Summer 2014 Dickinson Magazine

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NUMBER 1

DICKINSON MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2014

VOLUME 92

NUMBER 1

[ contents ] Dickinson Published by the Division of Enrollment, Marketing & Communications Executive Director of Marketing & Communications Connie McNamara Editor Michelle Simmons Assistant Editor Lauren Davidson Staff Photographer Carl Socolow ’77 Design Landesberg Design Contributing Writers Matt Getty MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson Tony Moore Rick Kearns Martin de Bourmont ’14 Magazine Advisory Group Gail Birch Huganir ’80 Jim Gerencser ’93 Matt Fahnestock ’01 David Richeson Adrienne Su Web site www.dickinson.edu/magazine E-mail Address dsonmag@dickinson.edu Telephone 717-245-1289 Facebook www.facebook.com/DickinsonMagazine © Dickinson College 2014. Dickinson Magazine is published four times a year, in January, April, July and October, by Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, Cumberland County, PA 17013-1773.

PRINTED USING

Printed with soy-based inks.

Please recycle after reading.

22 Going Local: Whether it’s digging into the past, polling the campus community or testing the waters (literally), placed-based student-faculty research is thriving in the Cumberland Valley. 30 Empowering Stories: Sharon Davie ’68 dedicates her life to sharing women’s stories with the world. 34 Reclaiming History: Archives & Special Collections’ latest digital archive opens a new chapter for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s descendants. 38 Dialogue, Discovery & Religious Life: As Dickinson grows more diverse, so do its faith communities. Learn how students and the new director of community service and religious life are building opportunities for interfaith dialogue — on campus and beyond.

See Web exclusives at www.dickinson.edu/magazine.

30 UP FRONT

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your view

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our view

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Dickinson matters

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college & west high

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kudos

14 commencement 21 in the game IN BACK

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ON THE COVER

Archival photo of the Camp Michaux Civilian Conservation Corps courtesy of the Cumberland County History Society.

42 beyond the limestone walls 44 our Dickinson 54 obituaries 56 closing thoughts

[ your view ]

More MOOCs

The Understanding Lincoln MOOC was fabulous, and I am grateful to Dickinson, Professor Matthew Pinsker and Lance Warren at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the stimulating experience.

Please do more.

JOYCE BONALLE ANDERSON ’63 MIAMI, FLA.

Center of attention

Dennis Akin, professor emeritus of fine arts, in Microcosm (1972).

It was rewarding to catch up with the current artistic creativity of Dennis Akin in the fall 2013 issue of Dickinson Magazine. He was a formative professor who made a lasting impression in my life. Through his demeanor and gentle, steady hands the concept of centering was transformed from the figurative to the literal and back again.

As a sophomore fine arts major, I first encountered Akin in a ceramics class. In the basement of Bosler were several wheels, a few electric kilns and the damp, musty smell of stone and earthenware clay pots drying on shelves awaiting firing.

Akin demonstrated throwing the first day of class. Genteel and austere in khaki pants and a light-blue, button-down-collar shirt, Akin set the wheel spinning and placed his hands on the clay. I remember time standing still as shapes shifted, but he remained still—in the moment, prescient, yet casual, even matter-of-fact.

At select moments the eyes telescope to record the details and burnish it to memory.

Mine did that afternoon. Without a trace of clay on any body part or article of clothing, aside from a whitish powdery haze quickly drying

on palms and the ends of fingers, he had demonstrated the centering of clay and the possibilities that lie ahead for shifting an ancient artistic medium into a desired form. The demonstration was over in a brief few minutes, but the lessons Akin imparted endure and remain.

Over time, after graduation, I produced some professional ceramics pieces and transitioned to photography, graphic design and communications. Although clay is no longer in my repertoire, the centering process remains, as has the impression of Akin as a gifted and insightful man, a teacher and artist in all areas of life. I am grateful to have had him as a professor, making me aware that oppor­tunities to remain centered are ­omnipresent.

RANDE STYGER ’73 NORRISTOWN, PA.

Safety first Forget about installing bike racks, pumps, etc. [noted in “Beyond the Bike Rack” in the spring issue]. Get some helmets installed on your riders. Bike Riding 101.

SARAH ARNOLD HIGGINS ’67 SPRINGFIELD, VA.

Send letters via e-mail to dsonmag@dickinson.edu or mail to: Dickinson Magazine, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013-1773. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

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[ our view ]

Enhancing engagement M A R S H A R AY , V I C E P R E S I D E N T F O R C O L L E G E A D V A N C E M E N T

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here was much to celebrate during Commencement weekend this May, but one thing that really caught my attention was just how well our speaker, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “got” Dickinson.

It wasn’t just the impressive red devil pin she wore to Saturday evening’s reception. It was something she said to the new crop of graduates Sunday morning.

After telling the class of 2014 they face a future filled with challenges, Albright reminded them that they do not face this future alone. “You are already part of an international network that expands beyond the digital bounds of Facebook,” she told the graduates.

She also spoke highly of the “tremendous education” they received and how Dickinson’s commitment to the useful liberal arts is “more relevant than ever.” But her line about this “international network” highlighted a distinctive institutional strength that we sometimes overlook. Dickinson is not just a college; it is an engaged, supportive community and network of 35,000 alumni, parents, friends, students, faculty and staff.

Evidence of how deeply our community members are engaged with the college and with one another was on display throughout the weekend. You could see it in the proud parents and alumni cheering on the graduates. And you could see

it in the more than 60 alumni family members spanning multiple generations who came back to present diplomas to legacy graduates.

As someone who is still new to this community, I can tell you that this kind of alumni and parent involvement is unique and very powerful. Clearly, my challenge at Dickinson is not to drum up engagement, but rather to meet that engagement where it is — to provide our community members with more opportunities to deepen their connection to the college.

To that end, we’re launching several new initiatives in the coming year. One of the most visible will be One College One Community. This new program, developed with the Alumni Council, will connect you with students and faculty to consider, discuss and debate a common theme each semester through regional and live-streaming on-campus events.

In the fall we will focus on Rose-Walters Prize winner James Balog, whose stunning photography captures climate change’s impact on glaciers. More information on specific events will be coming your way in the near future.

In addition to this opportunity to connect through lifelong learning, we are working to strengthen our regional club programs, providing more consistent support from the college to help you make the most of the Dickinson community in your area. We’re also working to enhance career-networking opportunities, strengthen our volunteer program and launch an alumni-student mentorship initiative. And we’re reworking the alumni Web pages to make them consistent with the recently redesigned Dickinson Web site and to ensure that they meet to your needs.

The Dickinson community is strong and active. My hope is that by shaping our programs to your interests, we’ll be able to leverage the power of this global network to further strengthen our community and the college. Dickinson’s future belongs to all of us. As the link between the past and that future, our alumni, parents and friends play an important role in the life of the college. I look forward to working with you to maximize your impact on Dickinson — and Dickinson’s impact on you.

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[ Dickinson matters ]

A community of value NANCY A. ROSEMAN, PRESIDENT

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Join the official Dickinson College alumni group at www.linkedin.com/ groups/DickinsonCollege-alumni-3018.

ommencement is a good time to step back and reflect on so many things. Certainly it is a time to recall that special day in our own lives and the journey that brought us to where we find ourselves today. For some it is not so long ago, for others it has been decades. Could you have predicted where you would be sitting today, reading this copy of Dickinson Magazine, as you were handed your diploma?

As we all congratulated our newly minted alumni and sent them on their way, I couldn’t help but think about what lies ahead and how we have prepared them. They are entering a world where being able to navigate difference is so critical, and we help them do this by bringing together an extraordinarily diverse community. This year’s graduates come from 29 states and the District of Columbia and 25 countries. They represent a spectrum of political views, socioeconomic status, academic interests, dreams and aspirations. By living and working with their classmates, they have been well prepared for the diverse workplace they are about to enter.

Many of our alums who are employers tell me that their biggest challenge in hiring recent college graduates is that so many lack the social skills needed to succeed in the workplace.

This is why I think a residential liberal-arts experience is so valuable and will become even more valued in the years ahead: Our graduates time and time again are notable in their ability to be members of a team and to solve problems collaboratively.

A Dickinsonian I met recently told me a story that illustrates this point. When she first graduated, more than 10 years ago, her computer-science degree opened the door to a job in a new company. One day, in one fell swoop, the vast majority of her colleagues were let go — but not her. Being an inquisitive

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Dickinsonian, she asked her supervisor why. Given the seemingly superior computer-science credentials of her now former colleagues, why was she retained? She learned that it was because she had developed healthy and productive working relationships with her colleagues. She was valued because she had helped to foster an environment that allowed for greater synergy and success within the company. She didn’t say this to me, but it was clear that she made everyone around her better.

What she did say was that her Dickinson experience was what made the difference; it had formed her perspective and approach toward working with others.

How else do we help our students succeed once they have that diploma firmly in hand? Over 70 percent of the class of 2014 completed at least one internship. That’s real life experience. Many of those internships led to job offers or to more informed decisions about career choices. Few things are more valuable. We integrate hands-on experiences throughout the curriculum, from archaeology to sociology to art history and, of course, the sciences. Our students enter their first job or graduate school knowing they can do the work, because in many cases they already have.

How else do we have confidence that our graduates will succeed? Fifty-five percent of them studied abroad. This means that they have a facility with cultural difference and language that will serve them well in the years ahead and will open doors to personal and professional opportunity. I constantly meet graduates who are doing interesting work and, so often, for some part of their lives have lived and worked overseas. In fact, 92 percent of our graduates are employed or in graduate school within one year of graduation. Those who question the value of a liberal-arts education — and the ability of that education to translate into a successful career — are just plain wrong.

As a community, there is much we can do to help our graduates succeed. We are working hard to improve our network so that all Dickinsonians, no matter when they graduated, can connect with one another. Using social-media platforms such as LinkedIn, we are developing a framework whereby our graduates can tap into that collaborative spirit that defines Dickinson. If you have not yet done so, please join the official Dickinson College alumni group on LinkedIn, which already boasts more than 5,600 members. Together, we can function as an extraordinary team—continuing to strengthen our vibrant, diverse community and making Dickinson an even better place.

[ college & west high ]

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New Ink

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his year we’re going to do things differently.” Spoken by every new leader, every new editor, since time immemorial. This year, however, student-editors really did do things differently.

Enter the revamped Dickinson Review, edited by English majors Allison Charles ’14 and Colin Tripp ’14 of the Belles Lettres Society (founded in 1786), and the brand-spanking-new Dickinson Science Magazine (DSM), co-founded by longtime Dickinsonian editors and contributors who also happen to love all things science.

DSM Editor-in-Chief Gloria Hwang ’16 (biochemistry & molecular biology) got the idea of creating a full-color glossy science magazine after taking a science-writing class with Mary “Missy” Niblock, assistant professor of biology.

Michaela Shaw ’16 (international business & management) and Lydia Marks ’14 (neuroscience) soon joined as executive layout editor and managing editor, respectively.

From a feature on the Joseph Priestley Award and student-faculty research updates to an ode to the sci-fi cult classic Blade Runner and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sarah St. Angelo’s deconstruction of the famous bathtub scene in Breaking Bad, the magazine’s first issue demonstrated the wide-ranging interests of its editors.

“I wanted the magazine to be as inclusive as possible,” said Hwang at the April launch party. “It’s received tremendous support, with 32 students and two faculty on staff, all of whom have inspired me.”

Dickinson Review’s metamorphosis began with guest editor Nicola Mason of the Cincinnati Review, who helped guide the redesign process.

Tripp and Charles also reached out to faculty and staff, as well as student groups like eXiled and the Arts Collective. In addition to a clean, modern layout for poetry and short stories, the Review includes a full-color center folio of visual art submitted by students.

“It’s all student-run, student-generated, so it’s great for skill-building for future work,” said Assistant Professor of English Siobhan Phillips, one of the Review’s ­advisors. “Putting together a journal and thinking about selection, content, layout, the feel of the whole thing—these are interesting and important elements that can lay the groundwork for future writing and publishing endeavors.”

Kathryn Davison ’16

Dickinson Review is available for purchase in the College Bookstore (Dickinson. collegestoreonline.com), and you can view the Dickinson Science Magazine on issuu.com/dickinsonsciencemagazine.

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[ college & west high ] Chat, rooms: For Students, by Students When Justin McCarty ’15 and Anna McGinn ’14 attended the 2013 Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium (PERC) symposium as observers, they couldn’t help but feel that something was amiss.

“There’s a lot of value in meeting with faculty and administrators in the field, because they have a wealth of experience, but people our age have a lot of modern, innovative ideas,” said McCarty, a double major in economics and environmental studies. “We knew that the more students we got together in a room, the more ideas there would be.”

One year later, McCarty, McGinn and like-minded Dickinsonians joined forces to host the PERC 2014 Student Sustainability Symposium, with an attendance of about 100 students from 25 institutions. Based on the responses he’s received, McCarty believes next year’s will be even bigger.

“As we’re speaking, new Facebook groups and e-mail lists are being formed, and new collaborations are in the works,” McCarty said with a smile. “So there’s a lot more to come.”

Learn more at dson.co/PERCforstudents.

A Literary Jolt “I was born and bred in the ‘murder triangle,’ ” said Paul Muldoon, launching this classroom visit as he launches his poetry— with a jolt.

“It was redolent of quite a few of the forces at work in Irish history coming together in some way. That’s where I was brought up.”

For students studying the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, interesting as it was to read about the forces of history that saturate his 30-some volumes of work, it was much more effective to hear the man describe them in person, and in that soft, ­honeyed brogue.

As this year’s recipient of the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Award, Muldoon spent his week-long residency chatting with students and professors about his poems and his experiences as a poet, rock musician and New Yorker poetry editor. He also answered questions about

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his pedagogical philosophy, his love-hate ­relationship with his computer keyboard, the interrelatedness of art forms and his view of the writing process as an act of informed channeling. Read more at dson.co/ muldoonresidency.

A Rush of Contradictions He was an abolitionist who was also a slaveholder. He coined the title of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yet had serious misgivings about direct democracy. With great confidence, he founded Dickinson College in 1783; but a feud with President Charles Nisbet led him to lose interest in the fledgling school within a few years.

These tensions between Rush the founding father and Rush the flawed human were dissected throughout The Republics of Benjamin Rush conference, organized by Christopher Bilodeau and Jeremy Ball, associate professors of history, in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Ball, who had formed a faculty study group in 2011, also wanted to address some disturbing stories about the Philadelphia physician’s views on race, including his notion of blackness as a curable disease — something that Rush believed would uplift African Americans. Rush’s narrative, however, is complicated by how we view history, “warts and all,” said Provost and Dean Neil Weissman.

“One of the reasons for this conference is to make sense of it,” said Ball. “It’s to help us figure out how to teach those historical ­confrontations, the tensions.” Read more at dson.co/rushconference.

In Code We Trust Digital currency bitcoin hasn’t been around long, but global voices have weighed in from the start, and thoughts on the effects of the cryptocurrency swing wildly.

In April, Alec Ross, senior fellow at Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs and this year’s Poitras-Gleim lecturer, was on hand to help sort it out.

“When we were little kids, money was something you carried in a wallet,” he said.

“It had volume; it had breadth.” With bitcoin and other digital currencies, monetary exchange is facilitated through computer code — a series of 1s and 0s — and it’s fully out from under government regulation.

Ross cited search engines such as Lycos and AltaVista in drawing his conclusions on bitcoin: While they may not exist as they once did (or at all), the search engine itself evolved and became stronger in such current forms as Google. Bitcoin may not live forever, but the category of digital currency is here to stay.

The only mystery is what form it will take in years to come. Learn more at dson.co/ bitcoinlecture.

Telling Herstories Have you been told you’re “bossy”? Or p ­ erhaps you’ve been called that other B word? From the Ban Bossy campaign to the media frenzy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s prospects as a presidential candidate, the perennial ­question of women’s equality remains a vexing one.

Women and Leadership at Dickinson: A Panel, hosted in March by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center, drew questions about power and privilege, the durability of the glass ceiling and the value of mentoring.

“So many young women come to college already leaders,” said Sharon Davie ’68, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Women’s Center (See Page 30).

“What I do is offer more, newer, riskier [­opportunities to lead].”

“I’ve felt really connected to my mentors and sponsors,” said Esprit Basner ’15, one of the student panelists. She mentioned Assistant Director of Campus Life Annie Kondas as someone who has both supported and encouraged her to step up. “She’s kept me in leadership roles.”

“I’ve been called bossy,” said Brenda Bretz ’95, associate provost for curriculum. “And it’s always motivated me. You need to have the self-confidence to overcome.” Learn more at dson.co/telling-herstories.

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Carl Socolow ’77 and Kathryn Davison ’16

Kudos

[ college & west high ] Promotions

The following were promoted to the rank of professor: Jennifer Blyth, music; Marie HelwegLarsen, psychology; Susan Perabo, English; Robert Pound, music; Karl Qualls, history; David Richeson, mathematics.

The following received tenure and were promoted to the rank of associate professor: Todd Arsenault, art; Andrew Farrant, economics; Lynn Johnson, Africana studies; Chauncey Maher, philosophy; Sarah McGaughey, German; Benjamin Ngong, French and Francophone studies; Mary Niblock, biology; Brett Pearson, physics and astronomy; Jerry Philogene, American studies; Jennifer Schaefer, mathe­ matics; C. Helen Takacs, international business & management; Edward Webb, political science and international studies.

Publications

A revised and expanded version of Professor Emerita of German Beverley Eddy’s earlier biography of Danish writer, feminist and humanitarian Karin Michaëlis was published in Danish translation by the Karin Michaëlis Society: Hjertets Kalejdoskop, translated by Kirsten Klitgård, Aarhus: Scandinavian Book.

Alberto Rodriguez, professor of Spanish,

published “Vicisitudes del quijotismo en Puerto Rico: ‘La peregrinación de Bayoán’ (1863) de Eugenio María de Hostos y ‘La charca’ (1894) de Manuel Zeno Gandía” in the book El Quijote: palimpsestos hispanoamericanos, ed. by María Stoopen, and published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Steven Erfle, associate professor of

international business & management, published “Deriving a Cubic Total Cost Function from a Cubic Total Cost Curve” in International Journal of Economics, Commerce and Manage­ment. The article is based on a managerial economics exam question and was written for use by students in that class. Notes Erfle, “The inspiration for writing this up as an article came from Pia Holtmeier ’16, who asked me for a more formal version when she took the course from me last year.” Erfle also published “Spatial Variations in Academic Performance and Obesity in Pennsylvania: A GeographicallyWeighted Regression Analysis,” Journal of Social Sciences Research, and “Persistent Focal Behavior and Physical Activity

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Performance,” Measurement in Physical Education and Exercise Science. Both papers form the basis for his IB&M course Applied Empirical Analysis of Middle School Obesity.

Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Hans Pfister published “The Sponge Resistor

Model—A Hydrodynam Analog to Illustrate Ohm’s Law, the Resistor Equation, and Resistors in Series and Parallel” in The Physics Teacher.

Jorge R. Sagastume, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and current director of Dickinson’s program in Málaga, Spain, published “Cervantes inmortal: lo apócrifo en el Quijote y en Borges” in Palimpsestos hispanoamericanos. Sagastume also published two books: Cervantes novelador: Las novelas ejemplares cuatrocientos años después and Sirena(s): Poesía extranjera fundamental en traducción castellana.

Kristin Stock, assistant professor of environ­ mental science, published “Recovery from acid rain speeding up in Northeast lakes” in Environmental Science and Technology.

Tony Rauhut, assistant professor of psychology, published “Time-dependent effects of prazosin on the development of methamphetamine conditioned hyperactivity and context-specific sensitization in mice” in Behavioural Brain Research.

Grants and Awards Alyssa deBlasio, associate professor of Russian, was awarded a $35,000 fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies.

She intends to use the funds to finish a book on the transition of Russian philosophical thought from the immediate post-Soviet period (1990s) through the first decade of the Putin era (2000s). She also plans to start a new book, which explores the influence of Soviet philosophy on a new generation of Russian art-house filmmakers.

Rebecca Connor, associate professor of chemistry, received a Single-Investigator Cottrell College Science Award of $35,000 through the Research Corporation for Science Advancement to fund a summer studentfaculty research project on the effects of par­ the­nolide on the heat shock response system.

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) awarded a 2014 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award to the LGBT Center of

Central PA History Project, in partnership with Dickinson’s Archives and Special Collections, which serves as the permanent repository of the archival, artifact and oralhistory collections of the project. Malinda Triller Doran, special collections librarian, serves as the liaison to the project and manages the collection.

Jeff McCausland, visiting professor of

international security, was named a Senior Associate Fellow for the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Hans Pfister, associate professor of physics and

astronomy, was awarded a $5,000 grant by the PPG Industries Foundation. Pfister designed

and built a cost-effective Solar Air Heater (SAH), having a very high solar-to-thermal energy conversion efficiency. PPG in Mount Holly Springs, Pa., supported by the PPG Industries Foundation, will work with Pfister to optimize the SAH’s glazing for maximum efficiency.

The Penn Humanities Forum has awarded Antje Pfannkuchen, professor of German, a

$5,000 Mellon Regional Faculty Fellowship grant. Through this award, Pfannkuchen will become a member of the forum’s weekly Mellon Research Seminar on “Color,” the program topic for 2014-15. The interdisciplinary seminar includes Mellon postdoctoral and faculty fellows from Penn and other institutions throughout the region.

The National Science Foundation awarded Sarah St. Angelo, associate professor of

chemistry, a $6,500 grant through the Penn State University Materials Research Facilities Network (MRFN) Fellows Program. The program will allow St. Angelo to access HRTEM to analyze nanoparticles synthesized with green reducing methods.

Matt Steiman, assistant farm manager at

the College Farm, and Tim Wahls, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, were awarded a Northeast Region Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Partnership grant of $15,000.

The grant will help them continue work on FARMDATA, an internet-based database system for inputting and reporting crop production records including seeding, transplanting, harvest, cover crop, compost, pest scouting, spray activities and customer invoicing.

Poetry

IN THE MAKING

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hether you’re an actor honing skills on stage, an artist attempting a new medium or a musician committing to a complex piece, all forms of creative expression take perseverance, passion and practice. Dickinson poets James George ’15 and John Kneisley ’16 had their efforts recognized in the Academy of American Poets (AAP) University & College Poetry Prize program, which sponsors more than 200 annual poetry prizes at U.S. institutions. George was the Dickinson winner for his piece “I’m From,” which was lauded for its “fresh, sharp-edged unpredictability.” Kneisley’s “Somewhere in the Outskirts” earned an honorable mention for being “rich in charming details.”

“James and John treat writing like the job it is,” says Adrienne Su, associate professor of English, poet-in-residence and coordinator of Dickinson’s AAP contest submissions this year. “Like all of our best creative-writing students, they work hard on revising drafts, take constructive criticism seriously, look to learn as much as possible from their teachers and peers, read widely and deeply and constantly try the unfamiliar.”

I’m From by James George I’m from the boggy backyard before the creek.

We walked barefoot over slimy rocks to pirate island, crayfish cove.

I’m from sweet wild strawberries in porcelain bowls fire pit pumpkins like ashy orange suns.

I’m from dusty treasures discovered: the scratched Bee Gees’ record, the tobacco-stained skull pipe, the box of rusty keys without locks.

I’m from family gatherings complete with candied sweet potatoes, bitter apple butter, pudding made with rice.

I’m from get up and go, narrow bike rides along the canal, kayaks gliding through whitewater like constant spears.

I’m from pop pop’s grave beside the arborvitae trees their branches separating graves from houses, providing visitors with shade.

Somewhere in the Outskirts New York, NY by John Kneisley

While walking on rusted train tracks covered with weeds and cricket songs, I saw burning coals beside a collapsed boxcar, a campfire of hobos clinking spoons and mugs together as they scraped coffee from silver tins, pulling all-nighters for the sake of conversation.

I heard poetry that night.

Not the kind in some Brooklyn café with beats and tones on stage before a microphone, their owners hungry for the sighs and snaps of an enchanted audience.

Instead I stared into the fire’s coals and listened to stories of steaming apple pie saving the stomachs of soldiers come home, cleaning a middle school every day to have enough money for cigarettes, the feeling of park-bench-sleeping on a summer evening and waking up the next afternoon.

Washing clothes in the Hudson only to pull them out clogged with city grime.

Glaring back at the policeman after being told to stop loitering by the church.

Dumpster-diving for a lighter.

My head swam as the coals grew dim and blackish-red, exhaling their final, heated breaths.

My eyes fell shut to a father picking apples with his five-year-old daughter, and to a fisherman reeling in a bottle of ancient wine.

I finally fell away from consciousness and let the hobos’ stories blend with the voices of crickets wailing to the stars.

I’m from love is kind, patient, caring, comforting on a frame in the hallway that smells of sun tea and pine.

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Carl Socolow ’77

Through his musicianship, his commitment to technical mastery, his musical scholarship and his gift for teaching, Truman Bullard both deepened and expanded the way we choral singers heard, felt and understood music. — J O S E P H S O B E L ’ 7 0

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[ college & west high ] ‘You Had Me at Truman’

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here’s a name for that irresistible force that drew four generations of former student-musicians together on campus this spring. They call it “the Truman effect,” and if you’ve made music at Dickinson, you’ve likely succumbed.

The catalyst, Truman Bullard, was a music professor and choirmaster at Dickinson for 35 years until his retirement in 2000, and he remains a visible presence on campus. On April 27, alumni ages 22 to 68 joined current music faculty members for a weekend celebration of Bullard’s 75th birthday that included a party and singalong with Bullard at the piano and a standing-roomonly concert of Brahms’ German Requiem by the Dickinson Choir, Collegium and Orchestra featuring soloist Anne Jennifer Nash ’96. It also marked the launch of the Bullard Music Studies Support Fund.

Some attendees, like Nash, pianist George Bowerman ’12 and church choir­master Rob Burlington ’93, are professional musicians, while others, like Bill Fisher ’84, who spearheaded the weekend celebration, and Joseph Sobel ’70 simply enjoy music-enriched lives. All said that Bullard’s inspiration runs deep.

“Through his musicianship, his commitment to technical mastery, his musical scholarship and his gift for teaching, Truman Bullard both deepened and expanded the way we choral singers heard, felt and understood music,” Sobel wrote in a scrapbook commemorating the celebration. “The experience, over time, was transformative and, on many occasions, transcendent.”

“He also is a mentor and friend to generations of alumni, and his influence continues long after graduation, because he truly cares and connects,” said Fisher, noting that he has joyfully performed Handel’s Messiah every year since Bullard recruited him to the choir in 1980.

“When I asked for help getting the word out about these events,” added Fisher, “one alumna responded, ‘You had me at Truman.’ ” Fisher notes that the Bullard scholarship, which funds music lessons for Dickinson students considering a music major, is the second formal recognition of Bullard’s enduring influence. He and wife Beth, a fellow musician-professor, also support an international-music concert series established by alumni in their honor, and the couple regularly attend campus concerts.

The Bullards also perform together as part of a quartet, and Truman occasionally fills in as a bassoonist in the Dickinson Orchestra. As a result, he’s met second-generation fans like Holly Kelly ’15 and Leah Beshore-Naftalin ’03, who heard tales of Bullard’s irrepressible passion for his subject before experiencing it firsthand, along with fellow instrumentalists like Jinsen Wang ’13, who consider Bullard a mentor and friend.

Ongoing fundraising for the Bullard scholarship ensures that “the Truman effect” will continue. “This is vital work, because the experiences students have when they commit to [music ensembles] … provide opportunities to learn about themselves and build confidence and mastery by taking creative risks,” Bullard said. “Music is a magical, meaningful way to make that identity quest. It’s also, for me, a lifelong source of beauty, connection and joy.” — MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

Events art junctions lectures

MAY 30-NOV. 1

The Trout Gallery

Arbus Frank Penn: Masters of Post-War American Photography AUG. 1-3

Volunteer Leadership Summit AUG. 13

Buzz Jones Big Band SEPT. 7

Faculty Recital

Rubendall Recital Hall SEPT. 8-9

Calendar of Arts: dickinson.edu/arts The Clarke Forum: clarke.dickinson.edu (includes event podcasts)

The Clarke Forum

World War I: Causes and Consequences Panel Discussion SEPT. 16

The Clarke Forum

Asia and the Environment Stephanie Kaza, University of Vermont SEPT. 17

The Clarke Forum

Constitution Day Address Kate Martin, Center for National Security Studies SEPT. 18

The Clarke Forum

Ecology and East Asian Literature Karen Thornber, Harvard University SEPT. 19

Faculty Jazz Ensemble

Rubendall Recital Hall SEPT. 19-21

Homecoming & Family Weekend

Read more at Dickinson.edu/magazine.

11

[ college & west high ]

Carl Socolow ’77

THE EVENING SHIFT

From left: Kay Kling, Sue Holloway, Emily Smith and Sharon McGlade.

“

F

irst-years are required to work in Dining Services.”

I heard this statement more than 100 times during my orientation week in August 2011. I had come to Dickinson knowing that I wanted to work on campus, partly because I needed the extra money but more so because I wanted to meet new people. So I signed up for the evening rush-hour shift, 6-8 p.m., three days a week at The Quarry. I would occasionally sub for someone who had an organic chemistry test the next day or who couldn’t make it to work because they had the flu.

It was during my evening shift that I met Emily Smith, the lead cashoperations supervisor. She would come in with her flowing blond hair and huge smile, hang up her jacket on the coat rack opposite the women’s bathroom and walk in to the deli with her hair tied up in a bun. We’d talk about everything

d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2014

12

while making lattes and wheat wraps, and she soon became someone I could go to and with whom I could share intimate stories.

For a lot of students, working in dining services during their first year is their first actual job, and the bonds that are formed with the adult workers are often students’ introduction to Dickinson culture. Whether that bond is built over the mutual dread of making yet another green-tea bubble tea or acci­dentally brewing water instead of coffee, the adult workers create an environment where students feel like they have a family away from home.

And as I started subbing for other student workers, I met the other women supervisors and built close relationships with them as well: Kay Kling, Sue Holloway, Sharon McGlade and Smith were my mothers during my first year at Dickinson. They looked after me as if I were their child.

Holloway, who has been working at Dickinson for more than 21 years, well before The Quarry became what we know it to be today, had worked at Racks restaurant in Carlisle before coming to Dickinson and worked her way up from part-time attendant to cash-operations supervisor. “My duties are to make sure the place runs smoothly every day,” she says. “So when problems arise, I have to take care of them and direct everybody to what needs to be done and how to do it.” She has seen Dickinson evolve into a more diverse community and played a vital role in transforming the dining experience on campus.

“I wanted to be a part of the culture,” adds McGlade, cash-operations attendant. McGlade had worked as a teller at M&T Bank before joining Dickinson. “I love the culture here and being with the kids.”

Kling chimes in: “The togetherness and teamwork with the other workers and the students is the best part about working at The Quarry,” she says.

“I mean, the students think that I’m strict and unfriendly because of this face I always make.” She purses her lips, squints her eyes and holds her face still for about five seconds.

“But once you get to know me,” she says with a smile, “you find out that I’m really not that bad.”

When I became an upperclassman, I did what all upperclassmen do: I didn’t work in dining services anymore.

I worked at the Office of Admissions, and I studied abroad in Norwich, England, but The Quarry and the women there were still my family.

101

SQUASH

I’d come in and, even after not seeing me for an entire semester, they would know exactly what I wanted to order.

They asked me about my study-abroad experience or scolded me when I didn’t come in to check on them from time to time.

Recently, while I was grabbing a straw for my mango smoothie, I spied Kling having a conversation with another student about his study-abroad experience. And then Holloway tagged in, joking around like she did with me.

It was then that I realized that there were many students who had strong connections with them and had viewed them as family the same way I did.

Holloway recalls one student who “one day just started calling me Grandma.

And I’ve been her grandma ever since.”

“She gets very upset when Sue’s not here,” says McGlade.

Working and interacting with students is something that all four women cherish. “It’s been interesting to get to know you and see you grow,” says Smith. “Seeing you from your fresh, little, green selves coming into college with big doe eyes in headlights, and then to see you find yourselves, it’s been amazing.” — Celeste Hippolyte ’15

A

176

The current speed record for a squash ball is 176 mph.

1,000

But that ball doesn’t bounce very well, so players burn an average of 1,000 calories per hour chasing it around.

40

The average match (best of three or five games) takes 40 minutes or so, closer to an hour at the professional level.

fter a 51-year hiatus, squash (the sport, not the vegetable) is returning to Dickinson at the varsity level in winter 2014.

If you don’t know much about this fast-paced game, you probably know at least this much for sure: It’s played in an enclosed court with a racket and a rubber ball.

But there’s a lot more to the sport Forbes magazine called the world’s healthiest. So let’s jump right in.

Squash is played by two players (or four, for a doubles match).

Players take turns hitting the ball against the front wall, below one line and above another, until one player reaches 11 points.

The college squash season runs from November to February.

The center of the court, where the half-court line meets the short line, is called the “T.” This is where the action is, and players strive to control it.

“At the highest levels of the sport, it’s a grueling physical game,” says Chris Sachvie, Dickinson’s new squash head coach, who was assistant squash coach at Brown University. “It’s a battle of attrition in which one player usually hits the breaking point.”

Urban squash programs are popping up all over the U.S., which has helped place players into top high schools and colleges.

Squash is played on every continent and in over 175 countries by more than 25 million people.

Squash has its own lingo, especially in terms of shots players can take. For example: • Boast: Playing the ball off a side wall or the back wall before hitting the front wall.

• Kill: Hitting the ball hard and low on the front wall so that it only makes it back to half-court.

• Rolling nick shot: When the shot is hit so well, the ball rolls along the floor.

• There’s also the Philadelphia (or corkscrew), skid boast and Mizuki, which can’t be defined in the confines of a mortal magazine.

Peter Arkle

What was your first-year experience working in dining services? Send your memories (of 50 words or fewer) to dsonmag@dickinson.edu for inclusion in a future issue of Dickinson Magazine.

Learn more at dickinsonathletics.com

13

L

ooking out into the sea of faces, hearing cheers from afar, and then stepping through Old West’s double doors and onto the dais during Commencement is a momentous experience. For the 62 legacy members of the class of 2014, that moment included a more personal touch. These graduates, who were handed their diploma by another Dickinsonian — relative, faculty member or administrator — exemplify a lifelong affinity for this institution. And the sentiment dates back to the very beginning.

“Many of the college’s early s­ tudents were people who had some kind of relationship with the school through other family members,” notes College Archivist Jim Gerencser ’93. For example, Isaac Grier was a member of Dickinson’s second graduating class in 1788. His son Robert Cooper Grier is one of the very first legacy ­graduates, following his father in 1812.

Dickinson’s first woman graduate, Zatae Longsdorff Straw, class of 1887, also was a legacy. Other Dickinsonians in her family included her father, William (1856); brother, Harold (1879); and sisters Hildegarde (1888), Jessica (1891) and Persis, who matriculated with the class of 1894 but left after one year.

The most extensive legacy family in the class of 2014 is that of Alexandra Faccenda, whose grandparents, William ’58 and Dottie Gayner Rogers ’60, and parents, Robert ’84 and Deborah Rogers Faccenda ’84, plus her uncle, Lewis Gayner Jr. ’57, and sister, Elyse Faccenda ’10, make for quite a deep-rooted family tree. Even deeper, Faccenda’s great-grandfather, Horace Rogers, was a member of the class of 1924, a distin­guished chemistry professor at the college and the first recipient of the Dickinson College Distinguished Alumni Award in June 1984.

“Being a legacy means that I’ll always have close ties with this part of my life, and I’ll always have somewhere to come back to,” Alexandra says. “Dickinson will always be a second home to me and my family because we have so much history and so many memories here.”— Lauren Davidson

Carl Socolow ’77

Find out who’s who at dickinson.edu/magazine.

Roots DEEP

[ commencement ]

15

[ commencement ]

C

lass of 2014 members Noorjahan Akbar, Benjamin West, Rizwan Saffie and Marketa Jakubcova discussed leadership and world affairs with this year’s Commencement speaker and recipient of an honorary doctorate in international relations, former Secretary of State of the United States Madeleine K. Albright.

Watch the full video at dson.co/ albright-roundtable and read the edited transcript below.

Q A with Madame Secretary

d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2014

16

Benjamin West: Let me begin by saying welcome, Secretary Albright. Thank you so much for being here. We have a few questions about American foreign policy. I was noticing in the last 10 to 15 years, issues in Latin America have taken a backseat in U.S. foreign policy to other more pressing world regions.

I was curious what you think in the next few years the greatest challenges and oppor­tu­ nities are for the U.S. in that region.

Albright: I have always believed that we needed to have a much more robust policy, vis-à-vis Latin America, but I have to tell you, frankly, it’s not easy — partially because if we do too much, then a lot of the countries there say, “Leave us alone.” And if we don’t do enough, then they say what you just said, which is, “Why don’t you care?” It is a complicated relationship. But one of the things that we did during the Clinton administration was to talk a lot about the solidarity of the Americas and try to figure out how to have respectful relationships.

When I was secretary, I used to travel around with a map that showed how the governments in Latin America were changing from authoritarian to democratic.

Authoritarian were in red and the democratic ones were in green. When we were in office, there was only one little red island left.

But I do believe that we need to have much more involved relationships, and ones in which we complement each other; we need to be partners.

Carl Socolow ’77

Marketa Jakubcova: Do you think that Ukraine should consider a decision that would divide the pro-West and pro-Russia regions [like Czechoslovakia], or is Kiev actually able to find a form of govern­ment that would keep the country as one? And what should the West be doing at this specific moment if the current expansion of sanctions is enough to stop Putin from taking over eastern Ukraine as a part of his ambition to expand Russian influence in the rest of Europe?

Albright: I think what President Putin did is a game changer in terms of the kinds of experiences that the countries in Central and Eastern Europe were having at the end of the Cold War. And I’ll never forget this. I was doing a lot of focus group work in ’91. I was in Russia doing one where this man stood up and said, “You know, we used to be a superpower, and now we’re Bangladesh with missiles.” There has been a real identity crisis that the Russians are having. Putin plugged into that and is acting as if he is bringing back Russia or the czars.

One of the proudest moments of my tenure as secretary of state was when we brought the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into NATO. Part of it was to make clear that countries that were ready to be members, could and should be part of the West; that countries need to be able to make their own choice about where they belong.

I could talk about this for a very long time because I feel very strongly about it, but I think that the countries that border Russia have every right to make decisions about where they want to be. And I think it’s possible, and likely, and would be good, if the Ukrainians were able to have a Western perspective, be a part of whatever groupings they want to be, but also have a good relationship with Russia. It doesn’t mean one is not the opposite of the other.

On your question about splitting, Czechoslovakia was a very special case, I think. And I have to say, when I was growing up, I would ask my parents, was I a Czech or a Slovak? And they said you’re Czechoslovak.

They were of the first generation of Czechoslovaks after World War I, and they were very proud of it. So I was one of the people who wish it hadn’t split. But what is interesting are the good relationships now between the Czechs and Slovaks.

Noorjahan Akbar: I had another question, but your response brought up one that’s different from my original one. In regard to Afghanistan, many people recently have been speaking of a federal system that would probably make the relations between the South and the North better, maybe give more power to the Taliban in the regions where they have more public support and not so in other regions. Do you think that same model of a federal government would work there as well?

Albright: I think, actually, yes. The people that I’ve talked to from Afghanistan — and by the way, I know both Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani — and the different groups within Afghanistan itself, I think there are people who say that Americans don’t understand how Afghanistan is put together. And culturally and ethnically there are highly differentiated parts. The question is how a federal system works. And if you look at constitutions in different federal governments that really work, they have a capital and a legislative system that allows representations of various autono­ mous parts. So it isn’t as if you separated and have no relationship. Do you think that?

Akbar: I’m highly conflicted about this issue because I also think that, much like Ukraine, these areas are very much mixed. In the South, which is highly populated by Pashtun ethnic groups, there are lots of non-Pashtuns.

In the North, there are many different ethnic groups. I don’t know how arbitrary these borders of states that we create will be and whether or not Afghans themselves will be satisfied with those borders.

Albright: The United States is different from every country. Even though we have a federal system, it’s a different kind of a thing. But I do think one of the things people forget about democratic governments is majority rule and minority rights. One can delineate certain

17

[ commencement ]

borders if, in fact, there are minority rights within them, but it’s difficult. When you think about federal countries that work, there are few of them.

One of the questions is what happens to the taxes? That’s what a lot of this is about.

If you collect federal taxes, do they go back to the other regions? And in Ukraine, what has been the problem, in addition to the history of how Ukraine was put together, is that the taxes have not gone back to the eastern part.

I think in Afghanistan, it’s a different issue.

And I also think that in Afghanistan, there are more different ethnic groups. And the relationship between the North and the South and the Taliban has been more complicated.

But it doesn’t surpass human brain power to try to figure out systems that allow some integration and, at the same time, allow various regions to have more control over their taxation systems and their rights if, in fact, it doesn’t undercut the rights of the minorities that live there.

Akbar: It’s a tough balance to keep.

Albright: It is.

Rizwan Saffie I’ve actually got a question about your pins. I know in the past you’ve given great significance to the pins you choose to wear at special occasions. You even wrote a book about the various pins you’ve used to express yourself both personally and diplomatically. And so I was wondering if you will have any special pin for tomorrow?

d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2014

18

Albright: Well, the pin I’m wearing today has special meaning because it’s your red devil.

I’m not going to wear a pin tomorrow because I don’t think it looks right on my academic robes. But the way it started, I have to tell you, is I clearly like jewelry. But what happened was that when I was ambassador to the United Nations, it was right after the Gulf War, and the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions that had to be kept on.

I was an instructed ambassador, and my instructions were to make sure that the sanctions stayed on. So every day, I said something terrible about Saddam Hussein, which he deserved. He had invaded Kuwait.

A poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them, an unparalleled serpent. So I had a snake pin, and I wore it whenever we talked about Iraq. And then when I went out — you’ve seen pictures of when the ambassadors go out and talk to the press — the camera zeroed in and [the reporter] said, “Why are you wearing that snake pin?” And I said, “Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent,” and I thought, well, this is fun. I went out and bought some costume jewelry to reflect whatever we were going to do on any given day. When the other ambassadors said, “What are we going to do today?” I would say, “Read my pins.”

Saffie: That’s the title of your book, right?

Read My Pins?

Albright: And they all have foreign policy stories. I have one pin that is actually an arrow, but it looks like a missile. When I was negotiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Russians, Foreign Minister Ivanov leaned over and said, “Is that one of your missile interceptors?” I said, “Yes, and we make them very small, and you need to negotiate.”

Akbar: You have been an icon for American women and women around the world. Your accomplishments are a testimony to the potential of women if they’re given the chance to really flourish. How do you define women’s empowerment? How do you distinguish an empowered woman and her qualities from one who might not be?

Albright: When I became secretary, I decided to make women’s issues central to American foreign policy, not just because I’m a feminist, but because we know that when societies empower women politically and economically, they’re more stable. You really see a difference. In every country, women are at least half the population. So if women are not part of the system, it really robs the system of resources, if I can put it that way.

It is very important to have women politically empowered, which means that they should be elected to various positions.

As a matter of fact, I just had an interesting discussion with [Lakhdar Brahimi] about Afghanistan where … one of the deals they were going to make was that every province was going to say that they would have two women elected to the Loya Jirga. And some of the provinces are so small, they made an agreement that by average, there would be two women. A real recognition that having women elected to office makes a difference in terms of the way decisions are made and what some of the priorities are. Economically empowering women makes clear that it isn’t that women don’t have jobs in developing countries; it’s just that they work harder and get no pay, which is not untrue in other developed countries.

What I find interesting, and it goes to the question that you asked, and it has a lot to do with all the countries, is democracy is very complicated. One of the issues that I’m sure you’ve talked about in your classes all the time is what comes first, political or economic development? They go together, because democracy has to deliver.

Watch the full discussion at dson.co/albright-roundtable.

583 Graduates

Class of 2014

55%

45%

representing

29 25  states

worthy 32% of the class of 2014 graduated with Latin honors

foreign countries

www.dickinson.edu/commencement

75%

Bachelor of Arts

25%

degrees awarded

Bachelor of Science

44

%

majored in an interdisciplinary field

56%

24 countries

6

continents

STUDIED OFF CAMPUS

awards & outcomes

1 2 5 10

Joining the Peace Corps

Teach for America

Fulbright Scholars

U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenants

19

Taking it all in stride

I

6

School records: Indoor Distance Medley Relay Outdoor 4 x 800m Relay Outdoor Distance Medley Relay Outdoor 3,000m run Outdoor 5,000m run Outdoor 10,000m run

3

other top 10 all-time performances: Indoor 3,000m run (2nd all-time) Indoor 5,000m run (2nd all-time) Outdoor 5,000m run (4th all-time)

7,853.6 Sara’s total mileage over four years at Dickinson is 7,853.6 miles. A trip from Dickinson to her alma mater, St. Johns School of Houston, is approximately 1,445 miles; theoretically she could run home and back twice with more miles to spare.

Carl Socolow ’77

t’s easy to imagine accomplished athletes being driven to play a certain sport at a young age.

But ask fleet-footed Sara Patterson ’14 how she became a runner, and you won’t get what you expect.

“In fifth grade, it was the only sport we were allowed to do,” she says, “so every single fifthgrader joined cross country. I did really well in my first race and then … just sort of fizzled out.” But the promise she showed in that first race reappeared in 8th grade, and she’s never doubted her talent again.

When Patterson began her hunt for the perfect college, she had academics and track on her mind, but she had already committed to another school.

A chance overnight visit to Dickinson, though, would open a new chapter in her life.

“It completely changed my mind,” she says of the visit. “I loved it. It changed my whole path.”

A big part of it was the camaraderie she felt spending time with her future team. “Just hanging out with them on an overnight, they just seemed like people I could be friends with.”

Now she’s at the other end of her Dickinson experience, and in her wake are a shredded record book and a senior season that prompted Head Coach Don Nichter to say, “We may never see accomplishments like this again in track and field.”

Patterson’s first record was set in the 10,000 meter when she was a first-year student, and during her last year as a Red Devil she went on to do, well, all of this: break records in the 10,000 (again), 5,000, 3,000, 4 x 800 relay and the distance medley relay. She also was named to the All-American and All-Region cross-country teams and the Centennial Conference cross-country and indoor and outdoor track-and-field first teams, which came among still other honors.

“Looking at me freshman year, no one would have thought I’d do all of this,” Patterson says.

Something else no one might have guessed is that she came in wanting to major in psychology but soon switched to neuroscience, an interdisciplinary program that kept her in engulfed in research.

“I’ve been in a lab my whole four years,” she says. “It’s really provided me with a base to understand how research works, and I can’t really imagine where I’d be without that great experience.”

Patterson, who graduated with honors (her senior thesis was “Blue Color Vision Sensitivity as an Indicator of Dopamine Levels in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder”), is now off to the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., where she’ll conduct research for a year while gearing up for grad school.

“I really love research,” she says. “And a big part of the reason I’m pursuing it now is because of my Dickinson experience.” — Tony Moore

[ in the game ] Men’s Baseball

Women’s Lacrosse

Women’s Golf

The Red Devils won nine straight games to start the season 14-1 and finished 22-12-1 overall, just missing the Centennial Conference (CC) playoffs by virtue of a tie-breaker. The team reached the 20-win mark for the third time in the past four seasons, the secondhighest win total in program history. Harley Moore ’15 was named All-Region by the ABCA and D3baseball.com and earned second-team All-CC honors. Hank Sanders ’16, Ryan Kramer ’14 and Ryan Dolan ’16 also were named to the All-CC squad.

Starting the season with five straight wins, the women finished 9-8 on the year. Co-captains Caroline Clancy ’16 and Moira Mahoney ’16, as well as Carly O’Brien ’15, were named to the IWLCA All-Region second team. Mahoney was named first-team All-CC, while Clancy and O’Brien earned second team. O’Brien tallied her 100th career point, raising her total to 123 in three seasons. Sydney Stern ’16 set a school record for assists by a rookie, ranking second on the single-season list with 36.

The women’s team excelled at the CC championships, placing third in the team standings. Melanie Campbell ’15 finished third overall and was the team’s Most Valuable Player. Stephanie Heiring ’17 was named the CC Rookie of the Year, earned All-CC honors and placed fifth in the individual standings.

The Red Devils added third-place finishes in the Gettysburg Blue and Grey Cup Invitational tournaments, as well as the Stevenson Spring Invitational.

Women’s Softball

Men’s Tennis

Women’s Track and Field

With a relatively young roster led by lone senior Ari Blask, the Red Devils finished 6-10 overall and 4-5 in the CC, just missing a playoff berth. Clark Chapman ’17 earned an honorable mention on the All-CC squad, while Blask earned his third selection to the CC Academic Honor Roll, joined by John Kneisley ’16, who also was named to the All-CC sportsmanship team.

The team set a remarkable 15 records and placed second at the CC championships during the outdoor season. Sara Patterson ’14 was part of five school records, was the CC Outstanding Female Performer for the indoor and outdoor seasons and earned All-America honors in the 10,000 meters. Kayla Zoscgh ’17 won the conference title in javelin and placed third at nationals to earn All-America honors after breaking the school record five times this spring. Rikka Olson ’17 cleared 12’ 2” to set the school mark in pole vault and become the third Red Devil to qualify for nationals.

Men’s Lacrosse The Red Devils made a great run at another CC title, earning the No. 2 seed in the playoffs before falling in the semifinals. Brian Cannon ’14 became the all-time leading scorer with 226 points, while Carter Moore ’14 finished second all-time, winning 525 face-offs in his career, and ranks third in career ground balls with 340. John “Draper” Donley ’14 ranks in the top 10 for ground balls and started all 73 games in his career. Cannon earned AllAmerica honors for the third straight year and joined Donley and Carter as USILA Scholar All-Americans. They were joined by Brian Gleason ’14, Chris Menard ’16 and Nick Baxter ’16 on the All-CC team.

Women’s Tennis The team faced some strong national and regional competition in its early matches, posting an 8-8 record overall and 6-4 in the conference to just miss the playoffs. Shannon Lavery ’14 earned her third-straight selection to the All-CC team, claiming first-team honors in singles. Madeline Altholtz ’14 earned second-team honors in singles. Madison Parks ’17 and Sarah Cantor ’15 earned second-team All-CC honors in doubles, and Parks also earned an honorable mention in singles.

Men’s Golf The men captured fourth place in the team standings at the CC championships. Chris Noonan ’15 knocked 10 strokes off his opening round to match the low round for the tournament with a 72 on day two. Captain Brian Palm ’14 held the second spot in the individual standings after round one. Both finished in the top 15. Noonan was the team’s Most Valuable Player for the second season.

Men’s Track and Field The men’s team combined for 12 school records during the indoor and outdoor seasons. Henry Mynatt ’15 closed out his career with All-America honors in the 10,000 meters. Ryan Steinbock ’14 finished with nine school records, breaking the 1,500 meter mark, twice outdoors. Aaron Pannell ’14, who repeated as an All-American in the 100 meters (placing fourth), became the first athlete to win the conference title in the 100 meters all four years, adding three straight titles in the 200 meters as well. He graduates with seven school records to his credit. Jonathan Jackson ’14 broke one of the oldest records in the books, eclipsing the 1968 record in the 800 meters. The Red Devils added outdoor records in the 4x800 and distance-medley relays and placed third at the CC championships.

— Charlie McGuire, sports information director

James Rasp

The team finished 14-20 this season, posting a 6-10 record in conference play. Stacie Maring ’16 was named to the All-CC second-team, while Chelsea Homa ’14 ranks second all-time at Dickinson in career strikeouts (503), appearances (98), shutouts (16), saves and innings pitched (491.0). She tied the school record with 17 strikeouts in a game. Katie Swade ’15 is second in program history with 62 career walks, while Grace Edelson ’16 rose to second with eight career homeruns in two seasons.

Need more Red Devil sports? Check out all the stats, scores, schedules and highlights at www.dickinsonathletics.com.

Information about live streaming and radio broadcasts is available on a game-by-game basis, so check the Web site regularly or follow @DsonRedDevils on Twitter for the latest updates.

21

[ cover ]

W

Going

hether it’s mining the past, polling the campus community or testing the waters (literally), placebased student-faculty research and experiential learning is thriving at Dickinson.

If you were to take Assistant Professor of English Siobhan Phillips’ course Writing About Food, you might write about volunteering at the local food bank, Project SHARE, founded by Elaine Livas ’83. Or consider the multitude of projects conducted every summer at or for the College Farm, such as building a crop-rotation algorithm. There’s so much happening at the farm now that there’s a student-faculty team creating a database of all those research projects.

For indomitable faculty members Maria Bruno, Andy Skelton and Amy Witter and their students in the following three stories, that research can get a bit messy and unpredictable, whether it’s delayed by an unusually fierce winter followed by a long mud season or the work launches a rhetoric war because the study results might have a negative impact on a particular industry.

What ties these disparate disciplines and personalities together, though, is their focus on going local in deep and thoughtful ways, with longterm consequences, such as leading the campus community toward carbon neutrality. Or changing the way we coat our driveways. Or even rethinking how we think about research.

By Michelle Simmons

Photography by Carl Socolow ’77

23

1785 BU N K ER HI LL FAR M

1933

CIV ILIAN C ON S ERVATION C OR PS

1943 Archival photos courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society.

PRISON ER OF WA R CA MP

1965 SU M MER CA MP

Going

A

Her class, which she introduced in 2013, incorporates bibliographic bout 16 miles west of Dickinson and along the research as well as guest lectures that cover cultural history, climate Appalachian Trail lies a 250-acre wooded area dotted and the environment, archaeological aerial survey methods and with collapsed foundations, partially hidden under sampling strategies. Students then conduct fieldwork during the decades of forest growth. A few steps from a smallish second half of the semester, culminating in oral presentations on their parking lot squats a pock-marked, six-foot-round concrete marker, research and written research proposals for further work there. with the letters POW just barely visible on its face. Several more steps, “Because the archaeology faculty has research areas in Greece and and you’ll come upon a fountain fashioned with cement and glittering South America, this course provides one of the few opportunities for blue bits of iron slag, full of leaves and detritus. students to learn about archaeology of the region in which they curFrom farm to camp to penitentiary and back to camp again, the rently reside,” Bruno notes. “This place-based approach also generates site — now known as Camp Michaux — has become a boon to Maria important opportunities for students to engage with the community.”

Bruno, assistant professor of archaeology and anthropology. With In addition to working with Smith at the CCHS, Bruno also is support from the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission tapping expertise from within the Dickinson community, including GIS (PHMC), Bruno is helping students in her Archaeological Method and Specialist Jim Ciarrocca, who is helping with the on-site survey and Theory class gain hands-on experience in surveying, mapping and, mapping, and biology instructor Gene Wingert, who as guest lecturer ultimately, excavation. They, in turn, are providing the PHMC and the provided a natural history of the area.

Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) systematic data about Anthropology and archaeology double-major Justin Reamer ’15, the archaeological record of this important place. who took Bruno’s course in spring 2013, is now conducting an Established in 1785 as the Bunker Hill Farm, it and other nearby independent study for a senior honors thesis, with the hope of finding farms later supported the laborers working at the Pine Grove Iron evidence of prehistoric American Indian presence at Camp Michaux.

Furnace and surrounding quarries into the late-19th century. After the Because of significant meta-rhyolite deposits in the region — metacollapse of the iron industry, the land lay fallow until 1933, when rhyo­lite being an important source 200 men arrived to construct of early stone tools — Reamer one of the thousands of Civilian Over the hill and through the woods believes that there may be Conservation Corps camps to artifacts to prove his thesis. pepper the country during the “Little to nothing is known Great Depression. about the area in the prehistoric period,” he says. “The potential of They laid roads, installed telephone lines, reforested land and built finding something there really excites me — to find quarries and to infrastructure for a nascent state park. With the start of World War II, figure out what the area was used for. Professor Bruno has really high however, the 40-plus buildings were shuttered until 1943, when the hopes that we’ll find something.”

War Department realized the location’s value as a secret interrogation After a long and difficult winter, in April, Bruno’s class, along with site for German and, later, Japanese prisoners of war. archaeology major Karl Smith ’14, who was working on his own The camp saw further use in the 1960s as a church summer camp, independent study taking old Michaux maps and digitizing them into until the main lodge burned down in 1972, and the land became part GIS maps, began their second round of surveying and mapping, using of Michaux State Forest. both GIS and an older, more simplified technology — a compass, tape “David Smith and the Camp Michaux Recognition and Development measure and clipboard.

Project have been compiling the rich historical information on the site In one spot, two students measured and sketched out the and have also developed a nice walking tour of the area,” says Bruno. diameters of an old pump house at the edge of a creek; elsewhere, “But there is much to be learned from an archaeological perspective, a group of three walked slowly, their gaze glued to the forest floor. which relies on the materials left by the people who lived there. Many Others took turns learning how to “look beyond, not through” the aspects of daily life go unrecorded in historical records, and historical Total Station viewfinder, as Ciarrocca put it. maps or accounts can sometimes be inaccurate.”

“We’re just figuring out the scale of it all,” says Bruno. “That takes Bruno got her sense of the Cumberland Valley’s archaeological a lot of time.” richness when she participated in Valley & Ridge, a program launched

by Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education to help faculty ­members inject place-based and experiential education into their curriculum. Since 2008, more than 50 faculty members have partici­ pated in the summer program, which has resulted in new or revised courses in disciplines as wide-ranging as political science, sociology, biology, international business & management and English.

Although Bruno’s primary research before coming to Dickinson was on the origins of agriculture, including the domestication of quinoa in Bolivia, the opportunity to work locally was too good to pass up, and it fit her already ingrained sustainability ethos.

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Jud Guitteau

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Going

S

o, you believe in living sustainably: You separate and recycle; you keep your thermostat at 65 in the winter and 72 in the summer; you drive a hybrid vehicle; you shop at a farmers market and buy only local or organic. You compost.

But here’s the rub: Sometimes you don’t feel like washing out that plastic container filled with unrecognizable goop that you found in the back of your fridge. Or you learn that the manufacture of your new hybrid might create a larger carbon footprint than keeping that 10-year-old diesel Volkswagen, but you buy it anyway. You’ve even talked with colleagues about carpooling to the office but, somehow, it never quite works out.

Good Intentions, Better Results

issues and how I could use psychology as a way of hooking students’ interest in sustain­ ability,” he says. “A lot of issues having to do with consumption, waste and so forth have to do with our habits, who we associate with and how our expectations are set by the people we associate with.”

Since 2007, the college also has committed to a Climate Change Action Plan, which pledges carbon neutrality by 2020. One of the key challenges to meeting that goal is in transportation, and Skelton saw an opportunity to conduct solid research that could support the college’s sustainability initiatives.

The project began in fall 2012, in his Research Methods in Social Psychology class, when, as a class exercise, he and students created a survey on employees’ commuting practices. “These projects work very nicely in the sense that they give my students an

“ Surveying seemed far more straight­forward on the surface than it turned out to be in practice …

I learned about the unexpectedly complex obstacles that stand in the way of reaching respondents.”

— JAMES COUSINS ’14

It turns out you’re far from alone, according to research on environmentally significant behavior (ESB) — individual behavior that can have impact on the envi­ ronment, whether it’s limiting consump­tion of fossil fuels, minimizing waste or other sustainability-focused actions — being con­ ducted by Associate Professor of Psychology Andy Skelton and several of his students.

“One of the things we talk about a lot in my classes is the difference between what people think they’re accomplishing,” he says, “and what they actually are accomplishing in terms of environmentally relevant behavior.”

Skelton had participated in faculty discussions as early as 2007 on how to integrate sustainability into Dickinson’s curriculum. “What it led to was the dedication of my upper-level courses to sustainability

opportunity to learn how you go about conducting surveys,” says Skelton. “What are the pros and cons of different approaches?

How do you conduct a survey that asks the questions that you want and does it very efficiently?”

Students worked with staff in the Center for Sustainability Education and the Office of Institutional Research (IR) to design the survey, which used two methods to capture a wide sample: oral interviews via phone calls and an e-mail that linked to a selfadministrated online survey.

“I learned about the unexpectedly complex obstacles that stand in the way of reaching respondents,” says James Cousins ’14, a mathematics major who worked with Skelton in an independent study. After graduating early, Cousins worked for IR and is now an analyst at Rapid Insight, a dataanalytics and consulting company. “Surveying

seemed far more straightforward on the surface than it turned out to be in practice.”

Thanks to students’ perseverance, the response was excellent, however, and they learned that an overwhelming majority of Dickinson employees drive to work. “We’re talking in the neighborhood of 85 percent,” he says. “It really has to do with the distance that you live from campus.”

Next came a wild idea, as he puts it. Given the dearth of public-transportation options in the area, he reached out to GIS Specialist Jim Ciarrocca: “One of the side effects of this [study] is that we’re now leveraging our GIS technology to learn more about the distribution of employees,” Skelton says. “Could we figure out where employees are concentrated, so that we could identify good matches for carpooling, ridesharing, that sort of thing?”

The idea has piqued interest among members of the campus community, but Skelton is quick to point out that this is no Big Brother project, in which employees will be assigned carpool companions or be required to reveal their home address, and he notes that the survey results reflect cultural norms. “Everyone is well inten­ tioned about the environment,” he says, “and everyone has a ton of habits that lead them to jump in their private vehicles whenever they need to. There’s always the balance between creating incentives for people not to drive and creating barriers to driving.”

And while he has tons of data, the discussion is just beginning. Since the initial survey in 2012, he and successive classes have improved on the model, crafting more sophisticated questions. For example, instead of asking whether one has driven to campus in the past week, they now ask how many days out of the week the person drives to campus. The difference is important, as they’ve since discovered that many do walk or bike to campus and drive only in bad weather.

“From the standpoint of a teaching tool, this has been really fertile for me,” he says. “The students seem to be more interested in this than in some abstract question of psychological theory, but you can always get that in there too.”

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Toxic Science

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Going

I

n a February issue of The New Yorker, a beleaguered biology professor and researcher at the University of California-Berkeley explains his world view: “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia is to keep track of your persecutors.”

Tyrone Hayes, the subject of Rachel Aviv’s article, had been fighting a decade-long battle with Syngenta, a global bioengineering company that specializes in seeds and pesticides. Hayes had been contracted to study one of the company’s herbicides, atrazine; when he discovered that it interfered with the sexual development of amphibians — and possibly humans — the company severed its ties with him. He continued his research, and the article describes Syngenta’s subsequent campaign to discredit not only Hayes’ research but also his credibility as a scientist.

Whether or not Hayes’ paranoia is legitimate (“Even paranoids have enemies,” quipped Golda Meir), Aviv noted a growing trend among some industries to go after the scientists whose research may affect regulatory policy — from tobacco companies undermining research on secondhand smoke in the 1990s to the 2009 Climategate controversy over the hacked e-mails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Enter Amy Witter, associate professor of chemistry at Dickinson. After her article “Coal-tar-based sealcoated pavement: A major PAH source to urban stream sediments,” appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution, the Pavement Coatings Technology Council (PCTC), an organization of manu­fac­turers of pavement sealants and their suppliers, issued a press release casting doubt on Witter’s metho­dology. Environmental Pollution also received a letter to the editor from the consulting firm Exponent Inc. questioning Witter’s analysis and accusing her of using misleading language. The firm had represented the Pavement Council in its opposition to Washington state’s 2011 bill banning use of the sealant.

Her article, co-written with Associate Professor of Earth Sciences Peter Sak, Minh Nguyen ’11 and Sunil Baidar ’09, presented

evidence that local waterways were contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a probable human carcinogen and component of coal-tar-based pavement sealant often used on driveways and parking lots.

National retailers Lowe’s and Home Depot no longer carry the product, and other research into PAHs and its connection to coal-tar-based sealcoat has resulted in bans in Minnesota, several municipalities in the West and in Washington, D.C. The coal-tar-based product, which is less expensive than asphaltbased sealant, remains popular for commer­ cial use east of the Continental Divide.

The PCTC letter arrived “pretty much the day after the article was published online,” says Witter. “Basically, every study that comes out, the PCTC refutes it.”

Witter began looking into PAHs in 2005.

She had done some sediment analyses from the nearby Conodoguinet Creek and found PAH concentrations that couldn’t be accounted for—until she came across a paper published by the U.S. Geological Survey that identified coal-tar-based sealcoat as a possible source.

Because of heavy professional obligations, Witter wasn’t able to dive more deeply into the research until 2007, when she took more sediment samples, using a slightly different procedure for analysis. “Those samples were consistent with what we had seen in 2005,” she recalls. “And I really wanted to nail this thing.”

Witter brought in Sak and GIS specialists Kristin Brubaker and Jim Ciarrocca to help her examine land-use practices in areas where the samples were collected. Together with her students, she sampled a total of 35 sites and identified the sealant’s chemical signature.

“The source of stream PAHs can be determined much like DNA fingerprints can identify individuals,” she explains. “In our study, the PAH fingerprint of coal-tar-based sealcoat and the PAH fingerprint found in urban creek sediments were nearly an exact match, giving us a high degree of confidence that coal-tar-based sealcoat is an important PAH source in the Conodoguinet Creek watershed.”

“ Many of our colleagues at Dickinson go to extreme lengths to carry out their research, especially when students or fieldwork are involved. This was minor by comparison.”

In collaboration with colleagues at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, she planned additional work to quantify how significant the contributions from sealcoat may be throughout the watershed.

Witter also used additional, more stringent standards. Through a small sabbatical grant from Dickinson, she purchased the chemicals she needed and shipped her samples to the University of Toronto, where she worked with colleagues who provided access to equipment not available at Dickinson. “Since 9/11, sending scientific samples across the U.S. border and back again has become more complicated,” she says. “However, I did one part of the analysis there because I thought, if this is going to be published, it’s got to be done this way, and it’s got to meet all the criteria. Many of our colleagues at Dickinson go to extreme lengths to carry out their research, especially when students or fieldwork are involved. This was minor by comparison.”

Over several years, Witter continued to collect and study samples, and her article is based on samples taken in 2010. “This paper has been peer-reviewed probably six times,” she says. “I’ve never had to revise a paper as much as I’ve revised this one. It’s very contentious science.”

Since the publication of her article, Witter has responded twice to the PCTC’s counter­ claims in Environmental Pollution. She stands by her study, but she worries about future research, citing similar attacks on the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey.

“That’s what this lobby relies on, that they’re going to bully you and grind you down so that you’ll change your research,” she says.

“They just rely on casting doubt.”

Read more about Witter’s research at dson.co/toxic-driveways.

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Sharon Davie ’68 has dedicated her life to sharing women’s stories with the world.

By Lauren Davidson Photography by Peggy Harrison

[ profile ]

Empowering S

haron Davie ’68 is a storyteller. Her voracious appetite for reading as a child led her to earn three degrees in English, author a number of poems and essays and teach dozens of literature courses at Kenyon College and the University of Virginia (UVA).

Davie is also an activist. She witnessed gender inequity early in her career: in academia, in literature and in everyday life. As an educator, as founder of the women’s studies program and founder and director of the Women’s Center at UVA and as a documentarian, she has seen how women struggling to find their voices often are forced to suffer in silence. Davie has chosen to give those voices megaphones.

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Missing pieces

Davie attended graduate school at UVA only a few years after the university had become fully co-educational in 1970, so she was one of the few female students in her field. Female faculty members also were scarce, and her doctoral courses on 20thcentury literature were almost devoid of women authors.

“It wasn’t until I was at Kenyon for my first teaching job that I realized the impact of having been taught by all male professors and being taught so few women writers,” she recalls.

“At the end of that first year of teaching, one of my favorite students wrote at the end of her final exam, ‘Were there really only two women writing in the 20th century?’ I’d been teaching only what I had been taught! That totally woke me up.”

So Davie started a reading group focused on modern and contemporary women writers. The first group included fellow faculty members, community members, even “the man who ran the laundromat,” she says.

The next semester, as the only woman in the English department, Davie taught the first women’s studies course at Kenyon, to the chagrin of some other faculty members.

In 1980, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Robert Kellogg asked Davie to establish a program in women’s studies.

“The whole process was very exciting,” she says. “Women’s studies faculty members were only just beginning to know each other, primarily through a Women’s Studies Committee set up the year before. So the first task was establishing a close community of women’s studies faculty and students. Part of what we were doing, too, was curricular transformation, in departments that were ignoring women and gender in their courses. We wanted to move the faculty into seeing that there’s another lens through which you can see every discipline.”

Davie received a Ford Foundation grant for curriculum transformation and laid the groundwork for the vibrant Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program that exists at the University of Virginia today.

A new movement

As women’s studies programs began sprouting up across the country in the ’70s and ’80s, so too did women’s centers, which Davie began to explore.

“It’s about women working in transformative ways.

Their stories are so important, and the writing I’m doing is in part telling a story about them , but that includes these women telling their own stories in their own words.”

“There was one professor in particular who just did not think women belonged as educators,” Davie recalls.

“I ­remember sitting in a departmental meeting and listening to this person tell disgusting jokes about women’s genitals. Here I am, a very young, new faculty member, and I’m somehow fair game for being made to feel uncomfortable and insulted.”

Another lens

Davie finished her third year at Kenyon, and, even though she was on a tenure track, she decided to take some time off to write. When she was ready to return to teaching, she found a home at UVA, where she taught contemporary and modern women writers, as well as 20th-century fiction and modern drama.

As she was one of the few faculty members at the university teaching courses focused on women, her students began flocking to Davie for help, whether seeking an advisor for an in-depth interdisciplinary thesis on Virginia Woolf, an enact­ment of a play by Ntozake Shange, or a women’s arts festival.

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“When I was women’s studies director, there were so many students calling me and asking for concrete and immediate help with sexual assault and other personal issues,” she says.

“I started getting really interested in creating something where you bring together what goes on inside the classroom with high impact education linked to experience outside the classroom.

We are whole people, and what happens to us in our lives outside the classroom is always interacting with what we learn inside the classroom.”

She also was serving on a task force exploring the status of women at UVA, and 28,000 students signed a petition demand­ing a women’s center on campus. The task force asked Davie, given her experience and interests, to travel to ­different women’s centers around the country and determine what models and methods might work for UVA. So when the ­recommendation to establish a women’s center was made, Davie was a logical first choice as the founding director.

“I was the center’s first and only employee for a while.

Since then we’ve grown considerably!” she says, noting that the

What would the future look like if there were no need for a women’s center? It would be a world with no violence, a world where women make as much money for the same job as men, a world where men value raising their children as much as women do, a world where many women are presidents of their countries.

center is celebrating its 25th year. With great pride evident in her voice, she describes the 33 interns breathing life into the center each year; the Women’s Center’s strong counseling and psychological services, which includes a trauma counselor who sees students who have experienced violence like sexual assault; the Body Positive initiative that is combating eating disorders in innovative ways; the global and local leadership programs for both women and men; and so much more.

Full circle

Not long after becoming director of the center, Davie received a phone call from a student survivor of a serial rapist. She wanted to talk to Davie about how important she felt it was for survivors to be able to tell their stories.

“She was talking so articulately and passionately about survivors being listened to and heard. When I got off the phone, it’s like I was struck by lightning. I thought, ‘What about when you don’t even speak the truth to yourself?’ And I suddenly remembered — unburied, really — being assaulted by a gang of men when I was in college. The whole thing came flooding back. There was something about the anguish in her voice that made the story of her experience open up this incredibly important thing in my own life.”

Davie continued with new vigor to find ways to ensure others were empowered to find their own voices, often through women’s center programs. After she attended an international conference in Uganda, she began gathering the stories of

women in other countries like Kenya and El Salvador, discovering grassroots women activists who are doing work that is transformative in their impoverished communities. Named a Fulbright Special Scholar, she also served as a consultant for faculty planning a new African Women’s Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Nairobi.

“My projects in Kenya and El Salvador are not only about violence against women and other severe problems, but are more centrally about what women are doing to change that reality in these and other countries,” she says. “It’s about women working in transformative ways. Their stories are so important, and the writing I’m doing is in part telling a story about them, but that includes these women telling their own stories in their own words. It brings my love of literature and women’s studies and activism all full circle.”

A new vision

So what is next for this storyteller, activist, educator, mentor, survivor and trailblazer?

“In a recent workshop, women’s center staff asked: what would the future look like if there were no need for a women’s center?” Davie says. “It would be a world with no violence, a world where women make as much money for the same job as men, a world where men value raising their children as much as women do, a world where many women are presidents of their countries. Let’s imagine the world we want, start working back from there.”

For resources on sexual- and relationship-violence prevention, visit Dickinson.edu/violence-prevention-resources, or learn about Dickinson’s women’s & gender studies program at Dickinson.edu/wgs.

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Digital archive opens a new chapter for the

Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s descendants.

by Rick Kearns

A

reclaiming history mere few miles from Dickinson, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) was founded in 1879 to “civilize” American Indian children by teaching them to assimilate into American society. Over the course of 39 years, the school took in approximately 10,000 children from 140 tribes — many of them forcibly.

Of those who attended, many entered careers as teachers, tradesmen and athletes — including Frank Mount Pleasant, Dickinson class of 1910, who competed in the 1908 summer Olympics in London. Others, cut off from their native languages, identities and families of origin, entered a legacy of trauma and disenfranchisement. All of them have stories to tell, and now, more than 130 years later, their descendants, as well as researchers and archivists, have unprecedented access to those stories.

One of those descendants is Rene Garcia, who learned about her grandfather, Peter White, and other Mohawk ancestors who attended the CIIS, through the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, a Dickinson-hosted Web site dedicated to posting all available records of the children who attended the school between 1879 and 1918.

The Dickinson team members behind this ambitious project include Susan Rose ’77, professor of sociology and director of the Community Studies Center; James Gerencser ’93, college archivist; Malinda Triller Doran, special collections librarian; and a multitude of students and recent alumni who have traveled to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., to scan more than 4,400 CIIS student files so far, totaling about 60,000 pages of records — two-thirds of the total amount on file. Barbara Landis, historian at the Cumberland County Historical Society, as well other local CIIS experts, is lending her expertise.

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More than 4,400 CIIS student files (about 60,000 pages) have been scanned so far. Gerencser says that they also plan to partner with other institutions that may have photos, letters or other items connected to the school as well as with descendants of the CIIS students and other researchers.

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The project is funded by Dickinson’s Research & Development Committee and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Digital Humanities grant, which supports the researchers’ travel to D.C. to scan and digitize the records.

Gerencser says that they also plan to build partnerships with other institutions that may have photos, letters or other items connected to the school as well as with descendants of the CIIS students and other researchers. So far, more than a few viewers have come forward with photos and other mementos.

“It was exciting to see the student records online that I wouldn’t have access to unless I wrote to NARA,” says Garcia, adding that she learned of the site through the CIIS Descendants, Relatives and Friends Facebook page.

“My grandfather was the first name I searched for, and it came up immediately,” she continues. “I learned that he was discharged for being irresponsible, and my mother told me that he was not happy during his time there. He went on to become an iron worker and was one of the Mohawks who helped build the Empire State Building. He was even president of the local Mohawk ironworkers union. His son went on to become the first Mohawk Catholic priest from St. Regis and in the U.S.” Garcia also found records of her grandmother’s father and nine other relatives. “For many of us, our grandparents’

time there is a mystery,” she says. “To see parents’ and even grandparents’ names in these records was breathtaking.

To see Mohawk names long forgotten was something I never expected.”

“Not much is known about my great-grandmother,” explains Joan Adolph, another database visitor. “Her name is Rose Dion, and she was Rosebud Sioux. She did not graduate. I love looking at the pictures and wondering about her. I just found out last July that she went there.”

Dickinson faculty and students also have been taking advantage of the different materials available on the site, which has separate pages for student files, images, publications, collections and Web sites. Alan Shane Dillingham, visiting assistant professor of history, used the site in his course Native Histories of the Americas, in which

in athletics, as he was an extremely talented football player,” Burkhart explains.

“Phillips attended the Dickinson School of Law and graduated in 1903, the same year he left the CIIS,” she continues. “He married a graduate of the CIIS, Earney Wilber of the Menominee tribe, and then attended Northwestern University. While at Northwestern he played football and earned the title of Best All-Western Guard. After graduating, he moved to Washington where he started his own law firm.

He later served as police judge, justice of the peace, mayor of Aberdeen, and the Grays Harbor County Superior Court Judge. Phillips is now considered the first American Indian to serve as a judge in the Washington court system.”

Burkhart notes that she already had known some American Indian history before taking Dillinger’s course,

“I wanted them to appreciate the stakes. There was coercion and violence involved in [the CIIS] students’ lives, but there were also moments of humanity, of the young people learning useful skills.” students learn about the lives of individual CIIS students and present their research to their classmates.

“It’s been a really exciting experience,” Dillingham says, explaining that the course is organized around certain themes, one of which was how the tribes shifted from isolation to a type of inclusion, integration and, to a certain extent, assimilation.

Dillingham brought in Landis to provide some context to the CIIS story, and he ensured that there was a good variety of choices in terms of geography, gender and other categories for his students.

“I wanted them to appreciate the stakes,” he says.

“There was coercion and violence involved in [the CIIS] students’ lives, but there were also moments of humanity, of the young people learning useful skills.”

One of Dillingham’s students, Mackenze Burkhart ’15, a double major in archaeology and anthropology, researched the life of a remarkable Carlisle student, James M. Phillips (Cherokee). “What I found to be significant about Phillips is that unlike the majority of narratives we read in class, Phillips’ story is one of success and happiness,” she says.

“Phillips entered the school in 1901, but only to participate

as that field has been an interest of hers for years. “However, in hindsight I can honestly say I barely knew anything about the CIIS and Indian boarding schools in general,” she says.

“I was struck by the fact that Indian boarding schools have gone by relatively unnoticed by many Americans and that the topic is largely evaded in K-12 education.”

Burkhart also learned some of her own family history researching the story of James Phillips. “My grandmother, who grew up in Bethlehem, Pa., mentioned that she remembers her church collecting clothing to donate to the CIIS,” says Burkhart. “I love making connections, and I found it extremely exciting to have a small, but personal, connection to my research.”

Those connections will grow as the research and digitization team continues its work.

“The CIIS student records going online have provided many of us with a snapshot of our ancestors’ time there — something we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” says Garcia.

“I am extremely grateful for all those whose hard work and dedication has made this possible and truly thank them for this.”

Alan Shane Dillingham

Learn more at carlisleindian.dickinson.edu.

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Marc Burckhardt

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D I A LOG U E D I SCOV E RY

Donna Hughes, new director of community service & religious life, opens doors to interfaith conversations and explorations.

by Martin de Bourmont ’14

life AT D I C K I N S O N

Carl Socolow ’77

we visited a mosque, a temple and a church and then did community service.

And then every night, we came together and talked about what we saw, what we thought about what we saw.

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Courtesy of the Office of Community Service & Religious Life

n the lower level of the Holland Union Building you will find a white door with a small rectangular window. A plaque identifies it as the door to Dickinson’s meditation room.

You will not find much behind it. At the center of the room is a table, fitted with a lone, empty drawer. A bookcase stands in the corner, offering visitors a collection of Bibles and an introductory text on the Baha’i faith. Below these tomes are two neatly folded prayer rugs.

You can sit either on the floor or on one of the chairs in the room’s left corner.

SPIRITUAL LIFE AT D I C K I N S O N

Once seated, you will look up at the room’s dull beige walls, unremarkable except for the corresponding cardinal direction written in bold black lettering on each of their faces.

The room’s blandness should not be taken as a reflection of the college’s spiritual poverty, however. Quite the opposite: The room’s plainness reveals an environment that encourages diversity and contemplation, where reflection is prompted by discovery and conversation, not visceral reactions to the flamboyance of sectarian icons.

More important, as a liberal-arts institution committed to upholding diversity of all kinds, Dickinson strives to embrace the spiritual and religious practices of all its students. And nowhere is this intention more clear than in the Office of Community Service & Religious Life.

When Donna Hughes, director of community service and religious life, arrived at Dickinson in 2013, she knew she wanted to build her programming based on a studentcentered approach. An ordained Methodist minister with substantial experience working closely with students on college campuses, Hughes sees Dickinson as an ideal environment to build a model interfaith program.

“What I find really fascinating at Dickinson is the openness of students to spiritual things, not necessarily religious things, to explore,” says Hughes. “When we had a meditation workshop, 19 students showed up on a Saturday morning. This is probably the most spiritually open of any place I’ve ever worked.”

Hughes believes that creating a public forum for worship and interfaith discussion on campus will prove durable and attractive — even to those who have shied away from religion and spirituality in the past or have felt alienated from it. “Just by the nature of what I do in religious life, there are students who are uncomfortable, as well as faculty and staff,” she explains. “As I develop relationships with students doing community service, here in the office or doing other things on campus, that allows the opening for people to feel like they could actually explore something religious or spiritual.”

To that end, Hughes has relied on four student leaders to help her with outreach and programming: Jiyeong “Faith” Park ’16, a member of the leadership team for the Dickinson Christian Fellowship; Shayna Solomon ’16, president of Hillel; Asir Saeed ’16, treasurer of the Muslim Students Association; and Emma Weinstein ’16, also a member of Hillel. As leaders in their own religious groups, they initiate interfaith discussions on meaning, under­ standing, purpose and faith. During meetings with Hughes,

1972

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protestant

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other

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no affiliation

Information on student religious identities is based on data collected by the Office of Institutional Research.

the students discuss how they experience spirituality in their lives as well as how they share those experiences with other students.

They also help organize and lead interfaith service trips, including one last fall to Philadelphia that included working in a soup kitchen, a thrift shop, the SHARE Food Project and Stop Hunger Now. For the 13 student participants and four student leaders, part of the trip included attending services in places of worship. “We visited a mosque, a temple and a church and then did community service,” explains Saeed. “And then every night, we came together and talked about what we saw, what we thought about what we saw — and not just the community-service aspect, but what we thought about what we observed at the religious services, what was striking, what we learned.”

Hughes and her team also are working to increase awareness of minority religious groups. “We are trying to encourage some of the students who practice Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism to come and discuss their experience,” Park says. “It’s a challenge. The student leaders are going to have to do a lot of personal invitation.”

Nor does the outreach program limit itself to community service or initiating conversations between believers. “We also want to serve nonreligious students,” says Solomon. “That’s a difference from the past.”

One way of connecting with nonbelievers is to host discussions with the help of the Secular Students Union (SSU). “We did a panel discussion with some students of different religious backgrounds; Professor of Religion Ted Pulcini, who is also a Greek Orthodox priest; and the SSU about the relationship between religion and science. It’s a controversial subject, but it was a really civil, intellectual discussion,” says Solomon.

That deliberate inclusiveness was especially visible at Dickinson’s World Religions Festival, an event organized by the student leaders in April. Held on Britton Plaza, the festival featured representatives from different religions, spiritual philosophies and cultures.

At each table, students could find something visual, informative or interactive — ranging from games and calligraphy tutorials to maps and dioramas. The participants did not aim to convince, only to share — to tell stories and reveal the beauty and care that lies at the core of a believer’s expressions of faith. The students forgot the meditation room that evening, exchanging silent contemplation for conversation in the spring breeze.

41

[ beyond the limestone walls ]

A worthy investment

BY TY SAINI ’93, ALUMNI COUNCIL PRESIDENT

A

s Dickinsonians, we see the world differently.

Where others see obstacles, we see opportunities.

Where others see challenges, we see solutions.

This mindset is especially important today, as many Americans have begun focusing on obstacles when they consider a college education. The media hype surrounding the rising cost of college has led some to a crisis of confidence.

I don’t dispute that ever-rising college tuition can give people pause, but it is increasingly important for us to consider not only the price of education but also the return on investment (ROI). When I discussed this with Coco Minardi, assistant vice president for engagement & annual fund, at our last Alumni Council meeting, she confirmed this very idea.

She noted that Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Dickinson as one of their 50 “Holy Grail” colleges offering a relatively low-cost, high-return education: The study reported that the median 30-year ROI of a Dickinson education is more than $1 million.

Part of that ROI is also the highly personalized education we received. I was a biology major, so naturally I have great

As my involvement in the life of Dickinson grows, it is my sincere wish that all alumni become more actively engaged — to give back to a place that gave us so much and to witness all the good that continues to happen at our alma mater.

d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2014

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My thanks to my contacts in the Office of Engagement & Annual Fund for prompting me to think more deeply about this topic and for sharing additional resources that helped with this column.

Jud Guitteau

respect and admiration for John Henson, Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology and my academic advisor. Henson ­constantly challenged me to do more and to do better. I also feel a special appreciation for my history classes taught by Provost and Dean Neil Weissman that took me out of the labs. And I will never forget the generosity of Professor Emeritus Truman and Beth Bullard of the music department, who graciously opened their home to me as a quiet place to stay and study during my junior year (Read more about the Bullards on Page 10). This type of distinctive education — in and out of the classroom — has unsurpassed value to us as individuals and even more so to our shared future.

As the Alumni Council president, I now have the opportunity to spend a great deal of time on campus, and I am so fortunate to observe what happens when young people come to Dickinson. By the time they graduate, these bright, responsible, creative and productive individuals are more than prepared to find solutions for society’s most pressing problems.

The effect is nothing short of transformational.

As my involvement in the life of Dickinson grows, it is my sincere wish that all alumni become more actively engaged — to give back to a place that gave us so much and to witness all the good that continues to happen at our alma mater. So, while the media continue to probe into the rising costs of college, I will continue to advocate for Dickinson and to help others understand that money spent on a Dickinson education has nothing to do with its “sticker price,” and everything to do with investing in the future.

Volunteer Leadership Summit

AUGUST 1-3

Build

➤ Learn how we can work together to expand upon

Dickinson’s success. ➤ Sharpen valuable skills that benefit you professionally

and personally. ➤ Strengthen your connection to Dickinson.

Engage

➤ Become a vital part of Dickinson’s volunteer efforts. ➤ Provide critical input to help strengthen our volunteer program. ➤ Celebrate our volunteer award winners at the

Celebration Dinner.

Learn

➤ Hear from senior staff how Dickinson responds to the ever-

changing economy to maintain its solid financial footing. ➤ Discover new volunteer opportunities. ➤ Receive in-depth training and best practices from staff

and seasoned volunteers.

Connect

➤ Strengthen your relationships with Dickinson staff. ➤ Expand your network with alumni and parents who share

your loyalty to Dickinson. ➤ Reacquaint yourself with the campus and check out our

new facilities.

“The Volunteer Leadership Summit was a great forum for sharing ideas, knowledge and enthusiasm among dedicated volunteers and for finding new avenues to build engagement.”

To register or to learn more, visit Dickinson.edu/volunteersummit.

— Kristine Ritter Wilhem ’99 on the 2013 summit

43

[ closing thoughts ] I came to Dickinson to be a lawyer AMY SHELLEY IMPELLIZZERI ’92

I

Michael Artman

n 1988, I came to Dickinson to be a lawyer. I wasn’t equivocal about this. I was on a straight-line path toward exactly what I wanted to do with my future. My articulated plan was to devour a liberal-arts education and translate it into the ability to think like a lawyer and, even more important, to write like a lawyer.

Although, if I’m being honest with you, more than 25 years later, I still have no idea what that means.

And I am a lawyer.

Sort of.

After graduating from Dickinson with a double major in English and philosophy, I went straight to law school and then headed off to a prestigious federal clerkship in Washington, D.C., before practicing corporate litigation for 13 years, including a decade at one of the top law firms in the country. I worked on highprofile cases and negotiated multimillion-dollar settlements. I tried my first case before I was 30 and argued in state and federal courts across the country.

I loved every minute of it. I embraced the fact that this straight-line path of mine had led me to exactly where I was meant to be.

Sort of.

Frankly, there were some detours, even during my career at Dickinson. Seemingly small detours at the time but huge in hindsight.

For example, there was a conversation during my sophomore year with a friend who already had started law school. He explained, in his well-meaning but misguided way, that any creative ideas floating around in my brain should extinguish themselves immediately, as law school requires suppressing creativity as much as possible. I pinned points on my destination-law-school-map as I quietly heeded his advice and suppressed my own voice. I carefully molded my transcript to look like a law-school applicant. And it worked.

Sort of.

The last week of my senior year, Professor of English Ashton Nichols called me on the telephone. I was shocked to receive a call from a professor at that time, convinced that I had said something to offend him in my paper for my independent study, a comprehensive look at Mary Shelley’s 19th century, for which I had registered as a pass / fail.

“Amy, is this right?” he asked. “Did you really mean to take the class pass / fail? I am about to give you an A, and I want to make sure there isn’t some mistake.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I responded. I was almost sheepish, lacking the words to explain to him that I didn’t want to risk anything less than an A, which would mar my law-school application transcript, but that I never would have strived for anything less. I also lacked the words to explain that my path was starting to look a little less straight.

I lacked the words because I had very nearly lost my voice. Intentionally.

Now, more than 20 years later, as I open a box with the galley proofs of my first novel, Lemongrass Hope, I’m overwhelmed reflecting on the path that had led me there. My publisher and I had a long list of media contacts, reviewers and authors to whom the first advance review copies (ARCs) were to be sent. But suddenly, holding my novel for the first time, it was quite obvious to me just who should receive the first two ARCs. My husband, Paul Impellizzeri ’92, and I took the day off to make a road trip to Carlisle to deliver the very first two ARCs — to my former Dickinson advisors and first mentors, English professors Wendy Moffatt and Ashton Nichols. The trip was a symbolic and meaningful act, as I realized that my path to becoming a writer had been anything but straight.

Standing in East College, nervously gripping my ARCs in the same halls that I had walked all those years ago, evolving into the writer I would later become, the road looked so much more curved than it had 20-odd years earlier.

In fact, it almost resembled a circle.

Amy Shelley Impellizzeri ’92 is a reformed corporate litigator and author. After 13 years practicing law, including a decade at top Manhattan law firm Skadden Arps, she now helps run an investor-backed start-up company as vice president of community & designer relations of ShopFunder LLC. Her first novel, Lemongrass Hope, will be released in October (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing), and her first nonfiction book, Lawyer Interrupted (ABA Publishing), is due out 2015. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Glass Hammer, Divine Caroline and ABA’s Law Practice Today, and her blog, My Cup Runneth Over, can be found at www.amyimpellizzeri.com. She lives in Pennsylvania — not too far from Carlisle — with her husband and three kids.

d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2014

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T

his fall, One College One Community kicks off with conversations around Chasing Ice, a documentary by James Balog, recipient of the 2014 Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism.

We’re bringing the conversation to you!

➣ Homecoming & Family Weekend: Chasing Ice discussion

and viewing party at the Carlisle Theatre and guided tours of Balog’s photography exhibit throughout the weekend ➣ Livestream and interactive discussion, Tuesday, Sept. 23: Join us for an interactive discussion during the livestream of Balog’s public lecture ➣ Regional events, discussions with faculty and students and watch parties: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.

Interested in hosting a watch party in your area? Contact Liz Glynn Toth ’06, director of alumni relations, at tothe@dickinson.edu.

Photo courtesy of Extreme Ice Survey

Stay tuned for an event near you! To get involved or learn more about One College One Community, visit Dickinson.edu/one-college.

P. O . B O X 1 7 7 3 C A R L I S L E , P A 1 7 0 1 3 - 2 8 9 6 PERIODICAL

W W W. D I C K I N S O N . E D U / M A G A Z I N E

P O S TA G E P A I D AT C A R L I S L E , P A AND ADDITIONAL MAILING OFFICE

[

well-stated

]

Lasting change occurs at the local level, and it starts with ‘islands of sustainability’ like Dickinson College.

JACOB SCHERR,

director of global strategy & advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Read his blog post at dson.co/scherr-nrdc.

If the students in the seminar learned anything through the course of the year, it is that any worthwhile endeavor takes much work and persistence.

A S S O C I AT E P R OF E S S OR OF A R T T ODD A R S E N AU LT ’ 9 9 ,

on Not In Show,

senior studio-art exhibit. Learn more at dson.co/not-in-show.

you need to get a job, but you also need to get a life.

WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ.

Read more at dson.co/excellent-sheep.

I took a quick tour of campus last night, and the memories just flooded in. The campus is the same, and it’s different — in all the best ways.

ANNE JENNIFER NASH ’96,

who returned to campus this spring to participate in a concert honoring Truman Bullard. Read more on Page 11.

I give to Dickinson as a thank-you for the education I received and the relationships I have made. I want future generations to benefit the same way I did.

ABBY CONGER ’09.

Get the latest news on Conger in Our Dickinson (Page 53).

Today, about 800 pounds of food are going to the farm to be composted, which is about one small Dumpster each day. That represents about a 50 percent reduction in waste going out the back door of dining services each day.

N E I L L E A R Y , director of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education, quoted in “Recycling the Leftovers,” The New York Times. See the full feature at dson.co/recycling-the-leftovers.