Issuu

FALL 2025 + WINTER 2026

Research

Where Curiosity Leads P.34 Profile

Wall Street on Wheels P.97

Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression in Colgate’s Third Century P.48

Can disagreements strengthen community? Discuss.

look

mark diorio

Chris King ’26 (left) and Ben Mitchell ’26 (right) searched for amphibians and reptiles at the Bewkes Center during a vertebrate and zoology course with Timothy McCay, Dunham Beldon Jr. Professor of biology and environmental studies. “We found green frogs, spotted salamanders, toads, and two snakes — which unfortunately slipped away from us,” Mitchell says.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

look

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

mark diorio

Professor of Art Lynette Stephenson asked her students to create abstract pieces for their first major project in Arts 231: Painting. Ines Donnelly ’28 (pictured), who has painted for as long as she can remember, says, “Working abstractly pushed me far outside my comfort zone. I began with two figures at the center, [but] with Professor Stephenson’s encouragement, I decided to take a risk: I abandoned the brush, picked up a palette knife, and started flinging paint onto the canvas. I realized I could still communicate the core feeling behind the work — the electric first spark between two lovers — even if the final image no longer showed them outright. And in the end, I loved where that leap took me.”

2 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Contents

FALL 2025 + WINTER 2026

Where Curiosity Leads Faculty-student research projects look at Mars, Congress, romantic relationships, and more.

President’s Message

letters

Discover

Studying the Upstream Journey In Alaska, Pete Rand ’87 is researching strategies for salmon species resilience.

Voices

A Story Always Finds a Way Home Daniel Cattau ’72 reminisces about family, Colgate, and the writing life.

Ask a Professor Why Don’t Frogs Get Fevers?

Lessons From the Bat Cave Kyle Rhodehouse ’19 studies how zoonotic viruses may provide insight into human immunology.

Solomon Tesfaye ’15 in his hometown, Buffalo p. 40

To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Expected A deep calling compels Solomon Tesfaye ’15 to give voice to his journey as a refugee.

Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression in Colgate’s Third Century

Sacred Spaces, Fragile Futures

Colgate is preserving and advancing a tradition of open discourse, both in and out of the classroom.

From the Kathmandu Valley, Vishnu Anandraj ’25 writes about being a witness to change.

Scene

Colgate News

Getting Religion Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst ’05 is committed to public-facing scholarship on a difficult topic.

4 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Beak and Skiff’s popular hard cider line, 1911 Established, is bottled on site in LaFayette, N.Y. p. 56

Interim VP for Communications L. Hazel Jack Director of University Publications Aleta Mayne Assistant Director, University Publications Mary Donofrio Assoc. VP for University Communications Mark Walden Senior Art Director Karen Luciani University Photographer Mark DiOrio Communications Specialist Kathy Jipson

endeavor

He’s Running the Family Business, With Innovation at Its Core Eddie Brennan ’02 has boosted Beak and Skiff with hard cider, concerts, and cannabis.

His Company Keeps Care Going

campaign

Atif Chauhdry ’95 helps health care organizations continue to serve their communities.

No Joke

Corinna Yee ’23 is serious about her stand-up career.

Contributors: Kelli Ariel, asst. dir., web and digital platforms; Travis Clines, advancement communications mgr.; Stephanie DeVries, communications mgr., centers and institutes; Bernie Freytag, creative dir.; Dave Herringshaw, sr. digital production specialist; Garrett Mutz, sr. designer; Rodrigo Santiago, sr. mgr., communications and creative media; Amber Springer, web content specialist; Rebecca Taurisano, assistant dir., advancement communications Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt. Colgate Magazine Volume LV Number 1 Colgate Magazine is a publication of Colgate University. Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407

Patty Smith ’78 is at home on the slopes in Snowmass Village, Colo. p. 79

Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Email: alumnirecords@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7453

Alumni News

Salmagundi

Football: Then and Now 112

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.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

President’s Message

Notes From the Campus

On Peter’s Glen In perhaps one of the most unusual juxtapositions of moods and activities, two different, atypical sets of activities and concerns have been on my desk these past several months. First, over the past several months, we have witnessed the final landscape work undertaken to establish and complete Peter’s Glen — a new, nearly 5-acre set of pathways and plazas through the campus, connecting the traditional academic core of the campus with the developing Middle Campus. This was a massive project, involving moving truckloads of dirt and planting quite literally hundreds of new trees and shrubs. At the same time, a shifting approach to American colleges and universities by the White House and the departments of education and justice has taken up countless hours with the senior administration and the Board of Trustees. The juxtaposition of those two matters — replanting a part of the campus and managing a changing political landscape — seemed striking at times. It would not be unusual for me, on any given day, to be responding to the latest message from the White House and consulting with our experts in Washington in the morning, and then walking over to the massive construction project in the heart of the campus. Was it odd to be tending to the beauty of the campus at the exact moment that the whole landscape of higher education itself was shifting? Yes, but that reflects something that has always been a feature of this position. At all times, you must be alert to the challenges of the present while thinking about what the campus will be like — academically, financially, and physically — in the future. It’s as if you are managing two Colgates on any given day. One thing is certain, though. The introduction of Peter’s Glen — with its long staircase from the Dana Arts Center and Bernstein Hall to Frank Dining Hall — has wrought a marvelous change on campus. Suddenly Colgate feels both smaller and larger. It is both better connected and more expansive. In a trying season, a new landscape somehow emerged, one that will mark the campus for decades. On Compacts and Principles One of the most dramatic messages to come from

6 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Washington was a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence,” which, among other things, promised favorable access to federal funds for research in exchange for certain checks on admissions, bans on tuition increases, and possible reviews of what was taught in classrooms. While the compact was not originally sent to Colgate, via a social media message, it was eventually implied that all colleges and universities were to have the compact made available to them if they accepted its terms. Well before the announcement of this compact, we had developed a set of principles to guide our reactions to changing federal rules and regulations. First we stated that Colgate would always follow the law. In reacting to announcements, social media messages, and executive orders, however, we stated that we would follow these guidelines: 1) Colgate alone would determine who could be on our campus as students, faculty, or staff; 2) Colgate alone would determine what could and could not be taught in our classrooms, as academic freedom demands; and 3) Colgate alone would determine how to provide care to members of our community. While the compact was never formally offered to Colgate, we came to the conclusion that its offerings would violate the first two of these guidelines and, should it come our way, we would not enter into such an arrangement.

On a Colgate Union As you will read in a piece in this issue, Colgate has, for years, explored the topics of freedom of speech and academic freedom. In the years leading up to the University’s Bicentennial, a task force composed of trustees, faculty members, and staff members issued a report on these topics, arguing that a deep commitment to free expression combined with a focus on the needs of the community should guide the members of this academic community. In the years that have followed, and building on the

Visit colgate.edu/ president.

mark diorio

ith it being such a complicated time in higher education, and with the atmosphere of colleges and universities shifting with frequency, I offer here a set of notes and observations titled “Notes From the Campus.” Perhaps, together, these notes offer a sense of what it is like to sit in a president’s chair at a leading national university in these complicated times.

culture of discourse and discernment that has long been present at Colgate, student and faculty programs have provided multiple venues for community members to discuss and debate challenging issues. Whether these are groups of faculty gathered at the provost’s home or students gathered in the Memorial Chapel basement, robust discussion takes place all around the campus. The question is, how might we make those sorts of efforts and programs more visible and more widely available? How can we actually show the nation that Colgate is a place of serious and considered discourse? For months now, I have been speaking to Colgate faculty, students, and alumni about creating just such a visible program. Thanks to the generosity of former trustee Becky Hurley ’81 and Christopher Hurley ’81, P’12,’12, we now have the funds to renovate a space on Broad Street for this work, in something we have called a “Colgate Union.” I view this as both a place and a program — one that is strictly nonpartisan — that has, at its core, the training of students (and, when appropriate, faculty and staff) in the skills of discourse, conversation, and, yes, debate. I join with the Hurleys in the hope that this will also be a place where notions of community participation and civic education are emphasized. At its most profound, might this be a place where the foundations of a flourishing democracy are strengthened? We have much thinking to do about how to create such a space and a program wisely and well. But I have full confidence we will get there. On the Colgate Commitment Lastly, the University just announced the third expansion of the Colgate Commitment, its signature financial aid program. At each one of these announcements, we have made access to Colgate wider and wider. Few things ensure a university’s future more than undertaking those steps necessary to bring talented and exceptional students to its campus. The Colgate Commitment is that work. And while the expansion of a financial aid program might not be as visible or dramatic as the construction of a beautiful new glen, in all ways, it is quietly as powerful. As I write this, the Colgate Class of 2030 is beginning to be shaped. One wonders about the world they will eventually enter. For now though, we stay focused on the campus that is about to welcome them next fall.

— Brian W. Casey

Letters Lasting Lessons From Now-Retired Professors Responses to “From First Lectures to Final Semesters: The Storied Careers of Six Retiring Professors,” p. 24, summer 2025 Chris Nevison was my teacher when I was majoring in computer science. His passion for learning, teaching, and expanding his own knowledge rubbed off on his students. While other comp sci teachers were specifically teaching us the programming course material, he often made us apply it to other areas so we wouldn’t be singularly minded. One day he had us working on a graphical user interface for a simulation he was doing with data on fish migratory patterns. I remember calling him over to ask for the answer to a problem I was having with my code. He sat next to me and said that the huge advantage we now had with the advent of the internet was that any problem, no matter the subject, could be solved through looking on search engines, online manuals, forums, etc. Rather than teaching me to be taught, he taught me to learn. That singular lesson was one of the most lasting from college. It allowed me to adapt to new professions, new hobbies, and an ever-changing world. Adam Palmiter ’03 I read your article on Professor Nakhimovsky with great interest. I learned many things about her that I hadn’t known. I was surprised that little or no mention was paid to her expertise in teaching the Russian language. In a textbook she co-authored with her husband, Alexander, we studied cases, declensions, conversations, and culture. We dutifully arrived at 8 a.m. daily for four semesters at Lawrence 201, and we were better for it. Thanks for the memories, Professor Nakhimovsky! Thomas Powers ’87

Another Jimmy Carter Colgate Connection Bill O’Brien ’77 read “Jimmy Carter’s Colgate Connections” (spring 2025, p. 104) and offered his own story, “My Memorable White House Evening with the Carters,” originally published on MinnPost.com. Jimmy Carter had been elected president in 1976, and after his inauguration, he threw a party for his earliest supporters, those who had worked on the New Hampshire primary. Although O’Brien — a Colgate senior at the time — was “not among the New Hampshire few,” two of his friends, Anne Arries ’78 and Jene Cates ’77, were. “I was proud of my classmates for their Carter work. And most pleased that they could bring dates to the White House. My friend Jeff (Fager ’77) and I lucked out,” O’Brien writes. “Fifty or so people mingled in the White House foyer…. When the Marine Guard Band began to play, I danced with my friends. The president and first lady danced among us…. I approached the first lady…. I introduced myself and asked if I might have the next dance. Only then did a man lean in, likely part of the very relaxed security detail. Rosalynn gave him an abbreviated wave, to signal that it was fine, that she understood I was harmless…. She paused, smiled, and said, ‘That is so kind, but I am tired and heading to bed.’ As she retreated, I thought I had never been so cordially brushed off. And I felt good about it. Maybe that’s the truest mark of a talented politician, to make a constituent feel good about rejection. Or maybe it’s more simple: that kindness is key.” Read O’Brien’s full piece: minnpost.com/community-voices/2025/02/mymemorable-white-house-evening-with-the-carters/

Read more letters at colgatemagazine.com. To submit a letter to the editor, email magazine@colgate.edu.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Voices

Reminiscences

A Story Always Finds a Way Home always believed that the ability to tell stories that stick in your mind comes from an early exposure to great storytellers. Information, for my Nebraska grandparents (born long before cars and planes existed), was the local weather reports or family updates. Even as a child, I knew stories were different: They were told and retold in the best oral tradition and in

8 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

an endless cycle of time, people, places, and even songs. I never wrote any of these stories down until recently, but dozens have survived in my mind. My grandfather Herman Cattau, a charming German immigrant and incorrigible trickster who died in 1973 at age 87, would break into this mournful song unprompted and usually in Plattdeutsch (low German):

Out in this cold world alone, Walking about on the street, Asking a penny for bread, Nothing but sorrow I meet, I am nobody’s darling, And nobody cares for me. My grandmother Anna hated the song and took it personally. After hearing the song all my life, I asked Herman why he liked it: “It’s to teach parents to be kind to their children.” The German critic Walter Benjamin, in The Storyteller, writes: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment … a story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

When I was a Colgate freshman in 1968, my dorm room was on the fourth floor of East Hall. That was unremarkable except for a minor problem: I had an artificial leg that weighed 14 pounds and there was no elevator. I did not complain and neither did my parents, who thought it would be good exercise. If that happened today, a Colgate dean told me, “There’d be seven attorneys on the phone right away.” For decades, this Colgate story lay dormant like a time capsule, but today the image of running up and down four flights of stairs hauling a metaphorical bowling ball never ceases to get a laugh or a horrified look. Why? The story didn’t change, but the context did: People today would expect an elevator because of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). An ordinary bit of information, released after time, becomes a story. I was born without a left leg at the knee, left arm at the elbow, and with only one functional finger on my right hand. I had the distinct advantage of low or no expectations, and the date of my birth, Oct. 2, 1950, was also the exact date when Charlie Brown first appeared in a comic strip — a nice touch by the divine storyteller. My parents moved from Omaha to the Buffalo, N.Y., area in the early ’50s. They bought a home in Williamsville, a suburb known for its excellent schools. Enrolling me anywhere was a long shot. My savvy parents asked to meet the school district’s superintendent, but he insisted they bring me along. I guess the interview went well: I was only 4 years old when I started half-day kindergarten, just a regular pupil — albeit Illustration by Michael Waraksa

one who flunked tying my shoes, then a prerequisite for first grade. There’s a poignant scene in Ted Lasso, where Jason Sudeikis’ character unexpectedly beats an arrogant Brit in a game of darts. “Be curious, not judgmental,” says Ted, quoting Walt Whitman and pointing out that he had been underestimated all his life. I also made a career — and won some pool hall and golf bets — out of often being underestimated. I’m always stunned that some educated adults still ask if I were a “thalidomide baby,” referring to the morning sickness drug that caused tragic birth defects in the 1950s, mostly in Europe. The drug was never approved for use in the United States. Often, older kids who should know better, stop to ask: “What happened to you, mister?” It took me decades to come up with a truthful answer that also put a stop to the questioning: “I don’t know.” Of course, I always give small children a fuller, kinder explanation and toss a ball to them, if one is handy, as an exclamation point. One sharp 3-year-old girl asked for a clarification: “But you weren’t born with the glasses, were you?” At my 45th Colgate Reunion in 2017, I was having beers with my basketball buddy and former trustee Tom Dempsey ’72 and Mark Murphy ’77, the recently retired president/ CEO of the Green Bay Packers. Dempsey pointed to me and said: “Dan, the best athlete in our class.” Like George Washington’s mythical cherry tree story, the quote is demonstrably untrue, but it’s also true enough. George was honest, and I could shoot three-pointers long before Steph Curry was born. I later sent Murphy an email, half expecting him to think we had been fooling with him. He quickly wrote back: “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s impressive, and Demps is not prone to exaggeration.’”

Beyond sports, my time at Colgate came with a roster full of five-star mentors: professors Jonathan Kistler and Bob Blackmore ’41 in English, Raymond Rockwood in history (who led the London History Study Group), Dean of Students Guy Martin ’57, and University Chaplain Coleman Brown. After graduating in 1972, I had monthly conversations with Coleman (who died in 2014). The wisdom usually went one way; but once (in 40 years), I finally said something that struck him as insightful and he replied: “Now you’re preaching to me.” A liberal arts education, I quickly found

out, was not about career plans but rather surprises. For a required course my sophomore year, I signed up for “the short story” taught by Frederick Busch, an author especially admired by the literati. We had to turn in a weekly, 500-word typed critique of a short story by the likes of Ernest Hemingway or William Carlos Williams. It basically was a boot camp about storytelling. (Tying shoes wasn’t my only problem; I didn’t know how to type. My roommate, Marshall Olds ’72, typed my papers and, no doubt, improved them.) I stayed in touch with Busch after college, and he was always generous with praise. In his quasi-memoir, A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life, Busch talked about the kind of stories he liked best: You will remember the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, the terror or illness of a child you tried to protect. It is those moments — they are lived at body temperature; there is nothing cool about them — that define a life. I was a history major and had a vague notion that I could write based on doing well in Busch’s class, two published letters to the editor, and a lifelong obsession with MobyDick. (I started reading Moby-Dick in eighth grade and reread it every summer through my junior year in college.) My first published letter to the editor was in response to a July 1971 Sports Illustrated piece titled “To the Brink — and Beyond” about a family, the Hills, who lost a father and two sons in trying to conquer Niagara Falls. Immediately, I thought of Ahab’s inscrutable madness and idolatry that, like the Hills, at least made sense to him. I wrote to the magazine comparing the Hills to Ahab, complete with Ahab’s chilling quote: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks….” Later, in reading a Herman Melville biography, I noted that his first journalistic efforts were letters to the editor at a small paper near Albany … just like my letter about Moby-Dick. (I’m still a white whale fanboy: An Uber driver at my local bar once asked for a reading recommendation. Two years later, after battling Moby-Dick to the finish, he remarked: “It’s not about the whale, is it?”)

This is the thing I always loved about Colgate: Nobody told me this was crazy. Which it was. A former Time-Life executive, Blackmore influenced generations of students who went into journalism. He saw my lack of experience as an old-school virtue and suggested that I look for a job “at any paper that interests you” along the way to Nebraska. I laminated two letter-to-the-editor clippings (including Moby), stuck them in my wallet — and drove away. In case anyone was dumb enough to hire me, I also started teaching myself how to type. Blissfully unaware of reality, I applied to dozens of papers, mostly in person, including: the Grand Island Independent (Nebraska); the Des Moines Register (Iowa); the Laramie Boomerang (Wyoming); and the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (South Dakota). One editor told me it was the “weirdest application” he ever received. Surprisingly, only one editor was curious enough to ask the most obvious question: “How fast can you type?” I told him I could type “half as fast as a two-fingered typist.” The summer slipped by with no offers, and I was about to start a bank training program. In desperation, I wrote a two-page letter to a kindly editor I had met in Omaha. I briefly described each rejection in dateline fashion. Grand Island – Applied for farm writer job. Editor tells me that having an uncle who is a farmer is not a qualification. I ended up at the Omaha World-Herald on a one-month tryout. With only Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, I’d travel 90 miles to Columbus, Neb., hang out with my grandfather, and listen to his stories, again and again. One day, he told my grandmother he was “going to the living room to take a nap,” but added, “I don’t think I’ll be around much longer.” He never woke up from that eternal nap. Decades later, I told Carl Keith, the Omaha managing editor, about what it meant to get to know my grandfather — in addition to the lucky career break. “By the way,” I asked him, “why did you ever hire me?” Was it my Nebraska family? The off-the-wall letter? Were you drunk or on drugs? “No,” he said, “it was Colgate.”

During my senior year, I spent the fall term with the London History Study Group. I had enough credits to graduate early, so I traveled in Spain for three months. I came back to Colgate in May 1972, two days before graduation, and with no post-college plans. English professor Bob Blackmore asked about my future. “I’m going to Nebraska to visit my grandparents, and I might try to get a newspaper job.”

— Daniel Cattau ’72 helped develop and edit the Pulitzer Prize– winning biography King: A Life by Jonathan Eig. In researching the book, says Cattau, Coleman Brown’s dissertation on Martin Luther King Jr. provided important insights. Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

voices

Anandraj at Swayambhunath, a Buddhist religious complex in Kathmandu

Reportage

Sacred Spaces, Fragile Futures From the Kathmandu Valley, Vishnu Anandraj ’25 writes about being a witness to change.

fter graduation, Vishnu Anandraj ’25 began his yearlong Watson Fellowship abroad, researching the impact of development projects — such as dams, mining, transmission lines, and highways. He aims to learn how communities are displaced and otherwise affected by the economic, cultural, and environmental impacts of these projects. Anandraj arrived in Nepal in August and will continue his travels in Ghana, Peru, and Thailand. At each location, he will meet with urban planners, conservationists, and Indigenous groups to learn how they are understanding and addressing displacement impacts. Hailing from Plainsboro, N.J., Anandraj majored in economics and minored in both political science and creative writing. He also interned with Colgate’s Office of Sustainability and plans to pursue a related career. “The challenges climate change

10 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

poses for economic development globally are fascinating to me,” he says, “so I would love to keep exploring that interest beyond my Watson.” While on his fellowship journey, Anandraj is writing a weekly blog: subscribe to “After the Blueprint” on Substack. The following is an edited version of his first few posts. On the morning of Sept. 10, 2025, Mangal Bazaar is quiet. Every store in sight has drawn down its roller shutters. The streets are empty, save the occasional motorcycle rolling away to its particular place of refuge. Even the stray dogs have disappeared. My only interruption from this eerie silence was, when searching for an open grocery store, I encountered a crowd encircling piles of smoke. The smoke rose from a local minister’s car, the fire spitting out of its warping windows. For the first time, I had witnessed with my own eyes a totem of Nepal’s unfolding disarray. Mangal Bazaar, like most of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, is (at the time of this writing) under curfew. This, the government’s attempt to regain control of the valley after the Sept. 8 protests, dubbed the “Gen Z Rallies.” Young people organized these rallies in major cities across Nepal, such as Pokhara, Chitwan, and Butwal, but it was Kathmandu that made international news, with headlines like: “At least nineteen killed in ‘gen Z’ protests against Nepal’s social media ban” (the Guardian). Although it is tempting to impose such a neat narrative on the social turmoil of a faraway country, these types of headlines ignore the complex political context. Nepal rests in a precarious position between the geographies and economic doctrines of India and China, while also being influenced by more Western, market-based ideas. The country has only been a democracy for a decade, which has failed to bring the economic improvements and social mobilization many hoped it would upon its inception. Why the promises of democracy in Nepal remain unredeemed is beyond my limited qualifications and understanding of the country. The particular feature of this government that drew so much backlash, though, seems clear enough: Corruption both big and small is making the country slip further and further away from its citizens, into the grasp of an entrenched elite. Motivated by these impulses, Nepali youth took to the streets. After the army killed 19 of them on that day, the country has been sent spiraling. The cards have already been shuffled: The prime minister

has resigned, a transitory government is forming, and new elections seem imminent. In the meantime, the Parliament and the Supreme Court are on fire. The military has been deployed, roaming the streets to quell anarchy that has erupted out of a wild rage far, far different from the more grounded desires of Nepal’s next generation for a government that truly serves them. When I first arrived in Nepal on Aug. 1, 2025, I sensed none of these impulses in the air. The most daunting fire I encountered in my first week emerged within my own mouth, from a lunch I was decidedly unprepared for. Bricks, Gods, and Neighbors At this point in the meal, the few remaining drops of Coca-Cola are merely insulting, not even offering the hope of respite. “Even for me, it’s spicy,” my Airbnb host Niroj tells me. His dark eyes widen, he flexes his jaw, and he massages his combed beard as if to soothe his face. For a moment, I believe him, but his Coke bottle is more than halfway full, and I can tell he is once again simply being gracious with his hapless American guest. I eat one last laphing (a Tibetan spicy noodle dish), rejoice in its flavor, wince at the scorching of my mouth, and try to salvage some dignity by leaving the Coke untouched. We leave the restaurant and continue our tour of Patan, Nepal, where I’m staying. “In the [Kathmandu] valley, there is a saying,” Niroj tells me. “Here, there are more temples than homes, more gods than people.” Patan certainly has its share of remarkable temples: sloped roofs stacked like stairways into the heavens, each tier traced with intricate engravings of elephants, deities, and dancers, with gates at the base revealing the god of each shrine. Yet worship is not reserved for elaborate monuments. Venture to the most unassuming places — between a print shop and a law office, for instance — and you may well find a temple. The omnipresence of temples in Patan is usurped by only one thing: bricks. Virtually every building, from local banks and cafés to Thangka paint shops and pashmina stores, is made of brick. The style has been influenced by more than aesthetics. “In the Kathmandu Valley, there is an earthquake every 100 years,” Niroj explains. “[There was one in] 1834, 1934, then …” he pauses, “well, 80 or so years, 2015.” Incidentally, bricks are meant to last for approximately 100 years, and more importantly, their ruins are easily reconfigured into new, usable bricks. “People think Patan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the temples,” Niroj says. “Really, it’s because our ancestors are

VOICES so smart. They built our city so intelligently.” Too intelligently, it seemed, for me. During my first day, while in a jet lag– induced purgatory between consciousness and sleep, I took many a wrong turn. The crooked streets twisted without apology, and again and again I stumbled from traffic-packed roads into serene, vast courtyards, where families were hanging laundry, cleaning their doorsteps, and wondering why some dazed foreigner had thrust himself into their afternoon. Niroj soon dispelled me of the notion that these were elaborate mazes built to trap clueless westerners like myself. In fact, courtyards are another integral component of Patan’s design. “They provide community,” he says, “away from the busy streets.” Open social spaces where people of all ages could mingle safely and easily meant that community was physically built and maintained within the city. “During the earthquakes, they also provide refuge,” Niroj continues. He recounts how, in 2015, you could find entire neighborhoods packed into these spaces, cooking, sleeping, waiting. Over the course of our tour, I learned that Patan — from its public water spouts and ponds to its plentiful shrines — is a city meticulously crafted to safeguard disaster. What will survive the devastation of Mother Nature? Patan’s answer seems to be bricks, gods, and the ties between your neighbors. The Concrete Tide In between getting lost, finding my way, and seeing just a glimpse of the Kathmandu Valley, I have been making some valuable contacts. Activists, academics, and NGOs have all lent their time to try to help me understand development-induced displacement in Nepal. Highways and transmission lines are just some of the ways development initiatives are causing resettlement for the Newari Indigenous communities that inhabit Patan and its surrounding areas. The Indigenous activists I am working with recommended I visit Khokana, the oldest Newari settlement in the valley, which houses within its tight city center and vast agricultural lands thousands of years of history. I arrive on Gai Jantra, a festival celebrated throughout the Kathmandu Valley to honor those who have passed away in the preceding year. All of Khokana is here, whether they are playing in the marching band, hanging leisurely from their windows, or peering from their shop doors. I spend my first hour there following the procession. Our walk through the city halts and surges, punctuated by various stops. At one, a

The proposed path would cut right through Khokana and the neighboring town of Bungamati, slicing the rice paddies with asphalt, severing the sacred ceremonial route to Sikali, and paving over cremation sites.

2 3

1. Kopan Monastery 2. & 3. Bhaktapur Durbar Square 4. A Thakali meal, one of the staples of Nepali food, which includes rice, dal, and chicken curry Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

voices group of men wearing bright red drink milk poured from a golden kettle. At another, a man roughly my age suddenly leaps as incense singes his fingers. Toward the end, I briefly drift away from the main crowd to witness two men dive into a pukhu, an enclosed, square-shaped, man-made pond. When the drums fade, I find Krishna, one of my Newari activist contacts. He takes me through the city, explaining the importance of shrines and common areas. Gutis, adjoining houses that form three sides of a square, are located throughout Khokana as community centers. “For every celebration, people congregate at the gutis,” he tells me. Similar to Patan, I realize, Khokana is intentionally crafted to facilitate community. Krishna and I move out of the main city and come upon a vast field of rice paddies. Like folds of a quilt, they stretch in layers for as far as the eye can see, blanketing the

town of Bungamati, slicing the rice paddies with asphalt, severing the sacred ceremonial route to Sikali, and paving over cremation sites. Families would lose their farmland, and the broader community would be rid of the sacred spaces that are foundational to their identity. What is most worrying to activists like Krishna is that the project opens a Pandora’s box of development initiatives in this part of the Kathmandu Valley. There is a plan to build adjoining roads to the Fast Track, transmission lines, and infrastructure on the banks of the Bagmati River, which passes through much of the valley. The Fast Track is seen as the entry point. A relatively small slice of land, which for centuries has sustained farmers with productive agriculture and communities with rich heritage, is now being asked to bear the brunt of a concrete tide indifferent to

Dhunche, in the Rasuwa district

valley in jade. Krishna points to a temple on a hill: “That is Sikali,” he explains. During the religious festival called Dashain, the townspeople don masks and carry the goddess Rudrayani on a wooden chariot from Khokana to Sikali, marking a crucial part of their five-day celebration. He also points to a place called Ku Dey. “This is where our ancestors first settled,” he says, “before jungle animals and the elements forced them to resettle where Khokana’s main city is today.” Krishna points these out because both Ku Dey and Sikali are sites of impending destruction. The government of Nepal is planning a Fast Track Expressway to connect Kathmandu with the rural southern Terai region. The proposed path would cut right through Khokana and the neighboring

12 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

whatever and whoever it will drown. “The government does not care about this culture,” Krishna laments, indicating a misalignment that defines much of this displacement conflict. In the balance sheets of the Nepali government, it seems the heritage sites of Khokana are unavoidable, bankable losses on the path to a much more important, significant kind of progress. Walking through Khokana on Gai Jatra, though, the obvious question is: progress for whom? From the city’s architecture to the sheer volume of people at the festival, one realizes that these ceremonies constitute an essential part of the daily, lived experience of the communities here. To sever their people from these traditions is to, in some fundamental way, destroy an active part of their livelihood. There is more for me to learn about

the Fast Track, which I plan to do through my continued work with activists in the field and through assisting their drafting of petitions and reports. Meanwhile, the Nepali Army has set up a camp in Sikali to oversee construction, and a Korean company has agreed to finance the project. Yet all around the Kathmandu Valley, Newari communities are mobilizing to resist them, providing counterproposals and urging the government to preserve the rich cultural heritage of Khokana. In addition to working on my project, I’ve had time to explore more of Kathmandu. Krishna even made me an authentic Newari Shivapuri National Park

VOICES meal. To share a home-cooked meal while traveling is to be briefly and truly embraced by another place and people, and that makes it a real privilege. There are few, if any, greater honors. This is the first time I have traveled alone — taken a flight to a destination without any close friends or family to await me. It’s a bit of a strange sensation to sit in restaurants full of chatter and not be a part of it, or witness groups of friends and families striding the same streets and feel distinctly separate. Moving through the world alone, safely and on my own terms, is a privilege just as much as it is an oddity,

though. I am growing to enjoy the gentle peace of wandering a foreign country with nothing but my Kindle, my camera, and my thoughts. The people I am meeting have been remarkably gracious and charitable with their time. Whether it’s Niroj and his family, taxi drivers, or my fellowship contacts, so many meet me with curiosity about who I am and a willingness to talk, share, and lend some local insight. The thing I am enjoying the most is being able to mirror that curiosity with my own. To be lost, asking too many questions, and still — always — welcome. ●

IN THE MEDIA

“ I’m going to go back to curiosity and empathy. Really, really understand the audience that you’re dealing with and anticipate those needs beforehand.” — Bill Winters ’83 in the Business Insider article, “A top banker said his Wharton MBA was ‘a waste of time’ — but the skills from his humanities degree are needed more than ever”

“ Many of us are at a point where we need to show up for our parents in ways we didn’t anticipate.” — Sian-Pierre Regis ’06 in the New York Times article, “5 Years Ago, They Reversed Roles With Their Parents. Where Are They Now?”

“... the trade deal could have a substantial positive impact on the U.S. economy, both directly through energy sales and indirectly through the broader industrial cooperation it fosters.” — Douglas Hengel ’76 in “Unlocking Trump’s Energy Deals and Sanctions” in the National Interest online publication

“ Ever since we’ve had that amendment, it has been very clear that this census has got to be for all people.” — Professor of History Dan Bouk on 1A, “Donald Trump wants to exclude noncitizens from the 2030 census”

“If you want one silver lining, no one has used one since Nagasaki and one can only hope that memories of the utter destruction of these bombs — of what they did to human beings — will prevent people, prevent governments from ever deploying them again.” — Andy Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of history and peace and conflict studies emeritus, on Short History Of... “The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings”

“ We hope we are going to find one of these obscure stars with the [James] Webb [Space Telescope] within its lifetime.” — Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie in The Pulse, “It’s Darker than Darkness — Rogue Dark Star Defies the Laws of the Universe”

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

SCENE Events

A Dynamic Weekend: Author Michael Lewis, Music, and a Football Victory

ichael Lewis — author of bestselling Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short — delivered an uplifting message in the chapel on the Saturday of family weekend in November. His visit was part of the Kerschner Family Series Global Leaders at Colgate. In an introduction to Lewis’ talk, Professor of History Dan Bouk stressed the power of ideas, storytelling, and engaging writing. “Michael Lewis has wielded his own big idea across his career,” Bouk said, “and the idea is this: even the most abstruse topic can become accessible and even alluring when it’s approached with a spirit of genuine delight.” Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short have all been adapted as Oscar-nominated feature films. Lewis’ most recent release, Who Is Government?, explores the complex system of governance carried out by mostly unrecognized individuals doing vital work for the public. Sharing anecdotes from his life and writing career, Lewis warned students against the pressure to determine one’s path too soon. “What a shame it is that life has gotten so frontend loaded and that you’re

expected to figure out who you are and what you’re meant to do on this Earth so soon,” he said. “Nobody I grew up with would have imagined I would end up doing what I’m doing.” Lewis encouraged students to embrace their curiosity before specializing. “You still might not know what you have inside of you,” he said. For aspiring writers, Lewis offered advice on authenticity, noting that finding your voice is a matter of “letting yourself become who you are and just going with it, as opposed to trying to hide it.” He distilled his philosophy of narrative by explaining that the best books “create a hole for the reader to walk into, and then they make it their book. They make it

Michael Lewis (right) — who wrote Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short — was introduced by Professor of History Dan Bouk (left).

14 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

whatever they need.” The evening concluded with a dose of Lewis’ signature wry humor. When asked if his book Moneyball — a deep dive into the effects of analytics on professional baseball — has ruined the sport, Lewis acknowledged the frequent critique and offered a bold solution for making the sport more interesting: “Put a live lion on the field.” In addition to Lewis’ visit, Family Weekend 2025 brought a dynamic mix of gatherings and events. Professors opened their classes to parents, giving family members a taste of their students’ academic experience. There were departmental receptions and open houses. Colgate’s a cappella groups

performed at Memorial Chapel, and the annual ALANA Multicultural Fashion Show highlighted the diversity of cultures and styles on campus. Throughout the weekend, Colgate fans turned out in force to cheer on multiple teams, including volleyball, men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s soccer, and field hockey. The First@Colgate tailgate party and food trucks surrounding Andy Kerr Stadium set the stage for a thrilling football victory, with the Raiders defeating Merrimack 23–20 in overtime. — Katie Child

Professor Monica Escudero Moro in Intermediate Spanish, one of the open classes held during family weekend

Mark DiOrio (2)

Author TJ Klune

X-travaganza

‘I Need to Speak Up Not Only for Myself, but Also for My Community’

ew York Times bestselling author TJ Klune spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in Love Auditorium on Sept. 11, kicking off Queer X-travaganza, an evening celebrating queer and trans visibility, creativity, and the arts. Klune’s talk was followed by an exhibition opening at Picker Art Gallery and an artistic performance in Bernstein Hall. The events were in coordination with Colgate’s Arts, Creativity, and Innovation Initiative, presented by Living Writers, University Museums, and the Ryan Family Film Series.

Klune’s hit novel, The House in the Cerulean Sea, “is set in a fantastical world where magical youth are shipped off to orphanages and treated as dangerous. This book and its sequel, Beyond the Sea, illuminate the very real difficulties of children and their advocates in 2025,” Professor CJ Hauser, director of this year’s Living Writers Series, said in their introduction. As part of the series, Klune spoke to Hauser’s class earlier that day and participated in the Living Writers podcast. “If I use my platform to just tell stories, then I’m doing it wrong,” Klune said on the podcast. “I need to speak up not only for myself, but also for my community.” He is a winner of the Lambda Literary Award, which celebrates LGBTQ+ writers. The House in the Cerulean Sea was published at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 — bad timing that Klune joked about in his talk. However, eight months later, the novel landed on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks straight. In Love Auditorium, Klune described his life growing up in rural Oregon and his personal struggles, including a mom and stepfather who didn’t accept him for who he was. The local librarian and his English teachers, Klune said, helped him realize his talents. Bolstered by their support, Klune added, he saw for the “first time in [his]

life that … the written word has power. It can make people happy.” During the Q&A, one audience member said, “House in the Cerulean Sea saved my life in a lot of ways. It was my first queer exposure to contemporary literature.” Afterward, a shuttle transported guests to Picker Art Gallery’s opening reception of X: Gender, Identity, Presence in the Dana Arts Center. On exhibition were works of art by Cassils, Antonius-Tín Bui, and significant queer artists hand-selected from the Picker collection. Cassils (he/they) is a transgender multidisciplinary artist who describes his performances as “social sculptures that reflect on the histories of LGBTQ+ violence, representation, struggle, and survival.” On display in the gallery was the first of three “social sculpture” films to be displayed over the course of the semester, each of which documents or adapts a live performance. The films invite trans and queer individuals to question “how to be together in solidarity and create communities of care and empowerment.” Featured artist Bui (they/ them) works in various media, including performance, community-based works, and hand-cut paper portraits. These artworks “allow Bui to explore their multifaceted identity as a queer, nonbinary Vietnamese-American artist,

13 bits 1 Vice President and Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin II was named a 2026 NASPA Foundation Pillar of the Profession.

2 Actors From the London Stage performed Shakespeare’s The Tempest during their Colgate residency in October.

3 In its Voices of Resistance podcast, The Center for Women’s Studies interviews Colgate professors and visiting speakers.

4 Colgate appeared on Forbes’ list of “vibe” schools — where campus culture, lifestyle, and aesthetic identity weigh as heavily as academic reputation.

5 Charred Goosbeak yukked it up with pro comedians Jon Barinholtz and Rob Belushi at its 15th Improv Extravaganza.

Sound Bite Mark DiOrio (KLUNE); Mike Roy (theater)

“This year’s community read reminds us of the power of theater to pull at our heartstrings and expand our understanding of the human experience.”

Prof. Cat Cardelús was named executive director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation.

—Professor Xan Karn on Primary Trust, which was performed in October Illustrations by Bernie Freytag

▼ Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

▼

7 At Masque & Triangle’s 15-Minute Fest, student directors presented four plays in quick succession.

8 Colgate’s Sigma Delta Pi chapter has earned two national awards: the Premio Octavio Paz and Premio Jose Martel.

9 A half-court buzzer beater from Jalen Cox ’27 sealed Colgate’s win over Siena in November — and claimed the top spot on ESPN’s SportsCenter Top 10.

while helping to liberate the voices of marginalized communities.” Their portraits also have meditative properties that create a space for reflection and resistance. In the act of creating each portrait, Bui looks back on their relationship with the subject and how they have influenced the artist’s life by crafting Bui into who they are today. Selections from the Picker collection aimed to show how queer art has expanded throughout the past century. Artists included Claude Cahun, who described themselves as gender fluid, explored gender identity, and resisted fascism; and Yasumasa Morimura, who “challenged the male gaze and traditional beauty standards” in his self-portrait photographs. “Pairing this selection of works from the collection with those of Cassils and Antonius-Tín Bui underscores not only the

historical contributions of queer artists to the visual arts, but also the range of creative responses to questions of identity, social constructs about gender, and resistance to repressive dominant ideologies,” explains Nick West, co-director of University Museums and curator of Picker Art Gallery. The final event of the night was Death Spiral, a live performance by Nicki Duval and Robbie Trocchia, featuring figure skater Milk, in Bernstein Hall’s Experimental Exhibition and Performance Space. Death Spiral included live figure skating movements, media projections, spoken word, and choreography. The “death spiral” in figure skating — which requires the male partner to hold his female counterpart inches above the ice, while spinning — served as a metaphor for trust and risk in the queer community.

“Throughout the performance, the artist placed emphasis on their mistakes in making the piece, revealing how an embrace of both failure and queerness opens up new possibilities within the creative process and for navigating the world,” West explains. Museum Operations Manager Darwin Rodriguez reflects on the night’s events: “Exhibition openings are special, because we as a cultural institution purposely fling the doors open and welcome our community into our spaces; they are evenings when museums are at their most accessible. It was humbling to find our program of events so well received and supported across campus, especially in the current political and social climate. It’s a testament to Colgate and its pursuit of rigor and fearless search for truth that made this night possible.” — Kaitlin Dowling ’29

10 Prof. DeWitt Godfrey’s Attun sculpture was a landscape merit winner in the CODAawards.

11 For Halloween, Paranormal Investigator John Zaffis shared his most chilling cases.

12 The Colgate golf team was one of 75 Division I programs nationwide to earn Golf Coaches Association of America’s Presidents Special Recognition for a team GPA above 3.5.

Figure skater Milk (center) performed Death Spiral with Nicki Duval (left) and Robbie Trocchia (right).

16 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Ryan John Lee

Five alumni have begun their Fulbright scholarships, from teaching English in Taipei to studying cancer in Germany.

Scene

Scholarship

Expanding Mission and Reach of Institutes for Advanced Study

Mark DiOrio

he University is broadening the scope of its four major institutes for advanced study to enhance student intellectual engagement with the pressing issues of the day, to expand the engagement of the University to the wider public, and to strengthen connections with alumni and other scholars. “Colgate is a place of serious engagement with the world and the issues before us,” says President Brian W. Casey. “With greater resources and broader mandates, the University’s institutes for advanced study will ensure that faculty, students, and staff can bring their creativity and critical thinking to bear on some of society’s hardest problems.” The expansion aligns with the University’s Third-Century Plan, a long-term road map aimed at making Colgate the nation’s finest undergraduate institution. “I am appreciative of the many faculty and staff whose energy and creativity are making these new directions possible, and grateful to those alumni whose support allows us to further the mission of our institutes,” says Lesleigh Cushing, provost and dean of the faculty. The Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions In recognition of its 20th anniversary, the former Center for Freedom and Western Civilization has been renamed the Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions, honoring Founding

Zemira Meade ’26 presented her Upstate Institute Summer Field School research about poverty issues in Madison County.

Director Robert Kraynak, professor of political science. Now under the co-directorship of Associate Professor of Art Carolyn Guile and George Carleton Jr. Professor of Philosophy David Dudrick, the Kraynak Institute’s mission is to cultivate intellectual diversity within a liberal arts education. The Kraynak Institute will uphold the ideal of a classical liberal arts education through a rigorous engagement with political theory, intellectual history, and Western traditions. It will also support the study of free speech, free enterprise, and constitutional democracy, and continue its public lectures and summer scholars programs. Additionally, three new forums will be launched for faculty, staff, and students to foster discussion on the themes of “the Past and Future of Democracy,” “Freedom in Public and Private Life,” and “Education for a Good Life and Character Formation for a Good Society.” The annual Constitution Day Debate, a signature event of the Kraynak Institute, was held

on Sept. 18, featuring a debate between legal scholars Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law and Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School on whether the nation is in a constitutional crisis. The Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs Thanks to a generous gift from Ed ’62 and Robin Lampert P’10, the Lampert Institute for Civic and Global Affairs will now have a named directorship. W. Bradford Wiley Chair in International Economics Chad Sparber now holds the title of Storing-Hou Director of the Lampert Institute, honoring two faculty members who influenced Lampert when he was a Colgate student. The Lampert Institute will continue its work on global public policy issues through its Changing World Order Initiative and Science, Technology, and Public Policy Initiative. The new gift will also enable new studentfacing programs, including a Sophomore Residential Seminar with a travel component to India and summer research fellowships for up to six

students to pursue self-directed projects off campus. Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute The Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute promotes collaborative research that brings expertise from disparate disciplines to bear on complex scientific problems. Under the new directorship of Professor of Biology and Mathematics Ahmet Ay, the Picker Institute will broaden its scope beyond faculty-only partnerships to include new opportunities for student engagement and publicfacing programming. The Upstate Institute Led by Director Julie Dudrick and its faculty director, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Cat Cardelús, the Upstate Institute will widen its purview to support community-engaged scholarship beyond the upstate New York region. The institute fosters connections between Colgate and its local community through community-based research and civic engagement.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

Arts & Science

Rooted in Tradition, Driven by Discovery

anaya Jones ’26 remembers the car rides from her hometown of Syracuse to Hamilton every fall, starting when she was 8 years old, to sell art with her mom at the Native American Arts and Culture Festival in Colgate’s Sanford Field House. “I loved the open land along the drive and the towns we would pass through,” Jones says. “The peacefulness of the ride was something I cherished.” Jones has gone from spending one day a year at Colgate as a vendor to a full academic year as a student. (The event itself has also undergone some updates, including a new name: the Indigenous Nations Festival.) Now both the campus and the faces Jones encountered at the festival throughout the years are part of her everyday life — including her thesis adviser, Professor Chris Vecsey. “I was pleased when I learned in fall 2022 that Janaya had begun matriculation at Colgate and even more pleased in 2024 when I heard that she had declared a Native American studies major,” says Vecsey, the Harry Emerson Fosdick Professor of the humanities and Native American studies. “What a fine student: conscientious, discerning, original in her analytics, and elegant in her writing.” Jones’ senior thesis is on medicinal plants — a subject she’s also known since childhood. She’s presenting a historical framework paired with current lab research using

yarrow, a flowering plant. “The way the Natives will use it is they’ll boil it, and my family does this, too — make teas out of certain plants,” says Jones, who is of the Oneida Nation. “My mom would say, ‘Go get the peppermint… You’re getting a cold. We need to make a tea.’ I’d run outside and bring it in. I’m very used to collecting and using plants when they’re needed.” In the lab, she is using a Soxhlet apparatus to extract compounds from yarrow while carefully collecting the steam. Jones then takes the plant’s concentrated extract and adds a sample to a spot plate containing the specific bacteria she is studying. She compares this plate with a control sample treated with an antibiotic. “I’m trying to test if yarrow can inhibit the bacteria’s growth as the antibiotic does,” explains Jones who, at press time, was too early in her research to report results. “It is truly a blessing to combine my research in the lab with what I have enjoyed learning from my family for years.” With a second major in biology, she’s well-versed in lab work and finds overlap in her two concentrations. For her biology major, Jones is doing a research tutorial with Professor Ken Belanger, looking at the health of the gut microbiome. After Colgate Jones hopes to work in a lab doing clinical research. “I enjoy the aspect of working with people and collaborating on projects,” she

18 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

says, “but I also like to combine that with research at the bench.” Just as knowledge of medicinal plants has carried through the generations of Jones’ family, so too have artistic talents. “It’s a family blessing and gift that’s been passed down,” Jones says. Her grandfather was a wood-carver, using sticks he’d find on the ground. “My mom said it was his way to bring life into the sticks again after they’d fallen,” Jones says. Her mom, meanwhile, is a painter and silversmith. Jones’ chosen mediums are painting and creating pebble art. The inclination to work with stones came naturally to Jones, who was part of a gem and mineral club at a very young age. She started collecting pebbles at her aunt’s house on Skaneateles Lake and making little pictures out of them. Throughout the years she’s refined her craft, using repurposed natural stone tiles as her background and “a super-secret” adhesive. “I don’t want people to know exactly what it is because it took me so long to figure out what works,” she notes. The final products are simple but sweet portrayals: families, love birds, a hiker, a lacrosse player. Janaya Jones ’26 and her mom, Marla Skye

“I don’t go into it thinking about what I want to make; I look at the stones and see what they look like,” says Jones, who sells her creations under the name Janaya Skye Pebble Art. “I think it’s a lot more meaningful.” Jones has taken on additional responsibilities for the annual Colgate festival, starting as a first-year when she helped revive the event following its hiatus during the pandemic. As a member of the Native American Student Association (of which she is currently treasurer), she’s also been involved in other efforts such as advertising. This year, though, she focused on preparing her art for the show and spending time with her mom. “I love being able to see my mom. We’ve been doing it together for so long, and especially now that I’m getting older, it’s nice to be able to have that thing with my mom that we’ve always done.” Her other favorite part of the festival is seeing the people she’s known throughout the years and meeting new ones. “I enjoy hearing people’s stories,” she says. “And what I really like is when my art touches someone.”

— Aleta Mayne

Scene

sustainability

2 Tons; $5K; 1,400 Followers = 1 Goal These campus initiatives are giving unwanted goods a new life.

A New Shed for All Those Threads

he Colgate Free Store — an Office of Sustainability initiative that recycles goods ranging from clothing to school supplies to small appliances — is celebrating two landmarks in its third year. During student orientation, the Office of Sustainability and campus partners hosted the inaugural Free Store Giveaway, supplying first-year and transfer students with nearly 2 tons of dorm supplies in a single day. Then, in October, the sustainability office received a $5,000 grant for a shed to meet its growing need for storage space. The new shed will enable the Free Store to recirculate an estimated 1,000 more pounds of goods annually. Additionally the shed will support Colgate’s Community Garden Compost Program by providing offseason storage space for composting supplies.

Illustrations by Bernie Freytag

“The Free Store supports Colgate’s zero-waste initiatives by diverting items left during move-out from the landfill and redirecting them back to the student body for free, building individual waste-reduction habits from a student’s first day on campus,” says Julia Sparks, assistant director of sustainability. “The additional storage over the summer will increase the Free Store’s waste diversion from approximately 2,500 pounds annually to an estimated 3,500 pounds or more each year.”

Hand It Down Through Hami-Down

andwritten price tags dotted piles of clothes on tables and hung from racks on Colgate’s residential quad in late October. The tags were one small indication of the large-scale efforts by the student leaders of Hami-Down during their first big sale of the semester. Hami-Down — a play on “hand-me-down” and Hamilton — gives new life to students’ unwanted items by connecting student sellers and buyers on campus. The group organizes large sales, like the one in October, but also coordinates sales between individuals. Leigh Frankel ’23 and Cameron Stokes ’23 founded Hami-Down in 2021 through Thought Into Action. Since its inception, Hami-Down has officially become an established LLC and has earned 1,406

followers on Instagram (@ hamidown_). Hami-Down is now in the hands of three CEOs: Valeria Reyes ’26, Perin Romano ’26, and Ella Bishara ’26. The campus sale events usually happen twice a semester, often around breaks, to give students the chance to also bring clothes back from home to sell. Individually coordinated sales occur through Instagram: Sellers post items, buyers message if interested, and Hami-Down coordinates the purchases. Whether buyers are interested in pieces during large sales or individual sales, they have the opportunity to try on clothes before purchasing. This arrangement contributes to the group’s sustainable mission by ensuring that consumers purchase clothing they’ll actually wear. “I loved being able to try on the clothes in Pinchin [Hall] so I could make sure they fit before buying,” says Grace Duggan ’28, who bought a black dress and a white top at the October sale. “It is such a great idea for campus so people don’t throw their clothes out. And it is a perfect way for people to find new pieces at a cheaper price.” In addition to apparel, buyers can find listings of lifestyle and dorm items, such as TVs, furniture, and drawer sets. “It’s always fun when we get a big-ticket item like AirPods or an expensive sweater,” Reyes notes. For the business’s online platforms going forward, Reyes says, “We are developing a website to house our submissions and FAQs, but we

plan to keep the e-commerce side of our business on Instagram, potentially utilizing a partner platform like Shopify. With these updates, we hope to take a broader range of payment methods and simplify the buying process on our established Instagram page to make things easier for our present and future customers.” Additionally, since the current team primarily consists of seniors, they are looking for the next generation of Hami-Down — to whom the current leaders can “hand down” the business. “We have seen a huge expansion in Hami-Down’s presence, popularity, and success on campus, and this is a testament to the hard work and dedication we have put toward Hami-Down,” Reyes says. “Before our sale, an underclassman said we were ‘the talk of the town,’ which was awesome to hear.” Whoever runs the business in the future and wherever they take it in its growth, Reyes emphasized the importance of maintaining Hami-Down’s mission of sustainably connecting students with new items to cherish. “Hami-Down’s future is ever-evolving and is imagined differently by each set of leadership; however, what stays the same is the mission and original vision of our founders,” Reyes says. “At its core, Hami-Down was started to connect the Colgate community while propelling a shared interest and passion for sustainable fashion.” — Alyssa Storey ’28

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Theater

Dancers Take Over Case Library

One group of students created a murder mystery dance set to the Pink Panther theme song.

idday library goers seemed a bit shocked to see people in the stacks breaking into dance on Oct. 23. Although the dancing may have appeared to be spontaneous, the performances in Case Library were anything but unplanned. Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Hank Bamberger saw something to be explored in Colgate’s spaces, and he used that vision as the foundation

of a midterm assignment for his Dance Imagery and Improvisation students. Bamberger wanted his students to see the value that setting adds to art, so he asked them to create choreography for unconventional spaces. The

Caitlin Pinto ’28 and her group based their dance on the concept of statues coming to life.

original performances took place in Chapel House, Dana Arts Center, and the new Peter’s Glen in early October; the class then took their dances to Case Library two weeks later for an event titled Stacking Movement. Expanding the idea of what a library can be, Bamberger’s class performed their dances throughout Case Library — starting on the bottom floor and moving up. The five groups gave 2- to 3-minute performances, each on a different floor. On Case’s first floor, often referred to as the archives, the first group performed the dance they’d initially created for the Chapel House meditation room. The students used the shelves of books and serious academic nature of the space to contrast with their fluid choreography. “The biggest criterion I kept stressing — and that I was pleasantly surprised that everybody truly grasped — was using contrast with a capital C,” Bamberger says. “Contrast is the [key] ingredient in making dance.” Another group performed on the stairs between the fourth and fifth floors of Case,

Contrast is the [key] ingredient in making dance. Professor Hank Bamberger

20 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

attracting a large audience of people working on computers or eating their lunch in Chobani at the Hieber Café. Originally this group performed in the Dana Arts Center lobby, incorporating the stairs, dim lighting, and railings into their piece. In the library, the stairs and lighting are much different than Dana, and dancers couldn’t use the railings in the same way, but the group adapted to their new setting. Another group, which initially performed at Peter’s Glen, performed on Case’s fifth-floor patio. It was a brisk and windy afternoon — typical of an October day in Hamilton — but the performers embraced the tones brought on by the weather, wearing long coats and letting the chill add to their mysterious theme. Contrary to the other performances, this group took a more humorous approach, creating a murder mystery dance with props and exaggerated facial expressions, all set to the Pink Panther theme song. The class was composed of students with various levels of experience — from football players who have never taken a dance class before to students like Katie Furlong ’26, who has danced her whole life but hasn’t spent much time creating her own choreography. “This was new for me,” Furlong admits. “I was able to take what I had learned as a competitive dancer and challenge myself to create something entirely different.” She is choreographing the Masque & Triangle musical, Cabaret, “which is in a very different dance style, but I’m able to take what I’ve learned in this class and use it in my personal creative endeavors,” Furlong says. Ailed Salazar ’28 has taken some dance classes before, “but nothing like this,” she says. “This class has definitely gotten me to step out of my comfort zone by discovering new ways of exploring my surroundings.”

— Peyton Taylor ’27

Ryan John Lee (2)

scene

Coach

Winning the Next Moment: Shannon Bush Leads Women’s Basketball

hen Shannon Bush was named head coach of Colgate women’s basketball last April, it marked the Holy Cross alumna’s return to the league where her own playing career began. A two-time Patriot League champion and former team captain, Bush comes to Colgate after a year as assistant head coach at Cornell and previous posts at California State University, Fresno; Siena University; University of Vermont; and Sacred Heart University. Each stop was marked by her knack for developing players and building cohesive, competitive programs. At Colgate she’s already off to a promising start: At press time, Bush had just made University history as the first women’s basketball coach to win her first three games. She recently appeared on the University’s podcast, 13. Here are some highlights from the conversation: “I think the Patriot League is the best league in the country. It gives the holistic studentathlete experience in a way that other conferences simply

do not. You get to explore your passions outside the court. You get a great level of education, and the priorities are right. So it is about the championship experience, having great success on the court, and seeking to hang banners, but it’s way bigger than basketball. That’s something I really value about the league and a huge reason why I wanted to coach in it.” “It’s been an absolute focus of mine since [I was] hired to connect with the alumni base. We want to reach out to [alumni] as we travel, get them to games, and have them meet our players. One of the things we’re looking at doing is a mentor program [connecting] our studentathletes with alumni who wore the jersey, did the same major, and are now in the career fields that [players] hope to go into. We have incredibly successful alumni all over the country doing amazing things; it helps the student-athletes to have somebody to relate to, but it also brings [alumni] closer to Colgate and, hopefully, back to games and back to campus.” “As a coaching staff, we are focused on relationships and connection. We had the team here for a couple of weeks this summer. It was about basketball, but a lot of it was about relationships … getting to know each other, and for them, [learning] what to expect from us as a coaching staff. I meet with players individually once every two weeks so we can start to build the trust. I want them

[The Patriot League] gives the holistic student-athlete experience in a way that other conferences simply do not.

to know that I care about them as people first. Certainly we talk about basketball, but a lot of it is ‘How’s your family? What’s going on with you? What things do you want to share?’ We are working to have that trust ahead of the season, so that when we face hard things, we know that both sides have the best intentions.” “[The Carey Center] is a complete game changer, and I honestly believe it makes this one of the best jobs in the country. I am so excited about what [the new facility] means for the student-athlete experience. To have that level of training facility and opportunity is a game changer for recruiting and for programmatic success.”

It sometimes feels like living in a Hallmark movie.” “This season, you’re going to see a lot of passion. I have it. I love this game. I coach basketball for the relationships and because I am so passionate about the transformational power of this sport. It turns people into leaders, and learning how to go through adversity is a huge part of what we’re teaching as coaches.”

“We’re trying to win the next moment. That really is where it’s at. I said it to [the team] on our first day of practice, ‘You don’t win on day one when you have big goals, and nothing is done in a day.’ We are focused on winning, but we’re mostly focused on the process, because the process is what leads to “I can’t say enough about the winning. Do we have great the Hamilton community habits? Are we doing things and the way that I have felt the right way? Are we doing it embraced. I joke that I have to collaboratively? Are we being give myself 10 extra minutes to great teammates as we do it? get anywhere because people Because if you focus so much on stop me, they want to talk, they the goal, you’re going to miss the want to engage, and I love it. You middle. And the middle is where go downtown and everybody all the good stuff is.” knows each other. They know my sandwich order at the deli. — Interview by Jordan Doroshenko Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

Q&A

‘I Want to Win for Our Guys, Our School, Our Alumni’ Mike Harder ’97, in his third season as men’s hockey coach, talks hockey and Colgate.

22 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

the game should be played, how it should be coached. I keep paying that forward.” You’re Colgate’s all-time leading scorer with 214 points. Which of your 88 goals do you remember most? “I remember almost all my goals. Each time it felt like I achieved something and all my extra work, all those early mornings, paid off. There’s nothing better than the feeling of scoring a goal; there’s this fleeting

moment of extreme satisfaction before you get punched in the gut on your next shift. It’s that few seconds of extreme joy that makes me remember nearly all of them.” What was it like playing in the American Hockey League and winning the Calder Cup with the Hartford Wolf Pack? “You learn what works, what doesn’t work, how guys interact on winning teams. I loved my time in pro hockey, and it got to a

mark diorio

You’re filling big shoes in following Don Vaughan and Terry Slater as head coach. What does that mean to you? “It means everything, and I don’t take it lightly. I’m starting to turn a little gray from stress because I want to win so badly for our guys, our school, our alumni. I love all 26 of our players, they’re great humans, but it’s all the guys who came before them too. Don and the assistant coaches I had in the ’90s, they formed my thoughts on how

Scene

point where I knew it was fleeting, so every season, every game, mattered more.” Tell us about playing professionally in Finland, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Sweden? “In the early 2000s, especially in Sweden, those teams were on the cutting edge of skill development in terms of managing practices, how to do off-day workouts. I loved stealing their ideas, and I loved learning different languages. It was fun. It was a little easier on your body, too; because it’s a bigger rink, you don’t get hit as much.” How do you motivate your players? “In our locker room I have the players’ youth hockey pictures above their name plates. I’ll say, ‘Think about who took that picture. Was it your mom, your dad, an uncle? What did they sacrifice to get you to the rink at 5 a.m.? How much did they give up to get you to this Division I school?’ It’s about getting them to reach their full potential.” You are Class of 1997. Do you hear from fellow alumni? “We have alums come in all the time and talk to our team. They also read the starting lineups before games in the locker room. So I definitely feel the weight of it. The program’s in a good spot. I firmly believe we can win here. Hopefully our alumni believe that, too, and feel included in the process.”

OH, CANADA

Radio

WRCU Brings Back Sportscasting

hen Colgate football takes the field for a home game at Andy Kerr Stadium, fans who can’t watch from the bleachers or via streaming now have another way to follow the action. WRCU has started broadcasting home games for certain sports, reviving an effort that had long been in existence before it was discontinued in the early 2000s, when Colgate shifted to professional radio stations for coverage. The University station began working with Colgate athletics a few years ago to establish a presence within athletics and generate more interest from students. The effort led to the station broadcasting lacrosse and softball games last spring. In the fall, the station started calling home games for football and soccer; basketball and hockey will be added. Come spring, the station will continue to cover lacrosse and softball. In addition the station launched a sports talk show at the start of the fall semester. Fans can tune into games on the radio at 90.1 FM or by visiting the station’s website, wrcufm.org. “I want WRCU to be a home for Colgate sports,” says Eli Senzel ’26, the station’s sports director. “It’s great to have students calling

games again. It’s really fun to be on the air.” The station has had a long history of broadcasting Colgate games and has been a springboard for some big names in the world of sports radio. Joe Castiglione ’68, who was the voice of Boston Red Sox radio for 42 years before retiring in 2024, got his start in radio by calling games at Colgate. While Colgate doesn’t offer courses in radio broadcasting, the radio station proved to be more than enough for Castiglione, who learned through trial by fire. Senzel, an English and political science double major from Seattle, handles the play-by-play for football and soccer, and will cover basketball. In addition he hosts the station’s sports radio show, called The 13th Hour, which offers analysis and recaps of recent games as well as interviews with student-athletes. Jack Zizza ’26, a film and media studies major from Syracuse, N.Y., says he’s grateful for the opportunity to work as a commentator on football games alongside Senzel. “It gives students valuable experience and offers listeners a fresh way to connect with the station,” Zizza says. “It’s a win-win all around.” — Rodrigo Santiago

Is winter tougher in Winnipeg, where you’re from, or in Hamilton? “Winnipeg. I go back to visit family but never in winter. It’ll get down to -40 degrees. It’s miserably cold, which was a great motivator for me as a kid to get out of bed early every morning and get to the rink where I’d shoot pucks every day. Coach Vaughan saw me while I was playing in a junior league in Saskatchewan, and that’s how I was recruited to come to Colgate.” Tim Hortons or Dunkin’? “I love how [Tim Hortons’] door handles are hockey sticks, so I have to lean toward them. It’s still a hangout place for my dad. We’re actually from Saint Adolphe, a small town south of Winnipeg, and that’s where he goes to catch up about the game the night before or how Connor McDavid played or….” — Tim O’Keeffe

Jack Zizza ’26 (left) and Eli Senzel ’26

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

A Grand-New Glen Taking steps to connect upper and middle campus

n August 2025, the University opened Peter’s Glen, a 2.5-acre, landscaped corridor that connects the upper and middle areas of campus and improves the pedestrian experience. People can now move directly from Bernstein Hall and the Dana Arts Center in Middle Campus up to the academic quad, following the pathway designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The project was made possible by Peter L. Kellner ’65, P’87, GP’16,’19. Before the creation of Peter’s Glen, stormwater flowed from multiple pipes out of the hillside above the Dana Arts Center and Bernstein Hall and flooded the undersized storm system at the bottom of the hill. Increasing the piped drainage system and managing the flow of water will now alleviate flood events on Lally Lane and along Taylor Lake and improve the conditions of Payne Creek. The stormwater channel carries runoff from rain and snowmelt through terraced bluestone pools and cascades. Construction began in March 2024. The vehicle traffic circle by Frank Dining Hall was converted into a new upper plaza featuring stone pavers, boulder seat walls, new site lighting, and tree and understory plantings. A new lower plaza at the south side of Ryan Studio connects the project’s main stairway and pathways to Bernstein Hall.

478

trees, each with a “gator bag” that is filled with water, which is slowly released through holes in the bottom to promote healthy root establishment

24 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

engraved marker stones were distributed alongside the main stairs to honor Colgate history

157

steps = nine flights of stairs; 82 feet from the top of the upper plaza to Bernstein Hall

1,300

tons of Alcove bluestone was imported from New York Quarries, in Alcove, N.Y.

SCENE

8,202

ground cover plantings, 593 shrubs, and 1,000 daffodil bulbs were planted

16,200

cubic yards of earth was moved to shape the new valley (enough material to fill almost five Olympic-sized swimming pools)

Numerous uses, from science labs to sports drills to dance performances to ...

mark diorio

benches made of black locust limbs are at the offshoot paths (custom built by Fifty Three Restorations, the craftsmen for Central Park)

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

Capital Projects

features expanded capacity and comfort for its residents, including 26 single rooms and four doubles. Designed with student well-being

in mind, the floor plan physically separates living quarters from social spaces, allowing students to socialize, study, and rest.

Building West Campus Momentum 1

olgate’s vision for a vibrant West Campus is taking shape, with the first two major projects now coming to life at 66 and 70 Broad Street. The multiphase West Campus initiative reimagines the area as a connected neighborhood for juniors and seniors, blending tradition with modern design. Recently the University announced $125 million in gifts supporting West Campus projects and unveiled finalized plans for the Carey Center, further demonstrating Colgate’s commitment to enhancing the student-life experience — a key priority of the Third-Century Plan. “We are making clear our commitment to building a residential experience that brings students together in community,” says President Brian W. Casey. “The development of West Campus is central to achieving the goals of the Third-Century Plan, especially our promise to offer an exceptional student experience to the best and brightest minds in the country.”

1. At 66 Broad St., a common-area gathering space fosters community for the chapter. 2. Delta Upsilon’s letters represent the organization’s ideals and history. 3. An industrial-grade kitchen allows for quality meals and streamlined service. 4. The light-filled, modern bedrooms support academic focus and comfort.

66 Broad Street The recently reopened chapter house of the Delta Upsilon fraternity at 66 Broad Street

26 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

66 BROAD STREET

mark diorio (6)

5. Contemporary seating and open space in the dining room accommodate the entire chapter.

SCENE

Throughout the house, the traditions of Delta Upsilon are reflected in accents of old gold and sapphire blue and in the prominently displayed symbol of the scales of justice, a motif found in the DU seal. Hallways and common spaces are bright and welcoming, while a new dining room accommodates larger chapter meals and gatherings. Fraternity composites once again adorn the walls. The building includes lifts and ramps in line with Colgate’s commitment to accessibility and is on track for LEED certification, supporting the University’s Green Building Standards. Also 66 Broad Street incorporates an exceptionally wellsealed building exterior, and uses heat pump technology for heating and cooling. These strategies significantly reduce energy use and support the University’s broader decarbonization goals. Founded at Colgate in 1865, Delta Upsilon celebrates its 160th anniversary this year. The current house was built in 1930 after a fire destroyed the original structure in 1928. As one of the oldest fraternity houses on Broad Street, the newly renovated building honors that long legacy while meeting the needs of today’s students. “The tradition of DU at Colgate is longstanding and proud,” says Tom Dempsey ’72, Delta Upsilon alumni president. “This investment in our home — where generations have lived and future generations will gather — reflects the University’s belief in what it means to live and learn in community. We’re proud to be part of that vision.”

70 Broad Street The next chapter of the West Campus initiative is already underway. Next door at 70 Broad — known as “The LOJ” — a reimagined building will create a welcoming, inclusive space for students engaged in outdoor pursuits and shared community living. It will be renamed Fox House, supported by a $10 million gift from Bob Fox ’59. At the completion of the yearlong rebuild, Fox House will provide lodging for 23–24

70 BROAD STREET

Fox House will feature a generous porch and immediate access to green spaces, designed to support an active lifestyle and community focus.

The student experience in West Campus will integrate seamlessly with life on the Hill — offering the kinds of living, learning, and social spaces that make all four years in Hamilton meaningful. Paul J. McLoughlin II, vice president and dean of the college

students in single, air-conditioned rooms. A thoughtful mix of private and communal spaces will include a generous porch, living and dining rooms, a shared kitchen, laundry facilities, and accessible bedrooms and circulation areas. Shared bathrooms will serve both residential and public spaces and meet accessibility standards. Sustainability is central to the project, which is designed for LEED Silver certification and will use heat pump systems to help reduce the University’s operating costs and carbon footprint, following Colgate’s Green Building Standards. In every aspect — from its layout to its materials — 70 Broad Street reflects a forward-looking approach to student housing. “These first two projects at 66 Broad and 70 Broad are a visible sign of our commitment to students and the intentionality behind residential life at

Communal spaces will feature a thoughtful mix of seating and accessible circulation areas.

Colgate,” says Paul J. McLoughlin II, vice president and dean of the college. “The student experience in West Campus will integrate seamlessly with life on the Hill — offering the kinds of living, learning, and social spaces that make all four years in Hamilton meaningful.”

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

scene

CAREY CENTER

1. The Carey Center’s design integrates with the campus landscape, including outdoor space for training and recreation. 2. A larger strength and conditioning center reflects Colgate’s commitment to athletic success. 3. Dedicated meeting rooms will support teams and administrative staff. 4. The bright, modern atrium will serve as a central gathering point.

Carey Center In April 2025, Colgate announced finalized plans for the Carey Center, a 97,250-square-foot, modern Division I athletics facility set to replace the outdated Reid Athletic Center. The family of Trustee Emeritus Chase Carey ’76, including his wife, Wendy, and their children, Steven Carey ’12 and Tara Carey ’13, provided the lead gift. The center will consolidate multiple

28 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

athletics functions and will feature a new 1,650-seat performance arena for basketball and volleyball, a 75% larger strength and conditioning center, and a dedicated operations hub for the football program. Additionally, it will house locker rooms, an academic success center, and administrative offices. The facility will also provide space for University events. Construction is scheduled to begin at the beginning of 2026.

“We are deeply grateful for the generosity of our Colgate community, who are investing in the future of athletics and the student-athlete experience,” says Vice President for Advancement Kim Harris. “The Carey Center anchors the University’s commitment to Division I athletics and will provide the important physical spaces to support our continued success.”

— Rebecca Taurisano

SCENE

Financial Aid

Expanding the Colgate Commitment

tudents with a total family income up to $175,000 will now attend Colgate University tuition-free, and those with family incomes of up to $200,000 will have their demonstrated need met without loans starting in the fall of 2026, thanks to a new expansion of the Colgate Commitment, the University’s pledge to increase access and affordability, first launched in 2020. This new income level for eliminating tuition more than doubles the no-tuition threshold that was established when the commitment was first introduced. In addition, this expansion increases the number of students who will not see a federal loan as

Profile

Making the Impossible Possible

annah Richards ’26 applied to Colgate precisely because she thought it was out of reach. “One of my high school teachers asked us to apply to a school we never thought we would be able to attend,” remembers Richards, who grew up in Berea, Ky. “When I went home that day, I had received a mailer from Colgate University. ‘What a sign,’ I thought. ‘I'll apply to this school for my final project.’ The more I looked into Colgate, I realized it was an amazing school. I knew I would love to go there, but there would be absolutely no way I could afford it.” The impossible became possible when Richards was accepted to Colgate and received her financial aid package. “I kept rereading the

part of their financial aid offer, and it adjusts the percentage of tuition for which families are responsible based on new income brackets. “Expanding the Colgate Commitment opens the doors of this world-class University to more exceptional students from all walks of life,” says President Brian W. Casey. Colgate has previously increased the opportunities for more families to take advantage of the popular aid initiative. This expansion marks the third time that Colgate has worked to broaden the scope of the aid initiative, a critical part of the University’s Third-Century Plan. The last update, announced in 2022, included expansion of aid packages to meet the average cost of textbooks and other academic expenses. Targeting lower- and middle-income families, who often face difficult conversations about choosing college based on net costs to the student, the Colgate Commitment ensures that only a reasonable percentage of family income goes toward tuition. Beyond aiding those with the greatest level of need, this expansion also makes a Colgate education more affordable for those in the middle- and upper-middle–income

brackets. Families with an annual income between $175,000 and $200,000 will, on average, now pay just 5% of their income toward tuition. Families with annual income levels between $200,000 and $250,000 will, on average, now pay 7% of their income toward tuition; and those with incomes of $250,000–$300,000 will pay, on average, 10% of their income toward tuition. “Applying for financial aid can feel complicated and overwhelming,” says Senior Associate Dean and Director of Financial Aid Gina Soliz. “This expansion of the Colgate Commitment helps simplify the financial aid process and increases the number of students who will benefit from having loans replaced with Colgate grants.” “We’re so grateful for the outpouring of financial aid support from alumni and families,” says Vice President of Advancement Kim Harris. “As more resources become available, the better able Colgate is to continue the expansion of the Colgate Commitment — one of the campaign’s top priorities because it has such a profound impact on the caliber of students who choose to enroll here.” — Daniel DeVries

numbers over and over again because I thought that it must have been a typo — there was no way that the financial aid offer was real.” The Colgate Commitment, which makes Colgate affordable and accessible for students like Richards, made her dream school a reality. “There have been so many amazing opportunities at Colgate that are not available at other schools or would have been out of reach for me,” Richards says.

“I’m on the Colgate pom team, a Division I team. [And] thanks to the Alumni Memorial Scholars program, I traveled to Germany and conducted independent research comparing perspectives on inclusivity of the deaf communities in Germany and America.” She also participated in the Sophomore Residential Seminar Program, England/ Ireland Extended Study, and Geneva Study Group — all of which were supported by her Colgate Commitment package. “During the Geneva Study Group, I was able to intern with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,” Richards says. “I have traveled the world, doing all these amazing things, and I’m not being held back because of finances. “I am extremely grateful for the Colgate Commitment and the donors who support it,” she continues. “They’ve made the past four years possible for me. If not for them, I would still be in a small town in Kentucky with no idea of the greater world around me.”

— Stephanie Boland

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Discover Ecology

Studying the Upstream Journey Pete Rand’s research informs strategies for Alaskan communities and salmon species resilience.

he Copper River watershed in Southcentral Alaska is a massive, free-flowing river system where a million salmon make the annual upriver journey to spawn. As climate change affects river and ocean conditions over time, Pete Rand ’87 is helping communities understand how salmon and the many people who depend on them can adapt and thrive. Rand is a research ecologist who studies cold-water fish with the Prince William Sound Science Center (PWSSC). “As a kid, I had a natural curiosity about all things aquatic,” Rand says. “Then Colgate started me on a lifelong trajectory of increasing my knowledge. I pursued graduate studies and a career in fisheries and aquatic sciences, which led me to Cordova, Alaska.” Cordova sits in the delta of the Copper River, on the eastern edge of Prince William Sound. “It’s a working town directly tied to fishing,” Rand explains. “Salmon is a major commercial and subsistence resource. Understanding and managing salmon populations is vital for economic, cultural, and food security reasons.” Based in Cordova, the nonprofit PWSSC was created in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. “Understanding long-term impacts of oil spills on marine life is still an important aspect of our mission to increase knowledge about marine and freshwater systems through research and education,” Rand says.

30 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

To shape its research, PWSSC works closely with a wide variety of stakeholders. Rand’s research projects in the sound and in local rivers involve fishery managers, commercial and sport fishermen, Native Alaskan communities, and state and federal agencies that manage the Copper River watershed. “The Copper River system drains an area about the size of West Virginia. It’s pristine in many ways. There are no dams,”

Rand says. “Many rivers and landscapes in the Lower 48 have been modified by development and dams, but these rivers are in a wilder state. It’s almost like walking back in time 100-plus years in comparison.” The system produces salmon well known among seafood markets, especially on the West Coast. “Copper River salmon is marketed as some of the first available to markets each year and fetches a high price for quality,” Rand says. Illustration by Matthew Twombly

However, he notes, adult salmon returning to the river from the ocean have been getting smaller over time. “We’ve seen a high frequency of unusually high ocean surface water temperatures; we think that’s affecting their metabolism and ability to find prey. Smaller salmon have lower fat reserves, which they rely on for energy to swim hundreds of miles to their spawning grounds.” What long-term implications could this downward trend in body size have on migration success? That’s what Rand is trying to find out: “My fieldwork is part of a multiyear collaboration between the Native Village of Eyak, Ahtna Intertribal Resource Commission, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and PWSSC, looking for relationships between fish size, river conditions, and the likelihood of these fish reaching their spawning grounds to complete their life cycle.” Even as their size dwindles, Copper River salmon may also have to fight against increasingly stronger river flows to reach their destinations. “A heat wave in 2019 perhaps gave us a glimpse of the future,” Rand says. “Heat waves may contribute to droughts in other states, but here, we saw accelerated glacier melt and extremely high river flow rates that impeded and even trapped fish during their migration.” Starting in 2019, the project team collected fish in the lower river, measured them, and inserted radio tags that each emitted a unique code. Rand and his colleagues tracked thousands of tagged fish using a network of receivers set up along the riverbanks. This September he also surveyed the population that reached Klutina Lake, where approximately half of Copper River salmon spawn. After analyzing the project’s multiyear data, he’ll help PWSSC convene scientists, Native Village elders, and other key stakeholders for the next step. “Creating opportunities to share knowledge is incredibly important,” Rand says. “Together, we’ll advance our shared understanding of how historical changes in river and ocean conditions have affected salmon populations, then apply those insights and the new data to predict impacts over the next 100 years. “Salmon are naturally resilient and adaptable,” he continues. “Because we’re working together now, we can determine ways to adapt fishery management practices to conserve salmon — so communities relying on these fish can be resilient too.” — Meghan McDonald Illustration by Bernie Freytag

Ask a Professor

Why Don’t Frogs Get Fevers? n mammals, fever is a crucial aspect of the immune response to pathogens. The hypothalamus region of the brain contains neurons involved in thermoregulation. When these neuronal circuits are activated by bodily signals released by immune cells during an infection, the core body temperature rises — an event generally referred to as fever. What’s interesting about ectothermic (colloquially known as cold-blooded) animals, like frogs, is that they do not have this fever response. Instead, they raise their body temperatures by migrating to warmer areas. And, if frogs infected with bacteria are prevented from accessing warmer locations, they are more likely to die. This shows that fever is important for survival during an infection because the internal temperature spike is required to eliminate bacteria from the system. Some of the major signals produced in the brain during

Anzela Niraula

bacterial infection are common between mammals and frogs. One such signal produced in the mammalian brain during infection is prostaglandin. Prostaglandins play a major role in triggering fever in mammals. In fact, one of the ways to suppress fever is by blocking prostaglandin production (which is what ibuprofen does). Directly injecting prostaglandin into the frog brain does not increase body temperature, but it causes the animal to migrate toward areas of higher temperature. This is called behavioral fever. So, basically, the frog brain, instead of triggering the body to generate heat and have a fever, causes the frog to seek out warmer locations during infections. Our lab is studying how the brain response to infection in tadpoles is altered by external temperature changes. This has important implications for how global warming affects the amphibian immune response to pathogens. At the same time, by examining the mechanisms by which the tadpole brain senses external temperature, we could gain insights into how the mammalian brain adapts to external temperature changes and regulates internal body temperature.

— Anzela Niraula is an assistant professor in neuroscience as well as psychological and brain sciences. Her lab uses mouse models and tadpoles to study the relationship between the immune system and the nervous system. Oscar Quintanilla ’28 has been working alongside Niraula since his first semester, sponsored by Colgate’s Science and Technology Accelerated Research Scholars (STARS) program. Founded in 2022 by Professor of Biology Krista Ingram, the STARS program supports firstgeneration college students and students from high schools offering limited science preparation by pairing them with faculty mentors early in their time at Colgate. Quintanilla is a neuroscience major on the pre-med track.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

discover

Lessons From the Bat Cave Kyle Rhodehouse ’19 studies Chiroptera to save human lives.

ittle understood and possessed of a fearsome aspect, bats have long had an eerie purchase on the popular imagination. But for Kyle Rhodehouse ’19, bats are not a menace but a means to find cures for serious illnesses that can sicken and kill humans, sometimes at epidemic rates. Rhodehouse studies emerging zoonotic viruses, those that find their origins in animals and spill over into the human population. Many of these infections can be severe and even lethal — such as Ebola, coronaviruses like SARS-CoV, and the Hendra and Nipah viruses — and come from bats. Now employed by the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Rhodehouse is posted to the Uniformed Services University, part of the Department of Defense, where he is conducting biomedical research as a postdoctoral fellow. Rhodehouse describes his current work as being a bat immunologist, with a mission to discover what makes bats such superb hosts for such nasty diseases. “They’re interesting animals, in part because they’re the only mammals that fly. Flying squirrels and similar mammals that take to the air don’t fly really; they fall with style,” explains Rhodehouse. “With bats, their immune systems have coevolved with flight, so they have a unique biological profile.” In addition, Rhodehouse says, bats are unusually social. “You’ll find thousands of them in a cave at a time roosting, so there’s a lot of interaction there. Besides that, caves happen to be a good space for the transmission of diseases,” he says. An important bat anomaly is that while they are first-rate carriers of viruses, they rarely seem to get sick themselves. “Humans are crummy hosts for the Ebola virus. If a virus kills a host before it can transmit to a new host, that’s a dead end for the virus and an evolutionary failure,” says Rhodehouse. “Bats can be infected with these extremely dangerous pathogens that would kill a

32 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

fundamental questions about the bat body and the human body.” In that sense, Rhodehouse is returning to his original focus in biology. He began his studies at Colgate with Associate Professor of Biology Priscilla Van Wynsberghe and other faculty, concentrating on cell biology. Then COVID-19 hit. “I felt like I was getting a message from the universe,” he says. Rhodehouse moved into virology and studied HIV, which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Now he’s back to cell biology for his day job, and is relying on things he learned at Colgate to find preventions and cures for new and dangerous maladies. “It’s kind of a joke, but sometimes when I tell people I study bats for the Department of Defense they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re going to make Batman,’” he says. “I tell them, no, I’m making Captain America. We’re finding ways to save lives.” — Chris Quirk

André Chung

Virology

human, and they’re fine. So these viruses are circulating through bat populations, but you rarely see ill effects in the bats.” While the mobility bats have from flight can increase the spread of disease, it also might provide clues to their disease resistance. “Flight is extremely metabolically costly. It requires certain adaptations to the physiology of an animal,” Rhodehouse says. “People are familiar with the idea that birds have hollow bones, but it gets down to the molecular and cellular level. You have to be able to meet those energy demands.” For that reason, one area Rhodehouse studies in bats is their mitochondria, which function as energy sources within cells. The mitochondria operate as batteries at the molecular level, providing power for a body to function. If Rhodehouse were able to learn that bats were possessed of extraordinary mitochondria, or that the bat metabolism had other unique and energysaving features missing from earthbound mammals, it could lead the way to therapies that could beef up human resistance to zoonotic diseases. “It’s a huge focus of my research. Are there just more mitochondria per cell, or do they handle energy production differently? Those are the kinds of questions I’m looking at.” Rhodehouse’s work is in the early stages, but he is optimistic about his direction. “If we can learn about the most energetically demanding physiologies on Earth, we can extrapolate from that information to hopefully curb diseases,” he says. “We started these projects from the angle of virology, but now we’re pushing into areas of physiology, cell biology, and

discover

Discourse

Getting Religion With a popular podcast and book, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst ’05 explores religion’s hidden power to shape our world.

lyse Morgenstein Fuerst ’05 wants you to know there is just no escaping religion. Even if you are not religious, she says, religion affects your life. It’s out there, with its systems and assumptions, structuring the world around you, influencing politics and policy, and determining who has power and who does not. “Church and state,” Morgenstein Fuerst has written, “are not separate — they’re not even on a break.” That drive to help people understand religion’s often unacknowledged role in our world is what motivated Morgenstein Fuerst, an associate professor of religion at the University of Vermont, to launch a podcast with her friend and fellow religion scholar Megan Goodwin in January 2020. Called Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion, the podcast would go on to air 114 episodes over more than five years and become an unlikely hit. (Weary of the workload that writing and producing a podcast entailed, the pair decided to bring it to a close in June.) Why “A Killjoy’s Introduction”? For Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin, being a

killjoy means sharing uncomfortable truths people may not want to hear. “We want you to see the world more clearly,” says Morgenstein Fuerst, who believes that not talking forthrightly about religion “allows intolerance and inequality to flourish.” Developing a better understanding of religion — its histories, tenets, rituals, how it functions in the lives of adherents — she believes, can also help us see its potential to create a better world. Keeping It 101, in its six seasons, offered deep dives into Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Judaism, Indigenous religions, African Diasporic religions, and many others. It explored early Christianity, religious nationalism around the world, food-based religious rituals, and the ways various religions have viewed illness and disability. It also asked and answered the question “Is religion dangerous?” While dead serious about its educational mission, Keeping It 101 also featured witty and irreverent commentary delivered with crack comic timing by Morgenstein Fuerst, an observant Jew who earned her master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, and her co-host and best friend Goodwin, who is senior editor at Religion Dispatches and identifies as Wiccan. The success of the podcast, which racked up more than 250,000 downloads by its end, also attracted the interest of publishers and gave birth to a book, Religion Is Not Done With You: Or, the Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law. Co-authored by Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin, the book was published in 2024 by Beacon Press and came out in paperback in fall 2025. The book’s reception was a big surprise for Morgenstein Fuerst, who directs the UVM Humanities Center and teaches such courses as Interpretation of Religion; Islam and Race; and Religion, Politics and Power. “It’s been shocking,” she says of the book’s success. “Academics don’t expect their work to be read. But paperbacks are printed to sell and the fact that the book has been reprinted indicates it’s being adopted in classrooms and used on college campuses.” The authors have also been getting a lot of feedback from across the country, including from public

The way I think about my scholarship comes down to the question of, ‘Are you serving the public good?’

libraries and churches that have chosen the book for their monthly book clubs. In the final episode of the podcast, Morgenstein Fuerst declared her role in Keeping It 101 “the most impactful work I will ever do in terms of scholarship.” A big statement, but she stands by it. In her other academic work, Morgenstein Fuerst observes, she often writes about hate, Christian supremacy, and Islamophobia. “These are things that no one wants to talk about. Also, academic research tends to be jargony and written for our colleagues.” With the podcast — and the book — though, connecting with the general public was the aim. Says Morgenstein Fuerst, “This was lightning striking. It’s hard for me to imagine anything else I write having that kind of quick and immediate adoption.” That hasn’t stopped her from beginning two new book projects, which she is currently working on simultaneously. One, the product of a Fulbright she won in 2022, examines how laws about Muslims and Jews set up in the 1800s under the British imperial system “contribute to a global conversation about Islamophobia and antisemitism.” The other mixes memoir with a history of adoption in the U.S., which has always been, she says, “part of Christian nationalist programs.” (Morgenstein Fuerst is an adoptee.) And while the podcast may be done, Morgenstein Fuerst remains passionately committed to what’s been called “publicfacing scholarship.” For her, that’s about more than offering a hot take as a talking head on a news show; it demands “writing in a way that grips the public without all the jargon and without every sentence having 16 footnotes that make it challenging for your average educated American to wade through. “I still write that way,” she says of her academic writing. “That’s how I keep my job and my health insurance. That’s how I push a conversation. But every time I write something like that, I do a translated version.” Her “translations” might be published on a website, or she might discuss the topic on a podcast or give a public lecture that is recorded and posted online. Morgenstein Fuerst, who says she “discovered religion” in her first semester at Colgate, adds: “I am one of those alums who credit Colgate with setting me up correctly…. The way I think about my scholarship comes down to the question of, ‘Are you serving the public good?’ That’s a value Colgate instilled. It’s not just, ‘What do you know?’ It’s ‘How are you showing what you know to others, and how is that making the world a little bit better?’” — Eils Lotozo Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

34 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Illustrations by Kathleen Fu

By Michael Blanding

W H E RE CU RI OSIT Y LE AD S Exploring Earth, Space, and the Political Landscape

hether traveling to sites in Oregon and Spain or relishing the beauty of Hamilton, Colgate professors and students began research projects last summer, many of which are continuing into this academic year — and beyond. Colgate Magazine put a sampling of the inquiries under the microscope to learn more.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Searching for Water on Mars Joe Levy, associate professor of Earth and environmental geosciences Riley Taylor ’26, Rowan Barnes ’28

hat do Mars and eastern Oregon have in common? Potentially quite a lot, according to planetary scientist Joe Levy. The Red Planet’s rocky cliffs are streaked with dark lines that some scientists believe show the existence of liquid water that could support life. “This may or may not be a sort of wet soil where water percolates down the sides of crater walls and cliffs during the Martian summer, and could be a place where microbes live,” Levy says. A cliff in Oregon’s Alvord Desert displays some of the same properties, with a hot spring emerging from under the mountains and flowing to the dry plains below. This summer, Levy led a team of students in “Planetary Habitability Research in the Eastern Oregon Desert,” flying drones over the surface to detect the presence of water in ways that could inform similar investigations on Mars. “I had really wanted to go to Mars, but this was the next best thing,” Levy quips. The research is part of the federally funded HeliHabitable mission, being conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is designing a nextgeneration helicopter that could be sent to Mars in the coming years. “It’s neat for students to be part of a NASA team that is ultimately building a mission to another planet,” says Levy. At the same time, students are able to see firsthand how experts in hydrology, spectroscopy, and other fields collaborate to succeed. “We exist in a constellation of experts who all work together,” Levy says. The mystery of Mars’ recurring slope lineae, as the cliffside streaks are known, is that satellite cameras don’t detect the presence of water on the surface, leading some to conclude that they are caused by grains of dry dust “flowing” down the hillside instead. In Oregon, however, sometimes the surface water evaporates, even while water flows beneath the surface. By using different technologies — including photo cameras, infrared cameras that detect heat, and spectroscopy that detects chemical signatures on the surface — at different times of day, Levy was hoping that the team could better discover that subsurface water. “Our experiment was to see if the detectability of the water changes as a function of when and how you go and look,” he says. “Spoiler: The answer is yes.” The two students, Riley Taylor ’26 and Rowan Barnes ’28, practiced flying the drones outside at Colgate’s Bewkes Center, where they learned to analyze spectroscopy, thermal camera, and visible camera data. Back in the lab, they learned to stitch it into a “mosaic” image. Then the team shipped the equipment west, flying to Boise, Idaho, and driving a pickup truck

36 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

into the barren, scrubby hills of eastern Oregon. The environment is Mars-like, Levy says, down to the minitornadoes that can blow through in the afternoon and could knock the drones right out of the air — requiring one student to be on “dust devil watch” while Levy or the other student was flying. In analyzing the data back at Colgate, Levy and the students found that in the evenings, the thermal camera showed a heat sink caused by water flowing under the surface, even when the spectroscopy data showed the top layer of soil was dry. Taylor is currently analyzing the data further as part of her senior thesis, but if the phenomenon bears out, it shows that the same techniques could potentially be used on Mars to

determine whether there is in fact water flowing down the hills. “We’re seeing a real consistency in the data, which is heartening,” Levy says. “This experiment really shows you have to look beneath the surface at different times of day to see if water is there. It gives us an exciting reason to go back to Mars.”

10 weeks, countless discoveries Summer research at Colgate isn’t only an opportunity for faculty to devote dedicated time to pressing questions, but it also offers a chance for students to participate in fieldwork, lab work with specialized equipment, or intensive literature research they rarely have time for during the academic year. Each year undergrads compete for the highly sought-after opportunities, receiving a stipend of nearly $600 a week for up to 10 weeks of research. The experience allows them to collaborate closely with faculty mentors, deepening those relationships as well as developing valuable skills that may serve them in their own research projects one day.

Sending Artifacts Back Home: What Does the Public Think? Elizabeth Marlowe, professor of art; director, Museum Studies Program Elizabeth Wall ’27, Addisyn Donfris ’26, Julia Bihari ’27

he first time art historian Elizabeth Marlowe was quoted in the New York Times as an expert on antiquities trafficking and repatriation, she was “over the moon.” Over the next few days, however, her excitement turned to surprise and then fascination over readers’ responses to the article. “A lot of the comments were quite hostile to the idea that museums are repatriating these objects,” she says. “That was a real eye-opener.” Over the past decade or so, consensus in the art history field has moved steadily toward an attitude of returning looted and stolen artifacts to their countries of origin. The general public, it seemed, has not followed suit. Eager to better understand the range of public opinion, Marlowe worked with student Audrey Hong ’23 and Sociology & Environmental Studies Professor Chris Henke last year to compile a database of comments on pieces from a variety of media, including the New York Times, Fox News, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and a YouTube video of stand-up comedian James Acaster. For her summer research project this year, “Art, Museums and Repatriation: An Attempt to Assess Public Opinion,” Marlowe and three advanced art history students dove deep into a qualitative analysis of the comments. Over eight weeks, the students categorized some 11,000 comments using 70 different tags representing various arguments for and against repatriation. These include righting the wrongs of colonialism, fears of a slippery slope in which museums will end up empty, or contentions that native countries lack facilities to take care of the objects. An expert on Roman art history, Marlowe first became involved in issues of repatriation when researching a particular Roman statue from the 3rd century. According to secondary sources, it had been found in a military camp in Rome. “But when I went back to try and figure out where the story of its discovery came from, it was immediately clear it wasn’t factual at all.” In fact, the story had been concocted in the 19th century to avoid export restrictions. Marlowe calls that her “Matrix moment,” where she realized that much of the received provenance information about historical objects lay on similarly shaky ground. Recently she has been investigating a group of bronze statues looted from a site in Turkey in the 1960s, helping recover them from museums around the world. By analyzing public comments around the issue of repatriation, Marlowe is hoping she and the students can help scholars and museum officials learn how to communicate better with the public about the

goals and processes involved in returning important cultural items to their countries of origin. Among other revelations, they found that humor actually seems harmful to the conversation, with the segments by Oliver and Acaster triggering little more than knee-jerk reactions based on stereotypes, regardless of whether they were pro or con. One of the students, Julia Bihari ’27, will continue analyzing the data in an independent study during the school year, with the hopes of publishing a paper in a scholarly publication such as the International Journal of Cultural Property. “It’s important for museum professionals to have a sense of the range of issues they’ll be grappling with,” Marlowe says, “so they can think about how to respond to move this conversation forward.”

Checking on Checks and Balances Annie Benn, assistant professor of political science Eli Senzel ’26, Luca Williams ’26

“My research is about bureaucratic policymaking and, in particular, the ways that Congress and the president battle for control over the policymaking that’s going to come out of that bureaucracy.”→

nyone who’s watched Schoolhouse Rock knows about the three branches of government and how they work together to pass, implement, and interpret laws. But what happens when two of those branches, Congress and the president, are at odds? “My research is about bureaucratic policymaking and, in particular, the ways that Congress and the president battle for control over the policymaking that’s going to come out of that bureaucracy,” says political scientist Annie Benn. It’s an issue that’s particularly relevant now, she says, as the presidency has taken more power away from Congress, frequently implementing policy through executive orders. “It’s important to understand the nuances of when and how Congress pushes back.” Benn looked at “Congressional Oversight of the Bureaucracy” in a pair of research projects this summer. Despite Congress’ role in passing laws, the executive branch, headed by the president, controls how policy will be implemented. Congresspeople have formal ways of affecting that policy, through public hearings, appropriations, and official communications, as well as informally through phone calls and meetings. Since many of those interactions happen behind the scenes and can take months or even years to bear fruit, however, it’s difficult for researchers to see exactly how Congress influences policy debates. “How do you trace whether a particular policy changed as a result of a hearing?” Benn asks, especially since many comments during hearings are more grandstanding and politicking than sincere attempts to impact policy. “It’s a hairy question.” Nevertheless, she has been diving into the data with the help of political science major Eli Senzel ’26, Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

who spent eight weeks this summer reading through transcripts of approximately 200 Congressional hearings about executive orders since the 1980s. Senzel was looking for concrete examples in which congresspeople have tried to affect agency behavior, and then seeing later if that behavior actually changed. “What we’re hoping to find is some understanding of the conditions under which agencies are more or less likely to do what Congress asks,” Benn explains. She suspects that they’ll find that Congress is more effective at shaping policy on narrow, particularized issues affecting their districts, while the president is more effective in having his way on broader policy implementation. “When Congress is most likely to be successful is on these local issues where they care a lot because their constituents care a lot,” she speculates. At the same time, Benn has been looking at the impact of another group in politics: the people. Luca Williams ’26, a double major in computer science and political science, developed a tool to scrape millions of public comments from the federal government’s online rulemaking portal. “When agencies go through a rulemaking process, they have to make a public

announcement, and anybody can comment on pending regulation,” Benn explains. Most public policy researchers, she says, assume that the majority of those comments are from interest groups. “But when you start poking around, you see private citizens commenting all the time,” Benn says. “It’s a sort of unrecognized phenomenon, and we want to understand when citizens are commenting, what they are saying, and whether agencies are responsive to those comments.” Williams will stay on this academic year as a research assistant, using artificial intelligence to classify the vast number of comments to understand when and how private citizens effectively influence government actions. “My hunch is that the impact of private citizens on outcomes has been undercounted,” says Benn, who hopes to author a paper on the findings with Senzel and Williams. In addition to better understanding policy, she says, this kind of direct research with original government documents can give students valuable insight into analyzing government action. “A lot of the work of government feels very abstract and hidden,” says Benn, “but it’s exciting to see how much of it is actually legible if you know how to find it.”

Digging for Answers Damhnait McHugh, Raab Family Chair and Professor of biology Zach Lightfoot ’26, Pablo Vivas Rivera ’26

he tiny French earthworm, Prosellodrilus amplisetosus, grows to be just 1 or 2 centimeters long and, until recently, was only known to inhabit the Aquitaine region of southwest France. About a decade ago, however, biologists were surprised to discover the worm in three sites in Ireland, more than 600 miles north. “They’re unassuming little creatures — quite small and not vigorous looking,” says biologist Damhnait McHugh. “So it was very surprising to find them so far from where they are otherwise known.” This past summer, McHugh worked with an international team of biologists to try to understand this mysterious migration in a research project examining the “Genetic Analysis of a Soil Dwelling Species Introduced From France to Ireland.” Along with two Colgate students, McHugh worked with colleagues in Spain applying genomics in an effort to pinpoint exactly where the worms came from and how they might have spread. Funded by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute at Colgate, the project intends not only to trace the spread of a potential invasive species, but also to examine their relationship to climate change. While the worms do not seem to directly compete with native worms, they feed on carbon deeper in the soil, potentially releasing more carbon into the atmosphere in a way that might exacerbate global warming. At the same time, their ability to thrive in Ireland might point to

38 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

← “They’re unassuming little creatures — quite small and not vigorous looking.”

changes in climate that allow their northerly expansion. McHugh first learned of the worm’s extraordinary journey at a conference in France a few years ago when Olaf Schmidt, a professor at the School of Agriculture and Food Science at University College Dublin, asked if DNA sequencing might help better understand the worm’s origins and trajectory. McHugh then traveled to Ireland to visit a UNESCO heritage site with 5,000-yearold tombs where the worms had been spotted. “We were stunned, because we found worms on every shovelful on that site,” she recalls. At another site, home to a Georgian manor and grounds, they found the same ubiquity of the species. “They were in every place we looked, whether it was the pasture, or under shrubbery, or by the riverbed.” She began sequencing a particular gene in the DNA of the worms found in Ireland and comparing it to worms found in France to try to create a family tree that could tell how recently the worms may have been introduced. “If the introduction happened quite recently, we’d expect the Ireland populations to still be very similar to those in France,” she explains. “If it happened centuries ago, it’s possible they would have diverged.” At the same time, if the Irish worms were similar to one particular spot in France, it would point to a single introduction that spread over time, versus a more varied genetic profile consistent with an ongoing migration with multiple points of introduction. This summer McHugh and the students traveled to Madrid to work with a team of colleagues who are worldwide experts in worm genomics and are spearheading the analysis. Students worked to culture worms in the lab, incubating them in soil and learning techniques to analyze the genetic material. The experience was invaluable in giving them exposure to a large research lab with professors and graduate students. “At the same time,” McHugh notes, “they could see how well resourced we are at Colgate, because we can do all of the same work back on campus.”

The data they helped gather filled in some of the gaps on the worm family tree, suggesting there may have been two separate introductions of the species from France, potentially brought in along with garden plants. “Now we can start looking at where those plants are coming from and building up evidence piece by piece,” McHugh says. As the interdisciplinary team continues to gather data, they can use that information to potentially stop future introductions of the species along with the disruptions they might cause.

Tracking Sleep and Well-Being Jennifer Tomlinson, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences; University professor, Core sciences Lauren Philbrook, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences Carlie Rzeszotarski ’26, Josephine Jenne ’27

ow well do you and your partner sleep — actually sleep — together? And what might it say about the health of your relationship? In a joint project, psychology professors Jennifer Tomlinson and Lauren Philbrook examined an oft-ignored aspect of a relationship: the eight hours or so that couples spend in bed together at night, either sleeping soundly or tossing and turning. In a project titled “Couples Who Play Together Stay Healthy Together: Shared Activities, Sleep, and Health,” they propose that the quality of a couple’s sleep at night is related to the quality of the activities they share together during the day. Tomlinson’s research is on “self-expanding activities” — that is, activities that give people an experience of challenge and excitement, expanding their knowledge, skills, and sense of self. Philbrook, meanwhile, has spent her research career looking at quality of sleep in children and teens. In conversations together, the two researchers wondered how novel activities might impact sleep of older adults in positive or negative ways. “When you are getting good sleep, it boosts your mood and physical well-being,” says Philbrook. “That might lead you to participate in activities that might also boost mood and health and then in turn be connected to your sleep. It’s an exciting intersection of our research interests.” At the same time, the majority of people are sharing a household — if not a bed — with a partner, which can also affect sleep habits. “Sleep is a dyadic process, where people are influenced by one another,” Tomlinson says. “We are thinking people will ultimately sleep better as a result of spending time and doing exciting things together.” Funded by Colgate’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, they began recruiting couples in summer 2024

and continued their research in summer 2025 with the help of Carlie Rzeszotarski ’26 and Josephine Jenne ’27. The researchers specifically chose to study couples in which at least one person was over 55, both because selfexpanding activities are understudied in this age group, and because oftentimes people develop sleep difficulties at that age (including waking up in the early morning and having trouble falling back asleep). Couples kept daily journals for 10 days of the activities they engaged in both alone and together, as well as how they slept at night. In addition, they wore so-called actigraphy watches that detected their sleep patterns. Philbrook trained the students in analyzing the actigraphy data and comparing those data points to participants’ self-reported descriptions of their sleep — even having the students wear the watches to track their own sleep and see how results could be different. “The watch and subjective reporting are correlated, but not 100% correlated,” Philbook says. “It shows in a handson way why we need multiple pieces of information to really understand what’s going on.” Between the Colgate team and collaborators at the University of Texas–Dallas, the researchers have enlisted 70 couples so far and hope to have 100 by the end of the year. Tomlinson and Philbrook have resisted temptations to peek at the data, but a former student, Claudia Coolidge ’25, did use some of it for her thesis last year, finding positive correlations between quality of sleep and subjective feelings of well-being. Jenne and Rzeszotarski are continuing to work on the study as research assistants, gathering and analyzing the data to the point where it will hopefully result in a series of papers. “It’s been really helpful for them to understand everything that goes into the research process — because you read studies in class and don’t necessarily realize how much goes into each data point,” Tomlinson says. “This really makes it come alive.”

← “Sleep is a dyadic process, where people are influenced by one another.”

creating a warm campus environment in summertime Colgate is a vibrant place during the summer months. This past season, for example, there were approximately 200 students conducting research with faculty mentors, and a handful of other groups were also on campus for various purposes. Among these groups there were student-athletes sharpening their skills, sustainability interns tending to the Community Garden and managing environmental initiatives, and international students who stayed on campus rather than returning home. To connect students and create a cohesive environment, University offices coordinated efforts, offering an array of opportunities for students to build community. Off-campus outings, boating, and barbecues balanced out intellectual engagement such as Career Services’ microcredential seminars, a writing workshop, an eco-art event, and group dialogue. “While students live and work in Hamilton in the summer, it is important that they don’t remain siloed but that they have opportunities to interact and build community with each other to exchange ideas and learn about what others are working on,” says Karyn Belanger, co-director of the Center for Learning, Teaching, and Research, who supports students in her role coordinating summer research.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

MARK DIORIO

40 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Expected A deep calling compels Solomon Tesfaye ’15 to give voice to his journey as a refugee — celebrating both the hardships and the joy.

L to R: Tesfaye on a stroll with his mother, Zelalem, in the refugee camp; Tesfaye with his father, Gezahgne, and his sister, Feben, at a playground in Sana’a, Yemen; Tesfaye reading a speech at church in Sana’a

By Solomon Tesfaye ’15, as told to Aleta Mayne

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

was born into displacement. Everyone else, including my parents, had memories of home, of a country and a flag they could call their own, of relatives and an identity that wasn’t defined by displacement and deprivation. The camp was the only thing I knew. I was the only child there. The other refugees had chosen not to bring children into that life, but my parents believed my birth was God’s will. Because I was the only child, the entire camp became my guardians — Somali refugees, navy men from Ethiopia, aunties and uncles who weren’t blood but who kept me alive. There were no real walls, no schools; only tattered tents and a building to distribute rations. Yet to me, it was a world: there were herds of goats in the pastures, countless people who loved me as if I were their own and took me from one end of the mountain to the next; there was a church, and music and parties to celebrate my birthday and the passing of time. Everything I know about resilience began in that place. My parents met at the camp, having found themselves there for different yet similar reasons. Both escaped Ethiopia during the civil war in the 1990s. My mother ended up at the refugee camp after my maternal grandfather, a member of the intelligentsia who was the minister of finance in the city of Harar, died in prison during the civil war. Soon after, many of my mother’s siblings died, too, of illness and other tragic circumstances. My mother and her remaining siblings were forced to fend for themselves. Everyone went separate ways; my mother fled to Yemen in the hopes

“To me, it was a world: there were herds of goats in the pastures, countless people who loved me as if I were their own and took me from one end of the mountain to the next; there was a church, and music and parties to celebrate my birthday and the passing of time.”

→

Tesfaye playing with his “goat friends” in the refugee camp in Taizz, Yemen

←

With one of his aunties at the camp

←

Tesfaye’s father, Gezahgne (second from right), with other sailors from the Ethiopian Navy

42 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

of finding better work opportunities so she could earn money to send home and one day return. My father was in the Ethiopian navy, but when the Derg (military junta) overthrew the government, my father and his shipmates were told: “Leave, or you will be executed.” So they, too, fled to Yemen. The Yemeni government was gracious enough to welcome them and set up the camp. I tell my story because it deserves to be told. Not to hold myself up as an inspirational figure, but because I believe I was called to share it. My hope is that the story itself — and the characters who carried me from a Yemeni refugee camp to Colgate — can inspire others. By every statistic, I wasn’t supposed to survive past my 1st birthday. The odds of making it from that camp to a graduation were, rounded to a whole number, zero. Yet I lived — past one year, past five, past decades (I won’t share how many so as not to date myself, but you get the point). Each milestone has been a miracle. Every year, a gift. And to whom much is given, much is expected.

Chasing Goats My earliest memories are of taking walks with my parents in the camp. Because it was high in the mountains, nomads would go near the camp to feed their goats in the pastures. I liked chasing the goats, and I remember one particular goat (I don’t know where he is these days, but he and I didn’t really get along). He used to chase me around, and one time he kicked me hard with his hind legs when I was trying to grab his tail. As he chased me and I stumbled and cried, my uncles and aunties in the camp would point and laugh like they were watching a comedy special. I call them aunties and uncles in the traditional Ethiopian way, but we weren’t related. (I didn’t meet any of my distant relatives until 2017, during my first visit to Ethiopia.) The people I consider to be my aunties and uncles are my mother’s friends and the soldiers who were in the navy with my father. They helped raise me. When I was 5 years old, my parents decided we should leave, in large part because they thought, “This boy needs to go to school, meet other children, and have some semblance of a normal life.” Up until that point, my learning was like homeschooling but not in the structured sense. My parents and the people in the camp taught me Amharic and a bit of Arabic; my uncles taught me how to play chess, as well as a bit of math and science from whatever they remembered.

“I tell my story because it deserves to be told. Not to hold myself up as an inspirational figure, but because I believe I was called to share it. My hope is that the story itself — and the characters who carried me from a Yemeni refugee camp to Colgate — can inspire others.”

A celebration of Tesfaye’s 2nd birthday in the refugee camp

Tesfaye’s father, Gezahgne (far left), eating with friends at the camp

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

On school days, Tesfaye spent more than an hour traveling via train, bus, and foot to get to his private high school from the projects in Buffalo.

↑

Of course, it wasn’t easy to establish a new life. My parents had to save up for several years, putting aside money from my father’s odd jobs in nearby cities and the injera (flatbread) my mother sold around camp. We found an apartment for us and a couple of family friends — six people in a two-bedroom apartment, because no one could afford their own place — in the capital city of Sana’a.

→

His parents, Gezahgne Derseh and Zelalem Gemmeda, own Abyssinia Ethiopian Cuisine restaurant at the International House Buffalo.

My uncles and aunties warned me that the Yemeni townspeople discriminated against us as refugees and that this was an Islamic country, so I should be prepared to be discriminated against for my Christian faith too. They said, “This isn’t the camp, so when you’re in school or out in the neighborhood, outside of our protection, you have to be careful.” We also had to practice our faith in private; I wasn’t allowed to tell others that we went to church or where it was because of police raids. I first went to the public school in Sana’a, which

44 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

included religious education and studying the Quran. Even though I’m a Christian, Quran was one of my favorite subjects. I was very good at memorizing entire chapters of it and had perfect scores on my exams. I was even encouraged by my teachers (word had spread around the school) to participate in Quran memorization competitions around the Middle East. I remember my teacher asking me to stand in front of the class while she reprimanded the other students, saying, “How is this Christian boy better than you at your own religion? This is a shame.” Obviously I wasn’t a very popular kid because of that. I loved learning the Quran and growing up in an interfaith context because I saw a lot of commonalities between my own Christian faith and Islam. But all the anger, all the hate, all the violence between Christians and Muslims confused me. I remember thinking in church once about how we have the same values as Muslims, the same idols and similar proverbs as the Quran. My own name is found in both (Suleyman), just a different pronunciation. I asked my parents, “Why do the Muslim boys hate me? They also believe in one God like us, they also have a Moses and a David in their stories … so how can that be?” Defending Our Rights I was a strong student and my mother received good feedback from my teachers, so she wanted to enroll me in private school. She had a secretarial job at a hospital, and a doctor she worked for told her about a Canadian international school in Sana’a where I could apply for a scholarship. I started going there when I was 11, for my last two years in Yemen.

MARK DIORIO (3)

Tesfaye’s fourth grade report card from his first school in Sana'a, Yemen

Because it was an international school, it was a liberal contrast to my previous school where girls and boys were divided and sat opposite each other, and all the girls were forced to wear a niqab, or face veil. The international school, by virtue of the fact that most of the student body was non-Arab and not Muslim, was more accepting and a better fit for me. In my neighborhood, however, I still faced much abuse. The word they used to describe me and my family means “slaves” in Arabic, referring to the menial labor jobs that were the only employment opportunities available for refugees. I remember hiding my cross under my shirt whenever I walked home alone. My mother likes to joke that she got to know all of our neighbors because of me. I used to get in so many fights with all the older boys that she had to knock on our neighbors’ doors to say, “Can you ask your son not to beat up my son anymore?” The abuse wasn’t only pointed toward me, but also my uncles. We would go to a store and people would spit on them. The policemen were abusive and corrupt. They hassled members of our community, demanding bribe money to be left alone. My dad and uncles had difficulty finding work because they weren’t officially recognized by the government and couldn’t apply for a lot of jobs. They also couldn’t own any property, and we had no rights. I recall my teacher asking me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I said, “I think I want to be a doctor.” She replied, “You’ll need to go to university for that, but you can’t go to university here. You’re a refugee.” It was a big shock for me, realizing that being a refugee meant being deprived of many things, including a right to education in this country. To protest the ways in which refugees were being treated, my father and uncles joined hundreds in a sit-in in front of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) building. They were arrested and imprisoned for several months, even though it was a peaceful protest. My mother is an entrepreneur, and she’d opened up a restaurant at the Ethiopian Community Center. We struggled when my dad was in prison, but not as much as we would have before the restaurant. Other community members came to assist; they supported those who were affected, and that eased the burden a bit. After school I would help out at the restaurant. On the weekends, my mother and I visited my father and uncles in jail, bringing them food. As a child, it was traumatic for me to see the people I love most in that setting and to see so many bodies held in captivity that way. The protesters’ efforts eventually paid off because it gave the situation visibility, and UNHCR and the Yemeni government started granting refugees asylum. Adjusting to Change I was 13 when our asylum cases were finally granted; refugees were able to go to different countries based on their applications. On one of the forms, we were given choices of cities where we could move. My mother told my father to leave it blank because she wanted to go wherever God would take us. I’m not sure if it was God’s choice (in fact I’m sure it wasn’t, because why would God not choose London or

“It was a big shock for me, realizing that being a refugee meant being deprived of many things.”

↓

At The Park School in Buffalo, where he attended high school

Melbourne?), but alas, we landed in Buffalo, N.Y. There, Catholic Charities gave us an apartment, language classes, and a second chance. I started at a public school, which surprisingly had a lot of international immigrant students: Somalis, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Burmese. The school placed me in an ESL class, even though I’d already learned English from my time at the Canadian International School. Also, I loved American TV; I used to watch The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and 24 with my mother. I even had a Walkman with a tape of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album. So thanks to 50, Will Smith, and Jack Bauer’s varied use of the language, my English was pretty good. I remember telling my mom, “They’re teaching us how to spell words like ‘apple’ in school. It’s childish and disrespectful.” My mother’s friend Auntie Almaz introduced me to a benefactor who made it possible for me to earn a scholarship to a private school in Buffalo called The Park School, and my educational path trajectory was forever changed. This benefactor set up a conversation with the administration, I took an entrance exam, and I was interviewed by some of the teachers. One of them asked me about geopolitics, but the great thing about being a refugee is that I’m well versed in geopolitics by disposition rather than intellectual curiosity — my life is defined by it. He was impressed by my knowledge and advocated for me to be enrolled. My public school teachers wrote amazing recommendation letters, so I was accepted and received a full scholarship (thanks to the benefactor who sponsored my scholarship). When our time in the apartment set up by Catholic Charities expired, it was too expensive for us to stay, so we moved to the projects on the west side of Buffalo. The school was in the northeast section of the city, and we didn’t have a car at the time, so I had to learn how to navigate public transportation. I’d catch the 5:30 a.m. bus, ride 25 minutes to the train station, take a train 25 minutes to the last stop, take another bus for 15 minutes, and then walk 10 minutes to the school. Sitting in homeroom one day, one of my classmates said to me, “Dude, I’m so exhausted. I just woke up 30 minutes ago.” I’m like, “I’ve been up since 5 a.m.” I thought it was so unfair, but my indignation fed my resilience and perseverance. It gave me the motivation to do even better in school. The Park School was an amazing educational opportunity, but it was difficult at first. Private school was a bigger adjustment than America itself. The students spoke differently than the kids in public school, they wrote essays differently than I’d been taught before, and there was a lot more critical thinking. I didn’t do very well in the beginning, but I learned to adjust quickly (a superpower that comes from being a refugee), and I was taking AP courses Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

“Each draft carried the weight of memory and trauma, but also the joy and laughter that defined our survival. The book became a mirror. It showed me not just what we endured, but also how much we built in the in-between spaces — between nations and political identities, between faiths, between identities.”

to set me up for college applications — including AP English, having been in ESL just a couple of years back. Mentors and Opportunities at Colgate Knowing my financial situation, my guidance counselor suggested I apply to Colgate, telling me, “It has great scholarships.” I applied, was accepted, and I did get a scholarship. We could only afford one college visit, so that was the one. When my mother and I went for prospective student weekend, she said, “It’s perfect.” She was happy that there were minimal distractions relative to the schools in major cities. I was part of the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) Scholars Program, and I took Intro to Neuroscience with Professor Jun Yoshino that summer. I love neuroscience because I have a huge interest in understanding people and how our minds work. It’s also a way for me to understand my history as a refugee. Why did these things happen? Why do people treat each other this way? What leads to our actions and motivations? Professor Yoshino’s class really opened my eyes, explaining it from a molecular and behavioral standpoint. My thesis adviser was Professor Spencer Kelly, who became an academic father figure and a role model of the kind of man I would like to be. My research was about how our nonverbal communication is an expression of implicit bias. It was a testament to the

46 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

really cool research students can do at Colgate with brilliant professors. I also minored in Islamic studies to keep in touch with my Middle Eastern heritage as well as my Arabic language and knowledge. I took Arabic classes with Professor Nady Abdal-Ghaffar, an amazing teacher who loved to yell at me as soon as he saw me walk into class, because he knew I probably didn’t do the homework. He’s Egyptian, so we connected. My classmates would say, “What did you do to make him this mad at you?” I’d explain that it was cultural: “This is normal dialogue. He actually likes me.” My work-study was at Case Library, and I had to file a lot of books (too many) over the three years that I worked there. Maybe that’s subconsciously where my interest in literature came from, because I was surrounded by books all the time. I worked a lot of shifts to earn money, and that’s also where I studied. Colgate let me travel and explore the world in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to. I did a semester in Cardiff, Wales, with Professor Scott Kraly. I went to Egypt with Professor Nady for a winter exchange program. And I did a State Department program in Oman, studying Arabic and Middle Eastern history. It was such a blessing to go to Colgate because, without that experience, my life wouldn’t be what it is today, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I had.

andrew daddio

A Nerd’s Disney World After graduation I had a bit of an existential crisis. My original goal was to become a neurosurgeon. But the endless years of training — and the burden of debt that came with it — terrified me. Having grown up in extreme poverty, I knew too well that this amount of debt could strangle a life before it could even begin. I found my way into the consulting space because it allowed me to use the research skills I learned at Colgate. It was demanding work, requiring me to dedicate long hours and sometimes sleep on my office floor, but I can honestly say it helped me grow personally and professionally in ways I could have never imagined. Soon after, I realized that rather than working to increase the profit margins of a Fortune 100 company, I wanted to do social impact work. I liked the work I did, but I wanted to do it for something that was meaningful to me. As an extension of my behavioral neuroscience degree, I became interested in behavioral economics and public policy. I applied to Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton — although I was hesitant to apply because I didn’t think I could get in. I remember expressing my uncertainty to a colleague, telling him, “Everyone who was admitted the previous year has perfect scores. They speak at least four languages.” He joked, “Well, you speak three and a half, so you’re close.” The belief that my Colgate mentors instilled in me helped a lot too. Professor Kelly wrote one of my recommendation letters, and I was almost embarrassed reading it, because he thought much more highly of me than I did. I was accepted to every school I applied to, and Princeton offered me a full scholarship as well as a stipend. It felt like a statement — that they wanted to invest in me and my education. God gave me that opportunity, and I took it. Attending Princeton for graduate school was the best choice I could have made. I was able to have dinner with Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of one of my favorite books, Thinking, Fast and Slow; he was the reason I applied to Princeton in the first place. I had engaging conversations with other amazing thinkers like Cornel West, who gave me inspirational words in the form of riddles, like “your vocation is in your voice, young man.” (I still don’t know what that means.) I even had debates with Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Biden administration, about topics I’d just learned that semester. It felt like a nerd’s Disney World. I learned a lot; the courses were challenging but also rewarding and exciting. For my research paper, “Preventing Violent Extremism in the Horn of Africa,” I traveled to London to talk to the Kenyan ambassador and members of the UK’s National Security Council. It was a very rewarding and important piece of research for me as an Ethiopian. I also spent a summer internship working for UNICEF in Ivory Coast. Writing Through the In-Between Princeton is also where I met other refugees. When I shared my story, they all gave me the same response: “Your life story sounds like a movie. God didn’t bring you here

“My life was never just about tragedy. It was also the ecstasy of playing soccer in the rain, the indignation of uncles arguing over politics, the fierce laughter of my mother, the comedy of chasing goats in a mountain pasture. It was hardship and beauty braided together.”

↓

Talking with novelist Carrie Brown at the 2022 Colgate Writers’ Conference

For more info or to get in touch, visit elsoloo.com.

just to bring you here. You have to share this with others.” I started to consider the idea of writing a book then, and it felt like a God-given calling. At first I resisted. I’d never written anything beyond research papers and policy briefs, and I had a litany of excuses: English is my third language, I have other career ambitions, I don’t know the industry, I have no road map. But the more I tried to ignore it, the more insistent the pull became. For the past five years, I’ve been working on a novel tentatively titled In-Between Worlds. It’s a coming-of-age story rooted in my journey, but told through a fictional character — because fiction allows me to both honor my family’s truth and reach for something universal. The process has been anything but easy. I interviewed my parents and camp survivors, dug up stories my parents tried to forget, and relived moments I, myself, had buried. Each draft carried the weight of memory and trauma, but also the joy and laughter that defined our survival. The book became a mirror. It showed me not just what we endured, but also how much we built in the in-between spaces — between nations and political identities, between faiths, between identities. I hold on stubbornly to that vision. Through pandemics, through personal losses, through the rejection letters that stack up for any new writer, I’ve refused to let go. InBetween Worlds deserves its readership. Refugee children deserve to see more than despair reflected back at them. And policymakers deserve to be reminded that their decisions shape individual lives like mine. Most importantly, the world deserves to see the joy in our stories. Too often refugee narratives are flattened into vignettes of destitution. My life was never just about tragedy. It was also the ecstasy of playing soccer in the rain, the indignation of uncles arguing over politics, the fierce laughter of my mother, the comedy of chasing goats in a mountain pasture. It was hardship and beauty braided together. That is what I want the novel — and one day, God willing, a film or show — to capture. Through my recent PEN America Emerging Voices fellowship, mentors helped me refine the work and prepare it for publication. I’ve workshopped In-Between Worlds at the Colgate Writers’ Conference, Sewanee, and Tin House. I’ve studied the craft relentlessly. Now I’m praying for the doors to open — for the right publisher, the right producer, the right partner who believes this story matters enough that they also want to see it through. To whom much is given, much is expected. This story was given to me. And I intend to carry it as far as it can go. — Solomon Tesfaye ’15 was recently given a Spotify x JED Impact award for unpublished stories featuring exceptional depictions of mental health. Professionally, Tesfaye works in management consulting, overseeing a portfolio of projects for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency on enterprise risk management and operational efficiency. Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression in Colgate’s Third Century Can disagreements strengthen community? Discuss. — By MARK WALDEN —

very fall, incoming Colgate undergraduates receive a stack of printed material. There’s a student handbook, a manual for student organizations, and a move-in guide. There are info sheets from Student Health Services and campus safety. And there is a booklet on academic freedom and freedom of expression, referencing faculty and administrative statements on faculty-student rights and responsibilities dating back to the late 1960s. It includes Colgate’s most recent statement on academic freedom and freedom of expression. Debates over freedom of expression and academic freedom on U.S. campuses go back centuries — to America’s founding era. They have taken on great significance in the

48 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

wake of recent global and national events. The general public and even some higher education institutions might have been caught off guard by this increased attention to matters of speech, but Colgate was not among them. Colgate has a long history of engagement with these issues. The faculty approved a statement on students’ freedom of inquiry in 1974. Campus expression was again explored by faculty and the Student Government Association (SGA) in 1980. Upon President Brian W. Casey’s arrival in 2016, and following his charge to a task force, the University undertook an intensive effort to articulate even more plainly its principles concerning freedom of expression, not simply as a bureaucratic exercise but as a community endeavor that goes to the heart of the University.

Mark Diorio (Kelly); Jason smith (casey)

In winter 2017, President Casey was settling into office as Colgate’s 17th president. In the nation’s capital, America’s 45th president was also beginning his term. The U.S. election that brought Donald Trump into the White House was divisive and triggered heated nationwide debates over political, social, and economic issues. Protests and walkouts took place on campuses across the country, and in March of that year, protestors at Middlebury College injured a professor who was moderating an event with political scientist Charles Murray. Within this national context, Colgate was busy. There was a bicentennial to plan, and Casey intended to use that moment to propel Colgate into the future by drafting with the campus a long-term road map for the University’s third century. This would require the Colgate community — faculty, staff, students, and alumni — to commit itself to sustained, generational development across all areas of the University. But current events could not be ignored. General encouragement toward openness and expression aside, the University had little specific guidance on how community members should conduct themselves when engaged in heated disagreements. Even the foundations for such guidelines were reopened for discussion: What constitutes free speech and freedom of expression on today’s private college campus? How does it contribute to or detract from the academic mission and from student life? Was divisive argument bad for a community? Meanwhile, the Chicago Principles of Free Expression were the center of attention in higher education circles. This broad positioning statement was published in 2016 under the leadership of Casey’s longtime mentor, Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago 2006–21, with whom Casey worked at Brown University. In the months and years that followed, a number of colleges and universities adopted the Chicago Principles as their own. “I saw drafts long before they became public,” Casey remembers. “Bob said, ‘Colgate should sign on to the Chicago Principles.’ I said that simply adopting someone else’s principles would not be effective. An institution has to wrestle with this on its own; we have to do our own work.” That work began in summer 2017 when Casey charged the faculty, Board of Trustees, and Alumni Council to elect delegates and form a Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression. He asked the president of the SGA to join as well, and Casey tapped Professor Spencer Kelly to serve as chair — Kelly was already leading the Academic Freedom Committee for Colgate’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Kelly was known

Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Neuroscience Spencer Kelly is the Hurley Family Chair in dialogue, deliberation, and decision making, as well as chair of the Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.

to host “speakeasies” at the Colgate Inn, where one or two faculty members began a conversation on a topic (e.g., civility, the purpose of the University, or biblical marriage) before guests broke into small groups for further dialogue. Casey’s decision was risky. There were plenty of other initiatives that could absorb the community’s focus. “It didn’t strike me

as a bad idea, but it did feel a little bit idiosyncratic,” says Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing, then a rank-and-file faculty member. “Learning about him as a leader and how much he had been influenced by Bob Zimmer, it made more sense because this is an intellectual legacy that he inherited. Then it became an interesting thing to think about: How do you do this when the topic itself is potentially so fraught?” The president was determined, and his charge to the task force was clear: “Academic freedom and freedom of expression being central to the academic mission of Colgate University and to the enterprise of higher education generally, the Colgate Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression is charged with reviewing the history of academic freedom and freedom of expression policies and developments at Colgate University and drafting a statement on academic freedom and the freedom of expression as it relates to all sectors of the University’s community. The task force will recommend the statement for consideration by the faculty, the Board of Trustees, and the Student Government Association.”

“An institution has to wrestle with this on its own; we have to do our own work.” — president brian W. Casey

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

“I wanted to be a part of the institutional voice task force because I wanted us to start with remembering what a university is for — what is our mission?” — Professor Spencer Kelly

50 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

of values should point directly to it. But what are Colgate’s values? The committee members came from a variety of backgrounds, worked in a variety of disciplines, and had their own perspectives, but they coalesced around “empathy, curiosity, warmth of spirit, concern for others, and pride in our community.” The Chicago Principles hold that a nearly absolute free marketplace of ideas is the highest ideal and caution against restricting

Associate Professor of Religion Jenna Reinbold is chair of the Task Force on Institutional Voice.

Mark Diorio

Eight faculty members, one senior staff member, three trustees, and the SGA president began weekly meetings in pursuit of their mission. Taking a page from former Chief Justice Earl Warren’s playbook, Kelly didn’t jump right into the issue at hand. He spent time building community within the committee. “I made a strategic decision early on,” he says, “to invest heavily in getting to know each other and where we were coming from — why we were interested in being part of this committee.” When that was done, Kelly asked the committee to take another moment to reflect. “Before we talked about academic freedom and freedom of expression at Colgate,” he says, “we had to step back and ask, ‘What is our goal at Colgate as a university?’” In search of an answer, they read and dissected the “13 Goals of a Colgate Education” as well as the University’s mission statement. Neither source gave them a single response to the question, but both documents pointed toward a direction on which all committee members could agree: Colgate should aim to create and share knowledge. “It might sound obvious,” Kelly says, “but if you talk to enough people, you realize even that can be controversial.” For example, creating and sharing knowledge does not equate to the pursuit of social justice, which some members of the community endorse as a goal of a university and others do not. If the creation and sharing of knowledge was the North Star, Colgate’s constellation

speech in the name of other values, such as empathy, sensitivity, and care. But while members of Colgate’s task force agreed that unfettered freedom of expression was of paramount importance, they also had a more nuanced perspective. What about our values around community and care? “We saw these values not as competitors to free expression but conditions that can strengthen it,” Kelly says. Embracing values helps us consider others’ perspectives more fully, making speech more likely to land well. Conversely, when these values are absent, speech can miss its mark — or worse, disrupt understanding and learning. “It was heavy,” Kelly says about the task force process. “There were emotions, and it was not a light deliberation.” Yet members met each other where they were, found points of commonality, and grounded themselves in their shared love of education and Colgate. They did their reading. They argued and persuaded, met with special guests, held forums, and modeled the behavior they were trying to describe. When it came time to write the report — an initial version was drafted by Board of Trustees Vice Chair Michael Herling ’79, P’08,’09,’12, who would go on to chair the board — the parameters had been established. Apply Colgate’s values to its purpose, while setting freedom of expression as a priority, and you have a shared commitment “to learning, inquiry, and community that encourages individuals to listen and speak with care, so that all voices among us are heard.”

The Report of the Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression was approved by the Board of Trustees, the faculty, and the SGA in the fall of Colgate’s Bicentennial year, 2018–19. It affirmed Colgate’s commitment to ensuring that every member of the community has the right to explore ideas and questions to the fullest, regardless of whether those ideas and questions are offensive to others. It also clarified that Colgate reserves the right to limit public speech based on considerations of time, place, and manner to ensure the continuity of University operations. Threats or incitement to violence, punishable under Colgate’s academic code of conduct, could not be confused with academic inquiry and free expression. It also said that Colgate needed to commit itself to the care of members of the community. It saw these values — free expression and community care — as conditions that the University had to tend to. It needed to do both. In these ways, Colgate’s report finds inspiration in the Chicago Principles. But Colgate did its own work, basing its intentions on the University’s particular mission and the values of its distinctive community of scholars. Institutional Voice “When we finished the task force, there were some people who felt that our work was done,” Kelly says. “But the report didn’t solve any problems. It just gave us a way to handle problems in the future.” One facet of those problems inverted the question of individual freedom of expression and academic freedom, applying it instead to the institution. George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel all presented moments when the public looked to institutions and brands for general statements of support. “Before George Floyd, we really weren’t talking about that as often,” says Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin II. “Then it felt like you needed to say something about everything. Spotify was telling me something, Target, Hulu — any business that I was doing business with felt the need to tell me how they felt about something.” By 2024 many of those institutions were retreating to a place of neutrality. “I am often called upon to issue statements on many topics on behalf of the University, some dealing with current events and political matters, others in recognition of historical milestones,” Casey wrote to the campus community at the beginning of the 2024–25 academic year. “It is time

to consider the usefulness and wisdom of such statements and to consider the effect they might have on academic freedom and discourse on the campus. When should Colgate use its institutional voice or speak to matters beyond the campus?” Again, Casey used governance structures to assemble a task force of community members who would consider the question. The group was chaired by Professor Jenna Reinbold, and it was a good fit — Reinbold’s research focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, and culture-war controversies. She regularly exchanges ideas and delves into differing perspectives with political science professor Tim Byrnes, the Peter L. Kellner Third Century Chair in philosophy, politics, and economics, in front of their respective classes to model intellectual dialogue. The Task Force on Institutional Voice met weekly, and, like the original Task Force on Freedom of Expression, it comprised a number of diverse voices and opinions. Like its predecessor, it started by reviewing available documents, including the “13 Goals of a Colgate Education” and Colgate’s mission statement. It leaned heavily on the academic freedom and freedom of expression report. The name of the task force was intentional. Other universities and companies were issuing neutrality statements, but “there’s a benefit to refuting the idea that institutions of higher education are radically neutral in some way,” says Reinbold. “I think it’s untrue, and I think it’s problematic to imagine that somehow there are no values built into what we do as an institution.” She wasn’t alone. According to Reinbold, the committee quickly concluded that, far from being neutral, Colgate was home to thousands of opinions, wide-ranging expertise, and lived experiences that informed an abundance of perspectives and perceptions. Furthermore, the University, by its own admission, prepares students for engagement with the outside world in all of its complexity, and ignoring current events erodes the quality of a Colgate education. But what did that acknowledgment demand of Colgate? “Some wondered if there was remedial work that needed to be done because institutions of higher education had already spoken so vociferously in favor of certain kinds of values and not others — should Colgate make statements on absolutely everything? What does it mean to do that remedial work?” Reinbold says. But through its deliberations, the committee came to agree that this road did not necessarily lead to clarity.

freedom of expression at colgate Check out some of the texts that have informed debate over freedom of expression and academic freedom at Colgate in recent years: Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech This book takes a look at the institutional perils of suppressing free speech on campus — written by constitutional law expert Keith Whittington, the David Boies Professor of law at Yale Law School and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy and administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Obama administration, reviews the legalities around free speech on college campuses. Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life Lara Schwartz is a civil discourse expert, instructor, and the founding director of the Project on Civil Discourse at American University. Her book is a long-form letter to new college students (and their professors), with descriptions and definitions of the concepts that make up freedom of expression and academic freedom on college campuses. I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times According to Cushing, this book by journalist Mónica Guzmán helps with “thinking about the polarization of America and how places like Colgate can push against it by giving faculty better tools for encouraging difficult conversations in their classrooms as appropriate.”

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

52 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing (end of table), the Mark S. Siegel University Professor in religion and Jewish studies, hosts salons in her Kendrick Street residence. Here faculty and staff members engage with ideas and with each other, embodying the spirit behind the report on academic freedom and freedom of expression.

deliberating, and drafting, Reinbold was teaching a course on theories and methods in the study of religion. The class included discussion on the role and presence of religion in American politics, and the two parts of her life would sometimes bleed together. “It turned into a little bit of a teaching moment,” Reinbold says. “They had lots of questions about what it means to create educational venues. Who does the work of making these venues happen — which I think is a great question. I reminded them that at least one of the venues in which it happens is literally where we are in the classroom.” Beyond Reports “This is an institution that doesn’t just want to create reports and statements,” says McLoughlin. “We want to make sure that the way people are living and experiencing this place — as a student, a faculty member, a staff member — that they have a sense of freedom of expression. They know what academic freedom is and what it isn’t.” In tandem with the Task Force on Institutional Voice, Casey formed a working group, led by Cushing and McLoughlin, to review Colgate’s various policies and handbooks to ensure that they are in keeping with the Report of the Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression. They have also been asked to take the original task force report and, with input Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin II

from members of that group, publish a document that clearly encapsulates and articulates its important points for all University audiences. There are practical considerations to address when moving from reports to University policies. The task force wrote about the University’s guiding philosophy on freedom of expression; it didn’t offer a list of do’s and don’ts. What exactly are the times, places, and manners that prompt restrictions? “If you were to say something that in any other context might be protected under the First Amendment, it actually could keep you from being a good campus safety officer, for example,” says McLoughlin. “So there are limits to what people can say in the workplace. But, by and large, we want people to understand that when we say ‘We want you to be authentically you,’ we mean it.” Furthermore, the task force encouraged toleration of offensive speech, but “certain kinds of offensive language are actually encoded in New York State law as grounds for sanction,” says Cushing. “[The task force was] saying ‘offensive’ in the colloquial sense — offensive shouldn’t be grounds for censoring something. So we are trying to thread that needle.” Threading the needle has required, yet again, a collective trip back to purpose, mission, and values. “Our values are that we live in community with one another and we owe each other respect and thoughtful consideration of each other’s views,” Cushing says. “But we owe ourselves the ability to push back against ideas that we think are intellectually unsound or sometimes morally suspect.” The working group developed its own reading list to deepen and broaden its thinking. In particular, members have turned to legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s book Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide for clarity on what is required and what is preferred when developing concrete guidelines for

Mark Diorio (3)

In the end, they came back to the same framework outlined by the freedom of expression task force. In fact, says Kelly, “I wanted to be a part of the institutional voice task force because I wanted us to start with remembering what a university is for — what is our mission? When you talk about institutional voice, whatever you say has to be relevant to what you are.” Colgate community members are empathetic. They pursue knowledge, and they share it. That said, “I have colleagues who are much better informed about certain things that are going on in the world than I am,” Reinbold says. “I would never presume to speak on those things when I know that I work with experts. We should all have a little bit of that attitude.” If the University itself speaks with a single voice on any topic, some of its experts could find themselves at odds with the institution and think twice before following their intellectual curiosity down certain paths. It could make them wary of presenting contrary facts in classrooms, seminars, and meetings. What if community members initially agreed with an institutional statement but then changed their minds based on available evidence? Could Colgate University change its mind too? In the end, the Task Force on Institutional Voice focused on Colgate’s purpose as a place that pursues knowledge and encourages lively, respectful conversations. In their report, members called on the president not to speak for the entire University, but rather to ensure that there were ample opportunities to discuss issues, learn from experts, and understand deeply. In its final report, accepted by the president in 2024, the task force stated, “While individuals have freedom of expression as members of this community, it is our recommendation that Colgate’s institutional voice be used solely for the promotion and support of educational venues … except in circumstances where the specific operations of the University are directly affected.” This is not neutrality. It is an acknowledgment of intellectual vitality. “Rather than reducing the diversity of campus perspectives to one institutional statement — which risks marginalizing some voices and limiting open, rigorous, and ongoing inquiry,” the task force writes, “the University should actively facilitate such open inquiry throughout our campus. This approach leverages the expertise of faculty and the insights of the broader community — students, staff, alumni — while remaining responsive to the collective knowledge and needs of all.” While her task force was debating,

ON THE MENU: A CHANCE TO CONNECT

Each semester students, professors, and staff members gather in the Hall of Presidents for a meal and guided conversations, sponsored by the Division of the Dean of the College. Participants take up challenging topics listed on cards. Here are a few examples to encourage discourse at your own dinner table: debate and discourse. Kelly, Reinbold, and other task force members are serving as expert resources as the working group moves closer to a completed statement, which will be issued prior to the 2026 academic year. Cushing has found ways to bring the entire campus into the thought process. She offered copies of Cass’ book to any faculty or staff member interested in reading it and set up a series of salons to facilitate campuswide conversation on the contents. It’s a model she has followed up with other books, including Try to Love the Questions, by American University’s Lara Schwartz, and I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, by Mónica Guzmán. On multiple occasions, a dozen teachers and administrators might

Maura Tumulty was part of a group of professors who reviewed best practices for civil discourse in the classroom.

→ What belief or value has most shaped how you see the world, and how has personal experience, data, or tradition influenced or challenged it over time?

→ Should the U.S. have a moral responsibility to intervene in global conflicts, or should we focus on problems at home first?

→ What’s a time when your perspective shifted after hearing someone else’s story or opinion?

→ Can artificial intelligence ever be truly ethical, or is bias and inequality always built into the code?

→ What role should colleges play in protecting or limiting speech that some find offensive or uncomfortable?

→ Where is the line between protest and disruption, and who gets to decide when an act crosses it?

be gathered around a lunch table in Merrill House or the dining room of the provost’s residence on Kendrick Avenue, debating the best ways to draw students into productive interactions, both with course content and with each other. She also hosts salon dinners on other topics, walking the walk, in a way. “The only rule during those dinners is that we stay as one conversation,” she says. “It gives you ways to think about [debate and discourse] when you go back to your classroom — what worked in that setting?” Why Wait? Brainstorming slates of texts that could be used in the Core Conversations track, Professor of Philosophy Maura Tumulty and her faculty colleagues Liz Marlowe and Ferdinand von Muench were fascinated by

the 1789 French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” That particular text was not chosen as an official part of the program, but Tumulty brought it into her own classroom, later alongside the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Colgate’s task force report, as a way to engage her students on free speech and freedom of expression. She quickly realized that there was a fundamental misunderstanding among many of her pupils. “A number of students seemed to be thinking that, if they were hearing faculty praising freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry, those faculty were praising the idea that they can literally do whatever they want in their classrooms verbally,” Tumulty says. “They weren’t thinking about the difference between the First Amendment — what I can shout on the town square, which is really expansive — and educational norms, Colgate’s mission, or even educational law.” In truth, academic freedom allows faculty members to speak broadly and without restraint on those topics within the sphere of their discipline. It ensures that they have the freedom to conduct research and teach courses without the worry that an administration, a dean, or any other authority will be displeased with their line of inquiry. If a chemistry professor, however, decides to deviate from the syllabus to spend 50 minutes opining on race relations in the American South, University censure is a possibility. Restrictions on time, place, and manner apply to faculty too. Tumulty gives students the comic example of trying to teach a philosophy course, only to be interrupted by an improv theater class entering the classroom and doing warm-up exercises. “I’m empowered to say, ‘Beloved colleague, you have to use a different space. It’s not about the content of what you’re saying — my students don’t have a space in which to continue the conversation we’re having.” Bridging the gap between 1789 and 2025, Tumulty asks students to review two Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

“Our values are that we live in community with one another and we owe each other respect and thoughtful consideration of each other’s views. But we owe ourselves the ability to push back against ideas that we think are intellectually unsound or sometimes morally suspect.” — Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing

The Colgate Union is a dedicated, nonpartisan center for discourse, where the Colgate community and leading figures in politics, policy, current events, and culture can discuss and debate important issues of the day. Such an enterprise adds to campus intellectual life and complements the rigorous work that already takes place in classrooms and academic departments across the University.

54 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

opposing pieces on how to think about freedom of expression in the context of higher education. Is it OK, for example, to show a Persian painting of Mohammed during an art history class, provided everyone has the chance to opt out? She will divide the class in two and tell them that she doesn’t care what their opinions are — for the next five minutes, they will argue a particular side of an issue. Then she flips the sides, and they will argue the opposite. Or she might ask them to consider an issue, form an opinion, and then ask themselves what the first objection might be to their point of view. “We’re giving them practice saying words that other people will disagree with, but that are not marked as their own words,” Tumulty explains. “They need a little bit of nudging and a little bit of scaffolding, but they can figure out how to talk about something hard without struggling or insulting.” Tumulty is one of many faculty members who are making discourse a part of the syllabus, and the number is growing. Statements like this are appearing on course documents: This class covers subjects on which people disagree, sometimes strongly. I value your perspective and want you to bring it into your work for this class. Even if I disagree with you, I will not penalize you for your views: In all written work, you will be judged by how well you support your ideas and how effectively you express them. A group of professors, including Tumulty, went further by spending considerable time during the 2024–25 academic year reviewing best practices for promoting civil discourse in the classroom. The effort is sponsored by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and it is led by Cushing and George Carleton Jr. Professor of Philosophy David Dudrick, who now serves as co-director of the Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions. On a ‘Colgate Union’ Discourse on campus is “as important to me as the trees, and I’ve planted a lot of trees,” Casey says. The roots of Casey’s love for discourse run deep — all the way back to his days at Stanford Law School, which is known for the use of the Socratic method in the classroom. He fondly remembers those days, when a professor would ask him to stand up and present arguments made on behalf of the plaintiff in a historic case. Then he’d be on his feet again to give the argument for the respondent. “It was a thrilling way to think,” he says. If discourse in the curriculum is exemplified by those Stanford years, debate, for Casey, is most visible in the

Mark Diorio

Oxford Union at Oxford University. Oxford is composed of dozens of colleges founded by different denominations. Because of these sectarian ties, students in the early 19th century felt unable to freely explore questions of faith and politics. In 1823 they banded together to purchase land near campus, and they built the Oxford Union, where they could gather, debate, and question each other without fear. They created their own rules to govern these events, and at the end of each, the audience would exit the hall through doors marked Aye or Nay to cast votes for a winner. The tradition continues to this day. “But debate is but one tool to discern the truth,” Casey says. “It’s not the only way people can tackle complicated things. There is conversation, there are classroom discussions, there is dialogue in hallways and dining halls. How do we build on those things already happening on the campus, and make them more manifest, more available to more people, more a signature endeavor for Colgate when people are looking at our University?” During an alumni event on Oct. 22, 2025, at Ruggles Hall in Chicago, Casey announced his intentions publicly — during a conversation with Tony Banout, the inaugural executive director of the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression — to consider making more formal a place on campus for the work that has been ongoing on the campus since the original task force report (and even earlier). He asked the audience to imagine a place on West Campus, where students who were dedicated to the principles of the task force could live together and pursue that work in tandem with their studies. This residence will be made possible thanks to a leadership gift from Becky ’81 and Chris ’81 Hurley, P’12,’12. With goodwill at its heart and through many conversations with faculty and students, the idea of a “Colgate Union” is beginning to be shaped. Casey initiated a series of conversations to gauge student support for the project during the fall 2025 semester, expecting to hear from a dozen undergraduates. By midsemester, more than 50 had raised their hands. He has had many conversations with numerous faculty members. The questions are: How do we do this well? How do we build on existing strengths on campus? “I watch our students who sometimes are unsure of how to communicate because they live in a culture where they endlessly self-censor,” Casey says. “They’re terrified of taking a position in the classroom, not because of the potential institutional damnation of that position, but because of

UCLA professor Eddie Cole discusses “The University and the Public Good: The Role of the American College in Our Time” with Vice President and Chief of Staff L. Hazel Jack during the 2024–25 Presidential Speakers Series.

the self-censoring that happens from peer pressure.” Here is the twofold problem and opportunity: remove self-censoring behavior by normalizing debate and free inquiry and grounding it in goodwill — leading to academic and interpersonal experiences that open minds and expand understanding. The Colgate Union’s programs — in the final form they take — must also open the University up to engagement with the world, because turning inward is fatal for an institution that aspires to be a vital national and international resource. “We can run the risk of always being inclined to talk to ourselves, and that’s a dangerous thing for a university,” Casey says. Affirmative Crystallization Casey has spent his career not only running universities but also studying them. He knows that great institutions don’t have fiveyear strategic plans — they pursue long-term road maps. They don’t just say, “We need a new building for computer science.” They ask, “How do we teach computer science at the highest level now and in the future?” He knows, too, that any lasting decisions

about the life of the campus have to come through established forms of University governance. Presidents come and go. Individual professors and staff members are hired and retire. The faculty as a gathering of scholars, the Board of Trustees as a fiduciary body, the SGA as a voice for students — these entities exist generation to generation. Their decisions transcend the moment. In 2017 Casey was faced with a question: How does Colgate become known as a proactive place where freedom of expression and academic freedom are hallmarks of the experience? The answer has taken time to develop. It has drawn in dozens of Colgate faithful and demanded thousands of their hours. Now we have to see what the next step can be — and this will take time as well. But if this president has made anything clear during his years at the helm, it’s that he’s more than willing to plant a seed and watch it grow.

Read both task force reports at colgate.edu/ president. Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

Endeavor Reinvention

He’s Running the Family Business, With Innovation at Its Core Eddie Brennan ’02 has transformed his family’s orchard into a thriving agribusiness with national reach.

ack in 2009, the future was precarious for Beak and Skiff. The family-owned orchard, then best known as a fall destination for apple picking and fresh cider, was struggling to stay afloat after two difficult harvests. Meanwhile Eddie Brennan ’02 — the maternal grandson of co-founder George Skiff — was in New York City, building a career at Bloomingdale’s, where he had spent nearly a decade rising through the retailer’s competitive training program. Retail was the field Brennan had always envisioned for himself, following in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, who was Sears’ CEO, and his father, who ran DutyFree Shoppers. But when his family called, Brennan stepped away from the steady corporate trajectory to return to central New York and help save Beak and Skiff. Today Brennan is president and co-owner of the fifth-generation apple orchard in LaFayette, N.Y., founded in 1911 by friends George Skiff and Andrew Beak. Under Brennan’s leadership, the company has

revenue came during the apple-picking season,” says Brennan. “We like to say that diversifying with hard cider helped save the family farm. Most of what we grow now goes into that product.” That willingness to experiment has guided other ventures too. Guided by

mark diorio

expanded beyond apples, branching into hard cider, spirits, cold brew coffee, live music events, and, most recently, cannabis. “People look at Beak and Skiff today and don’t realize how close we came to shutting the doors,” Brennan says. After all, explains Brennan, apple farming is unpredictable — one frost or hailstorm can devastate an entire season’s crop. When he took the helm, Brennan drew from his retail background and immediately set out to diversify, making the orchard less dependent on the six-week picking season. The breakthrough came with 1911 Established, a hard cider brand launched just over a decade ago. Named for the farm’s founding year, 1911 transformed apples — even the worst of the bunch — into small-batch hard cider at a moment when gluten-free and craft beverages were gaining ground. An early partnership with Wegmans provided credibility and scale, and 1911 is now one of the top 10 hard cider brands nationally, sold in more than 30 states. “Before we created 1911, 90% of our

56 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

We like to say that diversifying with hard cider helped save the family farm. Most of what we grow now goes into that product.

Brennan, the company has built one of the largest cold brew coffee operations in the country and turned its Apple Hill campus into a concert venue, drawing big-name acts — Death Cab for Cutie, Violent Femmes, and Indigo Girls, to name a few — and thousands of concert-goers each summer.

In 2023 Beak and Skiff entered the cannabis space with Ayrloom, a brand of vapes, gummies, and beverages that has become New York State’s largest cannabis brand. “Our cannabis division is now three times the size of our apple operation,” says Brennan, who sees THC-infused beverages

as a growth opportunity, with cannabis drinks emerging as a popular alternative to alcohol. Opened two years ago on the Apple Hill campus, a THC beverage bottling plant now produces Ayrloom drinks for New York and beyond. Though his professional focus has widened, Brennan ties his bold approach back to his Colgate experience. A former lacrosse player, he often hosts the current team at the orchard and credits the discipline and resilience he learned on the field for helping him weather challenges in business. “I have memories of getting up at 6 in the morning to practice in the freezing cold. The weather in Hamilton in February is pretty brutal,” he says. “Lacrosse prepared me for the business world and leading a company with 400 employees, as well as how to deal with adversity.” According to Brennan, family remains central to Beak and Skiff’s success. Cousins oversee core operations, from the orchard to logistics, and Brennan steers strategy, branding, and growth. “We like to say the fifth generation gets along better than any previous generation.” Together they are balancing tradition with reinvention, preserving 1,000 acres of farmland while pushing into new markets and ensuring the company is healthy enough to hand down to the sixth generation — including Brennan’s two daughters, ages 10 and 12. “We’re proud of our roots as Beaks and Skiffs, and hopefully our family will carry that tradition on.”

— Mary Donofrio Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

endeavor

planning

When Hospitals Can’t Pause, His Company Keeps Care Going Atif Chauhdry ’95 helps health care organizations continue to serve their communities amid staffing shortages.

n business as in life, timing is everything. Just ask Atif Chauhdry ’95, whose company went from a bootstrapped startup to one of the fastest-growing private companies in America in less than five years. Chauhdry founded Vital Contingent Planning (VCP) in 2018 to help hospitals and health care systems prepare for potential labor strikes so they can continue to provide patient care for their communities. A big piece of that work involves ensuring staffing levels remain appropriate, and VCP helps source and place nurses and other health care professionals as needed. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived two years later, the need for temporary staffing at health care facilities escalated dramatically — and quickly. Chauhdry launched a second brand, VCP Staff, in response to the increased demand. “From April 2020 to April 2023, it was

58 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

nonstop work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “We went from nice, modest growth to ‘Put your seatbelt on because we’re going a million miles per hour.’” The work paid off. In 2023 VCP landed at No. 28 on the Inc. 5000 list, which ranks the country’s fastest-growing companies based on annual revenue growth over a three-year period. The company’s revenue skyrocketed 10,718% between 2019 and 2022. “We made the list the following year as well, which doesn’t happen all too often because most companies can’t sustain that momentum,” says Chauhdry, who notes that Facebook, Microsoft, and Patagonia are all past honorees. “It’s a true testament to my team. They are the most caring, loyal, and passionate people I’ve ever been around.” Chauhdry, who majored in history at Colgate, first became interested in labor and employment issues as a student at St.

John’s University School of Law. He quickly realized he wasn’t interested in practicing law following graduation, and after a brief foray into public relations, he started a career in contingency planning and staffing for the health care industry. “The field was relatively new at the time, and it was a little bit of the Wild West,” he says. “Many of these companies did what they wanted, and the clients didn’t have much of a say. I learned a lot about how not to run a company.” VCP’s core business involves helping health care facilities prepare for worstcase scenarios — namely strikes — during union negotiations. That includes analyzing the financial impact of proposed terms, completing security assessments, providing crisis communications, and developing staffing plans. “We make it possible for unions and management to keep negotiating,” he says. “If management is worried about their ability to staff the hospital and take care of patients, they’re not in a position to talk to the union with a clear head. If they’re sitting there relaxed and enjoying a cup of coffee, that’s a sign that we’ve done our job well.” Many times negotiations end successfully; other times, the union goes on strike. When that happens, VCP quickly pivots to crisis health care staffing. One of the company’s biggest strengths is its ability to identify, recruit, and credential a wide range of health care professionals from across the country, including nurses, pharmacists, and technicians, with little notice. In one recent example, VCP brought in 600 professionals to cover for striking workers in less than 36 hours. According to Chauhdry, the company provides staffing for approximately five strikes a year. Chauhdry recently launched a third brand, VCP RemoteUR, a remote utilization review service that determines if a patient should be admitted to the hospital or remain in observation status. The technology helps improve patient outcomes, avoid denials by Medicare and private insurance companies, and increase health care systems’ revenues, explains Chauhdry. One client went from a $24 million loss one year to a $2 million loss the next. “We were a big part of that turnaround.” The next frontier for VCP, which is fully remote, is developing a new AI platform to enhance its work and streamline its processes. This is part of Chauhdry’s effort to keep his company from “going stale” and a reflection of his ability — and good fortune — to get the timing just right.

— Debbie Ritenour Illustration by Dan Page

endeavor

Comedy

No Joke Corinna Yee ’23 loves humor, but she’s serious about a stand-up career.

’m a total ham,” Corinna Yee ’23 says, noting that she got her start in comedy by impersonating teachers at her Annapolis high school’s talent show. “That got laughs. If I hadn’t done well, my ego would have been shattered.” Instead, a rising star was born. Today Yee is a stand-up comic in Los Angeles, where she’s become a regular at the city’s best-known comedy clubs, booking gigs alongside notable comic actors like The Office’s Craig Robinson and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Mary Lynn Rajskub. Many of Yee’s jokes are riffs on her bicultural upbringing in Maryland. Adopted from an orphanage in China at 16 months, Yee attended a Jewish elementary school, where she says she stuck out as the only Asian. On weekends she learned Chinese and acquired a taste for pork dumplings — “with a side of Jewish guilt,” she quips. At home, evenings often revolved around her parents’ favorite TV show, Seinfeld, which fed her taste for stand-up “way too young,” Yee remembers. “I didn’t know what it was called, just that it was funny.” At Colgate the double major in history and music was on course to become a history professor — until the pandemic,

Justin Gill

Stand-up is a lot like music. There’s a cadence, a beat. And you feed off the audience.

when Yee quelled lockdown boredom by binging comedian Nikki Glaser’s podcasts and Comedy Central roasts, savoring her scathing humor, penchant for selfdeprecation, and ability to read a crowd. “I liked how she was nice but also packed a punch,” says Yee. Inspired, Yee began to write her own material — and get serious about a career in comedy. Back in Hamilton, she started performing monthly at Colgate Stand-up Club shows in Donovan’s Pub, where her cracks about campus life (like the prevalence of Canada Goose jackets) earned big laughs. “Stand-up is a lot like music,” says Yee. “There’s a cadence, a beat. And you feed off the audience.” After graduating she moved to L.A., reasoning “if you want to be in entertainment, that’s where you go.” She first worked at Fox First Run, the distribution arm of Fox Television, where she helped affiliates promote syndicated shows. But stand-up remained her goal — so much so that when she learned about auditions for a new Hollywood comedy club, she showed up three hours early. “The first five people were guaranteed a guest spot at the mic,” she says. “And I was first. That led to me headlining a show for the first time.” By chance her parents were visiting L.A. and saw her big gig — before which Yee warned that nothing would be sacred. She’d be poking fun at her sex life, her childhood, and her parents’ ages (“decades older” than her friends’ parents, says Yee). “I told them I embellish for laughs. But they have a great sense of humor, and they understood.” Like most comedians, Yee often plunders everyday life for laughs. For example, she’s been known to welcome bad blind dates “for the sake of getting a funny story.” On one, “a guy decided we’d split a McChicken and then go rock climbing. Maybe he envisioned a Lady and the Tramp moment with the sandwich.” But her richest source of material is herself — idiosyncrasies like her daily uniform of button-down shirts and trousers from Talbots and Coldwater Creek, often hand-me-downs from her mom. In fact, with similar hairstyles, round spectacles, and loud personalities, “she might be using me as her body double,” an observation that has become a running bit in her comedy. “I joke that I may be 24, but I dress like the dean of the poli-sci department,” says Yee. “Or a butch Dora the Explorer.” Sharp material is only part of the equation, says Yee. These days, a memeworthy online presence is equally important when it comes to finding stand-up success.

“Traditionally the path was to build your rep on the stand-up scene, then go on latenight shows, and be signed by an agent,” she says. “Now it matters more how many followers you have on social media, and I’m still figuring out how to build my brand there.” At the same time, Yee is balancing stage life with student life. In June she enrolled in the master’s program in mass communications at California State University, Northridge, where, in between comedy gigs, she wrote and produced an audio history of Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank. But the grind is worth it, says Yee, when her material cracks up a crowd. “Stand-up is a vulnerable art form, so when the audience is with me and we’re feeding off each other’s energy, I get a sense of euphoria and pride,” she says. “It’s like I’m floating on clouds.”

— Michele Meyer

I joke that I may be 24, but I dress like the dean of the poli-sci department.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

campaign

faculty

leadership

Endowed Chairs Transform Research and Teaching at Colgate

Gratitude: The Fuel for Colgate’s Third Century A Message from Kim Harris, Vice President for Advancement

ratitude is not just a thought. It’s a sentiment and a practice.” I shared these words with my team in Colgate’s Office of Advancement a few months ago, and I remember them daily. Gratitude has been an underlying theme of The Campaign for the Third Century so far. Recent milestones — projects completed, foundations laid, dollars raised — are a reminder to be grateful to be a part of the incredible Colgate community. The University’s vision for its Third Century is ambitious, and it’s also essential. This world needs the kind of thoughtful, engaged leaders that Colgate educates; and I, for one, am grateful to be supporting the academic, social, and residential experiences that make that possible. When students returned to campus for the 2025–26 academic year, I was struck by the renewed buzz of possibility around campus. With Peter’s Glen opening, I was able to see many students and families making their way through the glen enjoying its majesty, and it struck me how interesting it is how memories are made. Today’s first-year students have never known Colgate without the glen — they can appreciate its beauty but may not have the same sense of wonder as students who witnessed firsthand the transformation of that wooded ravine. That same experience happened when Bernstein Hall opened last year: Returning students explored new spaces with excitement while the first-year students never knew a time when that building didn’t exist. The generosity of the Colgate community creates these experiences of inquiry, awe, and possibility. The day is coming when students will only know a Colgate that includes the Carey Center as the home for our Division I programs and a West Campus as a beautiful neighborhood that unites the intellectual, social, and residential ideals of the University. More of the student body will benefit from the Colgate Commitment as we strive to ensure that we can bring the finest students to campus regardless of financial background. Current and future students’ memories of Colgate may look different than those of alumni who graduated 10, 20, or 50 years ago. But the essence of those memories will be remarkably similar because Colgate is as committed to its mission today as it was in decades past. Each graduate’s personal gratitude for their Colgate experience binds them to one another and to this place. In September 2025, The Campaign for the Third Century surpassed $750 million raised, thanks to the generosity of our community. Any institution can plan for a historic campaign, but not every institution can pull it off. Indeed, few liberal arts schools can say they have stood where Colgate stands today. Importantly, we aren’t anywhere near finished. Our strengths empower us to continue pursuing our ambitions to expand the Colgate Commitment, to complete Colgate’s beautiful campus through much-needed capital projects, and to invest in our faculty and the academic enterprise. These coming milestones are a thrilling prospect that keep me motivated to do my part to ensure Colgate reaches its incredible potential. Thank you for doing your part as well. ●

60 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

The generosity of the Colgate community creates these experiences of inquiry, awe, and possibility.

ttracting and retaining top talent from around the globe is a priority for Colgate’s Third Century, and endowed chairs are critical to achieving that mission by providing faculty with the resources they need to stay on the forefront of research in their fields. The following four endowed faculty chairs participated in a panel during Homecoming 2025 weekend — detailing their paths to scholarship, sharing that Colgate provides the perfect balance of research and teaching, and talking about the transformative power of endowed chairs. The alumni and donors whose support makes these opportunities possible are continuing to shape both student and faculty experiences at Colgate in meaningful ways.

April Baptiste Leary Family Chair in Environmental Studies Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Professor April Baptiste experienced a powerful juxtaposition that would shape her career. She recalls walking home past the oil and gas pumps and smelling

Illustration by Anje Jager

campaign

fumes, recognizing the beauty of the natural environment that was marred by the machines harvesting resources. This early exposure to environmental contradictions eventually led her to environmental justice work. Baptiste was attracted to Colgate’s liberal arts curriculum that exposes students to a wide range of subjects and fields of study. As a new chair holder, Baptiste is excited about expanded collaborations throughout the Caribbean, enabling her to hire local Caribbean research assistants and accelerate projects. She anticipates the chair will allow "a different kind of teaching … to work closely with students to bring them into my research, to allow students to be able to partner with me, and to help me generate new questions.” Established in 2022 by Nora Gleason Leary ’82 and Robert G. Leary and the Gleason-Leary Foundation, the Leary chair is a permanent endowment fund created to assist Colgate University’s efforts in recognizing teaching excellence and scholarly achievements in the study of the environment and sustainability.

born from student collaboration, explores how concussions impact the gut microbiome of football players; the project has expanded to the women’s hockey team. Belanger says receiving an endowed chair is a deeply emotional moment. “Most people have tears at some point,” he shares. “It is very meaningful to receive an endowed chair.” The Russell B. Colgate University Professorship was established in 1974 through generous gifts from John K. Colgate Sr. H’69 and members of his family as a memorial to Russell Colgate. It goes to a distinguished faculty member in a department or field designated by the dean of the faculty and the president of the University.

Padma Kaimal Batza Family Chair in Art and Art History

mark diorio

Ken Belanger Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Biology As a young man growing up in rural Minnesota, Professor Ken Belanger enjoyed the outdoors. Initially a physical education major, he fell in love with biology during his studies at Luther College in Iowa where mentors were instrumental in guiding him toward genetics. He’s now a leading researcher in the field of microbiomics, studying how these tiny organisms influence and are influenced by their environment. Recalling the effect his mentors at Luther had on his trajectory, Belanger sought a career with a similar impact. The blend of teaching and research at Colgate proved the perfect fit. As the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of biology, the chair’s funding has allowed him to delve into topics from yeast genetics to cave microbiomes. One innovative project,

Professor Padma Kaimal’s family heritage from India, combined with her love for visual orientation, naturally led her to the study and appreciation of South Asian art. She was seeking to work in a place that valued teaching, which she discovered at Colgate, in addition to exceptional research support. Being named the Batza Family Chair provided Kaimal with “incredible trust from the institution,” she said. The chair led to a Fulbright specialist grant in Nepal, helping establish the country’s first liberal arts university. “Chairs help a small liberal arts college hold onto distinguished faculty at a point in their careers where they could go to a larger R1 institution or think tanks," said Kaimal. In August 2025, Mike Batza ’63 passed away, but his legacy will be felt through the generosity of this endowment.

Spencer Kelly Hurley Family Chair in Dialogue, Deliberation, and Decision Making Though he studied history as an undergraduate, Professor Spencer Kelly discovered his passion for communication while working with children in a psychiatric facility. There he had a crucial revelation: How a person says something is often more revealing than what they say. Later he was drawn to Colgate, a place that values teaching and research equally. Kelly focuses on bringing difficult conversations to the broader community. His Speakeasy model and Agree to Disagree events tackle contentious topics, demonstrating how to have productive disagreements. While concerned about the current national discourse, Kelly is inspired by his students’ desire for a better future and believes universities have a vital role in shaping it. “What makes an effective endowed chair is our generous alumni recognizing that good things are already happening on campus,” he said. “And putting resources toward that is a recipe for success.” Established in 2022 by Becky ’81 and Christopher Hurley ’81, P’12,’12, the Hurley Family Chair is a permanent endowment fund created to assist Colgate University’s efforts in recognizing one or more Colgate faculty members who serve as leaders in strengthening dialogue and deliberation in the Colgate community.

The Batza Family Chair in Art and Art History was established in 1997 through the generosity of the late Michael J. Batza Jr. ’63, a University trustee emeritus; his wife, Patricia; and their daughter, Maureen ’90. This endowment supports a chair in art and art history. Selection is based on the individual’s teaching excellence and scholarly achievements.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

SALMAGUNDI

Colgate’s first football team was established in 1890, with Samuel Colgate Jr. as head coach. “There is no longer a necessity to lament, because we have no foot-ball team,” the Madisonensis reported on Nov. 1. “Arrangements were at once made to secure suits and now about twenty-five men are pretty regular in their attendance at the practice games in the afternoon. … As we have no trainer it is not to be expected that our eleven will be able to especially distinguish itself when it comes in contact with college teams that have had this advantage, but we feel sure the team will be able to play well enough to make the games that are played here extremely interesting.” The team played a short season of only two games, both at home. Pictured is the lineup from the game against Hamilton College, which Colgate lost 14–32, but the team overcame St. John’s Academy 14–6 a week later. Another November day —135 years later — Colgate Magazine dropped in on the current team, and 12 players jovially reenacted the old photo at Andy Kerr Stadium, with help from Fred ’50 and Marilyn Dunlap Head Football Coach Curt Fitzpatrick. Front row, L to R: wide receiver Max Walters ’26, running back Marco Maldonado ’26, tight end Mason Mozo ’26, wide receiver Jariyah Sawyer ’26, quarterback Zach Osborne ’26, offensive line Miles Salinas ’26, tight end Dave Thomson ’26. Back row, L to R: wide receiver Matt Fogler ’29, wide receiver Reed Swanson ’27, wide receiver Brady Hutchison ’26, offensive line Ethan Tyla ’26, offensive line Nick Dalessandro ’26. 112 Colgate Magazine Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

university archives and special collections (THEN); mark diorio (now)

Then and Now

ACROSS 1

Crossword

4 9

Gregg Finkell ’98 challenges you to complete his crossword puzzle, which not only features Colgate-specific clues — indicated by a C — but also a Colgate-sized grid at 13x13 (a weekday New York Times puzzle, for example, is 15x15). Check your answers on p. 101. 1

4 10

18 19

17 18 25

26 29

30 32

31 33

34 36

13 14 15 16

41 45 46 47 48

24 27 28 31 32 33 34 36

DOWN

Elise (Beethoven composition) House in Bryan Complex ● Philosophical theories that contrast with dualisms and pluralisms Interior Outhouses Custom Robert Trent Jones golf course named by Golfweek as one of America’s Top 25 Best College Courses ● Noisy quarrel Horse racing wager in which one selects the first two finishers Munich mister Author of The Firm Motto of Colgate University ● Release Summers in Saint-Denis Final six lines of a sonnet JFK or LGA alternative One of several interest houses located on 48–Across ● Friars Club staple Veinte mas diez Protruding navel, familiarly Luger, for one Major campus thoroughfare (a.k.a. New York State Route 12B) ● Plant

Gregg Finkell ’98 majored in economics at Colgate and was a member of Alpha Tau Omega. Today he’s senior counsel at Pratt & Whitney in the commercial engines group. “We design and manufacture gas turbine engines that power a host of aircraft around the world,” he explains. “The engines are the coolest, most sophisticated machines on the planet.” Crosswords became a hobby Finkell picked up during the pandemic — first solving them and then creating them after discovering a New York Times how-to series.

Clipped From “Carnival Guests Enjoy Weekend at Annual Event,” the Colgate Maroon, Feb. 3, 1926

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

17 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 29 30 34 35 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

Something one might yell at 16–Across Colgate’s institutional type (abbr.) ● Inflatable conveyance used to navigate rapids WWII pope Quest. response Gene-carrying messenger, in brief Cask or barrel Before, poetically UK representatives First -Japanese War (conflict between 1894–95) Cat call Govt. agency for retirement, survivors, and disability insurance programs Andy Stadium ● Classic arcade standard GPT Museum network home to the world’s largest collection of works by J.M.W. Turner (with “The”) French friends “Good” cholesterol readings (abbr.) Wide shoe spec. Goes bad, as fruit Seventh of 26 Brought into being Kerry and McCain, e.g. of Sandwich [This is so fun!] Possessive pronoun that becomes a contraction with the addition of an apostrophe Task bar button Braise Where one might find a hammer, anvil, and stirrup Steal Yours and mine Erstwhile fraternity located on 48– Across without which “Colgate” cannot be spelled, in brief ● “Chandelier” artist

… The annual Winter Carnival was a decided success and all fraternity houses which held parties over the week-end reported a most enjoyable time. As was the case last year, the “weather man” decided to make himself very much in evidence and in an unmistakable manner. Party guests and orchestras who were expecting to reach Hamilton on the auto bus were unable to do so when a blizzard swept the central part of the state Thursday afternoon and evening, tying up traffic and blocking the highways. The visitors were forced to go to Utica and enter Hamilton via the Ontario and Western Railroad which ran a special train Thursday night.

Fall 2025 + Winter 2026

Colgate Magazine

113

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

Celebrate the Erie Canal’s bicentennial p.74

Get lost in Kathmandu p.10

Spend 40+ years as an Aspen Snowmass ski instructor

Chase goats in Yemen p.40

Tackle Colgate crossword clues p.113

Study zoonotic viruses in bats p.32

Run up the stairs at Peter’s Glen p.24

When life gives you apples, make cider p.56

Examine French earthworms in Ireland p.38

Track Alaskan salmon swimming upstream p.30

Perform a murdermystery dance at Case Library p.20

Become a stand-up comedian in L.A. p.59

Shoot pucks with octogenarians p.69

p.79

jill calder

In This Issue