‘Creating a Container’ for the Arts, p. 12
SPRING 2021
Ciara Bowen ’21 takes notes during Professor of Psychology Kristi Erdal’s Block 5 Human Neuropsychology course in Tutt Library. The library setting provided socially distanced seating and allowed students to access fresh air from a patio. The class was one of several in-person courses offered to students living on campus and locally off campus. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
A publication for alumni, parents, and friends. Vice President for Communications: Jane Turnis • Editor: Leslie Weddell • Production and Editing: Kirsten Akens ’96 • Creative Director & Design: Felix A. Sanchez ’93 • Photo Editor: Jennifer Coombes • Designer: Lesley Houston • Copy Editing: Helen Richardson • (719) 389-6603, bulletin@coloradocollege.edu • THE COLORADO COLLEGE BULLETIN (122-860) is published four times per calendar year by Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3294. General Series 608, Bulletin Series 514. PERIODICALS postage paid at Colorado Springs 80901-9998 and at additional offices. POSTMASTER: Please send ADDRESS CHANGES to Colorado College Bulletin, Alumni Records, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3294. The Bulletin is also available online at coloradocollege.edu/bulletin. To stop receiving a printed copy, email bulletin@coloradocollege.edu and let us know.
CONTENTS
24
Recruiting and Retaining Diverse Faculty
28
Nurturing Seeds of Innovation
32
Untold Stories: Taizo Nakashima, Class of 1893
From the Acting Co-Presidents
2
Campus News
4
ON THE COVER
Athletics
10
During Block 6, Artist-in-Residence Rosy Simas taught a dance production lab class, which culminated in an online and socially distanced live performance. Here, Kaila Ablao ’21 performs at the dress rehearsal. For more on this class and arts at CC, see pages 12-21. Photo by Chidera Ikpeamarom ’22
Arts in the Pandemic
12
Student Perspective
22
On the Bookshelf
30
Alumni Activities
35
Peak Profiles
38
Class Notes
42
Milestones
45
Point of View
51
People of Impact
52
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FROM THE ACTING CO-PRESIDENTS
PHOTO BY JENNIFER COOMBES
Dear Alumni, Parents, and Friends, As we look forward to a muchanticipated presidential transition at Colorado College, we are grateful for the opportunity to reflect on the past year together. It has been our sincere honor to serve as co-presidents during this interim, and we thank you for your continued support and engagement. Last spring brought many unforeseen challenges, but with your help CC adapted and stayed centered on our students. The pandemic dramatically changed students’ day-to-day campus experiences as we shifted to remote and hybrid learning to mitigate the virus’ spread. Despite unfamiliar circumstances, our faculty and staff embraced new ways of teaching and learning to provide a valuable liberal arts education and deliver support to our dynamic student body. Students found new ways to connect with one another and engage with the issues they are most passionate about, from the arts to social justice. Students’ willingness to radically change how they live, learn, and grow during this time has been a key to the success of this academic year
and the health of the wider Colorado Springs community. Because of these efforts, Colorado College has maintained a significantly lower infection rate as compared to local and state levels since the start of the pandemic. Our dedicated faculty and staff demonstrated courage, resilience, and creativity as we pivoted to virtual learning. They found new ways to engage students and make use of the Block Plan’s innovative flexibility, helping students connect with course materials and develop their sense of place, no matter where they were in the state, the nation, or the world. Our talented staff have helped students connect their studies with meaningful co-curricular engagement, provided invaluable mentorship, and have enabled structure and continuity as we face new challenges together. And you — our alumni, families, and friends — have supported this campus community with your time, volunteerism, and gifts. We truly could not have had the successful year we did without your
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engagement. You gave generously to CC’s COVID-19 relief efforts, you participated in student mentorship opportunities, and you offered feedback and support as we navigated a truly unprecedented year. You also joined us to celebrate the Class of 2020, who graduated during an especially uncertain time. We invite you to join us in recognizing the Class of 2021, who have similarly adapted amid trying circumstances. While this year has brought many challenges, there are also many causes for celebration. This issue of the Bulletin explores the pivotal role of the arts. From poetry to painting, fashion to film, from the classroom to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, we hope you enjoy reading about the community members among us whose creative works inspire and amaze. As we look ahead to the coming years, our commitment to the arts, and the transformative role they play both in our academics and in our wider society, remain strong.
Finally, we invite you to join us in welcoming L. Song Richardson to the Colorado College community. Richardson will join CC as president on July 1, and we share in your excitement as we begin this transition. She brings a wealth of expertise as an educator, an expert on implicit racial and gender bias, and a legal scholar, and we are confident that through her visionary leadership she will help this community grow. As we conclude the 2020-21 academic year, we extend our deepest thanks to you. We wish you health and happiness in the months ahead. We look forward to our continued work together. Sincerely,
MIKE EDMONDS Acting Co-president
ROBERT G. MOORE Acting Co-president
PHOTO BY JENNIFER COOMBES
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
To the Editor: AS AN AVID READER OF THE BULLETIN, I DIDN’T WANT THE YEAR TO END WITHOUT LETTING YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I APPRECIATED THE SUMMER 2020 ISSUE. The photo of Ali Keller in the Gates Greenhouse was especially meaningful for me. Many mornings I went up to the little greenhouse in Olin to take in the view of Pikes Peak and enjoy a little peace and quiet before spending the day in a biology, chemistry, or physics class. Since my class (’74) started CC with the Block Plan, I also appreciated the articles on the adoption of the plan and its flexibility.
Going forward, I’d like to suggest that at some time over the next few years you feature remembrances of the early days of the Block Plan from students and faculty who lived through them. I’m thinking especially of the classes of ’71, ’72, and ’73, which experienced a mix of semesters and blocks; as well as the class of ’74, the first to complete all four years under the Block Plan. I know there would be many interesting stories about adapting to the Block Plan — likely too many to tell. Sometimes things went too fast. For example, when the Block Plan started, the Chemistry Department decided to fasttrack biology majors, chemistry majors, and
pre-meds through organic chemistry during the freshman year. That meant three blocks of chemistry in the first year, one of general chem and two of organic (for me, blocks 7, 8 & 9!). Well, that didn’t last too long. On the other hand, sometimes things went too slowly. My first year I took an appreciation of music course. Although the textbook extended well into the “modern” era, our professor was still on the semester system and after 3½ weeks we had reached the Baroque period. Well, that’s more than enough for now. Keep up the great work! Mark Schlessman ’74
EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Block Plan, CC has been collecting remembrances of the Block Plan. Check out the Block Plan Stories section (and add your story) at coloradocollege. edu/basics/
blockplan/2020
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: In “Prioritizing Mental Health” (Bulletin, Summer 2020, p. 32), the academic degree Ph.D. should have been added after the name of Brittany Linton ’09. Linton is a licensed psychologist and serves as the director for primary care and mental health integration for the San Francisco Veterans Healthcare System. In the Aspen Bike Trip story (Bulletin, Winter 2020, p. 32), Paul Sheffer ’81 was inadvertently identified as Paul Scoggins. Sheffer was killed in a 1978 plane crash with Andrew “Andy” Reich ’81. In the Winter 2020-21 issue of the Bulletin, we stated that the Class of ’61 would have a combined 60th reunion with the classes of ’59 and ’60 in October 2021. However, the ’61 Tigers have decided to hold off and combine with another class in October 2022. See p. 44 for more information regarding Homecoming 2021.
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By Leslie Weddell
Two Library Areas Named in Honor of Jill Tiefenthaler
Kris Mayotte Named Head Hockey Coach at Colorado College Colorado College Vice President and Director of Athletics Lesley Irvine has named Kris Mayotte the 15th head coach in the history of the school’s hockey program.
Former President Jill Tiefenthaler. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
The CC Board of Trustees recently approved the naming of an entrance and study lounge in the Charles L. Tutt Library in honor of former President Jill Tiefenthaler. The library’s east entrance, which faces Palmer Hall, will be named the Tiefenthaler Entryway, and the large study area next to Susie B’s café on the library’s third floor will be called the Tiefenthaler Study Lounge.
Mayotte brings a wealth of success to Colorado College as one of the top assistant coaches and recruiters in the nation. Throughout his 10 years as a Division I assistant and associate head coach, Mayotte helped guide his teams to an NCAA National Championship in 2015, two Frozen Fours and seven NCAA Tournament appearances. In addition, Mayotte won a pair of gold medals and a bronze in three stints as an assistant coach with Team USA at the World Junior Championships. Mayotte, who spent the last two seasons at the University of Michigan with head coach Mel Pearson after five years under Nate Leaman at Providence College, has recruited six All-Americans and several of his players have made the next step to the National Hockey League.
The college’s naming policy provides for honorific naming to recognize individuals who have “provided exemplary, meritorious, or philanthropic support or service to the college.” President Tiefenthaler, the college’s 13th president, led CC from 2011-20. Under her leadership the college achieved significant advances including the expansion and renovation of Tutt Library, the largest carbon-neutral, net zero-energy academic library in the country.
“We are thrilled to welcome Kris to the Tiger family,” says Irvine. “Kris is the right leader at the right time for the Colorado College hockey program. I learned quickly why he was known as a rising star. He is a winner, a relentless recruiter, and an exceptional leader. Kris is a liberal arts graduate who understands combining academic and athletic excellence. He is positioned to be an outstanding leader as we plan to move the program forward and open the doors of Robson Arena.”
In making its recommendation to the board, CC’s acting co-presidents and Advancement Office wrote, “It is fitting to recognize President Tiefenthaler’s commitment to the college and its students by naming these two prominent, and active, spaces within the library.” Tiefenthaler left the college in July 2020 to become the first female CEO of National Geographic.
Earlier this year, Mayotte served as an assistant coach under Leaman on the goldmedal winning U.S. National Junior Team at the 2021 International Ice Hockey Federation World Junior Championship in Canada. Mayotte also helped the U.S. win gold in 2017 and bronze in 2018. “I am honored and humbled to become the next head coach at Colorado College and continue the historic tradition of Tiger hockey,” Mayotte says. “I am energized by all that CC has to offer and the vision for the program, and look forward to being a visible leader in the community. The addition of Robson Arena is a gamechanger and we have all the pieces in place to build a championship program. I look forward to continuing the high standard of excellence, on and off the ice, at Colorado College.” From 2014-19, Mayotte spent five seasons with Leaman at Providence College and was elevated to associate head coach in 2017. A member of the 2015 NCAA National Championship coaching staff, Mayotte led the Friar goaltenders as well as the penalty-kill unit, while handling all aspects of many nationally ranked recruiting classes. Providence earned a trip to the NCAA Tournament each of Mayotte’s five years at the college.
The east entrance of Tutt Library, to be named the Tiefenthaler Entryway. Photo by Skye Schelz ’21
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— Jerry Cross ’91
$500,000 Gift Supports Student Services Center; Honors Mike and Barbara Yalich Colorado College has received a $500,000 gift from the Inasmuch Foundation for the Mike and Barbara Yalich Student Services Center. The new student services center will be adjacent to the Ed Robson Arena and will honor the legacy and contributions of alumni Barbara Neeley Yalich ’53 and her late husband Milo “Mike” Yalich ’50. “We are deeply inspired by Barbara and Mike Yalich’s leadership in the Colorado College community and beyond, and we are immensely grateful to Inasmuch Foundation for their generosity and support through this gift, which will enable us to carry on the Yalichs’ legacy of community engagement,” says Mike Edmonds, acting co-president of Colorado College. The Yalich Center will house the student wellness center, health services and counseling, bookstore and mail center, as well as an art studio, café, and pub. Significantly, the Counseling Center, Student Health Center, Wellness Resource Center, and sexual assault response coordinator will be consolidated on the second floor. The health and wellness aspects of the center are not coincidental. Barbara Yalich began her career as the international president of the Association of Junior Leagues of America, and also served as the first executive director of the Health Association of the Pikes Peak Region and executive director of El Paso County Mental Health Association. She devoted her life to public service, returning to the college at several points throughout her career and ultimately serving as director of development. In 1991,
she was appointed vice president for development and college relations, which she held until her retirement in 1994. Following her retirement, she was awarded an honorary Bachelor of Arts degree. “Barbara Yalich has demonstrated throughout her career a real investment and commitment to well-being and to mental health,” says Heather Horton, director of the Wellness Resource Center. “So, having someone like her associated with our work and our offices is really exciting.” Horton says having the health and wellness services located together has many benefits and is consistent with what CC is trying to do as an institution. “We want to move toward a more integrated health and wellbeing program, where things feel seamless to students rather than these very separate entities,” she says. Horton is collaborating with Lynnette DiRaddo, who is running CC’s Arts and Crafts Program this year, on a project in which students decorate fabric and turn it into ottoman seating. “Hopefully that will just be a start to that connection to creative and artistic connections with health and wellbeing,” says Horton. Mike Yalich, who passed away in 2010, is remembered as a teammate, coach, community leader, and veteran. He served in the United States Navy from 1943-46, predominately aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Honolulu. He was part of numerous WWII campaigns in the South Pacific, among them the bombardments of Bougainville, Tinian, Saipan, and Guam. During his time at CC, Mike Yalich captained the NCAA championship ice hockey
Barbara Yalich ’53 and Mike Yalich ’50.
team that later was inducted into the Colorado College Sports Hall of Fame and the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame. He also played football and baseball at CC, was manager of the intramural sports program, and a member of Sigma Chi fraternity. The Yalich involvement in the community also includes a longtime connection to Inasmuch Foundation, established in 1982 by Charter Trustee Edith Kinney Gaylord ’36. The foundation, based in Oklahoma City, continues its late founder’s interest in Colorado Springs by supporting nonprofits that directly serve the residents of the city. Inasmuch provides grants to address dynamic community needs, from health care access to food and housing to the arts and journalism. The goal is for the Mike and Barbara Yalich Student Services Center to be
a valuable, versatile space for students and community members. “It’s more than just one service, it’s multiple destinations, multiple services, a wonderful gathering space,” says Rochelle T. Dickey ’83, ’P19, acting dean of students and acting vice president for student life. She notes the word ‘pub’ is used intentionally as it has different connotations than ‘bar.’ “A pub is a place for responsible drinking and socializing. It’s focusing on building community and people coming together, not just a place where people go to drink,” Dickey says. “I think it’s really important to reframe how some people think of the Robson Arena. Some people simply think it’s a place for the hockey team, and it is so much more than that. It’s a place for all students to come and be welcome.”
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By Leslie Weddell
CC to Require COVID-19 Vaccination for Fall Semester Colorado College has been relying upon science, data, its Scientific Advisory Group, national medical consultants, and public health partners to develop COVID-19 protocols, testing, and vaccination plans to keep the CC community safe. These efforts have been successful, resulting in a lower rate of COVID19 at CC than in the surrounding community. CC plans to resume in-person teaching, co-curricular activities, and the performances, lectures, and other events that were missed this past year, with the appropriate public health safeguards in place and fewer of the restrictions that hamper one’s mental and social well-being. To achieve this, with the recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Group, CC will require all
students, faculty, and staff who are living, learning, working on, and accessing campus for the 202122 academic year to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. All members of the campus community will be required to provide proof of vaccination or exemption by Aug. 1. This will also allow vaccinated students an easier entry to campus this fall because of the loosened arrival protocols. Aiming for high vaccination rates among CC community members is the best approach to take from a broader public health perspective and may mitigate some of the mental health impacts of the pandemic. The college hosted its first vaccination clinic in mid-April, with hundreds of campus community members and their families participating, and more on-campus clinics are
planned. Based on science, it’s clear that CC’s faculty, staff, and students will be most protected if everyone is vaccinated. Colorado College is at its best when its distinctive liberal arts education can be delivered in person, when students and faculty can exchange ideas in classes and field study, and when student organizations, clubs, and athletes can gather, engage, practice, and achieve together. The staff can better support the college’s mission and its students when they can be on campus, in a safe work environment. CC will work with students who may have limitations on accessing vaccinations and will consider requests for exemptions for medical, religious, and personal reasons.
CC Blends COVID-19 Protocols, Winter Sports into Unique Celebration It was the Winter Olympics, CC- style: No luge, no figure skating, no ski jumping. Instead, there was snowshoe racing without snow, fat-tire bike races where the slowest rider wins, and “Goggle Waddle,” a cross between blind man’s bluff and ball tag, played while wearing ski goggles. And because of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing, no shared equipment, and repeated disinfecting were added elements. Approximately 30 students participated in the midMarch event, with activities being held on Autrey Field and in Honnen Ice Arena. The Winter Glove Tactile Challenge combined outdoor skills with the spirit of the day: Students learned how to tie a variety of knots, then, adding to the challenge, tied them wearing oversized ski gloves — while being timed. “I haven’t heard students laugh that much in about a year,” says Rachael Abler, assistant director of outdoor education. And while there were no winners’ podiums or gold medals, there was the awarding of KIND bars and vouchers for rental equipment at the Ahlberg Gear House. The CC-style Winter Olympics were part of the Snow Day 2021 events, which also included a film festival premiering two hours of outdoor films featuring people of all walks of life in a variety of sports and
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The Snowshoe Relay, part of CC’s Winter Olympics, featured masked students balancing a ski pole while racing in snowshoes on Autrey Field. Photo by John Le ’24
a video competition. This film festival event was held on Vimeo live so attendees could discuss the films with MCs Katie Damas ’21 and Chidera Ikpeamarom ’22. The continuing pandemic meant that Snow Day 2021 looked very different than it did in its inaugural year in 2020, in which 75 first-time skiers and 15 outdoor education leaders participated in a day of skiing at Monarch Mountain. “We didn’t want Snow Day to lose the magic of making the outdoors more accessible to everyone,” Abler says. She credits Sofia Moreira Infante ’21 and Cody Leong ’20 with spearheading the initial event, and with helping to keep the initiative going this year, albeit in a different form.
“There was a lot of passion about making — and keeping — the outdoors accessible to everyone,” Abler says. The Snow Day 2021 events were reflective of the Office of Outdoor Education’s continuing efforts to engage students and build community, especially when the campus community is limited in how they can interact with each other. “We wanted to develop a mixture of programs,” Abler says. “Programs people could do on their own now, virtually or in-person, and later in-person and in groups. We know that many students, both domestic and international, are feeling isolated.”
NEWS IN BRIEF New Major Looks at Intersection of Business, Economics, and Society The Economics and Business Department launched a new interdisciplinary major in Block 5, one that examines the intersection of business and economics with society and builds on the commonalities and differences between the two disciplines. The new major, Business, Economics, and Society (BESoc), explores human economic behavior — its nature, sources, and consequences — and analyzes three key relationships: • It examines the roles business and economics play within society, in particular the place of modern corporations and social enterprises in civil society and in government and economic policy. • It evaluates the impact of business on society, focusing on market forces, on market failures, and on services provided to all members of society. • It explores the effects of society on business and the economy, examining how social issues frame business opportunities and strategies, and how corporations respond (or fail to respond) to social concerns.
Board of Trustees Approves New Trustees At their annual February meeting, the Board of Trustees approved new charter trustees Justin “Chester” White ’15 and Tony Rosendo ’02 (Rosendo will start his position in 2022), and new board officers Jeff Keller ’91 P’22, chair; Ryan Haygood ’97, vice chair; and Heather Carroll ’89, secretary. The positions are effective July 1.
PrintReleaf Program Update The Colorado College Bulletin participates in a project called PrintReleaf WeForest as a replanting offset of the paper it uses to print the magazine. PrintReleaf has now completed its reforestation project in São Paulo, Brazil. CC contributed nearly 3,000 trees to the effort, and any excess replanting credits were transferred to a deforestation rehabilitation project in the Dominican Republic.
RoCCy Stars at City Press Event CC’s RoCCy and UCCS’ mascot, Clyde the Mountain Lion, were the stars at a Colorado Springs press event in mid-March that unveiled upcoming events celebrating the city’s sesquicentennial (150 years). The pull of the region was on display with a tugof-war between RoCCy and Clyde, with Rocky the ram (no relation), serving as referee. Rocky is the mascot of Pikes Peak, also known as “America’s Mountain.” The tug-of-war ended in a 1-1 tie, but RoCCy and Clyde promised to meet again. The city is planning a series of sesquicentennial events this summer. Photo courtesy City of Colorado Springs
In-Person Commencement Plans Underway for Two Classes Commencement for the Class of 2021 will be held on Sunday, May 23, and Commencement for the Class of 2020 on Sunday, May 30. Both events will be held in person at 9 a.m. at the new downtown Weidner Field. Each graduate will be allowed to invite two guests to the event. This year’s festivities will look different from previous years, as the college has developed its plans for the in-person ceremonies in accordance with state and county COVID-19 guidelines. Health and safety remain the college’s top priority, and all graduates will be required to have a COVID-19 test on campus the Friday before each Sunday ceremony. Guests are encouraged to be tested on the Friday before Commencement at one of the testing sites available in Colorado Springs.
As always, family members and friends who cannot attend are invited to watch the livestream ceremony. Other end-of-year commemorations include the 2021 Honors Convocation, which can be viewed via webinar at 11 a.m., Tuesday, May 11. The annual program includes departmental awards, all-college awards, and awards from the Colorado College Student Government Association. The Baccalaureate address will be delivered virtually, as will the honorary degree ceremony. Links to view these pre-recorded events will be posted when they are available.
DISCOVER MORE ONLINE View the most up-to-date information at: coloradocollege.edu/commencement
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By Leslie Weddell
FAC U LT Y U P DATE S
9 Faculty Members Awarded Tenure; 7 Granted Emeriti Status Nine Colorado College faculty members were approved by the Board of Trustees for tenure and promotion to associate professor following the board’s annual February meeting. The CC faculty members awarded tenure and promoted, effective July 1, are:
Richard Fernando Buxton, Classics
Lynne Gratz, Environmental Studies
Olivia Hatton, Molecular Biology
Jessica Hoel, Economics and Business
Scott Ingram, Anthropology
DISCOVER MORE ONLINE
Jean Lee, Environmental Studies
Katrina Miller-Stevens, Economics and Business
Christina Rader, Economics and Business
Tina Valtierra, Education
Read more about the recently tenured faculty members at 2cc.co/2021tenure
Additionally, the board awarded emeriti status to seven faculty members who retired or are retiring by the end of the academic year. They are:
Barry Sarchett, English, started in 1989. “I have two articles that I want to finish after delivering them at conferences. Longer term, I plan to go to cooking school (preferably French), spend as much time in the Greek islands as possible, and of course read, read, and read some more.”
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Tom Lindblade, Theatre and Dance, started in 1989. “I am retiring to Los Angeles, where I will finally live permanently with my husband, Hugh Maguire. I will continue to work on a newfound passion: writing libretti and lyrics for new musicals, classical chamber works, and short operas. The one thing I will always take with me from CC is my amazing students, who have made my life rich for the past 32 years.”
FAC U LT Y U P DATE S
Marlow Anderson, Mathematics and Computer Science, started in 1982.
Kat Miller-Stevens Named New Director of State of the Rockies Project
Stephanie DiCenzo, Physics, started in 1982. “I hope to volunteer in the fight against voter suppression. I also hope to photograph the most entertaining of the mid-century commercial buildings (and their signs) in Colorado Springs, and to revive and improve my grasp of other languages. And to travel when the dust of the pandemic has settled.”
Mario Montaño, Anthropology, started in 1990. “I plan to continue doing research and writing on the TexasMexican border region’s folk foodways and doing fieldwork research on the different cultural regions in the Rio Grande River basin.”
Marc Snyder, Organismal Biology and Ecology, started in 1996. “I plan to spend time with family and friends (even if it’s virtual for now), time in nature (not virtual), reading, writing, traveling, and continuing ecological research. But mostly just enjoying family, friends, and nature.”
Ralph Garcia-Bertrand, Molecular Biology, started in 1991. “After retiring in August, we sold our house in Cascade, Colorado, and moved to the community of Navajo Dam, New Mexico. We now have a home on the San Juan River in New Mexico and continue to have our home in Leadville, Colorado. I look forward to spending time at both homes skiing, ice skating, fishing, hiking, and biking, while finishing my next book and getting back to woodworking.”
Associate Professor of Business Kat Miller-Stevens has been named the new director of CC’s State of the Rockies Project. Miller-Stevens’ interdisciplinary research bridges the areas of business, public policy, social impact, and nonprofit studies. Her research explores how social movements and collaborations create social change to influence policymakers and powerful industries. She is especially interested in the sharing of knowledge and resources, leadership and governance issues, and community and environmental impacts of social movements and collaborations. Those interests are not so much a jump to the State of the Rockies Project as they are a bridge to new endeavors. Learn more on page 51.
Professor Natalie Gosnell ’08 Receives Cottrell Scholar Award Assistant Professor of Physics Natalie Gosnell ’08 has been awarded the highly competitive Cottrell Scholar Award, which supports both original scientific research and new educational initiatives. The Cottrell Scholar program is highly competitive and open only to faculty members completing their third year in their first tenure-track appointment. The $100,000 award from the private Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) foundation supports the physical sciences. This year RCSA granted 25 awards nationally, representing a funding rate of 14% of the approximately 180 applications submitted. “The Cottrell Scholar Award honors and helps to develop outstanding teacher-scholars who are recognized by their scientific communities for the quality and innovation of their research programs and their academic leadership skills,” notes the RCSA website.
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FROM PRIDE TO EXCCELLENCE: The path to winning championships relies on alumni support By Joe Paisley
F
or John Schuler ’21, Tiger ExCCellence means more than fundraising dollars for Colorado College athletics. It is about winning championships, fueled by the financial support needed to compete for those titles consistently.
“So much of what we have access to and the resources we do have are because of funding from generous donors,” the men’s soccer captain says. “The facilities upgrades are big, but the small donations help as well. Our goalies get new gloves every year because a goalie alum wants to do that for us. From the little things to the big things, it is nice to have that generosity shown by our alumni. “But for CC to be one of the top Division III athletic programs in the country, we will need more gifts like this so we can keep building on what is already in place and create more opportunities to win championships.” The goal of Tiger ExCCellence is to allow coaches to focus on winning while obtaining what they need to improve a program, whether it is struggling or a regular national tournament entrant. “It allows for an aspirational culture,” says Lesley Irvine, CC vice president and director
of athletics. “I do not care if you’re winless or No. 1 in the country, there are things coaches need to move the program forward. You have to keep improving, because athletics is a competitive business.” That means giving the 350 Tigers what they need to succeed as students and as athletes within a financially sustainable plan. That means upgraded meeting rooms with everevolving technology, comfortable motel rooms on lengthy league road trips, and nutritious team meals, for example. “All that support is what makes it possible for teams to win,” Schuler says. “Without any of that you cannot win consistently. The weight room, the training room for rehab, sports psychologists and nutritionists are critical. I wouldn’t know all that [I do] without the support we do have. They teach us how to take care of our bodies and our minds.” “It’s a holistic, well-rounded approach to sports that a lot of schools do not have,” he adds. “That all combined makes us as successful as we are.” The men’s soccer and women’s volleyball teams both advanced to the NCAA national tournament during the 2019-20 academic year while CC finished in the top 10% of Division III schools in the Learfield IMG College Directors’ Cup national standings for the first time.
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LEFT: McKenzee Gertz ’21 led Colorado College to a 7-3 record and the team’s first-ever appearance in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Women's Basketball Championship Game. She was voted the 2020-21 Player of the Year in a ballot of the league's head coaches and is the only player in the history of CC women's basketball to earn three first-team all-SCAC honors. Credit courtesy of CC Athletics. BOTTOM LEFT: John Schuler ’21 is captain of the 2020-21 men’s soccer team. He helped the Tigers win their first Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference regular-season title and advance to the NCAA Division III Tournament in 2019. Schuler, an officer on the school’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, was named a Scholar All-American by the United Soccer Coaches during his junior campaign. Credit courtesy of CC Athletics.
We want a studentathlete experience that matches the academic excellence Colorado College offers. —Lesley Irvine, CC vice president and director of athletics
During that same time span, the studentathletes recorded their best cumulative grade point average (3.42) in more than a decade, led by a school record 256 Division III athletes garnering a spot on the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference academic honor roll (3.0 minimum). The Division I women’s soccer team also matched its record with 17 academic all-Mountain West Conference honorees that year. “We want a student-athlete experience that matches the academic excellence Colorado College offers,” Irvine says. For that to happen consistently, financial support must go beyond big-ticket items like El Pomar Sports Center and the on-campus Robson Arena, which opens this fall. Tiger ExCCellence, formerly called Tiger Pride, is part of Colorado College’s overall effort to develop sustained annual giving by nurturing alumni and donor relationships. It started well before the pandemic and put the nation’s colleges and universities under varying degrees of financial strain. “Athletics is just doing its part,” Irvine says.
“Any successful athletics [department] has a robust funding program supporting it. ” The dedication to win requires a financial commitment. “The main thing at DIII level, which does not hand out [athletic] scholarships, is giving them an opportunity to be successful and win,” says Matt Kelly, the college’s assistant athletic director of development. “As a former student-athlete myself, the experiences and the process of being a collegiate athlete allow individuals to set themselves up for bigger and better things beyond their four years in college. That means travelling and playing the best in the country. That means getting them here. Whatever our programs hope to accomplish, this will support it.” Those road trips help CC teams ready themselves for conference play while competing against top competition bolsters NCAA tournament qualifying. Making nationals and winning league titles become some of a college athlete’s most cherished memories, says Irvine, who hopes Tiger ExCCellence will help more CC athletes reach their potential. The current support the athletic department receives and the relationships between current Tigers and alumni make CC an attractive place for recruits, says women’s basketball player McKenzee Gertz ’21. “You know you are joining a community that can help you later in life,” says the molecular biology major from Fort Collins, Colorado. “It’s a great academic school, which aspires to be a great school in athletics. Our facilities are [Division] I caliber, and as a DIII athlete,
that is incredible to come across. That speaks to the level of support the school puts into athletics at all levels.” To build upon that foundation, CC athletics is asking for donations ranging from a onetime gift of $50 to an annual contribution for the specific amount and sport of the donor’s choosing. Gertz and Schuler, both scheduled to graduate this May, appreciate the current level of support and hope future Tigers can rely on more so they too can win championships. “There’s so much more to it than putting on your cleats and going out onto the soccer field,” says Schuler, a physics major from Chicago. “When I went to a lot of other schools [during recruiting] I saw their soccer teams training and playing games but it wasn’t as well-rounded with a complete student-athlete experience thanks to the support behind the scenes.” That support paid off with the program’s first SCAC men’s soccer regular-season title in 2019 and an NCAA berth, an accomplishment Schuler says he will always cherish. Creating those memories is what Tiger ExCCellence is all about. “It all comes back to our goal of competing for and winning championships,” Irvine says. “Annual giving allows coaches to address their needs and wants and to give their athletes what they need to compete at the highest level and succeed.” “We want to win championships,” she adds. “I cannot overstate that.”
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‘Creating a Container’:
Teaching and Learning During COVID-19 By Kirsten Akens ’96
Rosy Simas’ first scheduled campus performance through CC’s Department of Theatre and Dance was a go for March 2020. She packed up, got on the road, and, as Simas puts it, “from the time I left Minnesota and drove here, in that two-day timeframe, we started to enter the pandemic and that is when people started to think about restrictions.”
When she arrived in Colorado Springs, Simas, a transdisciplinary artist who historically has presented work as a choreographer, carried on. With partner and dancer Sam Aros Mitchell, she installed and performed a transitory piece in Cornerstone Arts Center on March 6, weaving together movement, film, and immersive music. Though the year to follow would throw everyone for a loop, including Simas, her visit had made an impact. She’s back on campus for the 2021 Spring Semester, as the Department of Theatre and Dance’s first artist-in-residence, thanks to the newly established Pamela Battey Mitchell Visiting Artistin-Residence in Contemporary Dance in honor of Hanya Holm. (See “Gift Creates New Visiting Artist Position in Dance Department,” p. 15). “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Rosy’s contributions to the Department of Theatre and Dance — and above all, our work on the antiracism initiative,” says Associate Professor of Performance Studies Ryan Platt, who also is chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance. “Rosy is a Native artist and activist who actively builds new Native audiences and combats the marginalization of Native artists,” he says. “Her teaching always involves astute attention to questions of identity, power, and cultural difference. These issues are particularly needed in dance, which many students regard as inherently neutral and a matter of technical skill.” Platt notes that Simas also is contributing to the larger artistic and intellectual discourse on campus and that the Department of Theatre and Dance has been collaborating with the Native American Student Union, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, and faculty in anthropology, English, and race, ethnicity, and migration studies.
Rosy Simas. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
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Photo by Jennifer Coombes
“These interdisciplinary connections are essential to bringing new knowledge and critical perspectives on indigeneity, colonialism, and embodiment to both our department and the larger college,” he says.
now,” Simas says. “I’m basically creating a container and we’re creating performance to put within the container and the students have a lot of input into what that is and how that is executed, or, for lack of a better word, interpreted.”
As a part of her residency this semester, Simas has been teaching and creating — and learning. During Block 6, she taught a dance production lab class for both trained dancers and students new to the stage. In it, the students worked toward creating a culmination project of an online and socially distanced live performance. At the time, students could choose to take their classes either in-person or online, and Simas ended up working with four students in person and one virtually. The four students on campus met for class in Cutler Hall with Simas (and Mitchell, who came along again to assist). The one taking class long-distance happened to be living in Minneapolis, where Simas is from and where Rosy Simas Danse, the Native-led arts organization she founded is based, and so Simas pulled in colleagues there to offer support and provide the student with a bit of their own in-person experience. “While we could wish that we could have more hands on to every element of the work, the multidisciplinary aspect of it, it’s just hard to do that right
“It’s challenging,” Simas adds, “but I think that it’s a challenge that is worthy of doing … . I don’t think we’re going back to all in-person anything. So whether we like it or not, we’re gonna learn from this experience. And even if we learn we don’t like it, we still have to participate in it, you know?” Beyond learning how to make the logistics of teaching during a pandemic work, Simas also learned how the pandemic would impact the content of her class conversations. She and the students spent a lot more time talking about what it is to perform, to share, and to communicate at a time like this, as well as more about presence and how personal space has changed. For instance, she says, when considering what is an individual’s kinesphere — the notion created by dance artist and theorist Rudolf Laban to define the space around a person’s body that can be reached by extended arms and legs — how has the dimension of that gotten bigger for most people because of the pandemic? “What is it to permeate that,” she asks, “and actually connect with audiences in a way that people have not been practicing for the last year?”
Photo by Chidera Ikpeamarom ’22
I’m basically creating a container and we’re creating performance to put within the container and the students have a lot of input into what that is and how that is executed, or, for lack of a better word, interpreted. Rosy Simas
The class also talked a lot about grief. “We [talked] about grieving and condoling and caretaking. I talk in my own work about how we’re all sort of in a state of shock. And as we exit that, we will begin to grieve, regardless of the fact that over — I don’t know what it is today — 550,000 people have died,” she says. “There will be this, I think, decade-long impact in how we do things. I mean, people have not been able to grieve, so how does that change our rituals around grieving?”
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Grief is a topic long familiar to Simas’ work, which she describes as weaving themes of personal and collective identity with family, matriarchy, sovereignty, equality, and healing, through movement. “I think most of my work deals with movement in general, and by movement, I mean, either moving bodies through space, moving sound, moving objects, or moving image,” she says. Her link to her ancestors — Simas is Haudenosaunee, enrolled Seneca, Heron Clan — is what calls her to create in the way that she does. “My work is really very simply about attention and building relationship to the natural world, building relationship to audiences and community, and bringing attention or bringing into focus issues or philosophy or ideas that are both related to my experiences culturally. But also my work really follows a genealogy because that’s a huge part of my research. A huge part of what I’ve spent the last 10 years doing is deeply discovering a very extended, wide family.” And, she adds, a part of that for her now “is about developing processes of grieving immense loss of my ancestors and of those of extended families.” She explains: One of the ways Canada disenfranchised many people was to enforce a patrilineal system in which Native women who married and had children with a non-Native man lost their status. Both they and their children were deemed non-Native. “It’s very significant,” Simas says. “Those are part of the losses that we both mourn and also try to investigate to understand more what it is that our families have historically gone through.” It’s a process that takes many shapes. Which is why when Simas describes her work as an artist as transdisciplinary versus multidisciplinary, it makes sense. “Multidisciplinary is, to me, bringing different disciplines together to create a whole, and transdisciplinary is working in different forms and with different materials and using different processes that the project requires, listening to what is needed,” she says. “I could end up doing a project that doesn’t have any dance in it at all, if that’s what the project requires. And I have done that, I have done just installations.” “Being in the messiness of not always knowing,” she says, “and working in a transdisciplinary way is more conducive for that for me.”
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Gift Creates New Visiting Artist Position in Dance Department In 2020, Colorado College’s Department of Theatre and Dance received a $530,000 gift to establish the Pamela Battey Mitchell Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Contemporary Dance in honor of Hanya Holm. The gift, from Jere Mitchell, an emeritus academic cardiologist at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, is made in honor of his late wife, Pamela Battey Mitchell ’58. Pamela Mitchell was a student of Holm’s for two years and was profoundly impacted by her time with her. Considered one of the founders of American modern dance, as well as one of the 20th century’s most sought-after choreographers of musical theatre, Holm made her way to Colorado College in 1941 as a visiting artist, and returned to campus every year until 1983 to teach in the summer dance program. CC gave her an honorary degree in Hanya Holm, 1980. 1960, and at a later event honoring Holm’s legacy, Dance Magazine’s Nik Krevitsky wrote, “The evening was filled with convincing evidence that Hanya Holm ... has prepared her students, then released them to fulfill their own potential, to become independent artists and to develop the security of their own uniqueness.” The gift allows the department to create a new visiting artist position, which will enable it to bring a variety of artists to campus and create relationships over time, much like the relationship that existed between Holm and Colorado College when Pamela Mitchell was a student. Pamela Mitchell attended CC for her final two years, also spending two summers on campus.“It was the most exciting, rewarding, and interesting time in her college career,” Jere Mitchell says. — Leslie Weddell Hanya Holm, center, dancing, undated.
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center of Colorado College. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
Largest Gift From Individual Donor in CC History By Leslie Weddell Colorado College has received a $33.5 million future estate gift from an anonymous donor, the largest gift ever from an individual in the college’s 147-year history. The unprecedented estate commitment will support future needs of the college and provide funding for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. “We cannot fully express how grateful we are to receive this unprecedented gift on behalf of the Colorado College community,” says Mike Edmonds, acting co-president of the college. “The donor who made this bequest for the future is showing gratitude for the powerful impact the college has on its students now — including our efforts toward antiracism and becoming more accessible — and entrusting CC to create even greater opportunities for thousands of students in the years ahead.” In noting that the donor has designated the gift to support future needs of the college and to provide funding for the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Robert Moore, acting co-president of the college, says, “This donor, through their extraordinary bequest, will make a transformational difference for the future of the college and the Fine Arts Center. Their foresight and generosity inspires our entire community.” The donor saw a chance to have a lasting impact with their gift.
“Colorado College has given so much to me, and it brings me great joy to see how CC positively changes the lives of students,” says the donor. “Every year I see curious, creative, critical thinkers expand their world, find their passion, and apply the knowledge and courage they gain at CC under the guidance of fantastic faculty and staff. That translates to exciting progress ahead for our world: This is where our next leaders are inspired. My wish is to keep that brilliance and spark bright for future generations.” The donor also says they made the gift because they want other members of the CC community to participate with gifts of their own. The amount of the gift is much less important than the act of giving, says the donor. “My first gift to Colorado College was $25. I’ve seen the promise that students bring, and that CC fosters. I encourage others to give back at all gift levels, because supporting this great place is a way to have impact far beyond the college’s boundaries, and far beyond this time.”
“The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College is beyond grateful for this incredible and generous gift,” says FAC Director Idris Goodwin. “As we strive to foster impact by supporting artists, educators, students, and communities across our region, generosity of this magnitude further cements our presence for future generations.” He notes that because this is an estate bequest, it will likely be decades before the funds are received. The Fine Arts Center is not actively making plans for how the gift will be used; that will be up to the leadership in place when the gift is realized. The college’s Building on Originality campaign is slated to end in December. Among its remaining priorities are: • Funds for a new Creativity & Innovation building • Increased scholarships and access • Increased alumni participation The campaign supports strategic plan priorities developed during the nine-year presidency of Jill Tiefenthaler, who left the college in July 2020 to become the CEO of National Geographic. L. Song Richardson, current dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, will become CC’s 14th president on July 1.
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Pivots in the Pandemic By Katie Grant ’92 Just as art comes in many forms and doesn’t need to fit into a specific box or category, neither does the work produced at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College during the pandemic. In fact, the FAC has risen to the occasion and proven that necessity really does breed creativity.
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The biggest challenge when the pandemic hit was that the FAC staff had to all of a sudden take on new responsibilities and to learn new skills seemingly overnight. That’s been a challenge just to keep people motivated and feeling supported…
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The FAC’s newest director, Idris Goodwin, not only stepped into the role after the doors were closed due to the pandemic, but he stepped up in a major way. Under his direction, programs have received remote options when possible and new programs have been born. “There is no substitute for the living, live-in-person experience,” Goodwin says. “But the remote work has only been good for us. It’s increased our reach, it’s increased the visibility of our brand.” Goodwin, a former professor in the Theatre and Dance Department at CC who recently was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship with a no-stringsattached $50,000 grant, is the first Black person to lead the FAC and sees the arts as crucial in a very specific way. “I think the arts are catharsis. I think the arts are therapeutic for makers, but also cathartic for the viewers and listeners. So, no matter how heavy the world gets, there will always be people there exploring and reflecting on what it means to humanity through arts … . For those of us who work in arts organizations, that’s our duty. Our duty is to create the space to center the arts or the artist and ask people what they think.” Idris Goodwin. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
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As a part of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College 2020 3X3 Project, Brian Colonna ’00 plays a grasshopper in the aptly named drive-in, socially distanced play Grasshoppers by Denver's Buntport Theatre Company, a companion piece to the "Rocky Mountain Locusts" film project. Courtesy Buntport Theatre Company
The biggest challenge when the pandemic hit was that the FAC staff “had to all of a sudden take on new responsibilities and to learn new skills seemingly overnight,” says Goodwin. “That’s been a challenge just to keep people motivated and feeling supported ... and we just wanted to make sure people still felt engaged in their duties and in the jobs that they take pride in.” While motivating and supporting the FAC staff, Goodwin has been continuing to do what he does — create. Last year he wrote a rap for Nickelodeon that was turned into an animated short called “Black History Month (It’s Yours).” And then, of course, there’s the work he’s doing with the United States Artist Fellowship. What the FAC gave visitors to think about after the pandemic hit just came in different forms than pre-pandemic. Before reopening their doors last November to a reservation-based system, the museum opened an eMuseum to be enjoyed from home (coloradocollege.emuseum.com/collections). Art and theatre classes went virtual, dance concerts such as Cleo Parker Robinson’s “The MOVE/ment” took place online, and new work started remotely. Three projects of note include the audio play series “Of Spacious Skies,” the 3X3 Projects: Creative Collaborations from Isolation, and FAC Connect.
Mountain Locusts,” submitted by filmmaker Emily Swank ’02, interdisciplinary artist Adam Stone, and actor Erin Rollman ’98 of Denver’s Buntport Theatre Company. Their film project focused on investigating a swarm of locusts that ravaged the Rocky Mountain region in 1875, and became a companion piece to “The Grasshoppers,” a drive-in, socially distanced short play staged in Denver and Colorado Springs by Rollman and fellow Buntport members Erik Edborg ’96, Hannah Duggan ’98, Brian Colonna ’00, and Samantha Schmitz ’00.
Former FAC Theatre Company Artistic Director Scott RC Levy took the helm for the “Of Spacious Skies” series by channeling his love of old radio plays into a historical extravaganza of Colorado Springs and the area’s celebrities including stage and film actor Lon Chaney and Katherine Lee Bates, who was inspired by Pikes Peak to write the lyrics of “America, the Beautiful.” The audio series can still be accessed online, and even viewed with a visual companion on Facebook.
Goodwin says, “We were able to provide money to artists during the pandemic, to keep creating. Essentially, that was my goal. The staff and I here are all lucky that we are gainfully employed people in a pandemic. We felt it really important to try to support independent artists who don’t have these full-time salaries to fall back on or who couldn’t tour or had exhibitions canceled and postponed.”
The 3X3 Projects funded $3,000 each to nine projects and required three artists in three different creative disciplines to work remotely and develop a digital experience about the Rocky Mountain West or the American Southwest region. One of the projects awarded funding was “Rocky
FAC Connect is a place to experience the arts: visual arts, performing arts, arts education, and more, with new content added regularly. With FAC Connect, online visitors can view new works and talk with the artists about them. For example, one option, Clay TV with Bemis School of Art’s Assistant Director Jeremiah Houck, takes viewers “in his studio for fun, relaxing videos of all things clay.”
“I hope folks realize that it should be evidence of my passion for the arts,” he says. “That it’s bigger than just what I make. … It’s about really supporting the arts and culture landscape of our time ... I see the big picture of it all because it’s really about what I think the arts can do for people or for communities and that’s why I’m out here doing this.” What’s next for the FAC? In May, expect a summer-long project called “City as a Venue” which, Goodwin says, “is an initiative that brings arts experiences outdoors safely. We will have a permanent stage on campus and then we’ll be out in downtown and various communities doing everything from theatre pieces to music, dance pieces, poetry. Bemis Art School will have a lot of interactive things going on, and we’d love to do some mural walking tours.” With its new director at the helm, the FAC will continue to make art and Goodwin is grateful for just how engaged folks have remained, despite being separated. “It’s just a reminder of what this is really all about. People want to gather and be in each other’s presence. So, yes, we can still get the things we need and survive in a largely virtual, masked, and distanced environment, but that’s not who we are as a species. We’re social, we need to gather.”
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DECOLONIZING DURING A PANDEMIC By Molly Seaman ’21 During her residency as the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019-20 academic year, Anna Tsouhlarakis erected two eye-catching billboards near downtown Colorado Springs.
Attempts at Minimalism, performance still.
These billboards read: “I really like the way you respect Native American rights” and “It’s great how you acknowledge that Native Americans are here.” Their design — in capitalized black sans-serif letters on white backgrounds — demonstrates a Minimalist approach that remains consistent throughout the videos, sculptures, installations, and other media now included in “To Bind or to Burn,” Tsouhlarakis’ new exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. When asked how she employs Minimalism to Indigenize contemporary art, Tsouhlarakis says, “Minimalism has always been connected with white men. This is a fiction that Western art historians and critics have led the world to believe. But so much of Indigenous art utilizes the framework of what we know as Minimalism and I believe this is why I have always been drawn to it. To see Native face-painting, beadwork, weavings, and rock drawings as forms of Minimalist art would rightly open the definition and help it be more accurate. I think I’m merely pointing to connections that are apparent to me.” After walking past the billboards, which are now displayed at the exhibit’s entrance, and a nearby projection of the billboards on the gallery wall, visitors are greeted by a large multimedia space that Tsouhlarakis decolonizes through a diverse selection of art forms that work in tandem to translate the Navajo tradition of binding. Binding can be described as an action used to teach self-control, respect, and balance within the worlds of human and nature. Examples of binding within the Navajo tradition include wrapping infants in cradleboards to ease their lack of bodily control and keeping hair clean and tied back so as to provide clarity of mind and positive intentions. Tsouhlarakis explains that her translation of binding is just one way to decolonize contemporary Western art. She explains, “I’m sure there are so many ways to get there but, for me, this made the most sense and was the most relevant.”
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Billboard erected near downtown Colorado Springs, 2019.
“The idea of having your child in a cradleboard is such a departure from Western mentality that non-Natives didn’t know what to think. The Western, or should I say American, mentality of being childcentric, rather than family-centric, does not grow a family or create people who are community-based,” she says. “I am more interested in helping create a population that is aware of our pitfalls and also interested in sustaining and building communities.” Experiencing the translation of binding happening throughout “To Bind or to Burn” can only be possible in person, for the efficacy of Tsouhlarakis’ messaging lies in the visitor’s ability to literally walk through installations like “Edges of the Ephemeral” — a site-specific installation made of found wood, found metal, crushed granite, other found objects, and manufactured signs — to watch massive projections of videoed performances, and to observe the series of sculptures and framed works of fire and ash on paper from every possible angle. Fortunately, visitors are now welcome at the FAC as long as enhanced COVID-19 safety protocols are followed. The new difficulties associated with creating during a pandemic haven’t slowed Tsouhlarakis down. In fact, the COVID-19 conditions may have rendered
Legend V, performance still.
“To Bind or to Burn” even more impactful to a wider audience. “It seems so many people sought new methods to deal with stress, anxiety, and isolation during the pandemic in various ways, so maybe it is more relevant in this time,” Tsouhlarakis says. “I think the relevancy may come from the fact that people are open to new ideas of dealing with new feelings and situations that we haven’t experienced.” Anna Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College with degrees in Native American studies and studio art. She went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in sculpture. Her work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as Rush Arts in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Heard Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In addition to her residency at CC, Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Yaddo.
PROFESSOR NATE MARSHALL’S
ENDURING MOMENTUM Chicago Public Library Award, “Finna,” and More
By Molly Seaman ’21
PHOTO BY JENNIFER COOMBES
Assistant Professor of English, poet, and spoken word artist Nate Marshall has not allowed the circumstances posed by the pandemic to decelerate his exciting momentum. In one year, Marshall published his anthology “Finna,” named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR; was awarded the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library; and — thanks to the pandemic — adapted his unique teaching style to remote learning. “Finna” explores the current era of reinvigorated white supremacy by examining the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people. Through lyrical poems that celebrate the Black vernacular, Marshall widens notions of linguistic and social possibility as he considers the violence inherent to gendered language and the propensity to erase certain peoples from the American narrative. In addition to receiving the 21st Century Award and publishing “Finna,” the English professor has also managed to convert his captivating teaching style to the online learning sphere, where he mentors students while simultaneously regarding them as fellow artists. He imbues his teaching with the idea that students have the ultimate power over their poems — that they are the story. Because poetry students look toward their powers of observation and their own identities for material, their message often intersects with the racial and social unrest that has taken place over the last year. “Classroom discussion has reflected upon the climate of white supremacy that has been particularly pronounced over the last year. I think many of these issues are new to students or at least students perhaps
feel an urgency around these issues that is new,” says Marshall. “It’s been interesting to observe and to engage with, and in many ways it has been rewarding to offer students some frameworks to consider these issues. The reality of my experience is that structural and interpersonal racism has been foundational to my understanding of the world and so these issues of white grievance or police violence or broad inequality are things I’ve been thinking about since childhood.” Marshall works to encourage student engagement by taking advantage of the online aspect of current classes; he takes classes on virtual field trips at other institutions and has featured class visitors who “would otherwise be too difficult to pull off.” His continuing love for the written word and for teaching writing permeate the classroom atmosphere, even through Zoom, and will continue to inspire students this semester as he teaches Introduction to Creative Writing with Visiting Assistant Professor of English Alison C. Rollins, who last year served as the lead teaching and learning librarian in Tutt Library, and who also previously taught the Advanced Poetry Workshop course. Marshall’s passion for teaching poetry stems from his ardent belief in the potential inherent in the art of
young people. When asked about the overall impact on poetry of Amanda Gorman’s widely acclaimed poem read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, he says, “I think when we have an inaugural poet — Gorman is only the sixth — it represents a kind of stage for poetry in U.S. life that’s rare. I’m not sure that will have a long-term impact on society, but I think it contributes to a chorus that makes the case for the value of art and specifically the value of investing in young people’s involvement in the arts and in poetry specifically. Amanda Gorman is one of thousands of young people in the U.S. and beyond who have been shaped and impacted by the transformative power of youth poetry programming. A few years ago, I was also one of those young people.” Marshall therefore views Gorman’s inaugural poem as not an outlier but as one notable piece of art in a never-ending stream of creation that emanates from young people in America. “We’ve been in a moment for the last many years where poetry has been attracting more attention — I’m thinking of Warsan Shire’s featuring in the Beyonce short film “Lemonade,” for example. Shire, like Gorman, was someone who came to poetry as a young person. I’m not sure if the interest will last but I think more people are reading poetry these days and I think that’s a good thing.” While Marshall does not believe that “The Hill We Climb” will incite more students’ interest in poetry in the long run, he hopes that it will “attract resources to the programs that make pathways for young people like Amanda.”
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IDEA/Campus Collection:
Regional Artwork That Speaks to CC’s Sense of Place
By Brenda Gillen Photography by Jennifer Coombes
A Collection by Way of Community
Prints by Adolf Dehn and Jean Charlot. A desert landscape by Agnes Pelton. Photographs by Laura Gilpin. These are just a few of the objects that comprise the Colorado College IDEA/Campus Collection. The artwork, separate from that held by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, has evolved over the years. In the 1970s, it included thousands of specimens when the college had a natural history museum. Since then, CC has dispersed the specimens, appraised the collection twice, and several people have handled its management. In recent years, it fell under the purview of Jessica Hunter Larsen ’90 when she was curator of the IDEA Space — an interdisciplinary experimental arts program. After CC announced its historic alliance with the FAC in 2016, management of the campus collection was placed in the hands of Professor of Art Rebecca Tucker. Part of what makes the collection unique is that it is almost entirely donated. It contains 600 objects,
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Pieces from the art collection of Conrad Nelson were donated to Colorado College and are currently on display at Tutt Library. The artworks are the beginning of what Professor of Art Rebecca Tucker hopes will be a campus loan program that will incorporate the artwork with students in the Art Department’s curatorial studies program to provide loans to students, faculty, and staff on a semester basis.
primarily paintings and works on paper, 100 of which are on display across campus. The rest are stored in Palmer Hall. “Officially, the collection is the umbrella for any piece of art owned by the college that is not in the FAC. So, outdoor sculptures, office decoration, all sorts of things, fall into the campus collection. And the job of the manager is to keep it updated, make sure everything is in good condition, and handle loans to faculty and staff,” Tucker says.
The collection is a little-known resource that represents many decades of college history. Future plans include creating and implementing a campus-wide loan program that would allow the collection to be more accessible and available to staff and students. Last year, Tucker facilitated the donation of 59 works from Conrad Nelson, an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Fine Arts Center. Nelson pursued a degree in fine arts after her career in corporate banking. Upon moving from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Buena Vista, Colorado, she made connections in the Colorado Springs arts community. “Her collection is important to the campus loan idea because she collected local and regional artists. The vision for the loan part of the campus collection is that it will be a collection that highlights our sense of place,” says Tucker.
Nelson’s collection goes back decades. Her husband, Grant Heilman, was a photographer who had collected art since the 1940s. When he died in 2014, Nelson had to decide what to do with the collection, and it just happened that Nelson’s longtime friend, Jean Gumpper, is a lecturer and artist in residence in the Art Department at Colorado College. “I happen to be lucky. I’m in a position to be able to donate. Jean Gumpper introduced me to Rebecca, and then all the pieces fell into place,” says Nelson. Nelson’s philanthropy comes naturally. Her parents were generous, and she too has always volunteered her time and resources. “I feel I have responsibility for doing something good. My theory is that art is like getting to learn to like certain foods. You have to be exposed to it to learn about it and appreciate it,” Nelson says. Blair Huff ’14 has been one of the first to work with Nelson’s collection. After earning a degree in art history at CC, she realized her dream of working at a museum when she was hired on as a curatorial assistant at the FAC in 2017. Her timing was fortuitous. “I was especially excited by the future of the Fine Arts Center and its alliance with Colorado College. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to come in when a lot of new, exciting things were happening, and everyone had so much enthusiasm for the future of the museum,” Huff says. She selected pieces from Nelson’s collection for an installation in Tutt Library. The pieces were hung in August 2020 when the library was closed due to COVID-19. Huff says that they include a wide range of subject matter and media, including abstract, figurative, and nature-inspired pieces. “I was looking for aesthetic similarities to group the objects and create moments where you could interact with them and see which pieces talk to each other in interesting ways,” she says. “I hope they give a sense of that feeling of stumbling upon something surprising, beautiful, or compelling.” Each library floor contains some pieces of the installation, and Huff made certain to include artwork in the areas of study and work. Also facilitating the installation were Steve Lawson, interim library director; Jenn Sides, library operations manager; and Dan Crossey ’74, carpenter and cabinetmaker.
An art piece by longtime CC faculty member Jeanne Gumpper is on display at Tutt Library.
On Campus, Online, and On Loan In addition to exhibitions like the one in Tutt Library, Tucker wants to make the collection more accessible by putting it online where students, faculty, and staff could view works and choose what they’d like to borrow. “It would allow people to select art that they like and capture some of the excitement and dynamism of living with original art,” Tucker says. Students would run the loan program and not only get experience managing a collection, but they’d also have a voice in selecting which gifts are accepted. “A lot of the antiracist values that we’re all working on can be encapsulated in this new program. We can make sure that the objects that we lend are diverse and reflect our region. There are ways to be thoughtful and mission-driven in how we capture our history and how we share that history in representative ways,” she says. Amber Mustafic ’19 and Lucas Cowen ’22 have been instrumental in developing the nascent loan program. Mustafic stayed on after graduation as a ninth-semester fellow in the art department, during which she designed the loan program. (See Alumni in the Arts on p. 40 for more on Mustafic today.) Cowen, a museum studies major, has taken a hands-on approach. He has moved artwork in the storage space, grouped them according to size, met with Nelson about her collection, and helped in other ways to get the loan program ready for launch. One of his tasks involved sorting.
Professor of Art Rebecca Tucker manages the campus art collection.
“There are a lot of works in the collection. So, we go through them to identify where things are assigned, who made them, when they made them, and when the school acquired them. We catalog them according to that data. And we decide whether or not some works are problematic and if we should omit them from the collection,” Cowen says. Since the collection contains not only paintings and the like, but also a six-foot-tall portrait of former CC President William F. Slocum, whose legacy includes overwhelming evidence of sexual misconduct and assault, those decisions require sensitivity. Cowen says the collection democratizes access to art, which sometimes can be a daunting space, especially in commercial markets. “A campus collection like this is really important, especially at a liberal arts institution, which is trying to foster a sense of values and morals. It can bring someone into understanding that they can have thoughtful opinions about art. Art can make a big difference in their lives. It can set them up for the rest of their lives to be not only casual observers but someone who can find art fascinating and compelling,” he says. He believes that having young people decide what goes into the collection and what work is worth showing will result in them finding art and artists whose value may not be recognized in commercial settings like conventional galleries. Tucker hopes to launch the new loan program in Fall 2021.
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STUDENT PERSPECTIVE
Jessa Granata ’23 works on embroidery techniques during an Arts and Crafts session led by Ana Kilgore ’21. Photo by John Le ’24
Whitner Reichman ’24 and Maxwell Hinds ’23 take a break from studying during Block 5's fourth week to enjoy some hot chocolate and churros provided by Bon Appetit and the Office of Campus Activities. Photo by Skye Schelz ’21
RIGHT: Olamide Olayiwoln ’24 and Ester Cornish ’24 enjoy an afternoon on Worner Quad on Jan. 20, with cookie decorating kits to celebrate Inauguration Day. Photo by Skye Schelz ’21 BELOW: Olivia Coutre ’23 crochets during a class offered by the Arts and Crafts Program. Students gathered twice a week to crochet together in Worner Campus Center. Photo by Patil Khakhamian ’22
Students walk across a snowy campus during Block 5. Photo by Skye Schelz ’21
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ABOVE: Winter Start students tie-dye class shirts during their in-person activities. Photo by John Le ’24 LEFT: Frances Heiss ’15 instructs a weaving class in the Arts and Crafts Center, teaching techniques to Sarah Edell ’24. Photo by Chidera Ikpeamarom ’22 BELOW: Filip Carnogurksy ’23 stands in a long socially distanced line at the Worner Campus Center to pick up a gift card to a small blackowned business in Colorado Springs. The Office of Campus Activities gave away more than 100 gift cards in late February in honor of Black History Month. Photo by Patil Khakhamian ’22
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Recruiting and Retaining Diverse Faculty:
THE RILEY SCHOLARS-INRESIDENCE PROGRAM By Jennifer Kulier
A study by the Council of Graduate Schools found that most Black and Latinx doctoral students in STEM fields do not earn their degrees within seven years, and many leave their programs. This is just one of the statistics related to the challenges members of under-represented minority groups face when seeking a career in academia — and it’s just one example of the reasons why, more than 30 years ago, Colorado College instituted the Riley Scholars-inResidence Program, and why, in the 2020s, it’s received a reboot. Since 1988, the Riley Scholars Program has helped those in under-represented minority groups prepare for careers in academia, or determine if such a career is right for them. Every year, four to six individuals progress through the program, many with goals of becoming faculty members at CC or other colleges and universities. “One of the great benefits of the program for fellows is that they have a job in which they don’t have service obligations and their teaching load is reduced, but they’re still paid sufficiently so they can focus on their dissertations, completing their scholarship, and navigating the job market,” says Heidi R. Lewis, director and associate professor of feminist and gender studies. The latter, she adds, can be a challenge for predoctoral academics. Some never complete their dissertations or Ph.D.s. Financial realities force many to get a job instead and the demands of that job preclude them from working on and finishing their Ph.D.s.
The Program at HEART Colorado College is a member of the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, whose goal is to increase the diversity of students and curricular offerings at liberal arts colleges, with a particular focus on enhancing the diversity of faculty members and of applicants for faculty positions. The Riley Scholars Program offers predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships to scholars hired through the consortium. Victor Nelson-Cisneros, retired associate dean at
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Colorado College, was both a co-founder of the CFD and was instrumental in the establishment of CC’s Riley Scholars Program. The Riley Scholars Program provides its fellows opportunities to complete their dissertations or cultivate their postdoctoral research and enter the academic job market while gaining meaningful experience teaching undergraduates in a liberal arts setting. The program also provides CC departments and programs with opportunities to enhance mentoring skills, expand and reimagine course offerings and improve departmental and programmatic climate. The program aims to recruit and retain faculty with marginalized social identities in the professoriate, especially at liberal arts colleges in the U.S. The program also aims to situate Colorado College as a premier site for faculty development, especially for undergraduate teaching excellence and quality scholarship. Last year, along with Lewis being named director of and support specialist for the Riley Scholars Program, the program itself got a reboot, including a renewed focus on the mentorship of the fellows and a new focus on mentor development. And today, as Lewis works with the fellows as they navigate the program, Peony Fhagen, senior associate dean for equity, inclusion, and faculty development, works with departments and programs interested in or currently hosting Riley Scholars. The benefits of the Riley Scholars Program represent something of a two-way street, offering advantages to
both the college and the fellows. The program helps the college achieve a more diverse faculty with new perspectives, and renewing CC’s commitment to the Riley Scholars Program aligns with the college’s antiracism goals. Lewis and Fhagen have worked to create a robust, intentional mentoring program for Riley Scholars. “Regardless of whether they stay at CC or go to a different institution, while they’re here, Riley Scholars are going to get good mentoring and support,” Lewis says. And many do stay. Some current members of the faculty or administration who started out as Riley Scholars include Claire Oberon Garcia, acting provost, dean of the faculty and professor of English; Mario Montaño, professor emeritus of anthropology; Manya Whitaker, chair and associate professor of education; and Brian Rommel-Ruiz, professor of history. Lewis also is a former Riley Scholar.
The Program in ACTION Riley Scholar Juan Miguel Arias ’12 attended Colorado College for his undergraduate education from 2008 to 2012, when he graduated magna cum laude with distinction. A neuroscience major, he served as a paraprofessional in the Psychology and Neuroscience Departments for a year before beginning his graduate training. He first received a Master of Science degree in developmental and comparative psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Following that, he entered a Ph.D. program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, focusing on developmental and psychological sciences, finishing in Summer 2020. His major interests were youth development, thriving, and equity, and he really wanted to find a way to connect that with other things he’s passionate about, including cultural histories of environmentalism and engagement with the outdoors. Arias identifies as Latino; he was born in Colombia, and moved to the U.S. with his mom when very young.
The Education Department’s Juan Miguel Arias ’12, left, and Solomon Seyum, with the Geology Department, are current Riley Scholars at CC. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
I’d like to help a whole range of kids and communities remember how uplifting a connection to nature can be, and how environmentalism has deep roots in cultural and social justice. Juan Miguel Arias ’12, Riley Scholar
“It was always an extracurricular thing — my interest in the environment and the outdoors — always separate from my academic pursuits. But then I thought, ‘why don’t I do that in education?’ So I shifted into environmental education,” Arias says. “The main questions I work on now are: How do we make environmental education more equitable? How do we best support historically excluded people in demonstrating and cultivating their own forms of environmentalism? I’d like to help a whole range of kids and communities remember how uplifting a connection to nature can be, and how environmentalism has deep roots in cultural and social justice.”
As he was finishing his doctoral studies, Arias reached out to the CC Education Department to let them know he was about to be on the job market and see what opportunities might be available. He was told that the department was looking for a young professor to teach classes for the Teaching & Research in Environmental Education (TREE) Semester, and that he should look into the Consortium for Faculty Diversity and the Riley Scholars Program. CC hired him as a Riley Scholar. “It was a very good alignment of the Education Department’s needs and my interests and goals. I’ve been falling in love again with everything CC is trying to be about,” he says. Arias says it’s felt good — like a homecoming — returning to family (his family moved to Colorado Springs a few years ago) and alma mater. “It doesn’t feel like I just left. I very much feel the nine years that it’s been. To come back to a place that I knew when I was a different person in many ways — I still love this place and I have so many new things to contribute now. I’ve been shaped and remolded, coming out on the other side of a long grad program. Now I’m working alongside others at the college on equity, justice, and antiracism at the faculty level. Not only do I want to, but I also feel
very capable. I know I can do it. I continue to learn a lot and I’m grateful to be doing it here.” Arias spent much of the summer of 2020 in the mountains near Woodland Park, Colorado, at the Catamount Center, teaching CC students in a fully masked, socially distanced setting for the TREE Semester course Foundations of Environmental Education. He also taught Critical Education Theory. The following semester he taught Educational Psychology and a master’s-level course, Teaching Identities. Although starting a new job during a pandemic has been hard in many ways, he’s been pleased with the experience of being a Riley Scholar. “CC seems sincere in working to diversify the composition of its faculty and I’m excited to be a part of that. Not only am I on the receiving end of that as a Riley Scholar, but the work I do can also help move us forward on our antiracist ambitions. I have things to give to CC and I’m given resources to do that — even though it’s been a challenge because of the pandemic. There’s been a lot of concrete mentoring and informal reaching out from colleagues; ‘Let’s have a Zoom coffee, a distanced chat on the porch, etc.’ It has been very helpful.”
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During a paired off exercise, Yasmine Khali ’24 (far left) and Erick Gullock Benavides ’24 (far right) look at different kinds of snow under a magnifying glass. Associate Professor of Organismal Biology and Ecology Emilie Gray’s CC105 Winter Ecology course visited Mueller State Park where students observed and took notes on various tree species and wildlife. The FYE course is designed for Winter Start students. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
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By Sarah Senese ’23
Over the summer, amid the chaos and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, Creativity & Innovation at CC decided to tweak one of their longest-standing traditions: The Big Idea competition. Creativity & Innovation Director Dez Stone Menendez ’02 had been mulling the change ever since she returned to CC in 2016. With a lot of help from the college, alumni, and the students, Innovation launched the Student Seed Innovation Grant to replace the Big Idea competition and get the first round of students funded and involved. While this may come as a shock for people who have grown to love the entrepreneurial competition, the Seed Grant has been a work-in-progress for years. The idea came from Menendez, who had been wanting to expand the program to anyone and everyone who had an idea, regardless of a business
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pitch or a spirit for entrepreneurship. She mostly “wanted to move away from the idea that innovation only lives within the business sector.” Although entrepreneurship is her forte, Menendez wanted any student who had an idea to be able to receive funds, obtain a mentor, and make that dream happen,
regardless of whether it became a sellable product or was voted into existence by a panel of judges. In addition to expanding who can apply, the new Student Seed Innovation Grants allow funding for all students, as many times as they choose to apply. One of the most notable changes from the Big Idea competition is that a single student can apply for funding up to $6,000, whereas the Big Idea competition focused on group projects. Any student enrolled and taking classes at CC has the chance to make their idea a reality, try a project once and try again, or even follow a hunch they’ve had for a while. For Menendez, this is an opportunity to show students that they can have the space to try and fail, all while being encouraged to not give up.
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The C&I initiative is preparing students to be comfortable facing ambiguity and the unknown, comfortable failing and trying again, but being supported all the way there.
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PROJECT IN PROGRESS
Dez Stone Menendez ’02, Creativity & Innovation Director
Lauren Weiss ’21, who has been a participant in the Big Idea competition and is a frequent student of Creativity & Innovation’s workshops and classes, has taken to the Seed Grant and is thrilled about the change. Her project, Geek Girl, is a startup dedicated to advancing education and closing the gender gap in computer science. She’s seeking to do this through virtual coding courses, leadership trainings, and an iPhone app to connect mentors and mentees in the field. Through the Seed Grant, Weiss is able to extend the work her team did previously in the Big Idea competition, but with increased funds, a chance to dig deeper, and in the best way
Lauren Weiss ’21. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
PROJECT IN PROGRESS
Alexia Preston ’21 and Logan Hemming ’22. Photo by Jennifer Coombes
she works — independently. What Weiss really loves about the new grant is that it allows her to pair up with a mentor to bounce ideas off of, get feedback, and have someone who keeps her accountable for her work and is there for unwavering support. Weiss is excited to see how the Student Seed Innovation Grant program grows, given that this is her last year at CC. “I see this change benefiting Colorado College students by promoting a more collaborative environment on campus,” she says. “One of the key aspects to the grant application is demonstrating support, whether that comes from students, faculty, or even local community members.” Another group working through the Seed Grant is Alexia Preston ’21 and Logan Hemming ’22. While their project is still in the prototype phase, they were both thrilled that the Big Idea competition had transitioned into what it is now. Their project, which is a small machine that would make for safer, more sustainable coffee, couldn’t have been put into the prototype stage without the new grant. “In a year where everything was put on hold, the Student Seed Innovation Grant allowed us to pursue a startup venture. As an idea born during COVID-19, timing was everything, so we are so happy the grant started when we did,” says Preston. While Preston and Hemming are not quite ready for the world to see their project, they are beyond thrilled that they now have the ability to work at their own pace and see their idea through, all thanks to the Student Seed Innovation Grant. But the changes don’t stop here. Menendez’s original plan way back in 2016 didn’t end with only students finding new avenues to pursue ideas. Creativity &
Innovation is currently in the process of creating a faculty and staff Seed Grant application, with the hopes that anyone at CC with a passion and an idea will be able to pursue it. Menendez says she even hopes that one day, “even a staff member and a student could come together to solve a real-world problem or ask a question.” The Student Seed Innovation Grant program also seeks to make problem-solving more accessible and inclusive, encouraging all of CC that the questions they have are worth being funded and answered. While the Big Idea competition was fostering an atmosphere of creativity, some students worked better alone, didn’t want their idea to become a business pitch, or just didn’t work well in a competitive environment. While Menendez’s first love lies with entrepreneurship, the ultimate goal was to make a grant that anyone could have access to. “The things I learned from most were my failures,” Menendez says, “and the C&I initiative is preparing students to be comfortable facing ambiguity and the unknown, comfortable failing and trying again, but being supported all the way there.” After this school year, Weiss will not be ending the Geek Girl story. She plans to study entrepreneurship at the University College London, where she hopes to further develop the startup by entering pitch competitions and gaining support through her graduate program. When asked what the Seed Grant and the Big Idea competition gave to her CC experience as a whole, she says she could “confidently say that being an active member of Creativity & Innovation has offered some of the most transformative experiences during my undergraduate studies.”
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By Leslie Weddell
The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools
A Short & Happy Guide to Advanced Legal Research
By Lindsey Pointer ’13, Kathleen McGoey, and Haley Farrar
By Ann Walsh Long ’89
As restorative practices gain momentum, scholars and practitioners have begun to ask: How should restorative practices be taught? What educational structures and methods are in alignment with restorative values and principles? This book introduces games as a tool to teach restorative justice practices. Grounded in an understanding of restorative pedagogy and experiential learning strategies, the games allow learners to experience and understand restorative practices while building relationships and improving skills. Pointer has a Ph.D. in Restorative Justice from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and currently serves as the assistant director of the National Center on Restorative Justice at Vermont Law School. Published by Good Books, 2020.
Legal research can be costly for students and practitioners in two ways: time and money. Long, a law professor at the Lincoln Memorial University School of Law in Knoxville, Tennessee, has written a book that streamlines the process of legal research involving any subject matter and during any stage of civil litigation. Included is an overview of the litigation analytics and artificial intelligence features available from Bloomberg Law, Lexis Advance, and Westlaw Edge. Long notes that the Block Plan taught her to be efficient with her time, a lesson she’s carried over to her professional life. Published by West Academic Publishing, 2020.
JB VANNATTA EVOLVED
By Jeremy Vannatta ’93
When North Becomes South By Becky Bronson ’79 Bronson wrote this book after visiting her son, a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote African village. What would you do without electricity or the Internet? You may find out in this dystopian novel. A massive solar flare triggers a change in Earth’s magnetic field. Suddenly, power grids fail all over the globe, the Internet shuts down, long-distance communication becomes impossible, and modern methods of transportation no longer exist. A separated family struggles to reunite in this changed landscape where each must answer the question: How do you steer your life when north and south are radically shifting? Published by Rebecca Bronson, 2020.
Evolved
FEATURING YOU ARE WHERE I WANT TO BE| LOVE THAT'S BOLD| MY 45S
Elements of rock, folk, alt-country, and bluegrass color Vannatta’s first full-length album, “Evolved.” A student of music, a fan of words, a longtime mixtape maker, and a part-time rock music critic, Vannatta has culled a group of 13 original songs built mainly from love won, love lost, and love spurned. His songs sound at once original and paradoxically as if they had existed in the ether for years, ready to be plucked and pressed to vinyl. “Evolved” is available for streaming on all major platforms.
Prioritizing Sustainability Education: A Comprehensive Approach Co-edited by Chara Armon ’95
Zucker didn’t set out to be a career musician; in fact, he majored in molecular biology. This is his debut album release, although he had released music throughout college and had been offered multiple deals by the time he entered his senior year. Like his breakout song, “comethru,” the album digs into the singer’s personal relationships and inner fantasies. He has sold out stages across Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, and “comethru” is platinum certified, with more than 1 billion global streams. Republic Records, 2020.
The book presents theory-to-practice essays and case studies by educators from six countries who present dynamic approaches to sustainability education. Too often, students graduate with exploitative, consumer-driven orientations toward ecosystems and are unprepared to confront the urgent challenges presented by environmental degradation. The approaches in this book expand beyond conventional emphases on developing students’ attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors by thinking and talking about ecosystems to additionally engaging students with ecosystems in sensory, affective, psychological, and cognitive dimensions, as well as imaginative, spiritual, or existential dimensions that guide environmental care and regeneration. Published by London: Routledge, 2020.
Created for Greatness
Heaven in Your Bones
By Robert Gregory Stephens ’68
By Caryn Daus Flanagan ’89
Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Have you struggled to find happiness that lasts? With all the trials, problems, pressures, and temptations you face, how can you live a happy, successful, and significant life? Told through the narrative of a father-son relationship, Stephens has written a guide to a happy life. During his 40 years of Bible study and mentoring, he found the answer in 10 life-changing skills based on God’s word. This book will help you discover how to embrace happiness that lasts; achieve peak performance; make wise decisions; conquer worry, fear, anxiety, and stress; and create a powerful prayer life. Published by Beaver’s Pond Press, 2020.
A young child’s world changes forever when, late one night, her parents receive a devastating phone call. Young readers follow little Sarah as she navigates sudden loss for the first time. Utilizing her natural curiosity, happy memories, and innate wisdom, Sarah’s journey leads her to a beautiful place of understanding and peace. Aimed at children 3 and older, this book, based on actual events, is a love letter to children experiencing traumatic loss. A portion of proceeds from book sales is donated to ACCESS, a nonprofit providing emotional support resources for people who have lost loved ones in aircraft accidents. Published by BookBaby, 2020.
love is not dying By Jeremy Zucker ’18
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SPRING 2021
We asked Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature
CO R I N N E SC H E I N E R
PHOTO BY JENNIFER COOMBES
“What’s On Your Reading List?” “I just finished rereading Tommy Orange’s ‘There There,’ which I first read when it was published in 2018. In the novel, we hear the stories of a wide range of characters, all of whom are heading to a Big Oakland Powwow. Through these characters, as well as through its prologue, the novel takes on stereotypes of Native identity, subverting these stereotypes by offering up each character’s own story of their lived experiences. These stories are ones of shared struggle for, Orange says, ‘I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other native people struggle, with identity and with authenticity.’ “Lately, I have been thinking a lot about identity and contemporary fiction, in particular the way(s) in which novels not only allow for representations of identity, but also provide spaces in which to deconstruct identities and I have been exploring new-to-me voices, which is how ‘There There’ found its way back to my current reading list. If you’ve not read it yet, I highly recommend adding it to yours.”
Lyme Disease and Relapsing Fever Spirochetes: Genomics, Molecular Biology, Host Interactions and Disease Pathogenesis Co-edited by D. Scott Samuels ’83 Lyme disease, the most prevalent vector-borne illness in the U.S. and Europe and a growing threat to global health, is considered a model system of emerging infectious diseases. The 2010 book “Borrelia: Molecular Biology, Host Interaction and Pathogenesis” was the first state-of-the-art reference work covering the myriad facets of the enzootic disorders caused by pathogenic Borrelia. This current volume, by the same editors, builds on the previous work and contains a vast amount of new information. The volume highlights and describes in detail the tremendous advances in understanding the Borrelia genus at the molecular and cellular levels as well as the pathogenesis of Lyme disease and relapsing fever. Published by Caister Academic Press, 2021.
Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving A Life By Katherine E. Standefer ’07 Standefer tells the story of her troubled relationship to her implanted cardiac defibrillator within the context of the device’s global supply chain and the dysfunctional American health care system. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in Southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, the book, both a memoir and mystery, takes the reader on a global reckoning with the social, environmental, and personal costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Standefer’s book was named a must-read by O Magazine and received a starred Kirkus review. Published by Little, Brown, Spark, 2020.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies Co-edited by Ryan Bañagale ’00, director of performing arts and associate professor of music Billy Joel has sold more than 150 million records, produced 33 Top 40 hits, and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Fans celebrate him, critics deride him, and scholars have all but ignored him. Emerging from a 2016 public musicology conference on Joel hosted by Colorado College, this first-of-its-kind collection of essays offers close analysis and careful insight into the ways his work has impacted popular music during the last 50 years. Ultimately, these chapters interrogate how music frames our experiences, constitutes our history and culture, and gains importance in our daily lives. Published by Lexington Books, 2020.
You Talkin’ to Me? How to Write Great Dialogue By Linda Seger ’67 and John Rainey Unlike the chitchat of everyday life, dialogue in stories should express character, advance the story, suggest a theme, and include a few memorable lines that audiences will be quoting for decades. Inexperienced writers write wooden dialogue, have characters all speaking the same way, or awkwardly insert exposition into conversations. In this book written for screenwriters, novelists, and playwrights, the authors explore dialogue from a different angle and discuss examples of great dialogue from films and novels. Each chapter ends with examples of poor dialogue, which are annotated by Seger and then rewritten by Rainey. Published by Michael Wiese Productions, 2020.
Alumni who have written or edited books, or recorded CDs, are invited to send notifications to bulletin@coloradocollege.edu and bookstore@coloradocollege.edu. To mail a copy, send to Bulletin, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903. All submitted material will be donated to Tutt Library. Inscriptions inside books are always welcome.
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Untold Stories:
Taizo Nakashima C L A SS O F 1893
Researched and written by Joan E. Ericson, Professor of Japanese, Colorado College
Shinri Kenkyū (Study of Mind) No. 96, 1919 (edited by Shinrigaku Kenkyūkai).
Colorado College’s connection with Asia was built, initially, by its international students. Their presence has surprisingly deep roots. Two of China’s most famous modern writers — translator of the complete works of Shakespeare Liang Shih-chi [Shiqiu in pinyin] and the poet Wen Yiduo — were among nine Chinese male students at CC in 1923-24. But Japanese students were here from the earliest decades. Taizo Nakashima (one of only five graduates from CC in 1893) would go on to acquire a master’s degree in psychology at Harvard University and a Ph.D. at Cornell University and become an eminent figure in that field in Japan.
in his father’s profession. Nakashima studied at the Taisei [Peaceful Occident/Western] Gakkan school in Osaka, a small school with a liberal arts focus, founded in 1886 by a Japanese Congregational pastor. It was at Taisei Gakkan that Nakashima was baptized and presumably changed his given name from Matsutaro to Taizo [Peaceful storehouse].
The annual Butler Center awards event includes an award in his honor, the Taizo Nakashima Emerging Student Leader, presented to first-year and sophomore students. While several Japanese students preceded Nakashima — the first, Goto Toyohachi, entered in 1884 — and another entered with him in 1891, Nakashima’s story stands out.
CC Chinese students in 1924; Wen Yiduo, front row right; Liang Shih-chi, second from right.
Taizo Nakashima [泰蔵中島] was born in 1866 in a fishing village in Wakasa — what would become Fukui Prefecture — the son of a prosperous fisherman. His childhood and adolescence spanned tumultuous years — the restoration of the emperor, abolition of feudal system and samurai privileges, construction of a modern military and state apparatus, and a wholesale transformation of its educational system. We don’t know why Nakashima left Fukui, but the former Matsudaira daimyo (hereditary lord of the domain) was well-known for encouraging young men to seek out modern knowledge and education. The sixth of seven children and the second son, Nakashima was probably freer to leave his family since he was not expected to continue CC Class of 1893.
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Nakashima came to CC with the intention of establishing himself as an intellectual and academic. He made a strong impression: In 1895, two years after he graduated, Taizo Nakashima was described in The Colorado Collegian as ‘one of the best students of philosophy and psychology that ever entered the college.’ Professor Joan E. Ericson
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He graduated from Taisei Gakkan in 1890, the same year that the Meiji Constitution signaled a conservative shift in education and politics. His decision to come to CC is surely rooted in the Congregational connection, especially since Nakashima became a member of the First Congregational Church in Colorado Springs. When Nakashima came to the United States, there were 325 men and nine Japanese women studying abroad and like many in this era, he did not receive any Japanese government support. The tuition and fees at CC in 1891 were $43 per year, with an additional $6 per week for room and board, the equivalent of $7,411.04 today, a large sum for a student from Japan. Prior to arriving at CC at age 24, Nakashima had joined a psychology discussion group in Tokyo led by Professor Yujiro Motora, the first Japanese to be credentialed abroad in psychology (Johns Hopkins University), who taught at Tokyo Imperial University. Nakashima came to CC with the intention of establishing himself as an intellectual and academic. He made a strong impression: In 1895, two years after he graduated, Taizo Nakashima was described in The Colorado Collegian as “one of the best students of philosophy and psychology that ever entered the college.” At CC, Nakashima studied on the Bachelor of Philosophy track: This required no Greek, less Latin, more science and a choice of a modern European
Students in front of Hagerman Hall (male dorm). Hirase is front row left; Nakashima is front row, fifth from left.
language (French or German). In April 1892, under “Personal,” in The Colorado Collegian, it was noted that Nakashima was “making a specialty of philosophy anticipatory to a professorship of philosophy in Japan.” Nakashima was an active member in the Apollonian Society, a male-only literary forum, one of three on campus that played a particularly prominent role in the extracurricular life at the college — the other two were the female-only Minerva Society and the co-ed Phoenix Society. Nakashima published a number of articles in The Colorado Collegian, including an essay on the transformation of modern Japan, with its enduring tensions between elements of Western civilization and “our own.” He also wrote of establishing a “Japanese Christian Church” as it had existed “in the mind of Christ… [with] the recognition of mutual brotherhood… .” The literary societies were also forums to polish oratorical skills and debate in which Nakashima excelled. In 1892, a joint meeting of the Apollonians and Minervans was held to debate: “resolved, that the time spent upon the study of Latin and Greek could be more advantageously spent upon English.” In addition to literary societies, sports played a prominent role in campus life. Nakashima was reported to be a pugilist (boxer). Perhaps that came in handy when he was elected the Apollonian sergeant-at-arms. The Colorado Collegian covered triumphs on the playing fields, but would also report that “foot ball, base ball, and rowing are finding their way into Japanese educational institutions.”
Taisei Gakkan students, with Nakashima, circa 1886.
Nakashima graduated from CC in two years. What was reported to have surprised his fellow students was the public reveal of his age — or that of “the squire” (Nakashima’s nickname) — as part of the biography given of each graduate at the graduation ceremony. At that time there were a variety of students on campus attending both Cutler Academy and Colorado College, but there were few older students outside the traditional post-secondary age range. At graduation, Nakashima presented an “oration” on “the modern movement against metaphysics”: He argued “the course of human evolution shows certainty to be obtainable by no other means than the one followed by science…” A fellow Apollonian member was E.K. Gaylord 1897, the father of Edith Kinney Gaylord Harper (1916-2001), who attended CC for two years and whose legacy continues to support the college through the Inasmuch Foundation. It was Edith Gaylord Harper, who was a charter trustee of CC, whose donation to support Pacific and Asian Studies
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Nakashima with graduate school friends.
Cover of Nakashima's Ph.D. dissertation, translated into Japanese.
in 1991 enabled the study of Japanese language at CC. In a whimsical survey of 34 students taken at the end of his time at CC, Nakashima responded that he would be spending his vacation in Chicago visiting the World’s Fair, that he did not “believe in co-education” (eight others also responded in the negative) and that he expected to be engaged “in five years.” E.K. Gaylord said he was going to spend his vacation “at work” in the mountain town of Rico, Colorado, that co-education “depends on the Co.” and that he expected to be engaged “when I lose my common sense.” At Harvard, Nakashima studied experimental psychology with William James. In his effects, his family still has a signed photo dedicated to him from James. He returned to Japan in 1896, married, and took a position as a lecturer at Tokyo Senmon Gakko, what would become Waseda University. This was followed by a series of short-lived appointments at prestigious schools and publishing translations. He also wrote articles about Japanese culture in English for resident foreigners and later found himself
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Nakashima when he was teaching in Japan after having received his degrees in the U.S.
Nakashima’s wife Sato and son Kenzo.
teaching English and ethics at an agricultural high school in Sapporo. At this point he returned to the U.S., earning his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1909 under Professor Edward Titchener. Nakashima’s 1909 publication based on his dissertation, “Timerelations of the affective processes” is still available online in the Psychological Review, 16(5), 303–339. During this period, Nakashima was communicating with those at CC. In October 1895, under “Alumni Notes,” the student publication notes that Nakashima had recently published a book in Japan on “Experimental Psychology.” Furthermore, Nakashima told his alma mater “that he is trying in every way to uplift his countrymen, and help them to a knowledge of the highest and best thought of civilized countries.” The last mention of Nakashima in The Colorado Collegian is the entry from May 1896 under “College Notes,” which informs readers he is writing a treatise on metaphysics in Japan. One remarkable aspect of Nakashima’s return to the U.S. is that he was supported by his working wife, Sato, who worked as a live-in tutor for a wealthy family. She sent what she could after caring for
herself and their son, born in 1903, to support her husband at Cornell. It is worth noting that all Nakashima’s higher education was outside of Japan, and foreign (American) degrees did not carry the same weight or secure tenure in Japan. In 1914, Nakashima earned a Ph.D. from Tokyo Imperial University and continued to teach at Waseda University. He died from tuberculosis in April 1919, at age 53. Many details of Taizo Nakashima’s family background come from the prominence of his son, Kenzo Nakajima (1903-79), an especially renowned literary critic and professor of French literature. (Although the Chinese characters are the same, his son began to use the more common pronunciation “Nakajima.”) When I contacted Nakashima’s descendants and visited them in Tokyo during late summer 2019, his great-granddaughter said, “You’re the first person who’s come to ask us about Taizo.” When they learned about his experiences at CC, they said the following mid-August, when it is customary to visit the family grave and place flowers in their memory, “We’ll have to get a bouquet of flowers to put on his grave, too.”
ALUMNI ACTIVITIES
Students protesting the Vietnam War, 1969.
PULLING BACK THE CURTAINS HOW A 1969 PRODUCTION OF ‘DIONYSUS’ SET THE STAGE FOR CC’S BLOCK PLAN
By Valerie Hanna ’18 Student activism had long been central to the liberal arts experience at Colorado College, and during the 1960s and early ’70s, students began engaging in new ways with social justice issues beyond the scope of CC’s campus. Many CC students challenged the ROTC program and the fraternity-sorority system, called for reform of the student judicial system, and advocated for racial justice. Both students and faculty marched on Colorado Springs City Hall to protest the racism and police violence perpetrated against Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black activists. They protested the war in Vietnam, leading weekly vigils at the Earle Flagpole, and led anti-war marches to downtown. They were joined by faculty on multiple occasions in their protest at the Fort Carson military base south of Colorado Springs.
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“WE HAD RADICAL STUDENTS INVOLVED IN WORKING ON THIS PLAN ... BECAUSE THEY HAD A SENSE THAT SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. THIS PROBABLY It was amid this environment of tension, controversy, and young adult activism that CC’s Block Plan was born. Some alumni reflect that college leadership was for the most part supportive of students’ activism, “so long as we didn’t burn anything down,” Les Goss ’72 says. He participated in the anti-war efforts at CC as a student, and was granted conscientious objector status in protest of the war. “Being on an urban college campus, we organized many sit-ins, blocking traffic on the intersections of Cascade and Cache La Poudre, or Uintah and Nevada, to protest the war and make our message seen and heard beyond CC,” Goss recalls. A cultural shift to freedom of thought was also reflected in innovations to Colorado College’s academic program. Among numerous changes to course requirements, the college instituted an honors/pass/no pass grading system and, after a good deal of debate, allowed men and women to visit one another’s dormitories.
Students attend a protest for civil rights, 1965.
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COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IF THERE HADN’T BEEN SUCH AN ATMOSPHERE OF CHANGE, EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE, IN SOCIETY.” Professor Glenn Brooks
Yet many professors and students alike still saw new opportunities to develop CC’s academic program. They saw that students were overworked and siloed taking five or more courses at a time on the semester program, and proposed a 4-2 model, in which students would take only four classes a semester. But when it came time to vote, the faculty turned down the proposal 3 votes to 1 vote. Looking back, the 4-2 system — which had already been adopted at Harvard University and other institutions across the country — was not that radical a proposal. But some thought that was the problem — it was a change, but not enough change.
Knowing that Colorado College was six years away from 1974, its 100th anniversary, Professor Fred Sondermann suggested to CC’s ninth president, Lloyd E. Worner ’42, that the faculty find a way of not just celebrating the last 100 years, but do something that would look forward to the next. This led to a college-wide effort to take a critical and reflective examination not only of CC’s academic past, but also its future, and Professor Glenn Brooks was tasked with leading the project. Brooks began the planning process in October 1968, soliciting ideas and feedback from the CC community. Initially there was no plan, only possibilities.
Students protest the KKK, 1979.
Much of the feedback Brooks received underscored “the need for greater immersion, the need for smaller, personalized groups of students and professors.” Brooks drew on inspiration from his colleagues who had proposed the 4-2 model, but dared to go further. By the end of January 1969, he had prepared a proposal for only one immersive class at a time, with nine courses each academic year. That spring Brooks installed a proposed schedule and invited students in to see if they could plan out a year on the new system. “We had radical students involved in working on this plan ... because they had a sense that something was going to happen,” Brooks shared in an oral history published in February 1996. “This probably couldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been such an atmosphere of change, educational and cultural change, in society.” Then it was, as Bryan Adams famously said, “the summer of ’69,” and indeed the times were changing. The counterculture movement came to a head at Colorado College with the now-infamous production of “Dionysis in 69.” The play, performed by an experimental theatre group from New York City, was part of CC’s 1969 symposium on violence. The play was an adaptation of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy “The Bacchae,” and was performed nude. However, for this particular performance, CC’s administration was promised that the actors would remain clothed for the duration of the performance. “Well, within two minutes, they were naked,” remembers Goss, who drove to campus with his friend from his home in Denver to see the performance, knowing little prior about the production. “They were out of tickets, but we got to watch backstage from the wings. It was truly a spectacle.” As one might imagine, CC became the center of a public relations nightmare, with the ensuing outrage and horror expressed by many members of the Colorado Springs community. Rather than divide the CC community, this brought the campus together; many faculty and alumni alike reflect that this play and ensuing outrage served as a catalyst for cohesion among the CC community. This was largely due to the open-minded response of President Worner, whose position was steadfast in defending the performance on the basis of free
CC students protest the Vietnam War, 1972.
speech and freedom of expression. Students were enthused by Worner’s tolerance, even gathering at the flagpole to show support of their administration’s response. During a time of division between many students and their college administration, CC students were protesting for theirs. It was an eventful summer indeed that preceded the Block Plan’s implementation. Brooks announced the Master Plan at CC’s 1969 Fall Convocation, the faculty voted to approve the proposal 72 votes to 53 votes that October 27, and the college would adopt the new academic program the following fall. The Block Plan was more than a new academic program; it became a cornerstone of collective identity. The Block Plan immediately proved effective in its ability to connect academics with life outside the classroom. Students in Professor Emeritus John Lewis’ Introduction to Geology course spent a majority of their time performing field study research at geological sites across Colorado, learning more from the geologic structures that were literally at their fingertips than they might have from a textbook alone. Professor Emeritus of Political Science Robert Loevy taught a one-block course, Political Campaigning, during which students worked for a political campaign of their choosing for academic credit. Students traveled across the nation to campaign, in the hope that they would impact the 1970 Congressional election. The course remained popular well into the late 1990s, garnering student engagement in various elections over the years. Block breaks offered students the opportunity to explore the Southwest by car, by foot, or even by bicycle, or students relaxed on campus and got to know the city. “Learning in a small liberal arts environment on the Block Plan challenged me and taught me to open my mind,” says DeeDee Dehning Loomer ’72,
who went on to earn her MBA after attending CC during a time when “I was told by my high school counselor that I ‘would make a great wife and mother if I had a college education,’ but Colorado College truly shifted the scope of my ambitions and how I see the world.” In the 50 years since its founding, CC’s Block Plan has come to embody an alternative path for learning, attracting curious students who are drawn to this singular academic experience as much as they are enticed by the college’s distinctive sense of place. And the arts remain just as transformative and relevant as they were during the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s, connecting us to our past and helping us imagine our shared future. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College Executive Director Idris Goodwin, who began his term in May 2020, emphasizes that the arts have the power to connect us across generations and identities, allowing for transformative learning and deeper understanding. (Read more about the Fine Arts Center on p. 16.) Goodwin, who is an award-winning playwright, was recently named a member of the United States Artists’ 2021 Class of Fellows. Prior to his current role as FAC executive director, he taught as a professor in CC’s Theatre and Dance Department (2012-2018), and was the producing artistic director of StageOne Family Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky. “Activism and social justice are central to our work at the Fine Arts Center, at Colorado College, and in our many communities,” Goodwin says. “It is important that we ground our work in our shared history so that we can honor those who came before us as we move forward together.” For further reading on the history of the Block Plan, see “The Block Plan: An Unrehearsed Educational Venture” by Professor Susan Ashley.
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PEAK PROFILES
By Valerie Hanna ’18 Over the past year, we have seen the arts take on new meaning as creators explore new mediums for teaching, learning, and self-expression during a global pandemic. The arts have long been an arena for innovation, community engagement, and experimentation, and young alumni artists are blazing their own paths as they respond to the changing world around them. From music to textiles, film to painting and design, these graduates have taken the lessons they developed as dedicated Colorado College students on the Block Plan into their lives and professional work post-graduation.*
MICHAELA KAHN ’20 graduated with a major in art studio and minor
in performance design, and is embracing her myriad passions as she pursues a career in fashion design. “I feel immensely grateful for my time at CC and for the opportunities I had to work with talented faculty members who supported and nurtured me in ways I could never have imagined,” Kahn says. “It is truly a gift to say that I was able to simultaneously grow, learn, and gain confidence in myself as a woman, designer, and artist all while doing what I loved. In addition, my strong interest in feminist and gender studies, fueled by impactful classes with Professor Heidi R. Lewis, influenced the way I think about my work.” Kahn fell in love with oil painting while at CC, ultimately creating three large abstract oil paintings for her senior thesis. “Painting on the Block Plan provided me with space to sink into my work and call the
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studio my home,” Kahn says. “I practically lived there for weeks at a time, only leaving for meals. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.” Kahn’s love for fashion flourished her sophomore year at CC during her costume design class with Adjunct Associate Professor and Costume Designer Gypsy Ames. She went on to take an independent study course with Ames her junior year, designing and creating her own line of clothing. Kahn planned to move to New York City after graduation, but her plans have been delayed due to the ongoing pandemic. She worked for fashion designer and philanthropist Tory Burch for six months and continues to volunteer as an assistant at a local art gallery. Kahn
recently launched her own brand, Michaela Laurel, intertwining her passion for painting, fashion design, and feminist and gender studies, using her paintings as the fabric for the pieces. To make the fabric patterns she used Adobe Photoshop to create four vibrant patterns from her original paintings. Throughout this past winter, Kahn has been working through the stages of pattern making, sewing, building herself a website, and learning the ins and outs of starting a business. In building her brand, Kahn grounds herself in diversity, self-expression, and body positivity. She plans to move to New York City this fall, where she is excited to join many other CC graduates in the city. She hopes to find a job in the fashion design industry while expanding Michaela Laurel. “I am unsure where this journey will take me but with my CC work ethic, I am consumed doing what I love and feel incredibly grateful for all the support I receive from family and friends,” Kahn says.
JABU NDLOVU ’19 is bringing a tangible impact to storytelling through a career in documentary filmmaking. Ndlovu graduated from Colorado College with their major in film and media studies and a minor in feminist and gender studies, and they are now pursuing a master of fine arts in social documentary filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
“I’ve known for a while that I wanted to pursue film, but it took some time before I landed on documentary filmmaking. My storytelling is less about journalism than it is about advocacy and uplifting others,” Ndlovu says. Ndlovu adds that while CC classes influenced their career path, certain faculty were also important mentors. “My film professor Scott Krzych taught me that research is bigger than you. And the feminist and gender studies faculty, Professor Heidi R. Lewis, Nadia Guessous, and Rushaan Kumar, as well as Michael Sawyer, taught me to work hard, think critically and self-reflexively with compassion. Their influence helped me develop my own ethos of care, which grounds my approach as an aspiring documentary filmmaker.” While at CC, Ndlovu brought meaning to their academics through myriad co-curricular endeavors. They played rugby; acted and directed in the studentrun production, “Relations the Play”; and participated as a member and then a director for SpeakEasy, Colorado College’s student spoken word troupe. After graduation, Ndlovu moved to New York City where they did carpentry
woodworking for a frame shop and photo studio while interning in a production house on the Lower East Side. They started working at Show of Force — a documentary, TV series, and transmedia company — as an office manager in 2020 and have been working there ever since. Ndlovu applied to MFA programs last spring when the pandemic started and enrolled at SVA this past fall. It’s been nearly a year of virtual learning, but Ndlovu has kept busy balancing their studies with employment and independent projects. Ndlovu worked on HBO’s “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” and is working on another HBO series which is slated to premier in the next few years. Ndlovu says that there is a strong CC alumni artist community in New York City, and these former classmates have become artistic collaborators and friends. Fellow young alumni have made cameo appearances in Ndlovu’s class projects, or have contributed behind the lens. “Long term, I want to continue to make films for and with the communities I care about, from the ground up,” Ndlovu says.
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AMBER MUSTAFIC ’19 creates one-of-a-kind embroidery pieces that weave together whimsical dreamlike imagery, creative wordplay, and expressive stitching that emulates brushstrokes. It’s no accident, as Mustafic was a seasoned painter long before she discovered her love for textiles.
Mustafic graduated from CC with a major in art history and a minor in museum studies, but took many art studio classes throughout her time at CC and honed her craft as an oil painter. She created several larger-than-life portraits as a student and continues to explore portraiture through both her embroidery and photography. After graduation, Mustafic worked as a design fellow at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. For the first half of her yearlong fellowship, she developed an art loan program using CC’s art collection, collaborating with CC’s art
department and FAC staff. For the second part of her fellowship, she devoted her time to creating her own original artwork. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic caused Mustafic to vacate her on-campus studio where she had planned to devote her time to painting, and space constraints inspired Mustafic to explore more “portable” forms of artistic expression. She found a new medium with myriad opportunities for experimentation in embroidery. Mustafic brought her love of photography into her work by dyeing fabric with cyanotype to overlay images, adding accents over the fabric.
JEREMY ZUCKER ’18 began releasing music officially as an up-and-
coming pop musician with his debut EP “Beach Island” in 2015. Zucker continued to create music and perform while at CC, and eventually signed a record deal with Republic Records during his senior year before graduating in 2018 with his B.A. in organismal biology and kinesiology. While at CC, Zucker was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, served as a resident adviser, sang in the a cappella group The Back Row, and played a semester of rugby. Since graduating, he has pursued music full-time — currently creating from his Brooklyn studio — and gained international recognition with his 2018 platinum hit “comethru.” Zucker explores mental health and relationships through his music, blending poetic lyrics with dreamy production. While he isn’t applying his major directly to his work post-grad, Zucker says that the relationships he made with
professors, mentors, and friends have both provided stability in his transition to life after CC and have inspired his creative process. Over the past few years Zucker has become one of the most prominent emerging artists in the industry. To date, he has gained more than 3.5 billion global streams across his catalogue with a number of platinum and gold singles including “comethru,”
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“These pieces are an extension of me. They often include imagery — either direct or symbolic — of people and places I love,” Mustafic says. “My affinity for plants reflects an admiration for growth and rebirth, which is especially poignant right now, as we’re collectively healing from but at the same still facing this pandemic.” Mustafic has broadened her craft to include commissioned pieces, which has challenged her to create imagery outside of her choice imagery of portraiture and flora. She is currently creating her original pieces from her home studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
“you were good to me,” and many more. He has toured across the world including North America, Europe, and Asia, and was set to go on his biggest headline tour to date in 2020 before being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Initially, it was difficult to create new music, back when COVID first started. I think a lot of us were pretty in shock with the gravity of the situation. It’s been a heavy year for so many people,” Zucker says. He adds that the pandemic has affected certain communities more than others, especially those struggling with mental health. “I’m grateful to have had my creative outlets; making music has helped me stay grounded and express emotions that are sometimes hard to access in my day-to-day life. And I’m so grateful to be collaborating with other artists who I admire,” he says — artists like friend and frequent collaborator Chelsea Cutler. The two released a new EP “brent ii” in February. To celebrate the release during the pandemic, they put on “brent: live on the internet,” a special livestream show that aired for one night across the globe.
SABRINA PIERSOL ’17 double-majored in studio art and classics at
Colorado College. Fascinated by the myriad meanings words can hold, Piersol says that studying Greek with Professors Marcia Dobson and Owen Cramer allowed her to explore translation as a practice, which has been extremely influential to her work. She adds that her CC blocks abroad in Spain studying drawing and in Italy studying ancient history and art history aided in the synthesis of her disparate majors. Piersol is grateful to all faculty members at CC who contributed to her growth and learning, and gives special thanks to Professor of Art and Russian and Eurasian Studies Ruth Kolarik, who was her faculty adviser for her classics and art combined thesis project. “Learning and working on the Block Plan allowed me to delve in uninhibited, and through immersive blocks I was able to engage even deeper with course materials, my professors, and other students,” Piersol says. “Some of my favorite memories were long nights in the CC print shop. I was so lucky to have such an amazing facility at my fingertips.” After graduating, Piersol moved into a live-work warehouse in Los Angeles with other artists, which doubled as a gallery and concert venue where the cohort frequently put on shows. She found work at a fine art print shop, Josephine Press, but to make ends meet took shifts at a fitness studio and burger stand. Soon after she started
working with a company that specializes in virtual reality producing, designing concept art, and developing creative pitches. After a couple of years a mentor invited Piersol to work for a speculative design firm that researches and designs cities of the future. “One of the most compelling projects I worked on was developing a floating city in the year 2070,” Piersol says. “During my time working for the firm, I was challenged to create and articulate various kinds of visual vocabularies in art and design endeavors.” In the fall of 2020, Piersol began her master’s in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, where she is currently studying and teaching. Piersol plans to continue pursuing art and academia. “I hope I am always painting,” Piersol says. “I would love to be showing work represented by a gallery. And I would also love to continue teaching at the college level, maybe one day even at CC!”
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CLASS OF ’61
In the Winter 2020-21 issue of the Bulletin, we stated that the Class of ’61 would have a combined 60th reunion with the classes of ’59 and ’60 in October 2021. However, the ’61 Tigers have decided to hold off and combine with another class in October 2022. See p. 44 for more information regarding Homecoming 2021.
CLASS OF ’81
The Class of ’81 has decided to postpone its reunion until 2022. See p. 44 for more information regarding Homecoming 2021.
1986 1971
Frieda Massopo Ekotto has been named second vice president of the Modern Language Association of America. Ekotto heads the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, the first African woman to do so. She also is a current member of CC’s Board of Trustees.
Mark Pankoff says hello to his fellow Tigers! Headquartered in New York City, Mark and his wife, Rebecca, helm a busy slate of activities for themselves and their quartet of 5- to 10-year-old children. In 2020, Mark chopped four cords of firewood, coached his son’s squirt hockey team to a championship, lowered his golf handicap, and more-or-less mastered the fine art of French braids. Off the rink and away from his axe and hairbraiding duties, Mark was recently promoted to executive vice president at Wellington Shields & Company, a prominent financial firm with a storied 95-year history.
1990
Leanne E. Winner was selected as executive director for the North Carolina School Boards Association, which represents all 115 local boards of education in North Carolina and the Cherokee Central Schools Board of Education. Leanne is the first woman to hold the position. Previously, Leanne worked for NCSBA as its director of governmental relations. Prior to that she worked for the law firm of Everett, Gaskins, Hancock and Stevens as a lobbyist, and in Governor Hunt’s policy office as the assistant director for the strategic economic development plan.
1991
William “Bill” Oman and his husband, Larry Crummer, are staying healthy during the pandemic by sheltering in place. They were in the middle of another world cruise in late March 2020 when the cruise was abruptly terminated in Western Australia. They had to scramble to make their own arrangements to get home. Fortunately, their ship had departed from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on Jan. 4 before the pandemic began. Everyone on their ship remained healthy and they spent most of their time in Antarctica or visiting remote islands in the South Pacific before everything came crashing down.
1976
Patricia Crown, a graduate of CC’s education program, was awarded the University Medal by the University of Colorado Boulder Board of Regents for her dedication to the health and well-being of children and families.
Susan McKee Tachau recently received an AARP Purpose Prize, which provides $50,000 to support her organization — the Pennsylvania Assistive Technology Foundation — and a year of technical support to expand its mission. Susan was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from CC in 2013.
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1992
1996
Iora Health announced that Gillian Munson would become chief financial officer. Gillian has spent her career building and investing in technology companies. Most recently, she was a partner at Union Square Ventures and CFO of XO Group, parent company of The Knot.
Stewart J. “S.J.” Breier is developing the second edition of “Orcish Poetry,” which begins, but does not end, with an anthropological parody of modern life. It’s the first in a series of “Poetry of the Fantasy Races.” For work, he’s still doing jobs like driving for Instacart, while looking to begin a career as a medical massage therapist. He says he is still a fan of Star Wars, though less of a purist, and questions the necessity of Leia’s slave girl outfit — it could be edited down for a re-release, he says, and we’d still have the original in the Hollywood vault for our history.
Erin McGuire Brady was elected to the state house of representatives in Vermont in November 2020. After CC, Erin spent five years working for Sen. Mark Dayton as a legislative aide in Washington, D.C. Then she earned her master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and became a high school teacher and an adjunct instructor in the graduate department at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.
2000
Joseph “Joe” Goetz was named music director of Classical Minnesota Public Radio last November. Joe will oversee daily programming and classical music selections and serve on the team dedicated to driving Classical MPR’s long-term strategies and goals, as well as those for American Public Media’s national classical programming. Joe began his radio career in 2005 at KCME in Colorado Springs, while pursuing his degree in music. He moved to Vermont after graduation and hosted classical music programming on Vermont Public Radio. He was also a member of the Burlington Choral Society, Vermont Choral Union, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra Chorus, as well as an occasional chamber music pianist. Most recently, Joe was the music director of WFIU at Indiana University.
2007
2008
Johnny Reed has been named a Roddenberry Fellow for his work with ProjectHEAL Inc., which he founded in 2017 “in response to the need for school staff, students, and families to discuss how trauma impacts student learning and teacher well-being, and to collectively identify healthy, culturally relevant coping mechanisms necessary to navigate and transcend the mental scarring that trauma can inflict.” Johnny taught high school African American literature through Teach for America at Butler College Prep in Chicago, Illinois, where he saw the need for this training to increase the number of trauma-informed leaders. As a Roddenberry Fellow, Johnny is the recipient of $50,000 that allows him to take the existing initiative to the next level and amplify its impact. As a result of the pandemic and the abrupt halt of most air travel, Johnny has partnered with Temple Media of Los Angeles — founded by Jaime Roman ‘13 and Evan Ryan ‘13 — and LJ Cunningham of Las Vegas, Nevada, to launch ProjectHEAL’s trauma-informed education live-stream channel.
2013
2014
Tiffany Etter Garza and her husband, Patrick Garza, welcomed a baby boy, Abraham Mason, on Dec. 28, 2020, in Houston, Texas. He joins older siblings Jack (7), Mila (4), and Logan (2).
2018 Jessica “Jessie” Pocock is the executive director of Colorado Springs-based Inside Out Youth Services, an LGBTQ youth education and advocacy center that annually serves 350 teens and young adults ages 13-24. It is the only nonprofit in El Paso County that serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and questioning youth — one-third of whom are homeless. Previously, Jessie served at other nonprofits and in pro-equality initiatives, such as One Colorado’s Southern Colorado efforts to advance statewide pro-LGBTQ and equity legislation.Formerly homeless herself and sober for 20 years, Jessie says, “Our goal is to save a life and help launch that life into adulthood and then into queer leadership for our world. That is what I live for. Young people come to our center, and they change, they grow, they develop, and they strengthen their lives — and it is so beautiful.”
Lauren Milliet was drafted to the Racing Louisville Football Club in the National Women’s Soccer League expansion draft. Previously, Lauren played two seasons with the North Carolina Courage. She finished her CC career tied for 11th place in program history with 16 career assists, tied for 12th with 21 goals, and holds sole possession of 13th place with 58 points. The two-time co-captain factored in 15 game winners, scoring eight and setting up seven. Lauren also competed with CC as Team USA at the 2015 World University Games where she struck for the only goal in Team USA’s 1-0 victory over South Africa. Less than two months later, she became the first CC freshman to record a game-winning goal in her first collegiate game since 2010 when she struck for the only goal in the 1-0 victory over the University of Northern Colorado. Racing Louisville FC is set to begin play in 2021 at Lynn Family Stadium.
Rosie Nelson won the Hilary Hartley Thesis Prize in 2020 for her work titled “Sexual Renegades: Bisexual and Plurisexual Experiences of Sexual Identity, Gender Identity, and Romantic Relationships.” Her thesis was supervised at the University of Bristol’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, where Rosie is a lecturer in sociology.
Singers, songwriters, and producers Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler put out a new single “This Is How You Fall In Love.” The new song is described as a smoothly harmonious song that brings their strongest vocals to the table.
Forbes has named Theodore “Theo” Hooker to its “30 Under 30” list for his work in building reforestation hubs — the enterprise that saves fallen city trees from landfills, turns them into their best use, and channels revenues into new tree planting — all while creating local jobs, supporting local economies, and fighting climate change. Theo co-founded Cambium Carbon, a circular economy startup reforesting America by enabling local wood economies, with Marisa Repka and Ben Christensen. Theo also was a Watson Fellow for his project Feeding the Earth and Ourselves, which focused on the complexity of food systems.
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Colorado College Esports Coordinator Josh Lauer was interviewed by KOAA News5 about careers and opportunities in the video game industry that is currently thriving, despite the challenges of the pandemic.
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Plans are underway for an on-campus Homecoming gathering Oct. 7-10, 2021, for classes currently scheduled to hold 2020 and 2021 reunions. The health and safety of our CC alumni, student, faculty, and staff community continues to be our top priority, and the college is monitoring national and international updates on COVID-19. If necessary, we will adjust plans for large gatherings on campus to reduce risk. More details can be found on the Homecoming website: coloradocollege.edu/homecoming
HERE’S WHO WILL BE CELEBRATING CLASS REUNIONS IN 2021
1959 and 1960 | 60th* 1964, 1965, and 1966 | 55th 1970 and 1971 | 50th 1975 and 1976 | 45th 1980 | 40th*
1985 and 1986 | 35th 1990 and 1991 | 30th 1995 and 1996 | 25th 2000 and 2001 | 20th 2005 and 2006 | 15th
2010 and 2011 | 10th 2015 and 2016 | 5th 2017-2021 | Young Alumni
*Please note: The classes of 1961 and 1981 have decided to hold their reunions in October 2022.
From The Archives
Photo courtesy CC Special Collections.
This panoramic map, dated January 1874, shows the layout of the city just a few months before CC was founded on May 6 and two years before Colorado would become a state. The nascent CC is not depicted on the map. Colorado Springs is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year.
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Georgia Herbert Silliman, age 98, passed away peacefully in her home on Sept. 25, 2020, in West Hartford, Connecticut. She was a lifelong Kappa Kappa Gamma and one of few female account executives at Aetna Insurance Company. Georgia was the first woman to graduate from the University of Hartford with a master’s in business.
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We recently received word that Lois Herbert Divinsky passed away Dec. 22, 1995, in Marinette, Wisconsin. She taught public school in Chicago, Illinois, for many years. Her sister, Georgia Herbert Silliman ’43, also attended CC and passed away last year.
Caroline Morrison Brown died Nov. 24, 2020, in Colorado Springs. She had a column for The Gazette called “Round Town with Caroline Brown” and wrote for local magazines. Caroline served on numerous boards including the McAllister House Museum and the Colorado Springs Symphony. She won volunteering accolades from the Quota Club and the Assistance League.
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Margaret Allen Marshall died last year in Fort Collins, Colorado. She was a Kappa Kappa Gamma at CC.
Mary Belle Kelley Judd of Dallas, Texas, passed away one week after her 100th birthday, on May 14, 2020. Mary was a professional violinist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. She also played in a Works Progress Administration orchestra established as part of the New Deal. While at CC, she met and married DeForrest Judd, who was studying at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Mary was a teacher of the deaf and fought for employment rights for the disabled in Dallas.
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Elizabeth Gilliland Sharp died Dec. 4, 2020, in Aiken, South Carolina. She and her husband, Donald Sharp, owned and operated the Logan County Credit Bureau in Sterling, Colorado, for almost three decades. Elizabeth was nominated as a candidate for the Colorado House of Representatives. She won the primary for northeastern Colorado but lost in the general election by only eight votes.
Esther Hansen Simon died peacefully at home in Colorado Springs on April 25, 2020. Esther worked as a medical technologist with Colorado Springs Health Partners. She is survived by her husband of 66 years, two daughters, one son, and two grandchildren. Her parents were both immigrants from Denmark, making Esther a first-generation American.
John James Limneos died Sept. 25, 2020, in San Diego, California. John played football for both CC and Notre Dame. He was fluent in Greek and volunteered as an interpreter for the United States Navy during World War II. He worked as a purchasing agent for the aerospace industry and the city school district.
Calline Lounette “Sunny” Burns passed away on Dec. 6, 2020, in Salem, Oregon. Besides being a great mother, Sunny worked alongside her husband in many businesses including raising Suffolk sheep, which she loved. Sunny was a great cook and loved to quilt and sew. She is survived by three daughters, one son, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Rosaleen “Roz” Malooly Evans passed away April 28, 2020, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Roz was a musical prodigy on the piano since age 7. She was a musical director, vocal coach, concert pianist, and taught voice at the University of Texas El Paso. She appeared on Broadway and had a stint at The Desert Inn in Las Vegas during its heyday.
Mildred Eloise Appling Vaag passed away peacefully on Dec. 25, 2020, in Denver, Colorado. Mildred taught high school English and her favorite class to teach was journalism. She worked as a freelance writer and proofreader for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper and then went back to teach preschool. After retiring, she wrote three volumes of memoirs.
Jule Hutchinson Haney died July 11, 2020, at the age of 102. Jule taught third grade at Jefferson Elementary School for 17 years. She was named the Colorado College Lloyd E. Worner Alumna of the Year in 1988 and was permanent secretary for the CC Class of 1939. She was preceded in death by her husband James Montgomery Haney ’39.
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Louis Loyd Kinkel died Nov. 4, 2020, in Hugo, Colorado. He was married to Elizabeth Dean Kinkel ’49. Louis operated the Jack Frost Market in Limon, Colorado, for more than 25 years. He served as mayor of Limon, town council member, and president of the Chamber of Commerce. He also served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
Barbara Jean Stark McClelland passed away on March 30, 2020, in La Jolla, California. Barbara was an accomplished pianist and a Kappa Kappa Gamma at CC. Barbara met her husband while working for Shamrock Foods Company. She is survived by her son and daughter, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
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Anne Mary Wiedman-Westcott passed away on Sept. 9, 2020, in Denver, Colorado. She met her husband, Gordon Westcott ’50, at CC. She raised money for the Denver Art Museum, Denver Symphony, and the University of Denver Art Department. Anne began playing bridge at CC and continued playing with the same group until her eyesight began failing in 2012.
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John Overton Goad III died in Evanston, Illinois, on July 2, 2020. John was stationed in Germany in World War II and declared missing in action for 10 weeks before turning up at a Russian Army hospital. He earned Bronze Battle Stars, a Victory Medal, and the Purple Heart. John worked his way up to vice president of Leo Burnett, the Chicago advertising agency.
Doris Vicellio Petersen passed away in her Salem, Oregon, home on Oct. 29, 2020. Doris studied business and enjoyed performing dance at CC. She taught third grade at Holy Family Catholic School for many years. Doris is predeceased by her husband, Robert Petersen ’52, and her eldest daughter. She is survived by her six children, multiple grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Helen Emily Kuh Changras passed away on Sept. 27, 2020, in Pleasanton, California. She was a mother of three and worked as a legal secretary before devoting many years to managing the family restaurant, The Savoy Tivoli. Helen volunteered with the PleasantonTulancingo Sister City Program, adopted many pets, played mah-jongg, and won ribbons for her stitching and her roses at the Alameda County Fair.
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Lt. Cmdr. Donald “Don” Blaine Stone passed away Oct. 19, 2020, in Chico, California, with family at his side. Don was in the U.S. Navy for 22 years on five aircraft carriers and spent four years at the Pentagon. He worked as a financial adviser after serving. Don’s favorite ways to spend his time included watching his children’s and grandchildren’s sporting events and cheering on his 49ers.
Louis Paul Housman passed away on Dec. 20, 2020, after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer in Pueblo, Colorado. He served the Navy on a destroyer in the Pacific and then served in the Army Reserves for many years. Louis was a teacher in District 60 for 35 years and is survived by his wife and many nieces and nephews.
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Mary Eno Sage Stewart died of natural causes on Jan. 1, 2021, in Hartford, Connecticut. Mary was a longtime community volunteer, and a member of Bonhomme Presbyterian Church, The Wednesday Club of St. Louis, and the Assistance League of St. Louis. She had a very short stint as a top secret courier for the Royal Navy. She is survived by her husband, two children, and four grandsons.
Robert John “Bob” Mason passed away on Dec. 13, 2020, at his home in Woodland Park, Colorado. Bob was a civil engineer and worked on the construction of the Air Force Academy. He then earned a law degree and specialized in corporate and real estate law and was in-house counsel for Craddock Development Company and Western Sportsman Magazine. He also did pro bono work for seniors, young families, and ranchers or farmers who needed help.
’57 Suzan “Suzie” Beer O’Neill passed away peacefully on Jan. 8, 2021, in Phoenix, Arizona. Suzie once worked for the USO entertaining the troops in Europe and was the executive director for the Wallace Foundation. In 1998, Suzie moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she learned to work with wood and tin from local artisans. At age 75 she carved a 10-foot totem pole for the family cabin in Pinetop, Arizona, depicting a school of fish swimming upstream.
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William A. “Bill” McCrea passed away on Dec. 16, 2020, in Mesquite, Nevada. He served his country as an Army medic in the Korean War. He attended CC on a hockey scholarship and met his wife, Sallee Jo Hazeltine McCrea ’61, in the registration line for classes. Bill taught and coached high school in Antonito, Colorado, and later in Colorado Springs.
Dr. Richard “Rick” E. Richards died March 20, 2020, in Colorado Springs. Rick taught at Western State University in Gunnison, Colorado, receiving the status of emeritus professor of biology when he retired. Rich loved teaching, classical music, singing, and climbing mountains. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, his brother, his children and stepchildren, and two grandchildren.
Dorothea “Vonnie” or “Beenie” Von Oven Adams passed away from COVID19 on Dec. 2, 2020, in her hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin. Vonnie was president of her Delta Gamma sorority and a Type 1 diabetes survivor for more than 60 years. She volunteered for 40 years at Beloit Memorial Hospital and was treasurer of the Beloit Janesville Symphony Orchestra.
James “Jim” Deyo passed away Oct. 31, 2020, in Louisville, Colorado. He served two years in the Army after graduating from CC, where he played soccer and was a Kappa Sigma. Jim worked at Rocky Flats as an engineer for 35 years. After retiring, he and his wife traveled across the U.S. and Canada in their motorhome.
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Peter G. Schuler passed away May 1, 2020, at his home in Dixon, Illinois. Peter was drafted in 1958 and served in the U.S. Army until 1960. He owned and operated Dixon Home Lumber and Rebuild for 50 years and retired in 1993. Peter is survived by his two daughters.
Susan Cooper Broenkow passed away on Nov. 26, 2020, in Monterey, California. Susan worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Oceanography department at the University of Washington. Susan was a founding member of the Monterey Peninsula Quilters Guild. She is survived by her husband and their two sons.
Susannah Mode McCuaig died peacefully in Florence, South Carolina, on Nov. 8, 2020, after an illness. Susannah was a professor of education at multiple colleges and universities. She was the author of many articles and professional papers presented in professional literature and at education conferences throughout the United States and Europe. Susannah was the recipient of the Girl Scout’s Curved Bar award.
Miriam Joan “M.J.” Hazard passed away from Parkinson’s disease on Dec. 1, 2020, in her sleep at home in Colorado Springs. M.J. was active in the Colorado Springs Junior League. She also was an active athlete and once won the Ladies Tennis Singles at The Garden of the Gods Club. Joan played duplicate bridge and earned a Bronze Life Master status.
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Duane Wilber Barber died Nov. 14, 2019, in Sunnyvale, California. He was a Sigma Chi and played tennis at CC. Duane was a surface scientist and is survived by his wife, Betty Barber.
William “Bill” Gappert passed away in Medina, Ohio, on Oct. 2, 2020. After college, Bill fulfilled his military obligation in the U.S. Army Reserves. He held various sales and management positions in Illinois and Ohio before retiring in Medina, Ohio, in 2014. Bill enjoyed soccer, which he played at CC, and was a competitive bodybuilder.
Alfred “Bruce” Kasten died Sept. 20, 2020, in Colorado Springs. Bruce studied geology at CC and fell in love with rock climbing. He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time and then became a tax accountant, owning his own businesses. He also earned awards for quickest draw and accuracy in Old West firearms competitions.
Conway Howard “Connie” Olmsted passed away peacefully in his Sierra Vista, Arizona, winter home on Dec. 11, 2020. Connie completed a year at Harvard before enlisting in the Army where he served as a medic from 1952 to 1954. He was a Spanish professor and taught at Purdue University before joining the Peace Corps and teaching English to Peruvian natives. He became the department head for the Department of Modern Languages at Metropolitan State University of Denver and remained a professor emeritus.
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Richard F. De La Vergne died Jan. 18, 2020, in Bluefield, Virginia. Richard served in the Army in Korea. He worked for Avis Rent A Car. He is survived by his two daughters.
Elaine Jane Schaneman Heimbouch died Sept. 16, 2020, while visiting family in Cincinnati, Ohio. Elaine taught high school English before starting her family. She served as a house mother for a fraternity at Wesleyan University and later for a sorority at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and also worked as a sales associate at a women’s clothing store.
Christopher “Chris” Barnes passed away peacefully at his home in Hancock, New Hampshire, on Oct. 6, 2020. He met his wife, Katharine Kephart Barnes ’59, at CC. Chris was a librarian at Cornell University, Keene State College, and the resident director of MacDowell Colony, a working retreat for artists. He founded Arts Pro Tem, a consulting firm for artists. For more than 60 years, Chris curated one of the most significant and complete private collections of Robert Frost material.
Ruth Ann “Ruthie” Lindquist Ford Farr passed away on Jan. 1, 2021, in Ogden, Utah. Ruthie was a dancer and Kappa Kappa Gamma at CC. Her first husband, Michael Ford ’58, also was a CC alumnus. Ruthie actively served in the Junior League of Ogden and earned an art degree at Weber State College. She is survived by four children and four stepchildren.
Margaret “Peggy” Jean Gurau passed away peacefully on Jan. 17, 2021, at home in Ames, Iowa. Peggy worked at Iowa State University as an office manager and secretary in various departments, including physics, child development, and chemical engineering. Peggy was instrumental in starting the public library in Roland, Iowa, where she was a founding board member and the first chairperson.
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Martha Garner Kistler passed away Dec. 17, 2020, in Kimberton, Pennsylvania. Martha was an accomplished artist focusing on drawing and charcoal sketches. She was an avid gardener and a volunteer at the Bryn Mawr Hospital for more than 25 years. Martha supported countless animal organizations and is survived by her husband and two children.
Ann Bender Veatch passed away Dec. 29, 2020, in McLean, Virginia. After attending DePauw University, Ann was sent to CC to establish an Alpha Phi chapter. Ann is survived by three children, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. She proudly continued to teach elementary school for Fairfax County Public Schools until the age of 78.
James “Jim” Drummond Clark passed away in Oxford, Ohio, on March 1, 2020. He was an associate professor of English at Miami University in Oxford. He wrote a book called “The Bugbears: A Modernized Edition” with John Jeferre.
Lt. Col. Clark Denny died Nov. 23, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. Clark served in the Persian Gulf and Vietnam for the U.S. Army. He was a Sigma Chi at CC. He is survived by his wife, Lillian Denny.
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Robert “Bob” Anton died Feb. 21, 2020, in Littleton, Colorado, from Parkinson’s disease. Bob came to CC following a stint in the Marines. At CC he was the business manager for the Nugget and president of Kappa Sigma. Bob had a long career as a portfolio manager for several mutual fund companies in Denver.
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’68 Arthur “Art” James Berglund passed away Dec. 19, 2020, in Colorado Springs. Art played hockey at CC and was the leading scorer his senior season. After playing professional hockey in Switzerland and Austria, he managed the Broadmoor World Arena for 13 years and then worked for USA Hockey as senior director of international administration. Art was part of the staff of more than 30 U.S. National teams, including six Olympic squads and eight National Junior Teams, and had a widespread impact on international hockey. He also helped design the blueprint for the first women’s Olympic team and took great pride in their 1998 Olympic gold medal. Art was inducted into multiple Halls of Fame for hockey.
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Sandra “Sandy” Marvin Francis passed away Oct. 13, 2020, in Dover, Delaware. She was a longtime special education teacher for first- through fifth-grades at John N.C. Stockton Elementary School in Jacksonville, Florida. After retiring, she moved to a farm in Virginia where she and her husband lived for 18 years. She enjoyed long walks with friends and family there.
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Steven Lee Methner passed away Jan. 1, 2021, in Nederland, Colorado, after a lengthy battle with cancer. He met his wife, Damaris Hoyl Methner ’69, at CC. He was a psychiatrist in Salt Lake City, Utah, for 45 years. Steve enjoyed skiing, tennis, spending time with family, travel, and being at the family ranch. He is survived by his wife and two children.
Carol Marchert Matoush died Oct. 12, 2020, in Colorado Springs. Carol served as deputy district attorney for the Colorado Springs District Attorney’s office from 1976 through 1995. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Carol is survived by her children and her husband.
Perry Love Lemelin passed away May 25, 2018, in Flint, Michigan. Perry was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and bragged about being a member of Mensa. She is survived by husband Joseph Lemelin, her children Whitney and Peter, and six grandchildren.
Steve Gustafson passed away at his home in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, on June 29, 2020. Steve was a gifted athlete and played baseball and hockey at CC. Steve worked for the state of Minnesota for 37 years and retired from the department of administration as a planning director in 2010. He also enjoyed working as a youth hockey referee.
Paul Klein died in Chicago, Illinois, on Oct. 11, 2020, from stage IV esophageal cancer. Paul was a longtime art dealer and founded Klein Art Works, one of the “original 16” galleries in the River North neighborhood. Paul was the art consultant and curator for the expansion of McCormick Place. He also competed in national and local backgammon tournaments.
Robert Brenner passed away in 2020 in Andover, Massachusetts. He was a physician specializing in urology at DartmouthHitchcock Medical Center and then at Greater Lowell Urology. Robert was a Phi Delta Theta at CC. He is survived by his wife, son, and daughter, Emily Brenner ’10.
Mark Edward Paulson, of Grand Forks, North Dakota, passed away Jan. 2, 2021. Mark attended CC on a hockey scholarship. He was president of Froehlich-PaulsonMoore, Inc., a private insurance agency and his father’s family business. Mark was recognized as the North Dakota Independent Insurance Agent of the Year in 1998 and was on multiple boards of directors in the industry. He continued to play hockey and coached youth teams.
Janet Bowley Landauer passed away Nov. 15, 2020, at her home in Reno, Nevada. She is survived by her husband, Richard Landauer. She was a Gamma Phi Beta at CC. Janet worked as part-owner and bookkeeper with her husband’s company, US Rope Co. She enjoyed reading, travel, music, Lake Tahoe, speaking German, and her miniature wirehaired dachshunds.
Harry Barton “Bart” Mendenhall II died Dec. 17, 2020, in a Denver hospital from COVID-19. Bart served as the Rocky Ford city attorney and general counsel to the Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District for many years. He was past president of the Colorado Bar Association and served as chairman of the Water Law Section. He was a commissioner for the Colorado State Supreme Court nominating commission.
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Julia Miller passed away Nov. 7, 2020, in Fountain Hills, Arizona. She was an English and drama teacher for sixth grade through high school at General William Mitchell High School in Colorado Springs. She loved bowling, Shakespeare, and all things literary. She is survived by her husband, four daughters, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Nancy Rae Reinisch passed away peacefully in her home from breast cancer, surrounded by family on Feb. 15, 2019, in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. She was the 235th triathlete in the United States to complete 100 career triathlons. She received the Garfield County Humanitarian Award and the Glenwood Springs Chamber Resort Association’s Athena Award. She was a therapist and social worker.
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Rebecca Marshall Klenk died of pancreatic cancer, peacefully at home in Maryville, Tennessee, on Nov. 15, 2020. Rebecca was an anthropology professor and author who taught gender and globalization, and women, politics, and the law among other topics at the University of Tennessee. She studied village women’s social justice activism in Himalayan India.
Timothy “Tim” McGovern died Dec. 24, 2020, in Greenwood Village, Colorado. Tim was a journalist after serving as a U.S. Army combat correspondent in the Vietnam War where he earned six decorations. He was a reporter and managing editor for many Colorado newspapers and won the Colorado Press Association’s Sweepstakes Award in 1982. Tim also taught writing and journalism at Metro State College, CU-Boulder, and the University of Denver.
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John Deregowski passed away Feb. 7, 2020, in Tiburon, California. John was a Sigma Chi at CC. He was the president of Associate Securities in Tiburon.
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Christopher Connor “Mac” McCafferty died Jan. 15, 2021, in Red Bank, New Jersey. Mac attended CC on a hockey scholarship. He played professional hockey for the Nashville Nighthawks before he began his youth coaching career with the Red Bank Armory in New Jersey. He was stellar with young people who flocked to him, listened intently to him, and learned from him.
Gregory “Greg” Mark Wuorenmaa passed away unexpectedly Nov. 5, 2020, in Colorado Springs. He met his wife, Colleen Sullivan Wuorenmaa ’87, at CC. Greg was an elementary school teacher to Navajo students in New Mexico and in Colorado Springs. As a Colorado Springs native, Greg’s extensive knowledge of the area made him an ideal tour guide for anyone who would listen to his educational and often humorous stories.
Charles Duran Sr. of Colorado Springs died Dec. 20, 2020. Charles owned and operated The Mission Bell Inn restaurant for many years. One of his proudest accomplishments was serving as a soldier in the United States Army, 101st Airborne Division where he was a jumpmaster. Charles also was an elementary school teacher until he retired from District 11.
’98 Nancy Oakes passed away in February 2020, in Maxatawny, Pennsylvania. Nancy was a freelance writer and illustrator at the Williston Pioneer Sun newspaper in Florida. She enjoyed kayaking, horseback riding, and swimming, as well as her reading, writing, state park, and art groups.
Annamarie Mason passed away Dec. 18, 2020, in Colorado Springs. Annamarie was an accomplished pianist and teacher who was nominated for Colorado Teacher of the Year in 1984. Annamarie is survived by her three children and four grandchildren.
Daniel “Dan” Joseph Conboy died July 3, 2020, in Tucson, Arizona, after a brief illness. Dan served in the Marine Corps from 1967 to 1971. He taught and coached for more than 20 years in Montrose, Falcon, and Colorado Springs schools. He met his current wife, Sally Necklason Conboy ’00, in graduate school at CC and they were married in Shove Memorial Chapel.
Friends of the College
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ristram C. “Tris” Colket Jr. P’91, G’20, G’22 passed away July 6, 2020, in Paoli, Pennsylvania. Tris was a CC trustee from 1989-95 and his daughter, Carolyn Cullen ’91, is a current trustee. He and his wife Ruth generously funded the Colket Center for Academic Excellence in 2001, the mission of which is to partner with “faculty, departments, and programs to provide students with the finest liberal arts education in the country. In an academic climate calibrated to challenge all students, the Colket Center facilitates student learning, cultivates intellectual community, and supports students in developing skills they can apply broadly across and beyond the curriculum.” Currently, the Colket Center is key in offering
remote services to meet the safety protocols of the pandemic and still support the students. Tris was the grandson of the late John T. and Ethel M. Dorrance. He launched his career with North American Smelting Company. The highlight of his professional achievement was the founding of Cressona Aluminum Company in 1979. In his personal life, Tris was always smiling when behind the helm of a sailboat off the Maine coast, piloting a plane, on his tractor, or with a flyrod in hand. Tris was a lifelong supporter and later board member of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
eventually becoming chairman of the Research Institute. His passion for research led to the creation of the Ruth and Tristram Colket Jr. Translational Research Building. Tris was especially dedicated to medical philanthropy — due in part to the loss of his sister to leukemia at a young age. Tris is survived by his loving wife of 53 years, Ruth, who dedicated herself to his continuing comfort and well-being. He also is survived by Carolyn and her husband, Craig Wood Cullen Jr; Tristram C. Colket III and his wife, Robin; Bryan D. Colket and his wife, Jayme; as well as eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and his sister, Charlotte C. Weber.
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In Memoriam A Tribute to Stephen Allen Scott, Professor of Music By CC Professors Ryan Bañagale ’00 and Steven Hayward the stream of great ideas seemingly pouring out of the back of Ryan’s head, “theI likered-brick solidarit y of Jonathan, Steve’s positive thumbs-up, and the fact that I look less fat than I actually am! I will cherish this shot for many years! ” — Professor of Music Stephen Scott, commenting on the photo, right, following his retirement celebration in May 2014.
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t was Victoria Hansen, Stephen Scott’s beloved wife, who emailed us the photo the morning after what had been a modest celebration of his retirement. Steve had made it abundantly clear that he did not want a formal retirement party. There would be no tearful farewells, no nostalgia on parade. And so there had been a dinner, and music of course, and also this photograph.
Whatever was said is lost now. Maybe a joke about Steve’s shirt. Or a suggestion that the photo would serve as the album cover of the band that the four of us would form immediately the next day — with Professor Jonathan Lee on sax. The two of us — Ryan Bañagale and Steve Hayward — are far left and far right in the photo, like a pair of (relatively) youthful parenthesis. But the fact is that no one in this photo actually sees themselves as old. Not that night. And not yet. We all believe we all have a lot of time left. When Steve first began to tell people he was thinking of retiring, there were expressions of incredulity. “I’ve got other things to do,” he would say. None of us knew that Steve would leave us for good on March 10, 2021. As someone who eschewed the formalities of a retirement party, there’s no doubt in our minds that Steve Scott would want something to appear in these Bulletin pages that went beyond a recounting of his many accomplishments, but still, the contours of his remarkable career must be recalled.
Steve came to Colorado College in 1969 and brought a world of musical experience with him. He trained as a composer; engaged independent field studies in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe; transcribed the recordings of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Gil Evans; and collaborated with figures such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley. He founded the CC New Music Ensemble in 1972 and a crucial turning point arrived five years later when he and a group of students began to explore bowing the strings of a grand piano — taking the top off and using fishing line at first, and then other objects, to see what different sounds could be produced. Steve wasn’t the first to hit on the idea of bowing a piano — he was always meticulous about crediting others — but it was his compositional genius that brought it to fruition, which turned an experiment into art. The Bowed Piano Ensemble was born from Steve’s two musical loves: jazz and experimental music. “At the time I was interested in large, extended chords derived from the harmonic explorations of the jazz musicians of the 1940s,” he wrote in a brief history of the ensemble. “The idea came to me that several of the nylon bows wielded by several players could create organ-like sustained chords.” In 2008, NPR’s Morning Edition offered the following description: “To get a sense of what the bowed piano is, imagine a grand piano
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Colorado College professors from left: Ryan Bañagale, Stephen Scott, Jonathan Lee, and Steve Hayward.
Piano Circus and Bowed Piano Ensemble. Photo by Stanley Sigalov
with the lid lifted off. Ten musicians crowd around, leaning over the innards of the instrument, like a team of surgeons performing an operation.” The ensemble toured the world for decades, including appearances at the Sydney Opera House, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and a volcanic lava-tube-concert-hall in the Canary Islands. It became CC’s best known and most celebrated musical asset. More than 150 students were members of the ensemble over the span of 35 years. Steve leaves behind a distinguished and lasting legacy, a loving family, and also many wonderful friends around the world, including the two of us, and Carlton Gamer, a former colleague in CC’s Music Department and a distinguished composer in his
own right. A few days after Steve’s death, Carlton sent in the following remembrance to Victoria, which seems a fitting note on which to end. Steve, Somewhere there’s music It’s where you are — Thank you for your beautiful new piano creations. I will always treasure the memories of the years we taught together, of Hawk and Pres, Billie and Ella, Bird and Diz, Miles and Trane and the whole pantheon. Rest in peace, dear friend. Carlton A concert in Stephen’s memory will take place during Homecoming 2021.
POINT OF VIEW
STATE of the ROCKIES 2021 By Kat Miller-Stevens Countries around the world including the U.S. are facing a paradox of how to provide affordable, reliable sources of energy, while minimizing negative impacts on the local and global environments. There is increasing evidence that climate change is occurring and has negative impacts on society, and one of its main human causes is the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) for energy. At the same time, burning fossil fuels has been an engine for economic development around the world. Thus, how energy is produced and consumed has complex repercussions for society. Recently, the production of oil and natural gas in the U.S. reached record levels. The U.S. is now the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. The key to this increase in production has been a combination of technological developments around fossil fuel extraction, most prominently hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking). While hydraulic fracturing was first developed in the 1950s, its proliferation began in the 2000s when it was connected with directional drilling and other technological developments, as well as increases in the price of oil and natural gas that helped make recovering the fossil fuels more profitable. Today, hydraulic fracturing is used to drill for oil and gas in dozens of states in the U.S. The Rocky Mountain region has some of the most prolific drilling in the country, as it includes multiple shale plays, most prominently the Niobrara (Colorado and Wyoming) and Bakken (North Dakota and Montana) and other various basins or shale plays in Utah and New Mexico. It is widely credited with boom periods of production and economic growth in these states. While there are economic and even environmental benefits associated with hydraulic
fracturing, there are also substantial environmental losses, as well as public health risks. One of the growing problems caused by fracking is that in the wake of falling oil and gas prices in 2020, energy companies are going bankrupt and abandoning their wells. The clean-up and plugging of these wells then becomes the responsibility of local and state governments. This has sparked policy debates and political battles in these states about how to best regulate or even allow hydraulic fracturing. The purpose of the current State of the Rockies Project research is to better understand these policy debates about the future of hydraulic fracturing and abandoned wells in the Rocky Mountain West. In this first year, our goals are to: • Explore consequences of hydraulic fracturing and abandoned wells on people and their environments; • Explore how grassroots social and cultural ideas shape social movements and public policies related to hydraulic fracturing and abandoned wells;
• Investigate social justice and environmental justice issues pertinent to hydraulic fracturing and abandoned wells; • Research the positive and negative economic impacts on communities relevant to this industry; and • Explore how the business strategies of oil and gas corporations change in response to social movements and public policies. We are excited and pleased to collaborate with Jonathan J. Pierce on this project. Pierce is the vice president of Safeguard Marine, LLC. He is the lead scientist and project manager on research projects seeking to mitigate risks posed by shipping on the marine environment. Pierce received a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from the School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado, Denver in 2012. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in public policy and administration at CU Denver, the University of Denver, and Seattle University. His research interests examine the motivations and advocacy efforts of actors in the policy process applied to natural resource development. Associate Professor of Economics and Business Kat Miller-Stevens is the new director of the State of the Rockies Project. Learn more about her in Campus News on p. 9.
Editor’s Note: Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project encourages students to explore critical environmental and social challenges in the Rocky Mountain West. Students embark on interdisciplinary investigations around the region to discover the possibilities for balancing human activity without spoiling the natural environment. The 2021 project focuses on understanding policy debates on the future of hydraulic fracturing and abandoned wells in the Rocky Mountain West.
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people of impact
Salvatore Bizzarro By Laurie Laker ’12 Salvatore Bizzarro, professor emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese, was one of eight children born to a school teacher mother and a theatre director father, and whose grandfather owned a circus. Born in 1939 in Tunis, Tunisia, he spent his childhood years in Italy before emigrating with his family to the United States at age 15. “I came here as an immigrant, with no English skills at all,” he explains. “I was placed in high school in a machine shop class, but I always loved language and reading. We’d come to the U.S. because Italy was in such awful shape after the Second World War.” Bizzarro’s love of creative words and work is in his blood, and he would eventually amass a library of more than 6,000 books in his CC office. Following high school, Bizzarro became a language teacher to help other immigrants gain the skills and cultural know-how to assimilate to the U.S. easily. International learning has been a part of Bizzarro’s world from an early age, and this combination of exposure and experience led him to consider a career in journalism before turning his life to teaching. At Fordham University in New York in the 1960s earning his bachelor’s degree, Bizzarro threw himself into anything related to Latin America — from geology to economics. At Stanford University, where he earned his master’s and Ph.D., he honed his study and research all the more, with his Ph.D. focusing in Hispanic American literature.
“Chile, and the work of Pablo Neruda, became a huge part of my life,” he explains. Bizzarro’s thesis for that same Ph.D., titled “Social and Political Themes in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda,” formed the backbone of his second published book, “Pablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet” (1979). His first was “The Historical Dictionary of Chile,” (1972). Following his Ph.D. in 1969, Bizzarro launched a career in academia as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. He arrived at Colorado College in the fall of 1969, as an associate professor of Romance languages, a year before the Block Plan officially launched. Initially not planning on staying long at CC, he ended up staying until full retirement in 2019. What changed his plans, as it so often does for many, is that he found firm and fast friends. That sense of community spurred on Bizzarro’s teaching and development. A year after he arrived, CC launched the Block Plan, and while Bizzarro came to enjoy and cherish the pace of learning it offered, he was initially skeptical. “I thought it would be detrimental to learning and retaining language skills,” he explains. That’s why, “with other colleagues, we launched the
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Photo by Josh Birndorf ’20
adjunct programs across the language departments to help students with their upkeep and skill maintenance. It was vital that we taught languages on the first- and second-year level, not just to upper-level students with previous skills.” The adjustment to the Block Plan was “challenging but really fun,” and Bizzarro was able to hone his craft at home and abroad. However, nothing quite beats the truly immersive experience of studying a language, a culture, in the space and place where they originated. Bizzarro’s premiere legacy at the college is the full internationalizing of CC’s study abroad programs, culture, and opportunities — which continue to shape experiences, memories, and lives. As the founder with History Professor Arthur Pettit of the CC in Mexico program in Cuernavaca in 1971 (later switched to Guanajuato and Oaxaca), Bizzarro and members of the Romance languages faculty ran the program for 37 years until 2008. His Italian in Italy program, where students take two blocks of Italian language classes while experiencing the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the country, ran for 22 years. He ran film and literature classes in
Chile with Chilean author Antonio Skármeta for 12 years, and, with his wife Kathy Bizzarro, went to Spain to inquire about setting up the Spanish in Spain Program, a creation by his wife who ran it as director for 12 years. The program still runs today in Soria, operated by Professor Carrie Ruiz. Bizzarro’s connections across the literary and political circles of Central and South America, as a result of his research, travel, and publication, bore fruit at home in Colorado at CC, as well. Bizzarro helped bring to the college authors Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, and Isabel Allende, as well as Azar Nafisi and author and PBS news personality Charlayne Hunter-Gault; political figures such as former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias Sanchez, and former U.S. presidential candidate and activist Ralph Nader; and activists such as Winona LaDuke and Anna Deavere Smith.
DISCOVER MORE ONLINE To read other People of Impact stories, go to coloradocollege.edu/bulletin/ people-of-impact
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Grace Dereemer ’23 and Quattro Musser ’22 show off the new tie dyed t-shirts they created in the Arts and Crafts Department at Worner Campus Center during Winter Start Orientation. Photo by Chidera Ikpeamarom ’22