Colgate Magazine — Winter 2019

WINTER 2019

FEATURE

Working Together: Professorstudent research collaborations P.26

Discover

Colgate’s natural history collections get a new lease on life P.17

Endeavor

Man challenges artificial intelligence P.40

CLASS ACTS Alumni share unforgettable moments with professors P.22

2019_Winter_Cover_19108.indd 1

1/9/19 2:52 PM

look The focal point of the Quad, Memorial Chapel was built in 1917 with a gift from Mary Colgate in honor of her father, James B. Colgate. The chapel’s first event was convocation in September 1918. Ever since, it has held religious ceremonies, memorial services, weddings, orchestral concerts, and countless Dancefests.

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

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 1

1/9/19 3:11 PM

MARK DIORIO

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 1

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 1

1/9/19 3:30 PM

PhotoDIORIO MARK / Art Credit

2 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 2

1/9/19 3:31 PM

look On a sticky September day, armed with bottles of Fantastik, rust remover, and elbow grease, students cleaned bicycles. Mark LaPan ’19 (pictured) was one of the students who spent the afternoon at Hamilton Community Bikes, an organization founded by Chuck Fox ’70 that repairs bikes for those in need. Students volunteered for six local organizations in conjunction with the COVE 9/11 Afternoon of Service. LaPan says, “9/11 is a great day for us, as citizens, to recognize that we should help around our community.”

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 3

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 3

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Contents

WINTER 2019 President’s Message

6

Discover

Jaws Drop Ecosystem changes affect great whites

Letters

7

14

Ask a Professor What is the future of maps?

15

The Newsworthiness of Police Shootings Professor Alicia Simmons and students track media reports

16

A New Lease on Life Reimagining Colgate’s natural history collections

Research Review A sampling of scholarship being explored by professors and their students

26

17

The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok

Voices

My Journey with Nietzsche

A medical hoax leads to a 50-year mistruth about MSG and an unexpected Colgate connection.

Professor David Dudrick

8

34

A Tale of Two Women Carolyn Daly ’06

9

Scene

Colgate News

10

Bicentennial 200 Years, One Monumental Celebration

Cover: After five years and numerous phone discussions, a book club with alumnae and their professor has its first inperson meeting at the Colgate Inn. Illustration by Stephen Collins. Read more alumni submissions on p. 22.

18

Class Acts Alumni share unforgettable moments with professors

22

Human mobility is being archived on scales unimaginable only a few years ago, for purposes yet undiscovered, for motives both transparent and opaque.

Geography professor Peter Scull on how smartphones play a role in modern mapmaking p. 15

4 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 4

1/16/19 8:59 AM

Endeavor

Leading Light Greg Russell ’91 illuminates the L.A. Philharmonic’s centennial

Vice President for Communications Laura H. Jack

42

Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Communications Director Mark Walden Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Creative Director Tim Horn Art Director Karen Luciani Junior Designer Katriel Pritts University Photographer Mark DiOrio Production Assistant Kathy Owen Contributors: Imani Ballard, Bicentennial communications specialist; Gordon Brillon, web content specialist; Daniel DeVries, media relations director; Sara Furlong, advancement communications manager; David Herringshaw, digital production specialist; Jason Kammerdiener ’10, web manager; Katherine Laube, senior designer; Brian Ness, video journalism coordinator; John Painter, director of Athletic Communications; Kristin Putman, social media strategist Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt. Colgate Magazine Volume XLVIII Number 2 Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University.

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

Go Time A documentary by Josh Rosen ’96 captures man vs. machine.

Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Telephone: 315-228-7453

40

Dollars to Doughnuts Satellite Doughnuts founder Colby Kingston ’18 on the benefit of an economics major and the love of tiny treats

41

Alumni News

44

Michael Torpey ’02 Hates His Own Game Show On Paid Off, contestants vie for money to pay off their student loans.

43

Salmagundi

81

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 Marilyn Rugg, Associate Provost for Equity and Diversity, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7288.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 5

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 5

1/9/19 3:31 PM

The University and the Nation

We seek the best for Colgate because the nation — indeed, the world — is best served when it can rely on excellent colleges and universities that train generations of reasoned and reasonable leaders, where the habits of mind of an informed citizenry are inculcated, and where deliberation and the rigorous pursuit of the truth inform a community.

O

ANDREW DADDIO

President’s Message

ver the past two years, as we have planned for the University’s Bicentennial celebrations, we have also begun the work necessary to create a plan for the University as it enters its third century. A university should never look back without also looking forward.

Through the work of the board, faculty, administration, and Alumni Council, plans are being developed to increase support for our nationally regarded faculty, for our curriculum and academic programs, for financial aid, for enhancements to our athletics programs, and for major investments in our student residential and social spaces. We are also considering how to improve the appearance and functionality of our campus as well as the ways we can continue to invest in and support the Village of Hamilton.

But why?

On the one hand, we are all ambitious for Colgate. For too long, Colgate has felt itself to be on the cusp of the short list of the finest national and international colleges and universities. To move firmly into the small ranks of the very best, Colgate must commit itself in a sustained, planned, and deliberate way to achieve excellence in all that it undertakes and must find the resources necessary to maintain such excellence over decades. There are no “overnight successes” in higher education — despite repeated reports of a college or university suddenly becoming “hot” (to use the term used to describe an institution that is suddenly garnering attention and resources). Those colleges and universities we all would consider as having recently moved into the ranks of the truly great did so because they imagined their best version and developed a plan to achieve that vision. These transformations took years, if not decades.

So we are planning Colgate’s future because we all seek that level of reach and regard we have long known the University deserves, or knew it could obtain should it be bold in its ambitions and excellent in its management.

But there is another reason we should, now, be ambitious for Colgate, to seek for it an excellence seen at few institutions. That reason is more profound than mere institutional ambition. We seek the best for Colgate because the nation — indeed, the world — is best served when it can rely on excellent colleges and universities that train generations of reasoned and reasonable leaders, where the habits of mind of an informed citizenry are inculcated, and where deliberation and the rigorous pursuit of the truth inform a community. Great nations have great colleges and universities. In times of transformation and, even, turbulence, the nation turns to its great colleges and universities for new generations of leaders, for debate and consideration, and for models of community.

Important universities are of their times. Great universities shape their times.

As our founders knew when they gathered, the institution of Colgate was to serve the nation through its mission. They knew its reach and social impact was to be concomitant to the excellence with which it took upon its essential acts. They looked beyond their hill. A nation was going to watch them.

We, too, must look beyond our hill during the decades ahead.

A nation is going to watch us. We should serve as a model for others, showing the nation and the world the ways in which critical thinking and reasoned debate can exist in a supportive environment that acknowledges difference while holding all to the highest intellectual standards.

As we plan for Colgate’s third century, at a time of great political turbulence, it is important not only to hope we succeed for the sake of our students, faculty, and alumni; we must also keep in our minds these larger obligations to the commonweal.

— Brian W. Casey

6 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 6

1/16/19 9:24 AM

Letters In praise of the redesign This magazine is light-years beyond anything else that’s been sent to me since I left Colgate.

The magazine should always be printed in this format. The layout is fresh, interesting, and made me want to read it. Really well done. It felt current without being trendy. Perfect.

Gillian Simon ’92

The facts about balloon releases As an environmentalist, I’m tremendously disappointed that the cover of the brand-new magazine [autumn 2018] would feature a balloon release.

Although this image was created via Photoshop, balloon releases are incredibly detrimental to the environment.

Balloons are ingested by farm and ocean animals, and they result in litter in communities.

Lastly, they create wildfire hazards by landing on power lines. In fact, many coastal communities around the country are banning balloon releases by law because of these issues.

In short, there is no value to such an irresponsible and thoughtless activity as a balloon release, and I hope you will take steps to make this clear.

Patrick Diamond ’00, vice chair, Surfrider Foundation, ​N YC Chapter

He’s got a friend in RBG I received my copy of the Colgate Magazine and enjoyed the new format. I particularly liked your piece about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“The A-Z on RBG,” p. 34).

Some time ago (before the movie), I attended a large affair at the Museum of Natural History. Most people there were there to be seen. As I was introduced to people, they spent the conversation looking for someone more important than me, with the exception of Justice Ginsburg. She spent the entire time we were together with her eyes never leaving my face. Nothing earth shattering was said, but I was impressed. It was real conversation, and I will always remember it.

I was pleased to find that Julie Cohen ’86 was a Colgate graduate. I certainly enjoyed the movie.

Bill Davenport ’59 There’s more to the story In response to “Two Hundred,” autumn 2018, #10: 1958 was a time when Syracuse University (SU) football was a powerhouse, ranked 9th in the nation.

Each year, prior to the Colgate-SU game, Colgate freshmen erected a bonfire as high as their graduation year (ours was 62 feet).

The operation was akin to building a house. That year, SU students attempted to infiltrate our ranks and ignite the “house” prematurely. We guarded our construction 24/7.

Surreptitiously, SU students were successful in infiltrating our ranks and dropped concentrated orange dye in Taylor Lake. Indeed, the lake was SU Orange!

We felt compromised. There had to be retribution. In Theta Chi, one of the brothers had

his pilot’s license. Four of us drove to Norwich and rented a plane.

While the SU team was scrimmaging, we flew over Archbold Stadium with ammunition. We had plastic shirt bags filled with maroon paint (not red as described in the article). We dropped the first paint bomb. Since we were flying at 100 mph, the bag dropped at an angle and landed outside the stadium. Had we been more attentive in class, we could have calculated the angle of entry to accurately hit the target. We were more accurate on subsequent passes. The team and coaching staff dispersed in panic — 300-pound linemen were setting a land speed record.

After our ammo was spent, we headed back to Norwich. The self-congratulatory spirit on the return trip was palpable.

Waiting for us was Dean of Students Fred Verro, arms crossed. The sight of the dean was not a good sign. Turns out, the first bag of maroon paint hit an ROTC car. The driver took the numbers off the wing.

Thanks to the benevolence of Dean Verro, who recognized the intensity of the rivalry, we only received six months of social probation.

Now you have the true saga of the air raid.

Stuart Angert ’62

The Plato bust used to be in the old chapel, and I have absolutely no idea how it got to my office all these years later. A couple of years ago, I came back to campus after the summer and it was just sitting in my office!

Bizarre.

Ulrich Meyer, philosophy professor

Correction to “Two Hundred” Our department was delighted to see the dinosaur egg (#19 and #86) and the fluorescent mineral exhibit (#197) among the noteworthy “200” citations.

Both are on display for anyone to visit: Colgate’s dinosaur egg is in a case in the Linsley Geology Museum, and the fluorescent minerals can be viewed near the Ho Tung Visualization Lab. The egg was kept in Colgate’s vault following the 1950s prank, but donors to the Linsley Geology Museum made sure it would be on display in the Ho Science Center after the department moved there in 2007.

Best wishes to Colgate during its 200th year!

The Department of Geology Colgate at 200 years In response to the 200.colgate. edu prompt “What song brings you back to your time at Colgate? What would you add to a playlist of Colgate essentials?”

Melissa Sugarman Gray ’96 responded: The Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes,” fall of ’92. I was a first-year in West Stillman, and a girl who would later become a friend blasted it out of her window for everyone to enjoy. To me, that was college life, and I loved it. Fun music, shared experiences, hanging out between classes. It made the homesickness disappear.

Solving one mystery leads to another In response to “Two Hundred,” autumn 2018, #166: The bust of Plato might have survived: It is in my office!

Share your story at 200.colgate.edu.

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

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 7

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 7

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Voices

DISCOURSE

My Journey with Nietzsche ask my students not merely to learn about but to do philosophy; I thus ask them to be willing to disagree. For disagreements to be profitable, though, we need to try to see the issue from the standpoint of those with whom we disagree. When we do, we may realize that we are the ones who are mistaken; or, we can learn something about the foundations of our beliefs. My scholarly work is centered on a philosopher with whom I disagree about almost everything:

I

8 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 8

Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s atheism has not led me to renounce my belief in God, and yet he is someone from whom I continue to learn a great deal.

When Nietzsche railed against the slavishness of Christians and bestowed upon himself the title of “Antichrist,” I could be sure he took Christian belief seriously. His proclamation that “God is dead” was warning as much as invitation; before walking along the philosopher’s path, Nietzsche asks that we count the costs.

Nietzsche thought something like Christian belief is needed to make sense of the idea that moral laws are absolute and objective, not relative and subjective.

Therefore, when religion falls, morality falls. We might wonder whether this is such a bad thing. Shouldn’t we stop being so judgmental and respect everyone as an equal?

It’s at this point that Nietzsche’s challenge becomes clear. For he asks: Why should we think everyone is to be respected as an equal? The only viable answer, he says, is one that invokes God: All human beings have an immortal soul. Following this line of logic, when God dies, so, too, does the conceit of basic, equal human worth.

It is undeniable that religious language is often invoked to defend the notion of basic human worth. My own Catholic faith tells me that all humans bear the image of God. America’s founding document speaks of our being “created equal.” But why think the commitment to basic human equality only makes sense or has grounding if one believes in God? To answer that question, first consider another: What is it about human beings that would make us all of equal basic worth? A satisfying response, according to Nietzsche, would need to cite a characteristic that is (1) shared equally by all human beings and that (2) confers substantial worth upon us.

Now, it’s easy to find characteristics of the first sort; for example, being a member of the species homo sapiens. And it’s equally easy to find properties of the second sort; for example, having the ability to think abstractly, work creatively, love selflessly.

But it is difficult — Nietzsche thought it was impossible — to find a suitably secular property with both these characteristics.

(Consider: Not all members of the species homo sapiens are equal in their ability to think, work, and love in these ways.) Given the impossibility of justifying equality in this way, Nietzsche concludes that human beings are not equal; some are higher, and others lower.

Not many of us will agree with Nietzsche’s rejection of basic human equality. In our day of increasing intolerance and division, though, his challenge is timely: What grounds basic human equality? Christian belief provides an answer — one that Nietzsche rejected. Does the rejection of God lead to Nietzsche’s conclusions? My journey with Nietzsche continues, but that is not a path I plan to take.

David Dudrick, the George Carleton Jr. Professor of philosophy, teaches courses on Nietzsche and Foucault, existentialism, and philosophical theology. Some of his best friends are atheists.

Illustration by Delphine Lee

1/9/19 3:31 PM

perspective

A Tale of Two Women

By Carolyn Daly ’06 his is the story of two women, both mothers who wanted the best for their children.

The first woman grew up in the western highlands of Guatemala. She dropped out of school in fourth grade to work and to care for her younger brother. It was what was expected of her.

The second woman grew up in a rural central New York town. The youngest of five, she spent her childhood playing sports and dreaming about her future. It was what was expected of her.

The first woman, Aura Perez, married at age 17 and had her first child at 18. She made money cooking, cleaning, and selling drinks on the street while her husband worked as a day laborer in the fields.

The second woman entered Colgate University at age 18 and spent the next four years playing field hockey, interning at the Supreme Court, and graduating with a degree in political science. She moved to Washington, D.C., and worked at a research firm and then a bank. I am that second woman.

Aura lived simply but happily with her growing family of eight. On many days, they didn’t have enough to eat, so her oldest daughter dropped out of school to work.

I joined the Peace Corps and was placed in Sololá, Guatemala, where 94 percent of families live on less than $3 a day. I learned

T

to appreciate the little things, and I fell in love — with the way Lake Atitlan reflected the sky, a blue so deep that it looked like a painting; with the pat pat pat of tortilla making at 6 a.m.; with the city of Sololá. And with a man.

Aura wanted to provide a better life for her children. She heard that Mil Milagros — an organization that equips women with skills and resources to improve the lives of children and families in rural Guatemala — was coming to her children’s school. They needed mothers to help, so she signed up to cook once a week.

After finishing my Peace Corps service, I decided that Guatemala was home. I married and we began raising our two young children there. When I started as the incountry director at Mil Milagros, I fell in love again — with the mission, the children, and the mothers who help it succeed.

Aura is one of more than 1,000 mother and grandmother volunteers trained by Mil Milagros. She began volunteering to cook in the school, then became a mother leader who now trains other mothers in nutritional and hygiene practices as well as gives hygiene demonstrations to the children.

Working with Mil Milagros gave her the confidence to resume her schooling, where she is one of two adults in the eighth grade class. The other is her daughter Marina.

Aura and I are different. I grew up in a country of privilege and opportunity.

Aura grew up in a country torn by civil war, corruption, and poverty. There is no denying the differences in our lives and our experiences. But we are both mothers who want the best for our children. I am grateful to have found an organization that partners with communities to improve the health and education of families, and allows me to work with inspiring women like Aura.

IN THE MEDIA “Trump is the first president since Ronald Reagan to target the federal judiciary as the place where he wants to impart more conservative ideals.”

— Political science professor Nina Moore to Spectrum News Rochester

The new mood is defined by the millennial generation’s role in the velvet revolution of this past spring.”

— Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in humanities and professor of English, in the New York Times on the emergence of a new Armenia

“Waldo has a very specific dress and a specific pattern, so you’ll know him if you see him. Our challenge is that each molecule is like a different version of Waldo.”

— Visiting chemistry professor Dan Zaleski on identifying the structure of gas phase molecules on Phys.org

“There isn’t quite the direct correlation between the amount of money that we’re told that these arms deals amount to and the number of jobs that we see at home.”

— Jennifer Spindel ’11 in an NPR interview on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Carolyn Daly ’06 (right) participates in a hand-washing demonstration by Aura Perez (left), who teaches children hygiene lessons to combat illness.

“Millions of cubic meters of buried ice have melted in the last decade. It’s unprecedented change over the historic period of Antarctica and perhaps since the end of the last ice age.”

— Joseph Levy, assistant geology professor, to Science Daily about changes in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 9

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 9

1/16/19 9:02 AM

SCENE university news

Colgate affirms commitment to freedom of expression

I

n the fall, Colgate faculty members and the Board of Trustees voted unanimously to adopt an official report in support of academic freedom and freedom of expression on campus, and the Student Government Association voted to embrace the document as a guiding principle for their organization.

The newly approved report stems from a Task Force on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression, which was formed by President Brian W. Casey in 2017 to review the history of academic freedom and freedom of expression policies at Colgate and to draft a statement to guide all sectors of the University community.

The 13-member task force of faculty, staff, trustees, and students met regularly over seven months to fulfill its charge, and a number of campus forums were held to solicit community input. The full document, which provides critical guidance on questions of free speech for faculty, staff, and students, is now available online.

“We thought it important to think through the issue of free speech in a deliberate and thoughtful manner, including representation from all parts of

our institution,” Casey says.

“In that way, through the creation of this report, we were modeling the kind of behavior we hope to encourage in our students — to listen to all sides, think deliberately about an issue, and come up with a realworld formulation.”

Task Force Chair Spencer Kelly, professor of psychological and brain sciences, says the group decided to build and improve upon the efforts of other institutions. “We felt that freedom of expression also comes with a responsibility to listen,” Kelly explains. “This needed to be a robust support of freedom of expression, yet within a set of shared community values. We had to look at how these principles ultimately improve opportunities for teaching and learning.”

Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies Nancy Ries, who also served on the task force, says that the document was made by the community, for the community.

“Our goal as an educational institution is to raise the level of knowledge, and all of the complex things that knowledge means and entails. Academic freedom and freedom of expression go hand in hand with building knowledge, with building understanding … and I think this statement captures a kind of dynamic that can be present in the community in terms of achieving those kinds of complex goals.”

Select passages of the document include: →→ “As a university dedicated to the liberal arts, Colgate

should support the rights of all community members to voice their views, even if unpopular, while helping them to likewise cultivate the habits of mind and skills necessary to respond effectively to views that they may find wrong or offensive.” →→ “Colgate should endeavor to establish and maintain a culture and community that will inspire its members to pursue knowledge with rigor and curiosity, speak and listen

update

Residence Halls Building Progress

C

onstruction continues for Colgate’s two new residence halls, with plans for them to open in time for Reunion 2019.

“These new residence halls ensure that the places in which Colgate students live support their full development

with care, and work so that even the quietest or most underrepresented voices among us are heard.” →→ “The University should educate all members of our community about the mission, goals, and values of Colgate and the importance of exercising our right of freedom of expression in a manner that is in furtherance of that mission and those goals and values, remembering that the exercise of intellectual freedom without consideration of these other values may cause needless harm to our community.” →→ “Colgate should encourage faculty, administrators, staff, and students to model the civic behavior that forms the basis for the exercise of freedom of expression within a community committed to Colgate’s mission, goals, and values.”

as citizens and leaders,” says President Brian W. Casey.

“These buildings reflect the profound beauty of our campus, as they support our students.”

These additions will mean that, for the first time in recent memory, all first-year students and sophomores will live on the hill. Colgate is making a significant investment in campus life, particularly for its newest students. The University has also expended considerable funds to renovate Andrews Hall, Stillman Hall, and the Bryan and Curtis-Drake residential complexes.

Mark DiOrio

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

10 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 10

1/9/19 3:31 PM

13 bits 1 Let there be light: approximately 67,000 twinkling white lights illuminated Willow Path during the holidays.

2 When the Colgate vs. Furman football game was canceled due to Hurricane Florence, the Raiders donated their hotel rooms and meals to storm evacuees.

→

3

Discourse

On Civil Liberties Today

Mark DiOrio

A

s Alan Dershowitz took to the Memorial Chapel stage in early November for his lecture, “Civil Liberties in the Age of Trump,” approximately 20 students stood and turned their backs in protest. It was a moment of First Amendment exercise that the target, a controversial scholar of constitutional law and advocate of civil liberties, supported.

“You can listen with your back to me,” he said. “That’s a perfectly legitimate form of protest. Maybe after you hear what I have to say, your protest can grow — or perhaps diminish.”

Dershowitz then launched into a vigorous defense against a 2014 sexual assault claim against him that has since been stricken from court records.

After approximately 13 minutes,

student protesters filed out of the chapel. Dershowitz thanked the students for their peaceful display and invited everyone to stay for the Q&A session so he could address any concerns.

“I hope that we will be able to continue this conversation in a constructive way,” he said.

Dershowitz discussed topics ranging from civil rights to the current public rhetoric on difficult issues. A self-described centrist liberal, he blasted President Donald Trump for separating immigrant families at the border, and he criticized journalists on both sides of the political divide for reporting the same facts differently based on their audiences. “Some of the media have prioritized ideology over truth,” he said.

Sponsored by Colgate’s Center for Freedom and Western Civilization (CFWC), the lecture is part of a year-long series designed to encourage discourse.

“The freedoms we have on this campus are blessings we should not take for granted,” said Associate Professor Carolyn Guile, co-director of the CFWC.

Languages

Yokoso and Huanying (Welcome)

V

isitors are instantly transported to Japan when they enter the newly constructed tokonoma (alcove) in Lawrence Hall.

Down the corridor, another seating area ushers visitors into a Chinese setting. Both spots welcome students and guests to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.

“We wanted to create a space for intimate group discussions,” says Yukari Hirata, Japanese professor and director of the linguistics program.

The project was hand built by carpenter Chris Hall. In accordance with Japanese building techniques, he used no nails and instead used joinery.

The lounge was dedicated on the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Robert Ho Center for Chinese Studies upstairs in Lawrence Hall.

The first private institution to host the New York State Sustainability Conference, Colgate also attracted the highest attendance (300).

4 Defensive end Pat Afriyie ’18 signed with the Los Angeles Chargers.

5 Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies Ellen Percy Kraly was one of WCNY’s 2018 Makers: Women Who Make America. Kraly works with refugees both locally and nationally.

6 In memory of late professor Bruce Selleck, friends and colleagues raised money for a maple sugaring operation at Rogers Environmental Education Center in Sherburne, N.Y.

▲ ▼ Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 11

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 11

1/16/19 9:03 AM

SCENE

▲ 7 MyinTuition, a new Colgate website tool, provides prospective students a reliable estimate of what a family will pay toward college costs.

8 Colgate’s recent agreements with universities in Switzerland, Italy, and Japan give students new study-abroad opportunities.

9 The Patriot League recently named its Coach of the Year Award for Dick Biddle, who is now retired from Colgate but is still the winningest coach in league history.

10 Breakfast of champions: Broad Street Diner opened in Hamilton last fall, serving up biscuits and gravy “just like mama makes.”

11 An all-star group of jazz musicians performed arrangements by Glenn Cashman, associate professor of music, on Oct. 21.

Arts

‘Butterface’ melts body stigmas

A

rtist-in-residence Jessica Posner gazes sternly under the bright Picker Gallery lights. Elaborate curls, red lipstick, and dark lashes give her a sense of glamour, even as she stands in nude Spanx in front of an eagerly buzzing crowd. Her voice cuts through the air and silence falls.

“She’s got a hot body,” Posner declares, “but, she has a butterface.”

Posner begins molding sticks of butter in her hands before sculpting them onto her face.

Her hair serves as scaffolding to hold the butter mask in place, which leaves her breathing strained. Chunks of butter fall to the ground, revealing smudged eye makeup and blood-like lipstick as the melted butter leaves an almost violent mark.

Her body suit is streaked with oily lines.

Posner’s live performance of “Butterface” marked the Sept.

19 opening of the Picker Art Gallery’s Embodied exhibition, which addressed sociopolitical meanings of the body. Posner

says, as a larger woman, she often received compliments for having a “pretty face” as consolation for her body.

In finding this was a shared experience among other women, she wanted to combine that slight with the insult “butterface,” which is slang for women with appealing bodies but an ugly face.

Since 2013, Posner has been working with butter as a material way of understanding the body. Combining her background in avant-garde performance art with research on how butter has been vilified in American culture just as body fat has been, she sought to develop a performance that addressed the judgment around the materiality of bodies. “[Putting] ten to fifteen pounds of butter on your face while wearing Spanx leads to thinking about the relationships between the objectification, sexualization, and judgment on women’s bodies and also thinking about the sculpting we do to ourselves,” Posner says.

This live performance of “Butterface” was part of a series titled “The Body Butter Politic,” which included a 40-minute film where Posner agitates cream until it eventually forms butter — a metaphor for the way political change happens, first with agitation and then with

solidarity among people.

At Colgate, Posner gathered participants for a new performance, titled “Mother.”

On Oct. 20, in Huntington Gym, the performers began by taking turns shaking clear jars of heavy cream to make butter; the sound of the solidifying liquid was amplified in the room. Posner first spoke into a loudspeaker on the politicization of the body, before joining the performers as they contorted themselves and chanted criticisms of their bodies. Once it was finished, she led the audience in a meditation on believing that one deserves to be happy.

Later in the month, a buttermaking workshop involved more students, and another performance of “Mother” took place at a cow pasture on nearby Kriemhild Dairy Farms.

“It felt uplifting to commune in the place where butter comes from while doing feminist art,” says visiting French professor Amanda Lee, who was one of the performers.

Posner hopes the framework of “Mother” will be implemented among activist groups, allowing them to portray political messages through bodily interpretations.

Watch a video of Posner’s work at Colgate: colgate.edu/ posner.

— Lauren Hutton ’21

12 Amy Leventer, the Harold Orville Whitnall Professor of geology, received the 2018 Goldthwait Polar Medal for outstanding contributions to polar science.

The Borough of Manhattan deemed Oct. 4 Tracey Hucks Appreciation Day in honor of her work as an educator, scholar, and administrator. Hucks ’87, MA ’90, Colgate’s provost and dean of the faculty, is a Harlem native.

Mark DiOrio

13

12 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 12

1/16/19 9:04 AM

SCENE Modeling marine particles and studying their global effects on climate change is the focus of Harris’s senior research. Working with Professor Ephraim Woods, Harris artificially creates particles that represent what would come off of ocean spray. “By doing that in a controlled environment, we’re able to treat them to other chemicals or molecules and put them in certain environments we think are being caused by humans,” Harris says.

The decision to major in chemistry and minor in applied math was a switch from Harris’s original plan to double major in chemistry and math. “I quickly found that the theoretical side of math was not for me,” he recalls. Fortunately, the applied math major and minor had become an option at Colgate in recent years, so he made the change. His two disciplines complement each other, Harris explains. “In order to understand the concepts in high-level physical chemistry, you have to understand the math behind them.

It’s almost like a new language you have to learn.”

He was Most Valuable Player of the 2018 Patriot League Tournament, which the Raiders won for the third year in a row and are the only team in the league to ever do so. Harris had two assists and two goals in this year’s tournament.

PROFILE

The Elements of Oliver Harris ’19 Meet #28: Midfielder, chemistry major, and applied mathematics minor

H

e and his soccer teammates had fought hard to beat the University of New Hampshire 1–0 in the first round of the 2018 NCAA tournament Nov. 15. That night, they piled onto the bus for the six-hour ride home. But Oliver Harris’s day wasn’t over; he had to prep for his computational mathematics test the next morning. So, he studied on the bus, fell into bed at 4 a.m., and awoke at 8 a.m. to take the test before leaving that afternoon

for the Wake Forest game. “You just have to balance,” Harris says in his characteristically casual way. The senior captain from Chappaqua, N.Y., has done well balancing his athletic and academic responsibilities, making both the Raider Academic Honor Roll and Patriot League Academic Honor Roll every year since he’s been at Colgate. Here are some of the elements that make up Harris, a chemistry major and applied math minor:

He scored the game-winning goal against Holy Cross in the 2017 Patriot League Tournament. “It went through two people’s legs to go into the goal,” Harris recalls. “It was so lucky. My dad called it destiny.”

Averaging 8 to 10 miles a game, the midfielder estimates that he ran 250 miles this season. “As a math and chemistry nerd, I like numbers,” Harris says. Tallying miles is one reason he appreciates the harnesses they wear, but also, the devices help with game strategy, showing a heat index of players on the field.

His Colgate legacy parents are Christopher ’87 and Louise (Richardson) Harris ’87. Christopher, having also been a Colgate soccer player, was naturally Oliver’s first coach from the time his son started playing at age 4. Louise was a member of the crew team, and as a biochemistry major, passed her science aptitude on to her son.

The future presents two options for Harris. At press time, he was waiting to hear back from graduate schools he applied to — with the goal of pursuing a PhD in environmental chemistry — and the professional soccer teams for which he’d tried out. “I’ll either be studying chemistry or playing soccer — the two things I love to do.”

— Aleta Mayne

ATHLETICS

A Stellar Season

Mark DiOrio (2)

W

ith the James Madison Dukes hot on their heels, the Colgate Raiders pulled off a 23–20 win in the second round of the NCAA Football Championship on Dec. 1, advancing Colgate to the quarterfinals. It was the first NCAA playoff game at Andy Kerr Stadium since 2003. A week later, the Raiders’ season ended with a 35–0 loss to No. 1–ranked North Dakota State in the Fargodome. Colgate’s 10-win campaign was only the fourth time in 128 seasons that they’ve accomplished that record. But, this was the second time in four years that the Raiders have made it to the NCAA quarterfinals.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 13

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 13

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Discover RESEARCH

Jaws Drop Lacey Williams ’16 is studying how changes in the ecosystem are affecting great whites.

urking deep in the murky waters of False Bay, South Africa, a 2,000-pound, 16-foot-long great white shark prepares for its attack. Speeding up to a swim of 40 miles per hour, the “white death” leaps out of the water and into the air, sneaking up on the cape fur seal it was tracking for some time.

Lacey Williams ’16 watches from her boat.

Widely considered some the most dangerous areas to swim, the False Bay waters around Seal Island have some of the highest numbers of predatory events by great whites in the world “by a long shot,” says Williams.

As a research assistant, Williams is studying the sharks’ ambush strategy — called “breaching” — to write a paper and answer some unsolved mysteries about its process. She’s teamed up with Chris and Monique Fallows, who own Apex Shark Expeditions, and Neil Hammerschlag, a professor and director of the shark research and conservation program at the University of Miami.

Those foggy False Bay waters only allow the researchers to watch the sharks hunt their prey during the climax of the breaching process. To answer questions about what happens during the preamble to the breach, they’ll monitor the crystal clear waters of Plettenberg Bay (about 433 km east of False Bay), where an emerging seal colony has attracted more great whites, altering the ecosystem.

“This project is essentially a fill-in-the-

blank,” Williams says. “[For example,] we haven’t been able to observe how a great white shark stalks a seal underwater before attacking, how the seals and the sharks use the seabed, and how deep the sharks start before they breach.”

The observational research in Plettenberg Bay will give the team insight into the predator-prey interaction of sharks and cape fur seals. They’ll observe movement patterns, the sharks’ intensity, and the prey’s response based on age, size of the shark, and other factors. With an influx of great whites to the area, this is uncharted

territory in the shark research world.

“We don’t know how the ecosystem around Plettenberg Bay will alter not only the sharks’ hunting strategies, but also the seals’ evasive strategies,” Williams says.

“This is an opportunity to answer so many questions using noninvasive methods.”

Williams met the Fallowses through Apex, an ecotourism company, when she went shark cage diving during a family trip.

She then became a crew member for two summers before beginning research. At Colgate, as a biology major, opportunities like an extended study trip to the Dolphin

Robert Harding Picture Library, NG Image Collection

L

14 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 14

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Research Center in the Florida Keys fueled her interest in marine life. Williams is planning to enter graduate school in fall 2019, but before doing so, she’ll continue her research with Hammerschlag and the Fallowses.

This summer, the group will travel to a marine protected area (MPA) in De Hoop, South Africa. They will identify endemic shark species (including smooth hammerheads), tag many of them, and use other survey methods to assess the species.

The researchers are looking into the smaller shark species because they believe that smaller shark populations are declining due to a commercial fishery in the area.

Overfishing of the smaller sharks could alter the food web, because they are an important part of the great white’s diet. “[The loss of great whites] has been devastating in terms of marine biology and science,” says Williams.

Through this research, Williams and her team hope to show the South African government that MPAs are critical for protecting these species — the economy and environment depend on them. Best case scenario: The government will extend the protected area over the entire habitat, creating a buffer zone for the sharks.

“We are at the point of no return,” Williams says. “If we don’t protect them now, we will lose them forever.”

— Rebecca Docter

DID YOU KNOW? ⚫ You’re more likely to be killed by a hippo than a shark.

ASK A PROFESSOR

How are smartphones and GPS devices affecting the future of maps?

Ubiquitous connectivity, the Internet, and location-aware smartphones have collectively revolutionized the cartographic process. Whereas the production of maps used to be the domain of government and corporations, individuals now routinely “map” throughout the day as they utilize the many location-based services integrated into their phones. The product of such activity is either a map, even though it may only exist in the ether for a moment or two (or until you get to your destination if you are using your phone for direction), or geographic data that will eventually underpin some sort of map. Either way, you are practicing a newage form of cartography. By allowing various apps and cellular providers to track you through your smartphone, you are generating geographic data. Have you ever wondered how Google knows when restaurants and stores are busy, or “popular” to use Google jargon? Human mobility is being archived on scales unimaginable only a few years ago, for purposes yet undiscovered, and for motives both transparent and opaque.

One thing is clear: Digital maps are different. What constitutes a map or how we even define the term is changing. For example, because there is essentially no cost to mapping today, you’re as likely to stumble across a map of whether people living in particular places prefer the term “soda” or “pop” as you are to find a road map. It’s safe to assume that there are at least as many maps as there are people who care to map — multiplied, of course, by the number of times they choose to do so.

Another thing that makes ephemeral maps unique, especially those displayed on smartphones, is their perspective. Typically the cartographer or smartphone user is placed at the center of the map, and increasingly the map is shown from the perspective the individual is literally facing. While “north up” might have been an arbitrary designation that did a disservice to those living south of the equator, these new map forms breed egocentricity. Research has shown that their use might actually decrease one’s spatial cognition. We are moving into a world where it’s impossible to get lost (unless your battery dies), but where no one knows where anything is actually located other than from their individual perspective at a moment in time.

Geography professor Peter Scull is interested in using geospatial tools (GIS and remote sensing) to study environmental change.

He recently began teaching a class called GIS and Society (GEOG340); the course is designed to contemplate issues of privacy and ethics as they relate to geospatial technologies.

Do you have a big-picture question for a faculty member? Write to us at: magazine@ colgate.edu.

⚫ Great white sharks can’t survive in captivity.

The longest a great white was held? About six months. ⚫ Williams’s interest in sharks started with her morbid fascination with shark attacks. ⚫ Williams is the 14th member of her family to attend Colgate, dating back to 1846. ⚫ Sometimes Williams names the sharks she frequently sees. Her most recent favorite: Pipsqueak, the smallest she's ever seen, at 2.2 meters.

Mark DiOrio

⚫ Great whites are the largest predatory fish. ⚫ The great white is the last living member of the genus Carcharodon.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 15

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 15

1/9/19 3:31 PM

DISCOVER

FACULTY

The Newsworthiness of Police Shootings Professor Alicia Simmons asks: Whose lives matter?

rayvon Martin. Eric Garner.

These names launched a cultural reckoning. They rose up again and again as crowds filled the streets to protest police shootings of unarmed black men.

But, “[these shootings] happen once every six days, by my estimate,” says Alicia Simmons, a social psychologist and associate professor of sociology. So why do we only know certain names?

“You need a particular kind of case to make news coverage,” Simmons says.

Her article, “Whose Lives Matter? The National Newsworthiness of Police Killing Unarmed Blacks” (Du Bois Review, fall 2017), identifies the factors that help a case reach prominence. These factors include: the percentage of the location’s population that is black, the existence of video evidence, and whether there were peaceful demonstrations in response.

Simmons and a team of student researchers have been digging deeper into the news cycle to look for patterns in the data. The students are collecting clips and transcripts from major networks like CNN, NBC, and Fox. They search the database LexisNexis for stories from prime-time news shows that mention the now-recognizable names of men shot by police. Next, they sort the data into categories, determining a news story’s framing — about protests, grand jury deliberations, or racial inequality — and the qualities that define the story.

The team is finding that the events preceding the shooting play a large role in the case’s rise to prominence. If the officer used a Taser, for example, that complicates the narrative.

“Everyone thinks Tasers are nonlethal,” Simmons says. “They’re actually less lethal.

But because that story is harder to tell, because there is debate in the medical community, we don’t hear about those stories.”

She is also designing experiments to test for a news story’s effect on the viewer’s perception by manipulating a TV news clip

T

to change the race and gender of a crime story’s perpetrator or victim.

A lot of Simmons’s research comes down to perception. Until the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, police shootings of unarmed black men rarely made major headlines.

With the rise of protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, that is changing — but Simmons believes that the way they’re covered in major news outlets remains a symptom of the way we process crime in America. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how the American news media portray race and crime, and how that shapes people’s criminal justice policy preference and their racial attitudes,” she says.

Ultimately, Simmons wants to collect her research for a book that will outline these phenomena, presenting the data in a way that appeals to a popular audience as well as social scientists.

Simmons says her goal is to give clarity about the nature of the news cycle. “I want people to understand the plain statistic,” she says. “It happens every six days. How many people can you name?” – Violet Baron

→→ Simmons’s student researchers created a database of cases involving police killings of unarmed black people over a two-year period. “We’re piecing it together,” Simmons says, because no official database exists. “This is a transparency and an accountability issue.” →→ The group collected data from ABC, CBS, NBC Nightly News, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post. →→ They looked at five case characteristics: context, event, decedent, officer, and flywheels. →→ “Context tells us where these things occur,” says Simmons, who found that police shootings of unarmed black people happen more often in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

In these communities, household incomes and college graduation rates are lower than the national average, and the percentages of black and foreign-born populations are higher. →→ Event details factor into whether it gets media coverage. For example, if the citizen does not resist arrest, the story is more likely to get coverage because the person is a more sympathetic character. →→ The story is also more likely to make the news if the officer has had a previous complaint against him or her. “A common narrative is the ‘bad apple’ cop,” Simmons says. “It’s [portrayed as a] discrete instance, which doesn’t point to any systematic issues. But when we’re talking about once every six days, that sounds to me like a systematic issue.” →→ Flywheels are subsequent events — protests, grand jury hearings, civil lawsuits — that lead to further news coverage. “These are no doubt signifiers of injustice,” Simmons says, “but they also open up more newsmaking possibilities by introducing new storylines and sources.”

Professor Alicia Simmons is a social psychologist focused on the intersections of media, race, and politics in the United States.

16 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 16

1/9/19 3:31 PM

DISCOVER

A New Lease on Life A Bicentennial exhibition reimagines Colgate’s natural history collections.

n the fall of 1868, Albert Bickmore traveled to Colgate (then Madison University) to become the University’s first professor of geology and zoology. In his luggage, he carried an extensive collection of natural history specimens — including more than 700 brightly colored birds — which he had collected and preserved from the East Indies and Asia.

After a year of teaching, Bickmore went on to found the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1869. His birds, however, remained at the University, forming the basis of what was to become a vast collection of natural history specimens.

Today, a new exhibition in Olin Hall celebrates Colgate’s natural history collections and explores the curious afterlife of Bickmore’s birds. Life After Death: 200 Years of Natural History at Colgate was spearheaded by professors Eddie Watkins (biology), Tim McCay (biology), and Elizabeth Marlowe (art and art history). Julia Marchetti ’18 (art and art history and environmental studies double major) and Erin Burke ’18 (history major) curated the exhibition.

“This exhibition has helped me to think about the way we frame what is valuable and what should be preserved,” says Marchetti, who is pursuing a master’s degree in historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. (Burke is working on a master’s degree in museum studies at the University of Glasgow.)

For many years, Bickmore’s birds, along with a growing assortment of other preserved creatures, were housed in glass cases in Lathrop Hall. By 1964, however, the birds were in decline, so zoology professor Robert Goodwin restored many of them with the help of student volunteers.

When Olin Hall was built in 1969, the collections were moved there for storage.

McCay found them when he arrived in 2000 and has spent several years working with students to catalogue and organize the specimens.

I

HIDDEN GEMS

andrew daddio

PRESERVATION

“We have more than 34,000 identified and catalogued skulls, mammal skins, eggs, seeds, mosses, lichens, lizards, pressed plants, stuffed birds, and other specimens,” he says.

Last summer, Marchetti and Burke combed through the collection, researched the objects and their unique histories, and designed the exhibition. McCay and Watkins served as scientific advisers. The result is a captivating array of preserved specimens, detailed labels, and archival images.

Bickmore’s birds peer out from every display, still looking vibrant and inquisitive after 150 years.

Life After Death offers a timeline of specimen collection and preservation at Colgate, and delves into the use of specimens in interdisciplinary learning.

Marchetti and Burke show how the collections have been used by theater, art, and museum studies students, as well as by those in the sciences.

McCay uses the bird collection in his vertebrate zoology class. Over his office desk, a stuffed passenger pigeon perches, serving as a silent testament to the extinction of a species. In the meantime, deep under Olin Hall in a climate-controlled room, the remainder of Bickmore’s birds await their next incarnation into interdisciplinary learning at Colgate.

– Jasmine Kellogg

Already dazzling in its raw form, a block of quartz is transformed into a Buddhistic figure with flowing robes.

A green-ribboned malachite stone is shaped into a tree. The Beauty of Sculpted Minerals exhibition in the Robert M. Linsley Geology Museum offers a visual display of natural materials and their artistic relatives.

The sculptures and minerals from which they’re hand carved are on loan from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Rich April, the Dunham Beldon Jr. Professor of geology emeritus, organized the exhibition to “show how minerals are beautiful even in nature but also after the sculptor has carved them into something we could treasure.”

In honor of Colgate’s Bicentennial, the professor wanted to recognize the University’s 150-year-long association with the AMNH, beginning with former Professor Albert Bickmore’s founding of the AMNH in 1869.

After a year and a half of planning, April’s exhibition came to fruition when the crates arrived last August. “I couldn’t believe how beautiful the sculptures were in person,” he says, having chosen the pieces from photographs. Although April says he loves all of the objects, a little Buddha, carved from tiger’s eye, stands out: “It has this reflective beauty.” But, April adds, each piece has its own attraction. “When people gaze upon this display,” he says, “every person will have a different favorite piece.”

The Beauty of Sculpted Minerals is on display until June 15.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 17

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 17

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Mark Diorio

Earth, Wind & Fire’s performance shook the steel rafters of Sanford Field House Sept. 22.

18 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 18

1/9/19 3:31 PM

Bicentennial

200 YEARS

ONE MONUMENTAL CELEBRATION

By Lauren Hutton ’21

A

s maroon crowds swarmed into Hamilton, excited whispers mentioned the likes of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Patti Smith and R&B legends Earth, Wind & Fire.

The village doubled in population as alumni, parents, and friends fled back to campus for the University’s three-day Bicentennial Kickoff Celebration starting Sept.

21. When combined with Family Weekend and homecoming, the festivities provided a continuous stream of special events.

In addition to the celebratory moments, the schedule included a number of opportunities to reflect on Colgate’s

200-year-long history. Jane Lagoudis Pinchin, professor of English emerita, and Professor of history Jill Harsin appeared with Provost and Dean of the Faculty Tracey Hucks ’87, MA’90 to discuss the impact of female students and faculty on Colgate, post-1970. At a Shabbat service and dinner, student co-authors spoke about writing Repression, Re-invention, & Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. On Saturday morning, Becoming Colgate author Jim Smith ’70, former Bicentennial Fellow Jason Petrulis, and Harsin discussed pivotal moments in the University’s past. The following day, the University showed a preview of Path of Duty, a new documentary that examines

the lives of three African American alumni.

Filmmakers Zeron Turlington and Nicole Watson joined Vaughn Carney ’68 and Diane Ciccone ’74, P’10, who inspired the work, to discuss their motivations in making the film. They cited a lack of representation of African American students in Colgate’s 200-year story and their hopes to participate in offering a​ more complete history of Colgate moving forward.

From lectures to concerts, from fireworks to the homecoming tailgate, there was something for everyone.

Here’s a look at some of the moments and behind-the-scenes preparations that made the weekend. ►

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 19

2019_Winter_Interior_19125.indd 19

1/25/19 3:58 PM

Mark Diorio

It’s not every day you hear of an ingredients list including 570 eggs, 4 liters of red food coloring, and nearly 50 liters of milk, but that is exactly what alumni couple Britty (Buonocore) ’12, MA’13 and Brendan O’Connor ’09 tallied when they set out to prepare the Bicentennial cake.

Colgate tasked the Flour & Salt bakery co-owners with providing a red velvet cake for 2,000 attendees in the shape of a 20- by 20-foot C resembling the new logo.

Brendan calculated how many cakes it would require and figured out how to form the shape of the letter. Then, for the month leading up to the Bicentennial kickoff, Britty and her assistant baker made 40 18by 26-inch rectangular sheet cakes. They spent almost two weeks whipping up vanilla buttercream frosting using 225 pounds of confectioners sugar and 112 pounds of butter. Then, the bakers lightly frosted, refrigerated, and refrosted (a technique called crumb coating) these dual-layer cakes before tightly Saran wrapping and storing them in a walk-in freezer.

“It was tiring and also terrifying,” Britty says. “Both Brendan and I graduated from Colgate, so we wanted this to be really wonderful.”

On the morning of the Bicentennial kickoff, Facilities Department members helped transport the cakes to Whitnall Field, where tables placed in the shape of a C awaited. For four and a half hours, the couple constructed the two-cake–wide C while Flour & Salt staff frosted it.

Didn’t make it to campus? The festivities continue throughout the 2018–19 academic year, traveling to cities around the world and linking the Colgate community online via the Bicentennial website at 200.colgate. edu.

Britty (Buonocore) O’Connor ’12

Marilu Lopez Fretts

Dessert for 2,000?

A Piece of Cake

Embodying Colgate’s Logo The letter C appeared many places during Bicentennial weekend — including gold pins, embroidered maroon hats, and banners throughout Hamilton.

But the most impressive display was when Colgate community members joined together to form a human C during halftime at Saturday’s homecoming football game on Crown Field.

Staff members from athletics, alumni relations, and the special events committee came up with the idea, and professors helped execute the plan.

First, in order to determine what points would make a perfect C on such a large

scale, math professor Will Cipolli superimposed the new Colgate logo onto a proportionally accurate football field background.

He then used precalculus distance calculations from known points (hash marks at certain points of the field) to determine coordinates.

Then, theater professor April Sweeney used her background in immersive theater to provide insight into the best way to position people and encourage participation from the crowd. Under her advice, people would first form the outline of the letter and then others would fill in the empty space.

On game day, recruited students — women’s hockey and men’s basketball athletes — created the outline, as they’d rehearsed.

Next, approximately 1,100 participants fled onto the field to complete the formation.

“We were all a part of Colgate’s history together,” Alena Maiolo ’21 says.

20 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 20

1/9/19 3:31 PM

GERARD GASKIN

The elements collided on Bicentennial Kickoff Weekend when nine-time Grammy Award–winning band Earth, Wind & Fire performed in Sanford Field House on Sept. 22.

More than 5,000 students, alumni, parents, and community members scored tickets for the free concert. Jazmyn McKoy ’17, once a member of the Colgate University Choir, was the opening act, belting out songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

(See p. 78 for more on McKoy.) When the R&B legends took the stage, audience members tossed around LED-lit balls as the renowned ensemble performed favorite tunes including “Shining Star,” “Let’s Groove,” and “Jupiter.” After the encore — “In the Stone” — the band handed out song sheets and drumsticks as memorabilia for fans.

The band encouraged the crowd to sing along — uniting alumni who were fans back in the ’70s with students hearing the classic tunes for the first time in what proved to be a memorable night.

Patti Smith HIGH NOTE: As Colgate prepared for Bicentennial Kickoff weekend, a legendary opening act took the stage Sept. 20.

Patti Smith, singersongwriter and author, appeared as part of the Living Writers series. Smith read from her National Book Award–winning memoir, Just Kids, and she performed a number of her greatest hits relating to the passages.

Mark Diorio (2)

Do you remember the 22nd night of September?

We were all a part of Colgate’s history together.

— Alena Maiolo ’21

A crowd of 7,753 fans at Andy Kerr Stadium watched the Colgate Raiders kick the Lafayette Leopards’ tails 45–0.

The Raiders wore vintage 1932 throwback uniforms for the homecoming game, which resulted in Colgate’s largest margin of victory in a shutout since defeating Lafayette 47–0 in 1945.

Jazmyn McKoy ’17

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 21

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 21

1/9/19 3:31 PM

CLASS ACTS Memorable moments with professors

NOW THERE WAS A GUY

“Now here’s a guy, this guy John Donne, and he writes poetry. But why poetry?”

Setting down his mug of coffee, Professor Bob Blackmore lit up another cigarette to replace the few he’d lit minutes earlier. He’d barely puffed on them before tossing them to the floor and stomping out the smoldering Luckys. I watched all of this from the front row of a Lawrence Hall classroom in the fall of 1963.

Professor Blackmore was the nicest guy in the world and often had noteworthy things to say about our readings in English literature. In those days, smoking was allowed in class, and he could sometimes barely be seen behind the nicotine haze of the cigarettes burning in his hand, or balanced on the ashtray, or smoldering on the linoleum beneath his feet — or all of those at once. Sitting in the front row, I was fascinated by his dexterity, by how he could have so many cigarettes glowing at the same time.

One nippy November day, with the smell of winter in the air, Professor Blackmore came into class, looking spiffy as could be in his sports coat and woolen slacks, complete with stylish deep cuffs…

“Now here’s a guy named Milton, a blind guy who could see better than anyone, but why poetry? Why?” This was his eternal question about all the poets we read. Out came the weeds by the dozen and down to the floor they went. The amiable, bespectacled Bob Blackmore chatted on in the haze, even as a still-flaming cig fell like a firecracker into the furry ashtray of one of his cuffs.

My friend Bill Wilson ’66 was sitting next to me, and we elbowed each other simultaneously, amazed at what we’d just seen, and what we were about to. My eyes were on that cuff, but sweet Bob seemed oblivious, until his tweedy gray wool began to smolder. He started looking around and sniffing the air as if someone were singeing pin feathers in the room. Smoke billowing from his britches, up he leapt from his chair and was out of there, “Why poetry?” be damned.

Over the many years later, I told my own students this little story to explain why they should always sit in the front row. Then, with Professor Blackmore eternally puffing cumulous clouds in heaven, we’d set out together to answer that unfathomable question, “Why poetry?”

Bruce Guernsey ’66 is a distinguished professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University and a poet who has published seven collections and several chapbooks.

22 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 22

Illustrations by Stephen Collins

1/9/19 3:31 PM

MY TEACHER I drove to Hamilton, N.Y., in December 2014 to take part in the funeral service for the Rev. Coleman Brown. Coleman had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education.

I took seven courses in religion as an undergraduate. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The classroom was where he lit the spark.

He was brilliant and slightly eccentric. Concerned one winter day that the heating system in Lawrence Hall was making us students too comfortable and complacent, he opened the windows, sending blasts of snow into the room as we sat huddled in our jackets. He had a habit of repeatedly circling words on the blackboard with chalk, leaving behind series of massive white rings and faint white streaks on his face (he ran his index and middle fingers down his cheek as he spoke). His worn tweed coats seemed to always have a soft coating of chalk dust.

He was loved, often adored, by most of his students, whom he looked upon as an extended family. His office hours were packed. He regularly brought

groups of students home for meals and evenings with him and his wife, Irene, and their four children. Three decades later, some of the most vivid memories I have of Colgate are of doggedly following him out of the classroom to continue the conversation he had begun in class, of meeting him weekly in his office, of listening to his sermons on Sunday mornings in the chapel, of dinners at his house, and, finally, after my graduation, of bursting into tears in front of my parents as I said goodbye to him.

Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion.

It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwin wrote, the ability to drive “to the heart of every matter and expose the question the answer hides.” And, as Baldwin further noted, it is about making the world “a more human dwelling place.”

Excerpted from an essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges ’79 that was originally published on Truthdig.com. Read the full essay at colgate.edu/magazine.

SHE BEAT THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME

As a quiet student, too shy to speak up and too timid to make use of professors’ office hours, it wasn’t until taking Visual Rhetorics with Professor Meg Worley that I felt comfortable coming out of that shell. Professor Worley’s sense of humor was immediately likeable and relatable. And it was easy to chat with her because she made it clear that she respected and understood that different students learn in different ways. For example, we had to complete a project at the end of each unit, and everything was encouraged. I created an experimental web comic that I still show in my portfolio.

Her ability to make comics and medieval marginalia equally fascinating is just what Professor Worley does. She also marks papers with stunning legibility, and in signature Professor Worley fashion, with brightly colored pens.

Martha Brill Olcott, an expert on Central Asia and former Soviet Union ethnic minorities, was my political science professor in 1990, the fall of my junior year. It was an important time: the Soviet Union was breaking apart, and there was little mainstream knowledge about Central Asian regional security. We were fortunate that Colgate happened to have among its professors a global expert on this topic.

Professor Olcott was often interviewed by 20/20 or NBC Nightly News, so we watched her videotaped appearances during class. We also had plenty of inperson time with her and heard some amazing stories.

During her extensive travels in past years, she was able to gather otherwise unattainable classified information from high-level Soviet officials. One of my favorite stories is how her father taught her to eat a full meal before meeting government officials for dinner, at which they typically drank a lot. She followed her father’s advice before going shot for shot with government officials. While they thought they were drinking a young, American woman under the table, she was gathering nuggets of useful information. She played them at their own game. Priceless and empowering.

Alyson Chu ’13 was an art and art history major who now works for an e-commerce business in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mishka Kohli Cira ’92 majored in Russian studies and is now a public health specialist whose work focuses on Africa.

THE ART OF BEING BOLD

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 23

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 23

1/9/19 3:31 PM

“Whether he was at his home in Hamilton, N.Y., his apartment in Geneva, his car, or in Prague doing research, Professor Douglas joined us month after month.”

— Class of 2008 alumnae

WELCOMING BEARS AND ALIENS ALIKE As an avid teddy bear collector, I arrived at Professor Anthony Aveni’s office early in my sophomore year with a rather special bear in tow, fit for his Astronomy in Culture class. Professor Aveni opened the door and immediately exclaimed over my bear, who is white with a bright green alien face. He asked me all about Bailey the alien bear, where in the universe he was from, and if he was near any of the constellations we were studying.

It set a kinder tone for an interaction I was nervous about — namely, asking for help after a difficult test. After this initial meeting, Professor Aveni told me that Bailey was welcome to come to our classes and evening study sessions, and my bear was soon a frequent visitor of the Ho Tung Visualization Lab. Bailey was even allowed to make an appearance during the final exam, when he poked his head out of my purse across the room (while wearing a tin foil hat, of course, which Professor Aveni knew would dampen any potential cheating powers). Even during the hardest test of the semester, Professor Aveni made a point of making me laugh and feel comfortable.

Michelle Cohen ’15 was an English major who is now managing editor of HAKOL, the Jewish newspaper of the Lehigh Valley (Pa.)

THE BOOK CLUB At our five-year reunion, Professor Ray Douglas biked over to a group of us lounging under the shady trees by Whitnall Field to say hello.

He’d just published Orderly and Humane, a thorough examination of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after World War II. It was a book we all wanted to read, especially because he had been doing the research and writing while we were his students. We wanted to read it together — not only did the subject matter warrant discussion but, if we were being honest with ourselves, life, work, and Netflix can sometimes get in the way of academic pursuits, and we wanted to make sure someone else was holding us accountable for our reading.

After Professor Douglas biked away, Jill Ferris said, “We should start a book club.” And so we did.

We started our first chunk of reading and picked a night to call each other. We e-mailed Professor Douglas to let him know our plan. He decided to join us that night and gave us great perspective on the subject matter. Finally, after about two hours, he said he had to get to bed because he had class in a few hours. We then found out that he was leading the Geneva Study Group and it was 4 a.m. in Switzerland.

Although we thought Professor Douglas was a onenight guest of our book club, he turned into a core member.

Whether he was at his home in Hamilton, N.Y., his apartment in Geneva, his car, or in Prague doing research, Professor Douglas joined us month after

month on Google Hangout at all hours of the day and night.

When we finished his book, we started another. And then another. And yet another. We have read, learned about, and discussed the 1918 influenza epidemic, slavery in New York City, the secret relationship between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI, the Taiping Civil War, the fight for independence of the African nation of Katanga, and most recently, the history and expansion of cotton as it impacted the world economies.

After five years, seven books, two marriages, 2.5 kids, and numerous promotions and job changes, our book club is still going strong. This past June, during our 10th Reunion, it culminated in our first in-person meeting at the Colgate Inn. Professor Douglas came after landing in Syracuse only a few hours earlier; he’d just hiked the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain.

Ever the educator, Professor Douglas’s boundaries to educate extend beyond the classroom, beyond geographic divides, beyond the waves of the Internet. Ten years since our graduation, he encompasses what it really means to get a liberal arts education in today’s world. During our time at Colgate, he was our academic adviser, but he has continued to show his interest in and commitment to our lives, well-being, knowledge, and education beyond our time on the Hill. Even though we are not technically his students anymore, he continues to engage, challenge, and support our academic pursuits.

Next up? The Spectacle of Flight

by Robert Wohl.

Emily (Good) Pettit ’08, Nicole Carlino ’08, Sarah Hale ’08, Maria Concilio ’08, Amelie Lipman ’08, Jill Ferris ’08

“It set a kinder tone for an interaction I was nervous about.” — Michelle Cohen ’15

24 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 24

1/16/19 12:51 PM

WAKE-UP CALL It was 1956, my freshman year, and I was taking the legendary Earl Daniels’s English 101 at the outrageous time of 8 a.m. Like everyone else, I staggered across the Quad to Lawrence Hall and found my seat.

I believe Professor Daniels had us sit in alphabetical order.

At some point in the class, he burst out, “Greenbaum!

Strike that man!” Next to me, blissfully in dreamland, was Larry Goodman ’60. I obediently nudged Larry awake. Professor glowered at him, pointed to the door, and shouted, “Out!” And out Larry went. Needless to say, the rest of us stayed wide awake for the remainder of the class.

On the serious side, Professor Daniels taught us the proper way to read poetry, meticulous examination of novels as well as scrupulous editing of our writing. He showed us that a college class was in a different league from high school — and we had better step up our game. Tough medicine, but well worth it.

Steve Greenbaum ’60 was an English major who retired from teaching in 2000 after a 38-year career with the Los Angeles Unified School District. He’s now in real estate sales with his wife, Ruth.

Read more stories online at colgate.edu/magazine

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 25

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 25

1/9/19 3:32 PM

26 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 26

1/16/19 12:53 PM

Research Review

A sampling of scholarship being explored by professors and their students

Winter 2019  Colgate Magazine  27

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 27

1/9/19 3:32 PM

Cracking the Kailasanatha Code One of southern India’s most cherished temples has a secret that’s been buried since the 9th century. Professor Padma Kaimal believes she’s figured it out.

F

or centuries, visitors of the Kailasanatha temple in Kanchipuram, India, have entered the inner courtyard and followed its path lined with sandstonecarved deities including Shiva, Parvathi, and Skanda.

Hindus believe it is most auspicious to circumambulate temples by moving clockwise. But by studying clues laid out in a counterclockwise direction through Kailasanatha, Professor Padma Kaimal discovered a secret meaning — one that hasn’t been affirmed since the 9th century.

“After thinking about it for a few decades, I finally figured it out,” says Kaimal, who has written about the temple in a forthcoming book from University of Washington Press.

“It’s a puzzle, and all the pieces fit together.”

The Kailasanatha monument was built

by Rajasimha, ruler of the Pallava Dynasty, in the late 7th to early 8th century. Kaimal, an art and art history professor, first visited in 1984. “I was overwhelmed by it, and I took all the pictures I could,” she recalls. “I just kept returning again and again.”

Surrounded by a high enclosure wall with menacing stone lions, the complex includes a central shrine and 58 subshrines.

The more Kaimal visited, the more photos and notes she took, mapping out diagrams, finding patterns, and uncovering layers of significance.

On the north side of the central shrine, the sculptures represent discipline: Rigid bodies engage in themes of battle, conquest, domination. The figures on the south side of the building show continuity: Languid bodies display nature, sexuality, rebirth.

“These modes of being were both important to the royal family,” Kaimal says.

The sculptures, she soon realized, also appear to be moving in two directions — some guiding visitors clockwise and others leading visitors counterclockwise.

The inscriptions on the buildings, too, are carved both clockwise and counterclockwise.

One, in particular, puzzled the professor: a 12-verse poem that reads counterclockwise and runs below statues of Shiva and the goddesses. It has been believed, until now, that the sculptures and the inscription below tell two unrelated stories.

The courtly poem carved around the building praises King Rajasimha, narrating his descent from gods, sages, and valiant kings, and tells of his great deeds. The sculptures, meanwhile, depict the gods fighting against evil, ruling from their thrones, dancing, flirting, and marrying.

“Even though they seem to be about different things, they’re sharing ideas,” Kaimal says.

Working with a colleague to carefully line up the ancient Sanskrit words with the statues above, Kaimal spent months poring over it and eventually cracked the code.

“Suddenly my hair was standing on end as I thought, oh my god, it’s coming together, it actually means something,” she says.

The sculptures and the inscription “are in dialogue with each other to tell a third story neither medium could tell on its own,” Kaimal explains. “The secret message that comes at the end of the two stories is that the king is continuing the work of the gods, returning the world to a utopia, and fusing with the god [Shiva].” Furthermore, the inscription states that King Rajasimha took initiation into a tantric sect, indicating that he was renouncing this life in order to join with the divine.

In the Hindu faith, circumambulating counterclockwise is done in the hopes of attaining transcendence and escaping rebirth, while most people move clockwise in order to achieve a prosperous life on earth. So only those who moved counterclockwise through Kailasanatha would have known the secret meaning.

Those people were the esoteric sect initiates, believed to be the Pallava kings.

“For the king to take initiation into a secret sect was a pretty big deal,” Kaimal says, explaining that sects are for people who are leaving society — a counterintuitive goal for kings. But, she believes, Rajasimha wanted the best of both worlds.

The king sought different kinds of power: magical strength on the battlefield, the potential to nurture and transform the whole world, and the ability to unite with the gods. The symbolism throughout the temple represents the king’s desire to simultaneously continue his lineage and “let go of life and seek transcendence,” Kaimal says. “These are not polarities, these are complementary. He wanted both.”

In a way, the Pallava kings did attain both. Although their dynasty died in the 9th century, their legacy lives on through the Kailasanatha temple — a monument that attracts flocks of tourists and devotees alike.

As the first person to read the temple this

Book Smarts

When working on her forthcoming book on the Kailasanatha monument, Professor Padma Kaimal recruited students to help. Hannah Bjornson ’15, an art and art history major, conducted research for the chapter about the physical changes to the temple over the centuries.

“She was turning up archaeological reports from the British Library — stuff I would never have known how to find,” Kaimal says. “She spent the summer sending me these gold mines.”

Three other students also lent their expertise. Shan Wu ’15, Daniel Berry ’17, and Angel Trazo ’17 produced diagrams to complement Kaimal’s text — a hefty job considering the numerous sculptures, inscriptions, and symbols.

The students’ work, Kaimal says, allowed her “to tell the story more clearly.”

way, Kaimal is relieved that her thesis has been accepted by some scholars around the world. “A lot of people feel possessive about this monument,” she says. “It’s kind of like the Sistine Chapel.” Still, despite their acceptance, some of Kaimal’s Hindu colleagues took precautions after her presentation at the temple: To undo the energy of going counterclockwise, they took several clockwise trips.

— Aleta Mayne

28 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 28

1/9/19 3:32 PM

Welcome to 1940

Live people were reduced to data.

Professor Dan Bouk is bringing them back to life.

K

nock. Knock. Knock.

Earnest Forning answers the door. He’s a janitor in 87 Hamilton Place, the Harlem apartment building where he lives. He’s face-to-face with enumerator Lucile Kenn, who asks him his age (51), heritage (German), income, and other personal details. Kenn records them in her ledger, which would become an entry in the 1940 United States Census.

More than 75 years later, Dan Bouk is standing on the sidewalk, looking up at 87 Hamilton Place, retracing Kenn’s steps.

Through archival documents and the 1940 census, Bouk, an associate history professor, is rebuilding the stories of mid-century Americans for his book, The Inventory of Democracy: The 1940 Census and the Politics

of Facts, the release of which will closely follow the 2020 census. From the Minnesota garbageman who told the census taker he earned no wages because he didn’t want the government to know his income to poet Langston Hughes, whose roommate answered the enumerator’s questions for him, Bouk uses data to reconstruct lives, one by one.

“These recreations fascinate me not only for the stories they tell about those being enumerated,” Bouk writes on his website, “but [also] because they invite us to learn more about the enumerator, one of the toooften faceless thousands mobilized to record for the nation and for posterity the facts of every American life.”

Stories like Kenn’s drive the narrative on Bouk’s website, censusstories.us, the precursor to his book. Providing a view into 1940s America, he uses information from the National Archives, local history collections, news stories, and articles from secondary literature to give the census a narrative and make his research more relatable. Bouk’s research brings to light the realization that the names listed in the

census aren’t just numbers on a vintage spreadsheet — they’re people, with compelling stories and backgrounds, who deserve to be remembered.

Bouk, who has a degree in computational mathematics and built his site from scratch, is no stranger to sifting through data the layperson would find snooze-worthy.

“I’m interested in things shrouded by cloaks of boringness. They look boring because they’re important,” Bouk says.

“The census count matters a lot in the day-to-day administration of government, so it matters in our lives.”

The 1940 census came when President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was in full swing, signaling a transition in the way the government thought about its economic responsibilities. For the first time, the census asked questions about income and housing that would be used to develop the new welfare state. With the 2020 census looming, these principles are largely still in place today.

“The census is a part of the mechanism by which the United States federal government is allocating resources and by which it makes decisions about how to shape the economic lives of people,” Bouk says.

Through Colgate’s first history lab (which he started), Bouk tasks students with exploring areas of the census he wouldn’t be able to on his own. This past fall, the students, Andrea De Hoyos ’20, Emily Karavitch ’21, and Ethan So ’21, analyzed the 1940s documents — including a list of census supervisors — searching for anything they deemed interesting. They built a database of their findings, which Bouk uses to aid in further research.

“Normally, I would probably just look at it and say ‘that’s interesting, but there’s nothing I can do with it.’ Because I’ve got this lab, I say, ‘let’s dig into this thing and see what happens,’” Bouk says.

Now, with documents detailing the process by which census supervisors were chosen, the team is matching names from their database to piece together a background for those who changed history by compiling the census. This information will be used in Bouk’s book.

Standing outside 87 Hamilton Place, Bouk thinks back on the meeting between Forning and Kenn. Thanks to the 1940 census, we know more about people like Forning: their ages, jobs, incomes, addresses. Thanks to Bouk and his students, we know their stories.

— Rebecca Docter Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 29

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 29

1/9/19 3:32 PM

Where There’s Smoke

Chemistry professor Anne Perring and Brady Mediavilla ’20 investigate the harmful effects of Western U.S. wildfires.

T

he devastating wildfires that roared across California in 2018 killed at least 91 people and caused more than $400 billion in economic damage. The most visible consequence of the fires, however, was the smoke that lingered in thick yellow clouds over San Francisco in November and harmed air quality as far east as New York City.

“You can have a fire in California that makes people unable to go out and exercise in Colorado,” says Anne Perring, an assistant chemistry professor.

Beyond the short-term health effects, scientists have a lot to learn about the smoke’s environmental effects on the climate. “Fires are major sources for particles in the atmosphere on a global scale,” Perring says, “but the chemistry can be very different depending on the kind of wood or other fuel that’s burning.”

This summer, Perring and Brady Mediavilla ’20 are taking part in a massive government research project to better understand that chemistry. They’ll be in a NASA plane flying straight into fire plumes in order to measure their composition. The project is part of FIREX-AQ, a joint project of NASA, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and approximately 40 participating institutions to better understand the effects of fire on global processes, including climate change.

Climate change has increased drought, leading to more wildfires, which in turn can create particles that cause more climate change. Perring and Mediavilla are investigating black carbon, otherwise known as soot, which can absorb solar radiation and lead to atmospheric warming. “By some calculations, it’s the second-biggest forcer of climate change after CO2,” says Perring, who joined Colgate last year after working with NOAA in Colorado. Unlike long-term greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, however, black carbon only stays in the atmosphere a short time — typically

days or weeks.

For that reason, accurately measuring properties of black carbon in fire plumes — including where the plumes are in the atmosphere and how long they last — is crucial to developing climate change models.

For their experiments, Perring and Mediavilla will take turns riding on an old Alitalia DC-8 jetliner, which has been fitted out with a variety of scientific equipment. “The airplane looks ridiculous because there are all sorts of things hanging off of it,” she says.

They will use a single particle soot photometer that sucks in particles and vaporizes them with a laser to tell how many are in the air. In addition, it can tell whether they are coated with other organic “goo” that changes how they absorb light.

“It should give us a better understanding of the properties of these particles that will be indicative of how they affect the environment,” Mediavilla says. He contacted Perring last summer, looking for research experience in environmental chemistry and sustainability, and he jumped at the chance to be involved in this project. “It’s not something you get the opportunity to do all the time,” he says.

The pair will spend three to four weeks in Idaho next summer chasing wildfires, hoping to take measurements in the air every second or third day.

When they are not flying, they’ll be in airplane hangars using high-powered computer software to crunch enormous data sets. “We have millions of particles every flight to work with,” Perring says. “You can spend a year or two on this kind of data analysis.”

In addition to her work on wildfires, Perring is also pursuing a project with other Colgate students examining the effects of pollens and spores in the air that can cause allergies. For his part, Mediavilla is planning to make the wildfire research the focus of his senior thesis next year, hoping to make a difference on a pressing environmental hazard. “Especially with the increase in burning from wildfires, the more we can look at this, the faster we can incorporate it into climate models,” he says. “Hopefully we can get around to mitigating it before it gets out of hand.”

— Michael Blanding

Former President Barack Obama honored Professor Anne Perring as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in January 2017.

30 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 30

1/9/19 3:32 PM

Virtually Inspired

Professor Karen Harpp, Vis Lab Director Joe Eakin, and students are developing an educational experience for young scientists.

A

“

n expedition on this sort of scale has never been attempted in the Galapagos before…”

So said the promos for the BBC documentary Mission Galapagos (2017). On the program, scientists from across disciplines traveled to the famous archipelago in 2016 to study its ecology.

Volcanologist and Colgate geology professor Karen Harpp was invited to go along to search for confirmation of a drowned island in that neighborhood of the Pacific.

While the scale of the documentary was grand, its scope was limited: In order to meet the demands of TV, BBC producers told Harpp that she would have to find the island during a single five-hour submarine dive. She explained that it was an unlikely outcome — and she was right.

“We didn’t have a home-run answer, and my piece didn’t make it in,” Harpp says.

Instead, she appeared on screen providing background information on key scientific concepts. Those explanations had to be as concise as possible, and it occurred to Harpp that quick, cut-and-dried statements might paint a skewed picture for aspiring young scientists. “We don’t want to deliver science as a done deal, because how is a kid supposed to be inspired to pursue a career in science when you say, ‘We’ve solved the problem; we’re finished!’”

Harpp decided to channel her concern into the creation of an interdisciplinary academic experience that would teach students from around the world about science — with all of its nuance and ambiguity — using the Galapagos as a lens.

Within a year, Harpp was back on the archipelago with a Colgate team that included Emily Weaver ’20, Caio Rodrigues Faria Brighenti ’20, and Ho Tung Visualization Lab Director Joe Eakin.

This 10-day trip was a preliminary visit to introduce the students to the Galapagos, its beauty, and some of its residents, including scientists and naturalist guides. Based on these conversations and investigations, the team decided that the project was worth pursuing and that it should integrate geological and biological concepts in an interactive online experience, a virtual tour.

The technology for the concept had to be developed before Harpp could apply for a Galapagos National Park permit, which is required for any comparable project. So, upon their return to campus in summer of 2017, Brighenti, a virtual reality (VR) developer working in Eakin’s Vis Lab, started exploring methods to produce interactive tours of the Galapagos. Weaver began drafting lesson plans to guide the narrative.

By the end of the summer, Brighenti had produced … a 15-second prototype.

Given the render time of VR files and the download time for users, Brighenti says, “drastic change was needed if we wanted to complete anything.”

They also needed to figure out how to deliver their experience to users around the world. The solution came from Lev Horodyskyj, curriculum designer at Arizona State University (ASU) Online, who visited campus that year. He talked about teaching geology in remote locations using an ASUdeveloped system called SolarSPELL: Solar Powered Educational Learning Library.

Designers attach MicroSD chips full of educational media to Raspberry Pi computer CPUs and make the library accessible via mobile phone — no Internet required.

Harpp and her team realized during this presentation that SolarSPELL could provide a perfect solution. They were convinced after further conversations with Horodyskyj and his ASU colleagues, who were game to collaborate on the project.

Summer two of the project, which they titled Virtual Galapagos, was a churn of activity. The team, including new members Julia Rose Dottinger ’18, Marie Pugliese ’20, Devin Ferri ’21, and Katie Weber ’20, developed curricular modules based on topics like mantle plume formation and animals’ use of currents for interisland transportation. Pugliese took on the latter.

She drew on her experience coordinating educational programs at her local aquarium.

She read the scholarly literature and interviewed Colgate faculty members such as geology professor Amy Leventer.

“We knew we needed something that would tie everything together — the children who were going to do this needed a reason to do it,” Pugliese says. So they created characters to draw students into the program: Carlos the blue-footed booby and Adrianna, a Galapagos penguin. Users join Carlos and Adrianna as they travel around the islands, learning interdisciplinary science while searching for elusive pink iguanas.

Dottinger drew the characters (voiced by Harpp’s family members) and whiteboard

Drawing in an audience: The Virtual Galapagos team explains concepts like mantle plumes and the motion of tectonic plates through colorful, engaging animation.

animations to explain complex topics that Carlos and Adrianna must learn to take the next step along the journey. Users even have a field book that saves the notes they take as they tag along.

“We are consciously trying to instill the fact that science isn’t complete,” Pugliese says. “In the script, when appropriate, we even say, ‘Scientists don’t know that yet.’”

All of these grand ideas went to Brighenti for coding. To make the program fit onto a SolarSPELL, he decided to shift to a web-based platform. “I figured out how to take things from the storyboard and convert them into HTML,” Brighenti says.

“I was able to learn as I was building.” The team finished summer number two with a fully functional prototype of one module.

With this one prototype module complete, the project will continue this summer when the team builds additional modules. Research, learn, test, pivot, and work collaboratively for as long as it takes.

That’s how you do science. It also helps to be open to new possibilities. “Virtual Galapagos is not like a normal research project where I know where I want to go with it, the students join in, and then there’s bobbing and weaving,” Harpp says.

“We wanted to see if we could get any piece of this working at all, because it is from scratch. This one — we’re all in it together.” — Mark Walden Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 31

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 31

1/9/19 3:32 PM

The Untold History of the Garden State The stories of African Americans in New Jersey weren’t being written. Graham Hodges decided to change that.

Professor Graham Hodges was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for his project “Black Flight from Slavery in the Americas, 1500-1865.”

S

tarting as a slave society in the 17th century, New Jersey is now home to the fifth largest black population in the country. It is also one of the five most racially segregated states in the nation.

Throughout its history, the state has been on the tail end of advancements for black people, including being the last state in the North to emancipate slaves.

Though black New Jerseyans are free today, many lead impoverished lives with limited access to education, health care, and housing, a direct result of the legacy slavery holds over the state. These are just some of the themes Professor Graham Hodges explores in his new book, Black New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

“New Jersey is seen as the northernmost extension of the Mason-Dixon line, as a place where there’s a lot of racism and a lot of Jim Crow behavior,” says Hodges, the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of history and Africana and Latin American studies. “It’s something that colors the black experience up to the present day.”

African Americans have historically been forced to

make personal sacrifices to further advancements for their people. In his book, one of the players Hodges uses to make this point is Marion Thompson Wright, a mid–20th-century academic who gave up her family to become the first black woman to earn a PhD in history. She also was the first black historian to receive a doctorate from Columbia University.

Wright established a guidance program at Howard University, where she studied and taught, to help other black people advance. Her dissertation influenced the landmark court case Brown v. Board of Education. “She definitely normalizes the business of being a black female academic,” Hodges says.

But, in addition to noting her accomplishments, Hodges was also struck by the sacrifice of her personal life and eventual suicide.

It was uncommon for a mother to leave her children in the 1940s, and even more uncommon for her to give up parental rights. But in doing so, Wright was able to pave the way for future female black academics.

“It’s difficult for female academics in many institutions to get ahead because family life competes with professional life. It’s one of those sad statistics that oftentimes the most successful female academics are those who never married or who have no children,” Hodges says. “But that’s not always the case.”

Working on his book, with more than 350 years

32 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 32

1/9/19 3:32 PM

to sort through, Hodges enlisted the help of those he trusted most — his students. Madeline Canning ’18, one of several students who assisted with the book, spent part of summer 2015 scouring the New Jersey archived state Supreme Court records. There, she studied pre–Revolutionary War court cases that involved African Americans accused of federal crimes, such as escaping slavery. Later that summer, she moved on to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., looking at pension requests from African American families of soldiers who died in the Civil War. This was the first of many research grants for Canning, and she says the opportunity to work with Hodges was invaluable. “What fueled my love of history, and what has maintained it for the last several years, was getting to hold these documents that are older than the country we live in,” she says. “I was getting to look at court cases such as Negro Tom v. The King, which was wild, and an experience I never thought I’d have,” she says.

Beginning with Canning’s pre–Revolutionary War research, Hodges writes of black New Jersey history through to the present day. He ends the ongoing history with a message of perseverance.

“New Jersey blacks have faced such foes in the past and did not flinch from direct opposition to racism and injustice,” he says. “History tells us that they will again.”

— Rebecca Docter

New Faculty Chair Holders Endowed academic chairs and professorships provide resources that support the work of faculty members across campus.

Colgate’s Board of Trustees approved a new slate of endowed chair holders during its autumn meeting.

“The efforts made by these four faculty members — both as researchers and as educators — demonstrate the best of Colgate and this university’s commitment to academic rigor in all its forms,” Provost and Dean of the College Tracey Hucks ’87, MA’90 says.

Rick Geier (chemistry) takes on the Warren ’43 and Lillian Anderson Chair in chemistry. Geier, an organic chemist who teaches nanotechnology, will hold the title through June of 2029.

Thanks to the Andersons, in addition to the chair Geier now holds, new summer research positions for students and funds to purchase a MALDI-ToF mass spectrometer are available.

“This instrument is not a common resource at a predominantly undergraduate institution and we are fortunate to have it,” Geier says. In his research, Geier develops novel methods for synthesizing porphyrinic macrocycles. His publications reveal a steady output of scholarship with sustained involvement of students, who appear as coauthors.

Jill Harsin (history) now holds the Thomas A. Bartlett Chair, named in honor of Colgate’s 11th president. “I will use the resources of the chair to further my research,” says Harsin, whose specialties are in European history, the history of France and the French Revolution, and women’s history. She has both published in and served on the editorial board of the premier journal French Historical Studies. Her book The War of the Streets: Honor, Masculinity, and Violence in Republican Paris presents a narrative history of the turbulent July Monarchy, which encompassed two successful revolutions, three Paris insurrections, and seven assassination attempts against the king and his family.

Jarena Lee

Timothy McCay (biology and environmental studies), now Dunham Beldon Jr. Chair of natural sciences, studies ecology, biostatistics, vertebrate animals, and natural resource conservation. He sees himself as a terrestrial ecologist, with interests in two groups of animals — shrews and earthworms — as well as the buckthorn, an exotic plant. He is also interested in acid rain and the forest-floor ecosystem. McCay has participated in interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together biologists, geologists, geographers, and other scientists. He has published consistently with Colgate students on his projects.

Paul Robeson

Mary Moran (anthropology and Africana and Latin American studies) will hold the title of Arnold A. Sio Chair in diversity and community through June 2020. Since 1982, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Liberia, focusing on a small southeastern region inhabited by the Grebo people.

Her most recent research focuses on the larger process of gender transformation in Liberia. Remembering her Colgate job interview in 1984, Moran recalls meeting Arnie Sio (who died in 2011). “From the time I came as a new faculty member, Arnie was a wonderful friend and mentor,” she says. “To be recognized with an endowed chair that honors Arnie’s memory gives me a wonderful sense of a circle being completed.”

Marion Thompson Wright

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 33

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 33

1/9/19 3:32 PM

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 34

1/9/19 3:32 PM

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. HO MAN KWOK

By Michael Blanding

A medical hoax leads to a 50-year mistruth about MSG and an unexpected Colgate connection.

T

he letter was just a few paragraphs long. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) under the heading “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome,” it began: “For several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.” It went on to describe symptoms including “numbness in the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness, and palpitation.”

For the next couple of paragraphs, the writer speculated on the cause of his ailments, suggesting that perhaps it was due to the food’s high sodium content or some ingredient in soy sauce or cooking wine.

“Others have suggested,” he continued, “that it may be caused by the monosodium glutamate used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants.” The Illustrations by James Steinberg

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 35

letter ended with an appeal to other doctors to conduct more research and was signed “Robert Ho Man Kwok, MD, Senior Research Investigator, National Biomedical Research Foundation, Silver Spring, Md.” Professor Jennifer LeMesurier first heard about the letter in 2013, when she and her husband were watching an episode of the PBS show The Mind of a Chef with David Chang, featuring Japanese ramen noodles. LeMesurier perked up when a guest mentioned the controversy over monosodium glutamate (MSG), a food additive in Asian cuisine that has long had a harmful reputation. Not true, the guest said, MSG was perfectly safe — and, in fact, the whole controversy had started with one letter to the New England Journal of Medicine back in the 1960s that bogusly claimed MSG caused illness.

“It was a throwaway line,” remembers LeMesurier, an assistant professor of

writing and rhetoric at Colgate. Yet, it made her curious. Could a decades-long food controversy really have started with one letter? Then a graduate student at the University of Washington, LeMesurier went to the medical library the next day where, sure enough, she found the missive in an old issue of NEJM from April 4, 1968.

Wondering if there had ever been any response, she began to pull subsequent issues of the journal and found a cascade of other letters that either detailed their writers’ own unfortunate run-ins with Chinese food, or ridiculed the whole idea. Both types of letters had one thing in common, however — a disturbing undercurrent of racism that seemed to blame the unsavoriness of Chinese food rather than the chemical itself for its supposed effects. “You would expect doctors to be very clinical, but this quickly veered into ethnic name-calling,” LeMesurier said.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 35

1/9/19 3:32 PM

She published her findings last February in a paper titled, “Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner,” in Poroi: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention. In it, LeMesurier argues that the racist distrust of MSG snowballed through the media to create a hysteria over the additive that has continued to the present day. In detailing the outsized effects that letter has had, though, she never doubted its authenticity — until a few months later.

In January 2018, LeMesurier was shocked when she listened to a voicemail message. The caller identified himself as Dr. Howard Steel ’42, a Colgate alumnus and former trustee. “Boy, have I got a surprise for you,” he said. “I am Dr. Ho Man Kwok.”

A FATEFUL WAGER It started out as a bet. In 1968, Steel was a young orthopedic surgeon at Shriner’s Hospital and a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Another doctor, Bill Hanson, used to rib Steel about his specialty, saying orthopedic surgeons were too stupid to get published in a prestigious journal such as the NEJM. In fact, he bet Steel $10 he couldn’t make it into its pages. “That was a threat, and he was willing to make a buck,” said Steel in an interview earlier this year, before he passed away in September at the age of 97.

At the time, Steel and Hanson used to go to a Chinese restaurant called Jack Louie once a week, drinking too much beer and overeating — invariably feeling sick afterward. Following one of those episodes, Steel had a fit of inspiration. “I decided, well, I’ll write a little article and send it to the New England Journal of Medicine,” Steel said. “I’ll make it so obvious, they will know immediately [that it’s fake].” After penning the notorious letter, he signed it Robert Ho Man Kwok, which he thought would be an obvious play on words.

“It was a breakdown of a not-nice word we used when someone was a jerk,” Steel said. “We called them a human crock of you-know-what.” If anyone needed further proof that the letter was a spoof, he also made up a fake medical institution, the National Biomedical Research Foundation of Silver Spring, Md. “It doesn’t exist.”

A few weeks later, when the letter was actually published under the title “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome,” Steel was pleased with himself and promptly went to Hanson to pay up. Lest anyone think the phenomenon was real, Steel contacted the letters editor to tell him it was “a big fat lie,” he said. When he didn’t hear back, Steel called the journal’s editor, Franz Ingelfinger. “I told him it was a bunch of junk, it was all fake, it was all made up, and he hung up the phone on me,” Steel claimed. The brush-off was even more surprising, considering he knew Ingelfinger from his boyhood in Atlantic City (see p.39, “A Charmed Life.”)

After the NEJM published his letter, Steel watched with a mix of humor and horror as the MSG controversy unfolded, with dozens more letters to the editor responding to his original. He persisted in calling the publication’s office, leaving messages for Ingelfinger without response. A current spokesperson

As LeMesurier researched the journal, she discovered that NEJM actually had a long tradition of such “comic syndrome letters.”

for the NEJM can’t confirm whether or not the publication considered pulling the letter. “Due to the fact that it was published 50 years ago … we can’t comment or speculate on its publication, or the purported refusal at the time to retract it,” responded Julia Agresto, a media relations and communications specialist, via e-mail. Today, she said, letters are peer reviewed on a “case-by-case basis,” but she does not know if Steel’s letter was peer reviewed. “However, we would imagine that it was not,” she wrote.

Years later, as LeMesurier read all of the MSG letters, she tried to parse their subtle mix of earnestness and dry humor. One of them, published May 16, 1968, by H. Schaumburg of Albert Einstein College, claimed that he, too, “on three occasions experienced a tightening of my masseter and temporalis muscles, lacrimation, periorbital fasciculation, numbness of the neck and hands, palpitation, and syncope” within 20 minutes of eating Chinese food. The overly scientific phraseology (lacrimation means crying) is the first clue that Schaumburg may have been writing with tongue in cheek, and LeMesurier’s suspicions only grew when she read that he and his companions had “consumed twenty-four ounces of beer” before one episode, and that he would be “delighted to submit a grant, perhaps a career development award, to the National Institutes of Health for an intensive study (with foreign travel funds) of this problem.”

As LeMesurier researched the journal, she discovered that NEJM actually had a long tradition of such “comic syndrome letters,” as one observer called them: missives that used pretentious medical language to poke fun at a common problem. One letter, for example, decried the “cryogenic cephalagia” — otherwise known as “brain freeze” — that accompanied drinking slushies. The letters about Chinese-restaurant syndrome, however, seemed different. Rather than focus in on the symptoms of the supposed ailment, they increasingly focused on the fact that it was associated with Chinese food — with some writers apparently “in on the joke” while others weren’t.

MSG is naturally occurring in: →→ potatoes →→ tomatoes →→ mushrooms →→ grapes →→ juices →→ cheeses, including Parmesan and roquefort

36 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 36

1/9/19 3:32 PM

THE TRUTH ABOUT MSG MSG is a naturally occurring food substance, with a distinctive savory taste known by Japanese as umami. “It’s a chemical the same way water is a chemical,” said LeMesurier, who is herself of Korean descent, raised by white parents. “If you have ever eaten aged cheese or heirloom tomatoes, you’ve eaten MSG.” Its powdered form was created in 1908 by a chemist in Japan, and it made its way with Chinese immigrants to the United States, where it was commonly added to dishes in Chinese restaurants.

Despite the fact that MSG appears in everything from flavored potato chips to Parmesan cheese, the letter writers universally described experiencing symptoms after eating foods such as “egg foo yung” or “duck sauce.” One writer described what he called his “Chinese headache.” Another detailed aching in the arms after eating egg rolls. A definitive note from the NEJM editor even targeted one specific Boston restaurant, Yee Hong Guey, for its adverse effects and coined the mockscientific term post-cibal-sinal (roughly “after eating Chinese”) syndrome as an official name for the ailment.

Although LeMesurier doesn’t think the writers were being overtly racist, she believes they were picking up on larger stereotypes in the culture of Asian Americans as exotic and strange. “They had a supposed subject, the ChineseRestaurant syndrome, but the focus was really on Chinese identity and getting in digs about these stereotypically Chinese foods,” she said. “They used Kwok and MSG as figureheads for everything that was silly and frivolous and dangerous about Chinese identity.”

In that, they joined a long tradition of exoticism and mistrust of Chinese food, LeMesurier found. Since Chinese immigrants first appeared in America en masse in the mid-1800s, media has been ridiculing their food. A 19th-century cartoon depicts Chinese people eating rats, and many writers of the period similarly describe Chinese food as dirty or unclean — including Mark Twain, who refers to a Chinese grocer selling a “mess of birds’nests” and sausages each containing “the corpse of a mouse.” The NEJM letter writers picked up on these tropes, with one writer choosing the exotic bird’s-nest soup as a stand-in for all Chinese food and another referencing Chinese foods in a doggerel poem as a “vile miasma.”

Ironically, while LeMesurier was researching her paper, she came across a reference to a real Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, who died in 2014, and she logically assumed

he was the original letter writer. Many of the NEJM letter writers at the time, however, made the same joke as Steel, playing on the word Kwok with “crock” — though it’s unclear whether they suspected the name was real or a pseudonym. The one letter that got closest to Steel’s ruse commented: “For certainly he is Dr. Human Crock, and his ‘Chinese-restaurant syndrome’ is totally illusory and nonexistent.”

However self-aware the letter writers were, the joke was totally lost on the mainstream media, which picked up the story almost immediately. A New York Times article from May 19, 1968 — six weeks after Steel’s letter — took Chinese-restaurant syndrome at face value, noting that it had been first identified by “a Cantonese doctor named Robert Ho Man Kwok,” who had come to the United States “eight years ago.” How the Times had gotten specific information about this doctor who didn’t exist is anyone’s guess. Like the NEJM letter writers, the paper ignored MSG’s larger prevalence in food to focus squarely on

Chinese cooking as the culprit for MSG’s ill effects, even interviewing Chinese restaurant owners around New York to defend their cuisine.

A CAUTIONARY TALE From a made-up malady to “comic syndrome,” now problems with MSG had become a nationally recognized ailment.

“The New York Times and other national newspapers gave legitimacy to a lot of the stereotypes around Chinese cooking,” said Ian Mosby, a historian from York University in Toronto, who wrote a paper in The Social History of Medicine in 2009 examining Chinese-restaurant syndrome.

That journalistic misunderstanding is unfortunate, but hardly surprising, said Jeff Bary, a Colgate astrophysics professor who teaches the course, “Saving the Appearances: Galileo, the Church, and the Scientific Endeavor,” about how prejudice in culture influences the way we talk about science. “It represents a lack of scientific Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 37

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 37

1/9/19 3:32 PM

literacy on the part of people in the media, not to be savvy enough to know the difference between a letter submitted like this and a true scientific study,” he said. At the same time, he added, cultural forces can predispose journalists and readers alike to believe in science that wasn’t necessarily true. “On the face of it, it’s pointing to racism in the culture that they are so willing to accept this negative perception of another culture’s food,” Bary said. “It’s a narrative that fits into a particular worldview.”

Ironically, however, once the media established that worldview, doctors then set about to prove it, coming full circle from treating Chinese-restaurant syndrome like a joke to studying it as a real phenomenon. In fact, the same letter writer who kidded about receiving “foreign travel funds” to investigate the syndrome,

pharmacologist Herbert Schaumburg, conducted the first actual experiments exposing subjects to MSG. Along with his colleague, neurologist Robert Byck, he gave MSG intravenously to 13 people and orally to another 56, recording symptoms including burning, facial pressure, chest pain, and headache. Publishing their findings in Science in February 1969, they concluded from this scant evidence that “Chineserestaurant syndrome” was real. Other scientists followed with more studies, including some that injected large amounts of MSG into mice and monkeys, alleging long-term effects.

None of them could explain why a chemical that had always been in such common use was suddenly spawning such extreme reactions. “It would be safe to say that the studies were pretty poorly done,” Mosby said. “There were almost no double-blind studies.” In fact, other studies began appearing as soon as 1970, taking issue with the methods of Byck, Schaumburg, and other researchers. By then, however, Chineserestaurant syndrome had caught on in the culture, and the general public began warily checking labels in an effort to cut MSG from their diets. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader even lobbied Congress to ban its use in baby food.

More recently, studies have roundly debunked the idea that MSG is harmful. Multiple studies using

placebos have shown no difference in effects on people eating food with or without MSG. In 1995, the Food and Drug Administration asked an independent scientific group, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, to study MSG’s safety. It found that only a small number of people experienced any side effects, and that was only after consuming six times the normal serving of MSG on an empty stomach.

Contacted at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Schaumburg stands by his research. “We don’t think this stuff is harmful, but it definitely has a pharmacological effect,” he said. “If you take it intravenously, everyone is going to have incredibly distressing symptoms.”

Most people, Schaumburg continued, don’t have any consequences from MSG when they eat it because they don’t absorb it. A small number of people who absorb it more readily could have effects if they eat food with MSG on an empty stomach, “like wonton soup as an appetizer,” he said. Schaumburg took issue with the implication in LeMesurier’s paper that there was any kind of racism involved in how MSG is perceived.

No matter how many articles appear exposing the fallacy of Chinese-restaurant syndrome, prejudice against MSG persists. According to a survey by the International Food Information Council, an industryfunded nonprofit, 42 percent of the population still actively avoids MSG. That’s slightly less than the percentage who avoid artificial flavors and colors, but more than those who avoid caffeine, GMOs, or gluten.

Major snack food brands such as Frito-Lay and Utz have apologetically posted information pages about the substance on their website and prominently display to consumers which of its products do and don’t contain MSG. Meanwhile, reviewers of Chinese restaurants on Yelp still complain about hearts racing and limbs tingling after eating.

For LeMesurier, the story of MSG is a cautionary tale of how a simple prejudice can seep its way into a culture, even from scientists who should know better. “A lot of times people get into medicine because they want to fix things, but sometimes the fixing becomes the goal rather than dealing with what is really going on in a situation,” she said. “Medical students need to understand the ethics of writing, especially when representing a culture or a person and talking about sensitive things.” When Steel contacted her soon after her paper came out, it only solidified her feelings. “In a weird way, it shows the power of these narratives, that this wasn’t based on any facts at all,” she said.

Steel maintained that his letter wasn’t intended to be racist, and — insisted that he never caused any real harm with the controversy he helped launch. “Everyone is eating Chinese food anyway,” he said. In that claim, at least, he is right. According to a recent survey by food research firm Technomic, Chinese is the most popular ethnic cuisine in America, just edging out Mexican and Italian. Even so, Steel was earnestly apologetic about the trouble he caused with his fake letter. “I wish I had never written the damn thing,” he said. Lest anyone think that he somehow profited from the mishap, however, he was quick to add that his erstwhile colleague Dr. Hanson never made good on their wager. “I never got the 10 bucks,” Steel said. “Bill never paid me a dime.”

38 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 38

1/9/19 3:32 PM

A Charmed Life As improbable as the MSG controversy sounds, it was just one event in a life that reads like a page torn out of David Copperfield or Forrest Gump. Howard Steel’s family started Steel’s Fudge on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, which still doles out fudge and salt water taffy to sunburned beachgoers today. Sadly, both of Steel’s parents died of separate diseases before he turned 5, leaving him an orphan in the care of an aunt, with an allowance from the bank. He excelled in both football and academics, earning acceptance to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton — but the bank told him the schools were too expensive.

His high school English teacher, who was a Colgate alumnus, offered to drive him up to see the campus.

When Steel spoke with the dean, the dean offered him admission along with a football scholarship on the spot, Steel remembered. He fell in love with the University, where he majored in physics and chemistry, and served as president of Theta Chi as well as president of his class.

Listening to a radio report about the deepening conflict of World War II, on Dec. 6, 1941, Steel enlisted in the Navy and convinced his fraternity brothers to join, too. The next day, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But Steel never saw combat. While in boot camp, another soldier accidentally shot in his direction, whizzing past his head and taking off part of Steel's ear. The Navy gave him a Purple Heart, and then took it away when it realized he hadn’t been shot in combat.

After his service, Steel drifted down to Philadelphia, graduating with a medical degree from Temple University in an accelerated program of only two and a half years.

He took up a residency at Temple University Hospital, and eventually was appointed chief of staff at Shriners in 1966, just before his fateful letter to the NEJM. Steel went on to have a distinguished career as a surgeon, founding the first pediatric spinal injury center at Shriners and pioneering new surgical techniques.

Some of his grateful patients pooled together their money to create a foundation in his name with more than a million dollars, which supports lecture series at orthopedic associations around the world.

For those who worked with him, Steel’s joie de vivre left an indelible mark. In a 2012 video made about his legacy, colleagues called him “magnetic,” “charismatic,” and a “legend in the operating room.” During lectures to medical students, he would play The Beatles. And when he walked the halls, the toys and lollipops he had for his pediatric patients would be falling out of his white coat pockets. “Happiness should never be allowed to escape from the practice of medicine,” he said.

Steel, a Colgate trustee emeritus, died Sept. 5, 2018.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; five children, including Anna ’91; three stepchildren, Turner Cary Smith ’77, Celia Smith Carroll ’76, and Townsend Cary Smith ’81; son-in-law Brian Carroll ’76; 11 grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.

Although he was a pioneering surgeon, Howard Steel ’42 had numerous interests outside of the hospital — from flyfishing to horseback riding. Because he often encouraged his students and colleagues to maintain their nonmedical interests as well, a group started a foundation in his name that supports lectures on any subject except orthopedics or medicine.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 39

2019_Winter_Interior_19115.indd 39

1/16/19 12:47 PM

Endeavor Documentary

Go Time A film by Josh Rosen ’96 shows what happens when man challenges AI.

ee Sedol was struggling to keep up with his artificial intelligence (AI) challenger. Sedol, an 18-time world champion of the board game Go, had already fallen behind in the best-of-five tournament against AlphaGo, an AI program designed for the sole purpose of mastering the ancient game of strategy.

Contemplating his next move, Sedol cast his trademark quick, intimidating glance at the man across the table from him.

To Josh Rosen ’96, producer of AlphaGo (2017), a documentary about the match, this is one of the most telling scenes in his movie. “Sedol clearly was looking at his opponent, but that wasn’t his opponent,” Rosen says.

The man in the chair across from Sedol was Aja Huang — a member of DeepMind, the team that built AlphaGo — who was laying down game pieces where AlphaGo directed him to. When Sedol tried to read his opponent, he was really peering into a future where humans are increasingly flying blind, navigating complex tasks with the guidance of more capable AI technologies.

L

The nail-biter of a tournament between Sedol and AlphaGo, held in Seoul in March 2016, was watched live by approximately 80 million people. Go is a 3,000-year-old board game involving two players taking turns laying out sets of identical black and white game pieces across a 19x19 grid in an effort to surround and control game-board territory. More complex than chess, Go has more possible board configurations than the number of atoms in the universe.

The showdown between Sedol and AlphaGo can now be understood as a key moment in both the history of Go and the history of AI, raising important issues about how we will live with our AI technologies in the next century and beyond. Who prevailed in the end? You’ll have to watch AlphaGo, now available on Netflix, to find out.

Rosen, for his part, never set out to make a feature-length documentary, let alone one like AlphaGo, which would premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and win awards all over the world. Rosen has been telling stories since his college days, and this one took on a life of its own.

“I always knew I wanted to create things,” Rosen says of his years at Colgate, majoring in English literature and art and art history.

After graduation, he lugged his art portfolio around San Francisco, which led to a career in advertising. Today, he is creative lead at Google Creative Lab, where part of his job entails making short videos about the ways people are using Google technologies in the broader world. Through this work, he began collaborating with Greg Kohs, the director of AlphaGo. Rosen’s many roles on the film included outlining the film’s story, working with the editor, and creative directing the graphic and music sequences, among other tasks.

The project began with an invitation for Rosen and Google Creative Lab to come to London and see what DeepMind was up to.

Kohs and his independent film production company, Moxie Pictures, came on board later, once it became clear that there was a big story worth telling.

That story includes unfettered live access to the man-versus-machine tournament, in-the-moment reactions of DeepMind computer scientists, and interviews with Sedol, the DeepMind team, and other experts in the field. “We set out to just document it for research purposes,” Rosen says. “It became something that was beyond our wildest dreams.”

— Mike Agresta

It became something that was beyond our wildest dreams.

A scene from AlphaGo

40 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 40

1/9/19 3:32 PM

Dollars to Doughnuts Colby Kingston ’18 on the benefit of an economics major and the love of tiny treats

Walking into Satellite Doughnuts, the brainchild of Kennebunkport, Maine, native Colby Kingston ’18, you’re immediately tantalized by a counter full of miniature treats, ranging from chocolate caramel coconut to lemon meringue.

You might smell bacon cooking or see blueberry pie filling being made. In the back, you’ll see Flipper, the doughnut robot, spitting out batter and turning the pastries.

Here’s some insider knowledge about Kingston’s business:

“It was really important to me to make a space that was Instagrammable.

My logo is enormous — it takes up an entire wall. I’ve got lots of little photo opportunities, signs in the window that say funny things about doughnuts, in hopes that people will see how pretty they are and be urged to take a photo. That’s been a huge driver of a lot of my business.”

“The best way to learn how to do something is to pretend you know what you’re doing. A lot of times people ask me, ‘These are so good. How did you learn how to make doughnuts?’ The Internet’s a wonderful place.”

“I think anything miniature that isn’t normally served that way is going to have a great chance to rise in this environment.”

“We’re really lucky that the Bush family has their summer residence here in town, so a lot of different people come to visit them — Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives) is one of those. She’s a good friend of the Bushes, so she came last summer and actually brought the doughnuts home to President and Mrs. Bush.”

“Watching Brittany Buonocore O’Connor ’12 build Flour and Salt (in downtown Hamilton) and knowing it as this bakery that my friends and I would special order things from our first and second years to becoming the full-blown café that it is now, that continues to be very inspiring for me.”

“Ultimately [my economics major] is making me more savvy. I’ve experienced a lot of situations where I would speak to older people who were impressed — but, in a lot of cases, skeptical — of my age.

Some of the things that I was able to speak with them about came directly from my education in the econ department at Colgate. That was a huge leg up for me.”

— Rebecca Docter

daryl a. getman

entrepreneurship

“Being a Gen-Z who finds new food spots through social media so frequently, the opportunity to actually start my own picture-perfect place is where it started. [I thought,] how crazy would it be if people wanted to Instagram what I was putting out to the world?”

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 41

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 41

1/9/19 3:32 PM

ENDEAVOR

VISUAL ARTS

Leading Light

Suzanne teresa Photographed at the Hollywood Bowl, Courtesy of the LA Phil

Illuminating the L.A. Philharmonic’s centennial

usic lover Greg Russell ’91 can pinpoint a few monumental moments throughout his career as a visual content creator. Among them: working with Neil Peart, drummer of the band Rush, to create an elaborate drum riser and set, then going on tour with him; and designing a visual show for a concert by psychedelic Aussie rock band Tame Impala in New York City. Yet a third epic experience took place last September, when Russell and his company, Xite Labs, transformed the iconic Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. They used projection and advanced programming technology to execute an unforgettable night

M

of visual effects in celebration of the L.A. Philharmonic’s 100th anniversary.

Of all the shows Russell and partner Vello Virkhaus have done, this one required the most ingenuity. “It had the most technology, multiple types of software tied together, a lot of creative visuals to dream up, a big team, and a lot of pressure,” Russell says.

Xite Labs was selected from a pool of designers reviewed by the L.A. Philharmonic management through several rounds of presentations, which included illustrated concept boards. Demonstrating how, exactly, they’d sync the conductor’s movements with streaks of projected light around the Bowl (known as

motion-reactive visuals) via an interactive camera tracking system no doubt helped them land the job.

In preparation for the show, Russell and Virkhaus led creative direction for the Xite Labs team as they programmed computers to sync audio tracks from each section in the orchestra — woodwinds, brass, high strings, and others — with visual designs. Essentially, when the orchestra would hit certain notes or volumes, the audience would experience different projected visual effects.

While the technology itself isn’t particularly unique, Russell notes, it’s what they did with it that set them apart. “It’s like you can put a paint brush in someone’s hands, and they can paint something. But as artists, we can program it at a higher level and put it with a design that makes it more artful,” he says.

One of the biggest challenges was that they didn’t get to test the program live with the orchestra — or any of the other performers, including pop singer Katy Perry and pianist Herbie Hancock — ahead of time. “We joked that the show was our rehearsal,” Russell says.

The show went off without a hitch, though, thanks to heavy preparation and a dash of Hollywood magic. Russell even put his own musical talent to work, playing a programmed MIDI keyboard along with Hancock on the song “Rockit” to activate parts of the Bowl as he hit the notes.

Playing in several bands during his time at Colgate, where he earned dual degrees in music and neuroscience, Russell says the campus is where his creative side started to blossom — and eventually led to his career in visual arts. “I don’t think doing well in creative arts requires a background in arts as much as a background in creative thinking,” he says. “The ability to think creatively and act on those ideas with confidence — that’s what I walked away with from Colgate.”

— Kelsey Ogletree

New Reads Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism (Camden House) Co-authored by Michael Coyle, professor of English On Being Raped (Beacon Press) Raymond M. Douglas, Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of history Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press) Graham Hodges, George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of history and Africana and Latin American studies Read more about Hodges on p. 26 Death of a Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery (Kaylie Jones Books) Laurie Loewenstein ’76 The German Epic in the Cold War (Polity Press) Matthew D. Miller, associate professor of German; chair, German department Libya (Beacon Press) Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly (Melville House) Joshua Rivkin ’00 Modern Egypt: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press) Co-authored by Bruce K. Rutherford, associate professor of political science Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (Yale University Press) Susan Thomson, associate professor of peace and conflict studies

42 Colgate Magazine Winter 2019

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 42

1/9/19 3:32 PM

ENDEAVOR

Michael Torpey Hates His Own Game Show The actor turned game show host is shining a light on student loan debt.

Imagine a world where twentysomethings, with bright, blinding lights shining down on them, anxiously buzz in to answer general trivia questions like “What is the red planet?”

Frantically trying to pay off the collective millions they owe, contestants are picked off until a winner emerges. Their future depends on the outcome of the competition.

This isn’t some dystopian novel. “This is America,” Paid Off host Michael Torpey ’02 proclaims on each episode of the TV game show, which started last summer.

Michael Torpey ’02 asks contestants trivia questions to help pay off their loans.

I wanted to make a game show that could highlight the absurdity of the crisis and give away money to people who really need it.

“I felt embarrassed that only then did I realize it’s not just a financial matter,” he says. “Debt is an invisible burden that hangs over you and affects every decision you make. There is a serious psychological cost to it.”

Torpey knows that the average Joe isn’t booking underwear commercials left and right, so he created the show to publicly question how the average person should be expected to pay off high-cost loans.

“I am so thrilled/horrified that the national embarrassment [causing] the need for this ridiculous game show will continue for another sixteen episodes,” Torpey says of Paid Off’s renewal. “I truly hope the show won’t have to exist for long, but until real reform comes to higher education, I will continue to highlight the stories of the forty-five million Americans affected and give away as much money as possible to as many people as possible.”

Although Torpey says the show does its best to stay nonpartisan, he believes the government is not doing enough to protect student borrowers. Not-so-subtle jabs are sprinkled throughout Paid Off. For example, when contestants are kicked off, they’re guided to a telephone where Torpey encourages a call to their congressperson.

And at the end of each show, he even asks viewers to help foster change. “Call your representatives right now, and tell them you need a better solution than this game show,” he declares.

“The game show exists in a weird world of satire that’s pretty on the nose,” Torpey says. “People have said that the show is dystopian. I think it’s holding up a mirror to the current state of higher education, and if you think that’s dystopian, I agree with you.

It’s not a good situation.”

— Rebecca Docter

TRUTV

TV

Paid Off gathers college graduates from across the nation to compete in a Jeopardy! meets Family Feud–style trivia challenge for a sought-after prize: money toward their student loan debt. Torpey, an actor known for his roles in Orange is the New Black, Sneaky Pete, and Pottersville, is not only the host — he’s also the creator.

Torpey writes many of the questions he asks the contestants, inspired by the classic game shows he loved as a teen. And even though he keeps the air light in Paid Off, he wants viewers to know that student debt is a serious issue.

“It’s an unfair burden that’s being handed out in unfair ways,” Torpey says. “I wanted to make a game show that could highlight the absurdity of the crisis and give away money to people who really need it.”

Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, according to the United States Federal Reserve. The average college graduate owes $37,172 — more than the price of a wedding, a Tesla Model 3, or business start-up costs, compares CNBC. That’s about the amount Torpey was paid to be in a Hanes underwear commercial.

He used those funds to pay off the $40,000 of his wife's college debt. When they mailed the check, she cried.

Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 43

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 43

1/9/19 3:32 PM

SALMAGUNDI 13 Words (or fewer) Submit your clever caption of 13 words or fewer for this vintage Colgate photo by March 1 to magazine@colgate.edu or attn.: Colgate Magazine, 13 Oak Dr., Hamilton, NY 13346. The winner will receive a Colgate Magazine tote bag and will be announced next issue.

Connect Five After solving these questions, figure out the answers’ Colgate connection.

See p. 57 for the solutions.

1

Although this last name of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star is the same as a Massachusetts college, he would have been ineligible to attend because it is an all-women’s institution.

2 3 4 5

Started by two brothers in the early 1900s, this automobile company encourages consumers to “grab life by the horns.”

Created by an economist at Stanford University in 1992, this rule helps regulate interest rates for central banks and provide economic stability.

This type of research study allows for a more in-depth analysis as it focuses on a single event.

In 2018, this chart-topping artist became the first rapper to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. His mother chose his first name — the answer to this clue — in honor of one of the Temptations.

The Colgate connection: Winter 2019 Colgate Magazine 81

2019_Winter_Interior_19108.indd 81

1/9/19 3:14 PM

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Reminisce about legendary professors p.22

Watch sharks attack with Lacey Williams ’16 p.14

Practice new-age cartography p.15

Travel to the Galapagos with Professor Karen Harpp p.26

2019_Winter_Cover_19108.indd 2

Read Colgate’s stance on academic freedom p.1o

Ponder morality with Nietzsche p.8

Indulge (in) a little (doughnut) with Colby Kingston ’18 p.41

Collect specimens with Colgate’s first zoology professor p.17

Find out why Doug Bregman ’71 is suing the country of Turkey p.63

Meet the alumnus whose cancer research has saved millions of lives p.45

Learn about Buddhism and brewing p.72

Think MSG is bad for you?

Think again p.34

JILL CALDER

Recelebrate (or celebrate for the first time) Colgate’s Bicentennial kickoff p.18

1/9/19 2:53 PM