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On the importance of giving back (continued from p. 7) study of the creek. It covered everything from insect, plant and bacteria populations, to water flow and temperature, the dredging of the creek over the past 80 years, and current government policy and regulations concerning its zoning and use. The results from all of this analysis became the basis for the Rice Creek watershed management plan approved this past fall by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “Much of the technical water quality work for Rice Creek was completed by Albion College students,” says Rick Pierson, who coordinated the project with the Calhoun Conservation District. “This contribution to the development of the final watershed management plan was significant. The plan they helped develop will be used to manage the watershed and its resources over the next 10 years.” “There’s a motto for environmentalism, ‘think globally, act locally,’ and this was our chance for the students to do that,” says Rice Creek project director Doug White, who teaches biology at Albion and works with the College’s Institute for the Study of the Environment. White received a faculty/staff service award from Michigan Campus Compact for his leadership of the effort. “We became involved in a real-world project and were doing real work with our local environment.” White adds that the three-year project still represents “only a start . . . we’re still interested in working on the creek to implement projects that will improve it.” The Rice Creek project continues to serve as an educational resource for Albion College. Professors in biology and geology have developed class projects that build on the data gathered by the original study. “The Rice Creek project is definitely a highly beneficial educational endeavor, not only from the scientific aspect but almost as importantly for the servicelearning component,” says microbiology professor Luti
Erbeznik. “All [my] students . . . have expressed enthusiasm for the project [mainly due to] the fact that they are actually doing something that may make a difference in the real world.”
On the move: Mapping Albion’s ‘Boom, Bust, Recovery’ A book of photographic art, a 50-year examination of Kalamazoo River uses and abuses, a study of lead levels in the public schools, a look at racial segregation in the 1950s, an economic postmortem of the town’s once-largest employer—“Boom, Bust, Recovery: Explorations of Albion, Michigan—The Last Half Century” brought 11 students and their faculty mentors together this past summer to create these and other observations of Albion’s past and its prospects for the future. Developed by history professor Wesley Dick, the project received one of only two summer research grants awarded last year by the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), in conjunction with the Lancy Foundation. Other funding came from the College’s Foundation for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity. Dick, who has researched and taught classes on the city’s history for several years, notes that the “Boom, Bust, Recovery” project itself proved to be a community, as well as a College, endeavor. Not only did the students receive extensive assistance from the Albion Public Library Local History Room and the public historian, Leslie Dick, but, he says, “the project also depended on the generosity of Albion’s citizens who shared their lives with [us].” In November, several of the participating students shared their research at a town meeting. The program included a video presentation of interviews with area
residents. Recalls Dick, “When the audience broke into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of the video documentary, I knew that our work had resonated. One Albion citizen commented, ‘I felt like I understood Albion better. . . .’ I considered that a profound compliment for our project, our faculty and our students.” “It was an eye-opening experience to see how emotional many residents are about the town,” says junior Stephanie Pierce, who produced the documentary as her part of the project. A central issue for many of Pierce’s subjects was “the Malleable,” a foundry later operated by Harvard Industries that closed its doors in 2002 after 114 years in Albion. Pierce herself visited the foundry site and recalls, “I had to scrub for about 10 minutes to get the dust off [my feet]. . . . This made me think . . . if it is this hard to get 20 minutes of coal dust off of me, how hard is it to get 114 years of coal dust off of an entire town? This industry is stuck to Albion. How can we ‘clean it off’ and move on?” For his study, junior Nicholas Mourning gathered oral histories from African-American teachers. “Interviews that I thought would be an hour turned into three or four hours,” he says, as he became engrossed in his topic. Mourning talked with educators ranging from Albion’s first African-American principal (in the 1950s, of a segregated school) to teachers working today. “You really can’t separate education from the social and economic structure of the town,” he observes. Mourning was impressed with the teachers’ efforts to find ways to solve Albion’s problems, particularly in education and employment. Among the community residents who met with the students during weekly seminars were former factory workers, teachers and school board members, the president of the Albion NAACP, representatives from the business community and social services agencies, city government officials and journalists. Dick was recently notified that the College will receive another NCUR/Lancy grant to continue the research next summer.
Hometown hero: Dan Boggan, ’67 (continued from p. 4) “We all have to take responsibility for the errors in our nation’s history,” he says. “We have to be willing to sacrifice everything to correct them.” Daniel Boggan, Jr. earned his B.A. in history from Albion College in 1967 and an M.S.W. in social policy from the University of Michigan in 1968. He has received numerous awards for leadership and service throughout a distinguished career. Boggan has been
vice chancellor of business and administrative services at the University of California-Berkeley, city manager for the city of Berkeley and chief operating officer for the NCAA. He has served on many corporate and nonprofit boards, and, in 1999, as keynote speaker for the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday celebration in Albion, he established the Daniel Boggan, Sr. and Robert Holland, Sr., African American Community Fund.
Currently he is semi-retired, working as director of business development for an investment banking firm in Oakland, Calif. Recipient of both the Distinguished Alumni Award and an honorary doctor of public service degree from Albion, he is a College trustee and chairs the board’s Committee on Buildings and Grounds. In the Albion community, he serves on the advisory committee for Kids ‘N’ Stuff.
Hometown hero: Jess Womack, ’65 (continued from p. 5) That’s essential, he believes, for a more tolerant society. “As a nation, we have not come as far as we need to in terms of racial equality,” he maintains, adding, “I hold out great hope that society will improve. America’s great fault line is racial division, but the country has shown great capacity for reassessing the meaning of race. We need only look at the documentation of the human genome to be reminded once again that race is of little or no consequence as a means of
differentiating human beings. That fact should allow this nation to more positively assess how we address that issue.” Womack likes to tell young people, “There’s a big world of opportunity available. Stretch your imagination.” Jess Womack received his B.A. in biology from Albion College in 1965 and his J.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1973, after serving in the
Peace Corps and the U.S. Army. He has worked as an attorney with Ford Motor Co. and the ARCO Chemical Co., which at the time was a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield, and he is currently associate general counsel for the Los Angeles Unified School District, California. Womack serves on many professional and civic boards, including the Albion College Board of Trustees. In the spring, he will also chair a newly formed board committee on community relations.