Winter Scene 2012

scene Winter 2012

News and views for the Colgate community

A Q&A on financial aid Project 24/7: student lens Fighting for his life

scene

Winter 2012

26 A Q&A on financial aid

The whys and wherefores of the financial aid process, and how Colgate fits into the national picture

30 Project 24/7: student lens

Three student photographers depict student life on campus

36 Fighting for his life

Two Colgate alumni were instrumental in liberating a man wrongly sentenced to death row in the nationally known West Memphis Three case

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Message from President Jeffrey Herbst

4

Letters

6

Work & Play

13

Colgate history, tradition, and spirit

14

Life of the Mind

18

Arts & Culture

20

Go ’gate

24

New, Noted & Quoted

42

The Big Picture

44

Stay Connected 2012 Alumni Council Election

45

Class News 76 Marriages & Unions 76 Births & Adoptions 77 In Memoriam

80

Salmagundi: Puzzle, Slices contest, Rewind

DEPARTMENTS

On the cover: Danielle Iwata ’15 was the Soldier Doll in the Colgate Ballet Company’s production of The Nutcracker in November. Photo by Ashlee Eve ’14 Left: The burnt orange glow of the Willow Path trees radiates warmth over the winter landscape. Photo by Andrew Daddio News and views for the Colgate community

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scene team

Contributors

Volume XLl Number 2 The Scene is published by Colgate University four times a year — in autumn, winter, spring, and summer. The Scene is circulated without charge to alumni, parents, friends, and students.

In her second year as a photographer for Colgate’s communications office, Ashlee Eve ’14 (“Project 24/7: student lens,” pg. 30) picked up her first camera in middle school, and took IB Photography throughout high school.

An art history major from Deltona, Fla., she plans to minor in psychology and is involved in the Colgate Christian Fellowship and Delta Delta Delta.

Communications intern Marilyn HernandezStopp ’14, from Lakewood, Colo., is involved with LASO and the admission multicultural recruitment committee.

A Benton Scholar, she plans to major in peace and conflict studies and minor in Latin American studies. As a descendant of abolitionist John Brown, she found it particularly meaningful to cover the National Abolition Hall of Fame (pg. 8) Induction and assist with our Page 13 on inductee George Gavin Ritchie 1849, H’98.

An avid photographer for the last eight years, Janna Minehart ’13 (“Project 24/7: student lens,” pg. 30) is in her third year as a photographer for Colgate’s communications office.

A biology major from San Jose, Calif., she is a Benton Scholar and a member of the Student Conduct Board, Mock Trial team, and Gamma Phi Beta.

In his first year working as a photographer for Colgate, Duy Trinh ’14 (“Project 24/7: student lens,” pg. 30) has been shooting for three years. He said, “My favorite photos include wide aspect ratio, vivid colors, and an emphasis on the tiny details of objects that are normally seen as insignificant.” A political science and psychology major from Hanoi, Vietnam, he was inducted into the Phi Eta Sigma honor society.

Vice President for Communications Debra Townsend Managing Editor Rebecca Costello Associate Editor Aleta Mayne Director of Publications Gerald Gall Coordinator of Photographic Services Andrew Daddio Production Assistant Kathy Bridge

Contributing writers and designers: Barbara Brooks, Director of Marketing and Public Relations; Matt Faulkner, Assistant Director of Athletic Communications; Matt Hames, Manager of Media Communications; Jason Kammerdiener, Web Content Specialist; Karen Luciani, Art Director; Jennifer McGee, Online Community Manager; Katherine Mutz, Graphic Designer; Timothy O’Keeffe, Director of Web Content; Mark Walden, Senior Advancement Writer

Contact: scene@colgate.edu 315-228-7417 www.colgateconnect.org/scene

scene online

Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt.

Listen

Experts: http://www.youtube.com/cuatchannel13 Faculty members discuss their latest research on Colgate’s YouTube channel.

Look

Colgate Mobile: http://www.colgate.edu/news/ mobilewebsite Access university news, photos, event listings, and videos from your mobile device. Look for Colgate information on the go!

Watch

Webcams: http://www.colgate.edu/news/ webcams.html Five webcams provide real-time looks at campus and the village of Hamilton.

Get connected

Protecting your privacy on colgateconnect.org: In response to alumni feedback, we have password protected the online Scene class news columns.

You’ll use the same password you use to log on for the alumni directory or registering for an event. If you have any problems accessing your account, simply follow the on-screen instructions, visit our FAQs page, or e-mail alumni@colgate.edu.

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scene: Winter 2012

Talk

Reflections from India: http://colgate-india-core. blogspot.com Professors traveled to India in January for faculty development that will enrich the core curriculum.

Read their blog and post a comment.

Go paperless

Online Scene subscription: scene@colgate.edu To stop receiving the printed Scene, e-mail us your name, class year, address, and e-mail address, and put Online Mailing List in the subject. We’ll send you an e-mail when we post new online editions (www. colgateconnect.org/scene).

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Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the university, the publishers, or the editors.

Notice of Non-Discrimination: Colgate University does not discriminate in its programs and activities because of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin (including ancestry), citizenship status, physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status (including special disabled veteran, Vietnam-era veteran, or recently separated veteran), predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. The following person has been designated to handle inquiries regarding the university’s non-discrimination policies: Marilyn Rugg, University Harassment Officer, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7288.

Message from President Jeffrey Herbst

My fellow college presidents and I

are often asked

why our institutions cannot be run more like businesses. Usually, the question is framed around increasing productivity or cutting spending in order to eliminate the need for tuition increases. professors and to stay competitive, we must invest more to increase the size of the faculty. This year, in adding 19 positions, we were able to decrease our student/faculty ratio to 9:1, down from 10:1 in 2006–2007 and between 11:1 and 12:1 during the 1990s. This is a wonderful development for the education of our students, but is the opposite of what we would do if we were solely concerned with the “productivity”of faculty. Such is the price of the excellence that top students and their parents expect from us.

Other expectations involve the investments to provide a rich residential experience. The costs associated with food and housing, undergraduate research, extracurricular and study abroad programs, and the associated programs necessary to keep students safe and healthy continue to escalate.

Certain pressures cause us to work very differently from the private sector as well. As a residential school proudly anchored in Hamilton, N.Y., we cannot achieve some of the kinds of gains available to businesses.

Colgate cannot relocate, say, the math department to South Carolina or the English department to Singapore because wages for professors may be lower in those places. Nor can we lay off an academic department if we are suddenly faced with budget deficits.

Most importantly, we devote significant resources to providing expansive financial aid so that the outstanding education we offer is available to as many students as possible. We have been actively raising funds from our alumni and supporters so that we can devote even more resources to that cause in the future. (You can read more about our efforts in this area in “A Q&A on Financial Aid” on page 26.) In contrast, private companies generally do not see it as their responsibility to reduce the price of their products to make them more available to the needy.

Drawing funds from our endowment helps us to address some of the issues behind rising costs but, even here, Colgate is challenged. As compared with our peer schools, our endowment market value per student ($217,937) is only 71 percent of the median figure for the top 25 national liberal arts colleges ($306,017), as measured by U.S. News & World Report (as of June 30, 2010, the most recent information available). Colgate’s relatively weak endowment power is further highlighted when measured against peer institutions such as Hamilton College, whose endowment market value is 1.4 times greater, Bowdoin, at 2.0 times greater, or Amherst College, at 3.6 times larger.

Yet, even given these constraints, we do not simply pass our costs along to the consumer by raising our price (tuition). While constantly seeking to devote an increasing share of the budget to the academic program so that the educational “returns” on tuition are as high as possible, my senior colleagues and I also look for ways to increase productivity and reduce costs in appropriate administrative areas and functions.

Through the strategic planning process that we initiated this fall, the entire Colgate community will work together to find ways to further improve our academic focus and continue to funnel resources to what we do best — educating future leaders of intellect and influence.

Andrew Daddio

This is an especially important question in this age of higher education sticker shock. Students and their parents at all levels of income are concerned about limiting the financial burden that college tuition places on their families. Colgate University has taken many steps over the years to attain efficiencies and reduce costs, but our efforts cannot be compared to the corporate world. Examining the way that Colgate operates — and the issues that we must consider as a premier educational institution — can shed light on the challenges we face in achieving excellence while containing costs.

Measuring and accomplishing productivity gains on college campuses are not straightforward tasks. Our metrics do not involve numerical goals such as profit, but rather, the complex notion of educational attainment and scholarship. And, although there are certainly efficiencies to be gained through using technology in teaching, the intense discussion of a philosophy text led by a professor takes the same amount of time today as it did hundreds of years ago.

Indeed, we celebrate the labor-intensive nature of a Colgate education.

The personal relationships that students develop with their professors lie at the heart of a distinguished liberal arts education. In order to increase the opportunities for meaningful interactions between students and

To enhance the opportunities for meaningful interactions between students and professors, Colgate continues to invest in its faculty. Here, Spanish professor Fernando Plata leads a class discussion.

News and views for the Colgate community

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Letters

Autumn 2011

News and views for the Colgate community

’Gate posts Young runner for the circle Aging our way

The Scene welcomes letters. We reserve the right to decide whether a letter is acceptable for publication and to edit for accuracy, clarity, and length. Letters deemed potentially libelous or that malign a person or group will not be published.

Letters should not exceed 250 words. You can reach us by mail, or e-mail sceneletters @colgate.edu. Please include your full name, class year if applicable, address, phone number, and/or e-mail address. If we receive many letters on a given topic, we will print a representative sample of the opinions expressed. On occasion, we may run additional letters online.

I wanted to share some thoughts on the cover selection for the autumn 2011 Colgate Scene. I thought the image was a terrible choice for the alumni publication. I know we have very gifted photographers at Colgate, and it appeared the selection of the image was a last-minute choice made from a lack of options.

It was great (and apropos for a fall publication) to see a school football crowd on the cover; however, it was clear that the majority of individuals on the cover were not paying attention to the game, many looked bored, and the expressions of most of the students looked awkward and foolish.

I am not saying that pictures of beautiful Colgate landscapes need to grace all Scene covers, but this particular image did not represent the school well, and was easily the worst cover I have ever seen since graduating nearly 10 years ago.

Matt Behum ’02 Severn, Md.

College ratings as much a curse as a blessing I read with much appreciation President Jeffrey Herbst’s astute message about college rankings (Scene, autumn 2011, pg. 3). From well-intentioned attempts to help my own three children select appropriate colleges (Edward, Colgate ’81, did it right!) to making similar efforts to respond to clients’ requests for help with their children, I found over time that college “ratings” were as much a curse as a blessing. U.S. News & World Report is, so far as I am aware, the precursor in that game, or at least it was the one to which I turned most often.

For all the reasons President Herbst points out, U.S. News and its counterparts just can’t provide the real answers for any one prospective student who is necessarily sui generis; quantitative answers don’t go very far in finding the place where that

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scene: Winter 2012

James Yang

scene

Poor cover choice

unique he or she can thrive for four or more years. Trying to make the effort easy by using “ratings” will lead only to a generic (if that) answer, and certainly not an answer about which one can be confident for any one individual. I don’t know of any quick and easy alternatives, but I do know that wellresearched campus visits, time with a knowledgeable school adviser, and lots of information gathering from all available sources (including U.S. News and the like, for what they are worth), together with as much self-appraisal as a teenager can endure, is worth the effort.

A note about the Colgate Scene. It seems to get better with every issue. I receive three other alumni magazines at the moment: from Connecticut College, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. The Scene tops them all.

My compliments to all involved.

categories make the subject matter real and vital. I particularly commend the many short biographies like “The Swagger Life,” “A Voice for Kids,” “How to Love Your Retirement,” “In tribute” on Arnold Sio, “Tightening Cultural Ties,” and others. These are several expressions of the Colgate culture at work. This is where the university is alive, and graduates can join in the life across lives.

You care to let the reader know the living moment of Colgate. Keep up this especially good work!

Ted Clapp ’41 Damariscotta, Maine

Maroons online Thankyouforpublicizingtheavailability of the digitized versions of the Colgate Maroon. Yesterday I spent several hours searching the issues from the ’60s and was able to document many of my exploits on the hardwood at Huntington Gymnasium. Now I have some hard evidence to back up my claims of glory to my skeptical classmates. My family, of course, never doubted me!

Alan Charles Brown ’67 Bronxville, N.Y.

Edward C. Cazier P’81 Los Angeles, Calif.

Editor’s note: If you missed it, go to http://exlibris.colgate.edu/digital/ studentnewspapers.html. There, you can find the student newspapers from 1846 to 1997. Each title, including the Hamilton Student, Madisonensis, Colgate Maroon, Colgate News, MaroonNews, and more, is available.

Living moments

Hating “the ’gate”

The autumn 2011 Colgate Scene is the most engaging, well-presented, and informative edition of this magazine that I have ever seen — in a 70-year span!

The presentations of the individuals closely associated with the Life of the Mind, “Aging Our Way,” Stay Connected, Arts & Culture, and the other

I love Colgate, but hate “the ’gate.”

I hope this does not qualify me for the crotchety old alumni category, but I would like to express an opinion that I share with a few other alumni.

Can we get back to promoting and identifying Colgate University, rather than the overabundance of “’gate” in most facets of Colgate PR? When

Dartmouth is identified more commonly as “the ’mouth,” I will be happy to concede.

Thanks for letting me rant.

“business rescue operation” as in GM, or AIG. Professor Sio will be long remembered. My condolences to his family.

Steve Abrams ’79 Napierville, Ill.

Rev. Patrick Perrin Pastor, St. John’s United Methodist Church of Elmont Valley Stream, N.Y.

I stumbled upon the information of the passing of Professor Arnold Sio (“In tribute,” autumn 2011, pg. 79) as I Googled his name. I was a student at the University of the West Indies and sat in on one of his sociology classes (1969). He came to mind as I tried to think of a way of rescuing the term “bail out” as a pejorative idea. Professor Sio had introduced the concept “potency of definition” in a lecture on “black power”and the Civil Rights Movement.

His thesis was that the very ways in which we define reality carry within themselves a certain potency that could define or redefine that reality itself. He cited, as an example, a Time magazine article in which the racial conflict that was engulfing parts of the United States was termed “The White Problem” (not “The Black Problem”). Thus, “bail out” would become for me “economic rescue operation” or

A strong musical presence I wish you had been able to do a bit more in recording the death of Vivien Harvey Slater, who was a strong and elegant musical presence at Colgate for many years (In Memoriam, autumn 2011).

My close association with her consisted mostly of only one month, as an inept piano student under the old January Plan in 1969. She could not, nor could anyone ever, raise me above the lowliest hacker level at the keyboard, but she encouraged in me a general interest in music that has been lasting and fulfilling.

To me, she embodied three things that I think the university has always tried to stress: • The presence of a genuine teach- ing faculty.

• The ability of virtually any student to have significant

personal and intellectual contact with virtually any faculty member.

• The opportunity to pursue, at least briefly, an area of study or endeavor purely out of curiosity or passion, with little worry about practical or strictly

academic consequences.

Mrs. Slater was, as well, a wonderful musician and a lovely person.

Clark P. Stevens ’71 Sierra Madre, Calif.

Mike Knerr ’12

Remembering Arnold Sio

During exam cram time, President Jeffrey Herbst and his wife, Sharon Polansky, surprised students with a midnight milk-and-cookies treat at the library.

What they’re saying on Colgate’s Facebook page December 9/ColgateUniversity: If you missed it last night, President Herbst surprised students with cookies. #cucookies Linda Simon P’15 Thanks for taking care of our kids!

Sonia Gonzalez-Thomas ’81 I had to walk to the Coop during finals, and hope they were open, for a snack. No microwaves in those days! Good luck to all on your finals!

Wesley Gordon ’05 It is little things like this which make Colgate so special...it is refreshing, encouraging to see that such a caring individual is at the helm...good job Board! I challenge everyone who is inclined to ‘Like’ this to make a donation to the school as I will be doing...friendly challenge :)

December 9/ColgateUniversity: Like this if you’ve pulled/are pulling an all-nighter at the library.

Peter Muturi Njeri ’15 thank God I am not!

Carol Finn Sanzone ’99 Library is open all night now? No way!

Joe Doggett ’81 Nope. Would always drive to Hamilton College’s all-night room. A wonderful place to procrastinate.

Tammy Mitchell Fawcett ’85 Back in the olden days the library closed!

Many an all night at the dining room table at Gamma Phi were had.

November 27/ColgateUniversity: 82% of Colgate seniors report writing at least one paper or report of 20 pages or more. Like this if that sounds about right.

Glenn Hessel ’85 Hope it was more than just one....

Honor Sherman ’99 Wasn’t that the standard senior seminar paper? The experience helped me for my master’s thesis.

Sarah (Shaw) Brizendine ’96 wrote at least three... agree with Honor that the experience helped in preparation for grad school research/writing! Thx, Colgate!

Bari Brandes Corbin ’94 I remember at least one that had to be 100 pages!

Heather Ferina Hendrick ’99 Ummm, I wrote two 80 pagers — one for each major. Glad that’s behind me!

News and views for the Colgate community

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work & play

Campus scrapbook

A

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Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing with spirit and all. Photo by Andrew Daddio

B

The group Ayazamana performs a traditional dance of Ecuador at the Native American Arts and Culture Festival. Photo

by Ashlee Eve ’14

C

Monks of Sri Lanka from the New York Buddhist Vihara nourished themselves with South Asian food before performing a chanting ceremony. Photo by Janna Minehart ’13

D

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As part of a weeklong residency with the Colgate Chamber Players, Pablo Martinez of the Mexico-based Carlos Chavez String Quartet clarifies some musical points for violist Robert Hynes ’15. Photo by Janna Minehart ’13

E

A young cowboy takes the bull by the horns during the GateTown Connection Barbecue, organized by students. Photo by Janna Minehart ’13

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The collective brain power in the library this semester was enough to keep the lights on all night long. Photo by Justin Myers

G

Coffee break in between Family Weekend 2011 events, which included tailgates, departmental open houses, and, for the first time this year, classes designed exclusively for parents.

Photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio

H

Strike a pose — there’s nothing to it. Students show off their fancy footwork at Dancefest 2011. Photo by Janna Minehart ’13

scene: Winter 2012

B C

F

G

E D

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News and views for the Colgate community

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Students took to the chapel stage to share their views about racism and tolerance on campus at the forum held on October 4.

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scene: Winter 2012

Colgate hosts National Abolition Hall of Fame event “I will be heard!” Hugh C. Humphreys’s voice rang through Golden Auditorium during the annual Na-

Talking points

Duy Trinh ’14

This past fall, issues surrounding tolerance and inclusivity on campus became the focus of campuswide discussion and action. Near the start of the semester, an African-American student wrote a column in the Colgate Maroon-News titled “If only everyone were white.” The op-ed laid out the diffi culties faced by students whose race, socioeconomic status, and sexual identity place them in the minority.

Soon after, several anonymous racist, sexist, and homophobic statements were posted to the student newspaper’s comments section online, until the student editors removed them.

Reaction, dialogue, and action in response to the intolerant comments quickly ensued across campus, including several marches, one of which ended in James B. Colgate Hall.

President Jeffrey Herbst called for a campus forum on October 4, where more than 300 students, faculty, and staff members gathered at Memorial Chapel to discuss not only the incidents, but also a broad range of issues related to diversity on campus. The forum was moderated by members of the campus chapter of the National Coalition Building Institute, who asked participants to consider the question, “What do you think needs to change for Colgate to be a more

Janna Minehart ’13

work & play

inclusive and equitable community?”

In his opening remarks, Herbst cited the hurtful nature of the comments and how they affected the entire community. He referenced his research on institutionalized racism in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the pain such racist attitudes cause. He urged all audience members to “look deep within ourselves to see if we are achieving our highest standards and aspirations.”

Approximately 25 students took to the stage, where they discussed a wide range of topics including bias incidents, self-segregation, classism, sexual harassment, and Greek life. Many students shared personal refl ections and urged classmates to be agents of positive change. One student said, “Home is never perfect, but Colgate is my home.”

Following the forum, Herbst asked the ALANA (African, Latin American, Asian, and Native American) Affairs Committee, which is composed of faculty, students, and staff members, to solicit input from across campus and follow up with specifi c recommendations for improving inclusiveness. Their report was delivered to the president on December 6 and contained both long-range strategic recommendations and short-term goals.

Long-range recommendations include deep changes to administrative structure, admission and retention priorities, residential education, and systematic methods of analyzing progress. Those recommendations will be integrated into Colgate’s overall strategic planning process currently being launched by the Advisory and Planning Committee, which had already cited diversity as a key priority.

Short-term goals include strengthening policy awareness and effectiveness, building multicultural competency, and improving and expanding programs to bridge differences.

Herbst, along with Interim Vice President and Dean of the College Scott Brown, will be engaged with the ALANA Affairs Committee and multiple offi ces on campus to expedite as many short-term recommendations as possible.

Diversity issues draw attention

“Never take no for an answer. Never.”

— ABC News’s John Quiñones (above) advised students about overcoming obstacles when he visited campus as part of Latino Heritage Month.

“Satire is a check of the fourth estate; it is the fi fth estate.”

— Baratunde Thurston, director of digital media at the satirical newspaper The Onion, in his lecture, “Satire, Freedom, and Black People. Yes, That Is the Title.”

“Unlike prior generations that also saw a good amount of inequality around them, this is a generation of youth who really look around them and say, institutions have failed us, government has failed us, we don’t see hope for the future, we’re angry, and we don’t want to be despairing anymore.”

— Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland sociologist, on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Collins delivered Colgate’s annual W.E.B. and Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture.

“It set the stage for everything we’re going through today: the rise of China, the rise of India, the new age of globalization.”

— Frederick Kempe, CEO of the Atlantic Council and author of Berlin: 1961, spoke in Persson Auditorium about the relevance of the Cold War.

tional Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) induction ceremony in late October.

As master of ceremonies, Humphreys — a retired Madison County judge who teaches a course on abolition law at Syracuse University — was echoing the sentiments of the three abolitionists being inducted, as a testament to the conviction they showed in their mission to rid the United States of slavery and to promote equality for all. The ceremony included short performance monologues meant to capture the dynamism of each abolitionist.

In hosting this year’s event, Colgate confronted a piece of its past by celebrating someone who once was

Go figure – Grants granted $18.75 million total grant funding received from foundations and government agencies over the past fi ve years

3 grant-funded language interns, from

China, Germany, and Russia, help build students’ language skills each year

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prestigious NEH, NEA, and Guggenheim fellowships awarded to faculty in the past 15 years

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consecutive years of grants from the NYS Council on the Arts for the Alternative Cinema series

45,000

seconds of telescope observing time made possible by a faculty research grant from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

30 billion network packets (discrete chunks of data) captured and analyzed for a faculty grant to improve the functionality of Internet routers

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peer-reviewed faculty research grants awarded in 2011, totaling $2.9 million

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students who did research with faculty mentors last summer through grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and others

$1.2 million Colgate’s largest institutional grant — from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for innovations in undergraduate science education, 2008–2012

persecuted for expressing his beliefs.

One of the inductees, George Gavin Ritchie, was a student at Madison University (which would later become Colgate) who was expelled for expressing his antislavery views in the student newspaper. He soon became an important contributor to statewide and national abolitionist organizations.

Ritchie was nominated by William Edmonston, a retired neuroscience professor at Colgate, and his wife, Nellie, who said she had “discovered” him while searching for a topic for a Hamilton Fortnightly Club (research group) project.

Although his name is not as familiar as other abolitionists of the time, Ritchie’s story intrigued the Edmonstons because of his presence in the central New York area. They also had come to know members of the Ritchie family, which prompted them to delve deeper into his background. The couple described him as a “foot soldier in the trenches, doing the dirty work of the war on slavery,”and marveled at his courage in a time when the consequences for his actions were severe.

Also inducted in this year’s ceremony were Abby Kelly Foster, a Massachusetts resident and one of the fi rst women to speak publicly against slavery, and Jermaine Wesley Loguen, the “Underground Railroad King” of Syracuse who helped 1,500 fugitive slaves. The induction ceremony was part of a daylong event that featured workshops and presentations, including one by the Edmonstons. The next day, attendees were able to take a tour of the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum and the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark, both located not far from campus in Peterboro, N.Y. Colgate’s Upstate Institute has worked closely with NAHOF since its creation in 2005, including providing student interns.

You can learn more about George Gavin Ritchie on Page 13 in this issue.

— Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14

Greentivities Fair highlights sustainability efforts

Colgate’s sustainability groups gathered in the Ho Science Center atrium on October 4 for the fi rst Greentivities Fair, an effort to raise awareness about their work, recruit new members, and offer tips to help students act more environmentally friendly.

There, like-minded students had

Back on campus Mission: Employable

On November 21, the basement of career services’ Spear House was transformed into a miniature situation room. Maroon Council president Tom McGarrity ’79 gave two dozen undergraduates a briefi ng on job interview tips, techniques, do’s, and don’ts.

Do arrive early and carry your ID. Don’t use slang or let your phone ring.

Be observant, because somewhere around the interview room, there could be clues that point to a connection between you and your potential employer. Start developing the skill now — check out the pictures in your friends’ dorm rooms.

Students engaged in conversation with the former Univision president of network sales and took plenty of notes. “This is to try to take some of the stress out of the process,” said McGarrity. “You’ll actually want to go in there and talk to people.”

McGarrity ran through his own CV to illustrate a number of points. To this day, he cultivates experience on both sides of the interviewer’s desk.

He engages students in mock interviews as a career services volunteer and continues to present his credentials as an active consultant in the communications industry.

“Tom Vincent ’53 got me my career,” McGarrity told the audience.

“I feel obligated to help you with your career issues.”

about his mistakes as a student, for which he paid serious consequences but that had the positive effect of pushing him to delve into his studies.

After being pulled from the football team for a semester because of a brush with the law, Scott focused on exploring his academic potential. He discovered a newfound passion for fi lm, majored in creative writing, and, he said, uncovered the artist inside him.

Many of Scott’s teammates, as well as some of the professors whom he cited as positive infl uences in his life, fl ocked to his lecture.

“I don’t have any regrets,” said Scott, who is currently studying fi lm at California Arts Institute. “If anything was out of place, and didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be who I am now.”

Also on campus…

Jordan Scott ’09 returned to campus in mid-November to speak at the ALANA Cultural Center about “A dream deferred” — the bumpy road that nevertheless made him the man he is today. The former Colgate football player candidly told the audience

On November 6, Richard Kessler ’70, staff director of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, and his wife, Pamela Cox, vice president for Latin America at the World Bank, shared their professional paths and offered career advice for students. Robert Grossman ’96 of KPMG LLP, an audit, tax, and advisory services fi rm, hosted a tele-workshop called “What is Consulting?” on November 18. He covered such topics as what consulting means, how to get into the fi eld, and what students can do to become more marketable.

Susan Conn ’79, a pro bono attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Mid-New York and the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, spoke on December 2 as part of the Doing Well by Doing Good Series. Conn talked about her experiences in the legal fi eld and provided insight into personal fi nance-related issues.

the chance to discuss future collaboration. Green Gates and the Clean Water Coalition worked on ideas for teaming up — from screening the documentary Flow to performing a play together to putting on a “trash fashion show.”

Stephanie Fitch ’14 of the Clean Water Coalition showed photos of the group’s endeavors to beautify

the Chenango Canal — surveying the needs, removing overgrowth, and devising plans to plant bulbs and have the water tested.

“We’d like to make a section of the canal for people to picnic, fi sh for trout, and ride bikes,” explained Fitch, the co-president. The group strives to raise awareness about unclean water

A dream deferred

News and views for the Colgate community

9

Ashlee Eve ’14

work & play

The Composting Club breaks down the basics of recycling food for students at the Greentivities Fair.

Battling binge drinking

— not just in developing countries, but also right here in Madison County.

The Clean Water Coalition started locally by adopting a mile of the canal, and as they continue improving that area, they will raise money to build a well in a developing country.

Students attending the fair learned how they can decrease their own carbon footprints, starting in their kitchens. Many signed up at the Composting Club table to receive mini– compost bins, distributed through Frank Dining Hall.

Also at the event, Colgate’s sustainability coordinator John Pumilio gave an overview of the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan — the university’s mission to become carbon neutral by 2019 — in which several of the students who were present play a role.

Annemarie Heinrich ’12, who is taking the course Community-based Study of Environmental Issues, is helping research water consumption in different buildings on campus; her team will ultimately make recommendations to the university. Heinrich helped organize Greentivities as a member of the Greek Sustainability Council, which brainstorms ways to improve sustainability in the sorority and fraternity houses and elsewhere on campus.

10

scene: Winter 2012

The misuse of alcohol is an issue that many universities are tackling, and Colgate has ramped up its own measures to keep students healthy and safe.

In the fall, the university implemented a points system that holds students accountable for violating its Policy on Alcohol and Drugs. The system assigns points as a discipline measure, but also offers students options for point forgiveness.

Additionally, Colgate became one of 32 universities taking part in a unique program created by Dartmouth College to combat binge drinking. The Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking, coordinated through Dartmouth’s National College Health Improvement Project (NCHIP), aggressively manages excessive alcohol consumption on campuses using initiatives that require stakeholders to plan, do, study, and act (PDSAs).

The learning collaborative’s approach treats binge drinking, defined as five or more drinks in one sitting, as a public health problem. Its tactics are similar to those used by Jim Yong Kim, Dartmouth president and NCHIP founder, when he directed the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization.

A team of students, faculty, and staff members developed numerous ideas, which they implemented on a small scale. PDSAs in development include training students to watch out for intoxicated classmates at parties, delivering water and pizza to parties, and informing parents about the university’s new points system.

Jane Jones, alcohol and drug services coordinator, and her colleagues then use qualitative and quantitative data to assess outcomes, ensuring that only proven programs will be sustained.

“You make changes today that add up to larger progress tomorrow,” said Jones.

All of this activity happens within the learning collaborative context.

PDSAs are underway nationwide, and each college files weekly reports with NCHIP. The concepts and analysis, for better or for worse, are uploaded into the group’s shared database, which can be tapped by participants as they strategize.

NCHIP’s own core faculty — physicians, psychologists, statisticians, communications specialists, and pub-

Views from the hill Before winter struck, we asked students: what’s your must-have article of clothing or accessory as the weather gets colder?

“You always must have a sweatshirt and like three other jumpers, warm socks, and winter boots. I literally bought everything when I got here.”

— Gloria Kebirungi ’15, from Kampala, Uganda “Lots of layers.

I’m already cold, and everyone keeps telling me ‘you have no idea what’s coming your way.’”

— Gabriela Bezerra ’13, from Brasilia, Brazil “I think the best accessory is mittens because my hands usually get cold pretty quickly, so if my hands are warm, I can tolerate the cold … unless it’s below zero.”

— Saffiate Ba ’14, Hempstead, N.Y.

An exercise in community

It’s Thursday morning at Colgate’s Lineberry Natatorium. About 20 senior citizens are “bunny hopping” across the shallow end, moving their arms in a modifi ed breast stroke at the water’s surface. In one corner, a woman helps a man down the ramp and

begins talking him through sets of leg movements as he hangs onto the pool’s edge. Several folks swim laps in designated lanes, while members of another class, wearing soft foam fl otation belts, are sculling across the deep end. Through the cheerful din, a chorus of “Happy Birthday” breaks out.

Such is the scene at the Chenango Water Exercise Group (CWEG), founded in 1981 by Mark Randall, a longtime Colgate coach and athletics administrator who passed away in 2004. CWEG offers classes including deep- and shallow-water aerobics, water walking, and lap swimming, as well as individualized assistance with exercise regimens.

“The idea is to tailor the program to the needs of the person,” said April Cady, the program’s administrator.

Open to the community, CWEG charges a modest $250 annual fee for the 3-day-per-week, 48-week program.

Participants come from all walks of life — retired business professionals, farmers, homemakers — from Hamilton, nearby towns, and as far away as Utica.

Remarkably, CWEG, which rents the pool from Colgate, is entirely volunteer run. All receive training in exercise plus CPR and fi rst aid. In addition to participant fees, funding comes from donations. Colgate occa-

Brown bag

Dia de los Muertos “Talking with the dead is necessary to remind ourselves to enjoy our lives and not go about as if we had already died,” Renyelle Jimenez ’14 read, from the poem “Dia de los Muertos,” to a packed audience attending a November 1 women’s studies Brown Bag. To celebrate the Mexican holiday known as the Day of the Dead, the Center for Women’s Studies hosted the luncheon, with the theme “Remembering Beloved Women.”

The Day of the Dead is the Mexicans’ way of celebrating the lives of those who have passed away by sharing their stories as well as poking fun at death with decorations of skulls and skeletons, explained Spanish professor Carmen Serrano.

Jimenez, a women’s studies intern, was one of several students who read poetry and gave presentations on women to whom they chose to pay tribute. Setting the stage was a colorful shrine displaying pictures of those women, as well as deceased family members. Women whom students honored included Gwendolyn Brooks, the fi rst African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, and Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

After the presentations, students made Dia de los Muertos crafts, such as decorating clay skulls and drawing self-portraits on scratchboard paper. The event was cosponsored by the ALANA Cultural Center.

Sam Ward

Coleman Brown, retired professor of philosophy and religion, works out in Lineberry Natatorium with the assistance of Sylvia Roe, a Chenango Water Exercise Group volunteer.

sionally helps subsidize the purchase of equipment that can be shared.

People join for many reasons, from general exercise to rehabilitation after surgery; some are referred by their physicians. “Many have limited mobility,” said Cady. “Getting into the water alleviates stress on their bodies and gives them a feeling of freedom.”

Several members are both participants and volunteers, such as Linda and Dan Rauscher ’70, who live in Oriskany Falls. Dan joined CWEG after retiring from the U.S. Postal Service.

“I used to play basketball every Sunday, and it got hard on my knees. I needed a low-impact avenue of exercise,” said Dan. “Now, I swim laps for a half hour, and then I work with John Beyer for 45 minutes.”

Beyer, a retired Colgate soccer coach and athletics administrator, had been hesitant to get in the water after undergoing surgery — until he joined CWEG and began working with Rauscher two years ago.

“John says that I taught him how to swim,” said Dan. “That’s giving me a bit more credit than I deserve, but we have a good time, and he now swims the width of the pool.”

A longtime administrative assistant at Colgate, Linda had participated in the employee deep-water fi tness class before retiring and joining CWEG last year. She attends the deepwater class and assists a member who has multiple sclerosis with her balance-building exercises in the shallow end. “We’ve gotten to be friends as well,” Linda said.

“The exercise is very important, but the social side is huge,” Cady stressed.

“This group can relate to each other on all different levels, and they watch out for each other.”

“The instructors are great, and when we get into our groups, we have a wonderful rapport,” said Beyer.

“Coming here is the brightest part of my day.”

As for Dan Rauscher’s knees? “I played tennis this morning at Sanford Field House — I can do it once a week now.”

To learn more about CWEG, watch the video at www.colgate.edu/video or call 315-228-7621.

Karen Luciani

lic health experts — are also crunching the numbers, reading surveys, and mining data for methods to reduce the staggering numbers associated with binge drinking.

“Nationally, there are more than 1,800 deaths per year and there are 600,000 associated harms,” said NCHIP program manager Lisa Johnson.

The learning collaborative was launched last April as an 18-month program, punctuated by three learning sessions and a series of meetings.

Given the amount of data being collected and the number of institutions interested in the outcome, its potential will stretch far beyond 2012.

“High-risk drinking is a concern for most universities,” said Scott Brown, interim vice president and dean of the college. “We are proud to be part of an evidence-based, collaborative effort that promotes the safest possible environment for our students.”

For more on Colgate’s points system, visit colgate.edu/points.

News and views for the Colgate community

11

Answering the call

By Rev. Abigail A. Henrich ’98

Abby Henrich ’98 is the mother of three children and married to a theologian. She lives outside of Boston, where she is the pastor of an emergent progressive Christian community, Grace Community Church.

I am in my pajamas. That is, I am in my pajamas at 11 a.m. in my office.

My office is in the church. Pastors don’t usually show up to work in their pajamas. I did this morning.

It began at 7 a.m. My 3-year-old was happily eating eggs. The sweet legs of my 8-month-old were tightly wrapped around my waist, my shirt still damp from the morning feeding.

He was watching intently as I packed his brother’s lunch for preschool onehanded. My husband was already off to teach an 8 a.m. class. The phone rang. I was sure it was him to say good morning to his boys. Instead, it was Doug.

Sarah has tried again, he told me.

He can’t do this anymore. Clinical depression. It’s the third time his wife has tried to end her life, this time in their car backed into a pile of leaves.

My baby fusses on my hip. I talk with Doug as I spoon cereal into his eager mouth and help my eldest into

John Leith

work & play

Passion for the Climb

12

scene: Winter 2012

his clothes. I console as I change a diaper, pack the day care bag and school bag, and glance at my calendar.

Doug and I divide and conquer: I will call his kids’ schools and notify Sarah’s therapist; he will call her mother. What else is there to say?

It has become all-too routine. I pray with him before we hang up the phone.

There is no time to get dressed. I load up my children in the ice-cold car and head to drop-offs and then to the office.

It’s 11 a.m. I am still in my pajamas and on the phone. I’ve reached the principal.

11 a.m.? I have to be at the hospital at 12:30. Anne is in the final stages of breast cancer, and today the doctors and her daughter are meeting. They’ve asked me to help convince Anne to go home with hospice. It’s been a terribly long struggle, and the family is worn out. I have enough time to run home to throw on clean clothes. But before I leave, I need to make sure I choose the scripture and sermon title for Sunday’s worship. I leaf through my notes from the morning, scribbling an idea down.

Before I rush home to change, before I confront Anne with the reality that she is dying, before I pick up my children, before I scan Facebook for the latest “info” on my church youth, before I search our fridge for something for dinner, before I return to my notes for Sunday worship, before I sit down to a full inbox after my children are asleep, before I visit Sarah in the hospital’s lockdown unit, I stop and wonder: How did I get here?

After college graduation, I left the beautiful sloping hills of the Chenango Valley for the flat campus of Princeton Theological Seminary, where I received my master’s in divinity. At 25, I was ordained and installed as the solo pastor of a church outside of Boston.

Yet, this still does not explain how a woman with “Rev.” before her name spends her morning on the phone in her pajamas helping a family in crisis.

Especially a woman who rarely went to church as a kid and, at age 6, was quick to tell anyone who would listen

that the Bible was hooey — just where did Cain’s and Abel’s wives come from anyway?

I didn’t study religion at Colgate because I wanted to be a pastor, at least not in the beginning. I studied religion simply because I was fascinated with the big questions posed by life.

I also studied religion because I loved my professors. But then, I started teaching Sunday school at Park United Methodist Church on the Hamilton Village Green. I missed kids and yearned for community with people outside of college. The next thing I knew, that community had entrusted me with their 11- to 16-year-olds every Sunday morning. I fell in love with them.

My senior year, I knew without a doubt I was headed to graduate school. I still had no idea that what I would pursue would be a vocation, not just an education. Yet, I remember distinctly watching my pastor at Park one Sunday, and thinking: I can do that.

Over the next few months, it became, I want to do that.

7 p.m. I zip my robe, hiding my shirt dirtied by small, sticky hands.

The music is already playing. Briefly, I look over those who are gathered for a midweek Lenten service. I lead worship, reading the scripture passage, reciting the prayers. Simultaneously, I am thinking of Anne, of Sarah, of my sleeping children. I end the service with communion, the words spilling from my mouth. Come to this table not because you should, but because you may. Come to this table because you are welcome.

That’s how I got here. I was invited.

And I answered.

Read more essays from our Passion for the Climb series, or see how you can submit your own essay, at colgateconnect.org/scenepfc.

George Gavin Ritchie Although his time as a student here was brief, abolitionist George Gavin Ritchie’s impact was nothing short of remarkable.

Born in 1820, Ritchie entered the Collegiate Department of Madison University (the forerunner to Colgate) as a member of the Class of 1849. As a sophomore, he gained the somewhat reluctant approval of the faculty to create the school’s first student newspaper, the Hamilton Student, with the subtitle “A Semi-Monthly Mirror of Religion, Literature, Science and Art.” The faculty insisted he form an editorial board of four students chosen by the school’s two literary societies. After publishing only a few issues, Ritchie, a staunch abolitionist, proposed to publish an editorial, “Equal Suffrage and the Religious Press,” in which he chastised voters and the churches of New York State for not supporting equal suffrage for black men in the election of 1846. According to the “Records of the Doings of the Faculty, 1840–1851,” the other editors rejected the article, and the faculty warned Ritchie that he would be expelled should he insist on publishing it. Undeterred, Ritchie did just that.* The faculty not only expelled Ritchie — preventing him from earning his degree toward becoming a Baptist minister — but also made efforts to ensure that he would be denied entrance to any other seminary. Nevertheless, consumed with the cause of abolition, Ritchie continued the publication — twice renamed, to the Hamilton Student and Christian Reformer, and then the Christian Reformer. It became the voice of abolition and other reform in central New York. The faculty placed a notice in the Baptist Register disavowing any connection between Madison University and Ritchie’s paper, and passed a resolution stating that other students who wrote for or aided the paper would face expulsion.

Ritchie scraped by for a while through subscription income and support from fellow abolitionists, but severe financial difficulties forced him to shut down his publication by September 1847. Regardless, Ritchie joined the antislavery Baptists and participated in several organizations. He used his pulpit to advocate for peace, temperance, and abolition, and distributed antislavery literature. Most of his work centered in and around Oneida, Vernon, Litchfield, Richfield, West Exeter, and Clinton, N.Y. He died in 1853, at the age of 33, leaving his wife and five children.

Acknowledgment and recognition of Ritchie’s accomplishments — and a reversal of his treatment by the university — would not take place until a century and a half later. In 1998, Colgate posthumously granted Ritchie the degree he had never received. His great-grandson, Daniel Ritchie, accepted it in his name during the annual commencement ceremony. On a national level, this past fall, Ritchie was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame, following nomination by retired Colgate professor William Edmonston and his wife, Nellie (see pg. 9 in this issue). From late April through October 2012, Colgate’s Special Collections will mount an exhibition about Ritchie at Case Library. — Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14 and Rebecca Costello * Read the article at http://exlibris.colgate.edu/digital/studentNewspapers.html, Jan. 15, 1847, pg. 5.

13 Page 13 is the showplace

for Colgate tradition, history, and school spirit.

Ashlee Eve ’14

life of the mind 14

Mathematics students present their research findings.

scene: Winter 2012

Students do the math and do the research, too

Terms like “Borda Count” and “eigenvectors” may not seem tangible to most people, but they do have realworld applications — which two Colgate mathematics students explored over the summer. Shujing Wang ’12 and Daniel Michev ’14 presented the results of their research projects to a classroom full of students in the fall.

Michev collaborated on his project, which explored voting methods, with Elizabeth Wilcox, visiting assistant professor of mathematics. In his presentation, he first explained the concept of voting theory and said that the most common method — the plurality system (a candidate with the most votes wins, even without an absolute majority of votes) — is flawed.

Michev came up with his own method that combines two voting systems in order to achieve what he says is maximum fairness. His formula — (W x n/2) + (U x 1/v) — represents a mixture of the method of pair-wise comparisons and the Borda Count, two of the most widely studied voting methods. His method is not perfect, Michev acknowledged, but, he said, with modifications, it could potentially improve the effectiveness and fairness of voting.

It was Wilcox’s first time mentoring a student for a summer project, so she and Michev shared in the excitement of conducting research in a collaborative way. “This project bridged a few different topical areas, economics, voting methods, and math,” said Wilcox.

Wang’s mentor for her project, titled “Eigenvectors of the Network Laplacian,” was Daniel A. Schult, professor of mathematics. Wang’s research focused on how to effectively synchronize networks of oscillators by changing the eigenvalues (measures

of how well oscillators can synchronize) of the matrix representing that network. Each network serves as a representation of the way a “node” is connected via a matrix (the Network Laplacian). Adding or removing edges changes that matrix, increasing or decreasing its eigenvalues.

Giving an example that non-math students could grasp, Wang said, “Imagine each node is a friend you have on Facebook. If you know that person personally, we would draw a line to connect you and that friend. If you don’t know them, though, there would be no line. That is how you create a network.”

Both Michev and Wang agreed that, although research can be difficult, it is satisfying because of what it uncovers. “A lot of times you think your method will work, but it doesn’t,” said Wang. “Then you just try again and see what you discover.”

— Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14

Applying psychology know-how to Hamilton business

When a businessman in the village of Hamilton had a question about how best to gauge employees’ abilities, he turned to a Colgate faculty member for advice. That request has turned into an interesting collaborative project involving a student, a professor, and an innkeeper.

Spencer Kelly, associate professor of psychology, and Zachary Lin Zhao ’12 have been working with Ben Eberhardt, general manager of the Colgate Inn, to create a personality questionnaire that measures the aptitude of current, and potential, inn employees.

“Ben came to me, asking if I knew of any research that would help him better assess his current employees’ abilities, and his future applicants, in some sort of personality measure that could correlate to performance,” said Kelly.

Kelly said this did not exactly fall under his area of expertise, but he thought Zhao — a psychology and mathematic economics double major — would be great for the project. He set up a meeting for the three of them to discuss it.

Zhao researched various personality tests and combined them to make a questionnaire that best suited Eberhardt’s specific needs for current employees. From those results, Zhao was able to come up with an equation

Syllabus FSEM 125, Analysis of Health Issues: Cancer MWF 9:20-10:10 a.m., Olin Hall 205A Engda Hagos, assistant professor of biology Course description: This course focuses on understanding the cell and molecular changes that lead to human cancer. It addresses the causes, how the disease progresses, current treatments, and novel and future treatment strategies.

On the reading list: Cancer: Basic Science and Clinical Aspects, Craig Almeida and Sheila Barry; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot Key assignments/activities: Discussion periods every other week, for which students will be asked to complete a written assignment on the topic. Group poster presentations. Small-group presentations on a subject that is related to cancer biology and has societal implications.

The professor says: “This is not a biology course but, instead, is a core Scientific Perspectives course. This course enables students to think about how scientists learn about cancer, analyze, and report findings; and how our understanding of cancer influences our view of societal issues.”

Student perspectives: “Regardless of the dreary outlook many have on cancer, our class learned that not only is cancer preventable, but many types are highly treatable.”

“It was inspiring to read about the research process, which made me decide to do cancer research in my career.”

“This course helped prepare me for the rest of my college education. I learned how to plan ahead and balance my time. In addition, I believe I am on my way to becoming a better science writer.”

that enabled him to craft a second test for applicants.

While the personality tests are tailored specifically for the Colgate Inn, Zhao and Kelly believe they can become valuable tools for other businesses, as well.

“This is just one example of how the expertise on campus, from faculty members and students, can have a real, hands-on benefit for businesses in the village,” said Eberhardt. “I hope there will be even more connections between local business owners and students in the future.”

— Marilyn Hernandez-Stopp ’14

lion people had visited the Space Lab channel since its launch on YouTube, to learn more about the competition and to participate. And, more than 5.7 million people worldwide had enjoyed the program’s introductory video.

“These young people, who will someday change our world, may get the chance to see their work conducted beyond it — in space and in the ‘cloud,’” said Aveni.

its category. The university is ranked fourth among the bachelor’s institutions, according to the latest information supplied by Fulbright, which is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. The success of Colgate and other top-producing institutions was highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Colgate applicants have received a large number of grants the past two years, with nine Fulbright grantees and one French Ministry ETA recipient for 2011–2012 and seven Fulbright grantees for 2010–2011. Almost 1,700 American students, artists, and young professionals in more than 100 different fields of study have been offered Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English, and conduct research in more than 140 countries throughout the world beginning this past fall.

Aveni to judge astronomical science competition

Professor Anthony Aveni has been selected as a judge for the YouTube Space Lab, a global science competition and ongoing education program.

YouTube and Lenovo launched the program in conjunction with space agencies throughout the world, and the more than 35 judges are worldrenowned scientists, astronauts, educators, and explorers.

Aveni, the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies, will help select two science experiments designed by students between the ages of 14 and 18. The experiments will be conducted 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station and live streamed on YouTube this summer.

At press time, more than 1 mil-

Cyber insecurity in war

Aveni, who has taught at Colgate since 1963, helped pioneer the field of archaeoastronomy and is one of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy. A lecturer, speaker and editor/author of more than two dozen books on ancient astronomy, his most recent book is The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

Colgate ranks highly for Fulbright participation

With nine students having won Fulbright awards for 2011–2012, Colgate has been named one of the top producers of Fulbright students in

Andrew Daddio

Zachary Lin Zhao ’12 and Professor Spencer Kelly develop employee personality tests for a Hamilton business owner.

What would prompt a college student to want to toss his cell phone in the trash? New research by Carolyn Nordstrom, known as a pioneer in the anthropology of war and peace, was powerful enough to do just that.

Delivering Colgate’s third annual Schaehrer Memorial Lecture on October 13, Nordstrom addressed the role of technology in conflict from unexpected angles. Nordstrom has “an anthropologist’s sensitivity to the way that technical, moral, and existential perceptions combine to create a vision of the future,” said Nancy Ries, director of Colgate’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which sponsored the lecture. Nordstrom is a professor of anthropology at University of Notre Dame.

P-CON major Dave Esber ’11 was moved by her talk. “We constantly celebrate new technology and cast to the side any qualms we have because it is so important to our daily lives,” he said, “but she gave us reason to question this. I know that after the lecture at least a few of us were tempted to toss our phones in the trash.”

Nordstrom, who studies war, conflict, and transnational crime in Africa and South Asia, had much to talk about with President Jeffrey Herbst when the two met in Colgate’s studio to record a Conversation on World Affairs. The full conversation can be found on YouTube and on Colgate’s video console.

While on campus, Nordstrom met

Live and learn

When the Capitol Steps came to perform at the Palace Theater in early November, Jim Andretta ’12, Dana Paolucci ’13, and I were lucky enough to interview them before the show. As someone who’s been involved in professional politics since high school, a history major and political science minor, and a member of Charred Goosebeak (Colgate’s improv group), I was excited to learn from the pros.

Capitol Steps is a premier political satire group from Washington, D.C., claiming to “put the Mock in Democracy.” Formed at a Congressional Christmas party in 1981, the group pokes fun at politics.

Their performance at the Palace was a mixture of stand-up comedy, musical theater, and political parody.

From impersonating Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to poking fun at Justin Bieber, nothing in recent political or cultural memory was left untouched by the performers. For me, it was inspiring to see comedy and politics intermingling.

Although separate disciplines, they can combine for a powerful effect.

The interview was much like their show, often about serious subjects or directed by serious questions but always lighthearted. Starting off by asking questions like “How constructive is political satire?” we quickly moved on to “Who is your favorite terrorist?” and “When will Ronald Reagan rise from the dead to lead the Republican Party again?” By the end, even the camera crew was laughing out loud. It was refreshing to learn that even those involved in professional politics can be down-to-earth and find the humor in the sometimes-depressing rut that is politics.

The cast of Capitol Steps views their job almost as therapy — distracting people from the apprehension caused by politics.

I was reminded that, despite how grim and somber modern politics may seem, it’s still acceptable, and even necessary, to point out the humor in our own government.

After all, as the Constitution proclaims, we are the People.

— Joseph Petracca ’13 (pictured above, left)

News and views for the Colgate community

15

life of the mind

Through the Beyond Colgate program, Professor Catherine Cardelus took her students to Old Forge, N.Y., to measure the diameter of 3,000 trees and collect leaf litter in order to study forest health.

(IIE) released its 2009–2010 Open Doors data. Colgate appeared near the top of two lists for the number of students studying abroad. Colgate ranked No. 3 nationally among baccalaureate institutions in the number of students who participated in semester-long programs (360 students). And the university ranked No. 7 in the total number of students who studied abroad overall, including extended study trips (435 students).

The IIE, an independent nonprofit resource on international higher education exchange activity into and out of the United States, also found that study abroad activity by U.S. college students was on the rise in 2010–2011 for the second year, after leveling off during the economic uncertainty that began in 2007.

At Colgate, options for studying abroad are growing. Last spring, the faculty adopted a new portable aid policy that begins with the Class of 2016. Students will be able to carry over their financial aid when studying abroad on an approved non-Colgate program that better meets their academic interests than one of Colgate’s own faculty-led groups.

An interim portable aid initiative — in effect for the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 academic years — is now in place to encourage students to choose approved non-Colgate programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and other non-traditional study abroad destinations, such as the Balkans or former Soviet states.

“The main purpose of the program is to provide our aided students with the same opportunities for off-campus study as are available to full-pay students, particularly in destinations outside of Western Europe,” said President Jeffrey Herbst. “We believe so strongly in the importance of this that, rather than waiting two years for Colgate’s new policy on home school tuition/portable aid to go into effect, we are making funds available to make this happen now.”

with students and faculty, as well as several of the alumni whose contributions established the Schaehrer lecture series in honor of the late Peter Schaehrer ’65. Over the past few years, these alumni have formed an increasingly close bond with Colgate over their intellectual interests and the memory of their former classmate, who was a career educator and champion of civil rights.

The next day in Utica, Nordstrom delivered the keynote lecture at the inaugural UNSPOKEN Human Rights Conference, which featured panels on war, forced migration, refugee settlement, and community building.

Faculty, students, and alumni participated along with many partners.

Ries said, “Dr. Nordstrom provided the perfect bridge between our educational efforts at Colgate and the work at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, which sponsored UNSPOKEN.”

Opening doors, expanding study abroad

This fall, as alumni, faculty, and students celebrated the 50th anniversary of Colgate’s London Study Group, the Institute of International Education

Catherine Cardelus

Resourceful professors take students “Beyond Colgate”

16

scene: Winter 2012

Jessica Graybill, assistant professor of geography, needed to look no farther than Utica, N.Y., for students in her Urban Transformations seminar to find a place to experience the cultural, spatial, and environmental changes brought about by refugee migration.

The city’s leaders openly welcome

international newcomers — most recently from Bosnia, Belarus, and Vietnam — as a strategy for economic sustainability.

“The proximity of Utica and the richness of its immigrant history make it an ideal location for our work,” said Graybill, whose course spans the full spectrum of the research process, from project conceptualization through individual and team research components, and culminating in a final paper. But without a budget to visit, the 30-mile distance would be so close, yet so far.

So, Graybill applied to the Beyond Colgate program for $975 — a reasonable amount that would cover a series of five field trips and research support for her nine students. The decade-old program supports some 35 to 40 trips each year, all organized by faculty members who are as frugal as they are creative. Each trip must meet a common objective: allow students to apply what they are learning in the classroom, while exploring the region.

Elizabeth Fischer ’12 was part of the three-member team studying Beyond Greenspaces: Indicators of Sustainability and Well-being in Utica, N.Y. “We saw firsthand the decay and deterioration such as brown fields and vacant buildings that plague many parts of Utica,” she said, “but we were also able to speak with Planning Commissioner Brian Thomas about his sentiments on the sustainability of the city.”

Mark Stern, visiting assistant professor of educational studies, also brought students on a trip “to speak to people in the thick of it all,” as he called it. With his $2,500 budget, he brought the 25 students in his Politics and Education class to New York City for an 18-hour, round-trip marathon.

He planned bus transportation, meals, and meetings with professional friends and colleagues at the Promise Academy charter school and the American Federation of Teachers. The group also met with education reporter Dana Goldstein, whose stories appear in The Daily Beast, The Nation, and elsewhere.

“I’ve been telling my students that if you really want to understand education policy, you need to understand everything other than education policy first — you need context, and you need a political reading of that context,” said Stern. “The value of the

Learning chemistry piece by piece

“Hey, you get an oxygen double bond!” exclaimed a Hamilton Central School student to his friend while playing the board game Quest for the Cure: The Search for Nolenium. The game was created by and introduced to the high school regents chemistry classroom

by Colgate students Griffin Bleecker ’15 and Alison Ball ’15. Bleecker and Ball are enrolled in Professor Ernie Nolen’s first-year seminar/core Scientific Perspectives course titled Molecules That Rock Your World.

Elements, like iron, and alloys, like bronze, have entire “ages” named after them, but how did sugar change the course of history? In Quest for the Cure, players move around the board exploring the history of molecules around the world. For each correct answer, players receive a piece of the elusive molecule “Nolenium” — a nod to the game inventors’ professor — such as an oxygen double bond.

“This exercise teaches through soft learning,” Nolen said of his teaching method of having the students create and design games, including writing up all the questions. Through the process, his students learn subconsciously — they don’t realize what they’ve

retained until it “clicks” as they’re recalling the correct answers.

As if to illustrate Nolen’s point, the eyes of Mikhaila Redovian ’15 lit up on the realization that she knew the answers to the clues being drawn during the game she made, called Overdose.

Redovian and Zach Smith ’15 created the game, which is a kind of molecule Pictionary. Players pick a card, then draw clues for their partners to guess the answer.

“The idea is to create games that make science fun,” said Hamilton Central School chemistry teacher Terry Monty, who added that she was excited to invite the Colgate students into her 10th- and 11th-grade classes.

In another game, Moleclues, presented by Brian McCormick ’15 and Jack Metelski ’15, players guess a molecule based on a series of five clues — thus, the tongue-twister name. When players answer correctly, they receive a piece of a molecule.

The Hamilton Central students enjoyed getting a chance to play a game in chemistry class, even though they occasionally complained about the difficulty of the questions.

“It will get easier,” Metelski informed the frustrated high school students in his group. Although he was referring to his game, his statement could have just as easily applied to understanding chemistry.

For the Colgate students, a chance to go back to high school offered more than a memorable learning experience; it also showed them what they’ve learned this semester.

Get to know: Krista Ingram

Andrew Daddio

trip was to interact with people in order to try to make more sense of the increasingly messy and complicated landscape of education policy; to get through all the mire and muck and rhetoric surrounding education policy today and to just talk. We don’t do that enough.”

The way you do the things you do Krista Ingram, assistant professor of biology, wants to know what keeps harvester ants up at night. She’d also like to understand how hundreds of thousands of Pogonomyrmex barbatus within a single colony can organize themselves into squads of builders, foragers, defenders, and scouts without the coordinating power of a central leader.

Because questionnaires and psychological profiles won’t work with ants, she takes a biologist’s approach: she studies their genes to track the evolution of their social behaviors, and she invites undergraduates into her lab to participate in the discovery process.

Ingram’s fascination with ants began, oddly enough, while she was studying dolphins in Hawaii. At the beginning of her PhD work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, she realized that, in order to delve into the microscopic origins of animal behavior as she had originally intended, she would have to find a model species — one that was easier to fit on a microscope slide. So Ingram transferred to Harvard, where she could study social insects under the guidance of evolutionary biologist Steve Palumbi and collaborate with legendary naturalist E.O. Wilson.

Jump forward a decade, and you’ll find Ingram in her own lab at Colgate. Here, she dabbles in conservation genetics and molecular ecology, but devotes the bulk of her time to investigating the foraging behavior and circadian rhythms of ants.

Ingram and her students observe their insects as they engage in a variety of activities, then freeze them to capture a real-time snapshot of their brain chemistry. With the help of a new qPCR machine, purchased through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she can note exactly how many copies of any particular gene are active. In the future, she will use chemical inhibitors to switch them off and see if the technique changes ant behavior.

It doesn’t take a PhD from Harvard to realize that dolphins, ants, and people are different organisms, but Ingram points out that we share many common genes. That’s why the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and Colgate’s own Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute are interested in funding her research.

“I want to understand the relative roles of development versus environment in how genes are regulating these processes,” she said. “The same mechanisms are probably important for us as well.”

For example, if foraging genes can be linked to obesity, then knowing how to suppress them in an ant could prove valuable for humans; if you can track down the genetic cause for a sleep disorder in a six-legged insomniac, perhaps you can transfer that knowledge to a biped.

For Ingram — who recently collaborated on the publication of a complete fire ant genome — the excitement comes from seeing the presumably unseeable, discovering the way we do the things we do, and teaching a new generation of scientists the art of asking challenging questions.

“I always had the vision of working at an undergraduate liberal arts institution, but I wanted it to be a competitive institution, so I would have great students in the lab,” she said.

“Many of my peers at other research universities have become managers — I am lucky that I get to do the teaching and the science.”

Duy Thrinh ’14

Hamilton Central School chemistry students play a learning board game created by Colgate students.

— Mark Walden

News and views for the Colgate community

17

Top: Photo from Jo Ann Santangelo's Proud to Serve portrait project featuring LGBTQ American service members. Bottom: "Truer is an autobiographical series that renders visible social expectations of romantic narratives — as heterosexual and gender conforming," photographer Sophia Wallace explained of her collection. Both images were part of the exhibition A Fine Line: Private Lives for Public View.

Portraying issues of sexuality and gender, the photographic works of four art activists from various parts of the country were exhibited together for the first time in A Fine Line: Private Lives for Public View. The Clifford Gallery exhibition took place during November and December.

Benae Beamon ’11 brought the collections together as part of her student internship for the Office of LGBTQ Initiatives. Noting Beamon’s enthusiasm for art, Jamie Bergeron, assistant director of LGBTQ Initiatives, had suggested that she research queer art activism. In so doing, Beamon became interested in the impact that photography can have on its audience. “[Photography] combines so many different aspects and captures in a single image something that is so complex,” Beamon said.

“We wanted to represent people’s real stories,” explained Bergeron, who co-curated the exhibition with Beamon and Linn Underhill, associate professor of art and art history.

Each photographer’s collection represented a different aspect of sexuality or gender. The co-curators chose various themes that could contribute to the larger conversation about the LGBTQ movement.

For example, Catherine Opie — a photography professor at the University of California at Los Angeles — exhibited four photos depicting domestic partnerships in different families. “The collection talked about the constructions of family as being very important, even if they are nontraditional,” Bergeron explained.

Austin, Texas–based photographer Jo Ann Santangelo’s work addressed the timely topic of U.S. military service members who had been discharged under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy before it was repealed last summer.

Three of the photographers visited campus and gave a gallery talk. In addition, the artists spent time in Professor Kristina Watkins’s Gender, Sexuality, and Society class. The discussion between the artists and the students was so riveting that it lasted an hour beyond the end of the period, said Bergeron. “Students grilled the artists about their work, how they got into the field, and how they keep their passion for art activism and also their artistic edge.”

“They discussed the common practice of putting queer and gender identity categories into a box, when they cannot be so easily contained,” explained Sarah Bassett ’13, an art and art history major.

For Beamon, a religion major at Colgate who is currently earning her master’s in divinity at Yale University, putting together the exhibition helped her step out of her own box.

“The work I do is not visual, so to think about the meaning behind the pieces, communicate that to the artists, and hear about their experiences — those moments were really powerful.”

The Fever debates Marxism

When Simona Maicanescu took to the Brehmer Theater stage at the end of September to perform Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, the connection between the work and the university was at first oblique. But her arresting performance of the 90-minute monologue on materialism, Marxism, and the inequitable distribution of wealth invited the kind of debate that takes place at Colgate every day, from the core to the Quad.

“We are here for a reason: to educate,” said Adrian Giurgea, professor of English and director of University Theater, who challenges audiences

18

scene: Winter 2012

Preview

Fadi Kheir

arts & culture

Private Lives for Public View

Sérgio and Odair Assad in concert February 9, 7:30 p.m.

Colgate Memorial Chapel Free and open to the public Latin Grammy Award–winning guitar duo Sérgio and Odair Assad bring their famous virtuosity and aweinspiring ensemble work to campus for a performance of works by Heitor Villa-Lobos, João Pernambuco, and Egberto Gismonti.

These Brazilian-born brothers with Lebanese roots have created a new standard of guitar innovation, ingenuity, and expression. They have played a major role in both introducing and creating new music for two guitars.

Their exceptional artistry comes from both a family rich in Brazilian musical tradition and from studies with the best guitarists in South America.

The brothers have worked extensively with such renowned artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Fernando Suarez Paz, Paquito D’Rivera, Gidon Kremer, and Dawn Upshaw.

While on campus, the Assads will also offer a private master class with students.

For information on other campus arts events, visit www.colgate.edu/arts

to cross international, political, and social boundaries.

Giurgea said he chose The Fever because “it relates so well to current issues, from the riots in London to debates on the Tea Party’s agenda.” And he chose Maicanescu — a Romanian actress living in France, who performs an American play in both French and English — “because our identity is a complex one,” Giurgea said. “The time for insularity has passed.”

Monika Burczyk, lecturer in university studies, suggested her students in Core 152, Challenges of Modernity attend the play, because they had been studying Karl Marx just the week before. “I was struck by how creative work adds to the literary texts,” she said. “The play and the actor brought emotional resonance to our historic and contemporary understanding of Marx, which was an exceptionally enriching experience for students.”

The Fever was produced with support from the Cathy McNeil Hollinger ’83 and Mark Hollinger ’81 Artist-inResidence in Theater endowment.

Studying ‘new’ ancient reliefs This spring, 10 Colgate students and Elizabeth Marlowe, assistant professor of art and art history, are part of a discovery process that professional art historians would envy.

“They will practice exactly the kind of original research, and engage with the same thorny ethical and theoretical issues, that curators, dealers, collectors, and scholars do when confront-

ing new (or newly discovered) works of art,” said Marlowe, who created the course ARTS 481, Seminar in Art Prior to 1300: New Egyptian Reliefs in the Picker: Challenges and Opportunities.

The opportunity is rare for Marlowe as well. While searching Colgate’s Picker Art Gallery database for antique objects she might use in her classroom, she stumbled upon entries for 20 large limestone figural reliefs that were in storage. She now believes the pieces — all bequeathed to Colgate by the renowned collector and New York gallery owner Herbert Mayer ’29 — were most likely produced in Egypt in the 4th or 5th century CE. “These works have never been studied or displayed,” Marlowe said.

“They are unknown to the museum and scholarly world, so one of the first questions we had to worry about — something that is a real problem in my field — is the question of whether or not they were forgeries.”

Students will consider the reliefs from a number of angles, Marlowe said. “How do scholars reconstruct a historical context for artworks about which we have virtually no documentation? What do other reliefs produced in Egypt during that period look like?

Are there cultural property issues at stake here?”

Marlowe’s research interests include ancient and medieval art, art of ancient Rome, reuse of ancient monuments in modern contexts, and museums. As the author of a paper

Jave Yoshimoto, a Syracuse University Visual and Performing Arts graduate student, exhibited his work as part of the SU@CU; CU@SU exhibition at Colgate’s Clifford Gallery. While Syracuse University students displayed their work in Hamilton, Colgate students exhibited their art at XL Projects in downtown Syracuse. Each university’s group attended the other’s gallery talk to learn from nearby fellow art students.

titled “Framing the Sun: The Arch of Constantine and the Appropriation of the Roman Cityscape,” she was tapped in 2010 to appear in the History Channel’s “Secrets of Christianity” series. Her forthcoming book is Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. To learn more, watch a video with Marlowe at www.colgate.edu/video.

Russo talks small-town fiction

Having grown up in nearby Gloversville, author Richard Russo is no stranger to upstate New York, or to rural ways. “He has been called the patron saint of small-town fiction,” Professor Jane Pinchin said in her introduction of the Pulitzer Prize– winning author, the fifth writer to visit campus as part of Colgate’s fall 2011 Living Writers Series. This year’s theme: New York.

“I’m going to have fun tonight because I’m visiting some old friends here,” Russo said of revisiting the characters in his 2007 novel Bridge of Sighs.

After the reading, he talked about his inspirations — from his dad to Dickens — and shed some light on how he decided that it was his destiny to be a writer. While finishing his studies to earn a PhD in American literature at the University of Arizona, Russo recalled, “it seemed to me that the only people in the office having any fun were the writers.” He became a literature professor and built up his writing credentials. Now retired from teaching, Russo has published six novels, among other works of short stories and nonfiction.

Destiny is a common thread in Russo’s writing, as pointed out by a Colgate student earlier in the day when the author visited the Living Writers class co-taught by Pinchin and Professor Jennifer Brice. “Those things that happen to us early in our lives … get imprinted upon us before we have a chance to imprint anything on ourselves,” he explained.

Russo, who has now spent a number of years living in Maine (he taught literature at Colby College), emphasized that his writing doesn’t focus as much on setting as it does on class.

“As long as I have the right dynamic in a book … rich people, poor people, and middle-class people … and if they can all come together in that smalltown crucible, that’s where my fiction resides.”

Open mic Writing Rwanda

By Martin Conte ’15 In a room with vaulted ceilings high windows, and light streaming through I am alone with a pad and a pen, and I am silent. I close my eyes, allowing my pen to hear the sounds about me.

At first, I hear only the rustle of my moving arms, the wind blowing through the cracks in the window panes. At first all I hear is this solid Winter in Maine, that surrounds us with that muffled roar, with that chill that burns our throats, that sears to the bone.

Then, eyes closed, ears closed, heart and mind pouring open, I hear a young child’s voice.

He is wearing a long, torn, red shirt, dusty with the sand that has blown up against it, his hair straggly, or cut short to his head, his eyes wide, his stomach bloated from hunger. My pen weeps for this boy, watching from the bushes as men in many coats and grasping souvenirs, trinkets, children’s toys, young girls, line his family up, and behead them, one by one.

My pen grieves, and the blood of that boy’s family runs from it, and the paper drinks it up transports it from heart to mind to pen to paper to memory, to family, to community, to world, until the world has grasped it, and blown it out and around, shared its flame, shared this boy’s pain, until we all bear upon our shoulders the grief the pain, the blood which pools about his feet.

— Conte’s poem received first place in the 2011 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest, youth category. As he tells it: “I found the contest by chance last February. I had completed a three-week independent study creative writing project at my high school, writing a one-act play, a novella, and a smattering of poems, and I was looking for various publishers and contests, hoping to get my name into the writing community. In the words of the late John Spencer, this prize is ‘deliciously redundant’ — the mere fact that it’s being read is the prize.”

News and views for the Colgate community

19

go ’gate

Successful season for soccer

Jillian Kinter ’13 (#20), 2011 Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year, fights off a cast of Lehigh Mountain Hawks, whom the Raiders beat 2-1 on October 23.

The men’s and women’s soccer teams completed successful fall campaigns after both squads made the Patriot League Tournament.

The men’s soccer team had the most successful season out of all of Colgate’s fall sports teams this year, winning the Patriot League Championship in Washington, D.C., with a 2-0 win over American University — the fifth Patriot League title in men’s soccer history.

The team then headed to New Jersey to take on Rutgers University in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Falling to the Scarlet Knights, 4-2, in the fifth NCAA Tournament game in program history, the team completed the season with an 11-5-6 record.

Colgate Raiders also won two of the league’s major awards: Steven Miller ’12 earned the 2011 Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year, and Jimmy McLaughlin ’15 was honored as the league’s Rookie of the Year. Five Raiders were named to the All-Patriot League Teams (a league high), with Miller, Mike Reese ’12, and Patrick Letourneau ’13 being named to the first team, while Shane Conlin ’13 and Grant Reed ’13 were second-team selections.

The women’s team completed its season as the 2011 Patriot League Regular-Season Champions and en-

tered the tournament, which Colgate hosted, with a 7-1-2 mark in their final 10 games. Despite falling to Army in the semifinals by a 2-0 score, the team walked away with an 11-6-2 overall winning record. Jillian Kinter ’13 was named the 2011 Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year, and Jenna Raepple ’15 was Patriot League Rookie of the Year. Kinter and Raepple were also selected for All-Patriot League First Team; Caroline Brawner ’15 and co-captain Maddie Malone ’12 were named to the second team. Klara Jenkins ’14 was selected to the Academic All-Patriot League Team.

bid to the NCAA Championships at Indiana State University on November 21. There, Johnson became the fourth men’s runner from Colgate to represent the Patriot League — the first since 2005. He finished 115th out of 252 runners at the championships, with a time of 30:55.2.

13th win pushes men’s rugby into nationals

The 13th win for the Colgate men’s rugby club this season proved monumental — it propelled the team into the national championships, to be held this spring.

Colgate competed in the national qualifying tournament at Vassar College in mid-November, beating Marist 30-12 and Fairfield University 45-20 to win the Northeast Rugby Union Division II championship. The victories polished off an undefeated season for the club, which went 13-0.

The victory was even more meaningful for the team because they had dedicated their season to teammate Vic Krivitski ’12, who died last August after a lengthy battle with cancer.

The team had finished league play 7-0 (8-0 overall) with a victory over Cornell University in the Claret Mug match, and league wins over Siena College, Oswego State, RPI, Plattsburgh State, Hamilton College, Union College, and LeMoyne.

The women’s rugby team finished league play at 2-3, with victories against longtime rivals Union College and Siena College.

Both clubs are planning to take a first-ever combined Colgate rugby tour next spring, to Edinburgh and London, which is expected to include three games for each team.

Johnson wins Patriot League cross country title

Leading the men’s cross country team, Chris Johnson ’13 won the individual title in the Patriot League Championships at Lehigh University’s Goodman Campus in October. The men’s team finished sixth overall, with 169 points.

Johnson finished the men’s 8K with a time of 24:53.9 to take the individual title, winning by nearly 20 seconds over the second-place finisher.

The women placed third, with 98 points, defending their 2010 Patriot League Championship.

Then, in mid-November, Johnson came in 13th at the NCAA Northeast Regional at the University of Buffalo, finishing with a time of 31:38.2 in the 10K. The finish earned him an at-large

Bob Cornell

Coach Vaughan reaches 300 wins

20

scene: Winter 2012

After a 5-3 victory at Brown University on November 4, men’s ice hockey coach Don Vaughan became the 39th coach in the history of NCAA Division I men’s ice hockey to reach 300 wins.

The win also made him the 13th active coach, the fourth active ECAC Hockey coach, and the second coach that week (joining Dartmouth’s Bob Gaudet) to reach the milestone. Making the accomplishment even more special, Vaughan’s done it all at Colgate.

Vaughan was honored during Silver Puck Weekend in mid-November with a pregame ceremony. Fans took home a memento of the event — bobbleheads of Vaughan that were given

Raider Nation

Bob Cornell

Fan spotlights with Vicky Chun ’91, senior associate athletic director

Chris Johnson ’13 (#300) led the entire field in the 6K, finishing first overall, when Colgate hosted the annual Harry Lang Invitational. Johnson later won the individual title in the Patriot League Championships.

away during the weekend games with Quinnipiac and Princeton (both wins).

Vaughan was also honored prior to the Quinnipiac game when Athletic Director David Roach presented the bench boss with a framed picture that read “Mr. 300.”

Now in his 19th season as the coach of the Raiders, Vaughan has led his team to four 20-win seasons, two NCAA tournament berths, and 17 appearances in the ECAC Hockey tournament. Additionally, he has guided the Raiders to six ECAC Hockey semifinal clashes. The 2000 ECAC Coach of the Year, he has mentored three Hobey Baker Award finalists, four All-Americans, an ECAC Player of the Year, an ECAC Goaltender of the Year, two ESPN The Magazine Academic AllDistrict I honorees, three ECAC Merit Medal recipients, a Hockey Humanitarian Award winner, and 42 all-ECAC Hockey selections.

Women’s hockey recognized for Autism Awareness

On December 3, Colgate’s women’s hockey team was recognized for their fundraising efforts during Autism Awareness Night at the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. The event was coordinated by the advocacy organization Autism Speaks and the Syracuse Crunch AHL team.

In January 2011, the Raiders were inspired to create the Autism Awareness Project in support of a local teenager who has Asperger’s Syn-

drome. The team has since raised approximately $18,000 for agencies that assist individuals and families impacted by autism. The project has included “Light Up Starr Rink Blue” during Colgate’s ECAC Hockey game against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, special puzzle-piece jerseys worn by the players during two games and later auctioned off, and an online puzzle-piece fundraiser.

Colgate also established an Autism Speaks U chapter to support the work of Autism Speaks, North America’s largest autism science and advocacy organization. Autism Speaks U engages college students across the country in autism awareness, advocacy, and fundraising efforts.

Goals for Good

In the recent off-season, men’s ice hockey captain Kevin McNamara ’12 decided that he wanted to give back to Hamilton and other communities.

His idea was Goals for Good, through which fans can support their teams in a way that benefits their communities.

Realizing the power in numbers, McNamara persuaded all 12 ECAC Hockey member schools — both men’s and women’s teams — to get involved in his initiative. McNamara collaborated with the team captains, and each team is now partnered with a charity in close relation to itself, its school, and/or its community.

Throughout the league season, teams raise money on a per-goal or per-win basis, and funds are given directly to their partnering charities.

In addition, Goals for Good seeks partners to provide bonus donations to the teams that raise the most money over the course of the season.

Instead of being given to the partnering charities, the bonus donations would go to other areas of need within the community, such as the local food cupboard, the firehouse, or the youth hockey program.

“I’ve always wanted to find a way to thank the Colgate and Hamilton communities for the support that they have given ECAC Hockey and, specifically, Colgate University hockey,” said McNamara. “The fact that every team in the league is on board makes this initiative even more special. Through Goals for Good, each player in the league will be able to thank their communities for all that they have done.”

Tre Massey, age 8

Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio Game: Football Homecoming, 10/15/11; the Raiders defeated Cornell 35-28 in overtime Relation to Colgate: Mom is Crystal Neale, who is married to former Colgate men’s basketball all-star Tucker Neale ’95.

What do you think of being at Colgate with Tucker?

Tucker is an amazing basketball player and person. He is a great role model.

What was the highlight of your trip to Colgate? I got to meet the football and men’s basketball coaches.

Last thoughts? I want to come here and play Colgate football and basketball.

Courtney O’Connell ’13

Hometown: Dunedin, Fla. Majors: Sociology and anthropology Game: Women’s basketball home opener/Veteran’s Day game, 11/ 11/11; Colgate lost to Bryant University, 74-76 Why did you come to the game today? To show support for the veterans who have fought and are currently fighting for our right to deem ourselves a free nation — and, of course, to show support for the women’s basketball team!

How would you describe the atmosphere of this game? It is difficult to put into words. There were many emotions present, including pride for our nation and the troops, hope that all can return home safely, as well as excitement for the game itself.

Why did you come to Colgate? I absolutely fell in love with Colgate, and this school was able to provide me with an opportunity to play the sport I love [softball] as well as receive one of the best educations possible.

Rei Morimoto ’15

Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio Game: Men’s ice hockey beat Princeton, 4-1, 11/19/11, Silver Puck Weekend What’s that you’re holding? A Don Vaughan bobblehead [a giveaway for Silver Puck Weekend — men’s ice hockey Head Coach Vaughan recently reached 300 wins].

What is your favorite part of men’s ice hockey games?

Being able to come with my friends, and getting rowdy!

What do you think about tonight’s crowd? It’s nice seeing a lot of people from different places, not just Colgate students.

News and views for the Colgate community

21

McIntyre makes NHL debut

Alice Virden-Speer

Chuck Fox ’70 prepares to ship 75 bicycles to children on the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, as part of a collaboration between his Community Bikes program and author-athlete Kathryn Bertine ’97.

Kick-starting Caribbean cycling

Former Colgate standout David McIntyre ’10 made his National Hockey League debut, with the Minnesota Wild, in a nationally televised game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on November 28.

McIntyre was drafted by the Dallas Stars in the fifth round of the 2006 NHL Draft before coming to Colgate.

His rights were traded a couple of times during his Raider career, and he ended up in the New Jersey Devils organization following graduation.

After stints in Lowell, Mass., and Albany, N.Y., with the Devils’ American Hockey League affiliates, McIntyre was traded to the Minnesota Wild in the summer of 2011. From there, he went to the Houston Aeros of the AHL and had a successful beginning to the 2011–2012 season, with seven goals and four assists for 11 points in 20 games. That effort got the attention of the big club in Minneapolis, and he made his debut against the Lightning on the Versus network.

During his career with the Raiders, McIntyre was a top-10 finalist for the 2009 Hobey Baker Award, which is given to the nation’s top hockey player. He had 43 points on 21 goals and 22 assists that season and was a first-team All-ECAC Hockey selection.

In his senior season, McIntyre was a second-team all-league member and finished with 39 points on 11 goals and a team-high 28 assists. In his four years, he tallied 131 points, which is

22

scene: Winter 2012

Children in St. Kitts and Nevis will benefit from a zeal for wheels that is shared by two Colgate alumni from different generations. Thanks to a collaboration between Chuck Fox ’70 and Kathryn Bertine ’97, 75 gently used bicycles are being shipped to the small Caribbean islands, where they will be distributed to elementary and middle schoolers.

Fox’s Community Bikes program provides approximately 300 newly restored bicycles per year to people in Madison County who otherwise couldn’t afford one. He’s always wanted to expand, and with the help of Bertine, his program has gone global.

Bertine’s mission to qualify for the 2012 summer Olympics led her to the Caribbean Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which granted her dual citizenship in 2008. As a way of giving back to the nation that is helping her toward her Olympic dream, she has committed to helping them build a cycling federation — starting with the children.

“Because they allow me to race for them, I wanted to be able to make sure that the next generation of cyclists is up and coming,” she explained.

Bertine and Fox have known each other since she was a Colgate student, but they didn’t realize that their goals could intersect until she came to the university’s bookstore last year. In listening to Bertine talk about her new book As Good As Gold, Fox learned of her quest to make the summer Olympics. “I’ve got something you might be interested in,” he told Bertine, and then brought her to the Community Bikes garage in Hamilton, where he houses approximately 1,000 bikes.

She knew that just a small number of those bikes would make a huge impact.

Their collaboration got under way when Bertine put Fox in touch with the St. Kitts and Nevis Cycling Federation’s president, Greg Philip, and vice president, Winston Crooke.

The federation offers an after-school and weekend program that encourages youths to build a lifelong habit of cycling and helps those who want to compete in the sport.

Bob Cornell

go ’gate

24th on Colgate’s all-time scoring list, and he finished sixth all-time in games played, with 151.

For more information, visit Goals forGood.org, or follow it on Facebook and Twitter.

Jhazmine Lynch ’13 (#2) scored eight points for the Raiders, but the team fell to Sacred Heart 78-51 in Cotterell Court at the end of November.

As Fox was making calls to hash out the logistics of sending bikes overseas, he was told to contact USAID about its Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, which coordinates youth programs in an effort to combat drugand gang-related issues. He learned about the Denton Program, which allows U.S. citizens and organizations to transport humanitarian goods on U.S. military cargo planes for free.

At press time, Fox was finalizing the required paperwork and transportation details. The bikes were fully serviced and, after several Colgate Theta Chi brothers and members of the Morrisville College Auto Tech club dedicated their elbow grease to clean them, they were ready to go.

The first shipment will transport 50 bikes to Nevis and 25 to St. Kitts.

“Those bikes will go a long way,” Bertine enthused.

“It’s a small country and we feel like we can have an impact there,” Fox said of St. Kitts and Nevis, whose population is approximately 70 percent of Madison County’s. “Our hope is that if this is successful, we can build off of it.”

Former player and coach Olav B. ‘Ole’ Kollevoll ’45 was recognized posthumously as one of only six people ever to be awarded a Gold Puck by the Silver Puck Club, at its annual banquet on November 19.

“It was a great weekend that allowed us to celebrate the Colgate hockey tradition while at the same time honoring Ole Kollevoll, the architect of modern Colgate hockey,” said head coach Don Vaughan. “It was wonderful that his entire family was here to honor his legacy and the mark that he left here at Colgate.“ As a student, Kollevoll was a threesport athlete; he earned six letters and led the 1942–43 men’s hockey team to an undefeated season.

After earning his mathematics degree in 1945, he served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant in the Pacific during World War II. Following his military service, he played professional baseball with the Boston Braves and participated in the World Hockey Championships in 1947 as a member of the U.S. National Team.

Once his career as an athlete ended, Kollevoll turned his attention to coaching and athletic administration. In 1948, he joined the hockey and baseball coaching staff at St. Lawrence University, where he earned his master’s degree. In 1955, he returned to his alma mater to coach the first-

year football team and baseball squad, then later became head coach of the hockey program. From 1957 to 1965, he amassed an 82-65-2 record in eight seasons and coached a pair of ECAC playoff teams. He also was an assistant athletic director at Colgate during his time as head coach.

In 1965, Kollevoll left Hamilton to become director of athletics at Lafayette College. The Colgate Alumni Association awarded him the Silver Puck in 1968. He joins Harry Farmer ’39 and Whit Williams, former president of the Silver Puck Club, as the only recipients of both a Silver and a Gold Puck.

Kollevoll remained as Lafayette’s athletic director until 1989; he is a member of its Hall of Fame as well as Colgate’s Hall of Honor. The ECAC recognized Kollevoll in 1991 with a Distinguished Achievement Award for his significant contributions to intercollegiate athletics.

Kollevoll, who lost his battle with cancer in September 2010, is remembered as a great coach, friend, and mentor to all who knew him.

Get to know: Thomas Larkin ’13

Bob Cornell

Olav Kollevoll ’45 honored with gold puck

Speaking to Thomas Larkin ’13, you’d never guess that the 221-pound defenseman for the men’s hockey team originally hails from Italy. There’s no trace of an accent — well, maybe when you hear him pronounce “binoculars” as he talks about his favorite pastime of bird watching, which he explores during walks through Colgate’s woods and while fishing with his teammates.

Larkin, who is on a short list of junior hockey captains in Colgate history, admits that hockey players from Italy are rare. In all fairness, his hometown of Cocquio Trevisago is in northern Italy, close to the Swiss border, where hockey is more prevalent. He got involved in the sport at the age of 7 — oddly enough, through swimming lessons. When his mother first took her two sons to the local pool, which is attached to the ice rink, Larkin’s brother spotted a hockey practice going on, and wanted to play.

“Being the younger brother, I decided to follow in his footsteps,” Larkin explained. But, while his brother lost interest, Larkin fell in love with the sport and was determined to improve. Little did the young Larkin know then that, at age 18, he would be drafted into the National Hockey League.

His drive to become a great hockey player led him to America. “I had outgrown Italian hockey — there aren’t a lot of chances for youth development in hockey there,” he explained.

So, at age 14, he enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., where he set the singleseason record for goals and assists by a defenseman and left with the career point record for a defenseman.

Ironically enough, in honing his skills at Phillips Exeter and Colgate, Larkin earned the chance to represent his homeland. Last spring, he became the youngest player on Team Italy, which won the gold medal at the Division IA World Championships in Hungary. The win advanced the team, and in May, they will play the top teams in the world.

In the hopes of being invited to again compete for Team Italy, Larkin will audition at a three-week camp this spring. The camp takes place in the final weeks of the semester, which, Larkin acknowledges, will be tough to juggle with his studies. “It will be hard, but it’s such a great opportunity, and Italy hasn’t been in the top group in a while,” he said of his potential to play for Team Italy in the championships this year. “I’d get to play against the best players in the world, and it would be great for my development.”

The economics major (who speaks three languages) hopes to work in his field of study down the road, but for now, he has set his sights on the NHL. After graduating from Colgate, Larkin hopes to play for the Columbus Blue Jackets. The team picked him in the 2009 Amateur Draft, so he is hoping to sign with them in 2013.

In the meantime, Larkin said, he will continue to “do the best job I can for my teammates and team.” Having been recruited to Colgate, Larkin added that, “it’s been everything I thought it would be. Coach Vaughan, Assistant Coach Dexter, and Assistant Coach Lefevre are all great guys, and I’ve learned a lot from them.”

Check out www.GoColgateRaiders. com, which provides up-to-date information on Colgate’s 23 varsity athletic programs, including schedules, rosters, statistics, and game information, as well as online ticket ordering.

Grant Haines ’15 delivers a curling stone under the watchful eye of instructor (and chemistry professor) Roger Rowlett and his Colgate teammates at the Utica Curling Club during a warm-up before a Sunday game in October.

Lorenzo Ciniglio

— Aleta Mayne

News and views for the Colgate community

23

new, noted , & quoted

Books, music & film Information is provided by publishers, authors, and artists.

Blood Brothers: A Novel of Courage and Treachery on the Shores of Tripoli E. Thomas Behr ’62 (CreateSpace)

America’s 1805 war against the Barbary pirates of Tripoli, the setting of E. Thomas Behr’s novel Blood Brothers, brings together two unlikely allies: Peter Kirkpatrick, the captain of the USS Eagle, and the halfbrother he never knew he had, Henry Doyle. When the Mohawk people who raised him were driven from their homes during the Revolution, Doyle left America, converted to Islam, and became a professional spy and assassin for hire. Wholly to advance his own purposes, he agrees to serve the Americans. Like the country he serves, Kirkpatrick is driven by the need to demonstrate the power of America’s ideals against its enemies. But when he joins the invasion of Tripoli, Kirkpatrick’s beliefs will be tested. For Doyle, the question is simpler: Do I help my brother — or let him die?

Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I Justus D. Doenecke ’60 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky)

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, U.S. political leaders were swayed by popular opinion to remain neutral; yet, less than three years later, the nation declared war on Germany. In Nothing Less Than War, Doenecke (a professor emeritus of history at New College of Florida) examines the clash of opinions over the war during this transformative period and offers his perspective on America’s decision to enter World War I.

24

scene: Winter 2012

Doenecke reappraises the public and private diplomacy of President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisers and explores the response of Congress to the war. He also investigates the debates that raged in the media and among citizen groups that sprang up across the country as the U.S. economy was threatened by European blockades and as Americans died on ships sunk by German U-boats.

Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire Noor-Aiman I. Khan (Palgrave Macmillan)

An examination of the collaboration between Egyptian and Indian nationalists against the British Empire, this book argues that the basis for the Third World, or Non-Aligned, Movement was formed long before the Cold War. Using personal memoirs, intelligence reports, journal articles, records of conference proceedings, and secondary literature, Khan follows the connections between nationalist activists of both colonies through the first half of the 20th century. An assistant history professor at Colgate, she illuminates how Egyptian nationalists recognized a shared dilemma with Indian nationalists and cooperated with them to mobilize against imperialism.

The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald ’85 (Harvard Business Review Press)

In The Social Organization, two of IT company Gartner’s lead analysts share insights from their study of more than 400 organizations that have used social technologies to foster — and capitalize on — customers’ and employees’ collective efforts.

But the new social technology land-

scape isn’t about the technology; it’s about building communities, fostering new ways of collaborating, and guiding these efforts to achieve a purpose.

To that end, the authors identify the core disciplines managers must master to translate community collaboration into otherwise impossible results. The Social Organization highlights the benefits and challenges of using social technology to tap the power of people, revealing what managers must do to make collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage.

The Blitz: Fly Fishing The Atlantic Migration Pete McDonald ’93 (Departure Publishing)

The Blitz is an offbeat celebration of the unique and vibrant coastal fly-fishing culture.

Over the course of a year, Pete McDonald (Boating magazine’s deputy editor) and photography editor Tosh Brown followed an immeasurable biomass of predators and prey on their annual oceanic migration.

From Maine’s Casco Bay to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, they shot photographs, burned video footage, and interviewed an eclectic cast of anglers, guides, merchants, and fly tiers.

The result is a comprehensive view of the beaches, tidal rips, birds, bait, and game fish of the Eastern Seaboard.

Stephanie Isn’t Here C. Norman Noble ’57 (Smashwords)

In C. Norman Noble’s latest novel, local hero Cort Harper returns from college to teach science at his hometown high school but, despite his fame and spotless reputation, things don’t go well. His wife is murdered in an unsolved crime from which only Cort’s airtight alibi staves off his possible indictment — yet, there are those who believe he may have gotten away with the heinous crime. Then, some months later, murder stalks him once again as he is accused of the strange and violent death of one of his young students, appar-

In the media ently after a kidnapping. But this time, Cort is tried, convicted, and sentenced to be executed. Can he survive all this?

Writer’s Block

Julian Padowicz ’54 (Fireship Press) In Julian Padowicz’s new humorous novel, frustrated literature professor “Kip” Kippur decides to turn his lemon of a life into lemonade by quitting his job, moving to a new community, and writing the Great American Novel. But the new writer within him and the old writing teacher aren’t on the same page, and the “G.A.N.” (a thinly disguised memoir) collapses of its own ponderous weight. Drifting rudderless in a strange community, Kip wanders into a vicious murder, a married lady’s hot tub, and an invitation to sail from Massachusetts to Florida on a sailboat of dubious seaworthiness.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight Jennifer E. Smith ’03 (Headline)

In Jennifer Smith’s latest young-adult novel, 17-year-old Hadley Sullivan should be having one of the worst days of her life.

Having missed her flight, she’s stuck at JFK airport and late to her father’s second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother whom Hadley’s never met.

Then she encounters the perfect boy in the airport’s cramped waiting area.

His name is Oliver, he’s British, and he’s sitting in her row. A long night on the plane passes in the blink of an eye, and Hadley and Oliver lose track of each other in the airport chaos upon arrival. Can fate intervene to bring them together once more? Quirks of timing play out in this romantic novel about family connections, second chances, and first loves. Set over a 24-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver’s story is about true love finding people when it’s least expected.

From Sea to Shining Sea: A Ride Across America Alan Williams ’59 (iUniverse.com)

Little did a young Alan Williams know that when he received his first bike — a fat-tire, red-andwhite Columbia — that he would one day ride a bicycle across the United States. In his narrative, Williams chronicles his two-month cycling trip from Oregon to New Hampshire, where he fulfilled a lifelong dream by dipping his bicycle wheels in the Atlantic Ocean. Williams shares the moments that led up to his decision to ride across the country and chronicles his 3,700-mile journey, which included laboring up switchbacks on mountain roads, speeding down from mountain passes, bucking headwinds across a seemingly endless prairie, and experiencing the elation of reaching the Atlantic Coast. While sharing descriptions of places of interest, photographs, and training tips, Williams also offers a glimpse into the physical and mental effort required to complete such a journey.

“I had been fantasizing about this moment for 20 years, and I was wondering how I would react. And I think the one reason it was more excitement rather than just simply satisfaction was the fact that I knew it was tied to the freedom of the Libyan people… I think the story had to end this way; it’s a little bit of poetic justice.”

“Others are a great source of extrinsic motivation.”

— Regina Conti, associate professor of psychology and expert in motiva- tion, talked to Bloomberg Businessweek about how to stop procrastinating.

“You see so many other people getting involved that you’re not going to be the one person to just sit back and do nothing.”

— Monica Hernandez ’12 commented on opportunities at Colgate in a U.S. News & World Report “road trip” to five New York colleges.

Jews Clues: You’re Doing It All Wrong (CreateSpace) by C.J. Kaplan ’91 and Mitch Blum takes a humorous look at the “seemingly arbitrary, frequently ridiculous, sometimes contradictory instructions” that have been handed down from Jewish mothers over the generations. It is filled with “clues” (smart-aleck aphorisms touching on multiple subjects), “Chai-Kus” (Jewishthemed haiku), and funny essays.

“Israel’s curious coalition of the disaffected has emerged in an economy that is enjoying higher growth in real GDP than Bahrain, Brunei, and Oman.”

Also of Note:

Apologize to the Children: Healing Child Abuse Trauma through Attachment Reconciliation (Larch Press) by Gaston E. Blom ’41 challenges the usual management and treatment approaches to child-abuse trauma.

Blom, a board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, presents a series of child narratives in order to address the necessity for our communities to change value systems dealing with child abuse and neglect.

— Brian Flynn commented to CBS News about his reaction to the killing of former Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. Brian’s brother, John Patrick Flynn ’90, died in the 1998 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, for which Qaddafi claimed responsibility eight years ago. Colgate also mourned the loss of Scott Christopher Saunders ’89 in the bombing.

— Daniel Bertrand Monk, George R. and Myra T. Cooley Professor of peace and conflict studies, and professor of geography and Middle East studies, on the Middle East Channel at foreignpolicy.com.

“For those lucky few [hedge] funds that were able to survive 2008, 2011 may end up being the year written on their tombstones.”

— Steven Simmons ’91, head of Prime Ser- vices for Maxim Group, in a FINalternatives. com op-ed. Simmons was recently named to Institutional Investor’s 2011 list of Hedge Fund Rising Stars.

News and views for the Colgate community

25

A Q&A on

Financial Aid College financial aid is a hot topic today. Whether or not you’re a parent of college-bound children worried about being able to afford their education, you probably know someone who is, or are hearing about some aspect of it in the news.

The Scene invited Gary Ross ’77, vice president and dean of admission, and David Hale ’84, vice president for finance and administration, to discuss the whys and wherefores of the financial aid process.

As well, they provide their insight into the national picture and how Colgate fits in.

Who should be applying for financial aid — is there a specific income cutoff, for example?

Ross: I think that’s a personal decision to make as a family. Applicants need to have a conversation with their parents, or the person to whom they would look for support of their college education. That is a great opportunity to gain insight into their financial picture, which for most students is shaped significantly by the financial picture of their parents.

I don’t know that there is a specific income cutoff; it really can vary. What we say as an admission office is, if you believe you will need financial support to make your college education affordable and possible, then you should apply for financial aid.

Andrew Daddio

26

scene: Winter 2012

Ross: Right — it’s not that simple. For the students admitted to our Class of 2015, financial aid was offered to students who come from backgrounds where there literally are no assets, to several families with reported incomes of $300,000 or more.

Although that is a high income level, there are situations where it is a possibility to qualify for needbased aid, and indeed it happened in four situations in that class. [See chart below.]

Hale: There’s just no way around the fact that an education in a private, residential, liberal arts college is a major investment for a family. I go back to what Gary said earlier: if folks feel that they need assistance, they should apply for aid. They find out if they qualify for aid, and what their aid package is, and then they have to make a personal financial decision as to whether or not they can afford it. Every family needs to make a decision that best fits their situation.

People often express the concern that the middle class is getting squeezed out of accessibility to college — that students who are very poor receive financial aid, and those who can afford to pay full tuition have access because of their means.

But from the income range you’re describing, it sounds like that situation may not be mirrored at Colgate?

Hale: I would echo that, and also say a little more strongly that there is no specific income cutoff. It depends not only on income, but also on resources,

Gary Ross ’77, Colgate’s admission dean since 2000

So it isn’t that simple. You can’t just say, “If you make x amount of money, you should apply for aid, and if you make more than that, don’t bother.”

are responsible for health care bills for an aging parent? What if their home is in an area where housing prices have plummeted and they bought it at the peak of the market? Facing those kinds of financial challenges, that person would probably qualify for substantial financial aid, whereas another family with that income level but a different situation could qualify for very little aid.

as well as certain other obligations the family might have. For example, we take it into account when families are paying undergraduate college costs for other children.

Ross: A few years ago, we had a discussion here on campus on that very point. There was a real disagreement over what constitutes middle class.

Someone asked one of our economics professors to help us with the question. It turns out, there is no single definition; the government has one, and various economists have others, for example.

So when I think about the middle class, I think about a wide range of incomes.

Consider an income between $100,000 and $140,000. To most of us, that sounds like a tremendous amount of money and not at all a middle-class income. But what if that person has three kids in college at the same time? What if they

How can families get an estimate of where they might fall?

Hale: There’s a net price calculator on the Colgate website where families can input their financial information. It’s not a guarantee, but is intended

Class of 2015 Average aid awards for admitted students who applied for financial aid

Income

Number who applied for aid

Number with demonstrated need

$0–19,999 49 $20–39,999 96 $40–59,999 92 $60–79,999 102 $80–99,999 111 $100–119,999 79 $120–139,999 77 $140–159,999 78 $160–179,999 60 $180–199,999 43 $200–299,999 163 $300,000 and above 92

TOTAL 1,042

46 89 87 98 105 69 61 66 41 25 49 4 740

Average aid package*

$45,470 $43,525 $44,197 $39,446 $39,004 $34,275 $30,698 $23,347 $20,178 $17,626 $13,051 $7,159

*Includes Colgate Grant, job, and loan Individual results may vary, because factors other than income (e.g., family size, number in college, and total assets) can greatly affect eligibility.

Andrew Daddio

We read so often in the news that many college students are graduating with crushing debt.

There is a lot of scrutiny on colleges for the financial burden they are putting on students.

Could you talk about Colgate’s expectations for borrowing and how that compares nationally?

David Hale ’84, Colgate’s chief financial officer since 2001

to provide a sense of the aid package that a family might qualify for.

Ross: It’s important to note that the tool is only as good as the information that is plugged in. If somebody forgets about a $75,000 stock portfolio — we have seen that happen — it could distort the information they get from the result. So people need to be careful to put in accurate numbers.

How, then, is a family’s financial aid package determined?

Hale: What Colgate and most other schools do is determine an expected contribution — what a family can afford to put toward their child’s education. The key variables are annual income and other available financial resources, such as savings and home equity. And, as I mentioned earlier, having siblings who are attending college also can play a role.

And once Colgate determines the level of need, that’s the figure used to calculate the aid package, correct?

Ross: Yes, that is correct. And, since students must reapply for aid each year, we will continue to meet the level of their need, determined for that year.

So it’s an individual-by-individual determination?

Hale: It is. Just as the admission office does in determining whether to admit a student, the financial aid office staff reads every application for financial aid and assesses the expected family contribution on a family-by-family basis.

Once you determine the family contribution, how is the rest of a financial aid package structured to address what we call the “need” in meeting the total cost?

Hale: Colgate’s typical package includes a grant, a campus job, and a loan.

Hale: We try to provide as generous a package as we possibly can, so we meet the vast majority of need through grant dollars. While many of our wealthier peers actually have a no-loan policy, we can’t afford that, but we work to keep our loans quite low. In fact, the average debt load for the Class of 2010 is about $13,500. In comparison, the national average for seniors who graduated in 2010 is $25,250, as reported by the Institute for College Access and Success’s Project on Student Debt.

Ross: We want a student’s education to be affordable. I think — and I suspect the vast majority of people who are receiving financial aid would agree — that it’s appropriate to ask for students to contribute in some way to the cost of their education, but that contribution should not be so crippling as to hamper them for, perhaps, the first half of their lives after Colgate. I sometimes get frustrated because there are schools out there that call themselves need-blind, and if we followed their practices, we could call ourselves need-blind, too. What they do is graduate their students with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and just give them a meager amount of financial aid in the form of a grant. Instead, Colgate has had a tradition of graduating people with an affordable, manageable level of loans.

Can you explain what you mean by need-blind?

Ross: As my colleague in the financial aid office, Marcelle Tyburski, often reminds me, need-blind is not a financial aid term; it’s an admission term.

Need-blind refers to the process of application review. On the common application for admission

2011–12 Colgate grant recipients by income range

Family Number of

income aided students $0–19,999 61 $20–39,999 112 $40–59,999 128 $60–79,999 127 $80–99,999 117 $100–119,999 97 $120–139,999 77 $140–159,999 81 $160–179,999 33 $180–199,999 30 $200,000+ 33 As of fall 2011

to Colgate, there’s a box to check: Do you wish to be considered for financial aid? If you check ‘yes’ and demonstrate financial need, that application will be viewed with consideration given to the fact that you are a financial aid candidate. In a need-blind world, no attention is given to whether or not students are aid candidates when considering them for admission.

So if someone applies for aid, will it hurt them in the application process?

Ross: There are many students we consider for admission for whom their financial need would never become a factor because they’re so highly competitive within our pool. That said, once we confirm the applicants who are legitimate financial aid candidates, for more than a few students, we have to factor their financial need into our consideration for admission.

Colgate’s admission policy is what we call ‘need aware’ — because we will not admit a student unless we can meet their full need.

Does applying early decision give someone an advantage in terms of getting aid?

Ross: In terms of the admission process, we give people a slight advantage for applying early decision — but it does not affect their aid award. Someone admitted early decision who demonstrates a financial need will receive the same aid package that they would receive as a regular decision candidate.

It doesn’t happen at many places, but I will say one of the most despicable practices in the higher education world takes place when colleges make a determination that, because somebody applies early decision, they’re going to give them less than they might otherwise qualify for as a regular-decision candidate.

That does not happen here at Colgate.

Why doesn’t Colgate offer academic merit aid, beyond a family’s need, to attract more highachieving students?

Ross: An academic merit aid package will not attract a more highly achieving student than the compelling students in our applicant pool who have demonstrated need and wind up on what has been referred to as “the cutting-room floor” because we cannot afford to admit them. Some students might choose to not attend Colgate because they’re not receiving a merit aid package but, in my judgment, we shouldn’t try to fix that problem until we have fixed the problem that involves providing financial access to equally, if not more, compelling applicants.

Does Colgate offer other types of scholarships?

Hale: Through our commitment to compete in Division I athletics with student-athletes who are representative of the student body as a whole, Colgate does offer athletics scholarships in a limited number of sports. These enable our coaches to attract students who are strong both on the field and in the classroom.

Ross: Since instituting athletic scholarships back in 2003, a review done by a faculty committee chaired

by Professor Doug Johnson in 2009 showed that

News and views for the Colgate community

27

the overall academic profile of Colgate students increased, and our student-athletes are third in the nation in NCAA graduation rates.

What are the biggest misperceptions about financial aid?

Hale: It’s important to remember that there are more than 4,500 U.S. colleges and universities — large public universities, private colleges, two-year colleges, four-year colleges — including about 1,500 for-profit schools. Within those categories are schools that are stronger financially, and those that are weaker. As a result, financial aid is approached in many different ways that are often unique to a particular college’s situation. The press tends to lump all 4,500 schools together and say, this is what’s going on, and this is how a family should address financial aid. But there are so many differences in how schools might approach a single student that folks should not take one anecdote from one college and transpose that to think, “This is how I will be treated across the board.”

Ross: What an important point. I saw a figure recently that small private liberal arts colleges are attracting about 6 percent of college-bound students each year. Even within the small-college world, we don’t all have the same financial aid practices, but once you add in for-profit institutions and large public institutions, you can’t imagine how many different financial aid policies and practices there are.

It sounds like the important thing is for families to ask the same questions everywhere they’re looking, to get a better understanding of how each institution will approach their situation?

Hale: Right. If someone is looking at all similar types of schools, that will narrow the range of responses they might get. But, as Gary points out, many schools similar to Colgate may approach aid quite differently. For example, one of the things we are proud of is that we don’t “gap” students — some schools come up with an expected family contribution and say, “we can’t meet your full need, but we’re willing to give you a portion of that need. And if you can figure out how to make up the difference, you can come here.” Colgate does not follow this practice.

We’ve heard stories of students who receive aid for their first year, but then their package gets reduced the next year. Does that ever happen at Colgate?

Hale: Our commitment is to meet the full demonstrated need, which gets recalculated every year. If a family’s financial situation changes for the worse, we are fully committed to respond to that. But, if in subsequent years more resources become available to the family, the package will be reduced; the most common instance is when a sibling graduates from another institution. So, it’s an individual-by-individual and a year-by-year decision.

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scene: Winter 2012

Ross: I also think it’s a great reflection on the university’s practices and sound financial management that, while our country has been going through some of the toughest economic times in history, Colgate has never entertained the notion of reducing students’ financial aid packages, even when the economic crisis was at its peak.

that, and we’ve also seen our average financial aid package increase over time, as have our peer schools.

On the flip side, where there’s a significant amount of home equity, we recognize that not all of it can be directed toward a child’s education, so we cap home equity at two times the family’s income when considering a financial aid application.

Speaking of the economic crisis, the mortgage and housing debacle has loomed large. As you mentioned earlier, one of the factors in determining need is home equity. Many people are worried about the value of their homes. Some have been greatly reduced; others have homes whose values have skyrocketed, while their incomes do not reflect that value. Could you explain how home equity factors into determination of a financial aid package?

Could you explain how outside awards — for example, foundation scholarships — are taken into account in calculating a Colgate financial aid package, and why it’s handled that way?

Hale: Home equity is considered an asset that goes into the calculation to determine expected family contribution. If equity in the home has decreased, that is going to reduce the expected family contribution, which would indicate a greater need that Colgate would meet. We certainly have experienced

What about international students — can they apply for aid?

Class of 2015 financial profile (enrolled students) 2011–12 Cost of attendance Tuition $42,625 Student activities fee $295 Room $5,140 Meals $5,510 Combined student charges $53,570 Est. personal expenses/books $2,000 Incidental fees beyond total cost Transcript (one-time) $50 Health insurance $669 (for those not covered by a family plan) Average award for students receiving financial aid Colgate Grant Student loan Campus job Total award Percentage of class receiving financial aid

$35,175 $2,625 $2,600 $40,400 40%

Admitted students with demonstrated need met in full 100% Average contribution for students receiving aid Student $1,400 Parent $13,770 Total family contribution $15,170

Hale: This is one area where every school’s got a different policy. We do count the award as an additional resource; however, we do not reduce the grant the student receives, but rather apply that outside award to reduce either the job and/or loan component.

Hale: The same rules apply. We come up with an expected contribution and offer packages for international students just as we do with domestic students.

What should parents be looking at or thinking about in terms of financing college costs?

Hale: They vary by state, but there are very good state and private college savings programs called 529 plans, which are good savings vehicles that folks should investigate because there are some tax benefits associated with them. We know that families also utilize PLUS loans, which are federal parent loans, and some use home equity lines of credit (we call them HELOCs). In addition, many schools, including Colgate, offer a monthly payment plan.

How many students receive financial aid from Colgate today?

Ross: About 40 percent of our students receive financial support from Colgate. I tip my hat to Dave Hale and the business and finance side of the institution; that percentage has been steadily increasing.

Even in the epicenter of the economic meltdown, when colleges and universities were having massive layoffs, Colgate did not, and when colleges and universities were having massive cutbacks in financial aid, Colgate actually added financial aid dollars.

How much does Colgate spend on financial aid each year?

Hale: In this current academic year, approximately $42 million is providing aid for just under 1,200 students. In recent years, we have increased not only the size of individual aid packages, but also the number of students we aid.

What’s the university’s philosophy behind increasing the number of aided students each year?

Hale: We view every additional financial aid package we can offer in an incoming class as a victory.

How has that been going?

Hale: Coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, while we had to reduce expenditures overall, one place we didn’t reduce — and in fact, as we mentioned earlier, increased — was financial aid. But, in addition to reducing expenditures elsewhere, much of the increase in the number of students we’ve been able to offer financial aid to has to do with the success that President Jeffrey Herbst and the advancement staff have had in raising financial aid dollars during the Passion for the Climb campaign.

Can you provide a sense of where things stand on that front?

Hale: Originally, we were hoping to raise $87.5 million in commitments for financial aid, and we exceeded that. And so, in the final year of the campaign, Colgate set an additional goal of $40 million. It appears that we’re well on our way to achieving that goal as well. It’s important to point out that some of these are future commitments through planned gifts and bequest intentions, so not all of those dollars have yet been received. But we have been able to immediately put spendable gifts we have received to work to aid more students.

Colgate did admit one class need-blind, the Class of 2006. Aside from learning that the university couldn’t afford to continue the practice, was there anything else valuable that was learned in that experiment?

Hale: Financially, it did inform us of the incremental cost to fully pursue need-blind admissions at Colgate.

Ross: I think the Class of 2006 is very proud of the distinction of being need-blind, and they are an outstanding class. A couple of years ago, I received a letter from a member of that class, who told me why he thought their class was so distinctive. He described to me some of the friends and relationships with members of his class who were very different from himself. It was very moving to read how this one student reflected upon his experience and tied that into what he considered to be the need-blind experience that he was able to avail himself of while a Colgate student.

How would becoming need-blind change the student body?

Ross: It would be a dramatic step for Colgate. Dave mentioned that one of our goals is to be a place that has more socioeconomic diversity, and being needblind would enable us to achieve that goal. Also, if one looks at the students whom we are not able to admit because of their financial need, these are highachieving students who have made an impact on their schools, their families, and their communities — and yet, they were not the very strongest in our application pool, so they were not among those selected for admission with financial aid. Those are the most difficult decisions that we make in admission.

We want Colgate to be accessible for all competitive students, regardless of their need.

We’ve been very fortunate, as a part of the current campaign, to receive some terrific donations in support of financial aid. But, as we discussed before, we’re not need-blind. We can’t expect to be needblind in the near future, but thank goodness for many alumni and friends of Colgate who have made financial aid a top priority, because every donation that comes in brings us that much closer to a day when Colgate will become a need-blind institution.

Dave, can you give us a sense of how close are we?

What would it take, in today’s dollars?

Hale: We think we would need to aid about 75 — about 10 percent — more students within each incoming classs, which would mean that approximately 50 percent of each incoming class would receive financial aid. That translates into approximately $2.5 million of incremental costs per class, or $10 million when fully rolled out for four classes. To fully endow a need-blind admission policy tomorrow, we would need an additional $200 million in endowment.

That would be in addition to meeting the current campaign’s final goal?

Hale: Right. So on the one hand, it still is a very aspirational objective. On the other hand, again, we’re trying to chip away. Colgate has increased the number of financial aid recipients per incoming class by 30 throughout the past decade, so we’re making real progress.

Does not being need-blind put Colgate at a competitive disadvantage?

Ross: While I fervently believe that Colgate is already a part of the collection of top colleges and universities, there’s no question that, among the most highly regarded colleges and universities, most are needblind.

Hale: There is no question that there would be a competitive benefit for Colgate. That said, ultimately, we are driven by trying to make Colgate as accessible as possible, and that’s really the motivation.

— Rebecca Costello

Andrew Daddio

And we are really focused on continuing to do that. There are two points. One is, we would like to increase diversity of all types in the student body, including socioeconomic diversity, so that more students from a broader range of backgrounds, including those from the middle class, can afford to attend Colgate.

Second, right now, for our financial model to work, in each incoming class we need about 60 percent of our students to come from families who can meet the full price of attending Colgate. We need to lessen our reliance on that tuition income, slowly but surely over time, and instead build more endowment to draw from as a long-term financial strategy for the university.

Tyburski’s tips: questions to ask Are you navigating the college financial aid process?

Marcelle Tyburski, Colgate’s director of financial aid since 1993, shares her advice on the questions families should ask.

What forms do you require, and what are the deadlines for applying for financial aid?

What is the complete cost of a year at your institution, including tuition, fees, room, food, books, and average personal expenses?

What is the typical composition of a first-year financial aid package? Will you meet our full need, or will there be a gap?

Are PLUS (parent) loans included as part of an aid package?

How many hours a week is a typical work-study award each year? (10–12 hours/week is reasonable) Are non-custodial parents required to submit financial information as well?

How will my financial aid package be adjusted if I receive any outside awards?

What happens to the financial aid package after the first year? Will any increase in school costs be covered by the institution, or the family?

What are your scholarship/grant policies; for example, do scholarships depend on maintaining a specific GPA? Is campus housing available for all four years?

For more information on these topics, check out these online resources: • www.colgate.edu/admission/financialaid: FAQs, Net Price Calculator, downloadable Financial Aid and Financing Options brochure, and more

• youtube.com/cuatchannel13: archived webinar about the financial aid process with Tyburski and admission deans Karen Giannino and Lynn Holcomb

News and views for the Colgate community

29

Project 24/7: Student Lens

Photography by Ashlee Eve ’14, Janna Minehart ’13, and Duy Trinh ’14

During one week in October, three students joined three professional photographers in an intense undertaking for an admission marketing project.

The assignment: give prospective students a clear picture of students’ lives at Colgate — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While helping the next generation learn about the Colgate experience, they learned a thing or two themselves. These

Duy Trinh

Ashlee Eve

students photographing students can tell.

Ashlee Eve

30

scene: Winter 2012

Janna Minehart

images tell stories of authentic moments, as only

Janna Minehart

“It was pretty challenging to get some of the general student-life shots. I definitely got sideways glances when I was taking photos of people socializing in the Coop or eating at Frank. Those were also some of the most fun to do because I felt like I was capturing what it is like to be at Colgate. The day-to-day things like hanging out with friends, studying in the library, or getting coffee at the Barge are what makes up that indefinable ‘Colgate experience.’” – Janna Minehart ’13

Janna Minehart

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31

Duy Trinh Ashlee Eve Duy Trinh

“I didn’t realize how much really goes on at Colgate, even within a given day. There were so many options for what to shoot each day, in addition to simply getting candid shots.

Between dance practices, classes, extracurricular events, lectures, sports games, and music groups, I realized how vast the interests of Colgate students are and how many opportunities we have to get involved.” – Ashlee Eve ’14

32

scene: Winter 2012

Ashlee Eve Ashlee Eve

“I stumbled upon the guys playing Frisbee right under this fall’s very first snow while walking up the hill for another photo shoot — feeling miserable, of course, because all of a sudden it turned freezing cold. Suddenly, I noticed these two guys from afar, playing Frisbee, running around and shouting. Such a scene was not only beautiful in an aesthetic sense (two dark dots in a sea of white), but also very heartwarming.

That random shoot totally made my day.”

– Duy Trinh ’14

Duy Trinh

Duy Trinh

News and views for the Colgate community

33

“I think the whole project sharpened my sense of creativity. As my photo count went to hundreds and then thousands in just a few days, I began to run out of ideas for perspectives and arrangements. That, in turn, forced me to think a lot harder, to try walking on unconventional paths, and come up with new ideas. I can say with confidence that my post-24/7 photos look a lot more original and well done

Duy Trinh

than those I took before that week!”

“I enjoyed the challenge of creating an interesting composition and telling a story in situations that are not always ideal for photographs.

Sometimes you are lucky with the light you find, but oftentimes you are given dark, crowded rooms, and it takes a lot of creativity and technical know-how to produce a useable shot.”

– Janna Minehart ’13

34

scene: Winter 2012

Janna Minehart

Janna Minehart

– Duy Trinh ’14

Ashlee Eve (2)

“I love performance photography — there’s something about the stage lighting, the contrast between light and dark, and the simplicity of the images because of the black backdrop that I have always found particularly aesthetic.” – Ashlee Eve ’14 News and views for the Colgate community

35

FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE WRITTEN BY ALETA MAYNE

Two Colgate alumni, on opposite ends of the country, work in very different ways to free a man from death row after 18 years and 78 days of imprisonment in Arkansas.

Many helped save Damien Echols’s life, but Joe Berlinger ’83 and Dennis Riordan ’70 played crucial roles in his liberty.

Filmmakers Joe Berlinger ’83 and Bruce Sinofsky were in a mixing studio in Manhattan on August 16, 2011, putting the finishing touches on their documentary Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory when they got a phone call that would change the film — and much more. They dropped what they were doing, grabbed their cameras, and flew to Arkansas.

Attorney Dennis Riordan ’70 was in his San Francisco law office when he received a similar call, informing him of a life-changing development in his client’s case. Later in the week, Riordan would also head to Arkansas.

Through separate channels, Berlinger and Riordan had been working for years to save the life of the same man: Damien Echols, a death row inmate who had 36

scene: Winter 2012

been imprisoned for more than 18 years. Echols was convicted in 1994 of brutally murdering three 8-yearold boys in West Memphis, Ark. He was considered the ringleader; also convicted were Echols’s best friend, Jason Baldwin, and their acquaintance Jessie Misskelley.

Then teenagers, they were dubbed “the West Memphis Three” during the media swell that ensued.

Fade to black

May 5, 1993, was the last day second-graders Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were seen alive. Neighbors in their hometown of West Memphis recalled seeing the three Cub Scouts riding their bikes that evening. The next day, their naked bodies were found in a shallow, muddy creek in a patch of woods called Robin Hood Hills.

As the families and city were reeling over the crime, local authorities hurried to compile a list of possible suspects. Echols, an 18-year-old high school dropout, rose to the top. In the past, Echols had been arrested for vandalism and burglary; he also had spent several months in an Arkansas mental institution, where he was diagnosed as depressed and suicidal. Because of his penchant for wearing all black, being a loner, and listening to heavy-metal music, rumors about the teenager being a Satanist had always abounded. That combined history made Echols a prime suspect in the eyes of the West Memphis Police Department. Over the next month, Echols was brought in for questioning on several occasions; he claimed innocence each time.

Like Echols, Baldwin came from an impoverished background. At 16, Baldwin was reportedly a bright, dedicated student, but he also had a record — for shoplifting and vandalism. His close friendship with Echols, forged over shared interests in music and art, made him a person of interest to the police.

Almost a month after the murders, two police officers picked up Misskelley because he was rumored to be friends with Echols and Baldwin. Misskelley was a 17-year-old high school dropout, with an IQ of 72 (some considered him mentally challenged). That day, the officers interrogated him, without counsel or family members present, for 12 hours. In the last 45 minutes — the only portion of the interrogation that police said they recorded — Misskelley implicated Echols and Baldwin in the crime, and confessed to holding one of the boys in the woods until Echols could get to him.

Following Misskelley’s statement, he was arrested and charged with one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Echols and Baldwin were also arrested, and they were each charged with three counts of capital murder.

Seeing past Satanic panic

Soon after the arrests, Berlinger received a brief New York Times article about the case from HBO’s president of documentary films, Sheila Nevins. She was an admirer of his and Sinofsky’s 1992 movie Brother’s Keeper, a documentary based on a murder case in Munnsville, N.Y.

Filmmakers Bruce Sinofsky (left) and Joe Berlinger ’83 (right) visit Damien Echols (middle) on Arkansas death row. Photo by Bob Richman

“From the initial press reports, it seemed like a pretty open-and-shut case about guilty teenagers,” Berlinger recalled. He and Sinofsky talked to HBO regarding “making a fi lm about disaffected youth — kids killing kids.”

The fi rst outside media representatives to arrive in West Memphis, Berlinger and Sinofsky “embedded [themselves] in the community” and began fi lming the fi rst of what would become three documentaries, which they titled Paradise Lost. To establish rapport with the people involved in the case, the fi lmmakers distributed copies of Brother’s Keeper. They even encouraged the West Memphis judge to contact the Munnsville judge who had presided over the case in that fi lm, “to make sure that we were good guys,” Berlinger said. Their efforts paid off. The fi lmmakers gained access to behind-the-scenes events, which would much later prove to be naïve on the part of — and disadvantageous for — the local prosecutors.

After a few months of fi lming, looking at what Berlinger called the “fl imsy evidence,” and interviewing the three indicted teenagers, the fi lmmakers’ initial impressions of the case — and the storyline of the documentary — changed directions. “Once we interviewed them, we thought, there’s no way these kids could have done what they’re accused of; particularly Jason Baldwin, a straightforward, intelligent, shy kid, with little arms and little wrists who couldn’t have repeatedly stabbed someone to death, as the prosecution claimed. And the same thing with Echols; I saw a guy who was really smart, artistic, and different from the typical West Memphis high school kid, but not a killer.” Berlinger and Sinofsky called HBO and told Nevins: “This is not a fi lm about bad guys. This is a fi lm about three kids who are being falsely charged with a crime.”

But, the Arkansas media was taking an entirely different slant. At the time, “Satanic panic” was rampant in the United States, and the local media picked up on the alleged cult angle to the crime and ran with it, fanning the fl ames. With the newspapers going so far as to publish Misskelley’s confession, the chances of the West Memphis Three receiving a fair trial were dwindling.

11 out of 10

Under a legal restriction called the Bruton rule, Misskelley’s confession could not be used in the trial against Echols and Baldwin unless he testifi ed against them. But Misskelley refused, so he was tried separately. As part of his trial, Misskelley’s defense team outlined the problems with what they called a false confession, given that details in his account changed throughout the questioning. In the recording played during the trial, Misskelley initially said that the three victims had been seized off their bikes on their way to school — but all three attended classes all day. Through leading questions from the offi cers, Misskelley changed the time of the crime on eight occasions and eventually agreed that it happened in the evening. And despite urging from his interrogators, Misskelley could not describe how the victims had been hog tied with their shoelaces; he also claimed that one of the boys had been choked, which was untrue. The other details he provided were public information that could have come from anyone, his lawyers contended. The problematic confession and lack of evidence notwithstanding, Misskelley was convicted and sentenced to life plus 40 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the trial for Echols and Baldwin began. Over the next month and a half, the prosecution focused heavily on a devil-worshiping theory. They introduced Echols’s writings, drawings, and books about the Wiccan religion, and brought in someone to testify on the occult. In addition, two teenage girls testifi ed that they overheard Echols at a softball game bragging about committing the murders. Divers discovered a knife in the lake behind Baldwin’s house months after the crime, and that was also submitted as evidence.

Coloring public opinion from the outset, during a press conference after the arrests, Police Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell told the media that the strength of the case against them was an 11 out of 10. The defense teams were facing an uphill battle, between meager funding for

Steve Branch Age 8

investigatory work and the prejudicial publicity swirling around the case.

In court, the defense team had to place Echols on the stand so that he could account for his whereabouts that evening, but Berlinger believed that it may have also hurt his case. After spending numerous hours fi lming the teen, the fi lmmaker observed that Echols “had a chip on his shoulder, and he was enjoying the negative attention. Damien was an alienated, narcis- sistic kid, and was probably his own worst enemy.”

On the stand, Echols exhibited an apathetic air and admitted to his lawyers afterward that he was only half listening. His attitude — as well as Baldwin's — during the trial can be chalked up to the teens' naiveté that they might actually be found guilty.

Echols and Baldwin were forced to accept a new reality when they were convicted on March 18, 1994.

Echols was sentenced to death by lethal injection; Baldwin received a life sentence without parole.

“The prosecutors convicted Echols of checking certain suspicious books out of the public library, and copying off dark passages from the likes of William Shakespeare. God help him if he ever discovered Poe,” wrote columnist Bob Lancaster in the Arkansas Times.

“And yet this vague proposition of the murders as an expression of an ignorant boy’s conception of the demands of demonology was the state’s entire case.

That’s all we had. And an obliging jury — and a judge as dedicated to bringing forth convictions as he was to looking good — called it enough.”

“These kids clearly got railroaded,” Berlinger said, noting that his documentary became “a clear indictment of the system and a testament to these kids needing a new trial.”

Igniting a movement

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills was released, fi rst at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and later that year on HBO, to great acclaim — including Emmy and Peabody awards. Although all of the positive reviews were satisfying from a professional standpoint, Berlinger never forgot the fact that, while he was accepting accolades, the three young men had been in jail for several years. “There was no action happening, and it really haunted me,” he said. Berlinger’s fi rst child was born during the making of the fi lm, so with each passing phase of his daughter’s life — fi rst steps, starting kindergarten, birthday parties — he was reminded of the West Memphis Three “rotting in prison,” he said.

The fi lmmaker was frustrated that the documentary “never got off the entertainment pages and onto the news pages.” But, although Paradise Lost hadn’t yet made an impact on the legal proceedings,

Michael Moore Age 8

Christopher Byers Age 8

News and views for the Colgate community

37

it lit a fi re under its viewers that ignited a movement.

In one major initiative, a group in California started the Free the West Memphis Three Support Fund, a website to provide information to the public as well as raise funds for the convicted men's legal fees.

In addition to the everyday citizens who were inspired to offer support, a number of celebrities got involved, starting with the band Metallica. As Berlinger was fi nalizing Paradise Lost, he sent the band a rough cut and asked if he could incorporate their music. The heavy-metal band was one of the teens’ favorites — a reason why they were considered deviant. In fact, the prosecutors introduced Metallica song lyrics into the trial as evidence that the teens Despite what defense attorneys called a “false confession,” Jessie Misskelley was sentenced to life plus 40 years in prison.

“... their musical tastes, what they read, what they wrote, and their beliefs formed the bulk of the ‘evidence.’ And that’s just wrong.” were Satanists. “That was A.) morally wrong, and B.) absurd because Metallica lyrics have nothing to do with devil worshiping,” Berlinger said. The fi lmmaker explained to the band that “heavy metal is on trial as much as the West Memphis Three, because their musical tastes, what they read, what they wrote, and their beliefs formed the bulk of the ‘evidence.’ And that’s just wrong.” Metallica had a policy of never licensing their music to a fi lm, but, coincidentally, they were fans of Brother’s Keeper. Their manager immediately agreed to let the fi lmmakers use the band’s music — for free — sparking a longtime friendship that led to Berlinger and Sinofsky’s 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.

Other musicians and celebrities began to advocate for and offer fi nancial support to the West 38

scene: Winter 2012

Memphis Three after seeing the fi lm — many because they identifi ed with them. “I immediately related to Damien and what he went through growing up,” actor Johnny Depp told CBS’s 48 Hours. “I can remember being looked upon as a freak, or different, because I didn’t dress like everybody else, so I can empathize with being judged by how you look as opposed to who you are,” added the actor, who grew up in a small town in Kentucky.

Additional stars who joined the cause include musicians Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, and Patti Smith; Peter Jackson and his wife, Fran Walsh (who created The Lord of the Rings movies together); and actress Winona Ryder.

Inarguably, the strongest proponent for the West Memphis Three has been a woman named Lorri Davis.

The very night the Brooklyn-based architect saw the fi lm, she wrote to Echols in prison. He wrote back, and through letters (sometimes two in one day), their relationship blossomed. Five months after her fi rst letter, Davis fl ew to Arkansas to meet Echols in person at the prison. Over time, they fell in love, and she moved to Little Rock to be closer to him. In December 1999, the couple was married in the prison visiting room — the fi rst time they were together without a glass partition separating them. Davis became Echols’s partner not only in life, but also in managing his legal battle, hiring lawyers and top investigators.

Berlinger, meanwhile, was inundated with calls from people who wanted to help. He knew that he had to “continue to shine the spotlight on the case. I fervently believed they were innocent,” Berlinger said.

“The second fi lm, for me, was not about fi lmmaking. It was about advocacy.” Paradise Lost 2: Revelations was released in 2000, and it focused on “the fl awed appeals process and a now-discarded theory about how the killings took place.” The sequel accomplished the fi lmmakers’ goal of maintaining interest in the case.

The last hope

Sitting in his San Francisco law offi ce one day in December 2003, Dennis Riordan received a call. It was Davis, hoping Riordan would take on her husband’s case. The attorney had a vague recollection of reading a Time magazine article about it 10 years earlier, but he hadn’t followed the case since. Davis told him that several appeals and the traditional state writ of habeas corpus had both been lost. Their state court challenges to Echols’s convictions were concluding soon, so the case was going to federal court. Davis was looking for a lawyer to fi le a writ of habeas corpus asking the federal court to review the state proceedings. Riordan was recommended to her because “federal habeas corpus is a fairly arcane practice” in which he has a lot of experience, he explained. Also, the attorney has built a reputation as a leading criminal appellate lawyer, particularly because of the number of high-profi le cases on which he’s worked.

Riordan began gaining experience with bigleague cases as a student at New York University law school when he worked on the defense of inmates who took part in the 1971 Attica State Prison uprising.

A few years later, he was a research lawyer and then took over the appeal for Johnny Spain, a notorious Black Panther involved in that situation. That appeal

followed the longest-running trial in California at the time, so when Riordan won the case 13 years later, he had become an appellate specialist.

His other well-known clients include music mogul Phil Spector (convicted of shooting an actress in 2003). Recently, Riordan headed the appellate team challenging the obstruction of justice conviction of former San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds.

“In layman’s terms, he is the last hope,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Riordan in its 2003 article “Meet the Top 10 Lawyers.” And in the Echols case, Riordan became, yet again, the last hope.

His fi rst reaction to Davis’s call for help was, “I can’t possibly do this.” Riordan’s initial hesitation stemmed from Davis’s insistence that the claim in the case was one of innocence. “That’s rarely the claim in a death case because prosecutors generally will only fi le death charges if they’re 100 percent certain they will get a conviction,” he explained. Riordan’s reluctance was compounded when he learned that a lot of factual investigation was needed to establish Echols's innocence. “We’re a small fi rm in San Francisco,” Riordan said, “and she was talking about mounting a major investigative effort in Arkansas — for an impoverished defendant.”

After Davis convinced Riordan that she had the ability to raise funds for and coordinate the investigatory work, he agreed to at least look into the case. Coincidentally, the lead lawyers for the other two defendants were San Francisco attorneys whom Riordan knew, so he was able to get up to speed easily.

He also watched the two Paradise Lost documentaries (not yet knowing that one of the fi lmmakers is a fellow Colgate alumnus). The more he learned, Riordan said, the more he realized that, “much to my amazement, there wasn’t a single piece of credible evidence that tied these defendants to these horrible murders.”

But, still, Riordan wanted to satisfy his conscience that Echols was innocent before formally agreeing to take the case. His fi rst time meeting Echols in prison, in May 2004, sealed the deal. “It was a sense I had when I met him and developed a relationship with him,” Riordan said. Echols also made an immediate impression on Riordan because he insisted that, if DNA testing were done, there would be no evidence tying him, Baldwin, or Misskelley to the murders.

Getting involved in the case “very late in the game,” Riordan said, he and his law partner, Don Horgan, knew that the odds were stacked against them. “Everything brought on behalf of these defendants had been lost, even though they were very substantial claims.” On top of those defeats, the case was facing what Riordan called “uniform hostility from the public and the courts in Arkansas.”

Riordan and Horgan dug in and started working toward the October deadline to submit the writ of habeas corpus. During that time, they unearthed a major development: collaborating with Baldwin’s lawyers, they learned of misconduct by the jury foreman. Riordan had enough experience with jury misconduct issues throughout his career that he could smell it almost as soon as he signed on to the case.

The tipoff, Riordan explained, was that Misskelley’s confession was “publicized all over the newspapers,” so he suspected that, although it was inadmissible

in Echols and Baldwin’s trial, Misskelley’s confession had been discussed by the jury. Riordan’s hunch was confi rmed when he learned that Baldwin’s lawyers found a jury member’s notes about the confession, which were based on charts created by the foreman.

The foreman refused to talk to the lawyers at fi rst but, “his ego took over, and he admitted that he had [discussed the confession],” Riordan said. It would take another few years, however, to uncover the full extent of the foreman’s malfeasance.

Riordan and his team began fi ring off ammunition simultaneously in several different directions. Based on the evidence of juror misconduct, they fi led a new case in state court. They also fi led the writ of habeas corpus for the federal case. Additionally, Arkansas, like many other states, had recently enacted a new form of judicial action based on DNA evidence. Because of this new statute, “there were exonerations around the country, demonstrating that people had been convicted on false evidence that could be later refuted

by DNA,” Riordan explained. “We were seeking to have one of these various actions result in a judicial order for a new trial, either on the federal level, through the new state writ we had fi led, or the DNA action.”

As Riordan and Horgan worked on the legal aspects, a team of prominent investigators — hired by Davis and largely paid for by celebrity backers — were probing the evidence in West Memphis. Samples from the crime scene were tested at a facility chosen by the prosecution in order to show fairness: Bode Technology Group laboratories in Virginia. In late 2005, Bode’s reports verifi ed what Echols had maintained all along: there was no link from any of the defendants’ DNA to the victims, or to the crime scene.

The federal court decided to stay its hand until the state proceedings were over, and the Arkansas Supreme Court rejected the request for a new trial based on the claim of juror misconduct. That left the burden on the DNA action, which was slowly moving forward.

To garner support in the legal community and the public, Riordan began delivering presentations on the case. Appearances at New York University’s law school and the New York City Bar Association were the fi rst of many lectures he gave throughout the United States over the years.

Colgate brothers

One of the investigative experts hired by Davis was John Douglas, the famous former FBI special agent who pioneered criminal profi ling (he was portrayed in the movie The Silence of the Lambs). Douglas was brought onto the West Memphis Three case to do a “blind profi le” of who committed the crime, considering the forensic evidence, victimology, photographs, and other documents from the police fi le.

Through Douglas, another Colgate alumnus entered the picture: entertainment lawyer Steven Mark ’69. Because he is Mark’s client, Douglas consulted him before taking the assignment. When Mark heard that Riordan was on the case, he wondered if it was the same Dennis Riordan who had been his Delta Upsilon brother and good friend at Colgate. He was.

Mark’s role was to examine all of the documents before giving them to Douglas so that Douglas wouldn’t receive any biased information that might

Actor Johnny Depp speaks at the Voices for Justice rally held to advocate for the West Memphis Three in August 2010. Photo by Brian Chilson Damien Echols’s wife, Lorri Davis (left), and Natalie Maines of the band the Dixie Chicks stand in front of a two-block-long banner composed of postcards from West Memphis Three supporters. Photo by Brian Chilson

infl uence the blind profi le. “John got involved on the basis that he would render a report saying whether or not these guys could have committed the crime,” Mark explained. “I needed to be the wall between John and whatever evidence they gave him, so that he wouldn’t prejudge the situation.”

That would have been the end of Mark’s role but, like many others, the more he found out, the more fascinated he became. “I watched all ten DVDs of the trial, and any law student would have turned pale about the way this trial transpired,” Mark said. “It was just awful.”

Mark stayed in touch with fi lmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who were key players in the investigatory work on behalf of Echols. Although Mark specializes in entertainment law, his continued involvement “was just like adding another brain to the process,” he explained, and he offered his services as a researcher pro bono.

Deo ac veritati

The efforts of Colgate’s three alumni working on the case fi nally dovetailed during a November 2007 seminar and press conference at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law. Organized by Riordan’s team, the event was the fi rst time that all of the new fi ndings would be made public. “We are here today to present the evidence that no reasonable juror would convict Echols based on what we know today,” Riordan told the audience.

Riordan showed clips from Berlinger’s fi rst Paradise Lost documentary, not only to provide background, but also to demonstrate the weakness of the prosecution’s case. One critical scene, taking place before Echols and Baldwin’s trial, shows the prosecutors admitting to the victims’ families that they didn’t have a solid enough case without Misskelley’s testimony. “It’s a very revealing scene,” Berlinger recalled.

That scene was not only telling of how the fi rst trial was handled, but it also pointed out the contrast in how differently the new attorneys and judges interacted with the fi lmmakers. “From a lawyer’s point of view, the access the prosecutors and defense gave [the fi lmmakers] in the fi rst movie was a scandal, and ridiculous,” Riordan refl ected. “But that’s not Joe’s fault — he was making the best movie he could.”

Thus, Riordan prioritized the best interest of his client and didn’t permit Berlinger to fi lm certain events.

Also, because of the attention Paradise Lost had brought to the case, the courts were more careful with what they allowed, and the HBO cameras were barred from appeals hearings.

Berlinger and Sinofsky had begun shooting the third fi lm in their series in 2004. Riordan is shown throughout the documentary, but it took several years into fi lming before he and Berlinger realized that they had walked the same paths as college students in Hamilton, N.Y. One day, while Berlinger was fi lming an interview in Riordan’s offi ce, the Colgate connection was — so fi ttingly — revealed. The Colgate seal with the university’s motto, “Deo ac veritati” (God and truth), was peeking out from a piece of mail on Riordan’s desk, and it caught Berlinger’s eye, triggering a conversation about their alma mater.

Although there were stretches of time when there wasn’t a lot to fi lm, Berlinger said, he and his partner believed that “we’ve got to keep telling this story.” They shot bits and pieces over the years, knowing that the movie couldn’t be released until there were some major developments. Starting with that press conference, the tides would turn.

Riordan’s motivation for calling the press conference was to show, outside of court, all of the progress that had been made. Despite all of the major breakthroughs, the DNA testing was still pending in state court, and Echols was wasting away on death row. “We had to give everyone a sense that we had made a quantum leap,” Riordan said.

Presenting their fi ndings were four prominent investigators: Douglas, and leading experts in the fi elds of forensic pathology, forensic odontology, and DNA testing. What was revealed would debunk the entire theory that Satanism was a motivating factor in the murders. The pathologist and the odontologist found that what was initially interpreted as mutilation on the boys’ bodies — knife cuts and human-infl icted bites — as part of a devilworshiping ritual, was actually found to be postmortem claw scratches and bites from predatory animals News and views for the Colgate community

39

like alligator snapping turtles. Douglas bolstered those reports with his own fi ndings. Rather than a Satanic motive, he said, he believed it was a “personal cause homicide,” committed by someone who may have known the victims relatively well. Furthermore, he determined that the killer(s) demonstrated a criminal sophistication beyond the capabilities of teenagers.

These bombshells led to a shift in public opinion, specifi cally in Arkansas. The new evidence, combined with Douglas’s personal efforts, convinced two victims’ parents that the West Memphis Three were innocent.

One of those parents, who had been outspoken about the teens’ guilt from the beginning, admitted in several media interviews that he had been wrong in passing judgment too soon.

Additional information about the jury foreman’s misconduct also came to light. After one of his presentations, Riordan was approached by someone who said that he knew a Little Rock lawyer with additional information on the misconduct. Riordan called that lawyer, who had been contacted by the jury foreman during the trial. Although their business was about another matter, the foreman had spoken to him about the West Memphis Three case. In addition to violating the law by talking to an outside person about the case, the foreman also told this lawyer that, because he didn’t think the prosecution provided enough evidence to convict Echols and Baldwin, he had supplemented his and the jury’s knowledge with media reports. The jury foreman said he would do whatever he could to make sure the teens were convicted, the lawyer reported. After keeping quiet about that conversation for years, the lawyer was impelled to come forward because of the public dialogue about the West Memphis Three’s innocence, spurred by the new evidence.

The advocacy group Arkansas Take Action, founded by Davis and a couple of Arkansans, was another positive step following the press conference. That group attracted additional advocates for the West Memphis Three — most notably, Natalie Maines of the band the Dixie Chicks, who spoke at a rally in front of the Arkansas State Capitol and then delivered letters of concern to the governor’s offi ce.

Despite the change in public opinion, there was still work to be done in the courts. Judge David Burnett, who had presided over the original trial, denied the DNA action in September 2008 — just as he had denied every legal challenge on behalf of Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley. Through Burnett’s ruling, the state took the position that the new evidence was not strong enough to warrant a new trial.

Guilty until proven innocent

“Does anyone believe that if the state had even the slightest continuing conviction that they were guilty that they would let these men free today?” attorney Dennis Riordan asserted during a press conference, with his hand on Damien Echols’s shoulder, while Riordan’s law partner, Don Horgan, stands at his side. Photo by Alan Spearman, The Commercial Appeal

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Time ticked on, and it was another two years before the defense had the opportunity to appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, a hearing that would carry tremendous weight. This was the fi nal chance for Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley. And, it was the fi rst time the Arkansas Supreme Court would interpret the new DNA statute.

“This specifi c case has garnered a lot of interest, but the interests at stake here are a lot broader than the three individuals before the court, even though one of those [individuals] literally has his life on the line,” said Riordan in a conversation with Horgan, shown in Paradise Lost 3. The way the judges handled the statute that day would have “enormous implications for everybody who comes in their wake,” added Riordan’s law partner.

In court, Riordan argued that the statute should be interpreted to say that if the DNA evidence excludes the defendant as the source of the DNA, then the trial court should consider all of the evidence — not just the evidence submitted at the original trial — to see what a reasonable jury would deduce today.

The argument was sound, and the West Memphis Three got their fi rst break. The Arkansas Supreme Court granted them an evidentiary hearing in which all new evidence could be presented. The hearing would determine whether the three could receive a new trial; however, it wasn’t scheduled to take place until more than a year later — December 2011.

Berlinger and Sinofsky intended for the state Supreme Court ruling to serve as the ending to Paradise Lost Purgatory. The fi lm was scheduled to air on HBO in November 2011, right before the evidentiary hearing, “so 3: Purgatory that going into the hearing, the world would know what the evidence is and the Arkansas authorities would know that the world is watching,” Berlinger said.

Instead, an unforeseen development would not only alter the ending of the fi lm, but would also cause an unexpected and sudden end to the West Memphis Three’s legal odyssey.

It was announced, a few days in advance, that a surprise hearing would take place on August 19, 2011, at the circuit court in Jonesboro, Ark. nalizing Paradise Lost 3 in preparation for the Toronto Berlinger and Sinofsky were fi nalizing International Film Festival when they got the call. Legally, the details they were given had to be scanty, “but a major hint was dropped that this was going to be as big as it gets,” Berlinger recalled.

Riordan had known for a little over a week that a deal was being discussed by the Arkansas state counsel, but the complicated negotiations created uncertainty about his client’s future. The same day that Berlinger learned that something big was about to happen, Davis called Riordan to tell him that the deal was going to go through.

At the court session, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were given the chance to declare what is called an Alford plea: a guilty plea with a profession of innocence. Earlier in the week, they had agreed to the pleas, and that day, each stood to tell the judge, “I am innocent of these charges, but I’m entering an Alford guilty plea today based on the advice of my counsel and my understanding that it’s in my best interest to do so, given the entire record of the case.” The three men were freed in exchange for being sentenced to time served and 10 years’ probation.

As part of the agreement, they waived their rights to sue the state.

This strange twist of events occurred because, after the state Supreme Court hearing and in light of the new evidence, the state prosecutors were losing confi dence that they would prevail in the upcoming evidentiary hearing. Another major factor was that Burnett, the original trial judge, resigned and was elected to the state Senate. “He was out of the picture, and once the state saw that they were going to have a new, fair judge sitting on the case, they had a huge reason to enter into this plea arrangement,” Riordan explained. “The DA was frank about it: they knew they were going to lose the hearing, we were going to get a new trial, the three were going to be acquitted at the new trial, and the state would potentially be subject to millions of dollars in civil damages,” Riordan said. He added that, if the information about the jury misconduct were to be made public through the trial, “there would be a huge scandal.”

For Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, the Alford plea was tough to swallow: the three are still considered felons under the eyes of the law and are on probation. In fact, Baldwin did not initially want to take the plea, but agreed to it in order to save Echols’s life. Not only was Echols on death row, but a new trial could have taken years to complete, and his health was declining under the prison conditions.

“This was not justice,” Baldwin said in a press conference immediately following the hearing.

“And I did not want to take the deal from the get-go; however, they’re trying to kill Damien, and sometimes you just have to bite the gun to save somebody.”

“This is not perfect by any means, but … this has been going on for over 18 years and it has been an absolute living hell,” said Echols.

After not seeing sunlight in almost a decade, Echols emerged from the courthouse into the sunshine. He, Baldwin, and Misskelley were surrounded by a crowd. “It was like the mirror reverse of when we were arrested,” Echols told an Arkansas journalist afterward. “People back then were lined up like that, but they were condemning us, calling us names, damning us. This was the exact opposite. These people were cheering, they were happy, and they were celebrating the fact that we were fi nally getting out.”

15 documentaries short-listed for Oscar consideration, and the fi lmmakers were waiting to fi nd out if they’d receive one of fi ve nominations.

Once again, the acclaim is bittersweet for Berlinger.

“They are out [of prison] and that’s an important fi rst step,” he said, “but I am deeply troubled by the end results because I don’t think it’s right that these guys have to live with this sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.” His hope is that the potential Oscar nomination will attract more attention to the fi lm, which can “be used as a tool for exoneration.”

In Paradise Lost 3, Echols credits the fi lmmakers with saving his life. “I really do believe these people would have gotten away with murdering me if it were not for what you guys did, for being there in the very beginning and getting this whole thing on tape so that the rest of the world could see what was happening. If it were not for that, these people would have murdered me,” he said.

“Obviously, that’s humbling and makes me feel good about my work,” Berlinger said. “As an artist, you always wonder whether your work has any relevancy, and when you have a direct impact on somebody’s life like that and they acknowledge it, it feels great.”

Berlinger emphasized that he was only one of many who helped free Echols. “The real heroes of this story are people like Dennis [Riordan], the Free the West Memphis Three Support Fund people, and the thousands of people who stepped out of their lives to help. These guys got out of prison because of 10,000 acts of selfl essness, big and small.”

Innocence lost

The heroes in this story are many, but so are the sorrows that may never be resolved. “The tragedy is in many ways the explanation of what occurred,” Riordan said. “Three 8-year-old boys were murdered when they were out playing. Every parent who hears about this says, it could have been my child. It was the horror of it that led to so many of the mistakes and, frankly, abuses of the investigative process.”

With help from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Echols and Davis are still fi ghting to exonerate his name as well as fi nd out who did murder the boys.

They plan to set up a tip line, conduct new testing,

Saving a life

AN UNSPEAKABLE CRIME.

As scheduled, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory premiered at the Toronto fi lm festival in September; however, the epilogue Berlinger added to show the surprise hearing had to be left off because of timing. The fi nal version premiered at the New York Film Festival in October, and when the newly freed West Memphis Three took the stage, they were greeted with an extended standing ovation in the packed 1,100-seat Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Later that month, Paradise Lost 3 appeared at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and it premiered in Europe at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November. At press time, HBO was set to air the fi lm on January 12. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures named Paradise Lost 3 the 2011 Best Documentary. Also at press time, the fi lm was one of

WRONGFULLY CONVICTED.

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures named Paradise Lost 3 the 2011 Best Documentary.

FOREVER CONDEMNED.

OFFICIAL SELECTION

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2011

PRESENTS

OFFICIAL SELECTION

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2011

A FILM BY JOE BERLINGER & BRUCE SINOFSKY

THE COMPLETE INSIDE STORY OF THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE

DIRECTED BY

and interview new witnesses. The only way Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley can be exonerated is with a pardon from the governor of Arkansas.

In the meantime, the three men are trying to piece together new lives, relearn everyday tasks, and digest all that they’ve missed. Echols, for example, had to train himself how to use a fork and to walk again — in prison, he had to eat without silverware and walk with chains tying his ankles together. Modernday technologies like computers, the Internet, and cell phones have also been a learning curve. And, most meaningful, Echols has a son who is now about the same age that Echols was when he was incarcerated.

Before he was arrested, Echols and his girlfriend, who was pregnant, had intended to get married — which never came to fruition. Their son was born shortly after Echols was imprisoned.

“If I thought about everything that has been done to us … I probably would get bitter, but we’re venturing into an entire new world, and I don’t want to carry that stuff with me [going] forward,” Echols said in an Arkansas news interview.

Berlinger has had what he called “the privilege” of being part of — and facilitating — several of Baldwin’s post-prison new experiences. He ate breakfast with Baldwin on his fi rst day as a free man.

On a larger scale, Berlinger took Baldwin to his fi rstever concert, and what an extraordinary “fi rst” it was: rock star Sting’s 60th birthday party celebration at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan. Baldwin also took his fi rst trip abroad thanks to Berlinger, when they fl ew to Amsterdam for the fi lm festival.

Misskelley, trying to pick up where he left off, has returned to West Memphis, where his family and friends still reside.

Although the sudden Alford plea led to a different ending for the fi lm, Berlinger and Sinofsky didn’t change the title. “They have not been offi cially cleared or pardoned. [There’s] no compensation for their lost youth and no prosecutorial accountability. Worse, the real killer (or killers) walks free. As a result, our original title, Purgatory, seems, to us, to be spot on.”

“It’s not a fairy tale, and there can’t be anything akin to a happy ending, but it’s an amazing story of personal resilience,” Riordan said. “The number of people without whom this couldn’t have happened is large … but if you had to pick the absolute sine qua non, it’s the defendants who managed to survive all of those years in the Arkansas prison system, didn’t fall apart, and have grown enormously. They’re extraordinary people.”

PRESENTS a @ radical.media production A FILM BY JOE BERLINGER & BRUCE SINOFSKY “PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY” DIRECTOR OF & COORIGINAL JOE BERLINGER AND BRUCE SINOFSKY PRODUCEDBYJOE BERLINGER EDITBYEDALYSE ARDELL SPIEGEL PHOTOGRAPHY BOB RICHMAN 2ND UNIPRODUCER T DIRECTOR JONATHAN SILBERBERG PRODUCER MICHAEL BONFIGLIO SCORE BY WENDY BLACKSTONE FEATURING SOUND ADDITIONAL SENIOR EXECUTIVE SONGS BY METALLICA RECORDIST EDDIE O’CONNOR EDITOR DAVID MEHLMAN FOR HBO: PRODUCER NANCY ABRAHAM PRODUCER SHEILA NEVINS ©2011 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO ® and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc. Photos by Joe Berlinger and Bob Richman.

Paradice_Lost.indd 1

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News and and views views for for the the Colgate Colgate community community News

41 41

42

scene: Winter 2012

Andrew Daddio

News and views for the Colgate community

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salmagundi

62 Underwater activity 65 Collars 66 Mentalist Geller 67 You might see one in a park 68 Recipe instruction 69 Animal friend 70 Romantic rendezvous 71 “___ of the D’Urbervilles”

Puzzle by Kyle Dolan

See page 68 for a conversation with puzzle creator Kyle Dolan ’06, whose crossword puzzles have appeared in newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, and Syracuse Post-Standard.

See You Inside!

Across 1 Thermostat setting 5 Penne or farfalle 10 King topper 13 Short ride?

14 “What ___!”

16 Word on hats worn around Berkeley 17 It gets rid of wrinkles 18 Wrigley Field team 20 Town 33 miles from Hamilton, N.Y. 21 “The Simpsons” barkeep 22 Apparel 23 Love at first sight, metaphorically 27 Old European ruler 29 Cartoon character from Down Under 30 Syracuse-to-Utica dir.

Rewind

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scene: Winter 2012

31 33 34 36 38 41 44 46 47 48 50 53 55 58 60 61

“What’s up, ___?”

It can be inflated List abbr.

Possible start of a Cold War speech Starfish relative Collection of miscellany, on a blog Go downhill, maybe Lennon’s partner Giants QB Manning Boardroom fig.

Platoon setting Grp. with an annual tournament in Flushing Meadows Genetic material A cinch Old Russian space station Baseball stats

Down 1 Mohawk, e.g.

2 Moon of Jupiter 3 Reduce to nearly nothing 4 Quieted, with “down” 5 Classic arcade game 6 Toward the beach 7 Less outgoing 8 Tic-toe connector 9 Doctors’ org.

10 Wretched 11 Sauerkraut base 12 Golfer Ernie 15 Often-fried food 19 Granola grain 24 Break away 25 Lamar of the L.A. Lakers 26 Where one assumes a fetal position?

28 Rock band Sigur ___ 32 Active component of some disinfectants 35 Sound of disapproval 36 Size on a lingerie tag 37 Biblical boat 39 “___ Lang Syne” 40 Curry spice 41 Piniella who managed the 18-Across 42 Liable to come apart 43 Opposite of lots 45 Develop slowly 48 Well below average 49 Lose track of 51 Cover stories?

52 Collective term of address 54 ___ rule 56 Jaws island 57 Dada artist Max 59 QB’s stat 62 “Hello there!”, slangily 63 Addams Family cousin 64 Alt. spelling

Slices A pictorial contest, in homage to the nickname of New York Pizzeria, the late-night Village of Hamilton hot spot serving the Colgate community for more than three decades — one plain slice at a time.

In the autumn 2011 Scene, we asked readers to explain why these Colgate students were sprawled on the floor of Huntington Gym. Of those who correctly identified the event as class registration, Fielding Simmons ’65 won the drawing for a Slices T-shirt.

The year pictured was 1955.

Another reader, Norris Ford ’56, wrote in with his remembrance of registration during that era: “This is an image of the freshman class registering for their fall semester course selection in the Huntington Gym, first week of September. It was kind of a joke because, in those days, freshmen took a five-course load and most of that was prescribed: many or most took ROTC (1 course); all had to sign up for a full core curriculum (2.5 courses); they had to satisfy the language requirement (1 course); and they had to satisfy the athletic requirement (golf, swimming, tennis, squash). The lucky ones maybe got to select one optional course.”

See page 60 for the solution.

Anna Steel ’91 writes: “I was saddened to see the news of the passing of Dick LaBonte ’43 (In Memoriam, autumn 2011). My dad, Howard Steel ’42, and I gave his Winter Carnival poster to the Colgate archivist a few years back. Last I saw, it was hanging in the basement level of the new library.

“My dad was heavily involved in the Outing Club and the New York State Intercollegiate Ski Championship that took place over Colgate’s Winter Carnival in 1941. Dick LaBonte and Dad paired up to design the posters that were distributed to colleges all around. Naturally, it was important to feature a lady in the poster, and Dick included the male in the background as a likeness of my Dad — taken from his Vantine Studios junior-year headshot. I also love the old ski tips!”

Above: Emily Denton ’12 (center) hosts her fall 2011 radio show Color Riot every Monday at noon on WRCU. Photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio Back cover: Snow day sledding across the road from James B. Colgate Hall. Photo by Andrew Daddio

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