Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

AUTUMN 2023

FRUITS OF HER LABOR Neva Day ’91 hand-pollinates each blossom at her dragon fruit farm. P.46

How-to

The Academic’s Guide to Survival P.24 Tech

Alumni using AI for good P.42 Big Picture

Going above and beyond on campus P.32

look

mark diorio

Matthew McGeary ’24 assisted with the Central New York Native Bee Survey through his work with the B-Team at Rogers Environmental Education Center. “Even just in my short 21 years here on Earth, I am already seeing the ways that not only the world’s ecosystems are changing, but also the ones in my backyard,” says McGeary, who worked on the project as a Colgate Upstate Institute Summer Field School Fellow.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

1

look

mark diorio

In the Adirondacks, Alexa Lim ’25 studied loons to research their general behavior and nesting survivorship. She observed loons once a week throughout the summer as part of her research through Colgate’s Upstate Institute.

Hailing from Weston, Mass., Lim is an environmental studies major with a double minor in biology and global public environmental health.

2 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

3

look

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

4 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

mark diorio

This fall, Frank Dining Hall added two new stations — La Mesa offers Mexican flavors, and Paper Lantern serves up savory Asian-fusion.

Head Chef Anthony Donofrio strives to keep Frank fresh with new offerings, alongside his initiatives to cook from scratch whenever possible and supplement the salad bar with produce from the Community Garden.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

5

Contents

AUTUMN 2023 Dark Stars

President’s Message

8

Confirmation of the unusual objects could also solve a persistent enigma in physics.

Voices

19

The Kindness of Strangers

The Freedom to Choose

As an ESOL tutor, Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda has learned valuable lessons herself.

In an article for the Lancet HIV, Katie Williams ’15 helps spell out what “choice” in HIV prevention really means.

10

Mural in Clifford Gallery p. 14

20

The Academic’s Guide to Survival Whether you’re trying to avoid howler monkeys in the rainforest or howling at another person during a heated debate, these tips from Colgate experts will help you make it through unscathed.

24

From Knowing to Doing Rinad Beidas ’03 is helping to save lives by translating the best medical practices from lab to clinic.

21

Scene

Colgate News 12

The Mind of a Professor

Discover

Teo Ballvé is doing ethnographic research on survivalists who are preparing for the apocalypse.

The Gravitational Waves That Alter Space

22

Joe Eakin p. 37

Michael Lam ’11 was part of a team that discovered a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago.

Above and Beyond A look at some of the individuals who help Colgate operate at the highest level.

32

18

Cover: Neva Day ’91 at Wallace Ranch in California.

Read about Day on page 46.

Photography by John Trice

AI for Good Professor Teo Ballvé

How five alumni are leveraging artificial intelligence to take on the mental health crisis, develop lifesaving drugs, stop hackers, and launch a new wave of American innovation.

42

6 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Endeavor

Fruits of Her Labor

Vice President for University Outreach and Chief of Staff to the President L. Hazel Jack

At Wallace Ranch in California, Neva Day ’91 hand-pollinates and handpicks the exotic, high-maintenance dragon fruit.

46

Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Assistant Vice President, University Communications and Strategic Initiatives Mark Walden Senior Art Director Karen Luciani University Photographer Mark DiOrio Communications Specialist Kathy Jipson

No Need to Pause

Contributors: Omar Ricardo Aquije, athletics communications manager; Kelli Ariel, web manager; Daniel DeVries, assistant vice president, university communications and media relations; Mary Donofrio, advancement communications dir.; Jordan Doroshenko, dir., athletic communications; Bernie Freytag, art dir.; Garrett Mutz, sr. designer; Brian Ness, sr. multimedia producer; Kristin Putman, sr. social media strategist; Amber Springer, web content specialist

With her new product line Womaness, Michelle Jacobs ’94 helps women embrace menopause.

48

Digital Download Ole Obermann ’93 leads music business development at TikTok.

49

Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt. Colgate Magazine Volume LIII Number 1

Kassandra Alberico ’17, p. 89

Alumni News

50

Salmagundi

Alumni remember the day JFK was assassinated.

96

I believe it is important first to see the beauty in other people, especially if there are cultural, religious, political, or social differences.

Rev. Corey MacPherson p. 31

Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University.

Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407 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 Renee Madison, Title IX coordinator and vice president for equity and inclusion, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

7

President’s Message

Welcoming a New Class

T

8 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

the students are dressed up. It is dark out, and the lights inside the chapel reflect off the windows.

At some point in the ceremony — between the dean of the college’s welcome and the dean of the faculty’s remarks — I speak. When you get to the podium, and you look out at the packed pews, you are immediately struck by how young these students are, how very new they are to you and to each other. It’s important to pause just a bit before speaking. You want, very subtly, to indicate that this is a moment, a change. It’s the beginning of the year for me too. I’m thinking too, and, yes, this is a ritual.

At convocation this year, I included a passage from a 9th-century Celtic-Irish poem, opening with these four lines: Bitter is the wind to-night, It tosses the ocean’s white hair: Tonight I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway Coursing on the Irish Sea.

This ceremony ... is, in many ways, the moment these young people become Colgate students.

Visit colgate.edu/ president

mark diorio

here are two different speeches that open the academic year at Colgate University.

(There are, of course, many thousands of other things that happen to launch the new academic year — from move-in truck schedules, to orientation seminars, to group activities. But, because I am speaking from my perspective, it’s about those two speeches.)

The first speech is on move-in day itself, the Sunday that begins with streams of SUVs descending on the campus, filled with so many things that have to go from vehicle to small room, and ends with parents departed and students, somehow, arrayed in several hundred rooms crowded with things and emotions. This speech happens mid-afternoon of that loud and busy day. This speech happens under a large tent set up by Taylor Lake.

You have one job in this speech, and that is to make everyone know that Colgate is a good and caring place, and that (despite every emotion both parents and students feel) all will be fine, and that soon the campus will feel like home to these students. The tone you adopt is both parental and forgiving. You want to honor the emotions everyone is feeling and give permission to those in attendance to feel those emotions strongly and honestly. This is the speech that makes parents cry. They want to cry, and you give them permission. It’s a big day, and it’s my job to point that out.

It’s the second speech, though, that feels somehow more important, and more difficult to land well. This is the speech given three days later, at night, in Colgate Memorial Chapel, up on the hill. This is the convocation speech, and it is given in full academic robes.

Colgate has maintained the tradition of a formal convocation ceremony for decades now. This is the ceremony in which students, packed in the chapel, see the faculty for the first time. Deans in regalia wish the students well and a faculty member formally gives an address that welcomes them to life in the academy. This ceremony happens the night before classes begin, and it is, in many ways, the moment these young people become Colgate students.

The event is unusual, and self-consciously so. The performance of the ritual is a signal that things are different tonight and this is a different place than the place you were before. Bagpipes are playing outside. The University marshall has been leading me around all evening holding a huge mace (another old tradition), and

I had encountered that poem in college, and it had stuck with me. I was in a class in which it was read to us, and I remember being moved by its strength and beauty. It is vivid, quick, and powerful. At the time, I had recently decided not to enter the College of Business at my university, and I found myself in the College of Arts and Letters, and in classes where these things are studied. Sometimes I worried I was not in the right part of the college, that I had made a terrible mistake pursuing this course of study. The poem, though, stayed with me. And now I was reading it, again.

In the chapel that night, I wanted — more than anything else — to remind these students, sitting there nervously, that among the many things I hoped for them in college, I wanted them to be open to the possibility that their education would present them — offer to them, really — beauty. I wanted to say that this, too, is important and necessary.

On that night, as I was reading these lines, parts of Hawaii were on fire. The Supreme Court had just issued a ruling that was about to change college admissions forever. A potentially bitter presidential campaign was heating up. The war in Ukraine was entering a bloody new phase. The China economy was wobbling with a real estate bubble apparently about to collapse.

Yet, four lines from an Irish poem of the 9th century.

I speak often, in many venues, about the liberal arts.

I also speak about the power of the humanities. Often these speeches feel apologetic, defensive. Humanities enrollments are declining across the country. Some universities are cutting whole humanities departments.

In a world where students pay so much for college, and in which they want to launch their careers well, these defensive moments feel weak.

Yet for a few moments, during a speech in a crowded chapel, I had the opportunity not to defend the liberal arts, but to practice them — to invite several hundred students to hear a poem, to stop their fretting, to think about beauty, and to become, for just a moment, students of the arts and people who can be moved by the ancient and the sublime. Beneath the tents on the campus set up for opening days, besides the lines at the bookstore, past the calls to parents complaining about new roommates, is the mission of this place. And it is my job to remind the students, and myself, of that mission.

That mission includes beauty, and the wholeness of a person, and conveying timeless human emotions. Few people speak about this anymore.

That speech — my first time with a new Colgate class — is one of the most important moments of the year. And perhaps, just perhaps, some of the students left the chapel that night moved a bit. And, perhaps, while excited and nervous to begin their classes the next day, they left the chapel and went back to their dorms, walking across quadrangles in the evening, fearing not the fierce warriors of Norway.

— Brian W. Casey

On Aug. 20, Colgate welcomed the Class of 2027 — one of the most academically accomplished cohorts in Colgate history — with a 12% acceptance rate and a 3.97 average GPA.

Letters Embracing a Challenge Wow, what an amazing story! (“My Step Across the Pond,” summer 2023, p. 8.) Appreciate the opportunity to consume a challenging and uplifting experience.

Carlton Walker ’10 She Gets Our Vote Mary Gay Scanlon ’80 (“U.S. Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon ’80 is not afraid to speak up.”; summer 2023, p. 32) is actually my representative, and I voted for her but had no idea she was a Colgate alum! Thanks for sharing.

Jessica More ’10 Wonderful! I didn’t realize she went to Colgate! Love seeing the grads who are focused on public interest highlighted!

Meredith Marzuoli ’02 Loved that in the article she also mentioned a history prof I enjoyed as well: Jack Rakove!

Edie Delavan ’78 Steele

Rock Solid Dixie [Henry ’96] (“My Colgate research motivated me to become…,” summer 2023, p. 38) is one of the most sincerely nice human beings I’ve ever met. I bet she brings new levels of not only competence and brilliance, but also compassion and understanding to every project and group lucky enough to work with her!

David W. Harris ’92 From One Sports Reporter to Another As an old WRCU sports director, I salute Dave for what he’s done! (Profile of David Lloyd ’83, summer 2023, p. 71) Anthony Pietrafesa ’78

Inspired It’s currently summer of 2023 and I’m just now reading the summer edition of Colgate Magazine 2022. Why? Well, every season as I await the arrival of the most recent publication from Colgate, I promise myself that I will set aside 30 minutes or so, quickly read the president’s comments, and then skim over the remainder of the magazine.

And every season I fail; I immerse myself in the articles and information, I “travel back” to my days on campus, I reflect on the Colgate mission, and wonder if I “represent.”

Because you are publishing such a great quarterly, I’m reading the magazine (mostly) cover to cover! And for me this takes some time due to my nostalgia side tracks. Of course this is a lame excuse for being so far behind in what should be current reading — however, I did want to write and let you know how impressed I am with every issue. I’m always entertained, I always learn something, and for sure, I’m always inspired reading about campus happenings, my classmates, and other alums.

Thanks for producing such a great alumni magazine. Keep up the amazing work.

Steve Bushee ’81 To share your thoughts on this issue, email magazine@colgate.edu, or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

9

Voices Volunteerism

The Kindness of Strangers As an ESOL tutor, Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda has learned valuable lessons herself.

espite the high cost of living, the San Francisco Bay Area’s diversity and vibrant job market make it a magnet for refugees and immigrants. They arrive by the planeful into SFO, exhausted but hopeful. They have escaped war, famine, political persecution, and sometimes decades in refugee camps to make it this far, but before they even set down their bags, they must contend with a new set of worries. Besides housing and food, they need work permits, driver’s licenses, and jobs in a region where the median income for a family of four is more than $180,000, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

Their children must be enrolled in school at grade level, regardless of their English ability.

Immigrants and refugees have been arriving into ports like San Francisco for generations. On Christmas Day 1941, my then-7-year-old father, along with his siblings and mother, fled Honolulu after Pearl Harbor was bombed, leaving my grandfather behind. They had only recently moved to Hawaii from the Philippines, looking over their shoulders at the gathering clouds of war. When they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by International Red Cross volunteers, who helped them find a place to live and gave them warm clothes to wear (they were shivering in their Hawaii cottons). When my grandmother became ill, my father and his siblings were cared for by strangers for months. My family’s enduring gratitude, and their fascination with global cultures, were communicated to me. I grew

D

10 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Illustration by Delphine Lee

up wanting to travel the world, speak a foreign language, and live in faraway places.

Forty-five years after my father’s family received that help, I participated in the Japan Study Group as a Colgate undergraduate.

I will always remember how it felt to be surrounded by strangers speaking to me full tilt in a language I did not understand. On the train ride to my new home in Osaka, when my homestay mother saw that my eyes were filled with tears, she patted my hand and repeated, “dai-jo-bu.” At the time I did not understand her words, but the warm smile communicated enough. It meant, “everything is going to be all right.” Score another lasting win for the kindness of strangers.

I have been a volunteer tutor of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) with the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Transitions (RIT) for the past 13 years. RIT welcomes people to the Bay Area who have sought refuge, helping them to thrive in our shared communities. With RIT, I have worked with families from Myanmar, China, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ukraine. It is not an overstatement to say the experience has changed my life. I could not have sat in their kitchens, struggled with them over homework and registration forms, and held babies while moms took showers, without becoming emotionally involved.

Many RIT students are women who speak little to no English, stuck in their apartments with small children. Most of them have no transportation, no daycare, and no income, so they cannot take advantage of the many ESOL classes offered at community colleges and libraries around the Bay Area. Making friends is a challenge, and they are often lonely and isolated. They do their best.

Here’s an example: When I first met Thang Suan and his family in 2013, he and his wife, Mang, had recently fled ethnic violence in Myanmar. My initial focus was their oldest daughter, a charming second grader who needed homework help, but I soon found myself doing schoolwork with all the kids — there are six of them now. We subtracted and multiplied fractions, learned the alphabet, and wrote book reports. We have cranked out too many science fair projects to count, and the kids have grown up before my eyes. That second grader is a young lady now, a senior in high school.

Thang still works as a custodian on the night shift at a university. He leaves for work in the evening and gets home in the morning as the kids are getting ready for school. His family is harmoniously squashed into a three-bedroom apartment a stone’s throw from Route 101, the noisy main artery cutting through Silicon Valley. I doubt he

ever gets a full eight hours of sleep. Still, he is irrepressibly optimistic.

“One of my happiest days was when I got a car,” he says with his big smile. “It was such a feeling of freedom.” He chuckles when he describes his first months in California. “We didn’t even know how to sleep in beds or cook with a stove,” he says. “We cooked over a fire back home.”

He faces new challenges now. They need a house but cannot hope to buy or even rent one at market prices. His oldest daughters are now thinking about college, and that requires navigating the bureaucracy of student loans and scholarships. “Sometimes we need to talk about complicated things, but my children’s English is better than our native language (Chin). We can understand each other most of the time, but we have trouble communicating on a deeper level.” His faith, family, and community give him strength, though. “I’m proud to be an American citizen,” he says. “This is a great country, and I am thankful to be here every day.”

Within a few weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, families began arriving in the Bay Area from Kyiv, Odesa, and the Donbas. Many of them crossed into the United States from Mexico, some of them stopping at BayMarin Community Church, which had opened its doors to Ukrainians in need. The church was looking for an ESOL tutor, so I packed up my alphabet flash cards and drove to San Rafael, Calif.

One of my new students is a young woman named Halyna, who told me sadly that she had to leave behind the online marketing business she had painstakingly built in Rivne, Ukraine. She arrived in the U.S. last fall with no work and no place to live, expecting a baby. She is now rebuilding her company here in the U.S. while working on a college certificate in digital marketing, learning English as fast as she can, and raising a bright-eyed new American citizen.

Her roommate, Ksenia, also a single mom, is building a massage therapy business here.

Here are a few things I have learned from this experience: — Borscht calls for fresh sorrel; chicken kabobs benefit from a soaking in onion juice.

Let’s face it, food is a universal way of expressing love.

— It is nearly impossible to live in the U.S. without a car. Public transportation in the Bay Area is terrible. Without wheels, getting to doctor’s appointments, school, work, and the grocery store are major problems.

A driver’s license is an essential form of identification. Cars are a major, ongoing expense, and don’t even think of getting into an accident.

— Moving to a cheaper part of the country

It is not an overstatement to say the experience has changed my life. is harder than it sounds. In my experience, most refugees are reluctant to move far once they put down roots in a new place.

After the trauma of fleeing from their home countries, they wince at the idea of starting over again, even if it could save them money.

— Refugees want the same things that we do, including dignity, independence, and the pursuit of happiness. They want to take their kids to Disneyland; they want to own homes. They want meaningful jobs and reasonable pay for their work. They don’t want to take handouts, but nor did they ask for war or famine. Despite all the problems we have here, immigrants cherish the belief that the United States is still a land of opportunity, especially for their children.

— Time spent trying to help others is never wasted. There have been many days when I emerged from a lesson convinced that at best, I had been no help at all, or at worst, I had confused things. At such times, my mother’s words come back to me. For many years, she and my father volunteered with migrant workers in Kentucky. Just knowing that someone else cares, she would say, just showing up week after week with a smile, that has value. That time is never wasted.

An RIT coordinator once introduced me to a new family by saying simply, “We get no money. We do it for love.” And she made the sign of a heart on her chest. Our hearts all get bigger when we share them with others.

There is so much sadness in the world, but there is also hope where strangers help each other. I hope the United States remains a place where immigrants feel welcome and want their children to grow up. We are all better off with them here.

— Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda worked in the U.S. intelligence community and briefed Silicon Valley tech CEOs on geopolitical risk before retiring in 2021 to focus on writing a historical novel about Japanese feminist poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) and volunteering with refugees. Kocienda’s writing can be found in various publications including the New York Times and Redwood Writers Anthology; Cisco System’s cybersecurity blog; and on her blog, accidentalfeminist.net.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

11

SCENE Archives

An Afternoon With Greg Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company

G

reg Doran is on a mission: to view as many copies of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies as possible. “You might think, ‘What the hell are you doing going around the world seeing 235 copies of the same book?’” said Doran, the artistic director emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, when he visited in September.

His response: “Each of them has a really interesting and different story.” The University’s collection, provided by the library of James C. Colgate (Class of 1884) himself, is no exception.

Doran’s visit was organized into two interactive sessions.

He first joined visitors at Four Folios Fest, an opportunity for students to view, gently touch, and even smell the “smoky” folios (said to be once displayed on a fireplace mantle).

The fest was organized by Special Collections Librarian Xena Becker and the Special Collections and University Archives team.

“I wanted to give students the chance to be in the room with the folios, especially at the same time as Doran, since he’s

seen countless copies of them,” Becker said.

Afterward, Doran delivered a presentation for students and faculty members from the Department of English.

Department Chair Lynn Staley introduced him as a “legend in theater history,” and Doran then divulged a lifetime of anecdotes about his career.

He got his knack for Shakespeare in his childhood, when the “bug bit,” Doran said.

“I used to walk out onto the salt marshes and say Lady Macbeth’s words aloud to the cows…. I felt empowered by those words.”

12 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

In his later career as a director, Doran continued to relate Shakespeare’s words to a modern context. “There’s no such thing as a definitive production of Shakespeare,” he explained. “You can only do it with the actors you have, the audience you have, and the time that you’re in.”

Many of the four folios, too, are marked with their own personalities. On his tour, Doran has seen everything from muddy paw prints to confessions of love marked inside. Colgate’s copies are marked, too: “There are scribbles in the copy you

[Colgate] have, with someone just trying out their [pen] nib, or something,” said Doran.

Another defining aspect of Colgate’s Four Folio collection is a portrait of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, which Becker claims is the only of its kind.

“It [Hathaway’s portrait] was drawn by Nathaniel Curzon, who was married to Sarah Penn, who was William Penn of Pennsylvania’s daughter. So it was once the Curzon family’s copy of the third folio,” says Becker.

Whether preserved in print or performed on the stage, these works resonate with readers, audiences, and directors, even 400 years later, Doran concluded.

“Shakespeare’s plays are just like a magnet that attracts all the iron filings of what’s going on in the world,” he said. ”Somehow, they articulate those things in ways that I find uncanny.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

Greg Doran examined Colgate’s folios with Xena Becker.

mark diorio (2)

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

13 bits

Coursework

It Was Once a Utopia.

Now It’s the Site of MUSE 310A.

1 Poppy Liu ’13 stars in the second season of the Apple TV+ hit show The Afterparty.

A

t its height in the mid-19th century, the Oneida Community Mansion House (OCMH) was home to nearly 300 settlers who reimagined life in the industrial era. Today, it stands as a museum and a site of study for 16 students in professors Monica Mercado and Elizabeth Marlowe’s MUSE 310A: Utopia, Sex and Silver at the Community Mansion House.

This fall museum curatorial seminar bridges Mercado’s history expertise with Marlowe’s museum studies background. Their students learn about the specific history of the OCMH to deepen their connection to the upstate New York region and develop skills for sharing historical information with the public.

“The sense of place that you’ve moved to is sometimes easy for a college student to overlook,” says Marlowe. “This seminar is meant to lead to some real introspection about what it means to live in a community.”

To lead course discussions, students consider themes such as the Mansion House community’s utopian nature.

It was from 1840–70 when this ideal reached its peak, in a time Mercado describes as “rapidly industrial” and “increasingly capitalistic” in the greater context of American history. Historians of 19thcentury America also call this region of New York State “the burned-over district,” Mercado shares, and the community’s experimental values reflected the religious radicalism of its founder, the Yale Divinity School–educated John Humphrey Noyes. “[Members of the Mansion House community] decided Illustrations by Toby Triumph

2

Eli Watson ’24 continued his summer research into the fall class.

they would live together, work together, hold their wealth together, and support each other, but also, reimagine how people live,” says Mercado.

“After the community broke up, they went on to form Oneida Limited, a silverware company that was one of the most successful American-made businesses of the 20th century.”

Eli Watson ’24 researched the community’s history prior to his enrollment in the course as a summer fellow of the Mansion House museum in collaboration with the Upstate Institute.

He created panel exhibits about community members of note, such as Leonard Dunn, with special attention to their identities.

“Dunn was critical to much of the community’s industrial success,” says Watson. “He created countless machines, including washing machines and printing presses, for the community.”

One of Watson’s other panels uncovered the story of a mother named Harriet Worden. “If a mother and child were too strongly attached to one another, or the community perceived this,” Watson explains, “they’d be separated as a form of punishment.”

This system, among other

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa is this year’s Community Read.

family dynamics in the Mansion House community, have sparked controversy among historians.

“One of the community’s most tricky ideals was complex marriage — this idea that everyone was living in community, and also, in the eyes of God, married to each other,” explains Mercado. “So there were all these kinds of experiments in how a community should be sexually organized, which goes against 19th-century, middle-class propriety of who lives in a house and who’s married to whom.”

Considering the Mansion House community’s history as a whole, each student in the curatorial course has chosen an area of interest — such as art, gender, or commerce — to create a public-facing project for the museum. Director of Museum Affairs Tom Guiler, whom Mercado and Marlowe refer to as an “honorary third professor,” opened the site’s archives for student research.

“I feel like I could continue digging into this place for so long and learn so much,” says Watson.

— Tate Fonda ’25

3 Michael Sasso ’74 is one of 38 Floridians appointed to the state’s Judicial Nominating Commissions.

4 The Colgate cheer team is transitioning to a pom team to bridge the gap between cheerleading and the dance community.

5 The Oak Drive project has added ~2,000 linear feet of sidewalks and installed 25 light poles to help keep students safe.

6 Sophia Lopez ’25 researched the history of migrant farmers in Chenango County.

This class is funded by the Colgate Upstate Institute’s Community Course Development Grant.

▼ Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

13

SCENE

▼ 7 War hero Steve Riggs ’65 was inducted into the New York State Hockey Hall of Fame in July.

8 Prof. Jonathan Levine will participate in a 2027 lunar research mission through NASA’s PRISM program.

9 For 23 juniors, Career Services provided a Job Skills Accelerator.

10 Jane Pinchin and Burke halls received a 2023 Palladio Award (honoring outstanding achievement in traditional design) for a residential multi-unit.

11 The Alumni of Color group held a gathering on Martha’s Vineyard in August, organized by the Colgate Black and Brown Community Collective.

Initiative

Free for All An Office of Sustainability program saves students money and reduces landfill waste.

12 Variety called Blood for Dust, by Rod Blackhurst ’02, a standout of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.

13 Joe Berberich ’24 and Ekaterina Balsan ’25 flew in the NASA DC8 aircraft 2,400 feet over NYC as part of an air-quality study with NASA and NOAA researchers.

M

ini-fridges, clothes, lamps, you name it — at the Office of Sustainability’s Free Store, students can take home a variety of goods, free of charge. The store, which operates out of the Drake Hall tunnel on Tuesdays and Fridays, is committed to reducing landfill waste and promoting equity among the student community. In its first three days of operation, it sold 1,524 pounds of donated goods.

14 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

The idea to open a Free Store was proposed by a team of sustainability interns in the summer of 2022 (Robyn Landes ’24, Boyana He ’25, Becca Kornblau ’23, Brenna McConnell ’24, and Rachel Plasky ’25) and later implemented by the summer 2023 cohort (Kate Maxwell ’25, Charlie Tourbaf ’25, Jack Hyams ’25, Ella Cook ’25, and Owen Fahey ’25). To prepare for the opening, the team made a list of policies, gathered donations from the COVE’s salvage program, and created an inventory.

“We began researching other universities that were running

similar programs to work out the kinks before we opened the store,” says Tourbaf, who led the planning process. “We had to think about what would work for Colgate, specifically.”

To meet these ends, Tourbaf and his team created a list of store policies. To ensure fairness and ease of access, the store welcomes all Colgate students.

Five may enter at a time.

“We wanted to create a judgment-free environment where people would feel comfortable taking items they need,” says Hyams. But the Free Store, Tourbaf contends, also urges students to rethink consumerism and fast fashion.

“It is also here for students who just want to save some money,” says Tourbaf. “There

mark diorio

It took just four days for visual artist Chitra Ganesh to breathe life into a grand, wall-sized mural of a woman’s body in the Clifford Gallery. “Ganesh’s mural is as playful as it is insistent on liberatory worlds where difference is celebrated,” says Associate Professor of Art Margaretha Haughwout. This fabric and paint piece is but one component of Ganesh’s greater exhibition, which features framed panels of her feminist comics and a gallery of print-made images inspired by Sultana’s Dream, a Bengali feminist utopian story.

Ganesh’s work is based out of Brooklyn, N.Y., and has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kiran Nadar Museum in Delhi.

In addition to her artist talk in Golden Auditorium, Ganesh hosted a zine workshop at which students were encouraged to create their own reactionary comic art. Ganesh also welcomed class visits to the gallery during her stay, and offered critiques to senior art majors currently working on their thesis art projects.

SCENE are many students who buy stuff just to throw it out at the end of the year.”

Before the store’s grand opening on Aug. 25, Tourbaf and his team offered Office of Undergraduate Studies and international students early access. The store has also fostered partnerships with the ALANA Cultural Center and First@Colgate. A new cohort of sustainability interns and student volunteers, overseen

by Assistant Director of Sustainability Julia Sparks, compose the staff.

“I think that with the thoughtfulness and consideration that the interns have already put into the Free Store, it’s set up to be a really robust program,” says Sparks.

— Tate Fonda ’25

Event

Leadership

ALANAPalooza Celebrates Students’ Talents

New Head Golf Coach Appointed

I

t’s the smell of barbecue, the sound of song, and 50 students dancing to the “Cupid Shuffle.” Listen: Keiona Williams ’24 is singing “Someone Like You” by Adele as a murmur of networking students fills ALANA’s patio. It’s ALANAPalooza — a yearly gathering that promotes and celebrates Colgate’s multicultural organizations alongside student performances.

Here are some highlights from ALANAPalooza 2023: → Representatives from several multicultural student organizations, including Brothers and the Black Student Union, promoted their clubs. → The Colgate Resolutions took to the stage for an a cappella concert. → Bill Luo ’26 and Vivian Jiang ’26 of Cha ’Gate — a Thought Into Action entrepreneurship start-up that aims to introduce Asian culture to the campus by selling bubble tea — served their drinks.

→ Wellness resources and campus partners, including representatives from Chapel House, the Office of Counseling and Psychological Services, the Sustainability Office, and the Office of Off-Campus Study, connected with students.

— Tate Fonda ’25

andrew daddio

Singer Keiona Williams ’24 kicked off ALANAPalooza.

C

olgate named JP Kircher as the new head golf coach. Kircher previously had a historic seven years at Piedmont University, a Division III liberal arts institution in Demorest, Ga. He guided Piedmont to an NCAA Championship runnerup finish in 2023, anchored by the individual national champion Josh Hebrink, who became the program’s first individual gold medalist.

During his time at Piedmont, Kircher led his teams to three NCAA tournament appearances with six tournament championships and 14 individual medalist honors. His teams broke the program’s 18-, 36-, and 54-hole records and finished in the top 10 nationally in three of the last four years, including a No. 4 final ranking in 2023.

The 2023 Collegiate Conference of the South (CCS) Coach of the Year, Kircher developed seven All-America honorees, nine All-Region selections, 10 All-Conference members, and a CCS Player of the Year. Along with the program’s athletics success, Kircher fostered the development of 15 GCAA All-America Scholars, two Academic All-District, and several Academic AllConference honorees.

Kircher’s 2021 season saw Piedmont secure the program’s first conference championship and national title appearance. Piedmont won four team tournaments and reached No. 1 in the national rankings for the first time in program history during that same campaign.

His leadership roles included chairing the USA South Athletic Conference golf coaches committee and the CCS Conference, as well as serving on the Arnold Palmer Cup selection committee, the All-South Region committee, and the GCAA national coach of the year committee.

— Jordan Doroshenko

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

15

scene Volleyball

Going Pro: Julia Kurowski ’23

J Basketball

Tucker Richardson ’23 Signs With BC Nokia

T

he most decorated player in Patriot League history, Tucker Richardson ’23, has signed his first professional contract with BC Nokia in Finland.

BC Nokia currently plays in the top level Korisliiga and competes during the regular season October through March with playoffs extending into April.

Richardson is the only American on the current roster for 2023–24, according to the team’s website.

Richardson is the only player in Patriot League history to earn all four major awards, being named Rookie of the Year in 2017 followed by a sweep in 2022–23 as the Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

A product of Flemington, N.J., Richardson holds program records in games played (155), wins (110), assists (626), steals (221), and three-point field goals made (268). He finished his collegiate career with 1,740 points, good for fifthmost in program history, and helped guide the Raiders to four NCAA tournament appearances.

Richardson joins former teammates Jack Ferguson ’22, Jordan Burns ’21, Will Rayman ’20, Rapolas Ivanauskas ’20, and Francisco Amiel ’19 as recent graduates who have gone on to sign professional contracts overseas.

— Jordan Doroshenko

Richardson and Kurowski were both named Athletes of the Year at the University’s 2023 Golden ’Gates ceremony.

ulia Kurowski ’23 has signed a professional contract overseas with Vitrolles Sport Volleyball in France. She’ll compete for a team in 2023–24 that plays a regular 60-match season October–May. Kurowski joins Alli Lowe ’21 and Alex Stein ’20 as former Raiders to sign with professional teams overseas.

“This is an amazing opportunity that she greatly deserves,” said Head Coach Ryan Baker. “From the day Julia arrived to the day she graduated with her master’s degree, her passion for the game has been unwavering. She practiced and competed every day with enthusiasm, grit, and joy. We can’t wait to follow her pro career closely. I know she will

continue to make her alma mater proud.”

The Lancaster, N.Y., native was one of the Patriot League’s most decorated volleyball players. The reigning Player of the Year and three-time Setter of the Year was a four-time First Team selection, garnering AVCA All-America Honorable Mention and All-Region honors as a graduate student in 2022. She set the program’s all-time assists record with 4,068 for her career, good for fourth-most in Patriot League history.

With nine double-doubles and two triple-doubles, Kurowski’s 2022 campaign helped the Raiders secure their second consecutive Patriot League championship. She led the team in assists (560) and keyed Colgate’s .257 hitting percentage, which tied the best single-season mark in program history.

— Jordan Doroshenko

Scene

Dedication

The Clearing: A New Campus Space for Community, Reflection

mark diorio

M

embers of the Colgate community gathered on Aug. 15 for the dedication of the Clearing, a new campus space formed by an arc of trees that have been planted along a bend in Payne Creek as it winds toward Taylor Lake.

As part of the Third-Century Plan’s focus on sustainability and campus beautification, the University recently removed several oak trees — which had reached the end of their lifespan — from Oak Drive in an effort to renew the iconic entrance to campus. One of those trees was the site of the November 2000 car crash that took the lives of four young people, including Colgate student Katie Almeter ’04. In building the Clearing nearby, landscape architects included four new benches (joining two existing benches on the site), made with wood reclaimed from that tree, as a tribute to the memory of those lost in the accident.

The tree planting for the Clearing complements the University’s goals to naturalize the Payne Creek floodplain. The effort also diversifies and replenishes the campus tree canopy by planting 19 trees from seven different species.

Aside from one golden weeping willow (native to Europe) planted near Willow Path, all of the trees planted are native to the northeastern United States: red maple, beech, black gum, hop hornbeam, sycamore, and swamp white oak. Their canopy will thrive in wet conditions, increasing resilience to flooding, creating

habitat, and providing enduring beauty.

President Brian W. Casey acknowledged the anonymous donor who has made these projects possible, noting that, “As these trees grow, a room will appear. A corner of nature, slightly removed, a place apart, a special place.” It will be, “a place to gather, to read a book on a warm day, to stop and look up.”

In his remarks, Vice President and Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin invited community members to use the Clearing as a space to connect with one another.

“Community takes root in spaces where we can sit together, where we can hear one another’s story, and happen upon a new friend,” he said. “And community honors

the legacy of the lives, contributions, and ideas of those who come before us.

Students, visitors, and many more will carry forward the spirit of community that we feel and honor here today and every day.”

Bob Almeter, Katie’s father, closed the event with his own hopes for the Clearing and its place in the heart of the campus community. “It’s my hope and my prayer that, in this space, whoever chooses to come and sit here will be able to find that peace and that calm in the whisper of the wind.”

— Mary Donofrio

The Clearing is “a place to gather, to read a book on a warm day, to stop and look up.”

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

17

Discover Findings

The Gravitational Waves That Alter Space hile we sit and as we sleep, the entirety of the universe is being expanded and contracted by gravitational waves that imperceptibly alter the woof and warp of space itself. This astonishing discovery was confirmed on June 28, when NANOGrav, a collaborative of more than 190 scientists from around the globe, released the results of their 15-year search for the elusive waves.

Michael Lam ’11, a research scientist with the SETI Institute, was a member of the NANOGrav team.

Though the existence of these perturbations in the gravitational field had been predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which he published in 1915, finding them took more than 100 years.

Einstein discovered that gravity bends space, and does so in proportion to the mass of objects. Think of placing a bowling ball on a trampoline and you get an idea of what it looks like when large objects like planets or stars distort the shape of the space around them. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the gravitational field — most likely

W

We’ve opened up a new window into the universe.

18 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

propagated by huge cosmic events — that travel and permeate space, creating a kind of background hum of gravitational activity.

These gravitational waves have been notoriously hard to detect, but Lam and his colleagues developed a novel approach to find them — one that involved using pulsars, collapsed stars that produce energy that is observed at very regular intervals.

“Pulsars are like clocks, and we measure when their pulses arrive at our telescopes,” Lam explains. “If the pulses arrive early, or late, maybe they got squeezed a bit in compressed space, or maybe space was a little stretched by the waves.”

Unfortunately, the discovery process was not so straightforward. “There could be a million other reasons for an inconsistency in the pulses. Maybe the pulsar is in orbit with another object or there’s some other interference,” says Lam. “We weren’t quite sure how precise and accurate the pulsars would be, and what it would take to make our detectors work.”

The team was able to confirm the gravitational waves were interfering with the pulsar signals when they looked at pulsars in the same sector of the sky and found similar irregularities in their pulse patterns. “We knew then what we were seeing,” Lam recalls.

“That was incredibly exciting.”

The source of Lam’s love of astronomy is not unique but it has a distinctly Colgate twist. Growing up in New York City, Lam was astonished on his first visit to the countryside when he looked up and could see the night sky. Soon after, Lam’s parents, Cindy Sherling ’83 and John Lam ’80,

brought him to Colgate’s Foggy Bottom Observatory for a tour hosted by astronomy professor Thomas Balonek, who later ended up being Lam’s undergraduate adviser. “I remember going up a ladder and looking into the eyepiece of the telescope and seeing Jupiter with its atmospheric bands, and they gave me a picture of Jupiter. It was my first experience with a telescope, and that’s when I knew what I wanted to do.”

The next task for Lam and his colleagues is to suss out the source of the gravitational waves. “I’ve been telling people that the most mundane explanation is that they

TOP: Aurore Simonnet for the NANOGrav Collaboration

Michael Lam ’11 was part of the team that finally discovered a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago.

could be coming from supermassive black holes in the center of emerging galaxies,” says Lam, laughing. “In reality, there are probably many different sources. One possibility is that they are from moments after the Big Bang, during the period called inflation. We haven’t really had any direct observation of that period so far.”

Reprising Winston Churchill’s saying, Lam calls his team’s discovery the end of the

beginning. “We figured the waves were there and we found them. More importantly, we’ve opened up a new window into the universe,” he says. “Every time you do that you not only understand the universe better, but you start to see new things that you didn’t even know were there. What new physics are we going to find now? Who knows?”

— Chris Quirk

Research

Dark Stars Confirmation of the unusual objects could also solve a persistent enigma in physics.

hanks to recent images of three objects originally thought to be galaxies captured by the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a pair of Colgate researchers have found what could be the first confirmation of what are called dark stars, massive objects

T

that were likely formed in the early stages of the universe.

Cosmin Ilie, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and Jillian Paulin ’23, now a doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Katherine

Freese of the University of Texas at Austin, published their findings in the July 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Contrary to their name, dark stars would have to be extremely bright — so bright that the trio of researchers suggest that the stars could be mistaken with something much larger. “One dark star can shine as bright as an entire galaxy. They’re about a million times the mass of the sun and a billion times as bright,” explains Paulin. “The radii of these objects are also insane, about 10 times the distance between earth and the sun.”

The “dark” label comes from what fuels the stars. Rather than being powered by fusion, like our sun and other stars in our galaxy, they’re powered by energy from the annihilation of dark matter. “Dark matter is what we call the missing mass in the universe that we can’t see, but which we have known is there since the 1920s,” Ilie explains.

Paulin says that only 0.1% of the mass of these dark stars would be dark matter, the rest would be a mix of hydrogen and helium. “It just so happens that dark matter annihilation is a much more efficient heating mechanism than fusion.”

Ilie and Freese had shown in 2012 that dark stars can grow to be supermassive.

In addition, objects formed very early in the universe have high redshifts. Redshifts, like the lowering of the tone of a siren as it recedes, can be used to assess how distant an object is, and by inference, when a celestial object was formed. The high redshift in the objects in the JWST images, combined with their intensity, was puzzling at first, but also provided a clue. “Things need to cool down significantly in order for their structure to form. A galaxy would need to form a billion stars, which would take a long time,” explains Paulin. “But, you would have time to form one supermassive dark star.”

To resolve the conundrum, the team created a model of what a dark star would have to look like. “We found that the three objects we discussed in the paper were consistent with our model,” Paulin says.

The researchers are careful to emphasize that their study doesn’t confirm the existence of dark stars, but high-quality spectral data obtained in the future with the JWST could provide the smoking gun.

Paulin says the initial results are promising.

“If these do turn out to be dark stars, that’s further evidence that dark matter exists because these objects are inherently powered by dark matter. It will also give us more information about the nature of objects in the early universe.”

— Chris Quirk Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

19

discover

Global Health

The Freedom to Choose In a new article for the Lancet HIV, Katie Williams ’15 helps spell out what “choice” in HIV prevention really means.

or years, the only preventative medication option for HIV has been a daily pill called oral PrEP. Short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, the PrEP pill has been taken around the world by people who have a high likelihood of exposure to HIV, including young women, men who have sex with men, sex workers, and people with a partner who is living with HIV. In the last five years, however, two new HIV prevention methods have been introduced to the market — the monthly dapivirine vaginal ring for people assigned female at birth (the PrEP ring) and a longer-acting injectable called cabotegravir for PrEP (CAB PrEP), administered every two months. These new methods are giving people a choice for the first time.

“When individuals have a choice of what method they’d like to use, it can improve their adherence to that method, and they are more likely to continue using it,” says Katie Williams ’15, a technical officer with the nonprofit development organization FHI 360. Just because options exist in market, however, doesn’t mean individuals have a choice, says Williams, who works with the MOSAIC (Maximizing Options to Advance Informed Choice for HIV Prevention) project, a five-year global project funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for

F

20 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

AIDS Relief through USAID. She adds: “We assume everyone supports choice, but what does that actually mean?”

Along with several colleagues, Williams set out to answer that question as lead author of a recent article in the British medical journal the Lancet HIV. The piece lays out eight principles for product developers, policymakers, and medical providers to consider when making decisions about how to develop, assess, and introduce new methods for HIV prevention, based on the authors’ experience working on HIV prevention in 10 countries in subSaharan Africa.

Williams first began working on issues around global health at Colgate, where she was a history and geography double major.

“There wasn’t yet a public health minor, but my professors were supportive in giving me the tools and opportunities to work on sexual and reproductive health and rights in whatever way I could,” she says. In one history seminar paper, for example, she investigated perceptions of sexuality in the interwar period in France. As part of the Thought Into Action program, Williams and another student, Emily Hawkins ’15, created a concept called the “condom truck” to distribute condoms and positive, safe, sexual health information on campus.

She also gained international experience by traveling to Samoa for a semester to learn about the impact of globalization on local communities and research tsunami preparedness and environmental security.

“That on-the-ground, person-to-person interaction started me onto the work I am doing now,” says Williams, who later went to Fiji with the Peace Corps to work with women and youth on gender equity and reproductive health education.

There are many reasons why a person might prefer one PrEP method over another, she says. A sexually active young woman living in a geographic area with a HIV prevalence might need to be discreet around family members, opting for the vaginal ring, which can last up to a month, rather than taking a more obvious daily pill. On the other hand, someone might only need shortterm prevention, rather than the extended prevention the ring or the injection provides. “Or it can be as simple as hating needles or the burden of taking a pill every day,” Williams says. “It really depends on someone’s preferences, circumstances, their partnerships, and where they are in life.”

Among the principles the article proposes are some that may seem more obvious, such as “availability” and “accessibility” to ensure that the prevention methods are suitable to users, offered in clinics, and priced affordably in all areas of a country.

Others take a more upstream view, such as “participation,” ensuring that clinical trials by product developers include a wide range of individuals to ensure that methods are equally usable for everyone who may benefit from PrEP. Others target providers, urging clinicians not to discriminate or limit choices for patients based on cultural bias — for example, denying long-term preventative measures to young women based on a prejudice that they shouldn’t be sexually active. (The other principles are quality, privacy, confidentiality, and accountability.)

By publishing the article in such a high-profile journal, Williams hopes to support health advocates in helping craft government policies that will maximize choice and get donors and product developers thinking ahead of time what it will take to make all options affordable.

“We wanted to emphasize how the levers of choice operate across the entire health ecosystem,” she says, “and give folks in the prevention space more solid ground to stand on when they are advocating for choice, which should be the goal we are all aiming toward with the advent of new PrEP methods.”

— Michael Blanding Illustration by Dana Smith

Discover

Implementation

From Knowing to Doing Rinad Beidas ’03 is helping to save lives by translating the best medical practices from lab to clinic.

ou might think that when a scientific breakthrough occurs in medicine, doctors rush to put the latest discoveries into practice.

But that’s rarely the case. Even when clinicians want to implement the latest evidence-based practices, studies show, they are successful less than one-third of the time. That’s where Rinad Beidas ’03 comes in. As chair of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, she specializes in the nascent but growing field of implementation science, which strives to translate research into reality.

“It’s about closing the gap between what we know and what we do,” Beidas explains. “We spend billions of dollars on discovery, but pay little attention to how we actually get those discoveries in place in the real world.” One need look no further than the COVID-19 vaccine to see why such efforts are so important, she says.

After a spectacularly successful moonshot effort to develop a vaccine in less than a year, the distribution of the vaccine was plagued by delays, supply disruptions, and misinformation. “There was such inequitable access,” Beidas says. “It was such a missed opportunity.”

Beidas witnessed such missed opportunities at a young age. Born in Amman, Jordan, she came with her parents to the U.S. at age 2. Her mother earned her graduate degree in communications from Northwestern, while her father completed his medical training at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, in a safety net hospital that treats all patients regardless of their ability to pay.

“He would come home every night and tell me stories about how difficult it was for his patients to have access to high-quality, evidence-based care. I had this deep-seated outrage that health care wasn’t a right afforded to everybody.”

Coming to Colgate to study literature, she was inspired by a first-year psychology class.

Jose Torres, Gr8y Productions

Y

“It ignited a passion in me to understand human behavior,” says Beidas, who went on to write an honors thesis on the formation of false memories with mentor Doug Johnson, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of psychological and brain sciences. “I fell in love with the scientific process, of answering questions and using those answers to come up with the next set of questions.” She then earned a PhD in clinical psychology at Temple University in 2011.

There she watched children suffering from pediatric anxiety get better after undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the gold standard for treatment. Unfortunately, many children treated did not have access to the treatment in community settings.

Working with a visionary mental health commissioner in Philadelphia trying to implement CBT more broadly, Beidas studied what was most successful in instituting that practice. She found while training individual clinicians was necessary, higher-level organizational leadership and culture were most important to inculcating change. “Clinicians are doing the best they can with what they have,” Beidas says. “If you want to add on new approaches, you have to make sure that the organization is a supportive one.”

After becoming a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, Beidas experienced personal tragedy when a family member died by suicide with a firearm.

Beidas was at a doctor’s visit with her infant

son when she had an epiphany. “I thought, this could be a great place for a conversation about secure firearms storage.” She adapted an intervention in which pediatricians discussed secure firearm storage, providing a cable lock in the office, and found that parents were highly receptive to hearing this message from a trusted pediatrician. Beidas has since completed a large trial funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in 30 clinics in Colorado and Michigan, and results are forthcoming.

This past year, Beidas took on her new position at Northwestern — becoming one of a small number of women and an even smaller number of non-MDs to chair a department at a medical school. The school, she says, wrote implementation science into their strategic plan. “Talk about institutional commitment,” she says. “This is a once-in-alifetime opportunity.”

Beidas works on implementation projects in diverse areas including cancer, HIV, and high cholesterol. When she started in the field more than a decade ago, Beidas notes, people barely knew what it was — now it’s catching on in medical schools around the country. “I feel passionate about implementation science as a tool to amplify the needs of our communities and ensure everyone has equitable access to benefit from scientific discoveries,” she says. “It’s the challenge of our time, and I feel so honored to have the opportunity to study it.”

— Michael Blanding

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

21

discover

Insight

The Mind of a Professor Teo Ballvé is doing ethnographic research on survivalists who are preparing for the apocalypse.

Ballvé’s immersive style of research, called participant observation, is a hallmark of ethnographic fieldwork. His project has received two Colgate grants, from the Upstate Institute and the Research Council’s Picker Fellowship. In his Colgate notebook, with sketches like this, he organizes his thoughts.

22 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

DISCOVER

The Survival Condo sits in a silo built by the Army Corps of Engineers during the Cold War and was therefore designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike. The facility’s offerings include military-grade security, diesel generators, water reserve tanks, and hydroponic food production.

n case of a catastrophic event — a natural or manmade disaster — the luxury Survival Condo, located underground in the middle of Kansas, offers a contingency plan for survivalists.

Also called doomsday preppers, some of these individuals who are preparing for extreme emergencies are purchasing off-the-grid living spaces in this Kansas condo as well as other locations.

“Personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business,” according to the New York Times.

“There are all kinds of things they list as potential threats that this would be perfect for: solar flares, political civil unrest, nuclear disaster, super volcano,” explains Teo Ballvé, an associate professor of geography and peace and conflict studies who has been doing ethnographic research on survivalists.

Ballvé visited the Survival Condo last March, when he went to Denver to serve on a panel discussion about far-right politics at the Association of American Geographers conference.

“I finished my panel around 4:30 p.m. and drove nine hours to Kansas,” he remembers, to meet one of the condo’s project managers.

I

The condo extends approximately 200 feet — 15 floors — underground.

Each floor is 1,820 square feet, the concrete walls are 9 feet thick, and the facility is designed to sustain 75 people for more than five years.

The professor first started thinking about survivalism while teaching Environmental Security, a cross-listed geography and peace & conflict studies course he’s been teaching since 2015. The class discusses environmental change and the potential for political instability. In 2018, to hear firsthand from a prepper, Ballvé posted a message on the neighborhood community app NextDoor Hamilton asking for someone to provide this perspective to his class. “This wasn’t a tongue-incheek, ironic sort of thing,” the professor emphasizes. “I’m constantly asking myself to [look at this topic] in an academic way, in terms of analysis, not critiquing,” he says. “[I’m] trying to understand their views on their own terms.”

A local man responded to the post and visited the class twice in consecutive years. “I got to know him, and a bigger relationship emerged,” Ballvé says. The man told the professor, “If you’re really interested in prepping, you should join our group.” Ballvé took him up on his offer and, as part of his meeting attendance, began making his own emergency preparations at home. “The first thing everyone does is go around and say what they’ve been prepping since the last meeting, and this was something I wanted to immerse myself in,” Ballvé says. The timing worked in his favor: When the pandemic began in 2020, he’d stocked N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. “For them, it was total vindication,” he remembers.

For him, the utility of ethnography is that it’s not necessarily driven by strict research

questions and predetermined hypotheses.

“It’s usually more open-ended,” Ballvé explains. It’s that open-endedness that led him to join the prepper group in Hamilton and it’s why he ended up 200feet underground in the middle of Kansas.

Units start at $1.5 million and also provide more traditional amenities like an indoor swimming pool, an arcade, a gym, a movie theater, and a library. No one currently lives in the facility because it is for extreme emergencies only, but those who have purchased units do visit it occasionally.

A second condo is being built, according to its website. Just as Ballvé is careful about how he tries to understand survivalists, the site also states that they are not looking for “stereotypical nuts portrayed in movies, but rather likeminded individuals” with the desire to protect their families.

Ballvé — who previously worked as a journalist covering Latin American affairs and U.S. policy toward the region — envisions this project as a narrative nonfiction book one day. “Paranoia in American politics is nothing new and apocalyptic thinking has been with us since at least the Puritans,” notes Ballvé.

“But the story of preppers has a lot to tell us about the cynicism and anxieties driving today’s political divisions.”

See how other professors as well as staff members and students have filled their Colgate notebooks in this video welcoming the Class of 2027: colgate.edu/colgate2027

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

23

I l lus t r ation s by Mic h ael Waraksa

THE

AC A DE M I C ’ S G U I DE TO

S U RV I VA L Whether you’re trying to avoid howler monkeys in the rainforest or howling at another person during a heated debate, these tips from Colgate experts will help you make it through unscathed.

HOW TO: Research the Rainforest — 100 Feet in the Air Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Catherine (Cat) Cardelús studies patterns of biodiversity. Her work has focused on canopies in Ethiopia and Costa Rica.

“Climbing the tree is the easy part,” she says.

“The hard part is staying up there for eight hours.” More from Cardelús:

Line Up

I use a crossbow to get a fishing line over the branch I want. I follow the fishing line with a heavier line, and then I bring up my line.

These are big canopy trees — at least 100 feet tall with a massive diameter. You can

have six people sitting in them; everybody anchors the tree. Then we put on our harnesses and check each other.

Be an Inchworm

Special knots and tree-climbing equipment help you inchworm your way up. Stand, move a knot up, bend your knee and bring a stirrup up with you, then stand on the stirrup and push up. It can take from 15 minutes to a half an hour to climb 100 feet.

Wiggle While You Work

There are little seats built into the harness, but there’s a whole thought process of, “Can I sit here for an hour?” I’ll have the point of my toe leaning against one branch and then sit back; if you happen to find a spot of a branch that doesn’t have plants, you can sit

on that. You can also put your rope behind you and lean on your rope like it’s a seat. It’s very delicate. You’re constantly wiggling and adjusting.

Don’t Drop It

You need free hands to do your work. My pen, pencils, paper, garden shears, and water bottle all have strings on them that are tied to my body. I have a chest harness that police officers wear — everything I need is right there.

Use Your Pants as Paper

Sometimes we get up there and realize we forgot a pen, or the data sheet. You’ll do anything to not have to climb down and back up. So you think, “I can do this without a pen,” or “I’ll write on my jeans.” Or, “I don’t Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

25

need water. I’ll drink someone else’s water.”

You have to be flexible.

Triangulate

My students and I spend a lot of time talking about how to measure up there and how it differs from the forest floor. You can’t do as much area, so how do you get out farther than your arm’s length? You really reach into physics and geometry, and you think about distribution of weight. You can throw an anchor from where you’re seated, triangulate, and pull yourself across the branch. It takes incredible physicality, but also patience — with yourself, the weather, the snake that’s maybe on your branch when you get there.

No Monkeying Around

When I climb with my students, we usually have teams of three. I’ll have two teams in two different trees, and we’ll communicate

over walkie-talkies: “We’ve got monkeys in our tree. We’re coming out.” Monkeys are beautiful to watch; however, they’re intimidating when you’re on a 10-millimeter rope. You don’t want them to cut your line — they have canines and nails. My rule is that we get out of the tree: The monkey always wins.

Do the Cat Walk

I pace my day. I’m a slow walker; my students call it the cat walk. Walking an hour with a 50-pound backpack is a lot in the heat, then you set up the tree and sit, take data. You have to conserve your energy.

Smile, You’re on Canopy Camera

All these organisms — porcupines, kinkajous, and mice — have established highways on branches across the rainforest. I’ll set up a camera to see what they are doing to my plots at night. I’ll have electronic equipment

up there, measuring light, humidity, and temperature, and they’ll chew the wires.

A camera gives me the technology to see who is doing what and how I can make it so a mouse does not eat my stuff. I’ll put the equipment in little houses, or I’ll dangle it from a branch.

This summer, Cardelús and her husband, Professor of Biology Eddie Watkins, traveled to Colombia with five other scientists to look at field sites for their next forest conservation and canopy research project. “I’m interested in the biological significance of the area,” she says. “There are large tracts of forest that are uninterrupted. An old growth rainforest canopy that has all the epiphytes, which is what I study, takes 500 to 1,000 years to develop. Those are becoming rarer and rarer to find in the world.”

“You need to either be comfortable losing data or be able to MacGyver your way out of it.”

Professor Mike Loranty

Work Really Remotely Associate Professor of Geography Mike Loranty, who studies changes in Arctic ecosystems, does his fieldwork in boreal forests and the tundra in northeastern Siberia and Alaska. Here’s what he’s learned conducting research in these remote areas.

Be Low Maintenance

You might be at a field station where all the fresh water is brought in on a truck, so you get one shower a week and it has to be short.

You may have a chance to go for a swim, so it’s not unsanitary conditions, but it’s not like being at home and coming home at the end of a long day to have pizza, a beer, and a shower.

Have a Backup Bear Plan

In the U.S., we’ve always carried bear spray. In Russia, that only became legal in the last five years I was working there, so before that, we didn’t. When I was there in 2012, my Russian colleague told me, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve only seen one bear.

26 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

You’re not going to see a bear.” That year, we saw a bear. It wasn’t trying to eat us, but it came way closer than you want a bear to be. It chewed up some of our equipment, and it was a really uncomfortable situation. This Russian colleague had a flare, so he threw it at the bear. Eventually it moved, and we maneuvered in a way that the bear was no longer between us and our car, which was a half mile away. We made a hasty retreat.

Channel Your Inner MacGyver

A lot of my field-based work uses environmental sensors hooked up to data loggers, as well as instruments to measure greenhouse gas emissions. These are fairly sophisticated devices with a lot of components. If you were to use those instruments in Hamilton, N.Y., you could plug them in, use a generator, or regularly switch batteries. In the Arctic, that’s not the case — it’s all solar power and batteries. Even if I’m doing work in Fairbanks, Alaska, I can go to Lowe’s and get extra batteries and wiring supplies, or I can order solar panels or any other parts I might need. But when we’re in Siberia or other remote communities, those options don’t exist. So you need to anticipate what your needs might be and ship those things ahead. And when things do go wrong, you need to either

be comfortable losing data or be able to MacGyver your way out of it.

Leave Your Shorts at Home

We go in the summertime and the temperatures can be 80 or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. There are also a lot of mosquitoes because these are wet landscapes. So we’re not going out in shorts and T-shirts, having a nice time on the tundra. We’re in long pants, boots, and longsleeve shirts with nets over our heads.

Be Careful Not to Overwork Yourself

Above the Arctic circle, the sun doesn’t set in the summer. After dinner, it’s still light out, so you can end up walking back to the lab, or if you’re collecting samples, you can wander back out and think, I’ll do a few more. If you’re not careful, you can keep working and realize it’s suddenly 1 a.m.

Don’t Be a Know-it-all

We work in a lot of Indigenous communities, and you need to remember you’re a visitor there. Even though I have a certain kind of expertise, I don’t have the same kind of knowledge as people who have cultural ties to the place and who have lived there for generations. It’s important to be aware of that, to respect that, and go in with some humility. Because a lot of times when we do science, it’s not like we’re always making new discoveries. We’re often just rediscovering things that locals have known for a long time and presenting them using Western scientific norms — as opposed to, for example, traditional ecological knowledge or an oral history that people in the community might know.

This sort of humility and understanding is important more generally as well. The cultural norms can even be different in situations like waiting in line at the airport or what you might expect at a restaurant or a hotel.

If you just approach these remote places with an open mind and be grateful for new experiences, things usually shake out all right.

Loranty’s current projects continue to focus on changing Arctic ecosystems. With funding from NASA, he and colleagues from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are using satellite data to map how beavers are moving northward due to climate change, and measuring methane emissions from newly formed beaver ponds. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he and a colleague at the University of Connecticut are using Artificial Intelligence and a database of drone imagery to map Arctic vegetation change.

See Inside the Earth Karen Harpp, professor of earth and environmental geosciences and peace and conflict studies, has been researching the Galápagos since she first traveled there in graduate school. “The Galápagos are volcanic islands,” she says, “and they’re fed by a mantle plume, which rises from above the core inside the earth. It is a big column of hot rock that comes to the surface. For us to see what’s going on inside the planet, we analyze the lava that is erupted from volcanoes, which, in turn, is produced by the mantle plume.” Harpp discusses what it’s like to study this different type of core curriculum:

Permits and Planning

The Galápagos Islands are a national park overseen by Ecuador, so you need permits to work on any of the islands; you have to coordinate your work with park officials and the Charles Darwin Research Station, which supports research efforts in the area. You have to present the park officials with a detailed plan, tell them exactly how you’re going to collect the rocks, and prove you’re going to do it without any environmental damage. (If you’re a tourist, there are only a few islands you can visit, and you have to have a naturalist guide with you the whole time to make sure you don’t bother the wildlife or do anything risky.)

Close Quarters

On larger islands, the park lets you set up a field camp, so a boat drops you off.

For smaller islands, you have to sleep on a boat and go onto the island during the day, to minimize environmental impact. It is a very small boat, with only a few bunks. The cook’s space is the size of a bathroom stall, and there’s a tiny table where you all sit around and eat.

Scoop the Seeds

You can’t take fresh food into the field because of the risk of contaminating an island with seeds or a grain that could grow. (You can’t anyway, because there’s no fridge.) Any food you bring has to sit in a freezer for a few days to kill any bugs that might be in it. Usually, we eat oatmeal for breakfast, canned tuna and crackers for lunch, and pasta for dinners. If you’re being supported by a boat, you don’t have to bring food, but the ship’s crew still can’t feed you anything that has seeds in it. For instance, if they serve cucumbers or tomatoes, they cut the seeds out — because if you go to the bathroom on the island, you might start a tomato plant, and we can’t be ecosystem engineers inadvertently.

Ration Water

If you’re sleeping on a boat while doing fieldwork, the boats have plenty of water because they are supplied with desalination systems. But if you’re dropped off by a boat onto an island, you have to let the research station know Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

27

ahead of time how much water you’re going to need, they help you get that amount, you bring it with you on the boat, and you line up the jerricans at your campsite.

The Galápagos are on the equator, so fieldwork is very hot, you’re thirsty, and you have a limited quota per person per day.

Be Invisible

You can’t be seen by tourists. That’s a park rule, because they don’t want tourists to think they can go anywhere they want — the park is so careful about damage, you can’t even take a rock or shell home as a tourist. If we happen to be working near a tourist site, we have to go at the beginning or end of the day or when they’re at lunch, or we have to work elsewhere until they are gone so we don’t get spotted.

Watch Your Step

Some Galápagos birds nest on the ground, some in crevices of lava flows, others just out in the open. So you have to be vigilant not to disturb their nests or destroy anything; fortunately the birds are also pretty vigilant and will make a lot of noise if you get too close.

Knives Out

Carry a machete because some of the islands have dense vegetation, often with spines. After a few days in the field, you emerge looking pretty beat up with rips in your clothes.

Walking on Broken Glass

Lava is generated when rock melts inside the Earth (which we call magma), where it’s really hot. So when it gets erupted onto the surface and exposed to air, the surface of the lava freezes quickly. Think of it as black glass. On top, sometimes it’s in tiny fragments — so you’re walking on broken glass, which is reasonably stable to walk on, but your boots can get shredded.

Fortunately (and unfortunately!), lava flows have different shapes and structures. There’s a kind of lava called ‘a’a [pronounced ah-ah], which is a Hawaiian word for an especially uneven terrain made of lava.

We joke that it means “ouch” because it’s very sharp.

It can take you hours to cross a kilometer of ‘a’a. And you have to be very careful not to fall, because if you get injured out there, you’re a long distance from help.

The opposite end of the spectrum is something called pahoehoe. When the lava moves slowly enough that the surface doesn’t crack as it cools, it becomes ropey, like you skidded into a rug and squished it up (though it’s definitely not soft, it’s still rock!). We call the pahoehoe “highways” because they’re so much easier to walk on.

Harpp and Meg Gardner, senior lecturer in educational studies, received a National Science Foundation grant for their Virtual Galápagos project. In this summer teacher-training program, undergraduates from Colgate and Utica University built an interactive website for third graders.

28 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Discuss Controversial Topics Professor of Political Science Stan Brubaker teaches constitutional law, American politics, and political theory. He also moderates Colgate’s annual Constitution Day debate.

In these polarized times, how can we discuss controversial topics with others? It’s hard — especially when social media makes it so easy to “like” one’s way into an agreeable crowd, so simple to “share” only the news that reinforces our point of view, and so satisfying to decry those with whom we disagree.

To venture opinions that challenge the circle of the like-minded can be risky; even with good intentions, individuals have found themselves ostracized, canceled, rejected, or worse.

Nonetheless, the subjects I teach are inherently controversial.

Even after nearly a half-century of teaching, I know I still have a lot to learn, but I’ll pass on a few things that seem to work.

First, I like to encourage the idea that we’re looking at something, something that is external to us and the particular elements of our personality and beliefs; we might draw on these elements to help highlight what we see and how we see it, but we can’t simply stop with these personal reactions. In constitutional law, for instance, I often start by handing out drawings, face down, and ask the students to turn theirs over and tell me which they have — a rabbit or a duck? Usually, they divide roughly evenly. Then I point out they are looking at the same drawing; they’re just seeing it differently.

Once an individual is fixed seeing it one way, say the rabbit, it’s often hard to “unsee” it and instead see the duck. But we talk about which lines to highlight, and then the duck snaps into focus and it might be hard to see the rabbit again.

Unlike the clever artist, the framers of the Constitution didn’t deliberately try to fool us with ambiguities. Nonetheless, the words they gave us and that “we the people” ratified and amended leave

us with many puzzles. And beyond the text, we need to consider what else should go into constitutional interpretation — the original meaning or more often meanings, historical context, background principles, political practice, inference from structure and relationship (separation of powers and federalism), underlying moral principles and political theories, precedent, penumbras, and pragmatic concern with consequences. Does the equal protection clause permit race-based preferences in colleges for purposes of increased diversity? Can California ban the sale of pork from pigs “confined in a cruel manner”? Metaphorically, do we have a duck or a rabbit before us? The issue can be viewed either way, but unlike the drawing, we need to decide which one is right.

Many students are tempted to draw back to their feelings or elements of their personal identity, “speaking as an X, Y, Z,” but I insist they make an argument. Why should we be persuaded that this is the right way to see the issue? Or they might, in the name of peace and community, say, there’s “no right answer,” just different answers. Maybe, I will reply, but why should we think “no right answer” is more persuasive than any of the other possibilities?

If they were a justice on the Supreme Court, would they write, “There’s no right answer to the question before us, but speaking as an X, Y, Z, I feel…?”

After students become more adept at constructing their arguments, I take matters to another level, either in class discussions or moot court exercises, and get them to make the best possible argument for the position they oppose. This is sometimes called the “ideological Turing Test”: Can they make the argument so effectively that I can’t tell whether it’s their own or the position they oppose? This is a mind-bending exercise, and few fully succeed.

Occasionally, in the course of this effort, students will actually change their own position; they find the other more persuasive.

More often, they’ll stick to their guns, but come out of the exercise with greater appreciation and respect for the opinions of others.

When I run the Washington, D.C., Study Group, we do a case study of the policy process, where we take a case actively on the policy agenda — health care, social security reform, campaign finance, electronic surveillance, and privacy — learn as much as we can through readings and talking with policy wonks and political actors, then try our own hand at coming up with a good policy. We soon realize that good policy is rarely a matter of getting the bad guys to stand aside. More often it’s a matter of balancing complex interests and tradeoffs.

Lastly, I would add the importance of sharing a meal together.

When I teach an FSEM, I add to the usual “how to’s” (read, research, write, etc.) a dinner devoted to “How to Pick up a Fork,” in the conviction that dining, with good manners and good conversation, is one of the higher forms of being human. When I bring a speaker or debaters to campus, I almost always follow up the event with a dinner with students and faculty and staff members. We begin with introductions, followed by lighthearted conversations with our neighbors, and then with a clink on the glass, we turn to the speaker’s topic. The discussion might wander in any direction, but we follow one rule: There’s only one conversation at the table, no drifting off to side conversations. Dining together, I’ve found, has a remarkable effect. The formality of being seated brings civility.

The act of sharing a meal brings a sense of commonality. And conversing in these circumstances usually brings some sense of common venture in the nourishment of what humanist Leon Kass has called “the hungry soul.” If successful, the dinner points beyond itself. Readers of Plato’s Republic might recall that early on there is the promise of dinner, but piqued by the cunning Socrates, the participants become so engrossed in the question, “what is justice,” that thoughts of food are left behind.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

29

Read

(When Highly Civilized Human Beings Are Flying Overhead, Trying to Kill You)

One August day in 2013, Professor Jane Pinchin and I drove down to New York City to talk to alumni about a fledgling program we were calling, mostly to ourselves, a book group on steroids. Since then, Living Writers has grown into a program with 6,000+ participants who read along with the students in ENGL 360 every fall, and who often join us, virtually or in person, for author appearances and book discussions.

At that 2013 event, there were 50–60 people in attendance, and things went along pretty much as they do, until we were nearing the end. A middle-aged man sitting halfway down the rows of chairs, wearing a button-down shirt and khakis, raised his hand. He had this to say: I was a physics major at Colgate, graduating in 197_. I had a high-powered career as an engineer, then a consultant, and along the way I got married and raised a family. In high school and college, I read all the time, then my life got busy and I stopped. Now that I have more time, I want to get back to reading, but I find I’ve forgotten how. Please, can you tell me how to read?

Earlier that day, on our drive down, Jane and I had talked about which books to recommend (Zadie Smith’s NW, George Saunders’ Tenth of December, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story), and we had prepared to talk about why reading is worthwhile (for pleasure, for beauty, for knowledge; as a hedge against loneliness and also a topic of conversation at cocktail parties).

Then and now, it seemed obvious the guy wasn’t asking about the mechanics of reading. Rather, he wanted to know how to read in a world that conspires in every moment to prevent us from doing so (hence the subtitle of this piece, lifted from George Orwell’s wartime essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn”).

What is it about the modern world that makes reading so darn difficult? Besides the obvious (iPhones, cable news, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc.), neurobiology offers a compelling answer.

Researchers studying the brain waves of people reading literature have discovered that 1.) It lights up every region of the brain; 2.) It engages nearly every cognitive skill (making meaning, solving problems, recalling the past, predicting the future,

30 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

retrieving vocabulary, etc.); and 3.) It takes a huge amount of energy. Much of this energy, writes literary critic Sven Birkerts, is devoted erasure, to self-silencing. “We suspend our sense of the world at large, bracket it off, in order that the author’s implicit world may declare itself.”

To the retired engineer in the middle of the room on that August day in 2013, I’d like to say a couple of things: 1.) I applaud your courage in asking a couple of literature professors how to read; and 2.) Whatever answer I gave back then was probably lousy.

Try this one instead: Read like a child. Remember what it felt like to gobble up books? To fall into a Nancy Drew or Harry Potter novel? How time stopped, and you felt as if the world of the novel was real-er than the one you were living in? That feeling is still out there, waiting for you. Also, keep in mind that listening to a book is just as good as reading one, especially if the only time you can carve out is on the subway or the stair machine.

Read what you like. If you’re not sure what that might be, ask a bookseller or librarian for recommendations, or read reviews written by professional reviewers, published in newspapers and magazines.

Start every day with a poem. Some days it will feel like dental floss for the brain; other days, it will give you a jolt of pleasure

as powerful and surprising as the sight of a 360-degree double rainbow.

If you happen on a really good book, stick with it, even if it hurts. Stick with it especially if it hurts. “Good writing never soothes or comforts,” writes novelist Joy Williams. “It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face.”

Read as if there really are highly civilized beings flying overhead, trying to kill you, and the only way to save yourself — the only way to save the whole world — is to keep on reading. Here’s one great writer, Ian McEwan, talking about another great writer, Martin Amis, who died in May: “In his final months, he read the complete works of Edith Wharton. He wrote two weeks ago to say that he could no longer read with a pencil in his hand. That may have been his one important concession to his illness.”

— Professor of English Jennifer Brice continues to teach Living Writers, which she co-led with Jane Pinchin (the Thomas A. Bartlett Chair and professor of English emerita) until Pinchin retired in 2015. For more information on Living Writers, visit colgate.edu/livingwriters. Also, Brice is publishing a new book titled Another North, which is an essay collection releasing in 2024.

Consider the Contrary Professor of Philosophy Ed Witherspoon teaches Logic I (Phil 225), in which he provides students with methods for evaluating the validity of arguments.

There is a story from the ancient world of a sage who was visiting a harbor ringed with altars and statues dedicated to Poseidon. The local guide said, “These are offerings from sailors who survived storms and dangers by praying to the god.” To which the sage replied, “And where are the offerings of those who prayed and did not survive?”

The sage’s response points out the flaw in the guide’s reasoning.

The guide claims that the sailors’ prayers to Poseidon caused their safe passage. As the sage reminds us, you can’t establish a causal claim just by enumerating cases in which the proposed cause was followed by the putative effect; you also have to consider whether there are cases in which the proposed cause was not followed by the putative effect.

We all recognize the need to consider both positive and negative instances in evaluating causal claims. No one would go along with me if I said, “There have been several instances in which (A) I put on shoes and then (B) a hurricane struck, so my putting on my shoes causes hurricanes.” But when it comes to confusing or contentious causal claims, even normally astute reasoners can be misled. A successful Florida businessman is funding a clinic devoted to so-called “medical freedom,” where patients with COVID-19 can receive non–FDA-approved treatments. In a recent interview he justified his faith in ivermectin as a cure for COVID-19: “I’ve seen people take it who were sick, really sick, and it works.” Our sage would ask, “And how many people with COVID-19 took ivermectin and did not recover?”

A structurally similar fallacy occurs when people are motivated to argue against a causal connection. An opponent of capital punishment made the following argument to show that the death penalty has no deterrent effect: Interviews with all the prisoners on Texas’s death row revealed that none of them thought about the death penalty when they committed their crimes. Upon a moment’s reflection, the question, “Did the threat of the death penalty deter these convicted felons from committing capital crimes?” answers itself. But that answer does not touch the question of whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect.

For that, you’d have to look for people who would have committed a capital crime if not for the threat of capital punishment.

(For the record, I doubt there is a significant number of such people, but establishing that would take some serious data collection and analysis.)

An argument in a similar vein is sometimes advanced by opponents of gun control: Even in states and countries with strict gun regulations, terrorists get access to weapons and commit mass shootings, so gun laws do nothing to deter terrorism. What question would our sage pose in response to this reasoning?

Students in an introductory logic class learn to recognize poor arguments and get tools for constructing good ones. You may not be able to spend a whole semester thinking about how to think, but you can cultivate the habits of mind that studying logic fosters — habits like articulating your assumptions and presuppositions, seeking out and listening to people whose views differ from yours, and looking for evidence against your preferred conclusions. There is no magic bullet for avoiding bad thinking, but with care and good will, we can all move from fallacy to sagacity.

“I believe it is important first to see the beauty in other people, especially if there are cultural, religious, political, or social differences.”

Rev. Corey MacPherson

See the Beauty of Empathy As a college chaplain, I have had the privilege of building relationships with students from many different religious traditions. For those students who believe that religious life is important, I always encourage them to “see the beauty” in other religious traditions. All too often, particularly within the many theological streams of Christianity, we are quick to notice what is different in other religious traditions and then criticize and label them as wrong. This way of living not only leads to a critical spirit but also causes us to overlook the profound beauty of other religious traditions and cultures as well as the positive contributions they bring to our world.

In the same way, I believe it is important first to see the beauty in other people, especially if there are cultural, religious, political, or social differences.

While seeing the beauty first can perhaps mean outer appearances, that is just a tiny part of what I mean by beauty. As Helen Keller once wrote to a friend, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.”

I define empathy as: the genuine commitment to know and understand another person, driven by no other desire than to see and appreciate the unique beauty they bring our world.

Once we begin to understand, even in small ways, how others — who may have very different religious, social, and political views — are also striving to simply navigate this complex life based upon all they have experienced in their own journey, we can start to see what a precious gift they are to our world.

So, let us continue to embrace the responsibility of cultivating the splendor of empathy in our world with the unwavering belief that every life truly is a precious and beautiful gift.

— Rev. Corey MacPherson is the chaplain and Protestant campus pastor. He has written numerous devotionals as well as articles on preaching and servant leadership and has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

31

Photography by Mark DiOrio

Above and Beyond

A

hmad Khazaee ’05 is standing on a promontory along the coast of Maine. He’s watching for the blinking lights of his drone, hovering in the darkness of Casco Bay. The director of creative technologies, engagement, and support has left his office in Case Library to take pictures of harbor seals for professors Krista Ingram and Ahmet Ay, and the law says he must keep the machine at least 400 yards from the seals’ rocky home.

More than simply choosing to accept this mission, Khazaee helped design it — and the accessories now strapped to the UAV flying above the Atlantic. Oh — and there’s another one that goes under the ocean.

But we’ll circle back to that.

It’s no surprise that Colgate University hires IT experts, not to mention groundskeepers, campus safety officers, accountants, writers, and student life professionals. But general titles can obscure some of the remarkable duties that employees take on, if and when needed, because they work in a community that exists to discover and share knowledge.

Colgate Magazine interrupted several of these staff members to speak with them about what they do and how they came to be doing it.

32 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

A look at some of the individuals who help Colgate operate at the highest level

Ahmad Khazaee ’05 is the director of creative technologies, engagement, and support at Colgate.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

33

‘YES, AND…’

K

hazaee arrived in Hamilton, N.Y., from Texas in 2001 as a first-year student, figuring that, if he was ever going to explore outside of the American Southwest, his college years would be the best time to do it. He began his first week with the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) summer program but then overheard professors talking about a vacancy in the Science and Math Initiative.

He volunteered to switch over. “In that program, you came in with your OUS class, but you had to do some research in your second year,” he explains. When he was warned that the program was rigorous, his response was “Whatever. I got it.”

That’s been his M.O. ever since.

After earning his math degree, he took a job in Colgate’s Information Technology (IT) Services, managing computer labs — his first day was during his own senior week — and worked his way up through the ranks. His current title is an unusual one in higher education IT, but it reflects two key aspects of his work: whether he is engaging professors, staffers, or students, “part of it is deciphering what it is that they want; part of it is production,” he says.

He listens. He comes to understand the base requirements. He uses his own expertise to see the greater potential, and then he applies some signature energy to complete the task. The recent drone flight across the inlets of Maine is a case in point.

It all started with a conversation about data storage and how to manage the information that Ingram and her research partners were acquiring in their study of facial recognition that documents seal migration behavior.

34 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

(See Colgate Magazine summer 2022.)

Initially, the researchers sat in a boat, maintaining the requisite distance from seal gathering points regardless of the currents. Khazaee pointed out that his drone could hold precise positions on its own, and its missions could be automated.

What’s more, it could be equipped with infrared (IR) technology to take the same pictures at night. He also knew that he could purchase and modify a drone that would maneuver underwater, allowing Ingram to collect water samples and study DNA markers without disturbing the seals.

“I don’t tend to shy away from complex problems,” he says. “You have success

with a difficult one, and you know that, soon after, a slightly harder one will probably show up.”

The summertime trip northeast from Hamilton allowed Khazaee and Ingram to test the technology that they had been developing throughout the 2022–23 academic year. Initial flights were successful, and permits to move forward are pending.

“Someone asked me what I would do if I won the lottery,” Khazaee says. “I would be a perpetual student. And these opportunities, these questions that come up, afford a moment to dive into something new, with enthusiasm and the pressure of a deadline.”

— Mark Walden

THE OPTIMIST/ PESSIMIST

T

Mary Williams ’08 is Colgate’s director of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety.

WILLIAMS’ RESPONSIBILITIES RANGE FROM CHECKING THE WATER QUALITY AT THE BEWKES CENTER LAKE TO APPROVING DRONE FLIGHT PLANS THAT ENTER CAMPUS AIR SPACE TO DEALING WITH HAZARDOUS WASTE FROM THE NATURAL SCIENCE LABS.

here’s a menu of acronyms to know when working in any role at a university. For Mary Williams ’08, director of environmental health and safety, her daily diet is an alphabet soup.

“We’re like an internal OSHA, EPA — all of those regulatory agencies,” Williams says of her department. “We’re the ones making sure everything’s in order and that we’re meeting at least the minimum of the legal and regulatory requirements from the federal government, the state, and the county.”

Williams’ responsibilities range from checking the water quality at the Bewkes Center lake to approving drone flight plans that enter campus air space to dealing with hazardous waste from the natural science labs.

“A lot of what we do is think about what could go wrong,” she says.

That’s a huge part of her work related to emergency response, and another acronym: the EOC, aka, the Emergency Operations Center. Williams is often section chief (and twice has filled in to lead the entire group) for the EOC, which regularly does crisis training and handles University emergencies.

A biology major, Williams intended to be a veterinarian. After graduation, she worked part time on campus as a psychology animal lab assistant for two years before becoming a biology technician. When the Office of Environmental Health and Safety added Caption ebissim they de a third position to their department, simendus eos id quam recruited her over. faccus dolutem quis Today, she describes herself as both an re con exeruptus aut optimist and a pessimist: “I have to hope volorum remolupta that people are going to do the right thing, but I also have to plan for people not doing the right thing.”

When asked how she stays on top of all the new and revised regulations she needs to know, Williams says LISTSERVs help.

She adds, “There’s always more to learn.

It’s job security.”

— Aleta Mayne The most influential parts of her student experience, Williams says, were the Manchester Study Group with Paul Pinet, professor of geology and environmental studies (now emeritus), as well as Outdoor Education’s Wilderness Adventure. “I recommend studying abroad for every student at Colgate, and the preorientation programs.”

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

35

Heidi Riley is the director of Outdoor Education at Colgate.

SOME LIKE IT HOT

M

ild, medium, and spicy. Those are the classifications that Outdoor Education (OE) leaders use to describe the difficulty of their trips. Director Heidi Riley likes to turn up the heat.

“My greatest joy is coming up with adventures that are unlikely,” she says. “A combination of activities, or taking unlikely locations or routes, is so fun.”

Last year, she hatched a plan to test out one of these combo trips. She and a student leader loaded packs with blow-up kayaks, paddles, and wet suits and biked to Beaver Creek. At the state forest, they hiked down to the creek and dismantled their bikes, with the intention of paddling downstream with their bikes on the rafts. “But we ran into too much alder trying to get to the creek, it was sunset, and we totally got shut down,” she remembers, laughing. So the two trekked out of the woods, reassembled their bikes, and rode back to campus.

Riley went into it with the attitude of “This might not work out, but it’s safe, and

36 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

attempting something with an uncertain outcome every now and then is worthwhile.”

(Although that test expedition didn’t work out, subsequent attempts at other locations have.)

Having an upbeat and flexible mindset — and helping others to do the same — is a job requirement in her line of work. Riley takes it to the next level: Her master’s degree in Christian theology has trained her in pastoral care, or facilitated meaning making. “When outdoor education is doing its job well, it helps people identify what matters to them and how they nurture that,” says Riley, whose undergraduate degree is in natural resource management. “Sometimes [what matters to people] is about being outside, sometimes it’s about the environment, sometimes it’s about the skill in your body, and sometimes it’s about how you relate to other people.”

As director, Riley oversees all of the OE programming, the biggest of which is the pre-orientation wilderness adventure. She and her staff spend the summer months planning these six-day trips; this year there were 21 options, from canoeing on Long Lake (mild) to hiking several Adirondacks high peaks (spicy).

Another significant part of Riley’s job is staff training for 15–18 students,

10–20 hours per week during the academic year. Students learn how to lead trips, facilitate team-building strategies, handle interpersonal conflict, and make riskmanagement decisions, both in terms of group development and environmental decision-making.

“The staff training component we have is unique” compared with other universities, Riley says. “Anybody else who would have the length of staff training that we have is also a degree-granting program.” Additionally, Colgate’s OE program is special because of the leadership skills student staffers learn “that have tons of transference,” as well as the technical skills taught.

Riley herself learned a new skill — ice climbing — when she came to central New York after growing up in Florida and attending college at Texas A&M. “This is totally different from anything I’ve been around,” she says. “Ice climbing’s the best.

The aesthetics are really interesting. And the route finding and assessing the environment to make micro decisions is very engaging.

You can’t think about anything else while you’re doing it, which is a rare opportunity these days.”

— Aleta Mayne

MENTORING STAR STUDENTS

J

oe Eakin tends to think big. As technical director and designer for the Ho Tung Visualization Lab, Eakin not only shares his passion for astronomy with Colgate students, but also with the

greater community. Since 2008, the outreach program he created has helped prepare science educators and exposed thousands of local elementary school kids to the basics of physics through hands-on projects at the planetarium.

But Eakin’s latest project combines astronomy with another of his passions: video games. Inspired by the course Astronomy and Culture, Eakin conceptualized a video game based on the Mayan ball court — a brutal,

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

37

ancient ball game that dates back to 1600 BCE. Astronomy and Culture was taught by Tony Aveni, the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies emeritus, who was one of Eakin’s first mentors and collaborators when he arrived at Colgate. “[Mayan ball court] was bigger than soccer is today,” Eakin explains.

The idea is simple: players on two opposing teams must use their bodies — no hands allowed — to propel a rubber ball through a stone hoop. The game wasn’t just a recreational activity, but also held religious and political significance in Mayan culture (and often involved human sacrifices).

“The Aztecs and Mayans believed the ball court represented the heavens, the ball was the sun, and the game was a battle between day and night,” Eakin says. “I thought it would be interesting to work with students to create a video game version we could play in the planetarium.”

For Colgate students and other local college students interested in video games, it wasn’t a hard sell. In 2022, Eakin put together a team of eager computer science, film, engineering, and music majors to learn the development software and start creating an alpha version of the game, dubbed “Huetzi,” the Mayan verb meaning “to fall.” The project required as much ancient research as tech savvy: The game is set in Chichén Itzá, and students designed avatars depicting the helmets, pads, and thick belts players wore to launch the ball with their hips. Associate Professor of Anthropology Santiago Juarez served as a consultant to help students refine the details.

“We’re making this as historically accurate as possible,” Eakin says, “and it’s cool because the students have essentially created their own universe inside the game.”

While the group is still making some finishing touches, the game is playable, and in late August, Eakin shared the project at the Digistar Users Group Conference in Glassboro, N.J. Eakin and the students’ eventual goal: To share the game with planetariums around the country and allow players in different domes to virtually compete.

But, just like Eakin’s other projects at Colgate, the game’s main objective is to inspire students’ passion for astronomy.

“I want them to feel a sense of pride and ownership with the projects we do here,” he says, “because the planetarium is really the students’ space.”

— Mary Donofrio — Mary Donofrio

38 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

FIRST THINGS FIRST

N

avigating college is especially challenging for those without a family member who can share personal insight on the workings of higher education. For students who will be the first in their families to obtain a fouryear degree, First@Colgate fills that gap.

As a first-generation graduate herself (at Duke University), RaJhai Spencer, the Giovanni ’94 and Maree Cutaia Director of First@Colgate, can say, “I understand what you are going through.” She, Assistant Director Tabisha Raymond, and their student

SPENCER LOVES SEEING STUDENTS BUILD CONFIDENCE IN NAVIGATING ACADEMIC MATTERS AND GETTING OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONES SOCIALLY.

staff members support first-gen students through their educational journeys.

The first-gen experience is not siloed, Spencer points out: they live in the residence halls, eat on campus, and go to class with everyone else. The program gets them connected and normalizes what they are going through. “It’s letting them know what resources are available. It’s setting up regular check-ins to help them keep on pace,” she says. “It’s people who share similar experiences, befriend them, and help them navigate.”

Spencer, who also advises more than 300 students as an administrative dean, became First@Colgate’s inaugural director in fall 2020. She came to Colgate following six years with Florida State University’s

RaJhai Spencer is the Giovanni ’94 and Maree Cutaia Director of First@Colgate.

first-gen department, initially as a college life coach and ultimately as senior associate director. She also brought a unique set of earlier education roles.

“I graduated from college a year early and had no idea what I wanted to do,” Spencer says. “I went home, lived with my grandfather, and became a substitute teacher at my high school.” She also worked in Duke’s Talent Identification Program for middle and high school students; as a graduate teaching assistant while earning her MA in sociology from the University of Illinois-Chicago; and as an American English language coach. Her entrance to higher education followed her marriage — to Dorsey Spencer, now Colgate’s dean of students — when the couple lived in Nigeria. “Dorsey was the director of student

activities at the American University of Nigeria; I was an academic adviser.”

Her background helped RaJhai to think about how First@Colgate can best support first-gen students. Everything is optional.

The pre-orientation gives incoming students a head start in getting acquainted with campus. Throughout the four years, social, academic, and professional development offerings include group study nights and workshops with Career Services; Center for Learning, Teaching, and Research; and other departments. Alumni (often first-gen themselves) sometimes reach out to offer programs, Zoom calls, or to connect with students one on one. Last year, participants had lunch with and networked with the Alumni Council.

Trips offer recreation or professional development off campus. Last year, First@ Colgate took students to Chittenango Falls and to Boston to explore graduate school opportunities, among others.

RaJhai loves seeing students build confidence in navigating academic matters and getting out of their comfort zones socially. “They are talented. Open to learning and new experiences. Thinking deeply about their education and how it impacts their families. Brave,” she says.

“We want to make Colgate a place that is welcoming and inclusive, and what we do with First@Colgate is directly tied into that. We are laying the foundation for a next generation of leaders.”

— Rebecca Downing

→ In the winter, the heating plant needs a dozen 30-ton loads of wood chips per week to feed the boilers.

→ The cost is $1,200 per load, which works out to approximately $60,000 a month to keep the campus running.

But that’s about half of what it would cost to heat the campus with gas.

→ The wood chips Colgate uses are sourced locally from scraps produced

by Gutchess Lumber and are a renewable resource.

MOST OF THE WATER USED BY THE BOILERS IS REUSED. AFTER THE STEAM IS SENT OUT TO THE BUILDINGS ON CAMPUS, IT RETURNS AS CONDENSATE, WHICH IS PROCESSED, CLEANED, AND THEN REHEATED TO MAKE STEAM AGAIN.

→ Colgate is able to reuse 93% of the plant’s water.

LEADING THE STEAM TEAM

H

eating Plant Foreman Paul DuVall knows what it takes to keep Colgate running — snow, sleet, or shine. “I’ve been working with boilers for 30 years,” he says. “I like the challenges we have every day.” DuVall, a Sherburne, N.Y., native, gained his first

40 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

experience working with oil boilers at a plant in Norwich. He began at Colgate 14 years ago as a boiler operator and never looked back.

Being a boiler operator is demanding and precise work. The hours can be intense, especially if there is an equipment breakdown. When the entire campus depends on the successful operations of the heating plant, you need the right person for the job. DuVall is supported by his awardwinning team of boiler operators (the

heating plant team won the Team Excellence staff award in spring 2022). “Everybody in the heating plant wants to do their best for Colgate. It takes all of us, when the need is great; everyone steps up to support each other.”

The heating plant needs constant supervision, so members of the boiler operator team must be on premise at all times, including holidays. During the COVID-19 shutdown, they were some of the only people on campus. “We felt very

Paul DuVall is Colgate’s heating plant foreman.

isolated,” says DuVall, “but we have a phenomenal crew, and we all leaned on each other.”

When an emergency threatens the boiler operations, DuVall and his team step in to do whatever is necessary to keep the steam running. In December 2022, a water main on Broad Street broke, and water stopped running to the heating plant. Most of the water used by the boilers is reused. After the steam is sent out to the buildings on campus, it returns as condensate, which is processed,

cleaned, and then reheated to make steam again. But the condensate isn’t enough to keep the boilers running in the winter time.

“Without makeup water, the boiler would go dry and the whole campus would have no heat,” says DuVall. “We got the fire trucks here, and ran a fire hose down the floor and dropped it in the condensate tank.”

He notes that the frightening part was knowing that if the fire trucks were called out on an emergency, they would have to leave. DuVall worked with other facilities

crew members to ensure that in the event of another water main break, heating plant employees can draw on water from one of the other buildings up the hill on a different line. “You need to make sure you have more than one game plan,” he says.

DuVall believes in his work and in supporting his team. “When your job is better, your attitude is better,” he says.

“Life’s short, so you should enjoy coming to work and you should enjoy what you do.”

— Jasmine Kellogg Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

41

AI

FOR GOOD

By Daniel Oberhaus

How five alumni are leveraging artificial intelligence to take on the mental health crisis, develop lifesaving drugs, stop hackers, and launch a new wave of American innovation.

Last November, research lab OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT — its artificial intelligence chat program — and ignited an AI mania that shows no signs of abating. This new breed of AI is driven by so-called “large language models,” which ingest massive amounts of textual data and use it to produce unique responses to user input. ChatGPT and other large language models are already transforming industries ranging from software development and finance to education and advertising. But ChatGPT and similar systems are just one facet of the AI revolution.

Colgate Magazine spoke with five alumni who are using AI to make the world a better place by improving our mental health, protecting us from sophisticated cybercrime, finding solutions to our climate crisis, developing lifesaving drugs, and driving economic prosperity.

42 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Illustrations by Stephan Schmitz

AI Is Transforming Mental Health

I

t’s lonely out in space. For decades, NASA has known that depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues may naturally arise when astronauts spend weeks or months orbiting hundreds of miles away from the Earth’s surface. As the space agency began to lay the groundwork for a crewed mission to Mars, it was apparent that finding a way to support the mental health of astronauts on longduration spaceflight would be critical to the success of the most ambitious space mission ever undertaken. But in a tightly packed spacecraft, there’s no room for a therapist to fly along.

Approximately 15 years ago, Claudia Zayfert ’83, who was the director of the

Anxiety Disorders Clinic at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, teamed up with a colleague from Harvard Medical School who had received a grant from NASA to develop an AI system that could autonomously manage astronaut health on long-duration spaceflight missions. “It was designed with the Mars mission in mind, where you’re so far from Earth that you can’t have a conversation in real time,” Zayfert says. In an ideal scenario, a flight to Mars takes 21 months round trip — a long and dangerous journey, especially if astronauts lack access to personalized mental health support. It seemed like an area where an AI therapist might do a lot of good.

While collaborating on the NASA project, Zayfert and her colleague hatched a plan to apply the same methodologies used for the spacefaring AI therapist to people on Earth with limited access to therapists and other mental health professionals.

In 2019, Zayfert co-founded Evermind to commercialize the AI technology that

had been developed with spacefaring applications in mind to provide access to mental health support for the multitudes of earthlings who — like an astronaut on a mission to the Red Planet — don’t have access to an in-person therapist. Evermind’s flagship product is ePST, a virtual, AIassisted therapy that uses hundreds of short audio and video clips of a real, expert psychologist sitting in a warmly lit room to help treat depression.

Although the virtual therapist in Evermind’s videos is a real mental health professional, his pre-recorded responses are selected by an AI system based on a user’s input. Each week, the AI therapist learns more about the user based on their feedback about how the treatment is progressing.

It integrates that feedback and advises them on skills to practice and steps to keep moving forward. Although there are dozens of companies providing AI-driven therapy today, most of these systems use generative AI, which produces novel responses to user input. While generative AI is useful in the case of a tool like ChatGPT for coming up with new ideas, it can be ineffective or even dangerous in a therapeutic context because the AI program might provide false or potentially harmful information to a patient.

At Evermind, Zayfert and her colleagues took a totally different approach to AI-driven therapy that keeps the best part of virtual automated mental health­–support services while providing guardrails to ensure they are effective and safe for users. ePST is based on a type of AI known as an “expert system,” which is designed to emulate the thought process of a human expert — in this case, a therapist. The AI operates across a database of responses vetted by human therapists and uses well-established therapy protocols to intelligently select the best response for a given user input. This ensures the AI program stays on script and provides mental health support in a way that has been proven to help patients grappling with depression.

“The system isn’t generating its own responses,” Zayfert says. “All the responses are preprogrammed, and it follows a rigorous, evidence-based protocol every step of the way.”

Whether you’re an astronaut hurtling through the vastness of space toward another planet or one of the billions of people back on Earth, Zayfert believes that thoughtfully designed AI systems have an important role to play in helping us deal with our all-too-human problems. She says the point of applying AI to mental health is not to replace human therapists, but to empower individuals to learn the skills they need to cope with their mental health Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

43

challenges. “This is a tool kit you carry around in your head, that you put to work in your life, and that’s what good therapy does,” she says. “It teaches you something that you carry with you, not spoon-feeding you the answers to life’s problems.”

AI Is Saving the Planet

I

n July, the U.N. secretary-general declared the world was entering an era of “global boiling” as countries broke heat records and experienced unprecedented wildfires and cataclysmic flooding.

Finding new ways to deploy technology to stave off the worst impacts of climate change has never been more urgent, and Anthony Annunziata ’05 believes that AI may prove to be a decisive factor in our ability to survive on a warming planet.

As the director of product and business incubation, IBM’s AI and Quantum Accelerated Sciences division, Annunziata is leading a team of researchers who are experimenting with ways to leverage the company’s cutting-edge AI systems to tackle a host of large-scale problems in the realm of scientific discovery, health care, and climate.

After graduating from Colgate with a degree in physics, Annunziata spent his early career seeking ways to apply his technical skills for social good at institutions, including MIT, Cambridge, and Yale. “I went into Colgate

44 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

not knowing if physics could even be a viable major choice, never mind a career choice,” he says. “I emerged convinced that this is the thing I wanted to do in grad school and beyond.”

In 2017, Annunziata launched IBM’s quantum computing business, and since then he and his colleagues have been searching for ways to use quantum computing and AI to accelerate scientific discovery. If a lab needs a better catalyst to perform a chemical reaction, for example, or create a new-andimproved energy storage method, Annunziata and his team can train their AI on existing scientific literature and use that model to form new hypotheses and predict the outcomes of experiments. “I have a portfolio at IBM that’s trying to research and develop ways to use AI for these really tough societal challenges,” he says.

In the context of climate science, Annunziata and his crew at IBM are using AI for a host of applications that range from identifying promising new materials for carbon capture technologies or making improved predictions about how climate change could affect a particular region’s rainfall, soil, or cloud cover. He sees AI as a uniquely useful tool to apply to climate science because it is so multidisciplinary and the problem space is so complex.

But connecting the dots between various fields of scientific research and technology development is an area where AI, with its superhuman ability to analyze data, can give human scientists and technologists a big advantage.

“AI isn’t going to be able to come up with all the solutions, but it will help us find solutions to societal problems faster, whether they are diseases, energy consumption and storage, or understanding how best to target climate change mitigation,” Annunziata says.

“I think that’s going to have an impact across lots of areas. I’m a big optimist here.”

AI Is Accelerating the Development of Lifesaving Drugs

D

uring the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States marshaled its scientific, technological, and industrial resources to develop three novel vaccines in record time as part of Operation Warp Speed. It was an unprecedented feat in terms of the amount of time between

the emergence of a pathogen and the deployment of a vaccine, but if George Armstrong ’18 has his way, AI will make this sort of accelerated drug discovery routine — and save countless lives along the way.

As a deep learning engineer at Nvidia, Armstrong is helping the company find ways to enable researchers to use AI for life science and health care applications including AI models that could someday help with the development of precision drugs that are tailored to an individual patient’s genetic profile. It’s a skill set he honed at Colgate, where he contributed to a research project run by Professor Ahmet Ay that used machine learning to improve cancer subtyping — a way of grouping cancers based on their molecular characteristics.

This project led to subsequent research on advanced computing approaches for studying the microbiome — the collection of microorganisms that live on our bodies and in our guts — throughout Armstrong’s PhD program at the University of California San Diego.

Today, he is developing techniques that use AI to rapidly analyze human DNA and use this information to identify new drug candidates for a wide variety of diseases.

“One of the big things AI is doing right now for life sciences is helping to predict the structure of proteins,” Armstrong says.

“That way you can better predict whether a drug is going to induce a change we want and not induce a change we don’t want.”

It’s a radically new approach to the traditional drug discovery paradigm, which typically involves running expensive and time-consuming computer simulations to identify promising new therapeutic molecules. But by leveraging large language models — the same type of AI that underpins applications like ChatGPT — this process can be done more rapidly and at a fraction of the cost. To put the magnitude of this new approach to drug discovery in perspective, Armstrong says that it can take “years and years” of compute time to identify the structure of a single promising protein. With AI, a similar result can be delivered in as little as 30 minutes.

“AI isn’t just impacting the speed of innovation; it can also be far more energy efficient for drug discovery,” Armstrong says. Energy-efficient computer systems will be especially important in a world in the throes of climate change — training the third generation of ChatGPT, for example, is estimated to have released more than 500 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — but this must be balanced with the profound benefits for the life sciences that will be driven by AI systems.

AI Is Driving Business Innovation and Worker Productivity

I

n April, Goldman Sachs released a report detailing how AI could create almost $7 trillion in value over the next decade and raise global gross domestic product by more than 7%. There’s certainly a lot of money to be made, but for Micah Kotch ’98, a partner at Blackhorn Ventures, there’s no reason that this wave of innovation can’t help digitize and decarbonize our largest industries in the process. Indeed, he believes it’s the businesses that use AI to reduce operating expenses and emissions while simultaneously improving labor productivity that stand to be the biggest winners of this new technological paradigm.

“We invest in enterprise SaaS [software as a service] start-ups building digital infrastructure for industries that power, move, and build our world, industries that generate $3T in annual revenue and account for approximately 90% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,” Kotch says. “Our investors are looking for impact and understand that digitization and decarbonization go hand in hand.”

At Blackhorn, Kotch and his partners invest in start-ups that use AI to drive resource efficiency in sectors, including

construction, energy, supply chain logistics, and transportation. In a world where every business is looking for ways to incorporate AI into their products and workflows, Kotch says proprietary data is king and a key differentiating factor for businesses at the forefront of AI-driven technological innovation. “Companies generating their own unique datasets can leverage the full potential of large language models,” Kotch says.

AI isn’t just good for business, however.

It also empowers frontline workers at companies whose work is vital to keeping America humming. As an example, Kotch points to Datch.io, a Blackhorn portfolio company that uses AI voice technology to enable “deskless” workers to talk through their everyday tasks and turn their speech into structured data. This saves countless hours that workers would otherwise spend doing data entry, providing more time to focus on manufacturing plant maintenance or installing electric utility infrastructure.

Blackhorn’s investment thesis means that Kotch has seen firsthand how AI is dramatically transforming a wide range of businesses that are critical to the U.S. economy, but rarely thought about in our day-to-day lives. Rail Vision, for example, is maximizing train efficiency by using AI to inform train operators about the best time to accelerate or brake, which has led to safety improvements, massive cost savings on fuel, and emissions reductions of up to 30%.

Kotch says these companies are examples of how venture capitalists like himself can simultaneously generate strong returns for investors while accelerating industrial transformation — and decarbonization of America’s largest and most important industries.

AI Is Protecting Businesses From a New Breed of Cybercrime

E

arlier this year, the FBI released its annual internet crime report, which documented a “staggering” rise in cybercrimes that cost American consumers and businesses more than $10 billion. One of the largest areas of cybercrime is known as “business email compromise,” a scam where hackers impersonate company employees and convince unwitting victims to transfer them large sums of money. While this type of attack isn’t new, hackers are

increasingly using AI to increase the scale and sophistication of their attacks. Although AI is driving a new wave of cybercrime, it may also be our defense.

As the vice president of legal at Abnormal Security, a cybersecurity company that uses AI to fight scammers before they get the chance to exploit companies, Evan LeBon ’05 has had a front-row seat to the emergence of this AI-driven cybercrime.

Since he joined the company in 2021, LeBon has seen the company’s AI-driven security systems stop attackers using AI to commit invoice fraud, impersonate company employees and executives, and even launch targeted attacks on university students to convince them to fork over their student loan payments to criminals.

“Emails and cloud communications are a huge attack vector for nation state actors and privately backed syndicates of shady actors,” LeBon says. “These systems are notoriously hard to secure because they’re very open by nature.”

The old way of preventing these kinds of attacks on corporations and institutions involved identifying attackers’ IP addresses or other unique signatures of their communications, and blocking them as they came in. Those methods were one size fits all and didn’t take into consideration the specific communications happening within an organization. By using AI, companies like Abnormal can learn how an institution’s communications normally operate and tailor its defenses to a wider but more nimble range of AI-driven attacks.

“We are seeing the problem get worse because the level of sophistication of the attacks is exponentially growing,” LeBon says. “And a lot of that is because attackers are using the exact same tools we’re using to provide security services.”

The benefit of AI systems, says LeBon, is that they can analyze massive amounts of data much faster and more accurately than humans can when identifying communication patterns that look suspicious. When Abnormal’s AI defenders identify a suspect request, they can immediately flag it for a company’s security team for further investigation. Although the AI-driven techniques used by cybercriminals are constantly evolving, LeBon believes it’s possible to stay one step ahead of hackers by using the same AI systems for good.

“I think it’s so important for people to look at the positive use cases of AI,” LeBon says. “Sure, AI can be used for bad, but it can also be used for good. We need to look at both sides of the problem and understand how we’ll engage with it as humans and what kinds of limits we should place on it.”

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

45

Endeavor

Day owns and works on Wallace Ranch in California.

Organic farming

Fruits of Her Labor Rising early in the mornings, Neva Day ’91 hand-pollinates each blossom for the exotic, high-maintenance dragon fruit.

46 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

he bright magenta pulp inside the dragon fruit that Neva Day ’91 has just sliced into quarters adds to its mystery. This curious produce has a “dragon-scale” exterior peel, but the soft, juicy flesh — a firmness that could fairly be compared to a kiwi — is dotted with tiny black edible seeds and a subtle sweet and sour taste. It’s such a refreshing treat on a hot day that one wonders why these exotic beauties, also called pitahaya, are not more common.

With a tour of Wallace Ranch, owned

by Day and her partner, Dicky Augustus, the answer is clear: Dragon fruit is a highmaintenance crop requiring extraordinary care and vigilance.

“It’s a ‘high-touch’ fruit,” says Day, which explains its lofty price in supermarkets.

Each vine yields fruit three to six times a year, and the trees must be hand-trimmed.

The fruit is hand-pollinated and handpicked.

Each individual young fruit is also wrapped in a net bag to keep birds away — at $5 each wholesale, it’s a heartbreaker to see a birdpecked pitahaya on the ground. And given the delicate twisted branches of the cactus vines the dragon fruit grows on, she adds, “no machine can do it for you.”

In fact, Day, who actively works the ranch with a few employees, sets out in the early morning hours with a makeup brush in hand, gently transferring the pollen from blossom to blossom to optimize the desired taste and appearance of each bud’s eventual fruit.

Long before Day and Augustus bought the hilltop ranch in 2018, she was already smitten with the dragon fruit she tasted during travels in Thailand and Vietnam, along with its healthy attributes, including antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. When the couple began looking for a new business and lifestyle venture, they discovered this 15-acre “gentleman’s farm” for sale in hilly Bonsall, Calif., northeast of San Diego.

“Turns out, it was a gentleman’s farm on steroids, and we went for it,” says Day of the acreage, where they grow and sell more than 50,000 pieces of fruit annually — among them, Hass avocados, Australian finger limes, passion fruit, citrus, and a dozen other varieties — to wholesalers, farmers markets, organic markets, restaurants, and Whole Foods.

However, in those first days, even the real estate agent could see the challenges that lay ahead for the new owners and told them to remember: “Fruit rots.”

“That was the best advice,” says Day, and they quickly got smart about the business of farming. “We realized we needed to hustle it out.”

Fortunately, Day is no stranger to hustle

T

Photography by John Trice

Day handpicks her dragon fruit.

or hard work: Upon graduation from Colgate with a double major in political science and social science, and a minor in Latin American studies, she started a career with Sears, Roebuck & Co. and then Sears Holdings Corporation in management positions across the country, making her way up the ladder, including a few rungs where she was the first female to tread.

While professional success had been the goal, Day wanted to tackle the athletic dreams she put off during her career. She took a leave of absence and trained as a triathlete.

Her daring pivot took her on a circuitous global journey, including marquee Iron Man competitions and victories, which led to competitive cycling — with daily five-hour workouts — and a spot on the U.S. National Track Cycling Team competing around the world. “The funny thing is that I always said I wanted to be a true athlete,” says Day. “And it happened when I was 37.”

It was a gentleman’s farm on steroids, and we went for it.

Also called pitahaya, dragon fruit has a subtle sweet and sour taste.

Clearly, her intensive endurance training set her up well for the long, physically demanding days on the ranch. With 5,500 plants in the ground, that innate tenacity allowed the couple to transition the expansive property into a certified organic farm: Everything at Wallace Ranch is either edible or a pollinator, says Day, as she picks a pineapple while butterflies quiver about.

Up from the terraced orchards and through iron gates, the ranch house is surrounded by a beautifully maintained compound that has a Secret Garden vibe: a paradise for fruit lovers with Peruvian apple, Asian pear, five-graft cherry, goji, cherimoya, guava, pecans, gooseberry, milkweed, aloe, and hundreds of other delights — even a calla lily field.

“All the steps in your life will allow you to

do what you are doing now,” says Day about the ranch responsibilities. “And, of course, you need to be good at all trades.” That, along with patience, trial and error, advice from fellow farmers and customers, tons of research, and expertise on organic pest control: Ants love dragon fruit, she adds, “I’m now proficient with ants.”

Day says she rarely finds reason to leave the farm’s 15 acres and that Wallace Ranch is a beloved daily challenge. “We’ve made chaos into sense.”

— Laurie McLaughlin Day says being at Colgate when she was a young kid was like “visiting family.” Her father, Joel ’60, attended the University, and her grandfather, alumnus and trustee Harold B. Day, Class of 1928, is buried in Colgate Cemetery.

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

47

endeavor

Business

No Need to Pause With her new product line Womaness, Michelle Jacobs ’94 helps women embrace menopause.

One word. Nine letters. Women dread its onset.

Menopause.

The condition starts affecting women around age 50, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the transition into menopause can be startling.

Symptoms like hot flashes, changes in weight, and irregular menstrual cycles have women looking for quick solutions.

And as menopause ebbs away, women find themselves getting to know a new body.

To make those transitions more tolerable, Michelle Jacobs ’94 and her business partner, Sally Mueller, created Womaness, a line of products for women in peri-, active, and postmenopause. Their mission is simple: “to create clean, modern solutions to help her through this time in her life with education, inspiration, and innovative products,” says Jacobs. Additionally, it was important to the pair that the products they created were clean, vegan, and cruelty free. “We consider Womaness products clean because they’re free of estrogen, phytoestrogen, or added hormones,” Jacobs explains.

She co-founded Womaness after a career in product development for lifestyle brands like Joy Mangano, Real Simple, and Giggle.

The Colgate English major earned her MBA from NYU in 2003, which helped her build a foundation.

“Sally and I are business people. We’re not formulators,” Jacobs notes. The pair worked with dermatologists and formulators to develop Womaness’ skincare line, and nutritionists and gynecologists to create supplements and sexual wellness products for the brand.

Some bestsellers are: Let’s Neck, a tightening serum aimed at neck and chest changes experienced during menopause; Me. No. Pause., a supplement targeting hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, memory, and mood; and Fountain of Glow, a face serum to address changing complexions. “[Menopause affects] women at the prime of their lives, literally the top of their career,” Jacobs says. “Their kids are older, they are traveling the world and running companies.” She created Womaness products to reach those women, so they can continue living their lives without interruption.

Jacobs and Mueller’s friendship was sparked through a business deal two decades ago: Jacobs, then executive director of brand development at Real Simple, pitched Mueller, a Target senior marketing executive, a line of products associated with the lifestyle brand.

When Mueller started having symptoms related to menopause, she did what most women do: made a doctor’s appointment.

At that appointment, the doctor gave her a list of products to buy on Amazon, and they produced mediocre results. So she called up her friend, Jacobs, to lament that she couldn’t find products to suit her needs.

There was “nothing that was clean, modern, felt like it was cool and sophisticated as she was,” Jacobs remembers.

Then Jacobs started thinking about her own experiences. At age 50, Jacobs herself was on the brink of menopause, and many

There needed to be a brand that not only gave us the products we needed at this time in our life, but also had education associated with it...

endeavor of her friends were in the same boat. “We really came up with this idea that there needed to be a brand that not only gave us the products we needed at this time in our life, but also had education associated with it to understand why our bodies were changing, how they were changing.”

Women should have access to menopause education so they can know the scientific reasons why their body is changing, Jacobs says, so the Womaness website includes a blog with expert interviews and tips for mitigating symptoms. For example, the

website recently featured an interview with Ekta Kapoor, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who is a specialist in menopause and women’s sexual health. “Women’s health has traditionally not been on anyone’s radar,” Kapoor says. “That’s why it’s important to advocate for ourselves.”

— Rebecca Docter Did you know? “Patients are living longer,” according to the NIH, “and women are spending up to one-third of their lives in postmenopause.”

tech

Digital Download Ole Obermann ’93 leads music business development at TikTok.

le Obermann’s love of music bloomed in childhood, while his father made breakfast. “Dad had a great vinyl collection — I remember him playing Hotel California and The White Album, ” Obermann ’93 recalls.

O

Illustration by Helen Green

At 12, Obermann got together with some kids who lived on his block on Long Island, N.Y., and formed a heavy metal band. During college, he was an on-air DJ at WRCU and also helped with programming. Record companies sent the station albums to play,

giving Obermann his first glimpse into how the music business worked.

Today, Obermann is vice president and global head of music business development and intellectual property rights for ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. The short-form video platform is the latest digital entity to reorient the music business.

More than a billion people use TikTok every month, and they watch videos from a feed that is customized for their interests by the company’s algorithm. Users often discover new music through song clips that creators pair with videos they post about every imaginable subject, from cooking to Tai Chi. Obermann’s first job in the music business was at Bertelsmann/RCA Records, where he was a production manager for jazz and classical releases. The company was still focused on selling CDs at stores, but digital music was beginning to catch on. After earning an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management — he majored in international relations at Colgate — Obermann served as a vice president at a Silicon Valley company that offered digital downloads. He later moved to Sony Music Entertainment and then Warner Music Group, where he was chief digital officer.

At TikTok, where he has worked for four years out of the London office, Obermann negotiates contracts with record labels and music publishing companies to acquire the rights to make their music available on TikTok. He works with artists and attends concerts, but those staples of the business are less important these days.

“Music scouts now spend as much time on TikTok to see who to keep an eye on as they do in clubs watching live music,” he says. Last year, about 50 artists were signed record deals after their music first caught on with fans on TikTok, he says. “The barrier to entry is almost zero now. TikTok is giving everyone a chance to have a voice.”

Sites like TikTok have also made the process of composing music more interactive. Many artists ask for feedback on TikTok and use the comments posted by viewers to retool their songs, Obermann says.

TikTok’s audience is dominated by young people, but sometimes the “new” music they discover there is actually old. In 2020, a skateboarder used Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 song “Dreams” in a video that went viral. As a result, the song was played on streaming services more than 8 million times in one week. “Young people discovered Fleetwood Mac, and they liked it,” Obermann says — just as he did in his parents’ kitchen so many years ago.

— Jennifer Altmann Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

49

SALMAGUNDI

‘A Universal Outpouring of Reverence, Honor, and Respect’ Alumni remember the day JFK was assassinated.

A

t 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The president was in the Lone Star State campaigning for reelection, and crowds of people greeted him as he rode through downtown Dallas. As the car passed the Texas School

96 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2023

Book Depository, bullets rained down and the president was shot. By 1 p.m. he was pronounced dead.

Reverent moments like this have the ability to permanently hold a place in our minds. In recognition of the 60th anniversary of the event, Colgate Magazine asked alumni: Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated?

Niday Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

60th Anniversary

→ Judy and I were newlyweds living just outside Washington, D.C. At that time, I had a job selling ThermoFax copy machines to the House and Senate offices. Judy was working for a U.S. congressman in his D.C. office. Things were at a standstill following the announcement of the Kennedy assassination in Texas. I recall driving into the downtown D.C. area, parking my car, and walking around, taking in all that was going on. It was a sad time in our nation’s history, and I have always felt that just being there at this time made me feel even more patriotic than ever. It was an emotional time, made even more so by witnessing what went on in our nation’s capital during and after the death of the president.

— Wayne Miskelly ’61

→ I learned about the shooting of President Kennedy while on board the destroyer Bigalow in port in Karachi, Pakistan. I was awakened in the very early morning hours of Nov. 23, 1963, in my cabin by some sailors in my division who said the president had been shot (the date was Nov. 23 because of the time zone changes).

These sailors had been out drinking when they learned of the shooting, and the main reason they woke me was to get permission to man some of our guns. I thought they were overreacting but said go ahead, and I went back to sleep. A couple of days later, I was on one of two submerged diesel submarines (I think I was on the Sirago) en route from Karachi to Djibouti, French Somaliland (I was on the sub for cross-training during the transit). On the day of President Kennedy’s funeral, the two subs surfaced within sight of each other. The sub captain allowed me up on the conning tower to watch a wreath being thrown over the side. After the wreath was thrown, both subs submerged. It was a simple but moving gesture.

— Edward Ramm ’61

→ I will never forget that day as long as I live.

It was a Friday afternoon and my wife, Jean, and I were driving to Rochester from Cornell Law School to spend Thanksgiving weekend with our families. We had just left Ithaca and I turned on the radio. We immediately heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was being taken to the hospital.

It was sometime later that he was pronounced dead. When we arrived at my parents’ home, everyone was in a state of shock and in tears.

We sat in front of the TV the rest of the day and most of the weekend as the unbelievable

events of the assassination and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby were played out on the screen. It was an event I shall never forget, and was exceeded in tragedy only by the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center.

— Ted Streppa ’61

→ I can still picture the exact scene. I was in my third-grade classroom at Mt. Pleasant Elementary in Livingston, N.J. The classroom phone rang and our teacher, Miss Fitzsimmons, picked it up, listened, and then began to cry.

She didn’t tell us what happened but told us that school was dismissed and we should go home. I ran home and found my mom crying in front of the TV. I remember we were out of school for a number of days and almost never moved from in front of the TV set the entire time. Those images are indelible.

— Liz Buchbinder ’77

→ I have a distinct recollection of Nov. 22,1963. When I graduated from Colgate, I had been uncertain of exactly what I wanted to do, so I had enlisted in the U.S. Navy to go to Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I., to which I reported in the summer of ’63. Nov. 22, 1963, was the day I was commissioned an ensign. By early afternoon, I was ready to leave for my duty assignment, an engineering officer on the USS Charles P. Cecil (DD-835) undergoing overhaul in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When leaving the base, the Marine guard normally just waved you through. That day he motioned me to stop. I rolled down the window and he said “Sir, turn on your radio. The president has been shot.” It was a sober drive to Brooklyn.

— Fred Likel ’63

“I will never forget that day as long as I live.”

— Ted Streppa ’61

→ In the spring of 1963, I was part of Colgate’s Washington Study Group. This group afforded countless opportunities, memories, and insights into the functioning of our federal government. Of course, we were too young to have voted for JFK in 1960 (voting age was still 21). But, we knew of this young man and I believe all members of the group were ardent supporters of a young, vital force

forging new frontiers in our nation’s capital.

One of the extraordinary experiences was attending a presidential press conference with seats among the press corps. Alone at the podium, our president stood before a press corps and confidently answered all questions.

We were impressed by the sharpness of many questions, the ability to use humor to deflect criticism, and in particular, how old our president appeared. No doubt, 2.5 years on the job had aged JFK so that he was no longer a young man. Six months later, I was an MBA student at the University of Chicago wondering what the heck a poli sci major was doing in an MBA program and signed up for an aptitude test to tell me. On the afternoon of Nov. 22, in the midst of the test, the bells in Rockefeller chapel on campus began pealing.

Shortly thereafter someone came in to say the president had been shot and asked if I wanted to continue the test. I did continue,

“Americans were united and the world shared in our bereavement for our president who opened new frontiers.”

— Larry Arnold ’63

then walked into the Rockefeller chapel for a few moments of prayer before returning to my dorm room in Chicago’s International House.

That night there was a universal outpouring of reverence, honor, and respect for our slain American president. Americans were united and the world shared in our bereavement for our president who opened new frontiers.

— Larry Arnold ’63

→ I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. Returning to a friend’s apartment in Casablanca after dinner, I was walking alone down a busy city street when a woman shouted at me from a second story window, “Hey! Amerikaniya! Your President — Boom!

Boom!” She pointed her hand like a pistol at her head and smiled weakly as she spoke.

I was shocked, although I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe her. I was also unsure how she knew I was an American. I’m still unsettled by the weak smile.

— Barrett Petty ’63

Autumn 2023

Colgate Magazine

97

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Fly a drone over the Atlantic Ocean p.32

Study a utopian society p.13

Write a thesis on Seven Oaks Golf Club p.65

Sip a bottle of wine that survived WWII p.83

Prove Einstein’s theory of general relativity p.18

Munch on a limitededition peach cobbler cookie p.73

Channel your inner MacGyver p.26

Help refugees learn English p.10

Buy a survivalist condo for the end of the world p.22

Build selfconfidence through mixed martial arts p.89

Recall the day JFK was assassinated p.96

Examine Shakespeare folios p.12

jill calder

Paint a mural in Clifford Gallery p.14