Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

AUTUMN 2022

BALL IS LIFE

Men’s basketball coach Matt Langel, in depth P.8

Feature

A conversation about higher education P.22 Business

Taking Initiative: alumni-created products P.34 The big Question

Looking farther into the universe P.20

look Lacrosse was one of the first women’s varsity programs established at Colgate in the early 1970s. The University is celebrating the 50th anniversary of women’s athletics this year. Read more about the history of Colgate women in sports on p. 14, and let us know if you can identify the who/what/ where in this archival photo.

Read this issue and all previous issues at colgate.edu/magazine.

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special collections and university archives

Contents

AUTUMN 2022 President’s Message

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letters

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Voices

Discover

Language of the Common Man For English speakers, there are no truly gender-neutral words, according to April Bailey ’14.

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Ball Is Life Men’s Basketball Head Coach Matt Langel is at home on Cotterell Court and in Hamilton, N.Y.

A Higher Education Conversation Alumni who work in academic administration navigate affordability, access, mental health, and the value of the liberal arts.

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Scene

Colgate News 10

Healing the Connection Between People and Planet

Taking Initiative These entrepreneurs had enough chutzpah to believe in their products and build successful businesses.

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Ecopsychologist Jeanine Canty ’92 unpacks the relationship between collective narcissism and environmental damage.

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Ask a Professor

How Does the Webb Telescope Enable Us to See Farther Into the History of the Universe?

20 To me, it has always been both a privilege and an honor to take care of people.

Dr. Merrill Miller, p. 16

Black Infants Are Receiving Lower Quality Care. Why? Erika Miles ’92 Edwards researches the causes and consequences.

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Balu Organics

The Man Behind the Curtain With the Wizard of Oz as her guide, Professor CJ Hauser explores the technicolor promises of the American dream.

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Vice President for Communications L. Hazel Jack Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Senior Director, Communications and Strategic Initiatives Mark Walden Senior Art Director Karen Luciani University Photographer Mark DiOrio

DJ duo Anden

Endeavor

Listen Up

Gordon Blaine Hancock, p. 79

The DJ duo Anden — Tom Cuppernull ’11 and brother Pete — released their first full-length album and have been touring North America.

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Colgate Magazine Volume LII Number 1

More than a decade into her writing career, Jennifer E. Smith ’03 has arrived.

Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University.

Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407

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She’s Documenting the Human Experience Alumni News

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It’s a Piece of Cake For Brenda Sabbag ’83, running a bakery comes naturally.

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Cover: Illustration of Matt Langel, head coach of men’s basketball, by Nigel Buchanan

Contributors: Omar Ricardo Aquije, athletics communications manager; Kelli Ariel, web manager; Ben Badua, campaign communications director; Daniel DeVries, senior director, communications and media relations; Jordan Doroshenko, director, athletic communications; Garrett Mutz, graphic designer; Brian Ness, University video producer; Kristin Putman, senior social media strategist Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt.

Beating the Odds

Films by Xan Parker ’92 have included topics like poverty, wildfire devastation, and most recently, reparations for Black citizens.

Communications Specialist Kathy Jipson

Salmagundi

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Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Email: alumnirecords@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7453 Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the University, the publishers, or the editors. Colgate University does not discriminate in its programs and activities because of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. For inquiries regarding the University’s non‑discrimination policies, contact Tamala Flack, Title IX coordinator and equity and diversity officer, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

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President’s Message

An Update on Colgate’s Third Century

FY 2021–22 Update The Third-Century Plan has, as its foundation, a belief that the residential liberal arts college form offers to students among the strongest forms of education available, matched with the belief that Colgate can offer this form of education in ways both unique and compelling. It also starts with the assumption that Colgate, should it stay focused on its core mission and willing to address and correct any areas of its program that are not excellent, can reasonably assume that it can be the most important liberal arts college in the nation.

As always, the Plan focuses on four pillars of focus and activity. These are: I. Attracting and Supporting Outstanding Students, Faculty, and Staff II. Strengthening the University’s Academic Enterprise III. Enriching the Student Experience IV. Improving the Campus and Its Environs Actions taken within each of these areas below are offered in detail in the update, but with highlights below.

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Students Colgate launched and then expanded the Colgate Commitment during this reporting period, removing federal student loans from the financial aid packages of families with incomes of $150,000 or less. The Colgate Commitment also established that students from families with incomes less than $80,000 per year are not obligated to pay tuition, and it sets an income-based tuition cap for families earning between $80,000 and $150,000 per year.

Note: Following the publication of this annual update, the University was able to announce an expansion of the commitment for the upcoming academic year, expanding no-loan coverage to students with family incomes up to $175,000 and providing textbook funds for aided students. This is due, in part, to a $25 million fundraising challenge that is nearing a successful conclusion.

For more information, visit thirdcentury. colgate.edu

mark diorio

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his fall, Colgate University published its annual Third-Century Plan update. This update has been shared with the Board of Trustees and Alumni Council as well as campus committees and bodies. I would like to take this opportunity to highlight for the readers of Colgate Magazine the major points of this report.

Great institutions plan for long periods of time, and they remain willing to — step-by-step — reach their chosen ends. Colgate must be such an institution. We must continually seek to serve our academic mission and our national reach by enhancing our academic programs, enriching the student experience, attracting the best and brightest, and stewarding our beautiful campus. This is the work of decades and generations, and it requires persistence and flexibility. It also requires both boldness and conviction.

The report, summarized here and posted in its entirety at thirdcentury.colgate.edu, shows these principles in action.

I. Attracting and Supporting Outstanding Students, Faculty, and Staff

In a further effort to attract the brightest students to the institution, Colgate completed the first year of its QuestBridge partnership, which has had a significant impact on inquiries, applications, and the diversity of the applicant pool. First@Colgate also wrapped up its inaugural year, supporting all first-generation students with an intentional program, while securing endowment support for its director and programmatic efforts.

Taken together, these efforts have helped to propel a 147.8% increase in applications during the past two years. The Office of Admission will update its strategic plan in the year ahead to ensure that the current number of applications (more than 20,000 applications for the Class of 2026) becomes the norm, allowing Colgate the opportunity to select among the nation’s most compelling and promising students.

Around campus, 25 students were awarded graduate school application funds, made possible by a gift from Giovanni ’94 and Maree Cutaia to support minority and first-generation post-degree plans.

Faculty Through gifts from alumni, Colgate has established a series of new endowed faculty chairs in disciplines from economics to environmental studies to arts and innovation. In the year ahead, fundraising will continue to add even more endowed chairs to our faculty ranks.

We will develop more robust faculty orientation and multiyear mentoring plans, and we will find new ways to collect data on equity in faculty workloads, including teaching and service in all its various forms.

Junior faculty members at Colgate are now enjoying a pre-tenure leave program that allows our “tenure stream” faculty members a leave pattern seen only at the leading research universities. This program will allow our newest faculty members sufficient time to develop their research programs and their teaching practices. Colgate is already seeing the benefit of such a program in its faculty hiring and retention.

During the last fiscal year, the University also marked the third anniversary of its on-campus membership in the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, which brings leading, diverse scholars to liberal arts colleges. Colgate hired 16 tenure-stream faculty members; more than half are female, and seven increase the diversity of our faculty via self-reported categories. Four hires were achieved by converting visiting assistant professor positions to permanent faculty posts to support departments with high enrollment demands.

Staff Colgate staff members are vital to the academic and student-life mission of the University. During the past year, the University created a Staff Advisory Committee, engaging in the extensive process of developing bylaws and holding elections for membership, which now includes representatives from all divisions.

Colgate, like all employers, is responding in real time to the unprecedented labor market competition.

Among our efforts, we have augmented our staff compensation budget by more than $1 million during the last fiscal year. We assessed compensation

for hourly employees and increased hourly wages accordingly, and we look forward to conducting a similar review for salaried employees in the year to come. Meanwhile, all employees have benefited from the extension of our flexible summer hours program, developed during the pandemic, given its value for staff members even outside of the pandemic context.

Great institutions plan for long periods of time, and they remain willing to — step-by-step — reach their chosen ends.

Ensuring Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion The last fiscal year was an active one as we pursued efforts to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on campus. Colgate was able to expand the size of the Board of Trustees in order to diversify its membership in a timelier fashion; this work was done in concert with the newly created ad hoc board DEI Committee.

On campus, we consolidated the offices of Equity and Diversity, EEOAC, Title IX, and the vice president for equity and inclusion to improve operations and access to faculty and staff members and students — and we welcomed Renee Madison, our new vice president for equity and inclusion, who engaged in a listening tour to build relationships in service of infusing DEI values across the campus.

II. Strengthening the University’s Academic Enterprise Launching New Multidisciplinary Academic Initiatives In anticipation of groundbreaking for the Benton Center for Creativity and Innovation, held in September of this year, the University spent 2021–22 engaged in a construction-documents design phase. This building, which will provide a new home for two of the fastestgrowing academic programs on campus — computer science and film and media studies — forms the anchor of the new Middle Campus. Utilities relocation for this intentional bridge between upper and lower campuses began in June 2022 and continued into early fall to prepare the site.

All of this activity took place concurrently with renovations to create the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Center at Olin Hall. Olin Hall will be expanded to house the Ho Center, and the entire building — Colgate’s largest academic building — will be fully renovated to meet the needs of modern science.

As we look forward to the creation of new facilities, we also anticipate the launch of new programmatic efforts. In 2021–22, a faculty working group completed a framework document for a public affairs and policy research initiative, detailing plans for a data center, a policy research fund to support student and faculty research, and outward-facing programs to amplify policy issues on campus. This document has been shared with the Board of Trustees and with faculty members, and a call was made to the faculty for proposals in an initial round of policy research, a pilot program supported by the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty.

III. Enriching the Student Experience Residential and Social Life The Third-Century Plan touches every part of campus, including aspects of the mission that take place outside Autumn 2022

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Strengthening Colgate’s Division I Athletics Program Reid Athletics Center — designed and built in another era, when the University was half its current size — is on its way to a transformative renovation. The University completed conceptual designs that reimagine the center, and we secured a lead gift for the renovation from Chase ’76 and Wendy Carey P’12,’13 and their children, Steve ’12 and Tara ’13. Next steps for the year ahead include initiating schematic designs for Reid, then transitioning into design development while fundraising continues.

To further the excellence available to our studentathletes, Colgate also completed an assessment of its entire Division I program, and the year ahead will see continued refining of the Third-Century Athletics Plan.

IV. Improving the Campus and Its Environs Colgate’s energy on campus has been mirrored in its pursuit of projects that benefit the Hamilton community.

During the last year, Colgate constructed and sold more than 20 homes in the Chenango Hill subdivision, adjoining the Five Trees development, addressing the Third-Century Plan assertion that Colgate needs

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In Conclusion This is our Third-Century vision, following 12 months of determined action. It reflects the work of faculty and staff members, students, alumni, parents, and friends. It has relied on endowment income, leadership philanthropy, and thousands of gifts to the Colgate Fund. True to the Plan itself, the efforts and resources we extended in the 2021–22 academic year will continue as our legacy for generations to come. And this is just the beginning.

— Brian W. Casey

mark diorio

classrooms and labs. Advancing both the physical and programmatic development of Upper Campus and the Residential Commons System, Colgate carried on with long-term plans for a fifth Residential Commons to replace both Gate House and 113 Broad Street.

The University secured a $10 million gift from trustee emeritus Robert Fox ’59, GP’23,’25 to build Fox Hall, the first residence hall of the fifth Residential Commons.

Infrastructure planning continues with Robert A.M. Stern architects, as does refining of fifth Residential Commons plans, with modifications to the original four Residential Commons.

Turning to Lower Campus, we considered first steps to significantly improve housing and social spaces for juniors and seniors throughout many years.

to develop a variety of housing stock options that are affordable for faculty and staff members from across salary ranges.

We also pursued further renovations at the Chenango Nursery School, investing in the families who call Hamilton home.

Renovations to Seven Oaks Clubhouse and Golf Course were completed in summer 2022, as were renovations to Hotel One75 (formerly the Wendt University Inn), with the hotel open to receive guests as of mid-August. Meanwhile, University representatives met regularly with the village of Hamilton Planning Board throughout the year to share concept drawings for 18–22 Utica development, and we are pursuing next steps to add to the overall housing inventory in the village, including 39 apartments in this location.

Colgate’s commitment to stewarding campus and its environs is of mutual benefit to the University and the surrounding community. It is yet another point of connection between the institution and its locale. To that end, in 2021–22, Colgate signed the Second Nature Climate Commitment, approved a plan to continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on campus, and took first steps to plan for resilience in preparation for a changing climate. We continued to fund sustainability projects through the Green Revolving Loan Fund, which seeds savings, derived from past projects, into new efforts to reduce Colgate’s environmental impact.

As Middle Campus has taken shape, moving from planning documents to design phase to physical structures, we have received preliminary sketches/ designs and plans to manage water flow of the ravine, which leads to Taylor Lake and the floodplain in Lower Campus. And, as Colgate Magazine readers will know from our spring 2022 issue, the University is making historic efforts to restore both Willow Path and Oak Drive — extending these iconic allées to achieve the vision of their original designers.

Letters

Chenan-gri-la In the last issue, we offered “13 Ways to Find Summer Fun in Madison County” (p. 97). Online, readers weighed in and added their favorites: I can’t think of anything much better than sitting on a deck on Lake Moraine with a big coffee and a line in the water in the morning.

Derek Peplau ’95 I spent the summer of my junior year working in the chemistry lab, and I loved spending the weekends taking long bike rides on back roads. So beautiful and peaceful.

Lydia McNally ’84 Danenberg The correct answer is playing Seven Oaks Golf Club.

Jamie Foley ’94

Amplifying Voices Powerful article, LeRoy Potts Jr. ’85 (“Owning Up to the Past and Fixing the Present,” summer 2022, p. 22). Thank you for sharing. So proud of you and the efforts you have made to amplify the voices and stories of those who are sometimes voiceless and without an advocate.

Veronica McFall ’89 Thank you for your compassion and important work. Through a deeper understanding of our own histories and struggles, we can empathize with the plight of others, fear less, and advocate for the human rights policies needed by all.

Amy Silva ’79

Exemplary Leadership Aldrin [Rafael Bonilla ’92], congratulations and best wishes in leading the COVID Task Force (“On Task,” summer 2022, p. 86).

What a great honor, recognizing your leadership skills and keen organizational insights, all in a voluntary capacity. This country needs more people and leaders such as you.

Mark L. Krinsky ’67 A Teacher for Teachers Responses to “Leading ‘a Friendly Revolution’: James E. Clarke,” summer 2022, p. 67: All I ever wanted to do was teach, but at the time, there was only a secondary education teaching program. He sat with me and the course catalog, and we put together courses to make my own major. It became a formal major by my senior year. His commitment to teach outside-of-the-box approaches to prospective teachers inspired many to become great teachers Heather Lubking ’84 Brown Had him as my freshman seminar professor and still recall the dinners at his house for our class. What an intro to the “small liberal-arts college” experience.

Goldie Blumenstyk ’79

Larger Than Life I was quite moved when reading the nice memorial regarding Brad Ashford ’71 (“The Independent-Minded Moderate,” summer 2022, p.

61). My memory of the young Brad was quite vivid. In early September 1967, I had just been dropped off by my dad at the school’s orientation, as he needed to leave early to head back for a six-hour trip to central Massachusetts. I was

unpacking my stuff in Dodge Hall, not knowing a soul, except for one of my new roommates....

This very large man approached me with very large hands, and proceeded to shake my much smaller hand, and, with a large smile and big voice, boomed out, “Hi there, I am Brad Ashford and hail from the great state of Nebraska!” I felt better right away! Now [how] hard would it be to adjust to this new, foreign school, when greeted by such a terrific guy? As the four years went by, at times, we were in the same classes, [and] at times we were not. However, anytime I had the occasion to see Brad in those years, he always had [a] huge smile and that warm personality. I was not surprised at all reading about his many successes after he graduated, and his eventual climb to become a congressman.

Alan Rome ’71

Faithful Alumnus I am writing to thank you, profoundly, for your “Acts of Faith” article (spring 2022, p.

48) issue. I came to Colgate in the fall of 1957 to major in history; I graduated in 1961 with a major in philosophy-religion.

That department opened my eyes to whole new vistas. The University chaplain in those days was Robert V. Smith, and the associate chaplain was Donald L. Berry. Those two men would be absolutely delighted to see how opportunities for the development/deepening of faith have expanded at this time. Ken Morgan, the Chapel House “guru,” would join in that delight. Bob Smith and Don Berry were instrumental in urging me to go to graduate theological school and helped me to be accepted into Yale Divinity School. Your article brought back many memories, and continuing gratitude to Colgate for a truly meaningful education.

Ross B. Jackson ’61 A Transformative President President Brian Casey’s

snapshot message (“The Campaign for the Third Century,” spring 2022, p. 8) is great, but everyone has got to hear him in person. Sheri and I heard Brian at the Presidents’ Club dinner in Hamilton and again in the chapel on reunion weekend. Inspirational! When our 50th Reunion Committee first met with Brian on April 1, 2017, to begin planning our celebration. I sensed then and firmly believe now that his will be a transformative presidency, leading to an extraordinary advance for Colgate. Brian Casey has Colgate leading a national conversation. My professional and personal life trajectory was put on the high road by Colgate faculty: Hartshorne, Terrell, Wardwell, and Stan, in particular. What reinvigorates and excites me in 2022 is the cadre of Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative faculty — Carrie Keating, Rebecca Shiner, Bruce Hansen, Ken Belanger, and others — who are the advance element of the Third Century at Colgate. Brian Casey is investing wisely in our faculty, as well as in our students, our athletics programs, and in the architecture of our beautiful campus. That night in 2017, he talked about the beauty of the architecture and a plan for elaborating that was clearly emerging. I look back 100 years to when Harry Emerson Fosdick’s (Class of 1900) sermons and books impacted the world; then I look ahead 100 years and am supremely confident that Brian Casey’s presidency will make a BIG, and a good, difference. Fosdick’s 1930 hymn is sung in the chapel — and around the world! Now is the time for new praises to be sung on campus, and around the world!

James Campbell Quick ’68

To share your thoughts on this issue, email magazine@colgate.edu, or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

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Voices

profile

Ball Is Life Head Coach Matt Langel has turned Colgate Men’s Basketball into a competitive program that’s gained national attention.

Meanwhile, he’s raising his family in Hamilton, where he’s made his home.

walked into the Reid Athletic Center and approached an intimidatingly big maroon door with the Colgate basketball logo in the middle and a sign that read, “Matt Langel.” This door is different from the other coaches’ doors. You can’t see through it, and what’s beyond seems more daunting than the others. I paced around outside, watching my phone impatiently for it to be 11 a.m. — nervous, because Matt Langel is a big deal.

With three Patriot League Coach of the Year awards and three NCAA tournament appearances, Langel has elevated Colgate Men’s Basketball in his 12 seasons as head coach. He has led the Raiders to five

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straight Patriot League championship game appearances, three regular season championships, and coached two Patriot League players of the year. He has also been recognized by college basketball’s top analysts as one of America’s most underrated coaches as well as a top rising coach in the nation. “It’s not easy to sustain success at a mid-major program in upstate New York, but Langel has made it look easy,” college basketball insider Jon Rothstein wrote in an article on College Hoops Today.

When I walked into Langel’s office, he stuck out his hand, and I greeted him with a casual handshake. A former basketball player himself, he stands tall at 6 feet, 5

inches, with a commanding frame. His black hair with streaks of gray matched the black vest he wore with black pants. He smiled with half of his mouth and spoke with ease.

Langel’s office is covered with basketball memorabilia. There are basketballs with all of his accolades, including his most recent — the ball commemorating his 166th career win, which made him the winningest coach in Colgate program history. On the wall to his right, there are black and white photos of his three kids — Luke, Jackson, and Logan — all playing basketball. Next to those are posters that display the words: Think, Care, and Believe. On Langel’s right are colorful pictures of him and his team; photos of him hugging coaches, players, and family during and after games.

Langel grew up in Moorestown, N.J., where he played soccer, baseball, and golf, in addition to basketball. It wasn’t until middle school that he really started to love basketball and think about playing in college.

“There was so much competition being so close to Philadelphia,” he says. One of those competitors was right across the bridge, a young kid from Lower Merion, Pa., by the name of Kobe Bryant.

Langel’s father was an attorney at a large firm in Philadelphia, and he happened to represent some of the athletes in the area, including Ron Jaworski, Doug Collins, and Bob Froese. Langel often had playdates with their kids: “We grew up with the perspective of sports not just being fans, but it being someone’s life.”

He studied at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with a concentration in management. On the basketball court, he played under legendary coach Fran Dunphy.

The team went from 12–14 his first year to a combined 42–14 in regular season play and 17–1 in Ivy League competition his junior and senior years, when they made the NCAA Tournament. “We embraced the expectations and culture of how Penn needs to be at the top,” Langel says. “I was lucky to be with other guys who were doing that, and, eventually, you look up and you’re the oldest in the Ivy League, considered one of the best players, and having an undefeated season. It was a pretty cool process.”

Langel was a sharpshooter with good length, and he had a great understanding and joy for the game, according to Dunphy.

“He wasn’t the most outgoing guy, but his basketball spoke volumes,” Dunphy says.

Langel ended his UPenn career as a member of the program’s 1,000-point club and fourth in three pointers.

He met his wife, Tara, at UPenn when she was a first-year member of the women’s basketball team and he was a senior. It wasn’t Illustration by Nigel Buchanan

until the spring of Tara’s junior year that they started dating when he was playing overseas.

After Tara’s graduation, she traveled with him as he competed in Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

When Langel started playing in Europe, he was excited to experience parts of the world he’d never seen before. At the same time, he found himself in a professional environment that was strictly basketball driven, and most players were more focused on themselves.

“It’s a job,” he says. “Like any industry, they’re trying to advance their careers.”

He also tried out for a few NBA squads, including the Seattle SuperSonics and his hometown 76ers, which didn’t last very long, he admits. “It gives me a lot of perspective on life and basketball.” In thinking about his subsequent move, he says, “I knew basketball was hard work, but I enjoyed it the whole time. So whatever I was going to do next, I didn’t want that to change.”

UPenn’s Dunphy gave Langel his first opportunity to coach, and in those two years, the Quakers made two NCAA Tournament appearances. In 2006 Dunphy decided to leave the Ivy League and coach the Temple Owls. “It was a daunting test,” Dunphy says. “To go to a totally different league, environment, mission of the institution.

I needed people I trusted.” So he brought Langel and his staff along with him.

Dunphy’s impact on Langel’s career left the younger coach in a good position: “Because of all the successes the program had, probably very little of which had to do with me, I got a chance to come to Colgate and coach,” Langel says. On April 28, 2011, he was introduced as the head coach of the Colgate Men’s Basketball team. He was chosen from more than 100 candidates. Before Langel, Colgate Basketball had only three winning seasons in the previous 16 years. For his first six years, things remained the same. But Langel started to get his bearings, and the University started to establish a winning culture. “We had leadership from the presidential level and the athletics directors who said they really believe in what the men’s basketball team is doing.”

In listening to Langel speak, you can tell how hard he works. “You need to be constantly working to do better, to improve, and if I model that and our staff is modeling that, we’re able to bring in guys with that mindset.”

He has brought in players who match his mentality because he pours effort into recruiting them. “You have to work hard to find the right fits,” he says. One of Langel’s biggest Colgate recruits was guard Jordan Burns ’21 in 2017. Langel remembers going to recruit at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament in Las Vegas, where “there [were] so many teams … platinum, gold,

silver, and bronze [divisions].” Burns was in the copper division, playing in a gym off-site. “Normally they have NCAA coaches and seating where nobody else can sit, and there’s signage all over the place,” Langel says. “There was none of that. I’m standing there, watching, and he’s dominating. And I’m looking around and thinking, ‘This is like America’s Funniest Home Videos, and somebody’s pranking me. This kid might actually have a chance.’”

Langel brought Burns and his family to Colgate to offer him a scholarship. Four years later, Jordan Burns ended his career with the fifth-most points in Colgate history, most assists, fifth-most three-pointers, and he was named the 2021 Patriot League Player of the Year.

When Coach Langel is on the court, he is locked in. Take the Raiders game against American University in late February, for example: As the buzzer sounded and the game started, Langel had his arms crossed.

He simply observed when the Raiders were on offense. He had no reaction to a Tucker Richardson ’23 three pointer or an and-one from Keegan Records ’23. Langel just took a slight glance at the scoreboard and squirted a sip of water in the side of his mouth. The only time he made an outward reaction was when something went wrong. At one point, he fell to the ground in frustration as Nelly Cummings ’22 made a bad turnover, immediately calling down the bench for a substitution.

Occasionally, he yelled “HANDS” and “FILL” on defense, clapping his hands afterward.

He gave low fives when players substituted out, but Langel didn’t interact much with his players. During timeouts, he went straight to his assistant coaches with the white board and then over to the team for a brief moment.

Off the court, he has a different relationship with his players. “I think, most importantly, they believe that I care about them — not just as a basketball player and how they played,” Langel says. “Much like my own family, I care about their wellbeing, their growth, their development, their education, what’s next in their life.

Our obligation is always to the team first, but we want to help them succeed.” He likes teaching young people how to think critically, form opinions, and figure out who they’re going to be. Langel says the hardest part about his job is helping student-athletes achieve their dreams, goals, and potential, while in an industry that is judged on the simple result of wins and losses.

“On the court, coach is someone I trust to put me and the team in the right positions to succeed,” Richardson says. “Off the court, coach is a mentor and someone who gives incredible life advice. The one rule in our

program is ‘Do the right thing,’ and I think that sums up his approach to basketball and life.”

Dunphy weighs in: “[What] sets him apart is he really gets what makes a young person tick. He understands how to read people, how to get along with them, and the empathy that’s needed to be a part of a team.”

Langel has made a name for himself on the national scale. When Colgate beat Syracuse this past season for the first time in 60 years, the Twitter buzz included: “[This] is a good time to remind people that Matt Langel is the best coach in the country that no one ever talks about. Built a program from the ground up there and does nothing but win,” Sports Illustrated writer Kevin Sweeney tweeted. ESPN’s Dick Vitale wrote: “Wow the Red Raiders r [sic] going to have a solid year as Coach Matt Langel has done an excellent job in his 11 yrs.” When I read these to Langel, he laughed uncomfortably.

“It’s nice for the program, the players, and our institution when we’re getting that recognition, because it shines a bit of light on what a special place Colgate is,” he said, not wanting the personal recognition.

Langel has proven that he could be a head coach at a top school in the nation, and there’s scuttlebutt in the college basketball world that he might jump ship to coach at a school in a better conference. “The team, the program, and the individuals within the program are extremely important to me,” he emphasizes. “I don’t look at my career like, ‘What’s the next opportunity?’”

Hamilton is a special place to Matt Langel.

It’s where he’s raised his kids, turned a mediocre program into a competitive one, and where he’s made his home. He has his family, fellow coaches, students, and the village community members, who all mean more than any win or accolade. For that reason, Langel is not leaving any time soon.

After signing a contract extension through 2027 back in 2019, he recently extended his stay in Hamilton by three more years, committing to the University through 2030.

He says, “This is a great place to be.”

— Cam Cobey ’22 graduated with a degree in economics and English.

He was a sports editor for the Maroon-News and contributed more than 50 articles during his four years. He is an aspiring sports journalist with works published on NBA.com and multiple FanSided properties.

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CAMPUS LIFE | ART | ATHLETICS | INITIATIVES | CULTURE | GLOBAL REACH

SCENE Relics of a Bygone Era

C

olgate is one of only approximately 1,000 federal government records depositories, which are mostly public and college libraries. As such, its collection of government records, stored in Case Library, has been an invaluable source of information for students and faculty members conducting research.

But these days, not all of those records are easily accessible.

In addition to traditional paper records, starting in 1970, the University began to amass a collection of microfiche records — small transparent plastic cards, each holding dozens of shrunken documents — designed to be read in special viewers that magnified each miniature record and enabled researchers to make full-sized copies.

The eventual development of vast and inexpensive digital storage easily supplanted microfiche technology for records management, and the microfiche records were discontinued in 2021. What remained at Colgate was the University’s collection of more than 1.5 million records on those microfiche cards.

Those files became relics of a bygone era of records management, explains Professor of University Libraries and Head of Research and Instruction Joshua Finnell. But instead of simply disposing of them, the University recently donated

10 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

documents available and accessible to researchers around the world.”

facts of record: ⚫ Colgate first became a federal records depository on Feb. 7, 1902. ⚫ Most of the collection is composed of transcripts from congressional meetings, hearings, and various annual reports from federal agencies. ⚫ Records on the microfiche also included NASA files and previously secret documents and official correspondence dating back to the Cuban Missile crisis.

⚫ Some of the oldest paper records on file in the depository are bound in sheep leather. ⚫ The microfiche collection was stored in 12 massive 500-pound cabinets on the third floor of the library. They were located next to the Blackmore Media Center behind the main stairwell. ⚫ During renovations of Case Library in 2004, the thirdfloor section of the building that stored the records was constructed with additional support to bear the records’ weight.

— Dan DeVries

mark diorio (2)

In Case

its entire microfiche collection to the Internet Archive for digitization and long-term storage — effectively opening up global access to many records that were previously only available on campus.

“The history and development of microformats (film and fiche) is a fascinating one, from their role in sending secret messages via carrier pigeon during the FrancoPrussian war in the 1870s to their central role in preserving the nation’s newspapers in the 1930s,” Finnell explains.

“Many of the databases we have come to take for granted were originally constructed from digitizing microfilm collections.

This is an exciting partnership with the Internet Archive that will ultimately make these

Solomon Tesfaye ’15 (right) talks with novelist Carrie Brown.

13 bits 1 Joe Castiglione ’68 has been recognized for being the Red Sox broadcaster for 40 seasons.

2 Associate Head Cross Country and Assistant Track Coach Kimberly Keenan-Kirkpatrick was the head manager for the U.S. Women’s Track and Field team in the 2022 World Outdoor Championships.

3 Event

Pick Up Your Pens

andrew daddio

M

ore than 110 aspiring and published authors — alumni, parents, students, employees, local residents, and visitors from across the country — were on campus in June for the 27th annual Colgate Writers Conference. The event was spearheaded by Associate Professor of English Jennifer Brice, with assistance from four undergraduate Creative Writing Fellows.

The theme of the conference rested on a series of questions: In times of crisis, where is the writer? How do writers in various genres respond to real-world crises? What’s the difference between art and journalism; art and activism?

Or is there any difference at all?

How have the crises of the last few years affected our writing?

One participant, Solomon Tesfaye ’15, is a first-generation graduate from Colgate, where he majored in behavioral Illustrations by Toby Triumph

neuroscience and minored in Islamic studies. After graduation he went on to work for a strategy and market research consulting firm in Boston. He then left to pursue a master’s degree in public policy and development economics from Princeton University. He currently works at a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., delivering insights to executives.

Here’s more about Tesfaye: I’m an Ethiopian refugee, born and raised in a refugee camp in Yemen. I’ve been extremely lucky to have come to America and get some of the

I want others like me to have the option to go to a bookstore and say, ‘That sounds just like me.’

Solomon Tesfaye ’15

The New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium, including Colgate, received a $1.5 million grant for a leadership fellowship for humanities faculty.

best education the world has to offer.

Where I come from, people don’t really have the opportunity to engage with literature. (That’s a privilege that my parents and my education afforded me.)

And when they do, they don’t recognize themselves in the characters of mainstream literary fiction. I don’t either. I think that a book written by us, for us (refugees), could make readership more inclusive. I want others like me to have the option to go to a bookstore and say, “That sounds just like me.”

Or, “This reads like something my mom would say!”

4 The Colgate University Bookstore marked its 20th anniversary in its downtown location.

5 The newly refurbished Hotel One75 is now the largest lodging venue in Hamilton.

This is why I’m working on [a] novel and trying to find a publisher to save our stories from the sea of forgotten tales and make our stories come to life.

— Jasmine Kellogg

6 Women Leaders in College Sports selected VP and Director of Athletics Nicki Moore as the Nike FCS Executive of the Year.

Visit colgatemagazine.com to read an excerpt from Tesfaye’s Parable of the Children in The Field.

Autumn 2022

▼ Colgate Magazine

11

SCENE

▼ 7

Research

The Colgate Community Garden is flourishing in its new, permanent home on Route 12B.

Is the U.S. Consistent With Handling Human Rights Violations?

Center for Freedom and Western Civilization fellow examines the history of U.S. intervention in El Salvador

Dr. Ellen Larson ’94 is the new director of Student Health Services.

Syllabus

ARTS 241A: Analog Photography

9 The 2022 Hall of Honor: 14 inductees who together accumulated 31 conference championships across 21 sports.

10 This year the COVE Salvage Program donated approximately 30,000 items, including 182 boxes of food, 482 bags of clothing, and 36 tons of reusable goods.

11 How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo Mbue, is this year’s book for the Community Reads Program.

12 The University announced a four-year extension of its test-optional pilot program for applicants.

13 Men of Mark is an upcoming documentary about Colgate’s first Black students by Jacqueline King-Howell ’97, based on a book

by Diane Ciccone ’74, P’10.

→ Professor Lakshmi Luthra, associate professor of art & art history and film & media studies; director, Film & Media Studies Program → Course Description This introductory course to analog black and white photography emphasizes creative expression and critical engagement with photography as a form of art. Students will learn to emphasize depth, exposure, movement, time, and shape within compositions. → Course Goals Each student is expected to learn the basics of operating a 35 mm camera, the principles of film exposure and processing, and fundamental darkroom techniques. Through study and experimentation, students gain a material understanding of photography as the manipulation of light and time. Thematic projects, complemented by department-wide lectures and class readings, engage the tradition of documentary photography as well as avantgarde experimentation and constructed scenes. Each project will push students to cultivate their powers of perception and expression.

12 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

→ Course Assignments Throughout the semester, students will partake in four creative and conceptual projects.

For each project, the student is encouraged and expected to maintain craft analog skills as well as build upon the conceptual assignment’s prompt. Students will end assignments with a cumulative critique as a class, developing the ability to analyze and critique photographs as well as present their works in an articulate and thoughtful manner. → The Professor Says “In this class, students spend long hours in the darkroom, engaging in hands-on experimentation with light, lenses, exposure, and the expressive possibilities of a nearly obsolete imaging technology. Though we think of photography as a visual medium, much of it is done in the dark because of the lightsensitive materials involved.

Days may pass between the original capture of the image and the moment it appears in the chemical developing bath under the red lights of the darkroom.

The capacity to pre-visualize and engage in a slower process of imaging changes our experience of time and stimulates the imagination.”

A

s a recent history graduate and child of Salvadoran immigrants, Joel Alfaro ’21, MAT’22 holds a keen interest in U.S.-El Salvador relations. This summer, Alfaro had the opportunity to delve headlong into this complicated history through a research fellowship for the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization.

Alfaro’s project, titled “U.S. Military Intervention in Latin America: A Reflection of American Ideals,” focused on the U.S. presence in El Salvador in the 1980s–90s, exploring whether the military adequately upheld U.S. ideals of human rights and democracy while there.

“In recent decades, the U.S. has pressured foreign governments such as El Salvador to undergo democratic reforms,” says Alfaro.

“Simultaneously, the U.S. has also aided and abetted these same governments as they were committing human rights violations. What does it mean for the U.S. government to have taken these antithetical actions at the same time? This is the question I sought to answer.”

A central theme he has investigated in his research is how consistent U.S. political leaders are at being inconsistent in how they interact, aid, and punish foreign governments when those governments are found to be violating human rights.

“This inconsistency in morals and policy derives from when we have to prioritize either

Maxiphoto

8

scene human rights or our own national interests first,” explains Alfaro.

Just one example that Alfaro cites took place in 1984 when the United States helped to organize a presidential election in El Salvador, but failed to provide adequate security so left-leaning candidates and their supporters could participate in the election process without risking their lives. In essence, the U.S. went through the motions of organizing a democratic election but did not put the vital mechanisms in place that would ensure it was truly democratic.

According to Alfaro, possible reasons for this failure could be rooted in well-documented instances of Salvadoran business and military elites pressuring the U.S. ambassador to not allow left-leaning parties to participate as well as the Reagan Administration’s overarching goal to prevent the institution of

communist governments by any means necessary. As seemingly at odds as these actions may be with U.S. ideals, this history of contradiction is not something that Alfaro believes should be passed over or ignored.

“By recognizing the past, we can learn how the U.S. government has historically empowered or influenced democratic leaders and thus better understand U.S. foreign policy and actions in the present day.”

Having recently received his master’s degree in education from Colgate, Alfaro aspires to become a social studies teacher and use his position to empower and inform future scholars about diplomacy, democracy, and political processes.

“From this fellowship alone, I am already taking away lessons that I want the next generation to carry with them.”

— Bri Liddell ’25

Additional research conducted by students throughout the summer: Aleksia Taci ’25 examined textiles excavated from medieval Iranian tombs.

istock: pchoui (Loon); Shae Labbe ’19 (In Tandem)

Anya Sokolowski ’25 worked to reconstruct narratives of survivors of the Underground Railroad.

Shane Knopp ’23 used CT scans to investigate earthquake generation.

Claire Chen ’24 gathered firsthand accounts of Asian LGBTQ+ individuals in the film industry.

Tessa Mountain ’23 tracked nesting loons in the Adirondacks.

Chuck Fox ’70 leads the women’s soccer team in tandem-bike training.

Doing Good

Riding In Tandem

T

he women’s soccer team took a break from preparing for the 2022 season in early August when they strapped on bike helmets and completed a tutorial to volunteer for In Tandem.

The program helps people with disabilities to ride a tandem bicycle with a lead rider. It was launched a year ago when Community Bikes in Hamilton partnered with Heritage Farm, a local organization that teaches skills to people with disabilities.

Volunteers are taught to be captains, who are responsible for operating the bicycle while the person in the back (known as a stoker) pedals from behind.

Approximately 30 soccer players gathered at Community Bikes on Milford Street to train with In Tandem coordinators.

The team was split into pairs, and everyone had an opportunity to be a captain and stoker.

Ellie Stokes ’26 says the experience was an important team-building exercise. “It was a really good thing for us at the

start of the season, to help us learn to trust each other and to build camaraderie,” she says.

Head Women’s Soccer Coach Lyndse Hokanson says In Tandem became a great chance to help the community after the pandemic made it difficult to volunteer in previous years. “Whenever we have the opportunity to get involved in something that impacts Hamilton and will allow our student-athletes to engage with the community, we’ll do it,” she says.

Community Bikes has recruited Colgate students and faculty members in the past, but women’s soccer is the first team to sign up. Assistant coaches Lizzy Johnson and Haley Hilliard, who knew about In Tandem, connected the team with Community Bikes — which was founded by Chuck Fox ’70.

“It was highly successful, and it’s something we’d like to do again,” says In Tandem coordinator Colleen McNerney.

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Autumn 2022

Colgate Magazine

13

scene SCENE

Adrienne Vaughn ’22

Coeducation

Celebrating 50 Years of Women’s Athletics

O

ne of the most significant milestones in Colgate athletics history has arrived: 50 years of women’s varsity sports.

Women students began playing on intramural teams when the first fully coeducational Class of 1974 arrived on campus in 1970.

Then in 1972, colleges and universities nationwide began being more inclusive of women in athletics with the passing of Title IX — part of the Education Amendments.

“Colgate University will comply with all applicable provisions of Title IX,” said then-President Thomas Alva Bartlett. It took support from faculty members

and students, administrators and board members. It took the efforts of women, who led the push to change, and the men who supported them.

With two women on the Physical Education Department staff, in 1973, women’s varsity competition began in six sports: basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, swimming and diving, tennis, and volleyball. While Colgate men’s athletics programs were part of the NCAA, women’s teams competed through the Association for the Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which was formed in 1971. Colgate women played at the Division II level.

The athletics opportunities

14 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

for women were gradually expanding with the help of Title IX. The University’s first

Women’s soccer Patriot League champions, 1994

mark diorio; special collections and university archives

Field hockey

recruited female athletes arrived in 1976. A year later, women began to receive sportsrelated financial aid.

Colgate’s club softball team filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in 1977, seeking varsity status. The team won its case.

The popularity of women’s college sports began to grow.

Fans were attending games, and women’s basketball was receiving TV contracts for tournaments. The NCAA saw a financial opportunity in women’s athletics. Colleges started to abandon the AIAW, which folded in 1982. By joining the NCAA, Colgate female student-athletes began playing against Division I opponents.

More club teams gained varsity status. Soccer made the transition in 1982, followed by 4. cross country in 1987.

While the number of women’s varsity teams was growing, equality was lacking in other areas. All varsity women’s teams shared one locker room, and the bulk of the athletics budget was reserved for male sports. By the 1990s, nearly 40% of Colgate’s approximately 500 varsity athletes were women, although their teams received only approximately one-third of the athletics budget and the available scholarship funds.

Another significant moment in Colgate women’s athletics came when female students sought a varsity ice hockey program. Women had been

SCENE scene playing ice hockey on campus since the early ’70s, competing in intramurals and then forming a club team. The first club teams used worn hand-me-down uniforms from the men’s team and had to borrow helmets.

Players had to use figure skates.

In the late 1980s, the club team had a budget of $4,000.

The movement for ice hockey became a long and dramatic process that put Title IX to the test. Petitions to form an ice hockey varsity sport were denied in 1979, 1983, 1986, and 1988.

Two lawsuits were filed, and seven years would pass before women won their battle and saw ice hockey achieve varsity status, which came in 1997. Colgate earmarked $40,000 in annual funding for women’s ice hockey, ensuring the program received adequate equipment and new uniforms.

The women’s ice hockey team began competing at the Division III level.

After the success of hockey, men’s and women’s crew was next in line to become varsity sports. In the fall of 2000, the crew teams, which together had about 100 rowers, moved up to varsity status after 23 years as a club sport.

Women’s Athletics Today Colgate sports have come a long way since the first women’s club teams received varsity status in 1973. The University now has 13 women’s teams and 12 men’s teams that compete at the Division I level.

Whether on the court, the field, or the ice, women have been responsible for some of the most successful athletics programs in Raider history.

The women’s soccer team won nine conference titles in the ’90s. The women’s ice hockey team reached the national championship for the first time in history in 2017–18.

Since then, the hockey team won the program’s first two conference championships.

Last season, women brought home two of Colgate’s three conference titles (volleyball and ice hockey).

In December, volleyball advanced to the NCAA tournament following a season when the Raiders took on some of the best, including the two teams that reached the 2022 national championship. Two months later, women’s hockey hosted a regional quarterfinal as a top four national seed.

And the list goes on for the achievements of women in competition.

Colgate’s 25 varsity teams continue to draw top recruits from across the country, many of them women.

Women have taken their place among Colgate’s Hall of Honor. The names include Sandra Baur Bixby ’76, a member of the first varsity teams in field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse in ’73–’74. She's known as one of Colgate’s founding mothers.

There’s also Gail Majdalany ’79, Colgate’s first woman allAmerican diver.

The 2022 Hall of Honor welcomed 14 new members, including six women.

Women have also become coaches and taken on

3.

Whether on the court, the field, or the ice, women have been responsible for some of the most successful athletics programs in Raider history.

various leadership roles. In 2012, Victoria Chun ’91, a stand-out volleyball player and coach, became the first woman to serve as the athletics director. She was also the first Asian American woman athletics director in NCAA Division I history.

Today, Nicki Moore is vice president and director of athletics, a role she began in 2018. Through this appointment, Colgate became the second-ever Division I program to hire two women athletics directors in succession.

Under Moore’s leadership, Colgate has improved the infrastructure for many women’s sports, enhanced equipment, and launched the first women’s program endowment. In addition, the University has added athletics scholarships and financial aid to several women’s sports.

“Colgate women are a special group — they have advocated for themselves over the years, and through that advocacy, have improved the opportunities for all women on campus,” Moore says. “It means that while we do have a rich history, 50 years is still a relatively recent history, and so we are still today in the early stages of building the women’s program — particularly when you compare it to the 200 years of the men’s program.

“Thus, being intentional and bold today in enhancing and

Carter Leahy ’22

advancing opportunities for women student-athletes gives Colgate the best chance to be wildly successful — even on the national stage — in these programs down the road.”

As Colgate embarks on its Third-Century Plan, upgrades will be made to athletics facilities, with the most extensive renovations coming to the Reid Athletic Center. Reid was built in 1959, when Colgate was an all-male campus with 1,500 students. While women saw their club teams become varsity sports, facilities were not designed for female athletes.

While improvements over the years have provided women’s teams with more adequate facilities, the Reid renovations will provide Colgate with a facility designed for a coeducational campus.

That means significant improvements to locker rooms, team rooms, file review spaces, and the coaches’ offices, especially for women’s sports.

Men’s and women’s basketball teams will enjoy the exact same square footage and amenities to their facilities. And volleyball will be elevated to the same level.

“While men’s sports will also see significant enhancements, in Reid, we have been very intentional to ensure all new facility projects are planned and built with equity as an important driver,” Moore says.

Stay tuned for more stories celebrating women’s athletics in upcoming issues.

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Autumn 2022

Colgate Magazine

15

A Look Back at Women’s Sports: Dr. Merrill Miller

F

or her contributions to Colgate athletics, Dr. Merrill Miller was one of five Colgate women honored this semester as Patriot League Trailblazers of Distinction.

Miller stepped into new territory for women in the medical profession in 1981 when she was hired to be Colgate’s team physician. At the time, no other head physician in NCAA Division I was a woman. The news was not a shock to Miller — because she was used to it.

While she was in medical school, the majority of the students were men. And before joining Colgate’s staff, Miller worked a decade in the profession and encountered few female doctors.

“It was not surprising to me,” Miller says. “I grew up in a time when there were very few women in medicine. When I went to medical school, there were only five women in my class of 105.”

Miller is a native of Kew Gardens, a neighborhood in New York City. She is a 1967 graduate of Cornell University. She completed her medical training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Buffalo, and the SUNY-Health Science Center in Syracuse.

She was working at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse when she decided to apply for the Colgate position. She’d treated the son of Colgate chemistry professor John Cochran; he and his wife encouraged Miller to look into the Colgate Student Health Services job. Miller had already treated many patients in the Hamilton area and attended Raider games.

At Colgate, she became

16 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

meant coaching multiple teams or helping to wash uniforms.

Success in competition was also scant, at least for some women’s programs.

“I remember the days of women’s ice hockey playing hard but losing, sometimes by double digits, and now they are nationally acclaimed and play in a first-class arena,” Miller says.

“Like many others, I cheered for them just as hard in the early years as in their current championship years.”

Now in her 42nd year on the job, Miller says she has seen Colgate evolve to become a leading university with an athletics program that competes on a national level. And like her early years at Colgate, the job

continues to thrill her.

“There is nothing like the exuberance of a college campus,” she says. “You have enthusiastic, sharp, smart, talented young people, and you have great wisdom and skill from staff and faculty members.

“I smile when I think of each and every one of them and the thousands of other people who I have been able to watch during their time here, particularly in sports because I’ve spent a lot of time with them. The things that our students do are extraordinary.”

— Omar Ricardo Aquije Dr. Miller earned a Maroon Citation in 1994 and was inducted into the Athletics Hall of Honor in 2013.

special collections and university archives

Trailblazer

the doctor for every athletics program while serving as University physician and director of Student Health Services. She pursued the role with passion and enthusiasm, and with a love for the energy found on a college campus.

As student-athletes towered over her, she paid no heed. “Several people who interviewed me here asked me, ‘What’s it going to be like taking care of these big football and basketball players,’” she remembers. “My answer was, ‘I will ask them to sit down.’ I never saw it as an issue.”

Coeducation had been in place at the University for a decade when Miller arrived, but much still had to be done before women gained equality. As she handled her job with grace and professionalism, Miller helped set the foundation for the success of women’s athletics.

She watched Colgate athletics transform into a landscape where women stand on equal ground with their male counterparts.

“To me, it has always been both a privilege and an honor to take care of people,” Miller says.

“I am extremely grateful to be recognized for that.”

She adds that others deserve credit for her recognition as a trailblazer. “There are so many wonderful colleagues here, in my office, on campus, in athletics, where I have spent a lot of time. They are the ones who are equally deserving and should be recognized for the wonderful care and attention they provide not only for our students, but also for helping to guide faculty and staff members, and for the connections with parents.”

When speaking about women’s athletics from those days, Miller points to former Head Volleyball Coach Janet Little, who was also a part-time athletics trainer and an assistant coach for other teams.

Miller recalls women coaches in the ’80s having to do everything they could to keep their teams going, even if it

The Third-century plan

Campus Planning

Leadership

Middle Campus Takes Shape

President Brian W. Casey’s Appointment Extended

T

his fall, Colgate broke ground on the Benton Center for Creativity and Innovation, which will serve as one of the centerpieces of the University’s Middle Campus.

A terrace adjacent to the Benton Center will provide additional spaces for faculty and staff to gather and collaborate. The Ravine, a landscaped walkway descending from the top of the hill near Frank Dining Hall, will seamlessly connect a newly created Middle Campus to Upper Campus and the academic quad.

Plans for Middle Campus also call for a new Performing and Visual Arts Center to house Colgate’s theater and dance programs; renovations to James C. Colgate Hall to house the music department and serve as an events hub and recital space; a new Picker Pavilion and interconnected facilities for University museums and collections; and renovations to the Dana Arts Center and the Brehmer Theater.

Serving as a second academic quadrangle, Middle Campus is a substantial rethinking of the University’s overall educational experience. It will dismantle physical barriers and integrate disparate spaces in a way that encourages students to move across disciplines and infuses their studies with exploration and innovation. This is a hallmark of the Third Century, the most significant transformation in University history.

“The arts are increasingly interdisciplinary,” says Dean and Provost of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing. “By animating this area of campus, we will radically alter the student experience, better infuse and integrate the arts into the curriculum, and attract faculty and staff of the highest caliber.”

— Ben Badua

T

he Board of Trustees unanimously voted on Aug. 29 to extend the contract of President Brian W. Casey through 2030 (his second contract extension) as the University continues to advance projects associated with the Third-Century Plan and the recently announced $1 billion Campaign for the Third Century.

“We are fortunate to have one of the nation’s most strategic and visionary presidents. Thanks to President Casey’s guidance and collaboration with our University community, Colgate has moved forward with a series of transformative initiatives that have improved access and affordability and touched every corner of campus, while also increasing faculty support to extend the academic reach and reputation of the University,” said Michael J. Herling ’79, P’08,’09,’12, chair of the Colgate University Board of Trustees. “I want to take this opportunity to thank President Casey for his leadership, his vision for Colgate, his focus on creating a caring community of scholars, and his commitment to excellence.”

Casey assumed the mantle of president in 2016, and his contract was first renewed in 2019. Since taking office, he has led the University through several major construction projects, including the creation of two new residence halls and Benton Hall.

Oak Drive is undergoing a renewal project to beautify and reenvision the historic entryway to campus, and major construction is now underway to create the new Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Center at Olin Hall. Groundbreaking for the Benton Center for Creativity and Innovation took place this fall, starting Colgate’s new Middle Campus.

Casey’s contract extension comes at a time of unprecedented growth at Colgate, as the University received an all-time record number of applications for admission this year.

Now in its second year of implementation, Colgate’s Third-Century Plan has resulted in the launch of the Colgate Commitment, which includes a No-Loan Initiative.

“I am honored by the trust that this University community has placed in me and the senior team at Colgate. My interactions with our faculty, students, staff, and alumni over these past six years have shown Colgate to be an extraordinary place,” Casey said. “As a student of the history of American higher education, I know that most leading colleges experience periods of growth when the right combination of academic talent is aligned with ambitious students from all walks of life and a supportive administration. We are at one of those moments now at Colgate, and I am proud to be part of its trajectory.”

After earning a law degree from Stanford University and starting a career in law, Casey transitioned to higher education following a PhD from Harvard University in the history of American civilization, focusing specifically on the history of American higher education and American intellectual history. Casey served as assistant provost at Brown University, associate dean for academic affairs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and was the 19th president of DePauw University before starting his role as Colgate’s 17th president on July 1, 2016.

— Dan DeVries

I am honored by the trust that this University community has placed in me and the senior team at Colgate.

Autumn 2022

Colgate Magazine

17

Discover Linguistics

Language of the Common Man April Bailey ’14 shows that people are always talking about men, even when they think they’re not.

hen Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s dusty surface and delivered his famous “one giant leap for mankind” line, it was memorable, if not exactly equitable. An astronaut today might replace “mankind” with “humanity,” or another gender-neutral word. But according to April Bailey ’14, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at New York University, the astronaut’s audience would still hear those words and think of men.

They wouldn’t be able to help it. Bailey’s research shows that for English speakers, words like “person” and “people” are not truly gender-neutral. We associate them more closely with men than with women.

And this bias is baked into not just our minds and our language, but also the technologies we use.

Bailey and her co-authors described their findings in a paper published this spring in Science Advances. For their study, they took advantage of a technique known as “word embeddings.”

“This is a really old idea from linguistics, that there’s something important about the meaning of a word that’s captured just by its

W

18 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

context,” Bailey says. If you come across an unfamiliar word in a sentence, neighboring words can give you a hint about its meaning: Does it have to do with politics? Pop music?

Is it a breakfast food?

The researchers turned to a huge data set called the Common Crawl. It’s a crosssection of the internet, containing more than 630 billion words (mostly English) from almost 3 billion webpages. For any word within this data set, its embedding is a very long string of numbers representing how often the word occurs near other words in the data set. Researchers can then calculate how similar these strings of numbers are to each other.

Bailey and her co-authors started with a list of gender-neutral words, including “people,” “person,” “humanity,” “human,”

and “someone.” They compared the embeddings for those gender-neutral words to embeddings for a list of male words: “man,” “men,” “he,” and so on. They also

Whatever the factors are behind our language’s inherent gender bias, Bailey says, it has ‘troubling implications.’

Illustration by Dan Page

Randy Thomae

looked at embeddings for a third list that included words such as “woman,” “female,” and “she.”

When we talk about “people,” the researchers wanted to know, whom do we really mean?

They found that the embeddings for the gender-neutral words were more similar to embeddings for the male words than the female words. “Our concept of a person, although it’s ostensibly gender-neutral and gender-inclusive, has more overlap with the concept of a man than a woman,” Bailey says.

Further experiments, which looked at lists of adjectives and verbs that were stereotypical to women or men, confirmed the finding. “We think of generic people as men, and men as generic people,” Bailey says. “And we think of women specifically as women.”

These hidden biases don’t shock Bailey, based on the other research she’s done.

“What is surprising about it,” she says, “is that men and women are each, of course, about half of the population.” There’s no reason that we should assume a person is male.

As Bailey begins a new role as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, she’s “interested in trying to understand more about where this bias comes from,” she says. For one thing, she wants to explore whether the same biases exist in some non-English languages.

Whatever the factors are behind our language’s inherent gender bias, Bailey says, it has “troubling implications.” When engineers or policy makers are making decisions that will affect all people, are they unknowingly thinking more about the consequences for men?

Furthermore, Bailey says, word embedding isn’t only a tool for psychology researchers. It’s a part of technologies that we use every day. For example, automatic translation uses language embedding to predict meanings. So does predictive text — when your phone guesses the next word in the message you’re sending a friend, for example. And gender bias, as Bailey has shown, is already built into the word embedding data that those programs draw on.

In her future research, she also hopes to learn about the personal effects of our subtly gendered language.

“What does it feel like to be a woman and to be exposed to this kind of bias — to have other people around you talking about a person or people, and then realize that they don’t mean you as much?” Bailey says.

“Women are, in fact, people too.”

— Elizabeth Preston

Ecopsychology

Healing the Connection Between People and Planet eanine Canty ’92 sees connections: between people and nature, personal and collective. “My first semester at Colgate, a professor brought together Gandhi and ecology,” Canty recalls. “I was 18 and hardly understood his focus on ‘interrelatedness,’ but that planted a seed.”

It grew into a career of uncovering links between social and ecological issues through the lens of ecopsychology. Her new book, Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet, equips readers to understand and begin to restore those links in their own lives.

“Ecopsychology looks at how people are disconnected from nature,” Canty explains.

She boils down the basic tenets: “The planet needs healing from climate change and destruction. People need healing from illness, violence, estrangement, addiction.

Earth’s suffering and people’s suffering are directly connected. This all takes place in the context of a globalized, corporate consumer culture hyper-focused on individualism and pursuing wealth.”

As a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a guest teacher at several other schools, Canty had been writing, researching, and teaching ecopsychology for years before this book.

Narcissism’s role, however, was new to her. Early ecopsychology writers had connected the dots between narcissism and consumerism; Canty took this further by studying narcissism and concepts of “self” across academic research, philosophical traditions, and pop culture therapy.

She learned that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is often linked with a childhood in which caregivers could not or would not create deep connections. “Despite that, so many sources demonize narcissists,” she says. “Top literature recommends cutting ties with them.” When you do, the person simply feeds on someone else’s attention and energy. The cycle of harm continues.

Due to this — and the growing number of people who exhibit narcissistic patterns — Canty believes narcissism should be addressed as a collective issue.

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“Everyone's a narcissist,” she says. “It’s not about labeling anyone. It’s not a fingershaking.”

Instead, it’s an opportunity to realize that our suffering and the damage we’ve inflicted on our planet stem from the same root — and the same practices can help us heal ourselves and the environment.

In her book, Canty provides a primer on narcissism before demonstrating how collective narcissism evolved from Western social structures that distance us from nature- and community-based traditions.

“The globalized, corporate consumer culture conditions us to think in certain ways, to be self-focused yet insecure. ‘How do I look? How do people see me?’ All our time and attention go there,” Canty explains.

“We’ve lost a deep connection with our inner life and the sense of deep community we need to be healthy.

“That makes it easier to see people and Earth’s resources as disposable,” she adds. “To not question systems that ignore human dignity.” This is how our collective narcissism intertwines with large-scale social and environmental issues: poverty, mental illness, school shootings, political polarization, climate change.

The good news is that we can heal by changing our collective ways of being in nature, in community, even in business. The last portion of Canty’s book provides readers with what she calls “patterns and practices” to help readers “feel whole, able to love who we are rather than who we think we need to project, and then extend compassion to people we perceive as ‘other.’”

— Meghan McDonald

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discover

Ask a Professor

How Does the Webb Telescope Enable Us to See Farther Into the History of the Universe? t this point, you may be wondering, “What’s the big deal with this James Webb Space Telescope?” It’s not often that astronomers dominate headlines across the world.

However, it’s not every day that humanity successfully launches a space telescope as large or technologically advanced as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Astronomers have been looking forward to this moment for decades, with many of them having contributed large portions, if not the entirety, of their careers to this mission, so it is a momentous, once-in-alifetime achievement worthy of being celebrated worldwide. I know many astronomers around the planet were sitting in front of their computers, streaming the unveiling of the first JWST

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images with tears welling up in their eyes. I was certainly one of them.

For the general viewer, you might be wondering “Why is the telescope so special? Is it really all that different from the iconic Hubble Space Telescope?”

Without going into details about the work involved in assembling the telescope and its instruments, let’s chat about at least one major scientific question the JWST can address and what makes it uniquely equipped to do so.

The telescope’s primary mirror is made of 18 hexagonalshaped segments and has an effective diameter (it’s not exactly round) of 6.5 meters.

Compare that to the 2.4-meter mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. For those who haven’t taken Introduction to Astronomy, the difference means

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train in the example above with distant galaxies that all happen to be moving away from us as the universe expands, we can expect the wavelengths of the light emitted by these galaxies to be longer than if they were sitting still. Red light, having the longest wavelengths of light perceived by the human eye, lends its name to the increase in wavelength.

How much longer are the wavelengths of light coming from these first stars and galaxies?

Imagine that the receding train is moving so fast that the pitch is shifted beyond our ear’s ability to perceive the sound. In a similar fashion, cosmic expansion redshifts the light from these galaxies to wavelengths that are beyond our eye’s ability to detect them. The effect of 13+ billion years of cosmic expansion is so dramatic that ultraviolet and visible light emitted by these first objects will be shifted into the infrared region of the spectrum and beyond the colors we perceive with our eyes.

The JWST, with its goldcoated mirror and suite of infrared sensitive instruments, is built to detect and decode the infrared light that has traveled to us from across much of the visible universe. The first images released were snapshots or a glancing view into space. They revealed that, once the JWST has more time to turn those glances into stares, it is going to provide a most excellent window to a time in the early universe that has previously been inaccessible to the world’s astronomers. When we peer through that window, we expect to find answers to questions related to the origins of elements and cosmic structures that determined the nature of the present-day universe. I feel like it is always a great time to be an astronomer, but the next few years are going to be special as the JWST challenges and expands our understanding of the universe on a regular basis.

— Jeff Bary is the Sweet Family Chair and an associate professor of physics and astronomy.

NASA

James Webb Space Telescope Artist Conception

that the JWST captures 7.3 times more light than the Hubble.

More light collected means you can see fainter objects. The ability to see fainter objects translates to seeing more distant objects. Seeing more distant objects allows astronomers to peer farther back into the history of the universe.

In addition to being bigger, the JWST’s mirrors are made of beryllium and coated with a thin layer of gold. The beryllium provides a lightweight, yet strong structure with properties suitable to the low and shifting temperatures the telescope will encounter in space. The shiny gold coating makes the mirrors excellent at reflecting infrared light. That’s really important to understanding why the JWST is going to peer back in time to the formation of the very first stars and galaxies.

Due to the cosmic expansion of the universe set into motion by the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the wavelengths of light emitted from galaxies that are receding from us are “stretched.” The amount of stretching, or what is typically referred to as a redshift, increases with the distance to the object due to the very nature of the cosmic expansion. Most of us have experienced a similar phenomenon while parked at a railroad crossing as an oncoming train blows its horn. While the train might be getting louder as it approaches, we hear a higher pitch of the horn than if the train were parked on the track.

As the train passes, we hear the opposite effect and the pitch gets lower. Sound is a wave, the wavelengths of which determine the pitch we hear. The motion of the train toward or away from us alters the wavelength of the sound, which translates directly to the shift in pitch we perceive with our ears. Shorter wavelengths (train approaching) lead to a higher pitch. Longer wavelengths (train receding) lead to a lower pitch. Light, also a wave, experiences this same phenomenon known as the Doppler Effect. If we replace our

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Research

Black Infants Are Receiving Lower Quality Care.

Why? Erika Miles ’92 Edwards is studying the causes and consequences of the issue.

n looking at neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), there can be inequities in care — especially with Black patients — finds Erika Miles ’92 Edwards. She researches the causes and consequences of the issue as director of data science for Vermont Oxford Network (VON), which is a nonprofit collaboration of more than 1,400 health care centers across the globe working together to improve neonatal care.

In America, Edwards reports, Black mothers are more than 50% likelier to deliver preterm babies than white mothers, and Black infants have a higher mortality rate than white newborns. “Our research shows that Black infants receive care at lower quality hospitals that have less resources, are less well staffed, and serve more patients,” she explains. “It’s also been shown that a majority of Black, Asian, and Hispanic infants receive care at hospitals where white infants do not.”

That lower-quality care creates a multigenerational problem: “The continued presence of structural racism and segregation has been shown to cause ‘weathering’ of a person’s genes,” Edwards notes. “That means prematurity can be passed down; so if a Black mom has a premature daughter, it’s more likely that her daughter in turn will have one.”

Edwards and her team at VON recently decided to dig deeper into more specific disparities in neonatal care, conducting a study of almost 170,000 infants at more than 700 hospitals. Their first finding revealed that health care providers frequently neglect to give pregnant women who are Black

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Illustration by Delphine Lee

or Native American antenatal steroids, which encourage fetal lung development and maturity. A second finding showed that infants in those groups are also more likely to be admitted to the NICU suffering from hypothermia. “We don’t know exactly why these common standards of care are missing,” Edwards says. “But it likely comes back to the poorer quality and resources of the hospitals where these patients are admitted.”

Edwards and her team hope that by bringing findings like these to the attention of hospitals, staff members can improve “internal processes that include keeping newborns warm, or work with local providers to make sure that every mother receives the steroids,” she says.

“We want to have an impact by providing evidence-based, data-driven ways for them to achieve best practices,” says Edwards, who is also a University of Vermont research associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Department of Pediatrics.

Edwards designs webinars and other efforts to educate member NICUs on how to screen for social determinants of health, widely defined as the conditions in which people live, work, and play. If necessary, hospitals and clinics can then refer patients to social workers or pro bono lawyers who can help patients resolve disputes concerning housing, health benefits, and immigration.

The nonprofit’s grant program has provided seed money for innovative projects developed by member hospitals.

These include nursing-led implicit bias training, peermentoring for moms going home with high-risk babies, and the purchasing of hospital-grade breast pumps to lend to patients who, for cultural or financial reasons, are reluctant or unable to breastfeed.

“Breast milk reduces the chances of all sorts of morbidities for a baby, but even so seemingly a small issue as this can become a matter of equity,” points out Edwards.

“When your baby is in the hospital for 60 days and you need to work and provide child care for your other kids, you’re less likely to have the time to go back and forth to the hospital to breastfeed or to do it after you take the baby home.”

Neonatology has made “tremendous advances” during the decades that VON has been tracking infant mortalities, Edwards sums up. “Now we need to apply our efforts to the social aspects of medicine. From the time the baby arrives at the hospital through its stay there and continuing after its discharge, there’s a huge opportunity to consistently achieve better care and outcomes.”

— JoAnn Greco As a Colgate senior majoring in sociology and anthropology, Edwards read a New York Times article about NICUs. She was intrigued by the idea of “these places and who works at them and how they are organized,” she says. After deciding to pursue a career in health care management, she obtained degrees in public health and epidemiology. “I had a statistical bent and wanted to apply it to health.”

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A Higher Education Conversation By aleta mayne

Colleges and universities play a vital role in contributing to society, perhaps more so now than ever before. As President Brian W. Casey has said in several speeches recently, it’s Colgate’s responsibility to prepare students to be reasoned thinkers before sending them out into the world.

Our alumni are also doing meaningful work in academia, utilizing what they learned at Colgate and applying that knowledge as administrators at leading institutions nationwide. They’re shaping the next generation — and, at the same time, sorting out weighty issues like affordability, access, mental health, and the value of a degree (the number of students enrolling in U.S. colleges’ and universities’ undergraduate programs in spring 2022 was 662,000 fewer than the previous year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center).

“We’re at a moment, a tipping point in education,” says Jeanne Follansbee ’78, who is a dean at Yale College and a vice chair of Colgate’s Board of Trustees.

Colgate Magazine talked to Follansbee and eight other (out of approximately 2,000) alumni who are higher education professionals to learn more.

illustrations by peter james field

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INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING EXPANDS THE TOOLBOX STUDENTS HAVE. Jeanne Follansbee ’78, dean at Yale College and vice chair of Colgate’s Board of Trustees

WE’RE STILL NOT COMPLETELY OUT OF THE WOODS, BUT THE FINANCIAL RISK HAS GONE DOWN. David Hale ’84, executive vice president and COO, University of Richmond

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THE PANDEMIC IS ONE REASON FOR THE MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE, BUT “IT’S BROADER THAN THAT.”

DARIEN MCFADDEN ’88, director of the Center for Counseling and Mental Health at Amherst College

Caption ebissim de simendus eos id quam faccus dolutem quis re con exeruptus aut volorum remolupta

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philip keith

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t colleges around the country, the current senior class is the last one that had any semblance of a pre-COVID-19 experience, points out Darien McFadden ’88, director of the Center for Counseling and Mental Health at Amherst College.

“Everyone else has had a very mixed educational experience, and they missed out on a lot of markers — celebratory things, like even having a normal college orientation — that those of us who are older took for granted,” he says.

The pandemic is one reason for the mental health crisis among young people, but “it’s broader than that,” McFadden says.

“I think we’ve been seeing a trend toward increased anxiety and overwhelm for several years now.”

Generation Z has been called the loneliest generation, and social media use is considered to be a contributing factor.

“The ironic thing about social media is that it’s not very social,” McFadden notes. “All of these opportunities for people to have windows into the lives of other people does not do a tremendous amount for developing true social connection, knowing how to communicate with each other, learning life skills.”

At Amherst, like other college campuses, there’s a rising demand for mental health services. McFadden and his team have noticed an increase in students wanting weekly therapy sessions, for example. And while some experience serious mental health challenges that require clinical help, others are simply craving a space to connect and talk about normal struggles.

“Not everything is a mental health issue,” McFadden says. If a student had a death in the family, for example, it would be appropriate for them to feel sad. “My fear is that if we keep encouraging people to see a therapist simply because they’re experiencing painful feelings, we, in some ways, are telling them that their healthy emotions are bad or too much. And that’s a real concern.”

A solution to that problem, he proposes, is broadening wraparound support — i.e., enlisting campus partners, such as deans,

professors, and coaches, to serve as a listening ear. “Is there an opportunity to talk [to someone] and maybe find out that what you’re experiencing isn’t so unusual?”

McFadden has been at Amherst for 22 years (nonconsecutively; he spent time off campus working in community mental health) in various capacities. When he was promoted to director this past January, he had two stipulations: He wanted to stay involved in the postgraduate training program he’d been leading, as well as continue to practice clinical work. The training program is important to him because it has a multicultural focus: “We need more clinicians in the fields of counseling, clinical psych, and social work who know how to work with diverse populations.” He adds: “It is our responsibility to make sure the services we offer students are accessible to the diverse population we have.”

In addition, he wanted to keep a small

caseload because “I am a clinician at heart,” he says.

McFadden has known he wanted to go into psychology since childhood. “I was the kid in class to whom everyone went to tell their problems,” he says. In sixth grade, when his mom returned to college to finish her degree, he pored over her psychology textbook. McFadden majored in the subject at Colgate, along with English literature, and was president of the Psychology Club his senior year. It was his roles as a residential adviser and a peer counselor with a support call-in program, though, that he credits as his best career preparation.

Today, at Amherst, McFadden is “most proud of having developed relationships with students who have felt impacted by our connection.” He’ll receive emails from former students who reach out to say hello and update him on their lives. “That means a tremendous amount to me.”

MAUREEN O’CONNOR ’78, president of Palo Alto University

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ajoring in psychology at Colgate has not only been pertinent to Maureen O’Connor’s role as president of a university that specializes in the subject, but it’s also shaped her leadership skills. “There are many leaders in higher education with a psychology background,” O’Connor notes from Palo Alto University (PAU) in California. “It’s good for the breadth of the work we do,” she says, adding that her law degree has also been useful.

O’Connor’s understanding of human behavior has helped her comprehend people’s incentives, know how to motivate them, and communicate effectively, from conveying difficult messages to rolling out her strategic plan.

Becoming a university president wasn’t O’Connor’s intention; she wasn’t even looking for a new job when PAU approached her about the position. But, in each of her roles — as a law clerk, professor, department chair — she’s been motivated to take on more responsibility and “fix things, make things run better.”

The field of environmental psychology — how people engage with the world —

O’CONNOR’S UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR HAS HELPED HER COMPREHEND PEOPLE’S INCENTIVES, KNOW HOW TO MOTIVATE THEM, AND COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.

was introduced to her during Jan Plan research with Jack Dovidio, who is now Charles A. Dana Professor of psychology emeritus. It was a new field at the time, and she got hooked. “I loved psychology and I loved research, but what I cared about was applying it to real-world problems,” O’Connor says.

After Colgate, she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, writing criminal justice reform grants. “I realized there’s all this research on human behavior, and it’s not getting into the policy arena,” O’Connor says. “If I had a through line of my career, it’s taking data and research and trying to find ways to develop better policies — whether it’s higher education policies or policies in

the legal system — that are more consistent with what we know about human behavior.”

She then pursued a dual degree in law and psychology at the University of Arizona, became a law clerk, and started her academic career at the City University of New York — where she’d rise through the ranks in her 18 years there.

“Pretty early on in my career, I realized I couldn’t stand when things weren’t working well,” O’Connor says. Instead of complaining about the situation, she’d take on bigger roles that would enable her to implement change. When PAU approached her with the presidency in 2016, O’Connor thought, “I could take everything I’ve learned and apply it to a whole university.”

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Maureen O’Connor, president of Palo Alto University in California

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That is what we do. Let’s not try to be what every other university is trying to be. We have something to offer that nobody else is doing in the same way.”

Providing a research-based education is expensive, O’Connor acknowledges. But although large, online universities can offer a more economical option than in-person learning, “it misses every benefit that I took away from Colgate and what we’re trying to do at PAU,” she says. “It misses the engagement with research active faculty and with direct one-on-one mentoring and the support that students really need to excel.”

As PAU looks toward its 50th anniversary in 2025, O’Connor’s goal is to ensure that the university is thriving for another 50-plus

years. For that, she’ll continue to rely on her psychology background, which began in a Colgate first-year seminar. “I’m not doing a study every time I make a decision or going to the literature every minute, but it’s there,” she says. “And I know that when I’m stuck, or if I’m trying to strategize about something, I have this great base of our field to draw on.”

Now longtime friends, Maureen O’Connor ’78 and Jeanne Follansbee ’78 were two of the first members of both the Swinging ’Gates and the women’s intramural hockey team.

bryan meltz

The role is unique in that she’s in charge of a young institution (PAU was founded in 1975) and she succeeded a president who was in the position for 32 years. First on her agenda was updating infrastructure, administrative policies, databases, organizational structure — “all of the things that support the education.”

Last year, she unveiled a strategic plan, which — just as Colgate’s Third-Century Plan articulates — emphasizes the importance of embracing the institution’s distinctions and building upon them. In the case of PAU, which specializes in education in psychology and counseling, predominantly at the graduate level, O’Connor says: “We are at the forefront of psychology and counseling.

JEANNE FOLLANSBEE ’78, dean of summer session at Yale College

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t age 35, Jeanne Follansbee ’78 decided it was time for a career change and went back to school. The inspiration? Volunteering on Colgate’s Board of Trustees. “I realized my hobby was so much more fun than my job,” says Follansbee, who had been running her own advertising consultancy. So she enrolled in Boston University to earn her master’s and PhD in English, doing her homework alongside her two children, who were grade-schoolers at the time.

Now dean of summer session at Yale College, she has a couple of decades of higher education experience under her belt.

And, adding up her two separate stints on Colgate’s board, the vice chair has served for 18 years (she previously served as director of the Alumni Corporation 1981–85).

Here’s how she got to this point in her career and what she thinks about higher education today.

After finishing her PhD, she became a lecturer in Harvard’s history and literature program. When her term ended there, she was appointed as a junior faculty member in English at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. She returned to Harvard after three years and became the director of her former program. “Taking on the administrative piece was great for me,” she says. “I loved it.” Next was a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she was academic dean.

a class with Mansfield when she was a firstyear, before he died in 2008.

Being a board member has been a “mutually beneficial relationship,” Follansbee says. As she engages in strategic conversations about the direction of Colgate, Follansbee brings her perspective from working at Harvard and Yale. Similarly, she brings what she learns through Colgate’s board planning back to Yale.

“I think liberal arts is the best form of education for a changing world,” she says.

“The things I learned as an undergraduate and that Colgate continues to emphasize — critical thinking, great communication skills — are even more important in the world we’re living in.”

Follansbee gives kudos to Colgate for its plans to implement interdisciplinary learning through the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative and the Middle Campus Initiative for Arts,

Creativity, and Innovation. “To cross not just disciplinary lines but also divisional lines requires a really broad imaginary canvas with a lot of people willing to work together,” she says. “Interdisciplinary thinking expands the toolbox students have.

It also benefits faculty and their scholarship.

It provides different lenses for thinking about how to approach a particular problem, but it also shapes how to frame the problem.”

“I feel like we’re at a moment, a tipping point in education. There’s considerable anxiety about the cost of higher education and about the value of liberal arts. I believe it’s crucial to highlight the value of the kind of education Colgate provides. We’re training the next generation of flexible, creative, and visionary leaders.”

Follansbee’s grandfather was Winthrop, Class of 1919, and her father was Winthrop Jr. ’53.

LIBERAL ARTS IS THE BEST FORM OF EDUCATION FOR A CHANGING WORLD.

Today at Yale, Follansbee collaborates with the faculty to develop the summer curriculum (which comprises approximately 225 courses) and the study abroad programs.

In addition, she’s chair of the First-Year Scholars, Yale’s summer bridge program for first-generation, low-income students.

“I find it inspirational to work with these students,” she says. “Making the transition to Yale brings lots of challenges. It’s about helping them succeed.”

She majored in English at Colgate, but says that one of her favorite classes outside the department was astronomy with Professor Vic Mansfield. Her daughter, Karen Quinn ’08, also had the chance to take Autumn 2022

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IT'S CRITICAL TO FIND A PLACE WHERE [A] STUDENT FEELS AT HOME.

LIZ ENOS ’90, senior associate director of financial aid, Trinity College Finding the Right Fit “To students and families, I would say, there’s a college for you. It might, at the end of the day, not be the one that’s at the top of your list, that one might be unaffordable, but there’s always a way to obtain the four-year degree. It’s just a question of finding the college that’s the right fit for you, and part of that fit is financial.”

Advice to Parents “Do your homework. As early as you can, start figuring out how to best position your student. You have to look at your student’s strengths and weaknesses, what they want, how committed they are to a particular career path, for example. I have four children of my own; my daughters

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knew what they wanted to do. The question for them was what’s the school that’s best known for this career path, and in their case, they were able to go to state schools, keep their borrowing low, and go right into the career paths that they both wanted. It was worth every penny for them to get the training they needed to do the careers they knew they wanted to do, but not every kid is going to be in that position.

“There is a significant amount of students who have no idea what they want to do.

Then I think it’s critical to find a place where that student feels at home, where they feel like they can thrive, the campus resonates with them, where they look around and say, ‘These are my people, I’m going to fit in here.’ If they’re happy and they’re flourishing, they’ll find their pathway.”

Be Honest “Know what you can afford and be up front with your kids. So many parents want to provide this dream for their student, and they’re not willing to have the hard conversations. Have them early, so you’re

not springing this on a kid who has their heart set on some unattainable experience.”

On the Liberal Arts “It’s that idea of exposing yourself to all kinds of subject material that maybe you didn’t know was going to spark an interest in you. I majored in French and minored in theater, and people were like, ‘What was the plan there?’ but those were the courses I loved.”

The Importance of Higher Education “Being at a place like Colgate solidified for me the importance of higher education in general, liberal arts education specifically. It certainly resulted in me feeling like what I do matters, that I’ve chosen a career path that makes a difference and is important for students and families to make their experience a success. Having that valuable experience myself positioned me to want to make that possible for other people.”

EMILY ROPER-DOTEN ’02, dean of admission and financial aid, Olin College of Engineering

Leise Jones Photography

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er path began at Colgate, quite literally, on a campus tour.

As a high school student, Emily Roper-Doten ’02 was part of a group following a guide up and down the hill. She liked the experience so much, she decided not only to enroll at Colgate, but also to follow in that student’s footsteps — walking backward. After being a tour guide for a couple of years, Roper-Doten was encouraged by Gary Ross (the Jones and Wood Family Vice President for admission and financial aid) to become a senior intern in the admission office. That experience, as an interviewer and helping with April visit days, gave Roper-Doten the realization that she wanted a career in higher education.

She double majored in educational studies and theater, then attended Boston College’s higher education administration program. While earning her master’s, she interned in a variety of related areas. “I kept coming back to admission as being the place I wanted to be.”

Several universities offered her a position after she graduated, but Olin College attracted Roper-Doten because it was such a different place. It was a brand-new institution at the time — its first graduating class was 2006 — which offered a rare career experience. “I just kept thinking, when will I ever have an opportunity to work at a new college again? Colleges aren’t founded that often,” she says. Higher education institutions can be slow and difficult to change, so Roper-Doten relished “the idea of a place that was saying the old rules don’t apply. We’re purposely trying to build something different from the ground up.

It was this radical idea that engineering education is broken, and we should turn the educational model on its head.”

To “get that next level of experience,” after two years at Olin, Roper-Doten joined Tufts University. She spent nine years there, first as an assistant director and then as an associate director before returning to Olin in 2015 as the dean of admission and financial aid.

“This innovative educational format and a commitment to gender diversity and engineering in STEM was compelling to me,” she says.

It’s a small college, with 350 undergrads.

“We’re small and specific on purpose because of what it allows us to do in the educational model,” she explains.

The applicant pool has stayed steady at approximately 900 prospective students each year. Roper-Doten explains that their goal isn’t to increase the applicant pool number — because they only enroll approximately 86 students — but, rather, to increase representation in the pool.

“Our diversity is strong,” she says. “We’re seeing students applying from different parts of the world.” Even so, they’re looking at ways to find new populations of students to encourage. When she started at Olin, Roper-Doten says, it was such a new college that students mainly found out about it through word of mouth. “I said, we need to think about who doesn’t know about Olin and how we open up to schools that serve higher percentages of students from backgrounds that are historically excluded from STEM,” she says. Today they’re

creating relationships with counselors at schools with underrepresented students and partnering with community-based organizations that focus on college access.

Olin College (like Colgate) is continuing to be test optional for now. “I think higher ed is at a moment of seeing that we have lots of different ways to evaluate candidates for our schools,” Roper-Doten says. “I work closely with our institutional research group, and we look at what are the pieces of data that come in at the point of application, and how that data relates to success on campus.” Much of their research shows that high school GPA is one of the strongest indicators of how a student will perform, she explains.

“For different schools, you may see a different predictability in testing with what the student’s performance is. I don’t feel like I can speak for all colleges, but I do think it is our job as enrollment leaders to do the due diligence on this, and it’s a necessary part of our process.”

HIGHER ED IS AT A MOMENT OF SEEING THAT WE HAVE LOTS OF DIFFERENT WAYS TO EVALUATE CANDIDATES FOR OUR SCHOOLS.

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nother alumna whose campus experience built a foundation for her work is Christelle Hayles ’15, who worked for Colgate’s Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) and ALANA. Now, as a DEI specialist at MIT, she provides her thoughts on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

What did your responsibilities at OUS and ALANA entail?

It largely centered around student support via formal DEI programming, community-

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How has your philosophy major guided your work?

Philosophy gave me the tools to ask questions that help to make sense of the systems we operate under. There is still a lot of work to be done on how to have conversations around race, gender, class, and oppression in general, as well as the role universities have in rectifying those systems on their campuses and in service to their communities.

Philosophy also taught me that not everyone will see DEI work as imperative as I do and what it means to be in conversation with folks of oppositional belief systems. (Thank you, Professor Maura Tumulty!)

How do you lead people in conversations about DEI? It’s a personal journey to not only do this work, but to even consider doing this work.

When I am coming into a space and the conversation is around diversity, equity, and inclusion, my main goal is to meet everybody where they’re at. There might be folks who have had these conversations every day of their lives, or folks who are just figuring out what diversity means to them. Being able to steer the conversation where everybody takes something back with them requires patience and a certain skill set, but also requires being able to utilize the Socratic method — asking, ‘Why do you think that way? That’s an interesting point.

Where did you learn that?’ Being able to find where folks are coming from and their approach to DEI helps me make sense of a strategy in terms of, ‘What are your DEI goals? If you don’t have any, how do we set them?’

philip keith

CHRISTELLE HAYLES ’15, DEI specialist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

building initiatives, and trainings. The bulk of it largely centers around informal and formal one-on-one or group support.

The first thing that is necessary to situate yourself in a DEI role is to position yourself as a resource liaison, but most important, a trusted thought partner and listening ear.

JEAN MORRISON ’80, university provost and chief academic officer, Boston University

I BELIEVE THAT UNIVERSITIES SHOULD APPROACH SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS WITH SYSTEMIC SOLUTIONS. What does your role at MIT entail?

I am the DEI specialist for three academic departments: biological engineering, chemical engineering, and material science and engineering. I work collaboratively with the departments to foster an inclusive working and learning climate/culture that embraces intersectional identities, promotes diverse critical knowledge, and centers the lived experiences of marginalized communities to ensure that community members feel like they belong and can thrive. Additionally, I work alongside the DEI committees in each department, and with the department’s corresponding department heads, to facilitate the development/implementation of departmental strategic plans on DEI, and evaluating the progress in order to guide the departments in strategies that lead to longterm and sustainable inclusive excellence.

David Scavone ’77

How do you think DEI work should be approached?

I believe that universities should approach systemic problems with systemic solutions.

Applying a systemic and restorative justice lens to any university’s operational systems is a tall ask because universities risk losing the support (financially or metaphorically) of donors, alumni, and partners. In many ways, universities cannot make such bold moves in terms of updating their systemic operations because they could lose what they perceive to be the legacy of their institution. I argue that there is a brighter future for the higher education institution that courageously steps out to integrate DEI into the DNA of the university.

How do you personally hope to make an impact?

My goal is to position DEI as a standard and systemic part of whatever institution I am in. Like my mentor taught me: The goal is to weave DEI into the full fabric of the institution.

T

he honorary degree citation for Jean Morrison ’80 at Colgate’s 2022 Commencement recognized her as someone who is “constantly seeking ways to increase access to the sciences for underrepresented populations.”

Morrison has fought for equity in the five institutions where she’s studied, taught, and served in leadership roles — including her current position as the provost and chief academic officer at Boston University.

In June 2019, she brought that fight to the government when she testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the Hearing on Combatting Sexual Harassment in Science. She told them about her experience as a woman geologist pursuing her doctorate in the ’80s. In that male-dominated environment, “bullying behavior was baked into the system,” she said. “Back then, efforts to change that culture were only sporadic and arose from individual efforts, and not from the scientific or academic communities at-large. In fact, you would not have been considered a serious scientist if you even raised the issue for discussion.”

In that hearing, Morrison laid out a plan to make BU a more welcoming place for women as well as students of color and other underrepresented groups. In addition to her own experience, Morrison explained that the issue was particularly personal because her daughter was in a STEM PhD program at the time. “I want to be sure that she has the opportunity to thrive,” Morrison said. As provost, she also supported the launch of BU’s ARROWS (Advance, Recruit, Retain & Organize Women in STEM) program.

More recently, Morrison was responsible for the university establishing the Center for Antiracist Research through the hiring of Ibram X. Kendi. “[The center] does the scholarly work behind understanding systemic racism and history of racism, particularly in the United States, and policy matters around those processes that have sort of inherently structural racism,” she explains.

→Jean Morrison (second from right) testifying before a House committee about sexual harassment in STEM. Autumn 2022

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“All institutions of higher education, except HBCUs, were founded and developed without the context of having inclusion at their core, and they all have a great deal of work to do,” Morrison adds. “It takes a commitment to the issue and the focus of time and energy to help identify those systems that aren’t helping us to bring in more diverse faculty and staff members.

And of course, we’re always working on the diversity of our students to ensure that a Boston University education is accessible and attractive to students from underrepresented groups.”

Although there’s still much work to be done, “the world has come a long way” since Morrison was a student, she says.

She is grateful to have had a nurturing environment in Colgate’s geology department, finding mentors in professors Bruce Selleck and Jim McLelland. They all remained friends until the two professors passed away in 2017 and 2021, respectively.

AS PROVOST, SHE SUPPORTED THE LAUNCH OF BU’S ARROWS (ADVANCE, RECRUIT, RETAIN & ORGANIZE WOMEN IN STEM) PROGRAM.

JOE MANHERTZ ’96, athletics director at St. Bonaventure University

D BE PART OF SOMETHING MORE THAN JUST YOUR TEAM.

ivision I athletics prepares students to be successful, says Joe Manhertz ’96. “You’re double majoring,” he says, referencing the balancing act of academics and staying physically competitive.

Currently in the second year of his role at St. Bonaventure, Manhertz shares his six main objectives for student-athletes:

1. Educate: That’s part of coming to college, you get an education.

2. Compete, and really go all out: the intrinsic value of sports, the wins and losses, and the emotion that go with those.

3. Nurture: Build more than just working out and competing on the fields; nurture the mind, body, and soul.

4. Play the right way: Make sure we’re following the rules, doing what’s right.

5. Embrace differences: Not everyone sees life through the same lens. I walk through life as a 6'6'' African American man. Let’s embrace what’s different.

6. Build community: Be a part of something more than just your team, more than just being a student-athlete. Be a part of the university, be a part of the community, be a part of the state.

At Colgate: Manhertz played football and basketball. He majored in geography and education.

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DAVID HALE ’84, executive vice president and COO, University of Richmond

A

s some colleges are closing or merging (more than 60 in the past five years, according to the Hechinger Report), it’s a trying time to be in charge of a university’s finances.

David Hale ’84, who is at the helm of University of Richmond’s financial management, says, “We didn’t know what to expect” when the COVID-19 pandemic started. “We didn’t know if we could host students on campus and do our in-person, residential education in the fall of ’20. So as a result, we had to be very careful about our expense control, because residential education is a significant piece of our annual revenue,” he explains. “Similar to Colgate, we were able to move forward.” More from Hale: “I focus on the administrative side of the university, not on the academic side. A lot of it is what I helped oversee at Colgate [he worked at his alma mater for 20 years]. At Richmond, my responsibilities include financial management, facilities’ management, information services, and athletics.”

Majoring in geology: “Bruce Selleck was my adviser, and then he was my colleague in the administration at Colgate, so that was a wonderful journey, and he was a great mentor for me. I loved being a geology student at Colgate, but I didn’t think it was for me, as a career path. So I went in a different direction, and I [entered] an accounting program at NYU. But the Colgate education gave me the confidence and interest to do other things. And certainly, the quantitative skills and analytics skills that I learned being a geology major have helped me to this day.”

After NYU, Hale worked in financial management for the entertainment industry, first for Paramount Pictures and then for Sony. “But I decided I really wanted

I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING MORE MISSION-DRIVEN THAN PROFIT-DRIVEN. to do financial management work in the notfor-profit sector. I wanted to do something more mission-driven than profit-driven.”

He called Colgate’s career services office to talk to Judy Fischer (a well-known and beloved staff member who died in 2020).

Fischer had helped him as a student and did so again. “We’re hiring at Colgate,” she said.

There wasn’t a position in his direct line of work, but Hale became associate director of planned giving before moving to the financial offices after a couple of years.

How University of Richmond handled financial uncertainty at the start of the pandemic: “When [COVID-19] first came out, we cut operating expenditures. We froze salaries. We invested heavily in testing, masks, and air filtration units at all of our buildings. We bought new modular units to house students who needed to be isolated.

That was a pretty big investment.”

Looking back on 2020: “It was really hard for every single one of us in that moment.

We’re still not completely out of the woods, but the financial risk has gone down.”

there are currently 36 alumni working at colgate in various roles.

The Student Has Become the Master In looking at the nearly 2,000 known alumni who work in higher education, professors make up the largest cohort.

Here’s a snapshot of that group: Total number of professors: 636 Most popular discipline: English (43 alumni teach that subject) Institution with the most Colgate representation: University of Vermont (10 alumni) States with the most professors: New York (92) Pennsylvania (45) California (39) Professor teaching farthest from Colgate: Ralph W. Adler ’80 at the University of Otago, New Zealand Graduates who teach at Colgate: 4 Di Keller ’81, Rebecca Upton ’92, Peter Klepeis ’94, Dominique Hill ’05 Class producing the most professors: The Class of ’86 has 25 professors, more than any other year.

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TAKING INITIATIVE It requires guts and skill to translate an idea into a business. These entrepreneurs had enough chutzpah to believe in their products and build successful enterprises.

By Emily Daniel ’18, Rebecca Docter, and Aleta Mayne

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IT SUITS HER

Elizabeth Sisk Photography (right); Sean Scheidt Photography (far right)

As a C-Suite executive with the Dallas Stars Hockey Club, Alana Newhook ’09 Matthews was surrounded by men in custom suits and sport coats. They chose their own fabrics, and the garments they wore were studiously fitted to their frames. The same wasn’t available for Matthews: “I was like, ‘I want that.’”

So, in 2018 while pregnant with her first child, Matthews took a leap. She didn’t know what challenges motherhood would bring, so she felt it was the right time to pursue a creative endeavor. “There’s lots of women in executive roles or even building their careers, but the traditional, custom clothing companies tailor for men,” Matthews notes.

With Alautus (the name is a portmanteau from the name Alana and the Latin root for elegant, lautus), she seeks to flip the script by providing upscale, versatile workwear for women. Prices range from $449–749.

It’s important to note that Alautus wasn’t an overnight endeavor. Before seriously considering founding the company, Matthews first crowdsourced opinions about whether there was a need to be filled, surveying her wide network of bankers, lawyers, and sports executives. The response was overwhelming — of the custom options women could get, they were either made of cheap fabrics or cost upward of $4,000.

The garments were more accessible to Hollywood celebrities than the average executive. And, the pieces were basic, boxy cuts lacking fashionable flair. “I wanted to build something that was an investment piece, but also somewhat attainable,” she says.

Being the highest-ranking woman at the Dallas Stars didn’t hurt when it came to business experience. In her role as executive vice president of business operations and general counsel, Matthews navigated the general running of the franchise, which appeared at the Stanley Cup Finals in 2020. She says her role helped her round out the skill sets necessary to run her own business. “I could see it as a functioning business, as opposed to just an idea that I was piecemeal putting together.”

Overall though, she sees Alautus as a chance for women to support women: “My time in sports really cemented in me a passion for helping women on the way up in their careers,” she says. “Also, supporting the women who had fought the fight and been successful and risen to the tops of their profession.”

Alana Newhook ’09 Matthews

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“My time in sports really cemented in me a passion for helping women on the way up in their careers.”

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In 2018, Hilary Poticha ’95 Kurinsky and her family were having a roundtable chat when the conversation turned to collectible toys.

“I wonder why there isn’t a product where an animal’s arms and legs could actually stick out through holes in a pocket?” someone in the group pondered.

A month later, during the holiday season, Kurinsky noticed an ornament in the shape of an animal with long arms and legs. “I grabbed a T-shirt of mine, and I cut four holes in it,” she remembers. “I took the ornament down and shoved the arms and legs through, and I thought, ‘Huh, that is pretty cute.’”

That’s how Pockimals — palm-sized stuffed animals that button into kids’ pockets — were born. “We say, their belly buttons button in,” Kurinsky notes. In addition to Pockimals, she sells shirts, dresses, and backpacks with button holes that allow the tiny unicorns, foxes, and lions

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to attach. “Everyone asks, ‘Well, what are you? Are you a clothing company or are you a toy company?’ And I say, ‘I’m all of it.’”

Business Know-How Kurinsky spent 15 years in the banking industry before becoming a stay-at-home mom. She draws from both experiences to successfully run her business.

On Practicality Attaching the animal to a child’s pocket is cute, but mostly “there’s a place for it to go back for safekeeping with the hope that they don’t lose it,” Kurinsky notes.

Where to Buy Pockimals are sold on Pockimals. com, Amazon, and Etsy, but recently Kurinsky has also taken the business on the road: The toys are now available in more than 17 stores around the United States, including the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, an Apple Orchard in Massachusetts, and festivals in the Midwest.

Melissa Song Photograghy

A NEW KIND OF POCKET PROTECTOR

A DREAM COME TRU “One of the things we really wanted to stay true to was always using premium natural ingredients in our seltzers.”

After years scoring goals for Colgate’s men’s ice hockey team, Jack McNamara ’14 wanted to take a shot at a new venture: wellness beverages for athletes like himself.

The final product was Tru, a line of health-focused canned drinks formulated to suit a range of needs. For McNamara, the project was research intensive; he was hell-bent on creating something that actually worked.

“When I hung up the skates, I reached out to a bunch of different sports dietitians for top teams and basically begged them to talk to me,” McNamara remembers. He ended up sitting down with a former Boston Red Sox dietitian, and they talked ingredients, top-selling brands, and athletes’ common needs.

That conversation led to a seven-year process of making sure each can of Tru tastes great while delivering on its health-focused promises, like better sleep and stronger workouts. “The reason we launched all these products was because these were all problems that I had specifically,” McNamara says. The secret to making Tru work: delegation. With branding by a designer at Blue Bottle and growth led by a salesperson from Red Bull, the team remains lean. “I realized you can’t control every aspect of the business. As a co-founder, it’s difficult to let go,” he says. “But, when you hire the right people and delegate accordingly, things start taking shape in a beautiful way.”

product photo: @prospectstreetstudio; Headshot: Francesca Venezia

On Taste There are seven flavors of Tru: Energy, Focus, Power, Defend, Rescue, Dream, and Beauty. All of the drinks are naturally sweetened, utilizing ingredients like mango juice and green tea. “Our first formulation tasted like tree bark — you have to find a way to balance great ingredients with great-tasting ingredients. It’s been a learning process.

Every year, we’ve grown, and we just try not to make the same mistake twice.”

Expanding Horizons Tru is now found at several retail locations, like Market Basket and Wegmans. “Most recently, we landed a regional launch with Walmart into 430 stores. It’s a big opportunity for us.”

Secret Ingredients “One of the things we really wanted to stay true to was always using premium natural ingredients in our seltzers.

Oftentimes, those are more difficult to work with. Each of our products has a unique blend and a unique juice. Then, we go on from there.”

The Colgate Connection Phil Corrinet ’70 was one of the first investors in Tru, and McNamara has since served as a mentor for Thought Into Action. Also, McNamara often takes cues from Super Coffee CEO Jimmy DeCicco ’15. “I reach out to him, being like, ‘Hey, yo. I’m having this problem,’ and he always picks up the phone, lends an ear, and helps us out.

The entrepreneurial world in food and beverage is really small and extremely supportive.”

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NATURAL-BORN BUSINESSWOMAN Shirene Brown ’91 is flanked by color.

A rainbow of ribbons, fabrics, and other bits and bobs surround her as she gets to work on the items she sells on her e-commerce website. Among her creations are laser-cut wooden earrings, screen-printed coffee cups, and skincare products made from natural ingredients.

Chances are, if you want it, Brown is willing to find a way to make it. “That’s what I do — so many different things,” says the owner of Naturally Made By Shirene.

Learn more about what she makes in her studio: Finding a Solution One section of her business, the one closest to her heart, is Brown’s skincare line. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood, she struggled with a skin ailment that doctors couldn’t fix with medicine. Trial and error led her to create her Whipped Shea Body Butter, which helped calm the rashes she experienced. She says the process of creating this product helped her gain selfconfidence and acknowledge that she was beautiful even with physical imperfections. “Nobody thinks about the mental part of psoriasis, eczema, or skin inflammation,” she notes.

Making Improvements Brown is actively growing the skincare side of her business, recently enlisting the help of a cosmetic

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chemist to reformulate some of her bestselling products. In the future, she’s hoping items like her natural deodorant, made with tea tree oil and lavender, will be more shelf-stable. Next on her product agenda: A makeup line made with natural ingredients. “I am, one person at a time, trying to get everybody to become a little more natural and a little more wise about what they put in and on their body.”

Using Her Artistic License When creativity strikes, Brown runs with it. Recently, she started making hand-painted earrings in the shape of butterflies. “I get to blend paints and come up with different colors. Even today I was thinking of different earrings to design because I’m having fun with it,” she said during her interview with Colgate Magazine. “That’s the creative part of it.”

An Early Business Mindset Brown first became an entrepreneur at age 8, when she baked and sold bread and pies to members of her community. “I’ve always been a hands-on person,” she says, and that attribute, mixed with innate creativity, led her to pursue several businesses throughout her career. ’Tis the Spirit That Is Colgate Brown, a Colgate Africana and Latin American studies major, credits the University with helping her learn how to budget for her business. During her senior year, as the vice president of the Black Student Union, she was in charge of the financial aspect of the organization.

She’s still connected with Colgate — last year, she designed and engraved the champagne flutes for the 30th anniversary of the Alumni of Color organization.

THIS FATHERDAUGHTER DUO IS MIXING UP THE MEZCAL SCENE Through a decade of visits to Oaxaca, Mexico, Sydney Block ’18 and her family came to appreciate the ancient, spiritual tradition that is mezcal. So when Block and her father went into business together to launch a mezcal brand, they kept the mezcalero (a person who distills mezcal) at the heart of the company. “We visited upwards of 50, even 100 palenques over the last several years,” Block says, explaining

that these small distilleries are often on family farms, and each family makes the alcohol in a slightly different way. “It’s the most amazing experience to see families come together to do this — it’s part of everyday life for many people in Oaxaca.”

An environmental economics major at Colgate, Block was focused on bringing sustainability into the business from the beginning. Things clicked into place when the father-daughter duo met one mezcalero, Jorge, who is also a botanist working to graft wild agave so the plant can be more sustainably cultivated. Wild agave contains more sugar than cultivated agave, which means better-tasting mezcal, so Jorge is grafting together high-sugar-content wild agave plants and cultivating them on his ancestral land to avoid depleting the region’s wild supply. Each mezcalero the Blocks work with owns equity in the company,

and the company plans to use these local partnerships to support more sustainability efforts in the future.

Most of the mezcal market in the U.S. is the espadin varietal, which is made primarily from the blue agave plant, but Block said mezcal is made from more than 40 different types of agave. The brand hopes to introduce mezcal fans to new varietals with six offerings from six different mezcaleros, including an espadin, three wild varietals, and two ensembles. “My personal favorite is the mexicano because it has this beautiful, approachable, citrusy silkiness to it,” Block says. She recommends sipping it neat, at room temperature, with a slice of orange on the side to bring out its bright citrus quality.

“ It’s the most amazing experience to see families come together to do this.”

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FROM VINTAGE TO VIRAL When Madison Bailey ’18 bought a pair of 1960s chain earring sunglasses from a Brooklyn vintage shop, she had no idea that her modern spin on the retro style would become an overnight success. “I had never seen anything like these glasses, and I felt like the coolest person in the world when I wore them, but I also felt like they were lacking in modern colors, styles, and functionality,” Bailey says. In July 2020, she posted a video of herself to TikTok sporting a pair of her homemade chain sunglasses, called SUNLOOPS, and woke up the next morning to 300 preorders.

“One of the first things I did after I fulfilled the 300 preorders was email [Colgate’s Thought Into Action incubator] because I recognized that I needed help,” she says. By the end of 2020, she had left her job at the United Nations to run SUNLOOPS full-time, relying on the daily and weekly check-ins with her Thought Into Action mentors Kate Foster ’99 Lengyel and Julie DeLoca ’91 to help her navigate being a firsttime CEO. The company has been featured on the Today Show as well as in People Magazine and Marie Claire, among other media outlets.

“To put the power of social media into perspective,” Bailey says, “in April 2021, I had five videos go viral on TikTok and Instagram Reels in the span of one week, and those videos directly led to $20,000 in organic sales, without me having to spend a cent on marketing.”

Bailey’s go-to styles: The Annie frame in brown with tortoise diamond charms for fall, and The Kimberli in light pink with white star charms for summer.

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ON A ROLL Parents want the best for their kids — especially with the first child, decisions can be most precious. Barry Donaldson ’03 and his partner, Danielle, are no exception. When the couple had baby Nola, they wanted to buy her a ball pit for playtime. The parents ordered two types, but they weren’t up to snuff. “Their foam was sourced overseas, so it wasn’t good quality,” Donaldson explains.

Based in Canada, the pair found a company that provides soy-based organic materials and “we just went with it from there,” he says. “We started building everything

ourselves, ball pits and play mats.” Balu Organics was born in 2020.

Stars, they’re just like us: Justin and Hailey Bieber bought one for their nephew; Ashley Tisdale, Dakota Fanning, and several basketball players have also purchased the ball pits.

Snowball effect: When the couple started the business, they were running it out of their home. Soon, they moved into a storage facility and have since moved twice into new warehouses as the operation has expanded.

“We’ve always taken the money we’ve made and rolled it back into the company. It’s like a snowball that we’re rolling downhill to make it bigger and bigger.”

Adults can have fun too: When some customers half-joked that the company should make a ball pit for adults as well, “we did and it’s gone really well.” They’re also looking into making slides for the ball pits and kid-sized couches.

By day: Donaldson, who majored in computer science at Colgate, has been a project manager for the City of Toronto for the past 17 years. He earned his MBA at Ryerson University in 2010 with the plan of starting a business.

The latest addition: The couple had a second child, Myles, in November 2021.

We wonder: What will he inspire his parents to do?

“We started building everything ourselves, ball pits and play mats.”

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A LITTLE FLOURISH The last two times the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, Michael Kanners ’90 got a call. One of his clients, who works in the team’s front office, wanted custom-made cuff links to commemorate each event. In 2013, Kanners crafted a pair in the shape of a baseball; the 2018 commission was more ambitious — in the form of the World Series trophy. “It was rather challenging to try and create something that’s about 2 feet tall into a cuff link,” Kanners says, “but we got all the details down.”

A third-generation jeweler, he has tapped into a niche market for bespoke cuff links.

Kanners joined the family business after earning his bachelor’s at Colgate and a gemology degree from The Gemological Institute of America. A segment of the clientele were collectors who were in search of vintage cuff links. “The clients started asking me to make them new designs since there just wasn’t enough of what I was trying to hunt down for them.”

Most of Kanners’ cuff links range from $5,000–9,000. He acknowledges that it’s an expensive price point but explains that they’re costly because of the work involved.

The process begins with Kanners sketching out the design and then collaborating with workshops in Italy, Germany, and New York City. “These are the most highly sought-after stone carvers in the world,” he says, adding that the labor is the largest portion of the cost. His customers, therefore, are people “who appreciate finely made things.”

Most challenging commission: A Wake Forest University alumnus requested four sets of cuff links representing the school’s mascot, the Demon Deacon, with “WF” on the back. The client requested various hard stones — e.g., onyx for the hat; white agate for the hair, eyes, and teeth; and light brown jasper for the face.

What he’s working on now: “I’m more gemstone oriented … traditional stones like aquamarine, amethyst, or tourmaline, but still using modern techniques.” He’s also

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testing out different metals, like titanium: “You can anodize it into different spectral colors and then you can create very modernlooking designs. I’m doing more custom women’s jewelry now as a result of the cuff links. People are seeing that I have the ability to create things that are completely different.”

On his sleeve: Kanners says his personal

collection of cuff links is rather small.

He has a few pairs that his father and grandfather handed down, and he kept a couple of the first sets he made for the company. “My own dress is generally conservative,” he told Sarto magazine, “but I always like a subtle highlight. I think that one little flourish, which is under your sleeve most of the time anyway, when it’s revealed, it’s a nice touch.”

mitch helson (2)

His Colgate philosophy degree guides his work: “I try to figure out how the stones look best, what it means to be mounting each particular stone, and what the point of it is. There’s more thought behind it rather than just aesthetic design.”

A LIFE CHANGER FOR ONE, AND A GAME CHANGER FOR OTHERS

The process begins with Kanners sketching out the design and then collaborating with workshops in Italy, Germany, and New York City.

The Holy Grail of energy. That’s what David Feldman ’89 had stumbled upon, a kinesiologist told him.

Feldman was testing out the origins of UCAN, which is now a variety of products that athletes use to fuel their bodies. At the time, though, he was looking for a solution to a much more personal concern.

His infant son, Jonah, was born with a rare metabolic disorder called glycogen storage disease (GSD) type 1a, which prevents the liver from metabolizing glycogen into glucose. The body’s natural source of energy, glucose affects brain function, the respiratory system, and phosphate balance. Feldman and his wife had to feed Jonah every three hours. At night, they’d set double alarms to ensure that they wouldn’t oversleep and miss a feeding, which could have dire consequences.

“We were looking for something — is there anything out there to improve life for the patient, for the caregivers, something to be made easier?” remembers Feldman, who is an orthodontist.

Through research, they found the inventor of SuperStarch, a slow­– energy release starch that could lengthen the time between Jonah’s feedings. The inventor had sold the license for the starch’s use in GSD, but he licensed its use for consumer nutrition to the Feldmans. In addition to glucose management, “We realized what we had was good for a variety of things: athletics, metabolic control, healthy living,” Feldman says. In 2009, he co-founded The UCAN Company as a sports nutrition business. The products — gels, powders, bars — are purchased by more than 40 pro teams (including the Patriots), 300 college teams, and elite athletes. The company has rebranded the starch to LIVSTEADY, with the message that it’s a product that provides steady energy for active lifestyles and everyday health. Feldman also seeks to further the applications of LIVSTEADY to provide life-altering solutions of energy management for type 1 and type 2 diabetic individuals.

As for Jonah? The starch has been a “life changer,” Feldman says.

Jonah’s even able to be a typical college kid — at Colgate, in fact, as a member of the Class of ’24.

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illustrations by david plunkert

The Man Behind the Curtain “All the magic isn’t in fairyland,” he said gravely.

“There’s lots of magic in all Nature, and you may see it as well in the United States, where you and I once lived.”

— L. Frank Baum, Tik-Tok of Oz

By C.J. Hauser, associate professor of English

M

y friend and I went to the Yellow Brick Road Casino, looking for a good time. We were not optimistic about this, but we thought it might be a laugh. Neither of us was a gambler. We set ourselves a $20 budget because we did not trust ourselves with more.

I had been driving by this casino in Chittenango, N.Y., for almost two years. It is painted emerald green and has a wide yellow awning. Above the awning, the Yellow Brick Road’s sign of neon bricks blink in a spiral.

I was hoping that, inside, the YBR would have a little bit of Oz-y magic to it. You’ll think this was naïve of me, but I was hopeful because I used to know the Wizard of Oz. We were in communication for many years. I had my eye on the casino because, when the wizard died, he left me short on a kind of magic I’ve been looking for ever since.

In any given room, my grandfather would find the smartest, strangest child and put himself in league with them against the adults. He loved: hand buzzers, trick horses, Autumn 2022

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fake vomit, squirting daisies, cowboy truisms, knockknock jokes, and scatological humor. On grandparents’ visiting day in the third grade, he promised every child at my lunch table a strawberry-shortcake ice cream bar, against the wishes of their parents. Instead of simply handing out the ice cream, he gave us each a dollar, so we could feel the power of exchanging the currency ourselves.

I thought of him as a wizard. This is not a metaphor.

The thing my grandad Ed Joyce loved most was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and when I was a child he perpetrated an obvious but persuasive prank upon my little sister and me in which he convinced us, methodically, and across multiple media, that the Land of Oz was real.

Is it fair to call it a prank if he never hoped for a gotcha moment? If he hoped we’d believe in him forever?

Inside, there was nothing Oz-like about the YBR at all. It looked like clip art of a casino. Worse, it had been so long since I last gambled that everything about how a casino worked had changed. At the problematic Disneyland that is Mohegan Sun, I’d once been given a velvety pouch of chips, heavy with possibility. On a riverboat in Natchez, Miss., that looked like the set of Maverick, I’d received a foam cup of golden tokens with a lovely jingle to it. There’d been a kind of magic in the transubstantiation of money into these new currencies that had the power to multiply themselves into something more.

This was not the case at YBR. At the info desk, we were given loyalty cards with our legal names on them.

We took these to the slots, which were mostly digital: Lobstermania, Snow Leopard, Sexy Viking Lady — none of them Oz-themed. I put my card into a slot and tried to load money onto it, only to discover the card did nothing other than earn rewards points at a local gas station.

I approached a pair of nicely dressed workers who were milling about the floor, to ask them how I was supposed to give the casino my money. The workers were called, I kid you not, munchkins.

The munchkins told me that YBR was now a state-ofthe-art casino, just like Atlantic City, just like Vegas.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means,” the munchkins said, “you can put your cash directly into the machine.”

My friend and I returned to the digital slots, which, it turned out, were boring. You pressed a button to pledge your dollar amount, and the digital wheels spun. The button was unsatisfying. It offered no illusion of guiding my own fortunes.

The analog slots were better. Their tumblers rolled and glowed: bar, cherries, dollar sign. Was it the thunking of the machine that appealed, or was it that I had seen people win money this way in a movie? Or was it maybe that this machine had not a button, but a handle? It took some heft to pull it — you had to try.

There was even some technique to it, I told myself. I developed a slow-then-quick maneuver that got me closer to the triple cherries than I’d come before.

I liked how the old-gen machines made it seem like maybe I was a tiny bit in charge of my own fortunes. I could decide how to pull the bar, and how hard, and each time I fed the machine a dollar, I became a little more

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I thought of him as a wizard. This is not a metaphor.

The thing my grandad Ed Joyce loved most was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and when I was a child he perpetrated an obvious but persuasive prank upon my little sister and me in which he convinced us, methodically, and across multiple media, that the Land of Oz was real.

convinced I’d gotten my technique down.

Soon, I was going to pull the handle and the triple cherries would come, because I’d earned it. I’d put in my time with this machine, and America had raised me to believe that time invested would always pay off. I lost again. I had found myself in the space where the reality of the American Dream collides with the truth that the House Always Wins.

My grandad’s Oz origin story was the Depression. He was the son of a war hero/ex-con called Cap, who, when his Arizona dude ranch went bust, took his family on the road. My grandfather spent much of his early life on the move, sometimes even living out of the family car, as Cap joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and ran his “wild west” magazine. My grandfather often found himself parked in the library of whatever town they landed in, where he found his only friends: Dorothy and the Scarecrow and Tik-Tok and Polychrome and the whole cast of characters in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. He told himself that someday, if he ever had any money, he would buy all the Oz books. The 13 originals written by Baum, and 26 written by other authors.

As it turned out, as an adult, he did have money. Quite a bit of it. The story of how this happened is the sort of “up by his bootstraps” American Dream tale people can’t resist, and it was as ubiquitous in my childhood as the story of Oz. Ed Joyce went from being a child of the Depression living out of a car to working in radio.

He hosted a jazz program as Jazzman Joyce! After that there was a live children’s television show sponsored by a cake company, Breadtime Stories, which featured a real monkey named Cookie. There was a radio interview show, The Talk of New York, where he brought on guests like Malcolm X and Timothy Leary. When he moved into hard reporting, he was responsible for breaking the story of Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. In the 1980s, he became the president of CBS News, where he gained a reputation for being so simultaneously brutal and charming that he was known as “the velvet shiv.”

Across these years and successes, he went about acquiring a complete set of first-edition Oz books.

He read them to his own children, and while we were growing up, he read them to my sister and me. We all lived in the same small Connecticut town.

There was nothing I loved more than these stories.

He had a radioman’s flair and performed the chapters as a mad-cap, polyphonic one-man show. I can tell you exactly what the Nome King, and Princess Ozma, and Tik-Tok are supposed to sound like.

The Oz readings were only briefly discontinued when my grandparents retired back west to a horse ranch in Santa Ynez, Calif. I was 7 and my sister was 4.

The radioman’s solution to the distance, of course, was recording.

Every day, after school, my sister and I checked the mailbox for a padded mailer with a cassette tape inside.

An Oz chapter. My grandad included photocopies of the illustrations that went with the reading. He set the scene at the beginning of the tapes — telling us where he was sitting and whether any of his dogs were around. At the end he always let us know what he was doing next, normally feeding his horses, and then he told us to be good to our parents and stay “frisky and jolly.”

This was when my grandfather began convincing us that Oz was real.

There is one bit of tape to this effect still extant. Midchapter, mid-recording, he receives a phone call, the line bleating stagily in the background. He apologizes for interrupting our reading. “I think I have to take this…” he says, and pretends to turn off the tape. Then he says: “Oh, hello, Wizard!” in a tone of absolute delight.

He proceeds to make a date to hang out in a poppy field, assuring his caller, the Wizard, that he has indeed been practicing the magic he’d taught him so he could perform tricks for us kids that coming Christmas. Has he told the kids that Oz is real? Oh, no, no, he hasn’t yet.

But he will, when the time is right. “Goodbye, Wizard!”

When my sister and I first heard this bit of tape we

The first cracks in the illusion came in the sixth grade, when we were asked to read a biography by a significant person.

turned to each other and said nothing. To even repeat what we had heard would break the spell.

It was possible to believe. Because my grandad did do magic tricks. He pulled scarves from his nose and guessed the color of dice in secret boxes and erased images from coloring books with flourishing gestures.

Why wouldn’t we think he was in league with the wizard?

With each trip to California, the illusion grew. He took us to Figueroa Mountain and led us waist-deep into a legitimate poppy field. We collected pine cones bigger than footballs, which he soaked in Borax so that when we threw them into the campfire they turned the flames green. He pretended he could talk to animals (in Oz, animals talk) and taught his own horse to nod and stamp Autumn 2022

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marvelous future you aspired to! Oz was for everyone!

Late capitalism is not a good moment for believing in either of these kinds of magic.

As an adult, the real world often disappoints me. I am a person who prefers to live in my head, in books and fantasies, where everything shines slightly brighter than reality. I’ve often wished to go back to the times when some of the Nome King’s rocks might appear on my front stoop, when some animal would speak to me its secret.

The first cracks in the illusion came in the sixth grade, when we were asked to read a biography by a significant person. It is perhaps telling that, in my Oz-mania, I did not choose to read a biography of Baum and instead chose Judy Garland, who, of course, played Dorothy in the 1939 movie production of The Wizard of Oz. We were meant to come to school on Biography Day dressed as the subject of our chosen book and to report to the class about our lives … in the first person, in character. We would then go on to mingle with our famous compatriots at a “Character Brunch.”

My mother helped me locate Little Girl Lost: The Life and Hard Times of Judy Garland

by Al DiOrio Jr., at the local library. I was horrified and obsessed by Garland’s tragic biography and was determined to bring her truth to the people. And yet, in a totally warped choice, I still chose to appear at school dressed as Dorothy that day, not as Garland. I was all pigtails, glitter-glue heels, and blue ankle socks when I stood in front of my

professor hauser on teaching: “ When it comes to creative writing, I believe in creating a community, a think tank, where everyone in the class is invested in helping everyone else explore and realize their creative work. So many kinds of work emphasize efficiency and productivity — but making art, especially writing, is about the slow, the patient, the acceptance of small failures in the service of pressing on to the next iteration of the thing you’re trying to make. It’s about having a sense of humor about the process, but treating the result with a lot of dignity.”

Fall ’22 courses: Introductory Workshop in Creative Writing: Fiction and Advanced Workshop

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fellow sixth graders and introduced myself as “Judy, Judy, Judy.” I told the class that the rigors of my film shoots required me to take “uppers,” which were drugs, which also helped me lose weight, which was “good for Hollywood,” and about the difficulty I then had sleeping, which required “downers” (also drugs!), and how this cycle of uppers and downers eventually killed me.

I then whispered that there were rumors that my death wasn’t really an accident but a suicide.

When the bell rang, my teacher suggested I playact as Dorothy instead of Garland at the impending Character Brunch.

“Can I at least tell people about Carnegie Hall?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

I understand now that I was meant to read and report on something uplifting, to behave like the other children, who’d come dressed as Jackie Robinson and Marie Curie and whose families had presumably found them biographies that did not dwell on the other Black ballplayers who were robbed of the chance to make good on their talent, or on the effects of radiation exposure. We were all meant to be Dorothy and not Judy that day — to recite the shiny, Oz-y dream version of our biography’s subject. Given my predilection for fantasy, it might surprise you to learn that I was also the kind of kid who hated a lie.

But I knew there was a difference between a fantasy and a lie even then. And that day in sixth grade, I smelled a rat.

“Hi, Grandad. I was Dorothy at school this week,” I told him on our regular phone call.

“How did it go?” he asked “Not too great,” I said. “Not too great at all.”

When I told him what had happened, he positively cackled.

I am a teacher, and I once spent an entire semester, with my undergrad literature students in Florida, accidentally calling the American Dream the “American Myth.” It was November before a Cuban-American student I’d known for a couple semesters felt comfortable enough to correct me, midlecture. I thanked her.

“What an embarrassing and strange thing to get wrong,” I told the class.

“I mean you were wrong but you’re not wrong,” she said, plonking her copy of Winter’s Bone on the desk. We all laughed. It was funny but it wasn’t funny.

I suppose something about the word dream doesn’t sit right with me.

In Baum’s books, Dorothy’s adventure with the Wizard is only the first of many times she goes to Oz — in later stories she even brings her family with her, an uplifting example of chain migration — and Oz’s reality is asserted by these return visits.

Beowulf Sheehan

responses to his questions — an old duderanch trick learned from his father. He hid gemstones around the garden, insinuating that the Nome King had left them there and would be very angry if we took his treasure.

We always took the treasure, and often found notes in the same spot a day later threatening, thrillingly, to “stomp your curly toes off.”

My grandad was the sort of man who was always pulling your leg while simultaneously doing real things too amazing to be believed, so where the truth might lie was hard to parse. Back then, I think I knew I was supposed to believe, but only halfway, the way a good scene partner might. Instead, I believed it desperately, recklessly, as if asking too many questions might scare the fantasy away.

I had my reasons for wanting to believe that the world my grandfather was spinning for us was possible. I was a very ordinary girl who feared I might never become anything different, and in the Oz books even very ordinary girls from Kansas could be whisked away from chores and schoolwork to have adventures with robots and queens.

It didn’t matter that Dorothy wasn’t remarkable — she could still do incredible things. Back then, I made no distinction between believing in Oz and believing in an American Dreamish world where the poor son of an ex-con cowboy could rise through the ranks of American life. America would see something in you that no one else did and give you a chance at whatever

The movie sends a different message, not for lack of sequels, but because, in the end, Dorothy wakes up. It was all a dream, her family tells her. “But it wasn’t a dream,” Dorothy says, “it was a place.” All the Gales’ farmhands are gathered around her bedside when Garland says she saw them in Oz, as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. And yet here they are.

Bolger and Haley and Lahr, now in the reality of black and white. They are dressed sensibly, the dirt of their work on their gorgeous faces.

Were men such as them ever in such a place?

Oh, no honey, their looks say, not us — we never got to go anywhere like that.

They are still down on the farm.

I’ve always hated the way the movie gives us the promise of Oz only to snatch it away in the end, and the three friends break my heart most of all.

I’ve taught undergrads at five very different schools over the past decade. I am essentially an optimist and I earnestly believe in my students’ futures. Some of the students I’ve taught came up rough like my grandfather, some rougher, some of them were middle-class kids who never doubted they’d get a degree, some of them were scrappy farm kids, some of them survived lifetimes of hardship and were finally going back to school in their 60s, some of them were veterans, some of them had escaped gangs, some of them came from intense privilege, and many of them were firstgeneration Americans. I think that all of these different kinds of students wound up in my classroom in no small part because they had bought into an American Dream that promised a college degree would open doors.

And maybe this is why my belief in the dream crashed and burned.

Because it is easy enough to believe a dream for yourself, and quite another to speak it out loud to a room of students who trust you to tell them the truth.

These days, I cannot bring myself to sell my students any kind of American rhetorical goods that claim to be equally available to all of them. I cannot bring myself to tell them about the Technicolor future, and say, I see you there, and I see you there. Because, even if I do think I see it, there’s a chance that someday we’re all going to wake up and I will have betrayed them by dreaming too vividly at the front of the classroom.

I think my mouth said “myth” when it couldn’t say “dream” because to describe our collective American story to students as an available goal and not a particular generation’s narrative-shape-of-choice makes me feel like I am back in the sixth

grade, Dorothy on the outside but Judy on the inside. Like I am smelling a rat, and the rat is me.

When we were at the casino, we were in the current-day town of Chittenango, most of which is on Oneida, or Onyota’a:ká, lands.

Chittenango is also the birthplace of L. Frank Baum. Presumably, it is for this reason that the Oneida Nation decided to name its casino Yellow Brick Road, and its adjoining liquor store the Tin Woodman’s Flask.

Had I read a biography of Baum, instead of a biography of Garland, back in sixth grade, I would have learned what I found out the morning before our casino journey, when I looked up his Chittenango connection.

At the top of my search results I found this, from a recent NPR story: “L. Frank Baum, before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ran a newspaper in South Dakota. This was in the early 1890s during the Indian Wars. When Baum heard of the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee, he wrote editorials calling for killing each and every last Native American. From his Sitting Bull editorial: ‘The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.

Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.’”

Why would the Oneida Nation create a casino inspired by the work of the man who’d published this monstrous op-ed? I’m dumb enough to hope someone decided turning Baum’s world profitable for native people would be a satisfying irony. Dumb enough to hope maybe no one knew. I have the good sense not to call the Oneida Nation or the casino and ask. To spare whomever I’d get on the other end of the line my awful question and to instead ask myself what to make of all this.

I ask myself: Why, if I’ve called myself an Oz-freak all these years, a superfan, have I never googled Baum?

Perhaps I knew better than to try to look for the man behind the curtain.

I’m sure my grandfather wouldn’t have been surprised by the facts of Baum’s life and prejudices. There are inconvenient truths behind the curtain of most American Dream stories. Capitalism seldom offers a free balloon ride. Stories of someone rising up are usually at the expense of someone else we don’t talk about. That’s the wizardry of most lovely stories — the sleight of hand, the misdirection, the “look over here, not over there.”

I think these were ideas my grandfather

understood. Because, as it happens, I do own a biography of Baum. The Real Wizard of Oz by Rebecca Loncraine had sat unread on my shelf since my grandfather gave it to me, years ago. When I flipped it open, my grandfather’s inscription read: “I know you thought I made up all those stories. But this is really the guy. Love, Grandad.”

I don’t know what to do with Oz anymore. I want to tell you that it was real when I was small, when my grandfather was alive, but that would mean that it was only real so long as it was easy to believe in.

For as long as my grandad and the rest of the greatest generation were still alive, recounting their greatest magic tricks, it was easy enough for me to believe in the American Dream. But without my grandad around pulling silks from his ears, hiding quartz in the garden, coaxing horses to nod and stomp with sugar cubes, the illusion falls flat. The chances of an American Dream–style success in this world begin to feel dinky, random. And yet, even though there’s nothing beyond the façade of the Yellow Brick Road Casino that promises any kind of Oz, here I am, in Chittenango, on Oneida land, in Baum’s birthplace, feeding my money directly into those state-of-theart machines.

My friend and I called it quits and put on our winter coats. It was November and there was snow on the ground. On the way out, I asked him to take a picture of me.

In the parking lot there was a larger-thanlife, emerald-green mural of Dorothy’s friends: Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion. They were rendered almost like the old illustrations I knew. My friend backed up and backed up, almost all the way into the road, to take the picture. But they were simply too large. It was impossible to fit both them and me in the shot.

From The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser, published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by CJ Hauser.

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Endeavor

following its release. “We actually wrote the instrumental for that track last year, but it wasn’t until we came across the audio recording of RFK’s speech and pieced it into the track that we felt it fully came together.”

Anden, formed nearly a decade ago by Tom Cuppernull ’11 and his brother, Pete, was a labor of love until it was noticed by one of the top artists/producers in the music industry.

Enter Diplo. The Grammy Award–

music

Listen Up It was a long road to stardom for DJ duo Anden.

Then Diplo called.

hen Sen. Robert F. Kennedy spoke the following words in response to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he expected them to be heard around the world: “In this difficult day, in this difficult time … it is perhaps well to ask … what direction we want to move in.”

What Kennedy perhaps did not expect

W

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was for those words to also be heard through a pair of headphones, in the year 2022, sampled in a song by the DJ duo Anden. They’re woven throughout “Escalus,” the second track on the EP Flicker/Escalus. “We feel that Robert F. Kennedy’s words are especially relevant to many of the challenges people face today,” the pair told Electronic Groove

winning DJ played Anden’s songs during sets and radio shows, launching the project into the spotlight. “Whenever you have these large A-list DJs playing your music, that’s usually a good springboard to helping elevate your act,” Cuppernull says. Larger acts began enlisting Anden as the support act for worldwide tours, which grew their fan base. The duo worked with Diplo’s label,

Dave Costantini

Tom Cuppernull ’11 (right) and his brother, Pete, form the DJ duo Anden.

Higher Ground, and remixed his song “Hold You Tight.” And finally, Anden recorded their first full-length album, Youth Is Wasted on the Young (2021), complete with a North American headline tour. “If I had told my Colgate self that, 11 years from now, you’re not only still going to be doing it, but you’ll be touring with the artists you’re fans of, or that you’re going to have millions of streams, it would’ve definitely been a ‘pinch me’ moment.”

Cuppernull got a crash course in the genre of music that would become a large part of his life during the 2009 Australia Study Group. One of the guys living on his dorm floor at the University of Wollongong moonlighted as a DJ in the city: “He started bringing me out to his shows and would have me DJ with him, and because the parties he was playing were mostly people interested in dance music, I started playing it and I just fell in love with it,” he says.

He brought the genre back to campus, introducing it to his friends before it became big in the United States. “It was me definitely forcing it on people a little bit … these iconic, almost top-40, radio-friendly dance records that started coming out a couple years after I got back from Australia.”

Now, Cuppernull works 100-plus hours a week. But not all of that time is spent on the tour bus.

Having been a biology and environmental science major at Colgate, he’s now head of product for the climate technology start-up Benchmark Labs. There, he uses machine learning to create microclimate forecasts for his clients, such as the Nature Conservancy.

Those forecasts allow landowners to make informed decisions about the variable parts of their work, like water usage and labor scheduling. “That has become more and more important over the years as wildfires have been raging, as weather has become more and more unpredictable,” Cuppernull, who’s based in Portland, Ore., says.

How does he do it all? Thankfully, Wi-Fi is available on most flights, so even when he’s touring with Anden, Cuppernull can still plug into his work with Benchmark.

“Balance is something that I'm still working on,” he acknowledges.

— Rebecca Docter

Cuppernull stays connected with Professor Frank Frey, who led the study group in Australia, where Cuppernull became interested in dance music. “Frank was a mentor to me, both on the science side of things, but also on music,” Cuppernull says. He and Frey even performed on stage together — Frey’s band, Danger Boy, would play Colgate parties, and Cuppernull would DJ.

Entertainment

Beating the Odds After more than a decade into her writing career, Jennifer E. Smith ’03 has arrived.

ennifer E. Smith ’03 is not a rock star. “I don’t even play the guitar… I might be tone deaf,” she jokes.

Still, the prolific author can identify with one of her newest characters who is a successful indie musician. In The Unsinkable Greta James (Ballantine Books, 2022), the titular character’s career is in jeopardy after she has a public meltdown. Smith hasn’t hit bottom — quite the opposite — but she knows the feeling of uncertainty when your livelihood depends on your creative work.

“You have to have so much confidence and determination; the odds are so long, you have to think you can be the one to do it and make the magic happen,” she says. “On the other hand, it’s a job with no guarantees.

There’s no safety net, no matter where you are in your career.”

Now more than a decade into her writing career, Smith is on solid ground, and there’s no indication that that’ll change anytime soon.

She’s written nine young adult novels throughout the years, four of which are coming alive on screen. This past July, Netflix debuted Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, based on her 2015 novel. Estimated for sometime in 2023, the streaming service will release The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, based on Smith’s bestselling book to date. And she’s developing the scripts for two other potential adaptations: This Is What Happy Looks Like and Field Notes on Love, for which she’s co-writing the script with Lauren Graham (of Gilmore Girls fame) for HBO Max.

J

Change Is Good In addition to scriptwriting, Smith is branching out in other ways. The Unsinkable Greta James is her first novel for adults, and her next book under contract is also

intended for an adult audience. “As I’ve gotten older, it is a bit harder to reach back to remember what it’s like to be a teen,” she says. “And while I’m so proud of all those books and still would like to continue to write YA at some point, there’s something really nice about writing a character who’s thinking about the same types of things I’m thinking about.”

As with Greta James, Smith found inspiration for another new character through personal experience. Several years ago, her nephew was having difficulty transitioning from one classroom to another, and he was upset every morning before school. When her sister told her about the situation, Smith said: “It’s not his fault. The poor kid comes from a long line of creatures of habit.” She pondered that phrase further and wrote The Creature of Habit (Random House Studio, November 2021), a picture book for preschoolers and early grade school children. It tells the story of a creature who lives on the Island of Habit, and his routine is disrupted by an unexpected visitor who is his total opposite. “It’s about the fact that change doesn’t necessarily have to be a scary thing,” Smith explains. She wrote the book before the pandemic started but says that it’s become even more relevant in recent years.

“As we’ve seen, you can’t always control what comes onto your little island. Some changes can be hard and scary, but some can be good. And if you do step off the path you’re on, it can open your eyes in new ways and show you things you might not ever have seen before.” The book has been so well received that Smith is writing a sequel called The Creature of Habit Tries His Best.

The Long Game All of this success seems like a windfall (which is also the title of a 2017 novel by Smith), but it’s arriving after more than a decade of ups and downs.

“I feel really fortunate… I also feel that it’s such a good reminder that this is a long game,” she says. “Everything happening right now is the culmination of things that have been happening for a really long time.”

Books take several years to write; there have been some she didn’t finish. After novels are optioned for film, they can bounce around to different studios and producers, which was the case with Hello, Goodbye. Throughout Smith’s career, there have been books under contract that didn’t sell as well as expected and books she wrote just for herself that have taken off.

There was a point early on when she thought, “This isn’t going to be a viable career option for me.” She had written two books that didn’t get published and then Autumn 2022

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endeavor

Film

She’s Documenting the Human Experience s a documentary filmmaker, Xan Parker ’92 had driven through the frozen forests of Russia searching for stray tiger cubs and had helped chronicle a Mississippi Delta family struggling with the crippling effects of poverty. But nothing had prepared her for the utter devastation of the wildfire that burned Paradise, Calif., to the ground.

Just two months after the November 2018 fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed 95% of the town’s structures, Parker became the creative producer of Rebuilding Paradise, a film she worked on with Academy Award– winning director Ron Howard. During a 10-month period, she spent 75 days with the crew filming the 91-minute documentary, commissioned by National Geographic and released in 2020.

“It was heartbreaking to be with people who were in such incredible need,” Parker recalls. “But I learned more about the human condition than on any of my other projects.”

The opportunity to discover something new and tell stories on film is what attracted Parker to documentaries after she graduated from Colgate with an English degree. Her interest in filmmaking was sparked by a course she took at Colgate — Motion Picture Production, taught by Professor (now emeritus) John Knecht. “It set me on a path I’ve loved being on since,” she says. “The relationship between form and content, for me, started in that class.”

After graduation, she was living in her hometown of Baltimore when she went to the Charles Theatre to see Brother’s Keeper, a 1992 documentary about an alleged murder in a family of four brothers in upstate New York, which was co-directed by Joe Berlinger ’83 (with Bruce Sinofsky). “I immediately knew this is the kind of filmmaking I wanted to do,” Parker says. “All cinema has a kind of magic to it. And here was a documentary film that presented like a scripted feature. I was mesmerized.”

She landed a position as an associate producer at Maryland Public Television and later was hired at the same New York City production company where Berlinger had worked. In her nine-year stint at Maysles, Parker learned how to make documentaries in the cinema verite style.

A

did publish two others, but sales numbers were low. Smith decided to take a break from writing and focus on her full-time job as an editor at Random House — which the English major loved, but it was a fallback. “I knew I wanted to be a writer from an early age… [but] I don’t think I ever really believed I would be able to support myself.”

Ten months into that break, she had an idea for a book she wanted to write, even if it didn’t sell. “It didn’t seem like a big idea to me,” she says. “It was just a story I wanted to tell.” A boutique publisher called Poppy bought it, but “it was not a big advance,” she says. “It was not a highly anticipated book.

They just liked it too.”

In “one of those truly organic things that happens sometimes in publishing,” The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight caught on through word of mouth. It sold in more than 30 languages in other countries and “put my career on a different path,” Smith says.

Now, 10 years later, she’s having “a thrilling year.” Smith adds: “But it’s also the result of years of hard work and lucky breaks and fortunate timing. It’s like the saying about London buses: you wait and wait and none come along, and then three come along at once.”

— Aleta Mayne Two degrees of Nora Ephron: Smith’s first job after Colgate was for International Creative Management, which represented Ephron. “I had the chance to meet her…. She will always be a big inspiration in terms of writing and romantic comedies,” says Smith, whose favorite romcom is You’ve Got Mail. “I love everything she’s done. I love everything she’s written. She was incredible.”

54 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

The first film she worked on was LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton, which told the story of a family in the Mississippi Delta contending with poverty and neglect as a result of systemic racism and slavery. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2002. “It was the best possible film school, getting to work on the film, from the beginning of the research all the way to distributing and marketing,” she says.

Parker married Marwan Khuri ’92, and after they had two children, she took a break from documentary filmmaking. She ran the production division of branding agency DeSantis Breindel, which produced branded content and short films for the agency’s clients.

When Academy Award–winning director Ross Kauffman recruited her to produce Tigerland, a documentary about efforts to conserve the tiger population in Russia and India, Parker returned to her passion.

The experience of creating films such as Tigerland, which took her on location, is what Parker loves about her work. “In documentary [filmmaking], every project is

All cinema has a kind of magic to it. And here was a documentary film that presented like a scripted feature. I was mesmerized. a new story, a new adventure. Every film is an opportunity to go places, meet people, learn things, and become a mini-expert on something,” she says.

Her most recent film, The Big Payback, chronicles the first tax-funded reparations bill in American history, which was passed in Evanston, Ill., and will provide a total of up to $10 million to Black citizens over 10 years. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this past June and will air on PBS’s Independent Lens series in early 2023. Her next project will be an HBO documentary about how communities in Cape Cod are reacting to the recent influx of great white sharks.

“My goal is to continue producing films that are meaningful and relevant,” she says, “and it’s truly fulfilling to be able to set them in motion and see them all the way through.”

— Sherrie Negrea

endeavor

Entrepreneurship

It’s a Piece of Cake For Brenda Sabbag ’83, running her bakery and café has come naturally.

his is a story about family.

It starts in the wee hours of the morning with college student Mikey, white T-shirt stained from kneading and shaping bread, loading loaves into a blazing hot Italian oven. The dough has undergone a slow proof overnight to allow for a longer fermentation, during which the yeast consumes sugar, producing alcohol that cooks off during baking.

That process will give each boule a more delectable flavor and aroma.

Later, his high school–aged brother, Joey, stops in to help churn out more sourdough, the bestselling bread. Alongside them is Daryl, who effectively came with the bakery when the boys’ mother, Brenda Sabbag ’83, bought it 17 years ago.

When Sabbag started Provencal Bakery and Cafe in Middletown, R.I., she set out to run a successful business to support her children after spending years in the printing industry. Little did she know she’d create a community — more like a family — around the food produced there. Sabbag has no formal training in baking or cooking but, she

JOSHUA BEHAN (2)

T

says, “I like it, I’m good at it.”

By the way: This is also a story about good food. The Provencal staff makes a lot of it. The items on the menu read like pages in a recipe book, passed down through generations.

Sandwiches are named after important people in Sabbag’s life. “People invent them and then the name sticks,” she says. For example, the Mary Lou, composed of brie, apple, honey mustard, and fresh turkey, is named after her mother. There’s also a traditional Newport mocha cake, which is a well-kept secret recipe that’s made for Provencal by the building’s former owner, a fifthgeneration baker. “It’s extremely hard to make,” she says. “People try to make it and they fail.”

Sabbag also relies on the Generation Z members of her team to give her more

modern ideas, like the recent addition of bubble tea. “The young kids, they’re like, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ That got me into [modern times],” she laughs. She also leans on them to market her business on social media: After employee Breyanna quickly cores moist chocolate cupcakes and fills them with a fluffy buttercream filling, she snaps a few photos for Instagram.

Rewind to 2005, when Sabbag and her then-husband bought the bread bakery, which is a separate location from the cafe.

At the time, she did printing sales for small business owners, and she undertook marketing for the bakery on the side. She opened the cafe in 2010 after getting an itch for making treats like lemon squares and chocolate cake. In 2011, she left the printing business and pursued the bakery and cafe full time. Newly divorced with two small children, it was no easy feat. “I took a business that was in rough shape and did six, seven farmer’s markets a week — anything to get our name out there,” she remembers.

Her work paid off. Provencal produces 3,000 loaves of bread per week, made by hand; fresh baguettes, asiago bacon loaves, and pain de campagne, among other breads, are sold wholesale around Rhode Island and Massachusetts. People are starting to take notice: Sabbag and co. were recently featured on an episode of The Great Food Truck Race, hosted by Food Network chef Tyler Florence.

Sabbag took a leap of faith by buying her bakery all those years ago. But, if you were to peek into the window of her Colgate rental on West Kendrick Avenue in 1982, her success might seem a little more predictable.

Late at night, Sabbag would stay up kneading bread or baking lasagna from scratch for her roommates. One such roommate told her recently, “This was fate.”

— Rebecca Docter Autumn 2022

Colgate Magazine

55

SALMAGUNDI

James B. Colgate Hall

Found In the Archives

Laying the University’s Foundations

By Rebecca Docter

Colgate’s facilities are entering a new era, with guidance from the Third-Century Plan.

Expanding campus to fit the needs of a growing elite liberal arts university is also part of our history. Just take a look in Colgate’s Special Collections and University Archives, which houses a collection of ceremonial trowels made to commemorate such strides. Kept in small boxes, some carefully placed in tarnish-preventing cloth, these bits of realia give us a glimpse into the way forebearers thought about the University’s path forward.

Photography: Mark DiOrio and Special Collections and University Archives

104 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2022

James B. Colgate Hall (1889) The Building: First the library, later the administration building, and now the home of Colgate admissions, James B. Colgate Hall has served as the doorway to campus since its opening in January 1891. Administrators wanted to “remain competitive with other colleges and universities,” according to Becoming Colgate, and they needed new facilities, like a library, to achieve that.

Designed by architect Edwin A. Quick, the building was built to be fireproof to protect its collections. As the University grew, so did its collections, and by the 1930s it was nearing capacity.

The Trowel: Silver with an ivory-colored handle and maroon ribbon, the inscription reads: “This trowel was used by James B. Colgate in laying the corner stone of the Colgate Library. Madison University.

Hamilton New-York. June 19, 1889.” It was made by Harold A. Heady.

Andrews Hall (1922) The Building: Now part of the Brown Commons, Andrews Hall was built at a time when students preferred living in the village, or in fraternities down the Hill, according to Becoming Colgate.

The administration hoped that the new residence hall might help Colgate become comparable to other East Coast colleges.

“Built in the Tudor style, of native stone, the hall is in keeping with the rest of campus buildings, which it overlooks from the south,” reads a 1926 special edition of the Maroon. “It can easily accommodate 84 men.

Each suite is featured by a large fireplace.”

The building was a bequest of Richard Colgate.

The Trowel: This trowel, which laid the cornerstone of Andrews Hall, was a gift of Mrs. Leslie G. Parker. It has a wooden handle and silver blade.

Huntington Gymnasium (1924) The Building: In the 1920s, Colgate experienced a period of expansion.

Approximately 600 men were enrolled at the University at the time, and Huntington Gymnasium was built to support the development of athletics.

The Trowel: This heavy silver trowel was made by George W. Welsh’s Sons Jewelers in New York City. The inscription reads: “Presented to George W. Cobb in memory of his laying the cornerstone of the

Huntington Gymnasium Colgate University November 21st 1924.”

James C. Colgate Hall (1936) The Building: Like some other buildings on campus, James C. Colgate Hall was constructed with stone from the University quarry. It was designed to house the essential services for students, like a dining hall, post office, and activity spaces.

The Trowel: Made by former Colgate president George B. Cutten, it was used

by William More Parke (president of the Board of Trustees) to lay the cornerstone of James C. Colgate Hall. Stored in a tarnish-preventing silversmith’s cloth, the inscription on the blade refers to the building’s original name, James Colby Colgate Student Union.

Case Library (1958) The Building: Colgate’s new library opened in 1958 and was later named for President Everett Needham Case. The building was expanded in the 1980s and was renovated again in 2007, reopening as Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology.

The Trowel: The box holding the trowel for James B. Colgate Hall contains a card with a note dated June 21, 1958, from Colgate historian Howard D. Williams ’30: “This trowel was also used by Dean Carl A. Kallgren and others for laying the cornerstone of the new library building 20 June 1958.” Kallgren was dean of students at Colgate who later established the Kallgren Fund, which provides travel grants for faculty members.

Olin Hall (1970) The Building: The home of Colgate’s biology and psychological and brain sciences departments, the building has state-of-

Huntington Gym

the-art equipment to help students and faculty members succeed in teaching and research. It is currently being renovated and expanded and will serve as the home for the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative.

The Trowel: The translucent, amber-colored handle is engraved with the name of the maker, W. Rose.

Wynn Hall (1979) The Building: As the University’s chemical science building, Wynn Hall contains laboratories, classrooms, and more. In 2016, the University enlisted B2Q to “model, design, and commission a multi-phase mechanical and architectural renovation,” according to the engineering consulting firm’s website.

The Trowel: Created by the same makers as Olin Hall’s trowel, it’s also similar in looks.

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Peer into the history of the universe p.20

Play in a ball pit for adults p.43

Publish nine YA novels and make four into movies p.53

Find the real Wizard of Oz p.46

Lend your kimono collection to the Met p.62

Become the president of a university p.25

Read secret documents dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis p.10

Fall in Meet one of love in the the top rising Philanthropists coaches in the at Colgate nation house p.8 p.100

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s varsity sports p.14

Learn to heal yourself and Mother Earth p.19

Dig into the University’s past through archival objects p.104

jill calder

Spin records on tour — and predict the weather with machine learning p.52