have a career plan and take the appropriate steps needed to achieve their goals—but others are not as decisive or assertive, and we want to be certain that those students have a structure that will assist them in their decision-making for their next major life transition.

How will we involve alumni in the Albion Advantage?

Albion has over 22,000 loyal alumni, and there are many ways alumni can help us with the Albion Advantage. They can inform prospective students about this new program. They can help by serving as mentors—students need to solidify their career interests, and alumni perspectives can be invaluable. Alumni can present a realistic assessment of the pros and cons of a particular profession.

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We’d love for our students to engage in job-shadowing with alumni, to learn what a job is like on a daily basis. We strongly encourage our students to do internships, and if our alumni could be internship sponsors, it would be wonderful. Alumni could be excellent “career coaches” for students, offering advice by phone or e-mail. I would love to have alumni come back to campus on a regular basis to serve as guest speakers or executives- or artists-in-residence. And alumni could assist students with relocation after graduation—offering advice to ease the transition after college.

What do you see as the long-term benefits of the Albion Advantage—for our students and for the College as a whole?

Through the Albion Advantage, we’re providing our students with the timelessness of a liberal arts education and the timeliness of career preparation. We want our students to be prepared for their first job . . . and for the long-term career decision-making that will follow. Today’s students want to know they will be ready for those first steps after graduation, whether that means heading to graduate or professional school or entering immediately into a career. That’s where the Albion Advantage’s career readiness focus is invaluable.

However, we know that many of the careers that our students will eventually go into do not even exist today.

That’s why we want to keep the strong liberal arts foundation so that they are able to adapt and pursue emerging career opportunities.

We will make a conscious effort to have each student explore various careers. Rather than waiting until their senior year to determine their career path, under the Albion Advantage, students will ponder who they are, what they value in life, and what they want to do, right from the beginning of their time on campus. We want to be able to give them the experiences over their four years here to enable them to choose wisely and be confident as they move forward with their careers after graduation. We believe our students will graduate from Albion and become successful on their own terms, satisfied with their life’s work and with the education they received from Albion. And they in turn will provide critical leadership in their communities and beyond, changing society for the better.

For the College, I am excited about having this new strategic focus. Faculty and staff will all work together, blending our knowledge and expertise in support of students and helping them reach their goals. The students are the ultimate beneficiaries, but the Albion Advantage reinforces for each of us as faculty or staff why we are here. The heightened sense of purpose that we will gain through the Albion Advantage is incredibly energizing, and I can’t wait to see it begin to play out starting next fall.

Recent surveys have shown that students are more focused than ever before on their future careers, notes President Donna Randall, and they expect their college education will help them achieve their goals. The Albion Advantage meets that need by integrating academic work, experiential learning, and the development of professional skills.

To learn more about the Albion Advantage, go to: www.albion.edu/ advantage.

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To help students succeed, our schools should focus more on collaboration and less on competition, asserts educator Linda Yonke, ’75.

By Marian Deegan

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A. CAMPBELL PHOTO

Talking about educational innovation is easy.

Making it happen is often far more difficult. Yet at suburban Chicago’s New Trier High School, innovation has become a way of life—resulting in improved student learning as well as national recognition as one of America’s top schools. Last fall, under the leadership of Linda Carmitchel Yonke, ’75, New Trier was named a national Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education, the latest in a long series of honors from organizations including the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

As superintendent of the New Trier Township High School District, Yonke holds strong opinions about the knowledge and skills required to successfully prepare students for careers in the 21st-century economy.

“New Trier has its roots in the progressive education movement, and a history of outstanding achievement that stretches back more than 100 years,” she says.

“Our academic records are highly visible, but our curriculum encompasses more subtle components of service and global awareness and interdisciplinary connections as well. Students need to understand that what they’re learning is important in a broader social context.”

In looking back over her own schooling, Yonke reflects that sometimes it’s the unexpected experiences that can influence an educational path. Students need to be open to those as well. During her first semester at Albion, simple class scheduling conflicts nudged her into courses in history and field hockey. The changes affected her professional evolution in ways she could not have predicted.

“I’d hated history in high school,” she says, “but my first history course at Albion was a revelation.” Yonke became a history major, and credits one of Albion’s legendary history professors for galvanizing her fascination with the power of the past to shape the future. “I took every course taught by Julian Rammelkamp,” she remembers. “He was fabulous. I still have notebooks filled with copious notes from his courses. We read 10-15 books a semester to gather varying historical perspectives, and his lectures made the connections that wove everything together.”

And field hockey? “I had never played a sport,” she laughs, “but Char Duff asked me to join the field hockey team, and I went on to be the high scorer in my senior year. At the time, I found it fun and physically challenging, but I have come to appreciate how much athletics teaches girls about working as a team, gaining confidence, and experiencing their body as an athlete rather than a sexualized object. It was an important experience for me.”

After a college internship at a law firm, Yonke decided to remain with her initial choice of a career in education. She taught English for 13 years while earning a master’s in language and literature. A national conference showcasing the Reagan administration’s educational reforms fired her desire for a leadership role.

As superintendent of New Trier Township High School District in suburban Chicago, Linda Yonke, ’75, maintains it can be misleading to apply business models to education. “Results [in education],” she says, “aren’t measured in profit and loss. For us, it’s about seeing the student outcomes. There’s an interesting dilemma in education.

Everyone has experienced education. Everyone has a certain understanding of what education is all about. But their understanding is limited by their own experiences.

We need to do a better job of communicating what teaching is, what learning is, and what the challenges are today.”

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The most effective learning environment is found in schools where standards are set high and where teachers collaborate to help every student achieve his or her best, Linda Yonke says.

“The idea of major educational change was very exciting to me,” Yonke recalls. “I thought I could have the most impact in an administrative role.” She became the first female administrator in her own former high school.

“There was certainly some resistance to a woman in the position,” she remembers, “but I knew that I could do the work. Within three years, I became the first woman principal. I think it’s difficult for young women today to understand what that was like, but I’m glad they don’t have to go through what we did.” She went on to earn a doctorate in educational administration at the University of Illinois.

Today, Yonke oversees the education of 4,150 students at New Trier. Curriculum is guided by a strategic plan that encourages a climate of exploration, global citizenship, a healthy, balanced life, community service, and ethical conduct.

“There’s no one ideal way for students to learn,” she says. Lecture-based teaching is not a particularly effective way to reach today’s students, she continues.

It’s essential to use multiple teaching methods— including writing, oral presentations, and hands-on use of technology—to make course material meaningful to the students. And, she believes, the most effective learning environment is found in schools where standards are set high and where teachers collaborate to help every student achieve his or her best.

“I think we should focus on moving everyone up.”

Beyond the curriculum, New Trier takes a unique approach to student counseling. Instead of traditional guidance counselors, the school assigns a group of about 25 students to a same-gender classroom teacher who serves as advisor to each of the students through graduation. Advisors help plan course work, conduct advisee home visits, and know each student’s outside interests. “It’s a wonderful way to ensure that an adult knows each student well and has a close connection with the student’s family and school life,” Yonke explains.

The district’s merit pay system for teachers is another distinctive feature. Though New Trier’s initial pay scale is based on years of experience and level of education, compensation advancement requires a rigorous peer review and development of defined master teacher skills. To qualify for the top level of compensation, teachers must reaffirm master teacher skills

24 | Io Triumphe!

and demonstrate leadership at the school or in the teaching profession as a whole. “Our teachers aren’t just accumulating credits, course work, or years of experience,” Yonke says. “They are developing their craft and leadership skills. Our system has helped us attract and retain dedicated, high-quality teachers.”

She has concerns about the trends she sees in current federal educational initiatives.

“I believe in local community responsibility for education,” she observes. “Funding is tied to establishing your priorities as a community. I think the founding fathers were very wise to make education the responsibility of local government. I’m fearful that a national curriculum overemphasizes the areas of English and math to the exclusion of other subjects. Learning is an interactive and socially dynamic process. Students need exposure to the arts, physical education, science, and social studies. I’m concerned about standardization of curriculum. . . . I worry that this approach will narrow the full curriculum that students need, and trend toward a standard of minimal competency instead of encouraging teachers to teach to the students’ highest capability.”

Yonke knows firsthand about the funding challenges of public education after the February defeat of a referendum that would have provided $174 million for school additions and improvements. “We hoped that the availability of [federal] stimulus funding might help convince people to vote for the referendum, but clearly it did not,” she says.

“Certainly the economy was a factor, but there were other concerns as well. It’s complicated. We are evaluating community opinion, and taking another look at how best to make needed changes.”

Through her leadership, Yonke is carving out her own role in the history of New Trier’s academic success. “It’s exciting to see the changes in education right now,” she says. “We are in a time of great opportunity and expanded availability of information. Science is giving us insight into how kids learn most effectively, and we are translating those insights into our curriculum. I’m looking forward to how things will play out. Our teachers invite me to classes, and I love to sit in and observe. The best part of my day is seeing our students engaged in innovative learning.”

Marian Deegan is a freelance writer from St. Paul, Minn.

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Black and White and Read All Over?

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Not so much any more.

By Matthew Roush, ’78

How to survive in today’s media marketplace has become the new riddle for newspapers today.

Journalist Matt Roush, ’78, says it’s time to embrace the changes made possible by digital technology.

D. TRUMPIE PHOTO

His own career is a case in point.

Spring-Summer 2010 | 25

Hello, my name is Matt, and I’m a recovering newspaperman.

I have lots of company. Soon enough, the media that haven’t already done so will lose their addiction to newsprint. They won’t have a choice.

When I took my first job at the Three Rivers Commercial shortly after my graduation from Albion College in 1978, they gave me a telephone, a manual typewriter, the last guy’s Rolodex, and said, “Go get ’em, kid.”

When I got my fifth journalism job in 1990—at a business publication, Crain’s Detroit Business—they gave me a telephone, a monochrome monitor unit that was an only slightly glorified typewriter, and the last guy’s Rolodex, and said, “Go get ’em, uh, 33-year-old.”

Not much had changed in those 12 years.

Journalistic research was still manual drudgery. You wanted court records, you had to stand in line at the courthouse. You wanted business records, you had to stand in line at the Corporation and Securities Bureau in Lansing.

But then all hell broke loose. We got LexisNexis so we could request legal and news searches on companies and individuals from digital databases. PCs came along, and Internet speeds increased. Courts began putting their records online. Newspapers and magazines put up back issues.

And everything changed. In our articles, the quality of the research, its breadth and depth, improved by orders of magnitude. It became much harder to lie to us. If there was a bankruptcy or a fraud charge in your background, we were going to find it. If you had left a trail of broken companies or irate customers, we would know.

Today it’s like that—only more so. An entire world of information about everyone I write about, covering technology in Michigan, is at my fingertips.

It’s called Google, and it’s free.

Ah, yes, free. That’s also the problem.

Because newspaper content is also now free online, and a significant chunk of the population has been born since 1990 and thus doesn’t remember a time without the Internet, for them it has always been so.

To say the newspaper industry is in crisis is a laughable understatement. Circulation is plummeting;

26 | Io Triumphe!

more and more newspapers are choosing to cut back or eliminate the printed product. Meanwhile, newspapers have not yet figured out how to monetize their millions of online eyeballs at the same profit margins that they enjoyed in print.

And so we have this death spiral of declining revenue, and a management response to cut the newsgathering staff, which makes the content less compelling, which results in fewer readers, which results in revenue declining still further.

Opinion media—including most blogs, talk radio, and much of cable TV news—have grown amid this decline, but most of their audiences remain small compared to the traditional media. (Even Fox News is viewed at most times by only about 1 million of the nearly 100 million homes where it is available. That’s far less than the former circulation of the Detroit newspapers.)

What has happened is the atomization of media, their splintering into thousands of fragments. They used to say that freedom of the press was reserved for those who owned one, but the Internet has broken down this barrier. Anyone with a computer and access to the Web can begin writing news—whatever they may believe the news to be—and reach a worldwide audience of well over a billion people. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits restrictions on the media, outside of libel and slander, so the lines have blurred still further between fact and opinion.

The Internet has forced all media into each other’s businesses. Newspaper Web sites now feature audio and video. TV stations now write stories like a newspaper for their Web sites. And at my employer, WWJ Newsradio 950, we’re moving into video. We’ve been in e-mail newsletters that are sort of like specialty newspapers since 2000. WWJ hired me in 2001 to create something called the Great Lakes Information Technology Report, an online newsletter covering what was then called the “technology industry” in Michigan—hardware, software, and IT and Internet consulting.

Over the years our coverage has broadened to include Michigan’s economic transformation away from heavy manufacturing and into the industries that the Michigan Economic Development Corp. is chasing—yes, still IT, but also the life sciences (including pharmaceutical research and production, medical device research and manufacturing, and health services), advanced manufacturing, and all things green (including wind power, solar power, advanced batteries, fuel cells, and advanced powertrains for vehicles). We’ve even changed the name, to the Great Lakes Innovation and Technology Report—a new focus with the same acronym, GLITR. We’ve grown from a few thousand readers a day to upwards of 50,000 people, a deeply committed and intelligent audience interested in news of Michigan’s ongoing attempts at economic rebirth in a knowledge-based economy.

I’d like to think GLITR is a poster child for where the media have to go. They need to give up attachments to dead technologies. The media need

to realize they’re in the information business, and all the ways they get it to people—print, radio, TV, Web—are just the trucks they send it in. You can’t get too attached to one of the trucks; remember, you’re in the information business, not the truck business.

Journalists today must feel comfortable in any medium, and have skills in Web, video, and audio production, along with the ability to write quickly and accurately on tight deadlines.

Way back in 1988, then-Saturday Night Live performer Al Franken did comedic coverage of the presidential campaign in New Hampshire as an early prototype of today’s media one-man band. He wore a satellite dish on his head, providing his own video uplink.

That’s pretty much what I do today, with cell phone-based Internet access in place of the dish. (As for Al Franken, he’s now a United States senator. Isn’t the media landscape an amazing place?)

Here’s what I tell young people about journalism: If you had your heart set on being a big-city newspaper columnist, I’m so sorry. But if you want to be a great reporter, there’s never been a better time. There’s an audience of a billion people out there crying out for useful information.

Spring-Summer 2010 | 27

D. TRUMPIE PHOTOS

Al u m n ! A s s o c ! at ! o n N e w s

A capacity crowd filled the science complex atrium for the Young Alumni Awards ceremony. Catherine Fontana, ’08, spoke on behalf of the award recipients.

Inaugural Young Alumni Awards Celebrate ‘Top 10 in 10’ Albion honored some of its many outstanding alumni April 23, as alumni, faculty, staff, family, and friends gathered for the inaugural “Top 10 in 10” Young Alumni Awards ceremony. The award, established as part of the College’s 175th anniversary celebration this year, recognizes noteworthy and distinctive achievements made by alumni who have graduated within the past 10 years. It will now be presented annually in the spring in conjunction with the Elkin R. Isaac Student Research Symposium.

Accepting on behalf of the 2010 honorees, Catherine Fontana noted the diversity of their achievements. “We are the future faces of medical advancement, economic stability, political activism, climate change solutions, and creative expression,” Fontana said.

“These are the futures that a liberal arts education must prepare students for, and we feel incredibly fortunate that Albion College unwaveringly supported this academic mission. . . . This is the education the world demands of us.”

—Jake Weber

2010 Young Alumni Awards Allison Moore Beers, ’01 Owner, Events North Traverse City, Michigan Catherine G. Fontana, ’08 Ph.D. Student, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies New Haven, Connecticut

The 2010 Young Alumni Award winners: (seated, left to right) Yukiko Tanaka, ’02, Allison Moore Beers, ’01, James Gignac, ’01, Levi Straight, ’04; (standing) Sam Hogg, ’05, Anna Stroud Gladstone, ’06, President Donna Randall, Catherine Fontana, ’08, Nick Whitney, ’00. Not pictured: Ligia Paina, ’05, Nate Sowa, ’03.

28 | Io Triumphe!

James P. Gignac, ’01 Midwest Director, Beyond Coal Campaign, Sierra Club Chicago, Illinois Anna Stroud Gladstone, ’06 D.O. Candidate, Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine East Lansing, Michigan

Samuel E. Hogg, ’05 Founder and CEO, GiftZip.com Lansing, Michigan Market Specialist, NextEnergy Detroit, Michigan Ligia Paina, ’05 Ph.D. Student, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland Nathaniel A. Sowa, ’03 M.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Levi J. Straight, ’04 Mathematics Department Chair and Instructional Support Teacher, Northwestern High School Baltimore, Maryland Yukiko Tanaka, ’02 Musician/Concert Pianist New York, New York Nicholas M. Whitney, ’00 Postdoctoral Scientist, Mote Marine Laboratory Sarasota, Florida

To learn more about the Top 10 or submit a nomination for the 2011 Young Alumni Awards, go to: albion.edu/alumni/awards/youngalumni.

U P C O M I NG E V ENTS Please join other Albion alumni and friends at the following activities: June 8

175th Anniversary Celebration, Metropolitan D.C. area alumni with President Randall

June 21-23

Grandparents College, Albion

July 12

Battle Creek Bombers Alumni Family Outing

July 19

Detroit Tigers Alumni Family Outing

July 21

Lansing Lugnuts Alumni Family Outing

July 23

West Michigan Whitecaps (Grand Rapids) Alumni Family Outing

July 24

Great Lakes Loons (Midland) Alumni Family Outing

July 28

Traverse City Beach Bums Alumni Family Outing

July 30

Chicago White Sox Alumni Family Outing

August 9

175th Anniversary Celebration, San Francisco area alumni with President Randall

August 10

175th Anniversary Celebration, Seattle area alumni with President Randall

August 23

First semester, 2010-11 classes begin, Albion

August 26

Opening Convocation/Stoffer Lecture by George Heartwell, ’71, Albion

September 10

Stockwell Society Brunch, Albion

September 13

175th Anniversary Celebration, New York area alumni with President Randall

September 18

175th Anniversary Celebration, Albion Rocks “The D,” Detroit Day of Service/Celebration

September 24-26

175th Grand Getaway, Alumni and Friends at Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island

October 1-2

Homecoming Weekend

October TBA

175th Anniversary Celebration, Los Angeles area alumni with President Randall

October TBA

175th Anniversary Celebration, San Diego area alumni with President Randall

October 12

175th Anniversary Celebration, Chicago area alumni

October 18

175th Anniversary Celebration, Denver area alumni with President Randall

October 30

Family/Community Day; Football: Albion vs. Adrian

November 8

175th Anniversary Celebration, Atlanta area alumni with President Randall

November 9

175th Anniversary Celebration, Charlotte, N.C. area alumni with President Randall

These dates are accurate at time of publication, with additional dates/activities pending. For updates and details, please check the Office of Alumni Engagement Web site, www.albion.edu/alumni, or call the office at 517/629-0448.

Spring-Summer 2010 | 29

A L u m n ! a s s o c ! at ! o n n e w s

ALBION COLLEGE

HomecominG 2010 Help us celebrate Albion’s proud heritage throughout Homecoming Weekend!

Below you’ll find the events you have always enjoyed at Homecoming, plus a new day and time for the Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremony, a religious heritage celebration, a parade reviving a tradition of Homecomings past, and the Family Tent with activities for all ages.

Friday, Oct. 1 10 a.m. Fourteenth Annual Briton Classic Golf Tournament, The Medalist Golf Club, Marshall Start off Homecoming Weekend with a great day of competition and camaraderie on the beautiful Medalist course. All alumni, parents, and friends are welcome. You can line up your own foursome or join with other players on the day of the event. More information is at: www.albion. edu/sports/britonclassic/.

Homecoming Parade, 1965

12 noon Distinguished Alumni Awards Ceremony, Science Complex Atrium A luncheon and awards ceremony will honor this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award recipients.

2010 Homecoming Award Recipients Albion College will honor the following individuals during Homecoming Weekend for their contributions to and passion for Albion College, their communities, and their professions.

3 p.m. 175th Anniversary Religious Heritage Celebration, Kellogg Center Come celebrate Albion’s rich Methodist heritage and its influence on today’s diversity.

Distinguished Alumni Award Forrest W. Heaton, ’60 Michael A. Jurasek, ’81 Walter L. Pomeroy, ’70 William H. Richardson, ’62 Jess Womack, ’65

6 p.m. Athletic Hall of Fame Dinner and Induction Ceremony, Baldwin Hall Help us honor this year’s Athletic Hall of Fame inductees for their contributions to athletics as students or alumni.

Individuals William M. Barker, ’90 (Baseball, Football) Steven J. Cohen, ’94 (Men’s Swimming) Victor S. Cuiss, ’51 (Men’s Golf) F. Scott Newsome, ’92 (Track) Patrick D. Slone, ’00 (Football, Track) Kathryn S. Snedeker, ’82 (Women’s Field Hockey, Softball) Tonya A. Taylor, ’96 (Women’s Soccer) Ronald A. Vanderlinden, ’78 (Baseball, Football) Teams 1978 Women’s Field Hockey Team 1979 Women’s Field Hockey Team 1989 Football Team

Albion College Archives Photos

Athletic Hall of Fame Inductees

Homecoming Queen and Court, 1950 30 | Io Triumphe!

Saturday, Oct. 2 8 a.m. Golden Years Breakfast, Bellemont Manor All alumni who graduated in 1960 or before are invited to this complimentary breakfast.

8:30 a.m. Alumni Band Rehearsal, Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium (west end zone) Join the British Eighth as an alumni band guest. For more information, please contact Sam McIlhagga, director of bands, at smcilhagga@ albion.edu.

11:15 a.m. 175th Anniversary Parade Join us for a parade through the heart of campus on Hannah Street as we celebrate 175 years of Albion College.

12 noon All-Class Picnic Luncheon for Alumni, Faculty, and Students, Lomas Fieldhouse, Dow Recreation and Wellness Center All alumni are invited to a pre-game luncheon. There will be reserved seating for reunion-year classes.

12-3 p.m. Family Tent, Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium Stop by the Family Tent, which will be hosted by the Alumni Association Board of Directors again this year. Your entire family is invited to enjoy free Albion goodies, snacks, a bounce house, sand art, tattoos, photo opportunities, and lots more!

1 p.m. Football vs. Kalamazoo College, Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium The halftime program will feature the Homecoming Court, the British Eighth, and the Alumni Band.

2010 Class Reunions

Open Houses/Receptions Please go to www.albion.edu/homecoming/ for more information about open houses and receptions. Departments, Institutes, fraternities, and sororities will be hosting Homecoming events during the day on Saturday.

Classes of 1950 and 1955 Baldwin Hall, Albion Coordinated by Albion College

Class of 1985 Davan’s, Albion Chair: Mary Brown Lenardson

Art Exhibit, Bobbitt Visual Arts Center Jill Mason, ’02: New Works

Class of 1960 Schuler’s Restaurant, Marshall Chairs: Forrest Heaton and Wanda Read Bartlett

Class of 1990 Belle Notte Ristorante, Jackson Chair: Colleen Pearl McDonald

Saturday Class Reunions For classes ending in “0” or “5,” 1950-2010. Reunion information will be posted on the Web as details become available: www.albion.edu/ homecoming/.

Class of 1965 Schuler’s Restaurant, Marshall Chairs: Charles and Kristine Puvogel Munson

Sunday, Oct. 3 11 a.m. Worship and Praise Service Wesley Chapel Sunday worship services at First United Methodist Church of Albion.

9 a.m., Contemporary. 11 a.m., Traditional. All are welcome. For more information, contact the church at 517/629-9425 or the Office of the Chaplain at 517/629-0492.

4 p.m. Homecoming Choir and Orchestra Concert Goodrich Chapel The Albion College Choir and Albion College Orchestra will present their traditional Homecoming Concert.

Class reunions are located in Albion, Battle Creek, Marshall, and Jackson this year.

Class of 1970 Ismon House, Albion Chairs: Rick Lange and William Rafaill Class of 1975 The Medalist Golf Club, Marshall Chairs: Lynn Stevenson Sztykiel and Amy Beechler Wolbert Class of 1980 Daryl’s Downtown, Jackson Chair: Meggen Urka Nagy

Class of 1995 Cereal City Grill, Holiday Inn, Battle Creek Chair: Nicole DuPraw Carter Class of 2000 Arcadia Ales, Battle Creek Chair: Herb Lentz Class of 2005 Cascarelli’s, Albion Chairs: Emily Giacona and Sam Hogg Class of 2010 Norton’s Country Lanes, Albion Chair: Allie Lewis

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Albion Rocks “The D” Saturday, Sept. 18, 2010 Metro Detroit Alumni Day of Service and Celebration: Bring your family and friends!

9 a.m.-3 p.m. Serve the Community

6-9 p.m. Celebrate with Friends

Participate in any one of a number of service projects throughout metro Detroit benefiting such organizations as North Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy, Turning Point, Forgotten Harvest, Gleaners, Cass Community Social Services, Crossroads, Detroit Public Schools, and others.

Join fellow alumni and families for an old-fashioned barbecue picnic, meet and greet President Donna Randall, and welcome a delegation visiting from Albion’s sister city, Noisy-le-Roi, France.

Enjoy the company of Albion College alumni from throughout the region!

Come for the entire day or just one activity. We will celebrate Albion’s 175th anniversary, contribute to the betterment of our region, and reconnect with Albion friends.

All participants will receive a commemorative t-shirt. There will be a nominal charge for the picnic. Complete details for specific service projects and the picnic will be available after June 15, 2010 with online registration at www.albion.edu/alumni/detroitserviceday. Some service projects will have capacity limits so register early! For further information, please e-mail alumniengagement @albion.edu or call the Office of Alumni Engagement at 517/629-0448.

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A Grand 175th Getaway Spend a glorious fall weekend at the Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Sept. 24-26!

All Albion alumni and friends are cordially invited to join President Randall at the Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Sept. 24-26, 2010 to celebrate Albion College’s 175th anniversary. Group activities will be featured throughout this family-friendly weekend, and Saturday night entertainment will be provided by talented Albion College students. This event has been made possible by the generosity and hospitality of trustee Dan Musser, ’86, Grand Hotel president.

Exclusively for Albion alumni, the room rate is $75.00 per person, per night during the weekend. The rate is subject to the hotel’s 19.5% added charge, Michigan’s 6% sales tax, and a one-time baggage handling fee of $7.50 per person. Included in the rate is a full breakfast and five-course dinner daily, and a reception Friday and Saturday evenings hosted by Dan Musser.

The Grand Hotel’s golf course, The Jewel.

Rooms are limited and may be reserved after June 15, 2010 by downloading the reservation form at www.albion.edu/ alumni/grandgetaway. Additional details are available on the Web site. For a printed copy of the reservation form or for further information, please call the Office of Alumni Engagement, 517/629-0448.

Photos courtesy of Grand Hotel

Don’t miss this extraordinary opportunity!

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NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID RAVENNA, MI PERMIT NO. 320

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Communications Office 611 E. Porter Street Albion, MI 49224-1831

Saluting Our Young Alumni Award Winners Albion’s first class of Young Alumni Award winners was honored April 23 during a special ceremony in the College’s science complex atrium. Each year the awards will recognize 10 alumni who have graduated in the past decade and have distinguished themselves through professional or community achievements. Pictured are: (front row, left to right) Allison Moore Beers, ’01, Levi Straight, ’04, Catherine Fontana, ’08; (second row) Sam Hogg, ’05, Yukiko Tanaka, ’02, Anna Stroud Gladstone, ’06, James Gignac, ’01, and Nick Whitney, ’00.

Honorees Ligia Paina, ’05, and Nate Sowa, ’03, were unable to be present for the ceremony.

More coverage of the awards program appears on page 28.

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