Colgate Magazine — Winter 2020

WINTER 2020

GENE IDOL DNA research by Colgate biologists has far-reaching implications

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Feature

Marvelous Miscellany P.20 Voices

The Elephant in the Room P.8

Discover

Reel History: Hamilton Theater P.18

look In the Picker Art Gallery, Riley Corcoran ’22 contemplates different forms of visual expression and their relationship to “modernity” as part of Professor Jenna Reinbold’s Challenges of Modernity class.

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

maranie staab

Winter 2020  Colgate Magazine  1

Contents

WINTER 2020 President’s Message

Discover

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Inquiring Minds

Letters

Colgate recently received more than $1.3 million in NSF grants for faculty research.

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Voices

Only Yes, Only Yes Kerry Neville ’94 lets go of the uncertainty that had a hold on her and sees new possibilities in living.

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The Elephant in the Room The Ordinary Life

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Reel History Hamilton Theater: Here’s Looking At You, Kid

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Ask a Professor Are brains built for language, or is language built for brains?

Spencer Kelly explains.

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In two articles from his new book — one on a pachyderm and the other on a legendary professor — Steve Hannah ’70 writes with humor and grace.

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Colgate News 10

Cover: In Professor Krista Ingram’s study of student-athletes, swimmer Carolyn Silverman ’20 learned that she is a “lark,” performing better in the morning.

This photograph, by Mark DiOrio, won the University Photographers Association of America Monthly Image Competition 1st Place Best In Show Award.

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Marvelous Miscellany Professor Kistler had a rare gift that, in my experience, only a precious few teachers possessed — he made his subjects come absolutely alive in the classroom.

Cloven shoes, rebuilt bicycles, and jars of tinctures filled Clifford Gallery for ARTS Collects.

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Gene Idol In 1943, Oswald Avery, Class of 1900, discovered the importance of DNA. Today, Colgate biologists are following in his footsteps to make their own genetic revelations.

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Steve Hannah ’70, p. 9

Game Changers From the Red Sox press box to the NBA boardroom, alumni are shaping the world of athletics.

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mark diorio

Scene

Endeavor

As Good as Her Words Screenwriter Karen Bloch Morse ’95 has had more than two decades of success in Hollywood, most recently with a movie starring Glee’s Lea Michele.

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Vice President for Communications Laura H. Jack

Back to the Future Dan Slater ’00 discusses Wolf Boys, his book about teen members of a Mexican drug cartel.

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Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Communications Director Mark Walden

A Colgate Tradition Words from this year’s Living Writers visiting authors

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Chief Creative Officer Tim Horn Art Director Karen Luciani Designer Katriel Pritts

Laying Down Roots With her nonprofit Common River, Donna Sillan ’80 has created a model for development done right.

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They Are the World Mervon Mehta ’81 creates cultural harmony with Kuné.

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On the List Alumni on the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30

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University Photographer Mark DiOrio Production Assistant Kathy Jipson Contributors: 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, art director; Brian Ness, video journalism coordinator; John Painter, director of athletics communications; Pentagram; Kristin Putman, social media strategist Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt. Colgate Magazine Volume XLIX Number 2 Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University.

Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407 Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Telephone: 315-228-7453

left: Scott Soderberg

Derrick Darby ’88

Kim Hebert Simone ’98

Alumni News

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Salmagundi

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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 2020 Colgate Magazine 3

President’s Message On the Reach and Reputation of Colgate University

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As we implement The Third-Century Plan initiatives ... Colgate will exhibit the confidence to let the world know of this work and how it supports a vision for the future. book and will want to engage members of the leading campuses on the arguments of the work. There is an extremely talented high school student in California who is sitting down to think about college applications.

There is a leading lacrosse coach at a renowned university who is looking to expand next year’s schedule and pepper the calendar with visits to the best programs. There is an assistant dean or financial analyst considering colleges or universities as a next important career home. There is a couple approaching retirement, and they are thinking about relocating to the next great college town.

In every one of these moments, the reach and reputation of Colgate is in play. In each and every one of these moments, Colgate’s future is being determined.

So, as we begin this third century, we are entering a period of commitment to profound excellence in all we do, as well as a willingness to share this work with the world.

— Brian W. Casey

Read the full ThirdCentury Plan at colgate.edu/ thirdcenturyplan.

mark diorio

hen I think of all the things we hope to accomplish at Colgate during the next few years — removing student loans from the financial aid packages of all entering students, moving our faculty to levels of support seen at the finest colleges and universities, rebuilding many of our residential units so that students live in appropriate housing that provides a “home” for all, supporting athletics in appropriate ways, and creating new spaces for arts and innovation — I also think about the ways in which we can, and should, extend the University’s reach and reputation.

While this might seem like a less noble endeavor than, say, increasing financial aid for students or building new science facilities, it is imperative that Colgate take the steps necessary to engage more robustly in national conversations and serve as a crossroads for American intellectual life. People are profoundly aware of great colleges and universities and seek them out, whether as visitors, scholars, or applicants. These institutions are known for their greatness, being part of the national scene, and their common understanding of American thought and American education — or, better, world thought and the global educational system. Along with the other aims of our long-term plans, to be similarly known for engaged and consequential greatness must be a priority for this university.

Placing Colgate in the national conversation is a complex endeavor. It goes beyond a slogan or a University logo. There is no single lever that, once pulled, will suddenly and profoundly place Colgate in the minds of leading students, scholars, and supporters.

I know this in the face of many comments and suggestions from alumni about how best to “brand” Colgate, how best to create that single webpage that uniquely and compellingly presents Colgate to the world. People occasionally send me paragraphs on how they would describe Colgate. If we get that right, they are stating, then all else will follow. I read these with great attention and know that to mail such a thing to your alma mater’s president is best understood as an act of love and interest.

Reputation, however, follows excellence. So I hope our alumni see a two-prong endeavor unfolding over the next several years. As we implement The ThirdCentury Plan initiatives — whether they be in faculty recruitment and support, village improvements, athletics enhancements, or increased student aid — Colgate will exhibit the confidence to let the world know of this work and how it supports a vision for the future. Meanwhile, there is a young graduate student who, in a few years’ time, will seek a long-term faculty appointment at a great college or university. There is a leading political scientist who will finish an important

Letters accumulated stressors they endure in the service of their communities. None of them are looking to be called heroes or lavished with attention, but a little respect and appreciation could go a long way the next time you encounter a firefighter or police officer.

Matt Domyancic ’97

Giving Props to Public Servants Receiving the latest issue (autumn 2019) gave me goosebumps. It was a pleasant surprise to see a public servant on the cover, as well as the piece on “Supporting Student Veterans” (p. 10). Chief Jeanine Nicholson’s story (p.

20) was inspiring, and I hope it encourages more Colgate students and alumni to consider service to their communities as a first responder a viable career choice. It can be a higher calling with significant meaning to serve others compared to pursuing careers primarily for the sake of financial benefits or prestige. Unfortunately, at prestigious academic institutions, going into the military or public service can be frowned upon or perceived as a waste of an education.

I transferred to Colgate after two years at the Air Force Academy and am grateful for the growth I experienced being exposed to a completely different environment with a diversity of views. I now volunteer as a police and fire chaplain doing peer support work in the Los Angeles area. I wonder how many Colgate alumni know the sad statistics: In alarming rates, first responders struggle with PTSD, substance abuse, addictions, mental health issues, and medical problems from dealing with the trauma and

Meaningful Work I just wanted you to know how important the article on Michela Gallagher ’69 (autumn 2019, p.

22) was for many, both older people and children of older people. I have early MCI, which has no cure, and I clipped the article and sent it to my doctor along with info I dug up on her company. What she has seems to work, and that is a very important first for millions of people, when there is no existing cure except exercise and good living.

Bob Youker ’55 The Times They Are a-Changin’ I’ve always thought the Class of ’73, as the last all-male freshman class, probably had some interesting tales to share, much like the first coed Class of ’74. I recall receiving a letter at my home in the spring of ’69, shortly after I had accepted my admittance to Colgate, in which I was informed of the college’s decision to go coed in 1970. My parents were offered a refund on their deposit, and I was offered assistance in applying to other institutions. I had only applied to all-male schools, but the trend toward coeducation was occurring at every school to which I had been accepted.

Colgate was my top choice, so the decision to attend was an easy one. As it was, I married during my first year, and I lived a truly “coed existence”

throughout my Colgate days.

The school slowly changed, and those first women on campus confronted (and overcame) an undue amount of sexism in virtually every facet of student life. As a frequent visitor to Colgate over the past two decades, I notice a more refined and genteel ambience. The vestiges of the rugged, all-male school have all but disappeared.

Bruce Mitchell ’73

I spent over an hour on a recent air trip reading and underlining.

Donald Remey ’64

Noteworthy: The Third-Century Plan What a great issue! I especially liked the detailed article on The Third-Century Plan (autumn 2019, p. 26). I spent over an hour on a recent air trip reading and underlining.

Donald Remey ’64 A Welcome Opinion I found the piece “Dispatch From Afghanistan” (autumn 2019, p. 58) to be very revealing regarding Afghanistan today.

The positive views shared

by Michael Smith ’70 were enlightening — views that we don’t see or hear on TV here in the U.S. An enthusiastic generation that has come of age after 2001, students are “reconnecting with the world outside of Afghanistan … due to the restoration of higher education and the internet” plus thriving businesses and new restaurants. I hope he is right in opining that “the momentum will never be stopped.”

Bob Malley ’66 An Inspirational Coach Thank you for the sensitive, accurate, and thoughtful tribute to John Beyer (autumn 2019, p.

82). I was fortunate to be able to play for John for three years. He made a difference in so many of the lives of those who played for him, always adding a quiet humor and levity, but demanding excellence from us each soccer season. He laid the groundwork for the greatness that our soccer programs have achieved of late.

In the interest of accuracy though, the accompanying photo was of the 1966 NCAA tournament team, not 1968 as the caption suggests. Regardless, I mourn the passing of a giant in Colgate soccer history. You earned your rest, coach!

Rick Umpleby ’69 I was really moved by the tribute to John Beyer. When I was a Colgate intern at Ilion Central High School in the fall of 1963, John was my supervisor. John was a mentor in so many ways. I know he inspired me, and I was grateful for his knowledge in helping me to become a better teacher. Also, I had the good fortune to meet my wife, Margaret, in Ilion as she likewise was a Colgate intern assigned to Ilion Central. We will always be grateful to Colgate for bringing us together. We now have been married for more than 51 years. You put out a wonderful magazine, and we enjoy reading it.

Pat (and Marge MA’68) Moylan

A Much-Appreciated Lesson On “Lessons in Living (and Dying),” autumn 2019, p. 8: This is so beautiful and heartfelt.

Thank you for sharing this reflection, Professor [Meika] Loe. I’m going to print the sidebar (“What Constitutes a Meaningful Life?”) and post it on my refrigerator at home for my kids (and my spouse and me!) to see every day.

Emilio Spadola, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern and Islamic Civilization Studies To share your thoughts on this issue, email magazine@colgate.edu, or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 5

Voices Memoir

Only Yes, Only Yes Finding hopefulness through writing

ight years ago, I sat across from my outpatient psychiatrist, an impassive diagnostic bureaucrat who sat behind my 5-inch medical file — a monolithic, supposedly definitive summary of my case history. My shorthand summary? Rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, anorexia, alcoholism, self-injury, and hospitalization more than 20 times, with long stints in inpatient programs meant to save me from myself.

His finger tapped the file and he said, “There’s nothing more I can do for you.

You’re a hopeless case.”

This was not the first time I’d heard this.

My frustrated therapist of 10 years had frequently said with kindness and concern, “You’re the most hopeless patient I have ever worked with.” He didn’t believe that I was hopeless, but I did and believed my end was predetermined — suicide. After all, over the years, I’d attempted suicide half-heartedly, once with full intent, and I always returned to the world with regret, not gratitude.

Hopelessness, counter to common understanding, is not passive inertia, but agitated despair. I was consumed by the persistent agony of wanting to hope for my return from bleak, blank despair to a joyful, purposeful life. The novelist George Eliot writes, “What we call our despair is often only the eagerness of unfed hope.” This can feel like an untenable balancing act: how to live between expectation and decimation, over and over? Easier, really, to cut ties with the world.

But that afternoon? Listening to that

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psychiatrist who was so sure that I was a hopeless case, so sure that I was no longer worth treating, so sure I no longer had a possible future? I suddenly understood that the yielding to despair — the starving, the drinking, the cutting, the suicide attempting — was my failure to keep tenuous hold on hope’s speculative, provisional promise: maybe, but only maybe.

Could I live with that uncertainty?

With my own definitive expletive as farewell, I walked out of that psychiatrist’s office and back into life.

Yes, despair is the eagerness of unfed hope. Hopelessness severs connection, forces us into retreat. I have no hope for the world, no hope for us, no hope for myself, and therefore can take my leave. But the heart, though a bruised and battered muscle, is made of regenerative fibers and beats this rhythm — maybe more, maybe more. Risk offers its own unpredictable, though often wondrous, repairs. Emily Dickinson instructs, “Hope is a thing with feathers.” We are fragile beings, yoked to this earth by gravity and our eventual grave, but, capable, too, of aeronautical miracles. Resurrection by flight on wings and a prayer, on currents and updrafts.

In the past eight years, I’ve worked diligently and passionately toward my balanced recovery: necessary medication, meals, and sleep to sustain my brain and body, as well as a 12-step program and writing to sustain my soul. I was 7 years old when I started three-fingered typing on my mother’s Smith Corona — dreaming

through language. A sentence is an act of hope. Subject + verb + object = meaning.

Movement through time with purpose.

Writing requires rewriting, correcting redundancies, plot holes, inaccuracies, and hasty conclusions, but also requires revision, seeing with new eyes the expansive possibilities in a story.

When I began rewriting and revising my story, I could see pain and suffering, but also hope and joy in the meaningmaking and understood this: We have an obligation to reach for each other in truth and integrity. Gravity is a force that draws two objects together. My body and the earth. Me to you. Some birds — chimney swifts and peregrine falcons — fall into

IN THE MEDIA “I think it is important to be critical of the language of illegality, which ascribes a problematic agency to undocumented migrants, thereby masking the structural factor that both creates the condition of illegality and forces certain migrants to move.”

— Ryan Solomon, professor of writing and rhetoric, in Daily Maverick on civil society’s response to xenophobic violence in South Africa

Low-income communities are heating up faster at the neighborhood level than upscale communities, often because it has to do with less vegetation, trees, and gardens.

— Assistant Professor Andrew Pattison, in Montgomery Advertiser, on the relationship between rising temperatures and increasing public health issues

“She has completed a story, feeling + and proud of this.” Maybe more, maybe more was transformed suddenly into only yes, only yes.

— Kerry Neville ’94 is writing a memoir titled Fierce on the Inside. She is the coordinator of the graduate MFA and undergraduate creative writing program at Georgia College and State University, where she is also an assistant professor of English. Recently, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland, and was visiting faculty in the master of arts in creative writing program at the University of Limerick. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Remember to Forget Me and Necessary Lies, as well as numerous essays.

— Economics professor Chad Sparber, in Forbes, on the ways in which high-skilled foreign nationals on H-1B temporary visas contribute to America’s productivity

matthew odom

flight, leaping from branches and cliffs and careening to what seems sure death. And yet: wings and feathers. Edmund Burke writes that the imagination, necessary for enduring the chaos of despair, is “what the heart owns and understanding ratifies.”

We cannot be parsimonious or miserly in our hope, but must risk lavish flight and understanding together.

Years later, I managed to get a copy of that medical file. As I paged through it, my heart skipped a beat at a mundane medical management progress note — specifically, at one small almost inscrutable handwritten note jotted under the lab results and clinical markers (Appearance: Meticulous; Behavior: Cooperative; Mood/Affect: Less Depressed):

“When we aggregate at the national level, inflows of foreign STEM workers explain between 30% and 50% of the aggregate productivity growth that took place in the United States between 1990 and 2010.”

“As the sky was a bright, misty white toned to a muted sepia by the rising sun, I focused on capturing the contrast of the golden leaves of the trees standing out from the hazy surroundings.”

— Chris Hirt ’22 describes to Landscape Photography Magazine his published photograph, which he took on Colgate’s campus Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 7

VOICES

Humor

The Elephant in the Room What happens when a pachyderm named Barbara is on the loose

ne Sunday morning in August 1977 — a few years into my stint with the Milwaukee Journal — I got lucky. I was living out in the country and driving into metropolitan Sauk City to play tennis. As I passed through the adjacent village of Prairie du Sac, I saw what I took for a hallucination: A very large elephant was cruising up the street in front of me. It pounded down the sidewalk, tore across somebody’s front lawn, then turned up the driveway and into the backyard.

I had a hyperactive imagination in those days. So I instantly thought of a scene from Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, only instead of great white hunters tracking a rhino on safari in Tanzania, these were brave Wisconsin boys standing on the bedliner of a Ford pickup chasing a circus elephant a stone’s throw from my favorite tavern on Water Street.

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It was an unusual sight. I had never come across an elephant on the loose in Prairie du Sac before — or, for that matter, since.

So I joined the chase.

In his most profiteering moment, P.T. Barnum could not have concocted a more astonishing publicity stunt. But this, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, was no hoax.

Here is what happened just before midday, a dull and dreary summer afternoon in the little but lyrical village of Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, when the Carson & Barnes Traveling Circus came to town.

The circus hands, helped by the biggest and strongest of their 31 elephants, were hauling up the big top. According to Ted Bowman, the business manager of this traveling road show, the elephants were fully harnessed and in the process of hoisting the poles that support the tent.

Barbara, the very same four-ton pachyderm who made headlines when she bolted from the circus grounds in Fond du Lac a few weeks back, was part of the rigging crew. “She was pulling a pole up but when she almost had it upright, it slid off a bump in the earth and went clattering to the ground with a great commotion,” explained Bowman. “The noise must have scared her and, well, she just took off.”

“Took off ” is a bit of an understatement. For the next two hours, Barbara, all of 36 years of age and hobbled by chains connecting her front legs, led the circus animal keepers, local and county cops, the Prairie du Sac and Sauk City Volunteer Fire Departments, and a legion of joyriders on a 4-mile jaunt around town.

Sauk-Prairie police sergeant Paul Harman, doing his best imitation of a cop acting like elephants run through here regularly, said: “The elephant first went two blocks east to Water Street and then reversed direction. She went up past the ballpark, past the hospital, and made a beeline straight for the Maplewood Nursing Home on Sycamore Street.”

Judy Carr, 24, who is married to the circus elephant trainer, said Barbara never was one to let a mere building deter her.

“When she got to the nursing home, she looked into a glass window, saw her reflection, and charged. She busted the glass, stopped, turned to her right and saw another, bigger window, and went straight for that one.”

This time, as Norman Kraemer, a resident of Maplewood Nursing Home, tells it, Barbara was not to be denied. She shattered the window of a private room normally inhabited by two elderly women who were thankfully down the hall having lunch and hopped over a 3-foot concrete wall. Kraemer said the elephant trucked right on through the ladies’ boudoir, through the door, and out into the main hallway bisecting the nursing home.

The accommodating Mr. Kraemer gave me a guided tour of Barbara’s route on Sunday afternoon. Once in the hallway, the elephant turned right and headed for the main nurses’ station directly down the corridor. For some miraculous reason, the headstrong beast — “No, she’s really a sweetheart,” insisted Judy Carr — skirted the nurses’ station and didn’t so much as ruffle a piece of paper. In her wake, Barbara the elephant, who was evidently taller than the ceiling, left behind bent steel ceiling supports, tore out most of the overhead electrical wiring, and brought Illustration by Delphine Lee

VOICES most of the ceiling tiles tumbling down.

The place looked like an elephant had run through it.

Meanwhile, as she headed for the large exit sign to the south, Barbara paused to make a 90-degree turn into a private room at the end of the hallway where one Harley Hanick, an elderly gentleman with an everlasting devotion to the Green Bay Packers, was watching football on TV. Harley explained—with the sort of understandable outrage that anyone would feel if the Packers game was rudely interrupted—that the sudden intrusion “was pretty nearly like a tornado, what with all that goddamn racket and all. I went to see just what the hell was going on and walked right over to the door and then this goddamn elephant sticks its head right inside. I slammed that door pretty quick and changed her direction fast enough, you bet!”

Barbara, having had that unfortunate runin with the hot-headed Harley, now veered to the west, used her trunk to depress the bar across the door leading to the back of the nursing home, and was out in the open air once again. She rumbled along for another mile or so, decided she had seen enough of the local sights, and was captured in a cornfield.

Mrs. Josephine Roos, who is 82, was sitting by the window in her wheelchair, close to where Barbara made her entrance into the nursing home. She is an uncommonly calm human being. She said that the arrival of the elephant had brightened up an otherwise dull Sunday afternoon. “All my life I had to travel to see the circus,” deadpanned Josephine, who could have stepped out of a Grant Wood painting, “but today it finally came to me.”

Remarkably, not a single hair on a single head was disturbed during the chase and capture. In fact, late Sunday afternoon, there was an air of absolute festivity at Maplewood.

Two elderly gents standing by the reception desk swore up and down — between turns at poking one another in the ribs — that they would never take a drink again.

And a lovely little white-haired wisp of a lady, watching television in a room just off the main corridor, said to me: “This kind of thing is nothing new to us. Have you seen the size of some of the people around this place? Lots of elephants come here to retire.”

For his part, Mr. Bowman, the circus manager, took a practical view of the incident: “It’s not the kind of publicity we prefer, but if people didn’t know we were here before, they sure know it now.”

Two very different pieces, one author: Both of these essays are excerpted from a new book by Steve Hannah ’70. Dairylandia: Dispatches From a State of Mind (The University of Wisconsin Press) is his “love letter to middle America.”

Hannah is a former managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal and was a longtime CEO of The Onion. “The Elephant in the Room” is reprinted with permission from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The Ordinary Life,” the book’s postscript, is reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

All rights reserved.

the ordinary life We had a singularly inspiring English professor when I was an undergraduate at Colgate University. His name was Jonathan Kistler. He taught a popular course on Shakespeare. I approached him for advice in my junior year after I landed a microscopic role in the university theater’s production of Hamlet. For a week or so, I contemplated a career on the stage. He was generous and encouraging, even though I was pretty sure he thought I was better suited for a career in plumbing supplies. The experience ended up crushing my theatrical ambitions flat but it did have a couple of unforeseen benefits: I can still recite most of Polonius’s advice to Laertes (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” which I’ve used with limited success in counseling my children) as well as Hamlet’s sad soliloquy (“I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth”), which once got me a date with a really charming lady from Virginia who was mad for Shakespeare and momentarily mistook me for Laurence Olivier. It could have been the beer.

Anyway, Professor Kistler had a rare gift that, in my experience, only a precious few teachers possessed — he made his subjects come absolutely alive in the classroom.

Two years after I graduated, Kistler was invited to give the commencement address at Colgate. He told the seniors that, while he had personally attended something like 45 commencement speeches through the years, he could only remember one — a three-paragraph summary that he had come across in the New York Times. It made a simple point: Great success was sure to come, the speaker had assured his young audience, but it was probably more important to deal with the inevitability of failure.

Kistler recommended three books for the graduates to read: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The professor extracted important life lessons from each of these great books — lessons about how you might as well accept that human life is basically unpredictable and frequently unintelligible; that no man can “claim a genuine optimism unless he has first come to grips with this thing called pessimism”; and that — my personal favorite — in learning to accept people the way they are (as ordinary human beings) we learn to accept our ordinary selves.

But he liked Dostoyevsky’s take on living best: “It can make us see the extraordinary quality of what we usually think of as the ordinariness of life, the life we are living day-to-day: eating and drinking and talking … and the shopping and the tuition payments and the children. And all of our successes, which you know are good things to have, and all of our failures, which are inevitable.”

Kistler concluded his send-off better than anyone ever ended a commencement address before or since: “The novel can best immortalize the ordinary life, the kind of life your parents have led, and the kind of life you, too, will no doubt lead eventually. It is the kind of life that perhaps in the end breaks your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it.”

My mother would say it’s a good trade-off.

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 9

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

SCENE A Powerful Place The women’s studies center celebrates 25 years

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n the Center for Women’s Studies, postcards detailing the center’s impact decorate the room’s pillars. Written by students and alumni, they express the authors’ appreciation for a space that made them feel safe and changed their lives.

This postcard initiative was part of a semester-long series of events in honor of the center’s 25th anniversary.

“The women’s studies center is the place I was able to find my voice,” said Dena Robinson ’12 during a Nov. 5 brown bag panel.

Robinson was joined by panelists Sarah Sillin ’05, Gabriella Jones-Casey ’09, Emily Ha ’09, Poppy Liu ’13, and Tess Cumpstone ’15. Dominique Hill ’05, the A. Lindsay O’Connor Chair of American Institutions, moderated the event. The alumnae addressed the changes they fought for while on campus as well as how the lessons they learned through women’s studies shaped their personal and professional lives.

Many of the women spoke on the duality of their undergraduate years: time split between the empowering and accepting women’s studies community and time spent at an institution that was, in some ways, hostile to their identities.

They spoke of their gratitude for the reprieve East Hall’s

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As undergraduates, the women organized and tackled issues ranging from racism to rape culture, preparing them for careers as feminist scholars, community organizers, authors, and activists. They emphasized their desire to sustain the center and give back to students.

“You have a lot of power, and you can change environments through collective action,” Jones-Casey told students.

Later in the week, an evening reception took place. Susan Thomson, director of women’s studies and associate professor of peace and conflict studies, thanked those who helped shape the center — from current and former students, to center interns, to previous directors and professors. She then invited key members of the community

simendus eos id quam faccus dolutem quis re con exeruptus aut

L to R: Panelists Emily Ha ’09, Gabriella Jones-Casey ’09, and Poppy Liu ’13

andrew daddio

Anniversary

basement provided as they grappled with queer and minority identities as well as learned to navigate privilege on a predominantly heterosexual, white campus.

“A lot of my journey at Colgate was being able to step into the fact that I do deserve to be here,” Robinson said.

The alumnae attributed women’s studies with giving them the language to understand and express their feelings, in addition to providing a safe space and sense of community.

For Ha, a first-generation college student and young mother at Colgate, these attributes proved vital. “It’s not an exaggeration when I say the women’s studies center saved my life,” she said.

and advisory board to speak.

Associate Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing read from one of the center’s first newsletters, in which community members wrote about creating the center, then located in 113 Broad Street.

“There’s this idea of being built in existing spaces: carving out spaces for women with the strength and energy and foresight of the women who brought in the furniture and painted,” she said. “[The center] is a real beating heart of this campus. It is a psychic, spiritual, and physical home for so many of us.”

In addition to these events, a social media campaign united those on campus with others reminiscing from afar through: highlighting student clubs; flashing back to issues of the center’s magazine, Allegorical Athena; and spotlighting historical moments such as the center’s grand opening and previous brown bag speakers.

The anniversary events were made possible in part through the generosity of Katie ’01 and Tal-ee Roberts ’01, and Robert Chamberlain ’74 and family, in memory of Rita Chamberlain ’75.

— Lauren Hutton Caption’21 ebissim de

Sustainability

Building Excellence

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olgate’s commitment to a more sustainable future is earning state and national recognition. Benton Hall is now the U.S. Green Building Council New York Green Building of the Year, and Jane Pinchin Hall and Burke Hall have earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold status.

Construction of Benton Hall, Colgate’s home for Career Services, entrepreneurship, and scholarships and fellowships, was completed in 2018. The 18,500-square-foot building was designed to provide the University with energy and water savings for decades

to come. Colgate Project Manager Joe Inman said the University’s work with Robert A.M. Stern Architects led to the construction of a building with features that drastically cut down heating, cooling, and energy use, all while maintaining a look and feel that is a natural addition to the classic look of campus.

“At Colgate, we see the value of having a 50- or 100-year building that’s going to perform efficiently throughout its lifetime,” Inman says.

Last year, Benton Hall became the first LEED Platinum–certified building on campus, and it has since garnered additional accolades, including an excellence in masonry gold award from the American Concrete Institute, and the Associated General Contractors Jeffrey J. Zogg Award in recognition of excellence in construction

management and teamwork.

Part of Colgate’s path to becoming the first carbonneutral university in New York State earlier this year was to adopt a set of sustainable building guidelines to ensure that Colgate continues its trajectory toward even further reduced emissions. While all new buildings and renovations on campus now must adhere to LEED Silver energy standards, both new residence halls surpassed that and were awarded Gold status.

“It’s irrational to take shortcuts during construction and then operate for the next 50 years with increased energy and maintenance costs,” says Director of Sustainability John Pumilio. “We’ve been making the case over the past 10 years that investing up front is worth it for the University.”

— Dan DeVries

13 bits 1 Colgate students’ voting rate increased 25.5% in 2018 compared with 2014.

2 The Ho Tung Visualization Lab played a starring role in Data to Dome, the first iteration of the international planetarium conference to be hosted in the U.S.

3 Student-athletes maintained their national status as a top-20 program in Graduation Success Rate, with a 97 percent.

4 Community

Planning for the Future

R

egional leaders in business, economic development, education, and nonprofit agencies gathered in Hamilton for the Collaboration, Cooperation and Community for Commerce conference Oct. 25.

The event, designed to create working plans for regional economic development, featured three panels focused on cooperation in workforce development, collaboration in financing, and community branding and marketing.

Sponsored by John Golden ’66, former chair of Colgate’s Board of Trustees, participants shared stories of rural development models from other areas of the state and talked about local enterprise success stories.

Illustrations by Toby Triumph

“This format is to collectively envision the future of north Chenango and southern Madison counties,” said Professor and Upstate Institute Director Lynn Schwarzer.

Mark Golden, CEO and cofounder of Golden Artists Colors in New Berlin, N.Y., shared the success of his company’s Employee Stock Ownership Program, which has given his employees a sense of pride in being invested in their workplace.

Yusuf Harper, co-owner of the organic farm Norwich Meadows, said his company found success through shrewd market research and customer service. “The key to our success has been understanding and delighting our customers,” Harper said.

For Julie Dudrick, Upstate Institute project director, the full-day event was an important moment to pull together officials who work on similar efforts, but are separated by county lines.

“Hopefully this is a solid first step toward a more collective vision for what this area will

become,” she said.

Following the full-day event at the Colgate Inn, participants gathered at the newly renovated Hamilton Movie Theater for a community panel discussion with 22nd Congressional District Rep. Anthony Brindisi, Colgate President Brian W. Casey, SUNY Morrisville President David Rogers, and Cazenovia College President Ron Chesbrough. Colgate Professor Emerita Jane Pinchin moderated the discussion.

“We have 1,000 employees at Colgate. It’s $121 million a year in salaries and benefits that go back into the community, so we’re not a small actor,” Casey said. “...I think we have a profound obligation to speak of our mission. Education is a public good. The education and development of the next generation of students and scholars is an obligation to the state.” — Dan DeVries

Professor Kiko Galvez received the American Physical Society’s 2020 Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction.

5 Listen up! The new podcast, 13, asks a Colgate community member 13 questions. Download it from all major podcast platforms.

6 Flaherty Filmmaker-in-Residence Maryam Tafakory spent five days on campus for screenings, installations, class visits, and lectures.

▼ Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 11

SCENE

▼ 7 Doug Wilson ’57, former director/ producer for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

8 At the Northeast Regional Model Arab League Conference, Colgate represented the Union of the Comoros, a small island nation off the coast of Madagascar.

9 Basketball forward Jordan Swopshire ’18 was drafted by the Sioux Falls Skyforce.

Humanitarianism

Mapmaking for Disaster Relief

I 10 New York Times contributing writer and bestselling author Pamela Druckerman ’91 visited campus Oct. 2 to share her career path.

11 Shamarcus Doty ’20 will join U.S. Foreign Service with a Rangel Fellowship.

12 The Colgate Inn’s new speakeasy, The Library, features specialty cocktails like the Atticus Finch and the Leopold Bloom.

13 A historical collection that includes a ledger from the first meeting of Colgate’s 13 founders is now part of University archives.

12 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

n a lab nestled in the Ho Science Center, students quietly worked on computers, tracing the outlines of buildings and documenting roads difficult to see under the dense tree cover of rural areas of the Central African Republic, Kenya, and the Philippines.

On Nov. 6, Colgate’s second mapathon produced maps for areas where a lack of preexisting data makes it difficult for first responders to provide relief during humanitarian crises.

“Organizations like the U.S. Red Cross and the British Red Cross do a lot of humanitarian relief related to natural disasters like floods, droughts, and hurricanes,” said Mike Loranty, associate professor of geography and the organizer of the event. “A big part of those relief efforts is having good maps to know where infrastructure is and know where people are.”

The mapathon was held in partnership with the Missing Maps project, an open and collaborative initiative that uses satellite images to help map out disasterstricken areas. Individuals around the world document missing areas, which are then added to OpenStreetMap (OSM), a publicly accessible and free global mapping database. “[OSM is] created by a user community.

When thinking about open science and open data, a lot of that is created by users who donate their time and efforts to create something good that anybody can use,” Loranty said.

As students came and went during the course of the event, Loranty introduced participants to the Missing Maps project’s goals and provided practical help navigating the technology — particularly the Tasking Manager. It lists locations, explains their

situation, and shows the percent mapped thus far; which campaign is involved, what level of mapping is required; and a priority ranking. Once areas have been mapped, experienced OSM mappers will review the map for completeness. After verification, the data will be uploaded and can then be downloaded to first-responder GPSes. Students gravitated toward three of the Tasking Manager’s top priority projects: →→ Earthquakes in the Philippines necessitated disaster response mapping in Tulunan, Kidapawan, and Magsaysay. With more than 1,000 aftershocks, 14 deaths, and 403 injured, the Philippines Red Cross was asking for approximately 18,000 affected buildings to be mapped. →→ In Kenya’s Wajir County, heavy rainfall led to flash floods, rock falls, mudslides, and landslides affecting more than 101,000 people. With impassable roads, flooded schools, and food shortages, the Kenya Red Cross was asking for all buildings to be quickly marked. →→ Doctors Without Borders is planning a countrywide mortality survey in the Central African Republic to better understand the causes of mortality in the civil war–torn region and needed villages in the Ippy-Ouaka area mapped for rough population estimates.

“It’s a nice thing to do because we’re using our resources to help refine these maps. The next step is the local community taking it and using their expertise of the place where they live to add information to the map,” Loranty said. “It’s a pretty altruistic, remote partnership.”

— Lauren Hutton ’21

SCENE

The Third-century plan

recognition

Endowed Humanities Chair Honors Rebecca Chopp

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olgate’s 15th president, Rebecca S. Chopp, will be recognized for her leadership with an endowed chair in the humanities, named in her honor. The endowment will be established through gifts totaling more than $2 million from a group of former trustees, led by Board Chair Emeritus John Golden ’66, H’07.

“I want to thank John and his fellow trustees for their generosity and President Chopp for her stewardship of this remarkable institution,” President Brian W. Casey says. “In so many ways, her administration laid the foundations upon which we have built The Third-Century Plan.”

Colgate’s first female president, Chopp served from 2002–09. She led the development of Colgate’s 2003 strategic plan, which drove the Passion for the Climb Campaign — an effort that ultimately raised $480 million for a wide range of initiatives, including $142 million for financial aid. During her tenure, the University opened the Robert H.N. Ho Science Center and the renovated Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology.

Chopp fostered the creation of numerous endowed chairs as well as programs like the Upstate Institute and the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute, which encourages interdisciplinary learning that has become a hallmark of Colgate’s approach to liberal arts education. “If we kept students confined to disciplines of the 20th century, that [century] is what they would be prepared for,” Chopp said in 2009. “Core distinctions, high honors, interdisciplinary programs, institutes — all of those kinds of things are, at heart, about continuing the tradition of preparing students for the world in which they will live.”

Many of Colgate’s current wellness programs, residential education initiatives, and community partnerships sprang from efforts initiated during the Chopp presidency. It was her understanding of Colgate’s distinctive spirit, commitment to the excellence of its academic program, and ability to connect with the community that inspired Golden and his fellow trustees to make their gift.

“All of the emeriti trustees who spearheaded the establishment of the Rebecca S. Chopp Chair in the Humanities did so out of the deepest appreciation and affection for President Chopp,” Golden says.

Chopp went on to become president of Swarthmore College and chancellor of the University of Denver.

Reflecting on her years as Colgate’s president, she said, “We have been able, because of the generosity of alumni and parents, to do some wonderful things: build new buildings, expand financial aid, create faculty chairs, and endow coaching positions.”

Ten years later, the tradition continues, and those wonderful things include a chair in her own name.

report

Colgate Releases Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan

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n Oct. 30, 2019, President Brian W. Casey and Provost and Dean of the Faculty Tracey Hucks ’87, MA’90 shared Colgate’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Plan with the campus community.

The DEI Plan outlines the foundational structures that must be built to support the University’s strategic diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It contains a series of long-term initiatives and first steps to which the University will commit in the years ahead.

“Their completion will enable next steps,” wrote Casey and Hucks, “and are not an endpoint but a beginning.”

The DEI Plan was drafted from recommendations compiled from the DEI Task Force and the 75 members of its working groups, augmented by the results of a study commissioned by Colgate in 2016 as well as recommendations from previous administrative-, faculty-, and student-led DEI efforts.

On Nov. 15, following the release of the report, Casey and Hucks hosted the first in a series of forums to answer questions and solicit feedback that could inform future editions.

“In the words of my former teacher here at Colgate, the late Coleman Brown,” Hucks told attendees, “this space is one for seekers, believers, and doubters … for those who seek a better Colgate, who believe in its possibilities, and who doubt that the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion can ever be achieved with mere good intentions and well meaning.”

In person, Hucks and Casey reinforced the assertions found in their campus announcement: The DEI Plan will touch every corner of campus, including the outstanding people, academic programs, and student-life initiatives that make Colgate a distinctive leader in higher education. The plan is essential for the future viability of the Institution; diversity, equity, and inclusion are indispensable in a community that values achievement and dedicates itself to the education of a responsible, ethical citizenry.

Conversation therefore ranged from the intricacies of creating a successful cabinet-level DEI leadership position to the inclusion of DEI within the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum. Attendees also talked about the ways in which the institution will hold itself accountable and detail its progress through annual reports and other regular communications with the community.

“In preparing this plan, we have noted Colgate’s history of steps forward and back, false starts, and best intentions surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Casey and Hucks said in releasing the report. “One day, decades from now, the eye of history will inevitably be turned upon us — the generation that stewards Colgate in the early years of its third century. The actions we take now will determine our legacy. Let us therefore commit to an ambitious pursuit of excellence in our shared work of forging a more equitable and inclusive academic community.”

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 13

scene

LGBTQ Studies

Coming Out, Coming Home

Volleyball

Unmatched Since 1996

I

t’s been 23 years since the Colgate volleyball program had this many victories. In December, the Raiders finished out the season with an overall record of 24–8 and earned a 15–1 mark in Patriot League play.

The team’s winning streak came to an end in the National Invitational Volleyball Championship Quarterfinals Dec. 12. Taking on Texas Christian University, the Raiders couldn’t topple the Horned Frogs on their home court, losing 3–0.

But this loss followed two victories in the championship — which also qualified as the first post–Patriot League victories since the 1996 team won an NCAA Play-In match. In rounds one and two of the championship, Colgate beat Boston College (3–1) and Tulane (3–1), respectively.

“I am just so proud of this team,” said Coach Ryan Baker, who was honored as Patriot League Coach of the Year for the third time in his career. “These seniors raised the bar for our program, and I will be forever grateful.”

The seniors leave behind a strong team as they prepare to graduate. Julia Kurowski ’22 set the single season assists record with 1,247 on the year. She ranks sixth all-time in program history with 2,251 in her career, while she led the team this season with 17 double-doubles.

Meanwhile, outside hitter Alli Lowe ’21 set the total attack (1,289) record this season. She also ranked second all-time with her 465 kills on the year. Overall, Lowe ranks fifth in program history with 1,191 kills in her career. She was named Patriot League Player of the Year and to AVCA’s All-Region Honorable Mention.

Overall, Colgate totaled 43 double-doubles, 10 20-plus dig matches, and tallied 10 20-kill performances on the year.

“The future is bright for our program, and we will use all the positives from this season to use as a springboard for next year,” Baker added.

14 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

raider snapshots →→ Men’s hockey: The Raiders spent a week on the Emerald Isle, where they competed in the Friendship Four in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in November. →→ Women’s hockey: Greg Fargo became the program’s winningest coach with victory No. 138. →→ Men’s basketball: Jordan Burns ’21 tallied 65 points in two games, highlighted by a careerhigh 40-point performance at Green Bay Nov. 26. It was the most points in a game by a Raider since 1995. →→ Football: Jake Shaffner ’20 and Nicholas Ioanilli ’20 played in the FCS Bowl by Spiral in Daytona Beach, Fla.

— Celine Turkyilmaz ’21

justin wolford

O

n Oct. 4 and 5, the Colgate community celebrated the 10th anniversary of its LGBTQ Studies program with a symposium titled Home | Coming | Out. Coinciding with Homecoming Weekend, the symposium reflected aspects of belonging, visibility, and well-being through events that considered the past, present, and future — the opportunities and challenges — of LGBTQ Studies. It included a broad view of scholarship and pedagogy, as well as institutional and local impacts.

Ken Valente, professor of mathematics and LGBTQ Studies, organized the symposium. “I want to open up an intellectual space that values the experiences of those who identify somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum,” he says.

The symposium featured a keynote address by María Scharrón-del Río, interim associate dean of the School of Education and professor of the School Counseling Graduate Program at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Scharrón-del Río (who uses the pronouns they and their) discussed the intersections of their identity as a queer Puerto Rican.

“When coming out to myself about my sexual orientation in Puerto Rico, I struggled with who I wanted to be and who I was told I should be,” they said. “I found that there was no word that described me better than queer — queer felt like home.”

In addition to the keynote address, the symposium hosted three panel discussions that featured returning alumni as well as invited faculty, student life professionals, and representatives of local support agencies.

Topics included experiences and aspirations; the state and future of LGBTQ Studies; and fostering new forms of engagement with queer alumni and communities.

Keyra Jimenez ’19, who participated in the alumni panel, reflected on her experience as a queer person of color on campus. “I’m honored to be one of 14 graduates of this program,” she says. “Colgate has been around for 200 years — this means there’s potentially another 200 years of LGBTQ Studies that can be explored. It’s amazing that we can go in so many different directions from here.”

scene an ethnically mixed child living in Colombo when it was being transformed into a garrison city. While I grew up largely with my mother’s side of the family, I was clearly not Sinhalese, and as the war progressed, Tamils were increasingly marginalized.

People around me became increasingly nationalist and insensitive to minorities.

One reason for this was that Colombo would be bombed by militants, but the other reason was that the changing economy impacted people’s sense of security. Tamils were often scapegoated. It was easy for political leaders and nationalists to blame minorities for issues that had to do with neoliberalism and economics — much the way immigrants are blamed for economic inequalities in the U.S. today.

Faculty

Get to Know Nimanthi Rajasingham, assistant professor of English

F

mark diorio

or Assistant Professor Nimanthi Rajasingham, the Sri Lankan ethnic war isn’t only the topic of her academic work — it’s also her lived experience. Learn more about Rajasingham and her new book, Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War (Northwestern University Press).

Fiction, for me, has always been about social change and an index for registering the aspirations and desires of a given society. My interest in theater and performance has meant that I use intense close reading — very much what we do in literary studies — and extensive fieldwork. For example, I spent a year in Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones (where sweatshops are), where 85% of the workers are women. I was with a group of workers who produced theater about their lives. As I went for rehearsals, hung out with them, and spent some time in a factory, I came to appreciate their keen consciousness about how they’re being exploited in the factories.

But I realized that they never talked about minorities. These women are so politically aware about issues of gender and class, but they weren’t critically talking about Tamils who were also suffering, in different ways during the war. This is when I also started asking why there were so few minority women in the zones. I came to realize that labor zones were set up in Sinhalese areas, to employ Sinhalese only, to produce a working class that was nationalist rather than critical of the war. So, in this way, corporations and an ethno-nationalist state colluded to produce a new working class that was Sinhala in ethnicity and sensibility.

The book is about the war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983 and ended in 2009.

The war was fought between the state, controlled by the majority ethnic Sinhalese, and the separatists led by the Tamil Tigers, who claimed to represent all minority Tamils. Most people read the war as a struggle between a racist majority and a minority group, but, as I argue in the book, globalization and free markets have impacted that process. In 1977, the United National Party came to power and opened the economy toward neoliberalism or free markets. So, Assembling Ethnicities tracks how economic reforms and nationalism were entangled in one another during the war.

I address this by turning to fiction — be it novels, theater, cultural festivals, art, or films — because it can make us think about issues through imaginative uses of language and the creation of possible worlds. In my book, I develop the term “ethnographic fictions” to insist that some fictions are also invested in documenting the external world, and making important observations about the social reality.

As a professor, one of my main aims is to get students who have never had experiences we’re reading about to have empathy for people from different places.

Fiction is a powerful tool for doing this. I teach about the global south, and I think the radical empathy necessary for a planetary consciousness can be developed in profound ways through fiction.

I grew up in Sri Lanka during the war. My mother is Sinhalese; my father is Tamil. I was

Spring courses: South Asian Literature; Power and Justice in Post-Colonial Literature

Discourse

Championing Diversity on Campuses

H

alf of all undergraduates in the United States are the first in their families to attend college, yet only 14% of students at the most elite institutions come from the bottom half of the income distribution. Thirty-eight colleges in the United States have more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.

Anthony Jack, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, discussed these statistics during his Oct. 7 lecture, “The Privileged Poor — How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.” The talk, eponymous to Jack’s book, highlighted the importance of socioeconomic diversity on college campuses.

Jack, who holds a PhD from Harvard University, discussed his own experience as a low-income, first-generation college student. He coupled this personal narrative with lessons learned from his research on how poverty and inequality shape students’ trajectories to and through higher education.

“Conventional wisdom dictates that you need to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going. When it comes to understanding the undergraduate experience, the same sentiment is true,” Jack said. “We must examine where students come from — and what they have been through — to understand why they chart the paths they do once they reach our gates. Doing so forces us to think about how school policies and practices facilitate or hinder that process.”

Morgan Beatty ’20 serves as a student intern for the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) and the First Generation Initiative (FIRST), both of which support student success at Colgate. “Dr. Jack’s talk was powerful because it resonates with so many students on this campus, especially within the OUS and FIRST communities,” she said. “He spoke a truth that is prevalent but often under-acknowledged.”

Jack said: “To embark upon the crucial task of making colleges look more like the world, we must question what we take for granted. We must examine how both the symbolic and material dimensions of class affect campus life.”

— Celine Turkyilmaz ’21 Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 15

Discover

analysis

Inquiring Minds Colgate has recently received more than $1.3 million in grants for faculty research from the National Science Foundation. The research will shed light on the past, present, and future of the humans, organisms, and systems that make up our world.

eople usually think Antarctica is all about ice. But for Assistant Professor of Geology Joe Levy, it’s all about soil. Levy is studying how water from the thawing permafrost is seeping into the earth and creating underground bogs and streams. When, where, and how this groundwater flows will affect the chemistry of the soil, possibly

P

16 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

turning the dry, cold deserts green. And that will determine whether Antarctica ends up acting as a source of carbon dioxide, or a sponge.

Levy’s five-year, $500,000 grant will enable him to map changes in soil moisture on a day-to-day basis — something that’s never been done. To do this, he and his students will travel to the driest, coldest,

windiest place on the continent: Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. There they’ll spend December 2020 and January 2021 deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensitive spectrometers that will measure the movement and chemistry of the underground water. They’ll also collect and analyze core samples.

This “chemical fingerprinting” will provide insight into the Dry Valleys’ changing landscape and possible effects off shore. “In the oceans around Antarctica, it’s hard for algae to make a living,” Levy says.

“But if these wetlands release nutrients into the ocean, then that algae suddenly will have a lot more food to eat and can start blooming and helping the ocean suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.”

Levy is equally excited about the second component of this grant: establishing a selfsustaining “UAV Academy.” He will create courses to teach students about state-ofthe-art remote sensing and train them to “become their own geoscience research pilots.” The students who accompany Levy to Antarctica will come back and teach other students how to use drones to ask questions about the earth that have not been answerable before now.

Levy is also quick to point out that this is a CAREER grant, which promotes both science and teaching. That suits the geomorphologist just fine. “Students bring an amazing perspective because they have an incredible ability to think broadly and work across disciplines,” he says. “They are indispensable partners in my research process.”

Like Levy, volcanologist Karen Harpp looks beneath the earth’s surface, but she goes a little deeper — 1,800 miles deep, to be exact. Of particular interest to Harpp is the Galápagos archipelago. These volcanic islands were formed by a mantle plume, a column of hot rock that wells up from the base of Earth’s mantle — the vast region between the crust and the core — and ultimately causes volcanic activity. The professor of geology and peace and conflict studies explains that, because we can’t dig all the way to Earth’s core, we have to learn about the inside of our planet by looking at what comes out of it. “I study the chemistry of what volcanoes erupt,” she says.

To do that, Harpp uses an inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (ICPMS). Through a three-year Major Research Instrumentation grant, she and her coprincipal investigator (and former student) Alison Koleszar ’04, now a visiting assistant professor in the geology department, received $300,000 to back up Colgate’s 15-year-old ICP-MS with a new one. The instrument, which analyzes the elemental Illustrations by Dan Page

makeup of a sample, will be used to reveal what exactly is in the lava she and her students bring back from the Galápagos.

Harpp has long been an ardent promoter of hands-on research for undergraduates.

Most of her students have presented results of their research at major conferences and have also been co-authors on publications.

“You can talk all day, but when [students] go do the research is when it starts to matter,” Harpp says. “When you actually get to walk on the volcano, pick up the rocks, bring them back, and solve the problem yourself, that’s empowering.”

In addition to Harpp, Koleszar, and their students, Colgate professors and students working in other disciplines will use the ICP-MS in a range of studies, from determining roadside spring water quality in the Finger Lakes region to identifying Paleolithic art pigments. The instrument will also support regional research programs at other institutions.

Students are also integral to additional projects funded this summer. Physicist Rebecca Metzler received $275,000 for a $460,000 collaborative project with Gary Dickinson at the College of New Jersey to study the outer shells of barnacles. An expert in biomineralization — how an organism forms mineralized biological structures, such as teeth or shells — Metzler says that little is known about how their exoskeletons form. Understanding that could have long-term applications in dentistry, orthopaedics, and other areas where a product might form and solidify while inside the human body.

As little understood as they are, barnacles impact our world in significant ways, including economically. The crustaceans produce an incredibly strong adhesive, which they use to anchor themselves to underwater surfaces. They grow on pipes, for example, impeding proper flow, and adhere to boat hulls, creating drag and drastically running up fuel costs.

Barnacles have an ecological impact too.

Because they’re filter feeders, effectively cleaning the water as they eat, they play an important role in marine ecosystems.

Metzler’s study will explore how barnacles in their larval form grow under normal conditions — and how they grow in the warmer, more acidic waters caused by climate change. Whatever they show, the findings will have implications we’ll have to contend with, Metzler says. “Are barnacles going to proliferate because of these changes in climate, which would actually cause issues economically? Or are they going to die out, which would be a concern ecologically?”

Metzler is also interested in understanding the structure of the barnacle’s exoskeleton, which is unusual among biomineralized tissues in that it’s disordered. In mother of pearl, for example, crystals arrange themselves into a brick-wall structure. But with barnacles, the distribution of crystals is haphazard: “Instead of a brick wall, here we have crystals randomly scattered throughout the structure in ways we can’t predict.”

As little understood as they are, barnacles impact our world in significant ways, including economically.

If Metzler wrote this grant with a focus on students, it’s because early exposure to research changed her life. “I went to a liberal arts college and had a professor who asked me to do theoretical astrophysics research,” she says. “I fell in love with research. I felt it was giving me the power to ask questions.

When I got my PhD, I knew I wanted to work with students and involve them in experiments that many people don’t think undergraduates can do — which they definitely can.”

Like Metzler, Jacqueline Villarrubia is interested in how things form — namely, the Centros de Apoyo Mutuo, or mutual support centers, that surfaced in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. These community-based recovery initiatives were established when state and federal agencies failed to respond effectively to the emerging humanitarian crisis. While it’s known that they are key to disaster relief efforts, little

is known about community members’ experiences with them, Villarrubia says.

The sociology professor has received a threeyear $82,095 grant as part of a $300,000 collaborative project with Professor Roberto Vélez-Vélez of SUNY-New Paltz to conduct qualitative research in resilience and community-rebuilding initiatives. The result, she hopes, will be policy making that shifts from the “state-centered model” to a “dialogue with government officials and community organizers on the importance of creating policies that stem from within the community.”

Meanwhile, in Colgate’s mathematics department, two professors’ innovative work is pushing the boundaries of their fields. Assistant Professor of Mathematics Joe Chen has received a $142,873 grant to apply his expertise in microscopic probability models to large-scale phenomena such as heat flow, wave propagation, and fluid dynamics. By understanding how random walkers (particles whose paths consist of series of random steps) mutually interact on networks with self-similar or random features, Chen hopes to establish limit theorems that describe laws of nature in the form of differential equations.

Some of his recent theorems — one on the abelian sandpile model and another on the Sierpinski-Hofstadter butterfly — have emerged from fruitful collaborations with Colgate’s undergraduates.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Rob Davis received a three-year, $70,000 Algorithms for Modern Power Systems grant to apply his understanding of synchronization and convex polytopes, or polygons with flat sides and no dents, such as pyramids or cubes, to a real-world problem: stabilizing the electrical grid.

“I know a lot of uses for polytopes in other areas of mathematics. It was news to me that they could be used to study power networks,” Davis says. He and Tianran Chen, his collaborator at Auburn University at Montgomery, will use their respective geometric and numeric expertise to find ways of improving the efficiency, stability, and resilience of power networks through this $175,000 project.

In addition to producing open-source software, teaching undergraduates at both institutions is baked into the grant. “I like to expose students to new and interesting developments in my area of math,” Davis says. “There is this idea that math has to be boring and dry. In my classes and research, I tell students that, ‘You need to learn the definitions and the basic rules, but you’re never far away from something really cool.’”

— Sarah C. Baldwin Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 17

DISCOVER

Research

Reel History Hamilton Theater: Here’s Looking At You, Kid

s the iconic Hamilton Movie Theater underwent its fifth major renovation last summer, two film students — Chloe You ’22 and Molly Adelman ’21 — constructed a thorough history of how it’s changed over the years. These are the highlights:

A

Timeline: →→ Tripp’s Opera House was the original entertainment center in Hamilton, hosting not only musical performances but also banquets, masquerades, and local ceremonies. On Feb. 19, 1895, a massive fire that destroyed most of the downtown businesses burned the opera house to ashes. →→ E.B. Sheldon, who had been running his grocery store from one of the opera house’s upper floors, bought the empty lot and began building anew. The three-story building would house an opera house, Sheldon’s “extensive grocery business,”

18 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

and offices. Sheldon Opera House opened on Sept. 24, 1895, with a speech from Colgate President George W. Smith. The “all-modern improvements” included electricity, 1,000 folding seats, six scenic backdrops, and heated dressing rooms under the stage. In addition to vaudeville and other shows, the opera house began offering feature-length films — the first of which was the 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. →→ After Sheldon died in 1923, the Smalley circuit — one of the largest U.S. theater chains at the time — purchased the building. When admission prices increased from 25 cents to 35 cents in 1932, students protested until William Smalley threatened to shut the theater down. →→ In 1934, an even larger theater chain, the Schine Circuit, purchased the theater.

Renovations to the new Schine’s State Theater touted a redesigned balcony and a smaller stage, which fully transformed the space from a live-performance venue to one designed specifically for film screenings. It showed popular films (a feat for a small town) like Charleton Heston’s Ben Hur. →→ The year 1966 introduced new owner Panther Theater, which was notorious for showing children’s films in daytime and X-rated films at night. Business began to suffer.

→→ In an effort to revitalize the theater, Mayor Robert Kuiper bought it in 1973. The new Hamilton Cinema boasted a renovated lobby and a new sign — which was necessary because the old marquee was damaged from students sitting and climbing on it. →→ Alumnus Jay Metz ’59 entered the picture in 1989 and owned the theater until 2003. From 1996–99, the theater closed for renovations.

It reopened as a triplex called the Hamilton Movie House. →→ Colgate University purchased the theater in 2003 through the Hamilton Initiative.

Under the management of Chuck Fox ’70, it was renamed the Hamilton Movie Theater.

The simple wooden marquee that had been used since the 1970s was replaced by a lighted, more elaborate version that was given by the Class of 1956. Their stipulation: It needed to be modeled after Schine’s State Theater, where they spent time as undergraduates. →→ Last summer, the theater’s newest makeover included lobby renovations, reclining chairs, upgrades to the projection and sound equipment, a modern concession stand, and improved accessibility. A soft opening on Oct. 10 featured the 1985 flick Back to the Future. The next night, the community gathered out front to watch the ribbon cutting and celebrate the grand opening.

Illustrations by Peter and Maria Hoey

DISCOVER

ASK A PROFESSOR

Are brains built for language, or is language built for brains?

→

Credits: Research

by Molly Adelman ’21, a film and media studies and history double major; Chloe You ’22, a film and media studies and molecular biology double major; and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Mary Simonson.

Outlier.org

Read the complete history, view photos, and share your own Hamilton theater experience at colgate. edu/hamiltontheater.

This is a layered question, so let’s focus on a broad conceptual divide between two competing camps of thought: the nativists vs. the anti-nativists.

The nativists believe that language is the product of strictly biological evolution, and that human brains at birth are genetically endowed with specific abilities to learn language. The anti-nativists argue that language is the product of biological and cultural evolution, and that human brains at birth are genetically endowed with general abilities to learn language (and many other things too). Or as the developmental neuroscientist Elizabeth Bates put it: “Is language a new machine built out of new parts or a new machine built out of old parts?”

Everyone in this debate agrees that there is an uncanny fit between language and the human brain. The main disagreement is in what initially drove this relationship: Did the brain adapt to language, or did language adapt to the brain?

Proponents of nativism — like psychologist Steven Pinker — believe that human brains gradually evolved a specialized “instinct” that was specifically designed for language. It was as if language was a fully formed thing that came into contact with humans, and our ancestors’ brains gradually adapted to it. Brains that adapted best thrived and passed on their language-ready genes, and this led to more languageready brains in the population.

Over time, because language became crucial for survival, all human brains became genetically programmed for language.

In contrast, the anti-nativists believe that the brain gave rise to language. The cognitive scientist duo Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater point to the fundamental tenet of evolution that organisms need stable environments to adapt to. For example, the evolution of lungs required a steady supply of oxygen in the air once our ancient ancestors made the transition from sea to land.

If you think of language as an organism, which is how Charles Darwin viewed it, it’s interesting to ask: What changes faster, brains or languages? Clearly, languages change much faster than brains.

Evidence from the emergence of new languages — in the wild (Creoles and sign languages) and in the lab (artificial language games) — reveals incredible diversity of language structures from group to group and generation to generation.

This means that rather than our brains initially adapting to language, it was most likely the other way around: Language adapted to the brain because brains are more stable targets than languages.

This suggests that language is not specifically part of our genetic endowment at birth, but rather a cultural invention of our unique brains. To illustrate this point, consider an analogy that linguist Daniel Everett uses in his book Language: The Cultural

Tool. Everett compares language to arrows; I’ll paraphrase: If you learned that all hunter-gatherer societies use arrows in hunting, would you conclude that the brains of those hunter-gatherers must be genetically endowed with specific abilities to make arrows?

Of course not. Instead, it’s much more parsimonious to conclude that they are born with general problem-solving skills that they then apply to learn how to make arrows. It’s the same story with language.

Summing up, the nativists believe that human brains are built specifically for language, and the anti-nativists contend that human brains are built for general things, like problem solving, and this allows us to learn language as a part of cultural immersion.

In the end, both views might be right, just on different timescales.

Perhaps language was initially created by our brains in our evolutionary past, but once it arrived on the scene, our brains came to rely on it, much like the symbiotic relationship between host and parasite. Nowadays, language needs us as much as we need it.

Spencer Kelly is a professor of psychological science, linguistics, and neuroscience. He is teaching a Great Course on this topic that will be available through the Teaching Company this March.

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

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 19

Marvelous Miscellany

By Rebecca Docter Photography

by Mark DiOrio

20 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Cloven shoes, rebuilt bicycles, and jars of tinctures filled Colgate’s Clifford Gallery last fall. For the exhibition ARTS Collects, faculty and staff in the art and art history department offered a window into their personal lives. Take a look.

Lois Wilcox collects typewriters like her grandmother’s, on which she learned the alphabet. Other antique office implements have also found their way into her collection.

THE ADMINISTRATOR

Administrative Assistant Lois Wilcox Little Hall, which houses the Department of Art and Art History, opened in January 2001 — and Wilcox was at the center of its creation. She worked with chairs (now emeritus professors) John Knecht and Mary Ann Calo to complete tasks like organizing the move and choosing furniture. To thank her, the department gave her a gift: A typewriter just like her grandmother’s.

Wilcox keeps the piece on top of her filing cabinet, along with another she picked up at a garage sale. A donated letterpress and a selection of vintage department stamps join the collection. She says taking the pieces out of their element for the exhibition gave them an entirely new meaning. “Their own little pedestal takes them from being a few things on top of my filing cabinets to a conversation starter.”

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 21

THE BIKE HOBBYIST

Martinez’s role as studio safety technician involves an array of projects, like creating a system for students to scan an object to make it a 3D model. “I like to say that I show students how to make things, and I keep them safe while they do it,” he explains.

The technician uses similar skills in his personal life.

A longtime lover of bicycles, Martinez collects the modes of transportation, often tricking them out to suit his fancy. He displayed a set of four for the exhibit. A pair of bikes that he calls Baby and Me were built

by Martinez from extra parts and are incredibly simplified.

They’re meant to be ridden together — Baby by his wife, Sami, and Me by Martinez.

Another ride, Bad Boy, was built by a friend with an eye for design and is the “epitome of innovation,” according to Martinez. Sleek with top-ofthe-line parts, the bike was created with great precision.

It’s complemented by a piece Martinez has dubbed Hard-Liner, which stuns with a mid-century frame and modern parts; its ornate flames are a nod to the Hot Rod community. “They’re juxtapositions of each other.

One is very expensive, worth thousands of dollars, and the other one is barely worth several hundred dollars. But they function in similar ways and both have really cool features.”

22 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

By day, Duane Martinez helps give the next generation of artists the tools they need to create. In his free time, he does his own creating, taking bicycles to the next level.

Studio Safety Technician Duane Martinez

These Tramp Art boxes are just some of the treasures Professor Lynn Schwarzer and Professor Emeritus John Knecht collect. They often find their pieces at thrift stores and yard sales. “The best treasures you often find are underneath the saw horses, tucked away,” says Schwarzer.

THE FOLK ART COLLECTOR

Professor Lynn Schwarzer Ornate with delicately carved patterns, Schwarzer’s Tramp Art boxes look as though they were created by professional artists. Quite the opposite: They’re made of old cigar boxes notched with pocket knives by men from the 1870s to the 1940s. “They were made as a means of creating, of relaxing in the evening,” Schwarzer says.

She and her husband, Professor Emeritus John Knecht, started collecting them around 1980 because they were drawn to the idea that people made them with their heart and hands, and appreciate artworks created by artists working outside of established programs in the arts.

The boxes had a practical purpose for the people who made them, often functioning as sewing baskets or jewelry boxes.

“They’re utilitarian, but they’re also about form and texture and the pure geometry,” she says.

Schwarzer teaches studio art courses, and the boxes, in some respects, reflect her philosophy as an artist: “My sense of being an artist and studying art is to think about how one takes what one knows in the world, experiences, and is curious about, and brings that into a process of making.”

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 23

Asst. Professor Margaretha Haughwout Mirroring Haughwout’s home collection, jars of dried herbs, tinctures, oils, honeys, and other natural products lined shelves in Clifford Gallery.

They’re adorned with labels about where and when the substances were harvested and whether the moon was waxing and waning when they were made. Nearby, an unlikely guest: a doctor’s bag.

Haughwout ventured into herbalism at the behest of her father, a medical practitioner.

“In my adolescence, I rebelled against an expensive modern medical system and began to think about ways that everyday people can heal themselves,” she explains. “That rebellion began a lifelong conversation between us.”

Plants also make an appearance in Haughwout’s art practice. In her Food Forest Studio at the Schupf Art Studios in Hamilton, a site where Haughwout conducts eco-art experiments, she hosts ecoart events such as Grafters X Change, during which students learn about ecological arts practices.

Haughwout also teaches about code-based art, or art that is distributed, procedural, or instruction-based. “My own personal art practice now travels across technology and ecology.

It operates inside and outside of the gallery.”

24 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Certified by The California School of Herbal Medicine, Assistant Professor Margaretha Haughwout displayed some of the concoctions she’s collected and made throughout the past decade.

THE HERBALIST

THE JAZZ MAN

THE SHOE CONNOISSEUR

Professor Lynette Stephenson

Robert Blackmore’s collection includes several records by Duke Ellington, who performed at Colgate in 1940.

Professor Lynette Stephenson is stylish year-round, even in Hamilton’s frigid winters. To combat the elements, she wears her snow boots to campus, then changes into more attractive footwear before class.

Click-clacking down the corridors of Little Hall, Stephenson is always sporting fresh footwear, never repeating a pair. It’s easy for her, because she owns “an Imelda Marcos level of shoes,” she says. In her collection of more than 1,000 pairs is a dozen Margiela Tabi-style shoes. Stephenson included these in the exhibition in honor of the style’s 30th anniversary.

Stephenson teaches drawing and painting courses and is interested in contemporary art and theory — a realm in which fashion fits. Still a staple at fashion week, the Tabi can appear conventional from the side — but, when the foot turns, its iconic detail is revealed. A slit separates the big toe from the rest, giving a cloven appearance.

“I primarily like shoes that look odd,” Stephenson says. “I didn't set out to make a collection.

Just, I really liked them. They’re comfortable and odd looking at the same time.”

Margiela developed the Tabi following a trip to Japan, where the style is popular in sock form as part of the Wafuku, or Japanese costume. “It’s a twist on something that was traditional,” Stephenson says.

“I like in the fashion world the way they make that twist.”

Stephenson sees fashion as a type of art, and wearing an interesting accessory, like the Tabi, draws attention — as a magnificent painting would. That others notice what she’s wearing makes her feel confident. “People think fashion is superficial, but you’d be surprised how people feel differently by what they wear.

It changes the way you feel.” ●

Colgate professors collecting interesting objects isn’t a new phenomenon — just look at the University’s Blackmore Jazz Archive. Founded in honor of Robert L. Blackmore ’41, William Henry Crawshaw Professor of literature emeritus, the Case Library collection features jazz recordings and books donated by Blackmore in 2001. The library’s third floor includes a listening station and archival material about Duke Ellington’s 1940 concert in Memorial Chapel. Blackmore was, of course, in the audience.

The professor first shared his passion for jazz music with the Colgate community in 1961, when he began his WRCU show Your Monday Date with Jazz. He continued the project, his labor of love, until 2001. “I enjoy tension in poetry and dissonance in jazz,” he told the Colgate Maroon in 1986.

“I like the Blues. The Blues give you a glimpse into the soul.”

Throughout the course of 50 years, Blackmore compiled more than 60,000 albums.

Approximately 17,000 of them are housed in the library.

Colgate Magazine 25

Avery working in the Rockefeller Institute, 1926.

Gene Id 26  Colgate Magazine  Winter 2020

Oswald Avery, Class of 1900, made a discovery that revolutionized science. Now, Colgate biologists are following in his footsteps to make their own genetic revelations.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

By Michael Blanding

ol

O

swald Avery, Class of 1900, was a man who collected nicknames. During his years at fin de siècle Colgate, fellow students called him “Babe” due to his slight stature — he rarely weighed more than 100 pounds — and boyish features. As an immunology researcher at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, colleagues called him “Fess,” short for “Professor,” for his enthusiastic expositions on science, “always spicing his performance, with mimicry, pithy remarks, picturesque analogies, and verbal pyrotechnics,” in the words of one. One name Avery never collected, however, is “Nobel Prize Winner.” And yet, he made arguably the most significant discovery in 20th-century biology: the realization that a chemical called DNA carried the genetic information to control the development of all organisms.

Avery published that bombshell in the obscure Journal of Experimental Medicine in 1944 — nearly a decade before James Watson and Francis Crick’s breakthrough of the DNA double-helix assured their own place in Nobel history. In part due to Avery’s self-deprecating manner, which made him cautious of trumpeting his Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 27

28 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

inherited, but in the 1940s, they considered them to be an abstract concept, with little understanding of what chemicals made them up within a cell. If they had to guess, most scientists would have assumed they were made of proteins in the nucleus.

Along with two colleagues, Colin McLeod and Maclyn McCarty, Avery now set out to change that, tackling his goal in a patient, meticulous manner.

The researchers started with a culture made from beef hearts, in which they grew S strain pneumonia bacteria. They then killed the cells by breaking down their membranes, and washed off the sugar capsule with multiple applications of saline.

Precipitating what was left in an alcohol solution, they removed most of the proteins with chloroform to create a small amount of viscous precipitate, which they discovered was mostly sodium salt of deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA. By injecting this into mice along with the non-virulent R-type bacteria, they achieved the same deadly effects as if they had injected the S strain bacteria. In further experiments, they used enzymes to digest any remaining protein and found the experiment still worked; but when they used enzymes to remove the DNA, it failed.

Avery and his colleagues wrote their paper with a cautious tone, saying only that the nucleic acids “must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.” Others were much more excited. When Avery won the New York Academy of Medicine gold medal in 1944 for his pneumonia research, the award committee noted the paper’s “very far-reaching implications.” A leading biochemist immediately grasped the possibilities of injecting DNA into cells to change their properties, saying “the importance of these observations can scarcely be overestimated.”

The bulk of the scientific community, however, failed to embrace the significance, fixated on the idea that the solution still contained trace amounts of protein, which they figured must really be behind the change.

DNA, they thought at the time, consisted of only a monotonous sequence of bases, which couldn’t possibly account for the incredible genetic variability of life.

Over the next few years, however, scientists began to replicate Avery’s experiment with similar results, and most came around to the idea that DNA was indeed the basis for genes in the cell. By the time Watson and Crick demonstrated that the double-helix structure of DNA could provide the needed variability along with a means for replication, most scientists had realized DNA’s singular importance inside the cell.

That recognition was too late for Avery, who retired in 1948 and moved in with his brother Roy in Nashville.

He died of liver cancer in 1955, at age 77. Chemist Arne Tiselius, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1948, called it “lamentable” that Avery never received the top award in his field. “Had he not died when he did, I think he most certainly would have gotten it,” he said. Recognition has since come, if slowly. In 1983, Esquire named Avery as

Left: Colgate’s Special Collections and University Archives; Right: Mark DiOrio

finding too loudly, colleagues ignored and disputed his discoveries for years. But he was under no illusions about the importance of his breakthrough. “If we are right,” he wrote in a letter to his younger brother Roy in 1943, “nucleic acids are not merely structurally important, but functionally active substances in determining the biochemical activities and specific characteristics of the cells — and that, by means of a known chemical substance, it is possible to induce predictable and hereditary changes in cells.” In the 75 years since his discovery, that’s exactly what scientists have done.

Avery was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Oct. 21, 1877. He was the son of a Baptist minister, who brought him to New York City at age 10. Precocious as a child, Avery played the cornet on Sundays to attract parishioners to his father’s Lower East Side Oswald Avery in 1896 church. He attended Colgate Academy, and then Colgate University, where he led the University band with his trumpet and won He made competitions for public speaking. Despite excellent grades in music and the humanities, however, he arguably the only took the required science classes. So it surprised most significant everyone when, upon graduation, he decided to pursue discovery in a degree at Columbia Medical School. Working with 20th-century patients as a doctor in clinical practice, Avery felt biology: the frustrated at how little he could do for those with realization that a chronic diseases, and he decided to turn to research chemical called instead — first at Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn and DNA carried then at the Rockefeller Institute in 1913.

Avery didn’t set out to discover DNA. His main the genetic interest was finding a cure for pneumonia, which at the information time was killing thousands of people every year. In a to control the small, sixth-floor laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, development of he pursued the bacteria that caused it, Streptococcus all organisms. pneumoniae, for the better part of 35 years. Colleagues reported on two sides to Avery’s personality. On the one hand, there was the gregarious “Fess,” who was always smiling and happy to talk with his labmates. On the other was a quiet, almost brooding scientist, who eschewed big gatherings and rarely traveled, other than yearly trips to Maine. This Avery spent hours in the lab behind round spectacles, meticulously planning experiments to isolate and attack his nemesis.

Pneumonia comes in two forms: smooth (S), which is virulent, and rough (R), which is not. In 1923, Avery was the first to discover the difference between the two: a polysaccharide sugar coating on the S strain that protected the pathogen from being killed by a host’s immune system. An experiment by a British biologist in 1928 had shown that, by injecting a mouse with a nonvirulent R strain along with a type S strain that had been previously killed (and was therefore not pathogenic), he could create a live S strain bacteria, causing the mouse to die within days. Such a change was unheard of.

Clearly some “transforming principle” inside the dead bacteria was turning the live bacteria into a killer, but what was it?

Scientists had long understood the concept of genes, which determine how traits of organisms are

one of the 50 “who made a difference” in the preceding half-century, alongside such 20thcentury pioneers as Muhammad Ali, Walt Disney, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dr. Jonas Salk. Since then, the fields of microbiology and genetics have grown ever-more complex, with new tools and techniques to manipulate DNA to cure diseases, regenerate cells, and understand human and animal development like never before. But at the basis is Avery’s discovery in his lab 75 years ago. As the work of four modern-day researchers at Colgate shows, his legacy lives on, at his alma mater and beyond.

ABOUT TIME

E

veryone suspects they are either a morning person or a night owl. According to research by Associate Professor and Biology Chair Krista Ingram, that distinction might be genetic — hardwired into our DNA. Ingram has long been interested in the effects of genes on behavior, a much more difficult phenomenon to investigate than physical characteristics. “If you are looking at physical traits like eye color or freckles, you can often explain much of the variance in the trait due to heredity,” she says. “Looking at behavior and genetics wasn’t even possible until I was in graduate school, when microarrays came out and we could look at a suite of 8,000 genes at once.”

She began her career looking at behavior in insects, investigating something called the “foraging gene,” which seemed to control whether fruit fly larvae moved around a lot or stayed in place. In ants, this gene is associated with the daily timing of foraging outside the nest. Ingram, who is a morning person, was spurred to examine human circadian rhythms when her husband, a psychologist and a night owl — wondered if there were any genetic basis to those preferences. “I said, ‘Of course, they’ve looked into this,’ but I found out they hadn’t. I couldn’t believe it,” she says.

Time-of-day preference, or chronotype, comes down to a small number of genes, including a core group of eight that biologists call the clock genes. These genes transcribe proteins in a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei, and then break them down on a 24-hour loop, regulating a daily cycle. Only, that’s not exactly true, Ingram found when she began researching the process. “What happens is, it’s not exactly 24 hours

Professor Krista Ingram and research assistant Luvna Dhawka ’20 evaluate football player Abu Daramy ’20 for a study on student-athletes.

Since Avery’s time, we have been learning more and more about the molecular mechanisms operating within the brain and body. To use this information as a tool to look at things like behavior is really exciting.

— Krista Ingram

— you can be a little slow or a little fast — and that, in part, is what influences your behavior and influences whether you are a morning person or a night person,” Ingram says.

By examining gene transcription in hair follicles, Ingram has been able to tell where a person’s chronotype falls on the circadian spectrum. Only about 10–15% of people on either side are true morning or night people, she says, while about 70–80% fall somewhere in between. In looking at what causes this difference, Ingram has traced it to a genetic phenomenon called single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced “snip”), in which a single nucleotide on a clock gene is switched — for example, a cytosine (C) instead of adenine (A). “If you have three or more of those SNPs, you have a higher probability of being a morning person,” she says.

That difference can have real-world repercussions.

Ingram’s research has found that having a chronotype Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 29

different from one’s social group — for example, a night person forced to wake up early for work or school — is associated with a higher prevalence of anxiety and depression. In addition, she has found that people are more likely to engage in risky or unethical behavior during the opposite time of day they prefer. “If you think about judges or investment bankers who are making important decisions involving large financial consequences, it may make a big difference whether they are at their circadian peak or not.”

Recently, Ingram has begun examining studentathletes at Colgate, to see how much chronotype makes a difference on their performance. In tests with the swim team, she has found that swimmers competing off their circadian peak can post times a few hundredths of a second slower than they do when swimming at their preferred time of day.

In a sport where fractions of a second make a big difference, such results argue for the importance of understanding chronotype on all of our performance.

“We all need to understand that there are times of day when we will have to work harder to achieve the same results,” Ingram says. By becoming more aware of our genetically preferred time of day, she says, we can better plan important tasks, and put in more effort when we know we are working off our peak.

A DOG’S LIFE

30 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Professor Hoopes studies the genetic diversity of poodles.

11 pups she has bred since 2014 are champions or agility champions.

What fascinates Hoopes about poodles is the incredible diversity of size in one breed, which ranges from 8 inches at the shoulder for a toy poodle all the way up to 25 inches for a standard poodle. She knew there had to be something interesting happening genetically to allow for that variation. “I thought to myself, how are these small dogs even alive?” she remembers. “What other compensating mutations are allowing them to survive?” While she was leading the NIH study group, Hoopes and other NIH researchers found that a small number of genes could provide for this variety. In particular, Hoopes has focused on the effect on a single mutation in a gene called growth factor 1 receptor

Mark DiOrio

B

iology professor Barbara Hoopes didn’t expect her scientific career to lead her into the ring at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, running alongside her toy poodle Tommy in a master agility competition. But for Hoopes, the experience combines her two great passions — dogs and genetics. Hoopes showed poodles at dog shows when she was young, enjoying grooming them and teaching them tricks. That pastime fell by the wayside in college as she traded dogs for simpler species such as bacteria and yeast, and seeing what she could trick them into doing when their DNA was changed.

“I love being able to manipulate the genome and see what effect it has,” she says. After earning her tenure as a professor, she began showing dogs again — and thought it might be interesting to examine their genetics as well. She began working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how genes affect dog size, and in the midst of collecting samples at a poodle national dog show, she became enamored with a little silver toy poodle performing agility challenges. “Now I have 11 of them,” says Hoopes, who in 2015 was declared an American Kennel Club breeder of merit. In addition to Tommy, who placed third at the Westminster show, she now competes with dogs of her own breeding. Six of the

answer to yet,” Hoopes says. “The techniques are relatively straightforward, and undergrads can get some results and learn about doing science.”

Hoopes is now serving as a breeder representative for a toy poodle genetic diversity study sponsored by University of California-Davis. Having an understanding of genetics, she says, gives her a leg up in breeding her own dogs. But the results she is garnering from her research are not limited to canines. While dog size might be affected by a couple dozen genes overall, size in humans is controlled by hundreds. Nevertheless, she says, “if we can understand more about what these genes are doing in dogs, then it might help us understand more about what they are doing in humans and other species.”

LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT

S (GF1R). “That gene and five others can explain 80% of the variation in breed-specific height,” she says.

Insights like that can help breeders by figuring out in advance the range in possibilities of size in a litter of puppies from two parents. Toy poodles, for instance, can range between 3 to 6 ounces at birth. “The really big puppies are difficult for a toy mother to naturally give birth to, while the really small ones are hard to keep alive, and we have evidence GF1R is important to this variation,” Hoopes says. “So we are hoping our work will actually help breeders to know what to expect when they breed two dogs.” In her classes at Colgate, Hoopes helps students design their own molecular experiments with dogs, focusing on the effects of a particular gene.

“There are all these questions no one has gotten an

Avery made an important contribution to science with a really elegant experiment.

We let students know they can all play a part in contributing to science.

— Barbara Hoopes

ince Avery’s discovery of DNA, scientists have had a straightforward view of genetics: Organisms inherit genes composed of DNA from their parents, and that DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA, which creates proteins that build and influence cells.

Thus, RNA was thought to be just a messenger that helps make the more important proteins. Two decades ago, however, a microscopic worm called C. elegans complicated that model, says Associate Professor of Biology Priscilla Van Wynsberghe. Scientists discovered a class of small RNA called microRNA that are essential for cellular function. “They can bind to messenger RNA to inhibit gene expression,” Van Wynsberghe says.

“Small changes in gene expression can have devastating consequences on an organism.”

When one particular microRNA gene called let-7 is misregulated, for example, it can cause the worm to explode. “Its gonads and intestine literally explode out of its vulva,” says Van Wynsberghe. She conducts experiments on the species using CRISPR, a relatively fast and easy way to edit genes, which uses an enzyme to snip DNA to create a deletion or insert a new piece of DNA in its place. Understanding the role microRNAs play in the worm’s development can help scientists understand its role in humans because 35% of C. elegans genes have a human equivalent. “In humans, a misregulation of the let-7 microRNA has been associated with multiple cancers, including lung and colon cancer,” Van Wynsberghe says.

At Colgate, Van Wynsberghe works with students to design experiments using CRISPR and other molecular genetic techniques to manipulate microRNAs and other genes, thereby examining the effects on the worm’s development in real time. In addition, she has explored the effects of other components in the cell’s nucleus on Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 31

DNA modifications can be inherited and influenced by environmental signals,” she says, “is in some ways terrifying, but also fascinating.”

Professor Van Wynsberghe uses CRISPR to study microscopic worms (pictured larger than life as a backdrop here).

MIRACLE GROW

worm development. For most of the history of genetics, scientists have believed that while DNA is passed on to subsequent generations, any modifications to cells during a parent’s lifetime dies with them. “We now know that some modifications to DNA, which do not involve DNA sequence changes, can be inherited as well,” Van Wynsberghe says. She and her students are studying this phenomenon called epigenetics.

For example, they have looked at the effects of DES (diethylstilbestrol), a drug once given to women in the 1950s and 1960s to counteract pregnancy complications, which has since been associated with an increase in cancer. Daughters of women who took the drug while pregnant have been shown to be at higher risk for cancer, and their own daughters have shown to be at higher risk as well. In her experiments, Van Wynsberghe is studying how many generations of C. elegans show fertility and other defects after initial exposure to DES, as well as the underlying changes in DNA modification and gene expression that cause these effects. Her team has also been conducting experiments with other chemicals, such as plasticizers (compounds added to plastics to make them more pliable), and finding that an exposure to C. elegans can cause physical changes to several future generations. “The fact that these

32 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Avery went to medical school but got frustrated at his inability to treat many diseases. That’s often how research starts — there is usually a big question we are trying to solve that drives us to study one of those unexplained mysteries. In his case, it made him realize he could tackle the really big questions in science.

— Jason Meyers

Left: André Chung; Right: Mark DiOrio

W

e humans have some limited powers of regeneration.

After all, if we cut ourselves, we can regenerate skin to cover the wound.

But that’s nothing like what zebrafish can do. “They can regenerate almost anything that doesn’t kill them,” says Jason Meyers, associate professor of biology and neuroscience and chair of scientific perspectives core. “They’ll regenerate their fins, their hearts, their retinas … if a needle is put down into their brain, they’ll even regenerate that.”

The bigger question, of course, is just how do they do it? Meyers has been using CRISPR to examine the genetics behind regeneration in zebrafish and what lessons it might hold for humans and other species. In many ways, zebrafish make the perfect species to investigate. Their body plan and nervous system are very similar to humans, they are transparent, and they are fast growing, so experiments can be carried out quickly. “It’s great for working with undergraduates, because you start an experiment on Monday and you can see exactly what happened by Thursday,” Meyers says.

Scientists have also developed transgenic lines of zebrafish, which have been genetically modified to produce fluorescent-colored proteins in red and green that enable biologists to track exactly what genes do. Using such tools, Meyers has looked at how cells communicate with one another to spur the regeneration process. “How does a cell know that it’s been injured and needs to regenerate?” Meyers asks. By changing genes with CRISPR and tracking the different proteins, he has focused on a sequence of chemical interactions in the cells called the WNT signaling pathway, which seems to be important in telling the fish that it needs to regenerate lost structures such as retina or an earlike structure called the lateral line.

“If we turn the pathway up, we can overdrive the regenerative response and produce more than would normally be produced,” he says. With the help of students, he is now looking at other chemical pathways in the fish that might interact with the WNT pathway to complement the reaction. “Students design the pieces

of RNA to inject, screen fish for mutations, do DNA sequencing to understand what the specific mutation did, and make movies tracking the development and regeneration of these systems,” Meyers says.

In addition to understanding how cells signal the regenerative process, Meyers is also examining whether the regeneration of organs is a recapitulation of the development from an embryo, or a completely different process. So far, the answer seems to be somewhere between the two.

For the past 13 years, Colgate’s biology department has held the Oswald T. Avery Lecture, delivered annually by an alumna or alumnus who has made significant contributions to the field.

Answering questions like this can help us better understand how stem cells might spur regeneration of organs, limbs, or brain cells in humans. “By pointing at particular pathways that seem to coordinate regeneration in zebrafish, we can find good places where we should start looking in mammalian systems,” Meyers says. “We are trying to lay down a foundation of knowledge about when and where regeneration happens, so we can better understand our own limitations — and possibly how to overcome them.” ●

Professor Meyers studies regeneration in zebrafish and what lessons that may hold for humans.

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 33

Joe Castiglione ’67 at Fenway South in Fort Meyers, Fla. Photo by Jeffery Salter

34 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Game Changers

By G. Bruce Knecht ’80 Illustrations by Israel G. Vargas

From the Red Sox press box to the NBA boardroom, alumni are shaping the world of athletics.

Drew Esocoff ’79

D

rew Esocoff ’79 is consumed by an electronic wall that displays more than 100 images of various sizes. It’s an overwhelming array of video feeds and high-tech graphics, the most important of which are three rows of 8-inch-wide images near the bottom. They come from 30 cameras positioned inside the nearby stadium where the Philadelphia Eagles struggle to halt the Dallas Cowboys’ advance down the field.

Esocoff is also at the receiving end of a cacophony of words — from game officials, graphics editors, camera operators, and announcers Chris Colinsworth and Al Michaels. Responding to all of this with instantaneous decisions, Esocoff tells the technical director, who is sitting next to him in the mobile control room, to switch from one camera to another, insert graphic overlays, go to an on-field reporter, and replay a pass. Although the instructions are rapid, so brief as to be indecipherable to the unknowing, his tone is calm and the directions are invariably precise.

The product of Esocoff’s orchestration can be seen on the program monitor, which

is in the center of the wall. It shows what the rest of the world knows as NBC’s Sunday Night Football. For the last 14 years, Esocoff has directed the show.

He took a job on Wall Street after graduation but knew almost immediately that it wasn’t for him. After leaving Wall Street, Esocoff found a series of part-time jobs announcing games, but full-time positions were rare. Eventually, in 1983, he landed a production assistant role at ESPN,

the then fledgling network that was founded just four years earlier.

Esocoff is among the expanding group of alumni who have found careers in the sports world. Each alumni story is unique, but interviews reveal a number of common themes, starting with a lifelong love of sports. And, more so than most, their careers are marked by serendipity. Unlike jobs in finance or the corporate world, there are no training programs or established paths.

EACH ALUMNI STORY IS UNIQUE, BUT INTERVIEWS REVEAL A NUMBER OF COMMON THEMES, STARTING WITH A LIFELONG LOVE OF SPORTS. 36 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Left: Kylie Callara, NBC Sports; Right: Mark Thompson

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Joe Castiglione ’67 has been the radio voice of the Boston Red Sox for 37 years. As a kid, he enjoyed playing every available sport, but at age 10, he realized he would never be good enough to play for the New York Yankees. So, he hatched a new plan: He would announce their games.

At Colgate, Castiglione announced football and basketball games for WRCU. After graduation, he worked for radio and TV stations in Syracuse; Youngstown, Ohio; and Cleveland, where he became the Indians’ announcer. In 1983, he was offered the same job by the Red Sox. “If I couldn’t do the Yankees, it was the next best thing,” Castiglione says. Broadcast by 60 radio stations, his voice is so well known that people overhearing him on the street frequently turn their heads with varying degrees of recognition.

His exuberant reaction to the team’s 2004 World Series victory is particularly well known. “Can you believe it?” he declared repeatedly. Those words have since become a personal trademark. Castiglione is often tempted to redeploy the phrase, but he does his best to save it for “really big moments,” not more than 10 occasions a season.

Castiglione’s most important tool is the ultimate in old school: a large, plasticcovered book in which he records batters’ and pitchers’ performances with differentcolored pens. Strikeouts and walks are marked in red, hits in blue, homeruns in green. “You can’t fake baseball,” he says.

“Everything that happens builds on what happened before, so I need to understand the players inside and out.” Castiglione creates a new book for every season; the earlier volumes can be found in the New England Sports Museum.

But he acknowledges that technology, in the form of his iPhone, has changed the way he does his job: He uses it to mine

rich statistical databases and identify human-interest stories. Given what seems like an ever-expanding length of games, background information is more important than ever before. “That 5-and-a-quarterounce sphere with 108 little red stitches is only in play for 8 to 10 minutes in the course of the game,” he says, “so I have to find other ways to sustain the broadcast.”

MODERN-DAY CIRCUS “I’ve always had the view that sports is a uniquely powerful form of entertainment,” says Chase Carey ’77, whose meteoric career is deeply rooted in sports. “In a world where

more than 500 scripted television series are competing for audiences, the drama and emotion that comes from sports is unique.

There’s only one Super Bowl, one World Cup, and one World Series.”

At Colgate, Carey joined the rugby club; he continued to play while a student at Harvard Business School and a few years afterward. His confidence in the commercial appeal of athletic competition helped to propel a steady advance at Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media empire, which Carey joined in 1983. He negotiated for the rights to NFL games, helped launch Fox Sports, and ran Fox Broadcasting, among other responsibilities. In 2011, Murdoch named Carey as his probable successor.

In 2017, Carey became the CEO of Formula One, in which the fastest roadcourse race cars compete in 21 cities worldwide.

Chase Carey ’77 Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 37

Until Carey took over, Formula One was run by its founder, Bernie Ecclestone, who saw no need for marketing, research departments, or a digital operation. Because Carey knows how those functions have fueled the growth of other sports franchises, he’s done a lot of hiring at his London headquarters. Carey attends every race and travels constantly, recently attending meetings on five continents in a single week.

Each race is a major event, and the participants move around the world like a modern-day circus. On the Monday before a race, eight 747 cargo planes descend upon the host city bearing cars and equipment. The days preceding the main race on Sunday are filled with preliminary competitions, concerts, children’s activities, merchandising, and celebrity-studded parties. The final race, says Carey, “delivers a combination of shock and awe, technology,

and sporting competition that is like nothing else.” Afterward, everything is loaded back onto the 747s and, by 2 a.m. Monday, the circus is on its way to another city.

PART OF A FAMILY Growing up in San Francisco, Kate Bergstrom ’11 started playing soccer not long after she could walk. She switched to lacrosse in high school and proved to be a quick study. She was recruited by the coach at the University of California, Berkeley, but just before a firm decision was made, her mother met Gary Ross ’77 — Colgate’s Jones and Wood Family Vice President for

Admission and Financial Aid — at a college fair. He talked about Colgate’s new soccer coach with so much enthusiasm that the family scheduled a campus visit. Afterward, Bergstrom was sold. “Having grown up in a big city, it was a bit of a culture shock,” she says. “But the privilege of being an athlete is that you are immediately part of a family.”

Following graduation, Bergstrom became a paralegal in Boston. But she missed her life in athletics, so she started looking for entry-level sports jobs — few of which were available. Thanks to an introduction by Vicky Chun ’91, MA’94, Colgate’s then athletics director, Bergstrom met the commissioner of the American East Conference — a collegiate league with nine member schools, most of them in New England — which hired Bergstrom in 2015. She’s now the associate commissioner, in charge of finance, human resources, and several championship competitions.

“The number of people it takes to run successful athletics programs has expanded tremendously,” she says. Bergstrom attributes this to the unending quest to improve performance, particularly the greater emphasis on nutrition and conditioning, as well as the increased importance of social media– based marketing.

“It’s incredibly satisfying to put on a successful tournament, and the people who work here have such a passion for sports that it makes it easy to come to work,” she says. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Vicky Chun’s career spans the gamut of college athletics. Like Bergstrom’s, it began with youth programs in California. Chun and her parents were convinced she should go to an academically rigorous, Division I

Kate Bergstrom ’11

38 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

Left: America East Conference; Right: Yale University Photography

FROM STUDENTATHLETE TO AD

school in the east to play volleyball, and Chun chose Colgate. Her team won the Patriot League’s first championship in 1990, and, one year later, Chun was the league’s player of the year.

After graduation, she became Cornell’s assistant volleyball coach. Then, at age 24,

she became the head coach of Colgate’s team, where she accumulated a coaching record of 67–27. In 1996, Chun was named coach of the year; she is believed to be the first person in NCAA history to win both player and coach of the year awards in the same conference. She left Colgate to work

for the NCAA and a college athletics league, but later returned to become an associate athletics director. In 2012, Chun became Colgate’s first female athletics director. She left Colgate to become Yale’s first female athletics director last year.

Chun has always liked organizing teams.

As a Colgate student, she started and coached a club volleyball team that’s still active. She claims to be an introvert, but most people would describe her as gregarious.

“I’m not your typical athletics director, and that’s not just because I’m an Asian woman,” she says. Chun adds that she stands out mostly because of the emphasis she puts on communicating, which includes frequent social media posts — everything from amusing photographs to articles about the nature of leadership. “You can’t just communicate,” she says. “You have to overcommunicate.”

Her commitment to transparency is well suited to what she views to be a major change in students’ expectations of coaches.

“There was a time when coaches could compartmentalize their lives,” she says. “[But] today’s kids want to really get to know you, and they want to understand the whys.

If you tell them to jump, they want to know why they’re jumping. If you trust them, they’ll go through a wall for you.”

WELCOME TO THE NFL

Vicky Chun ’91, MA’94

One of Chun’s predecessors, Mark Murphy ’77, was recruited to play football at both Brown and Colgate, but he chose Colgate because it would allow him to also play a second sport, which turned out to be basketball his first year and baseball for the next three. But football was his main event, and he was a star. Murphy was captain his senior year, a season that was 8–1 going into the now legendary

“ THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE IT TAKES TO RUN SUCCESSFUL ATHLETICS PROGRAMS HAS EXPANDED TREMENDOUSLY.” — KATE BERGSTROM ’11 Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 39

Mark Murphy ’77

Thanksgiving night battle against Rutgers that was broadcast on national TV. (Colgate probably would have won if it weren’t for a call by one of the officials that was later determined to be erroneous.)

After graduation, Murphy became a professional athlete, and before his career even began, he learned a searing lesson on the downside of going pro. Washington Redskins coach George Allen told Murphy

he was so eager to sign him up that he wanted to be with him on the day of the draft. Flying to D.C. that morning, Murphy was met at the airport by a Redskins staffer.

But rather than delivering him to Allen, the staff member took him on an hours-long tour of the nation’s capital. By the time Murphy was finally brought to Allen, the coach said the draft was over and Murphy had gone unselected. In a world without

cell phones, Murphy wasn’t able to talk to representatives of several other teams who had tried to reach him in Hamilton.

“They had no intention of drafting me,” he says. “And they were trying to hide me so no one else could either.”

All was not lost. Allen made it clear that he still wanted Murphy on his team; he’d just wanted to eliminate the need to use a draft pick. He offered Murphy a one-year contract to play for $21,000, more than the $18,000 that General Electric said it would pay Murphy to join its management training program. But then, in another twist, Allen imposed a condition: He needed an immediate decision, saying he was thinking about offering the position to a prospect from Oklahoma. “That,” Murphy says, “was my welcome to the NFL.” Murphy went on to have a successful career with the Redskins. The 1982 season ended at the Super Bowl, during which he made an interception that played an important role in his team’s defeat of the Miami Dolphins. During the 1983 season, he led the league in interceptions, was selected for the Pro Bowl, and, once again, the team made it to the Super Bowl.

But one year later, Murphy’s playing career ended. He believes it was because he had been a member of the players union’s bargaining committee during negotiations that led to a strike and the cancellation of seven games in 1982. After Murphy sprained his knee, the team’s then owner, Jack Kent Cook, asked him about the injury. Murphy started to say that he was close to a full recovery, but Cook cut him off, declaring, “You will never play again.” He was right.

Murphy was released from the team and no other NFL team would talk to him. “If you were a players rep, you were usually cut,” Murphy says. “They viewed you as a radical.”

Fortunately, Murphy had started making plans for a different career, earning an MBA from American University during the off season and applying to Georgetown Law School. After graduating from Georgetown, he worked for the Justice Department as a

“ THE RELATIONS WE HAVE WITH OUR PLAYERS NOW ARE MUCH DIFFERENT THAN WHEN I WAS PLAYING.” — MARK MURPHY ’77 40 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

trial lawyer. “I really enjoyed the work, but I missed athletics,” he says. So when he heard that Fred Dunlap ’50 — his football coach senior year and mentor — was retiring, he applied for the job.

“Colgate took a chance on me,” Murphy says, noting that he didn’t have any experience in sports administration when he was hired in 1992. But there were challenges.

Early in his tenure, the football team posted a record of 0–11. For that, Murphy devised a solution: He recruited Dick Biddle to be the new head coach and brought Dunlap back to spend a year working as the offensive coach, which he did without pay. One year later, the team made it to the Patriot League’s championship game.

Murphy was not looking to leave, but in 2003, he was offered the athletics director position at Northwestern University. Four years later, he received an even more irresistible offer: to become the Green Bay Packers’ chief executive. The coach, the general manager, and the head of administration all report to Murphy. And because the team is owned by fans — 370,000 of them — he represents the team with the NFL. When team owners gather for meetings, he is the only former player to have a seat at the table.

Murphy says he frequently speaks up for player interests, but adds that he isn’t the only one. “The relations we have with our players now,” Murphy says, “are much different than when I was playing.”

and practices, assisted with travel logistics, and, along the way, developed friendships with team members that have continued ever since.

Even at Harvard Law School, basketball remained an important part of his life. On more days than not, he’d play a pickup game that began at 4 p.m. and carried on until dinner. As he reminisced about those games recently at his office in the NBA’s Manhattan headquarters, where he is a senior executive, Denenberg had a cast on his right hand and arm — the result of injuries from the pickup games he still plays.

The games at Harvard were particularly competitive. One of the other regulars was a classmate from Hawaii with an unusual name: Barack Obama. “He was a very good slasher,” which is to say he frequently found a way to get the ball close enough to the net for a layup, says Denenberg. “He called some really cheap fouls, but he was a great guy and

he ended up being the leader of whatever team he was on.”

After graduation, Denenberg took a traditional path, joining the Manhattanbased law firm Paul Hastings, where he spent much of his time preparing commercial aircraft leases. But a few years later, after he met a colleague’s husband who was the NBA’s general counsel, a new idea was born. In 1995, he went to work for the league. He started out handling contracts for the NBA’s expanding array of entertainment businesses, but he later moved into an executive role. He now manages media distribution partnerships and negotiates the league’s multi-billion-dollar contracts with major networks.

“I deal with 20 issues every day, and they all have something to do with basketball,” he says. “Not many kids get to play sports professionally. Working here is the next best thing.” ●

Left: Green Bay Packers; Right: Andrew Bernstein/NBA

THE NEXT BEST THING Dave Denenberg ’88 was barely 5 feet tall his first year in high school, but he never let that get in the way of basketball. “You can make your mark in other ways,” he says.

Throughout his four years at Colgate, he was the team’s manager. He filmed games

Dave Denenberg ’88 Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 41

Television

As Good as Her Words Screenwriter Karen Bloch Morse ’95 has had more than two decades of success in Hollywood.

42 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

T

Laura Austin

Endeavor

he Valentine’s Day gift that screenwriter Karen Bloch Morse ’95 received last year didn’t fit in the typical red-foil heart-shaped box. On that day, Morse’s pitch for a TV movie titled Same Time, Next Christmas was picked up for development. “It is unusual to pitch and sell something in the same day,” Morse says. “It was fantastic.”

And a bit terrifying, too: She’d have to speed-write the script to meet rigid Christmas production schedules. “Deadlines are typically flexible,” she says, “but there’s no postponing Christmas.”

Fortunately, Morse thrives under deadlines. She delivered a polished script in two weeks instead of the typical 10.

The project was greenlighted for filming in May, and in August she flew to work on set in Oahu.

After 24 years in Hollywood, Morse knows the rhythms of the screenwriting business well enough to relish such glamorous moments and on-screen successes when they come. “A lot of your work as a screenwriter never makes it to the screen,” she says. “So many things are out of your control. The only thing you can control is your own productivity and writing.”

When she entered Colgate, Morse thought she had the script for her professional life nailed down. She would become a lawyer, like her father. She enjoyed creative writing, and even attended a private high school in Maryland known for its writing program. “But it never occurred to me that writing was a job,” she says.

Then she met literature professor Fred Busch — and her script changed.

She launched herself into writing classes, including a playwriting course, and in her senior year penned a play that won Colgate’s creative arts competition. Busch and her parents encouraged her to pursue a writing career.

In 1995, Morse graduated and moved to Hollywood, initially working for fellow Colgate alumnus John Romano ’70, and then cutting her teeth as a script coordinator on the blockbuster TV show Dawson’s Creek.

She segued into screenwriting, working on rewrites and feature scripts for such studios as Sony, Disney, and Universal.

“The challenge of screenwriting is you have to hit all of your beats, deliver all of your information as visually as possible, and get all of the emotions into the movie in a finite period of time,” she explains. “You know that somewhere between 105 and 120 pages, you have to type, ‘The End.’” Her first produced film was the 2008 dance movie Center Stage: Turn it Up, followed by the 2010 remake of Ice Castles.

“The challenge of a remake is that you want to be respectful of the original film while modernizing the dialogue and setting,” Morse says. Feathered hair was out; cell phones were in.

Morse’s 2016 movie for the American Girl franchise, Lea to the Rescue, hit right as her two daughters were major fans of the company. “For a year, I was the coolest mom at their elementary school,” she says.

Same Time, Next Christmas aired on ABC Dec. 5. Glee star Lea Michele and Younger actor Charles Michael Davis play childhood sweethearts who reunite and rekindle their romance years later at the same Hawaiian resort where their families vacationed.

“Being on set is invigorating,” Morse says.

“It’s an exciting challenge to write on the fly as things change. And when you hear your words come to life, there is nothing cooler for a writer. It’s exhilarating.”

As for what the future holds for Morse, she has a feature film, Daughter of the Bride, shooting this spring. And it turns out that her title Same Time, Next Christmas was prophetic: She has just signed on to do another movie for ABC, for next Christmas.

— Kristin Baird Rattini

a colgate tradition The late, legendary Professor Fred Busch inspired both Karen Bloch Morse ’95 and Dan Slater ’00 (among many others) to pursue writing careers. He also started Colgate’s Living Writers course, which brings notable authors to campus. Here are snippets from a few of this year’s visiting authors: “I’m interested in the function of the ways in which we tell other people’s stories to bolster our own.”

— Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart author

“We know that truth is not just understood in the words we hear or that we are seeing, but there is also truth in action and in body language. That was my first language. I learned to read people.”

— Poet Layli Long Soldier

“What you take away will depend very much on what you came in with.”

mark diorio

— Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire author

“Catharsis is never going to come for me.

I don’t want it to. The idea that you exorcise what is painful or difficult or your past has to do with denying who you are.”

— Justin Torres, We the Animals author

living writers

Back to the Future Dan Slater ’00 on his nonfiction thriller Wolf Boys

1999: It’s late, but a bleary-eyed Dan Slater ’00 is engrossed in a book at Case Library.

Tomorrow he’ll walk up the Hill for Professor Fred Busch’s Living Writers class, the most intellectually satisfying in Slater’s course load. Slater will be prepared — he’s read beyond the syllabus, exploring the authors’ other works and biographies. He’s captivated because the writers are alive and able to talk about their books and careers.

“I recognized the value in getting access to the people who, in a sense, are returning from the future to tell you about the road ahead,” he says.

Twenty years later, Slater himself is back from the future.

His book, Wolf Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2016), was included in the 2019 Living Writers course. It’s the true story of two Laredo, Texas, teenagers who joined an infamous Mexican drug cartel. The book follows the harrowing account of their lives within Los Zetas, leading to their eventual arrest and detainment.

Slater started writing Wolf Boys in 2013 after he read an article about the two boys’ arrests.

Having a fascination with Mexican drug cartels, Slater felt the need to dig further. His journalism skills from a previous post as legal reporter at the Wall Street Journal would help as he started to explore the brutal lifestyle of the teens, Gabriel Cardona and Bart Reta. Then, he picked up a pen and wrote a letter to Cardona.

The two corresponded via pen and ink for months before Slater made the 1,600-mile trek from his home in Connecticut to the Allred Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

He faced many struggles writing Wolf Boys, from the toll the constant traveling to Texas took on his new marriage to the mental weight he carried after hearing the violent details of Cardona’s and Reta’s wrongdoings. Conscious of his privilege as a financially stable white man, Slater decided to communicate with Cardona and Reta with complete openness.

“I was serious, and I cared,” he says. “I think that’s the prerequisite. Even for fiction writers, if you’re going to take on a subject that’s not about your world, you have to be earnest.”

Slater was also well prepared in other ways.

His Brooklyn Law School degree aided his conversations with lawyers, including Assistant U.S. Attorney Jose Ángel Moreno, from whom he learned specifics of the case. When he wasn’t interviewing sources, Slater was neck deep in research about sociopathy and psychopathy relating to murder and violence, trying to understand the minds of Cardona and Reta.

Published before the true-crime craze took hold, the critically acclaimed book earned positive reviews from the New York Times and other media outlets. But to Slater, the most important feedback comes from the English teachers of adolescents in similar situations to his book’s protagonists. After Wolf Boys was published, Slater sent copies to schools in and around Laredo, but soon institutions across the country were calling. “The coolest thing to come out of the whole process was to see all these high schools adopting the book,” he says. The letters of thanks from those teachers and students — and the knowledge that he’d made a difference in young people’s lives — fueled Slater.

Slater is using that gusto to write his third book, a piece of historical fiction about the early 20th-century Jewish underworld. He says that the notion of writing for a career was planted during his first experience with Living Writers. The revered Busch invited an agent to the class to speak about the business of writing and publishing. “Before then, I thought writers lived on mountain tops, had long beards, and delivered their tablets down to little people below.”

2019: Back on campus to teach his own Living Writers course, Slater knows authors don’t live on mountain tops. But, sometimes, they can be found atop a hill.

— Rebecca Docter In addition to working as a writer, Slater held positions at a university, a literary agency, a law firm, a TV production company, media outlets, and a can recycling company.

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 43

endeavor what they wanted. Education, the duo learned, was the people’s hope for “a way out of poverty.” Sillan and Bekele raised funds for a one-room schoolhouse, and 12 years later, the school has expanded six-fold, serving 165 students in grades K–5.

The trees are now bearing fruit, which is part of the students’ lunches, along with vegetables from the garden, honey from the hives, and milk from the cows.

Collaboration

Laying Down Roots With her nonprofit Common River, Donna Sillan ’80 has created a model for development done right.

onna Sillan ’80 had just finished a trip to Ethiopia in 2006 when she felt it was time for a change.

She had been there to help friends adopt two orphans, lending her international public health expertise and experience from adopting her Vietnamese daughter. Sillan has worked in more than 40 developing countries, but rarely visits the same place twice. Her sister told her, “You’re like a tumbleweed blowing around the planet; you should find a village,” Sillan remembers. “But this was the sacrifice I’d made. You’re a stranger in a strange land, and you have to hit the ground working.”

When Sillan returned from Ethiopia to her home outside San Francisco, another friend introduced her to an Ethiopian man named Tsegaye Bekele at a local café. As they started talking, she discovered he was from the same village, Aleta Wondo, as her friend’s newly adopted children. A building contractor, Bekele wanted to help his village, but didn’t know where to begin. The two decided to pool their expertise and start

D

44 Colgate Magazine Winter 2020

the nonprofit Common River. Since then, they have transformed Aleta Wondo, building a school, an organic coffee plantation, a working farm, and a volunteer eco-lodge to create a sustainable, self-reliant community.

An international relations major at Colgate, Sillan remembers when news broke about the Vietnamese boat people, who were fleeing their country to seek asylum in the United States. “I was horrified,” she says. She went home to San Jose, Calif., for her January Plan and volunteered for International Rescue Committee (IRC), resettling newly arrived refugees.

After graduation, Sillan went back to work at IRC. She spent two years in Thai refugee camps, then earned a master’s in public health. Through a new position at Save the Children, she managed its urban health program in Indonesia. Nine years later, Sillan became an independent consultant, working everywhere from Afghanistan to Somalia.

Arriving in Aleta Wondo in 2006, Sillan and Bekele began by asking the community

On the campus, they also planted trees.

The trees are now bearing fruit, which is part of the students’ lunches, along with vegetables from the garden, honey from the hives, and milk from the cows. One day, as Sillan was training the school cooks, she noticed the women weren’t taking notes and realized they were illiterate. This inspired a literacy program that now teaches more than 150 women. “It’s been so empowering; not only are the women becoming educated, but also, their husbands respect them more.”

In addition, Sillan integrates public health into Common River. A long-standing collaboration with the University of Texas at San Antonio brings doctors and medical students for a curative health clinic and preventive medicine, saving many lives each year.

As with any organization, Common River has had challenges. A thriving effort to export local coffee was scuttled when government agents stole an entire shipment, and recent tribal violence has caused the NGO to temporarily close the school. However, the literacy program remains open due to the fervor of the women.

Even so, Sillan is proud of what they’ve accomplished on a shoestring budget and hopes it can serve as a model of community-driven development for other villages globally. As she continues to travel the planet, Sillan can be assured of one place where she’s laid down roots. “It’s been satisfying to deeper understand a community,” she says. “I’m not an external consultant; I’m a community member.”

— Michael Blanding Illustration by Delphine Lee

endeavor

MUSIC

They Are the World Mervon Mehta ’81 creates cultural harmony with Kuné

It’s 1978, and stage right in Brehmer Theater, Mervon Mehta ’81 delivers an impassioned monologue as Jeff Douglas from the musical Brigadoon.

Four decades later, he was back, this time center stage to introduce his project, Kuné, Canada’s Global Orchestra.

Reverberating sounds from the West African djembe drums married tunes from a Métis fiddle; other world instruments joined in to create a one-of-a-kind performance for the Colgate community on Nov. 17. Meaning “together” in the language Esperanto, Kuné was organized in 2017 by Mehta, who’s now executive director of performing arts at the Royal Conservatory.

He’d been ruminating on the idea for years, so when it came time to honor Canada at its sesquicentennial, Mehta seized the opportunity. He auditioned more than 150 musicians for a dozen spots in the band.

“I found that there were so many brilliant musicians living in Toronto who came from

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Seven alumni joined Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list for 2020. The annual feature includes pace-setters in 20 different industries; the University’s graduates appear in manufacturing, education, e-commerce, and finance.

Yuni Sameshima ’13 and Joey Petracca ’13 co-founded Chicory while participating in Colgate’s Thought Into Action (TIA) entrepreneurship program as

all over the place, but they were ghettoized in playing for their own communities,” he says.

“We have an Iranian tar player, and she’d be playing Iranian weddings in hotel ballrooms, but not for the mainstream audience or in the bigger venues. She didn’t have the infrastructure, she didn’t have the resources.”

Mehta decided to get those resources.

With government grants and private donations, he put together a band “that represents the four corners of the world.”

A sampling of that group: a sitar player from Pakistan, a Cuban-born saxophonist,

undergraduates. The e-commerce operation, now embedded on more than 1,300 websites, allows users to order recipe ingredients for home delivery. The duo earned start-up funding through the Colgate Entrepreneurs Fund following graduation. After a summer of work in the TIA incubator space, they moved their business to Manhattan and signed contracts with grocery chains like Kroger.

Katherine Hele ’13 parlayed her mathematical economics degree into a vice presidency at Bank of America, where she specializes in the financial dealings of industrial companies like Valvoline and

and a Chinese flutist. Each wrote a song representing his or her background and, together for months, they prepared for a one-time performance at the conservatory.

“We were going to celebrate the sesquicentennial and say, ‘Thank you very much,’” Mehta says.

One night with a packed house turned into months of events and celebrations.

Then came a record deal with Universal and a multi-city tour, including a stop at Colgate.

The success was thrilling for both the group and Mehta, who wanted his idea to come to fruition for a more personal reason.

His father, the famed conductor Zubin, and his mother, soprano Carmen Lasky, emigrated to Montreal in 1962, when Mervon was just 2 years old. Zubin, in particular, received backlash, because it wasn’t the norm to have a person of color as the high-profile music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. “I always grew up with a sense of being very much Canadian, but also being very much an immigrant from an immigrant family,” Mervon says. He wanted to convey that experience, and the Canadian people’s many others, to celebrate the diverse backgrounds and life experiences of the Great White North.

If the applause in Brehmer Theater was any indication, he has.

— Rebecca Docter Mehta got his start in the music world with the Colgate Thirteen, performing up to 80 times per year, including a show at the 1980 winter Olympics in Lake Placid. “After [the U.S. won the gold medal in hockey], we were singing in a bar, and I think we sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ 15 times,” he says.

DowDuPont. While conducting $70 billion in transactions for her institution, she has also engaged with her alma mater, recruiting from the Colgate student body and, most recently, hosting 21 undergraduates for a finance immersion trip in New York City.

In the education sector, TIA alumni Nick Freud ’15 and Rob Carroll ’15 wanted to bring college campuses to prospective students who might not otherwise be able to take a tour. So they founded CampusReel, which allows students to post their own walkabouts for global consumption. Recipients of Colgate Entrepreneurs Fund

support, the pair are now curating a collection of nearly 20,000 videos from more than 350 campuses. They have raised more than $1 million in funding.

Siblings Jake ’16 and Caroline ’19 Danehy are among the manufacturers on the 30 Under 30 list, thanks to their company, Fair Harbor — another TIA venture and Colgate Entrepreneur Fund award recipient. Fair Harbor clothing is made from material that was, at one time, plastic bottles. Recycling refuse into fashion allows the siblings to express their love for highperformance surfwear and the environment at the same time.

Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 45

SALMAGUNDI 1970 Salmagundi

13 Words (or fewer) In the autumn 2019 issue, we asked readers to get their creativity flowing and send in a caption for this vintage Salmagundi photo. Here are the winners:

Hello, President Nixon. We heard you needed plumbers.

— Gerald Jacobowitz ’55

Chronic ear wax, he’ll try any treatment.

— Mike Barnett ’67

Don’t worry mom.

I got a new snowplow tool.

— Yingsi Qin ’21

Plugging a new venture to JPMorgan at 4 a.m. be like.

— Daniel Espinosa ’23

A plausible theory of the real story: I recognize Rich Alderman ’60 (second from left) in the photo and assume he is with his Beta brothers in trying to clear the problem.

— Bob Wright ’60

Clipped

Style Files Bell-bottoms, shoulder pads, high-tops, banana clips— everyone has a cringe-worthy memory of fashion choices from the past. What looks do you remember from your time on the Hill? Write to us — and send pictures if you have them — at magazine@colgate.edu or attn.: Colgate Magazine, 13 Oak Dr., Hamilton, NY 13346.

Dukakis prefaced his talk by remarking, “If I knew anything about politics, I’d probably be here in another capacity.” He assured the large chapel crowd, “I did not come here in a tank… but I also didn’t throw up all over the prime minister of Japan.”

— Former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis poked fun at himself as well as former President George Bush during a March 11 lecture, “Inside the Presidential Campaign.”

From the Colgate Maroon, March 27, 1992 Winter 2020 Colgate Magazine 89

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

p.76

Discover hopefulness through writing p.6

Get rowdy and root on the women’s volleyball team p.14

Get inside the minds of Mexican cartel members p.43

Uncork wine tips with sommelier Kim Herbert Simone ’98 p.75

Spin tracks with Chicago DJ Lin Brehmer ’76 p.63

Train toy poodles with Professor Barbara Hoopes p.30

Race Formula One cars with Chase Carey ’76 p.37

Aid in disaster relief through mapmaking p.12

Reunite with the Vintage Thirteen p.56

Collect antique typewriters p.21

Celebrate progress during the Center for Women’s Studies’ 25th p.10

jill calder

Zip through Havana in a 1950s Cadillac convertible

Munch on popcorn and watch Hamilton Theater’s history unfold p.18