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Issue #10 / Spring 2014

The Magazine of Roger Williams University

New Life for Providence’s Old East Side Tunnel • Paper or Plastic in the Checkout Line?

A key ingredient in everything from food to facials, why does seaweed get such a bad “wrap” ?

IN THIS ISSUE Tunnel Vision Last fall, an urban architecture studio course explored ideas for reinventing an abandoned, subterranean railroad tunnel. With no design parameters and limitless imagination, the future architects created plans to reconnect Providence’s legendary East Side Tunnel to the vibrant fabric of surrounding neighborhoods in projects that proved both practical and whimsical. With the city’s bygone streetcar as his muse, graduate student Dominic Skrajewski’s vision (pictured here) to link the entire city via an innovative tram system pays homage to the historic setting. For a window into some of the original student designs, read “Invisible City” on Page 22.

RWU {Spring 2014}

RWU Issue #10 / Spring 2014

The Magazine of Roger Williams University

Features 22 Invisible City – By Jill Rodrigues ’05

Hidden deep beneath College Hill in Providence lays an abandoned, subterranean railroad – an unseen world with the potential to once again form part of the cityscape. Fueled by imagination and unbridled possibilities, architecture students from RWU dreamed up boundless prospects for reviving the historic East Side Tunnel.

32 Cover Story Turning the Tide – By Melissa A. Patricio

Look closely, and you’ll find seaweed and its byproducts in everything from food to face creams. Yet marine flora are considered a nuisance by the very beachgoers who unsuspectingly brush their teeth with algae-infused paste every day. Students and faculty at Roger Williams are hard at work to set the record straight on seaweed – and why it just might save the world.

40 Paper or Plastic? – By Ellen Liberman

It’s a common checkout-line query: “Would you like paper or plastic?” Yet in Barrington, R.I., a plastic bag ban courtesy of RWU political science faculty member Joseph Roberts is creating new dialogue – and hearty debate – about whether banning polyethylene sacks is sound environmental policy or an inconsequential fad.

Departments 2

Open Source

Off the Script

Your letters to the editor Featuring President Donald J. Farish

On the Waterfront

Mission Critical

Snapshots from across the RWU campus Our core values in action

A Braver Voice

Sports Center

Voices in Common

Tabula Rasa

From the Nightstand Athletics news and notes News from our alumni and friends 17 Things You Might Not Know About College Food at RWU

Open Source

RWU

Your letters to the editor

The Magazine of Roger Williams University

More Old Timers, Please I graduated 25 years ago and still love reading any and all publications sent out from Roger Williams. Just today I opened up the most recent RWU Magazine and totally adored seeing the huge article on Bob Blackburn! OMG he was popular 25 years ago, and I was so happy to see him still active in teaching! I’m wondering if this was the first time you have done any publishing about those old timers? (Not age-wise, but just from long ago…) It was so refreshing. I have a small list of professors from back in the day I would love to find out about, so I’m wondering if you are planning on doing this type of article again? Anyway, great job! – Ann Pace McGhee ’88 Barrington, R.I.

© 2014 Roger Williams University Published by the Division of Marketing and Communications Issue #10 / Spring 2014 President Donald J. Farish, Ph.D., J.D. Vice President of Marketing and Communications Judi Connery Director of Public Affairs / Editor-in-Chief Brian E. Clark Associate Director of News and Publications / Editor Melissa A. Patricio

Not the first time, and not the last! Flip through previous magazine issues at PDQ@RWU and you’ll find profiles of longtime faculty and staff. John Stout, for example – remember him? For future issues, send us your suggestions and we’ll see what we can come up with. –Editor History Lessons I am a member of the Class of 1986, as is my wife, Michele. I want to commend your publication for two excellent articles in the Fall 2013 Issue: (1) “The Renaissance of Roger Williams” – So great to see Roger get some good publicity, as he is probably the most understated but critical contributor to the soul of America. I may be a bit biased, as I am a direct descendant and my family lifelong residents of Rhode Island. Nevertheless…. well done! (2) “What They Left Behind” – We need to document more and more of these stories, and I offer up my father should there be more interest. My father, Horatio R. Rogers, Jr., served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater during WW-II. He is 88 years old and resides in Middletown, R.I. He has been interviewed by the Naval War College in Newport, where records of his experience during WW-II are kept on file in the library. I look forward to more great articles in the next publication! – John Rogers ’86 Mario J. Gabelli School of Business Advisory Board Beyond the Scope of Roger Williams As a 1994 alumna of Roger Williams University, I have been receiving this publication consistently through the years. The Fall 2013 issue is the absolute first time I have ever read the magazine cover-to-cover. I found it to be incredibly interesting. I hope you will continue to entertain the alumni with features that educate beyond the scope of the going-ons at the university. Keep up the outstanding work. – Cynthia Zenofsky ’94 Cranston, R.I.

Contributing Editors Leah Catania ’14, Jack Dunleavy ’15, Jill Rodrigues ’05 Contributing Writers Elaine Beebe, Adam Braver, Samantha Christopher ’14, Lori Cochrane, Ryan Edmonds, Ellen Liberman, Jacob Nussbaum ’14, Lesley Riva, Nick Williams Director of Design and Production Ray Talamo Assistant Art Director Jaci A. DaCosta Senior Graphic Designer Daniel Ruth ’08 Production Manager Nicole Gildea Contributing Illustrators Kathryn Hurley ’12, Lauren Nassef Contributing Photographers Julie Brigidi, Stephan Brigidi, John Corbett, Andrea Hansen, Robyn Ivy, James Jones, Jennifer Little, Michael Malyszko, Frank Mullin, Tom Nolan, Pete Paul, David Silverman, Peter Silvia, Erin X. Smithers, Ed Strong Please direct questions, comments, letters and other editorial inquiries to: email: magazine@rwu.edu phone: (401) 254-5552 fax: (401) 254-3185 RWU Magazine Roger Williams University One Old Ferry Road Bristol, RI 02809 Send subscription requests and changes of address to:

FIND MORE ONLINE…

from the entire issue of RWU Magazine. Additional content is just a click away at http://pdq.rwu.edu/mag10

WRITE TO RWU We welcome short letters on topics pertinent to the magazine and the University and will publish as many as space allows.

email:

magazine@rwu.edu write: RWU Magazine Roger Williams University One Old Ferry Road Bristol, RI 02809

Please include your full name, address and RWU affiliation. Letters may be edited for clarity and/or length.

email: jwhetstone@rwu.edu phone: (401) 254-3004 fax: (401) 254-3599 Joyce Whetstone Director of Advancement Services Roger Williams University One Old Ferry Road Bristol, RI 02809 While every effort has been made to ensure that information is accurate and up to date, we’re writing about a dynamic educational environment, and it is not possible to guarantee that all items will be accurate at all times. Roger Williams University and RWU are registered with the United States Patent & Trademark Office.

Off the Script

Featuring University President Donald J. Farish Read anything lately about K-12 or higher education reform? Imagine the challenge that today’s education majors (our future teachers) face while learning in the midst of such spirited debate playing out publicly, day in and day out. Kelly Donnell – a faculty member at Roger Williams since 2006 who will become dean of the School of Education this summer – chats with Don Farish on how best to prepare teacherleaders for classrooms in the 21st century. Donald Farish: When I arrived three years ago, the School of Education faculty were the first group I met with, and I recall asking about our program’s distinctiveness: “Why should students come here rather than a less expensive public university?” A number of faculty – yourself included, Kelly – spoke about a growing emphasis on urban education and underserved K-12 populations. Kelly Donnell: Preparing teachers to meet the needs of all children is something that Roger Williams does really well. Historically, teacher prep programs have been good at making sure teachers can meet the needs of a lot of kids, but we know there are children, often in underserved communities, who can be marginalized. Those students need the most support, yet urban schools are the hardest to staff – we want to ensure that our graduates are prepared to teach in a wide variety of communities. Farish: Clearly that’s where the need is. Getting teachers into affluent suburban schools is not a huge problem; but getting high-quality teachers into urban classrooms is an immense problem. Some people, motivated by the best of intentions, love the idea of working in an urban setting, but they have no idea what it takes. Unless students gain experience in these settings early and often, we’re ultimately facing a collision of cultures. Our program ensures that experience in a timely way. And the proof is in – we now have graduates teaching in a number of urban schools. In some cases they’re being hired preferentially based on the success of fellow RWU alumni. Donnell: We often think of student teaching during senior year, but every course, every year at the School of Education includes a field component. One exciting example is a multicultural education course taught by Kerri Ullucci and Annie Winfield. We realized that this was a very theoretical course where students would begin to understand the ideas, but they needed more: How do those ideas work in the

classroom? Dr. Ullucci is developing the curriculum by working with youth in Providence. She’s asking them directly: “You are the students we want to reach. What’s important for a teacher to know?”

harsh reality is that generally speaking, we can’t. There have always been high-quality, inspirational teachers, but we need more of them who are skilled at working with students from diverse backgrounds.

Farish: That’s a wonderful illustration of the overall direction the University is moving – out of the classroom and into the real world, both to marry practice and theory and to get future graduates thinking about positions of responsibility in the community. Teachers, of course, are inherently value-adding people. But creating well-prepared teachers, both through practical experience and classroom theory, exemplifies to me how the School of Education is embracing community involvement. Practical experience, to everyone’s benefit.

Donnell: That’s another reason why partnerships are so important. Historically, there has been a divide between K-12 and higher education. We need to do a better job to bridge that gap. One way that happens is by having a deeper, mutual understanding – and you can’t create that unless you bring the groups together.

Donnell: Increasingly, we’re seeing students hired directly into full-time positions from their experiences in the schools – whether in the Providence area, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. One challenge we face is that many of our students aren’t from Rhode Island. We hope that as they go back and teach in various communities, they spread the word about how well they were prepared. Farish: Ninety percent of our students are from outside of Rhode Island, so part of the value-add that we can offer (the School of Education, in particular) is importing talent. These graduates bring a different perspective, and the result is a less parochial system than Rhode Islanders teaching Rhode Islanders teaching Rhode Islanders. It’s a big wide world, and diversity of experience is critical. Ultimately, the preparation of well-qualified teachers to work in real communities is where the School can have its greatest impact. We’ll be doing ourselves a favor at Roger Williams, because it’s the students who have learned from great teachers who are most ready to go to college. There is a sense these days that colleges can magically make up for whatever educational shortcomings students coming from the K-12 system may have. The

Farish: Being a teacher today is harder than it was when I was in grade school, when we were tracked based on our readiness for college. Now, we’re trying to get everybody, essentially, ready for college. We expect teachers to work magic – teaching such a broad range of students in one classroom is almost more than one person can do. And yet, we have young people in every generation who were inspired by a teacher and want to be just like them. Donnell: The educational process, whether K-12 or higher ed, is very ecological. You can’t pull on one string without feeling it in many different areas of society. Yet college is expected to fix everything; K-12 is expected to fix everything. We idolize people who teach, and yet we ask so much of them. It’s a bigger problem than the band-aid fixes we use are going to address. Farish: We can argue all we want about the Common Core, but I don’t think it takes a great deal of insight to realize that the most important thing is the dynamic between the teacher and the student. An awful lot depends on those human interactions. Rather than try to straightjacket everyone, a little more freedom and creativity would probably go a long way to getting a different result. Donnell: You’re right – it’s not always easy to make things so clear cut. Learning is a messy process. Find More Online: http://pdq.rwu.edu/mag10

Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

EVER WONDERED HOW TO…

Standing Up Against an ‘Alien’ Invasion While stalks of tall phragmites blowing in the breeze and beds of lush green knotweed may look lovely along the local wetlands, these highly invasive species threaten to annihilate native vegetation competing for space in Allin’s Cove in Barrington, R.I. To the rescue? A small army of volunteers from RWU’s Habitat for Humanity chapter, which replaced the non-native plants with 300 shrubs and other flora native to New England as part of an ongoing restoration project.

Glass display cases, sheet metal baker’s racks, ovens in an array of retro colors…The shops might look like bakeries, but you’d be surprised to find out that not one of the six Johnny Cupcakes locations sells even a single cupcake. More surprising? The clothing and accessories brand launched in 2001 by Johnny Cupcakes himself – a former Newbury Comics employee and Massachusetts native born Johnny Earle – is one of the fastest growing companies in its class, on a global scale. In February, the young entrepreneur made his way to Roger Williams to share his insights on creating a business exactly as he created his: with passion, humor and – oh yeah – a wallet that was pretty much empty when it came to startup capital. Here are a few tips:

Start Strange “Strange is cool,” Johnny says. Don’t worry if your idea seems bizarre; in fact, aim for originality.

No Cash? No Worries. “If you have little to no startup money,” Johnny points out, “a great solution is taking pre-orders. You can sell something before it even exists.”

Advocacy Education in Action A new collaboration with Blackstone Valley Advocacy Center has students advocating for victims of domestic violence in Rhode Island’s busiest courthouse – Providence’s Garrahy Judicial Complex – as well as contributing to ongoing work at Newport’s Murray Judicial Complex. This real-life training via the University’s Legal Advocacy Clinic proves invaluable as students embark on careers, says Associate Professor of Legal Studies Tricia Martland. An alumnus working as a Vermont State Police trooper recently told Martland that the experience taught him how to conduct domestic violence investigations with compassion – cases that he says occur with unexpected frequency.

Remember: Everyone Hates Mondays Timing is everything. Try selling to people when they are in good moods. Aim for Fridays, paydays and holidays.

Who Doesn’t Love a Bargain? Motivate customers by offering discounts and freebies with each purchase. A Johnny-recommended favorite? Free stickers!

Keep it in the Family Beg for support from friends and family. “All these people want to see you succeed,” Johnny notes. “Also, they have a hard time saying ‘no!’”

Work Now, Play Later Less time spent closing down the clubs on weekends means more time to focus on what’s really important – developing your passions and your business.

Be Ready to Reach Out Travel, communicate and network with others relentlessly. The more people who know about your product, the more successful you will be.

On Onthe theWaterfront Waterfront

AIDA P. CROSSON ’16M

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION GRADUATE STUDENT; RHODE ISLAND DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE

A Supermodel for Public Service Aida Crosson’s trademarks are distinctly opposite: she’s the highest-ranking Latina in public office in Rhode Island and (unofficially) the Ocean State’s Latina supermodel. By day she serves as deputy secretary of state and director of personnel for the Office of the Attorney General, while her spare time is divided among walking the runway in Boston and New York; creating Runway for a Cure, a benefit gala for lupus research; and working with Latino youth across the state. An ambitious agenda for even the healthiest, yet Crosson contends with debilitating bouts of lupus, an autoimmune disorder that’s stricken her for 21 years – why her work with Lupus Foundation New England is so dear to her heart. SERVING OTHERS: Generosity became second nature at an early age for Crosson, whose mother and aunt opened their homes in the Dominican Republic to less-fortunate cousins and made donating clothes and food to the needy a regular affair. “I grew up in a family always giving, always helping others – it’s in my blood,” she says. HELLO, AMERICA: At age 14 she convinced her parents to return to the U.S. (Crosson was born in New York City) so she could learn English and experience life in America. They agreed to a deal: Crosson would speak English at school and with her father, but converse in Spanish with her mother and read one Spanish book a month to maintain bilingual fluency – and they’d go home after three years. Crosson, of course, remained in Providence, but she visits her family frequently. ON PAGEANTRY: In 1989, Crosson captured Miss Rhode Island Latina honors, even traveling to El Salvador to claim semifinalist in the national round. Her secret to victory? “Being honest with yourself, because you portray who you are. When you try to portray who you aren’t, it comes across false.” She’s stayed involved by training the next generation of Miss Latinas, even coaching one contestant to a national title. FASHION WITH HEART: A moment at last year’s Runway for a Cure resonated poignantly with Crosson. A young girl, ashamed of her hair loss from lupus treatment, ventured out in public for the first time to the fashion show and afterward told Crosson how inspiring it was to see her strut across the runway. Crosson beams as she recalls the girl’s words: “Because of you, I feel normal again.”

On the Waterfront

LETTING FREEDOM RING

Born in Texas to a Saudi Arabian Muslim father and Catholic Filipina mother, Leila Bajunaid ’14L has grown used to living in the center of contradiction. In fact, she says, she thrives in it. Raised in Saudi Arabia, the liberal feminist Bajunaid now makes her home in Rhode Island – the “best place on the planet,” she says. “In Saudi Arabia, I felt like people always judged me, were pretty harsh and strict, and made me feel bad about my beliefs or actions. Here, I feel I can be whatever I want to be and people will respect me. I feel I can be totally free.” WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING FOR YOU BEING A WOMAN IN SAUDI ARABIA? Saudi Arabia has strict guardianship laws for women. We can’t enter into legal contracts, we can’t leave the house without permission – it’s basically like you’re a child. And we’re not allowed to drive, which restricts mobility and opportunities for women. You always have to have a male guardian in your life. It starts with your father, then transfers to your husband. I’m here, literally, because I have permission from my father. IF YOU COULD GO BACK, WOULD IT BE DIFFICULT TO ASSIMILATE? I never assimilated in the first place! There are all kinds of very strict laws, and morality police. When I came to the U.S., I took an American government class and the first week the teacher was talking about democracy, a Bill of Rights, the First Amendment – and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I heard. A country that guarantees freedom of speech and encourages different values and dissent – I always thought I was one of the only ones who felt that way. WHY IS THE FIRST AMENDMENT IMPORTANT TO YOU? It’s an explicit version of all my values. I feel like the First Amendment was a radical view that I held all my life, but I never knew it was an expression. It was just a feeling. To come from a place where you believe your values are what excludes you from society to a society where it’s embraced and celebrated, it just changed everything for me. SO WHY DID YOU CHOOSE LAW SCHOOL? It was a natural progression. It wasn’t about becoming a lawyer, per se, but I want to learn the law and the Constitution. I wanted to go to a place where they treat the Constitution like the Qu’ran. I want a career that challenges me, that provokes me, that makes me want to think more. WHAT BEST PREPARES YOU TO ADVOCATE FOR THE DISADVANTAGED IN YOUR LEGAL CAREER? I have to keep reminding myself where I’m from. That’s what gives me the motivation to do what I do. I could have been born to a very strict, typical Saudi religious father and been stuck. The fact that I have been given this opportunity and I live here, I feel like it’s my purpose to help those who need it. I could’ve been in their position. No help. No guidance. That just keeps me motivated. WHAT WAS THE FIRST BOOK YOU READ THAT IMPACTED YOUR PERSPECTIVE? I remember reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a teenager and thinking, “Wow, this woman is talking about independence, choosing her own life!” WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE FROM SAUDI ARABIA OVER THE NEXT 50 YEARS? I’m hoping women’s voices will be heard in political meetings. I’m hoping that women will drive. I would like to get rid of the guardianship laws completely. Obviously that’s going to take more than my lifetime, but I would at least like to see the men listening to the women in their lives. I want to see women questioning that and finding their inner strength and inner power and determination and not have everything controlled by the men in their lives. Find More Online: http://pdq.rwu.edu/mag10

FULL NAME Leila Bajunaid ’14L EDUCATION B.S. Political Science, Cal State – Bakersfield J.D., RWU Law

RWU {Spring 2014}

FAVORITE FILM “The People vs. Larry Flynt” FUN FACT Has the First Amendment and the RWU Law seal tattooed on her arms

Biology of Tai Chi

Scene on Campus

Spot those brave souls practicing tai chi behind Global Heritage Hall at the end of this semester? Odds are they were biology faculty member Tom Sorger’s students, ready and willing to reap benefits of their professor’s lifelong practice of the ancient martial art. Sorger attributes tai chi’s yin yang principle – combining movement with balance around a stable, unwavering core – as key to his teaching philosophy: “It develops a heightened body awareness and ability to be present in the moment. In cultivating this inner energy, I feel both lighter and more grounded.” Come exam time, hopefully the professor’s students felt so, too.

The Campus Entertainment Network’s spring concert broke the mold this year, upping the production value and the energy of the year’s biggest event. Electronic dance trio Krewella blew the roof off the field house with their rockin’ rhythms and LED “volcano” screen in a sold-out live performance for 1,500 undergrads.

COURSE CATALOG

HIST 360 Pirates, Sailors, Merchants and More: America and the Atlantic World Instructor: Charlotte Carrington, Assistant Professor of History A Whole New World

Atlantic Citizens

Rarely do pirates and chocolate intersect in the same course – but few courses navigate the complexities of the emerging modern world the way Charlotte Carrington’s does. Students spend the semester investigating the complex identities and economics of the people, goods and ideas that traversed the Atlantic Ocean from the Viking Exploration to the late 19th century. “I hope they’re going to have this more complicated picture of Atlantic movement – that they’ll know about the founding of America and the slave trade, but will have a slightly different view.”

As new historical schools of thought emerge, Carrington says the exclusive study of early America or 17th century Britain has given way to a new trend: Atlanticism. Each week, students present a biography of an Atlantic individual – from silver miners to enslaved ship pilots to Christian missionaries – to develop a deeper understanding of the Atlantic cast of characters: “They didn’t think of themselves as isolated people,” Carrington explains. “Instead they had a wider Atlantic perspective and really saw themselves as Atlantic citizens.”

The (Real) Pirates of the Caribbean From the Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley to the fearsome Blackbeard – whose skillful intimidation tactics bore a hyperbolic reputation for violence – students spent the first half of the semester deconstructing the stereotype of the pirate, investigating everything from language to social class to clothing in order to separate myth from reality.

East Meets West The Atlantic world complicates traditional historical perspectives, Carrington says, particularly the notion that all movement was westward. Travel and trade across the Atlantic impacted all hemispheres and even inland settlements: “Their economy, what they wear, every turn of phrase they use is all impacted by the Atlantic world.” From Boston to the Congo, even people who never left home participated in the Atlantic world, she says, whether by the food they ate or the clothes they wore. Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

(Re)purposing Paper in Vogue An owl’s stare. Lavender sky framing an ice-topped mountain. The ceremonially gold-dusted face of an African man. Not exactly the pattern you’d expect on a dress. Still, sartorial inspiration can strike at any moment – and for visual arts major Amy Malkoski ’14, that moment happened to come at a Providence recycling facility when she found a stack of National Geographic magazines awaiting a (surely) less stylish fate. Malkoski’s drive to fashion dresses from recycled materials sprang from the concept of reuse – “giving the materials a new home and a new purpose,” she says. “I like working with unexpected materials that do something interesting structurally, texturally or with colors.” The resulting “Magazine Dress” – a fitted and pleated peplum with a plunging neckline constructed with glue, tape and staples to the measurements of the model (Thuy Nguyen ’14, whose artwork is featured on Page 6) – is fully exposed in its photographic presentation. Together with with Shannon Burke ’14 and Kim Kitchener ’14, Malkoski developed a salt marsh scene to serve as a neutral, earthy backdrop to contrast the vividness and sharp lines of the dress on Nguyen for the final exhibition. Photo: Amy Malkoski

Plankton for Pearl’s Progeny Who do you call when your octopus births thousands of babies? The marine science experts in the Wet Lab at Roger Williams, of course! Here’s a crash course in how the University came to supply the zooplankton needed to nourish baby marine creatures – including the unexpected offspring of Pearl, a Caribbean reef octopus, at Biomes Marine Biology Center in North Kingstown, R.I.

SURPRISE! Caught in local waters, Pearl produced a clutch of eggs, but aquarium owner Mark Hall assumed they were infertile – until they hatched by the thousands last January.

FEED ME, PLEASE Scrambling to find zooplankton – the only food consumed by newborn octopuses, which are about the size of a flea – Hall called Brad Bourque, marine laboratory manager at RWU.

WHY ROGER? Few aquaculture facilities specialize in copepods, tiny planktonic crustaceans – and a type of zooplankton – that are often key to raising marine wildlife in captivity, Bourque says.

A STEADY STREAM The University continues to supply a weekly source of copepods to Biomes to feed the offspring of Jasper, another common Atlantic octopus at the aquarium, and several seahorses.

TEACH A MAN TO FISH… With so much new marine life hatching at the North Kingstown aquarium, Bourque is teaching Hall to grow his own zooplankton – and his own algae, to sustain the copepods. Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

Mission Critical

Love of Learning • Careers and Future Study • Student and Faculty Research • Service and Sustainability • Global Perspectives • Civil Discourse

SAFE SPACES North Campus Residence Hall is home to gender-neutral living spaces and restrooms.

Campaigns for gender-inclusive policies on college campuses spark support, debate By Elaine Beebe As a school whose namesake touted diversity and tolerance, it should come as little surprise that Roger Williams University is among the growing cohort of colleges and universities that are devising gender-inclusive policies in support of LGBTQ students. Still, while the University and the School of Law have long provided gender-neutral spaces for LGBTQ students, it is only in the past two years that institutional policy has been formalized to recognize the community’s growing needs. The roots of growing attention to LGBTQ daily-life concerns at Roger Williams were planted in Spring 2012, when four students proposed gender-neutral housing options at the University as a final project for Associate Professor of American Studies Laura D’Amore’s “LGBTQ Lives in America” course. The proposal highlighted the fact that same-sex roommate requirements can be 14

RWU {Spring 2014}

unsafe or problematic for those who identify as LGBTQ. “I originally thought about doing genderneutral bathrooms for the project,” says senior Mikaela Feroli. “But I decided to go big or go home.” Go big, indeed. While the project originated as a hypothetical, the students were tremendously passionate about their cause and decided to advocate for a formal housing policy, according to Charly (formerly Abby) Snellings ’13. Their ideas weren’t universally embraced from the get-go, of course. “Initially, the obstacle was in the University’s perception that this would upset parents,” D’Amore said. “There is a false sense of security that if a person rooms with another person of the same gender they will be more alike, they will share interests, and they will not be having sex.”

In fact, despite strong student endorsement for a similar campaign happening at the time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that school’s Board of Governors vetoed the policy just weeks before it was set to take effect, deeming it inappropriate and a policy that would promote cohabitation. Such arguments are based simply on assumptions of a heterosexual world, D’Amore says. But the Roger Williams students were hardly dissuaded – they knew they would have to prove support for their measure and navigate University administration to inspire action. So armed with hundreds of student signatures, Feroli and Snellings worked with the University’s housing and residence life staff to craft a policy that was strong and sound before presenting to senior administrators. By Spring 2013 – just one year after D’Amore’s

students hatched the idea in class – RWU President Donald Farish approved the proposal for a Fall 2013 launch. “The community has been very receptive to gender-inclusive housing,” says Tony Montefusco, director of housing. “Last fall we had six rooms and apartments with 24 students; for Fall 2014, we have awarded 15 rooms and apartments to 51 students.” The policy currently applies to upperclassmen who must apply for the program – a stipulation not always required for similar housing at other universities. Freshman psychology major Taylor Anderson thinks the current process works for now but could expand to become even more accessible. “As far as some schools go, we are not far behind with gender-neutral housing,” Anderson says. “However, with other gender-neutral options on campus we can definitely use some more, such as genderneutral bathrooms. This is something I find incredibly difficult to deal with when I have to figure out where to use the restroom.” According to the nonprofit Transgender Law and Policy Institute, only 150 campuses or so (out of some 4,000 in the country) currently offer gender-neutral bathrooms. Roger Williams is in the process of expanding its policies to focus on restrooms, beginning with the School of Law’s designation of the restroom outside of the Office of the Dean as gender neutral for public use, with additional gender-neutral

restrooms for faculty, staff and visitors. Each restroom is for individual use; the only change will be signage. The policy, announced in January 2014, simply formalizes an existing practice. RWU Law has long recognized the need for a restroom where LGBTQ students feel comfortable and safe, says Deborah L. Johnson, the law school’s director of diversity and outreach. “As we anticipate that in the coming years we will have more students who are either transgender or whose gender identity or expression does not match their biological identity, we believed implementing the policy at this time just made sense,” Johnson says, noting that all student feedback has been positive to date. Montefusco also points out that a number of restrooms in the residence halls – Maple, Willow, Baypoint and the North Campus Residence Hall suites – are single occupancy and gender neutral. Additionally, the faculty senate and university administration have recently approved additional individual-use restrooms as gender neutral. According to Joseph Roberts, president of the faculty senate’s University Life Committee, three academic buildings – the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences, the Marine and Natural Sciences building, and the School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation – will convert single-user male and female restrooms to gender neutral by changing signage and perhaps adding locks that will

indicate occupied/vacant. The faculty senate unanimously approved these changes, as well as the creation of a map indicating the locations of gender-neutral restrooms. “You’ll never be more than a minute or two from one,” Roberts says. “It just makes sense to do this on campus.” Though these policies have found support on the Roger Williams campus, genderneutral policies remain a hot-button issue in the national discourse; the School of Law’s restroom policy came under fire by some external commentators within days of being announced. In an interview with the American Family News Network published after the law school’s announcement in January, Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute argued that policies that accommodate LGBTQ students force other students to compromise their privacy rights. “It’s compelling students to sacrifice their privacy to be able to use a bathroom or locker room or even showers without having the confidence that someone from the opposite sex isn’t going to come in and join them as well,” Dacus wrote. “Up to the point where people become educated and informed as to what’s happening, they can put their foot down to seek what is expected in terms of basic privacy protection.” Taylor Anderson, for one, disagrees: “While Roger Williams isn’t the hands-down best with gender neutrality, we are definitely on our way and getting better each year.” RWU

“As we anticipate that in the coming years we will have more students who are either transgender or whose gender identity or expression does not match their biological identity, we believed implementing the policy at this time just made sense.”

–D eborah Johnson, RWU Law Director of Diversity and Outreach Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

Mission Critical

Going to Jail With Public Defender Lynn Laweryson Ward ’11L When the doors of the Larimer County Jail clanged shut behind her this past spring, there were some things Lynn Laweryson Ward ’11L knew to expect. As a Colorado state public defender, based in Fort Collins, the jail was familiar territory – a place she visited weekly, if not daily, to meet with clients. The smells, the lines, the security checks were the wallpaper to her regular routines. But when she signed up to spend two nights in jail herself – as one of 10 public defenders who took part in a supervised two-night stay crafted to provide practical insight into what clients encounter when incarcerated – she still had some surprises coming. “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t think about – like the fact that clients don’t even get to wear their own underwear,” Ward says. “The underwear they give you has been worn by who knows how many people, the bras are kind of tattered and stretched out, everything is ill-fitting.” Or the constant noise at night. “None of us

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got any sleep, because it’s so loud,” she says. “Huge iron doors opening and closing all night, you barely close your eyes.” Ward and her compatriots were tightly scheduled and strictly segregated from the general inmate population. They underwent the standard booking and intake procedures, ate the food, slept in the cells, visited the library, attended some of the classes and shuffled down the halls in their prison-issue orange jumpsuits. “I was hoping to gain some perspective,” says Eric Vanatta, a supervising deputy state public defender and colleague of Ward who spearheaded the program. “We’re negotiating every day on behalf of clients, and you get to a place where you’re throwing around time like it’s not that big a deal, a few days more here or there. It’s important to know what those days really mean.” What they mean is a total lack of autonomy and a stripping away of personal identity. “Once you’re all wearing orange, it changes everything about you,” Ward says. The attorneys

were kept in protective custody, but at one point they were mistakenly led past a group of inmates in the hall, including some of their own clients. “It was such an odd moment, because not one of us was recognized,” Ward says. “It really brought home how it wipes away your identity.” “I think [the jail stay] is a fabulous idea,” says Andrew Horwitz, who directs RWU Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic and each year takes his students on a tour of Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institution to get a feel for the living conditions and to meet with a group of inmates. “Anyone doing this work would benefit from that kind of experience. I’ve always thought the tour I do is a tour that every prosecutor and judge should be required to take. They don’t really understand the realities people face when they are advocating for jail time.” Often, Horwitz says, students are impacted by how dehumanizing and oppressive the system is: “Even the language used by the guards, where they talk about not meals, but feedings; not number of people, but number of bodies.”

The BEST Way to Revive a River Ward takes pains to underline that the Larimer County Jail is a forward-thinking institution. “They are very professional; they understand you kill more flies with honey, and for the most part, they treat our clients with respect.” In the end, along with new insight into the physical and emotional reality of jail time, Ward emerged with some positive impressions. She and her colleagues attended a handful of the self-improvement classes the jail offers, met the mental health professionals and others offering services to inmates, and says she would now be more willing to recommend those services to clients. And now, when clients tell her she has no idea what they’re going through, she has an answer. “I always tell them, ‘I’m never going to know what it’s like to walk in your shoes, but I’m certainly doing my best to try and understand.’” — Lesley Riva

Two decades ago, the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council set out to build a boat launch on the Blackstone River – once declared the most polluted river in the nation – at a site called Manville Landing in Cumberland, R.I. The council had a few acres of donated land, solid funding from the state Department of Transportation and plans to complete the project in a year or two. But, as project manager Bob Cox recalls, “We sank our first piling, and a couple centuries’ worth of pollutants and carcinogens came bubbling up.” As it turned out, the land had been used as a dumpsite for the remains of an old textile mill, one of many that once lined the Blackstone and served as the backbone of Rhode Island’s manufacturing economy, destroyed by fire in 1955. Debris from the fire and pollutants from the dyes it spewed into the river lingered, trapped in the toxic sediments that line the riverbed. It took two decades and $700,000 to clean up the site before the modest boat launch could be christened. As the council looks to add more launch sites as part of a larger remediation project, the group partnered with RWU via the Community Partnerships Center, joining forces last fall with School of Engineering, Computing and Construction Management faculty members Anthony Ruocco and Janet Baldwin. Via an engineering senior design project, Ruocco and Baldwin have advised a team of students who are working to ensure the Council never makes such a costly mistake again. Dubbed BEST (for Blackstone Environmental Science Team), recent graduates Tim Clarkin, Meagan Connolly, Noelle Laflamme and Tanya Mello were charged with researching and identifying potential landing sites and designing basic rescue boat launches to fit them. The team first conducted a corridor land use evaluation, commonly known as a CLUE, to trace the condition and history and determine viability of selected sites. They inspected the sites on foot and fanned out to state offices, city halls and local libraries to

research each site’s past. If they found evidence of a textile mill or metal finishing plant, for example, they knew to move on. It’s an effective way to rule out sites like Manville Landing, without expensive soil and water testing. “If we’d had a CLUE, we’d have saved $700,000,” Cox says, ruefully. Phase two focused on designing simple launches for rescue boats: a concrete ramp, a floating dock and an area for vehicle turnaround. “Even if the towns have to call in a professional before building anything, they aren’t starting from scratch – our students have provided a viable plan,” Ruocco says. The project has been of immense benefit to the tourism council and Blackstone Valley community, says Cox, who has dedicated his own engineering career (and current retirement) to bringing the river reuse project full circle. And, the students say, it’s been equally valuable for their real world understanding. “I’ve learned so much,” Connolly says. “How to work at town halls, which are different every time; how to write an evaluation report; and all the work it takes to get a project going.” “It’s neat to design something in the real world,” adds Clarkin, an Ocean State native. “It’s exciting to know that I can work on something that will hopefully be built and benefit the people of Rhode Island.” — Lesley Riva Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

Mission Critical

Memorial Trees in Slater Park – There’s an (m)App For That Stretching across 197 acres of eastern Pawtucket, R.I., Slater Memorial Park stands out like a green thumb in an otherwise dense urban landscape. Bikers and walkers flood the park trails, and families flock to the picnic areas, petting zoo and carousel. The park is so popular, in fact, that in 2005 the city created a program for those who want to memorialize a loved one within its leafy borders. The “Tree In Memorial” program offers the opportunity to “buy” a tree in commemoration; a few hundred dollars gets you a tree named after your beloved Uncle Fred, with an option to purchase an accompanying personalized stone marker. The program has proven such a success that it has outpaced the ability of park officials to keep track of where the memorial trees are located – and more importantly, which tree belongs to whom. How could they keep visitors from barking up the wrong tree? That’s the question a team of RWU web design students stepped in to solve. Through RWU’s Community Partnerships Center, Pawtucket Parks and Recreation Director John Blais was matched with Mark Brickley, professor of web development and an expert on geographic information systems (GIS), who assembled a team of four seniors: Natalie Brough, Rachel Dewey, Tony Fitzhugh 18

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and Karly Rust. Using GIS technology, the group developed a mobile application featuring a searchable map of the park and an index to guide visitors to specific trees and provide information about the commemorated individuals. “If you click on a person in the list, the map zooms to that tree’s location and a pop-up displays, with the name, photo and a short bio,” Brickley says. “The map also has a search feature. Enter the name of a person and we zoom to the map of that tree. It’s a very neat system.” It’s also light years ahead of the old system, which was based on a bunch of paper records and hand-drawn maps in a file drawer. “We had people coming in saying, ‘My grandmother has a tree, can you tell me where it is?’ and I’d be going through years of paper records to find it,” Blais says. “It was like a scavenger hunt.” The first step for the students was to organize the old paper records and trek into the park on foot to identify the trees. “I did lots of work physically finding the trees, using GIS to map their location and the state the tree was in – unfortunately some were dead or had been chopped down,” says Brough, a business management major. “We also made notes on the kind of tree; now I can

tell an oak from a beech from an elm – a pretty handy little skill!” Business major Tony Fitzhugh took the lead on developing the website, figuring out the template and the process of getting the map online. He also hand-coded an application to allow the team to gather latitude/longitude data in the field, determine who “owned” the tree and note its condition. “We’re in the process of developing documentation for the town’s IT people, so they’ll know how to keep updating the map and make it sustainable,” Fitzhugh says. “The whole project has really been excellent for me – it feels like real life, and the CPC has been amazing about getting information out about the project and really supporting our work.” The map is not entirely complete: there are trees still to be mapped and added, and students will continue to work through Fall 2014, Brickley estimates. From the city’s perspective, however, the collaboration is already in full bloom. “The program is phenomenal, and I was just blown away by the students’ work,” Blais says. “I hope they know that they have created something that has real historic impact and will affect generations to come.” — Lesley Riva

Science: It’s Elementary! Algae: It’s slimy, smelly and squishy. What could fourth-graders possibly like better? For starters, actually getting their hands on it. Last fall, RWU senior Courtney Anderson – along with sophomores Jesse Freccia and Mohamad Ghulam and freshman Amanda McCabe – gave new meaning to “physical science” when the Physics 202 undergrads introduced students at the Nathanael Greene School in Pawtucket to the importance of algae and erosion. “We did four different stations – an algae and invertebrate touch tank, examples of underwater erosion and land erosion, and algae bookmarks to take home and encourage reading,” says Anderson, a marine biology major. “It was so much fun! And the kids were receptive to learning about algae – something that is not gross, but important to the ecosystem.” The fourth-grade teachers were learning, too. At a time when math and language test scores receive the most scrutiny, subjects such as science are at risk of becoming marginalized, says RWU Assistant Professor of Physics Jennifer Kreft Pearce. At the same time, she notes, Rhode Island is changing its science standards, emphasizing experimentation over memorization. “The teachers were enthusiastic about teaching science in the classroom, but were faced with many challenges including how to design an experiment and getting the materials they would need to do the project in class,” Pearce says. “We hope to help teachers prepare for this change, and our students benefit in that they learn valuable communication skills working across disciplines and with young children.” This is not the first time RWU students have lent their lab skills to local elementary schools. In recent years, RWU Associate Professor of Education Li-Ling Yang, who is a co-principal investigator for Project SUCCESS (a partnership that aims to improve elementary science teaching and increase student achievement) has deployed undergraduates to classrooms from Central Falls to Pawtucket – including Nathanael

Greene – to provide youngsters with hands-on experiments and hone their teaching skills. In addition to receiving professional development and opening their classrooms to Roger Williams student teachers, Nathanael Greene teachers Tracey Kareemo ’95, Kathy Maher and Keri Fournier say that the partnership with RWU invigorates them as teachers to see love of learning on multiple levels: in their classroom students, in the University’s practicum students and in themselves.

“We are so fortunate and truly thankful to be able to continue this partnership,” Kareemo says, noting that for her fourth graders, “it brings them the reality and awareness of going to college. And they think that working with college students is way cooler than working with their teachers!” — Elaine Beebe [Editor’s Note: For more on “slimy, smelly and squishy” seaweed, read “Turning the Tide” on Page 32.] Want more stories? Go to pdq.rwu.edu.

a Braver voice

At large in the community with writer-in-residence Adam Braver

From the

Nightstand

Early last fall, on the third floor of the University library – where a few of us had gathered to brainstorm on our fledgling Connecting With Your Library website – one idea that immediately took hold was a section called From the Nightstand. Put simply, a student would venture into the Roger Williams community to discover what people were reading, wanted to read and had read. The implications were obvious. Because the world of books is so central to our mission, we in the library saw it as a way to expand the conversation throughout our campus and extended community. And selfishly, it offered a way for us to gain exposure to new books. Looking Back a Decade Ten years ago, the University of New England in Australia launched a comprehensive study titled “University Student Reading Preferences in Relation to the Big Five Personality Dimensions.” Among its many objectives, one was to determine if reading choices were indications of personality traits, or perhaps vice versa. 20

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Needless to say, the portion of the study that focused on reading choices vis-à-vis personality traits showed a fairly consistent correlation. To quote from the study’s conclusion: Examination of each of the individual reading preference categories showed that the Big Five dimensions significantly predicted four of the eight reading categories: culture-related material, science-related material, people-focused material and event-related material. Openness and conscientiousness were significant individual predictors of reading preferences. High openness predicted preference for culture-related material and preference for science-related material. Low openness predicted preference for people-focused reading. High conscientiousness predicted preference for science-related material and preference for event-related reading. Further, high extraversion was a significant predictor of preference for people-related material. Of course, on the third floor of the library, we were hardly thinking so scientifically about our Nightstand section. Nor are

Adam Braver is an associate professor of creative writing and writer-inresidence at Roger Williams University. He is the author of five novels, including November 22, 1963, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and Misfit, a fictional account of the days leading up to Marilyn Monroe’s death. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated worldwide.

we now. Yet it’s hard not to consider that beyond how people’s individual reading choices might reflect their personalities, they may also illustrate how a community’s choices reflect either its homogeny or its diversity. Our First Step With little direction and lots of enthusiasm, freshman journalism major Zachary Mobrice roamed the halls of campus buildings to ask about books. Nothing scientific about his methodology. Nothing that he was leaning toward. No expectations. His only goal was to let people talk. Zach started in the President’s Office, made his way to various deans’ suites and poked his head into faculty and staff spaces across campus. And though I won’t dare to draw any conclusions (nor would I assume to make any allusions to the responses Zach received relative to the personalities delivering them), they did offer an interesting portrait. Cut to 1979 Zach’s undertaking set my mind wandering… It was a cross between an in-law cottage and a remodeled garage. My friend Pete lived there. It was a time when the rest of us still lived at home. Pete always was a step ahead of us. He was the type that your parents served beer to when he came over for dinner. And while the rest of us were negotiating permissions and trying to arrange rides just a couple of miles to downtown, Pete was driving two hours or more to go to concerts. At his semi-cottage, the most recent concert was the topic of the evening. A mutual acquaintance named Ross had joined us, someone I knew a little, but never really had a feeling for. I never quite got him. Perhaps most disarming was that it seemed that Ross figured he got me. Over the past weekend, the two of them had seen Yes perform “in the round” at the Oakland Coliseum. Personally, I never went much for progressive rock. The complex layers of synthesizers in their near symphonic arrangements left me a little cold. But as Pete and Ross talked at me, I was willing to believe that I was missing something. In truth, I was more interested in the “in the round” part of it – trying to figure out how that worked, remembering a film I’d once seen of the Beatles’ first concert in D.C., where every third song or so required Ringo to disassemble his kit and move the drums while the others stood waiting.

But as much as they tried to convince me, wooing me with nuggets, such as the guitarist being classically trained, it occurred to me that late afternoon in that cottage/garage that I would never be convinced. Unlike Pete and Ross, the music of Yes did not speak to the core essence of who I was. These two were detailed, analytical types. They were not prone to abstraction. I, on the other hand, was much more inclined toward random connections and the pursuit of finding meaning in those connections. It didn’t make me like Pete any less. (Although I still never really got Ross.) In fact, it made me like him more. I liked having a friend who seemed more like a complement than a reflection. I liked that through music, we were our own diverse micro-community. A Common Reading Back to From the Nightstand. Should it surprise us that history professor Jeffrey Meriwether beams about historical biographies and novels? Or that our provost, Andy Workman (also a historian), cites “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” among his most memorable books? And knowing how invested Diana Soares of the finance office is in her book groups (and the fact that you can spot her reading quietly in the library during lunch), does it shock us that the scope of her selections run through some of the most talked-about contemporary fiction? It shouldn’t surprise us, of course. It also shouldn’t surprise us that many people read beyond their own disciplines and interests. But perhaps what is reinforced (although, again, not surprising) is the way that looking at people’s reading habits reflects a kind of diversity among the communities in which we live. In this Roger Williams University community, as different as we all may be, we share the common value of learning, escaping, empathizing and releasing that comes through the pages of a book. And just as the debates about music between me, Pete and Ross highlighted our individuality, in the larger scope these common differences bring us together. I may have blinders on – I’ll be the first to admit it – but it heartens me to read about what other people are reading. It makes me feel like part of a community, no matter how disparate our ideas, beliefs and values may be. It makes me believe that through one common act, together we are working to enlighten ourselves. And through that process, intended or not, we create a more enlightened community. RWU

It makes me feel like part of a community, no matter how disparate our ideas, beliefs and values may be.

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INVISIBLE INVISIBLE CITY CITY With an abandoned, subterranean railroad as muse – and no real-world limits to constrain ideas – future architects from Roger Williams dream up creative ways to revive Providence’s historic East Side Tunnel

By Jill Rodrigues ’05

Photo: James P. Jones, Photography RI

UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT Entombed in the depths under bustling Gano existing, outmoded resources with value Street in Providence, beneath a shroud of (historic buildings, for example; or the carbon monoxide, the legendary East Side tunnel in this case) by coming up with new Railroad Tunnel – defunct now for decades, uses to extend the lives of those structures. since the last train chugged down its tracks “Infrastructure enables modern society to in 1981 – sits mostly untouched within one function,” says Bell, an associate at KITE of the city’s most densely populated and Architects in Providence. “We don’t always historic neighborhoods. see it, and when we do, it’s often unsightly. Ensconced in chain-link and gnarly oak “But as new technologies and networks trees hugged with vines, a mere two feet of eclipse obsolete infrastructure, the reuse of concrete peeks above street level. Only the this formerly vital fabric becomes not only curious dare the steep descent to glimpse possible, but increasingly desirable in a the graffiti tags, etched in sharp relief culture facing scarcity of resources. The against the concrete supports and massive Invisible City project asked students to rust-orange steel door. Absent rail ties loom reconceive and bring new vitality to an like missing teeth, the track submerged in abandoned site rich with possibilities.” inches-deep storm water, choked with Last September, as the students dived rubbish and blanketed with decomposing into the hypothetical classroom exercise, oak leaves. their ideas quickly found an unanticipated A mile away, nestled off-street behind off-campus audience when Bell had a the Providence Art Club, the tunnel’s west chance on-site encounter with Rhode Island entrance hovers, its matte green finish Governor Lincoln D. Chafee, who was camouflaging the steel with the rise of touring the tunnel to inspect its condition Benefit Street. The structure marks the end and ponder the possibility of future of the underground portion of a line that serviceability. Bell convened his class and carried passengers from Bristol and Fall convinced the governor to let them River to Providence’s Union Station starting accompany his team of engineers 100 feet in 1908 – a line now faded from sight and into the 5,080-foot passage. from history. Two months later, the students found But what if the uncharted potential of themselves presenting their designs in a reusing this unseen world were explored, with private meeting with Governor Chafee on no limitations on feasibility or budget? What if Capitol Hill, pitching tunnel reactivation pure, unbridled imagination could fuel the concepts that ranged from underground art renaissance of this Invisible City? Could it installations, skate parks and bike paths to a become, once again, part of the urban reinvented transportation hub – even a connective tissue linking India Point to the pneumatic tube ride for children! commercial district near North Main Street? While no single idea will be Last fall, 10 graduate architecture implemented wholesale, the students’ students at Roger Williams, all enrolled in visions could play a part in shaping a Visiting Assistant Professor Jonathan Bell’s credible, feasible adaptive reuse project for design studio, confronted those questions. the East Side Tunnel. The next few pages Dream big, Bell instructed his students. He offer a window into a handful of the challenged them to envision new life for the students’ Invisible City ideas, from the abandoned tunnel by creating designs rooted practical to the playful. in the concept of adaptive reuse – preserving

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Unearthing the Jewel within the Jewel Student: Caileigh Bailey-Ricci | Project: Burrowed Glimpses

For many of the students in ARCH 416.02,

all the way down to the gleaming copper vats in the brewery. the local ambiance informed their creative Horizontally, glass walls would both direction. College Hill’s rich visual and divide and connect the spaces, an element performing arts scene juxtaposed against the Bailey-Ricci conceived while imagining graffiti plastered over the tunnel walls and children “with their faces pinned against the corrugated metal doors inspired Caileigh glass” to discover what’s on the other side. Bailey-Ricci to create a space that celebrates Copper finishes would adorn stair railings the arts. and the dining rooms to mirror the Selecting the nearby SciLi (the Sciences appearance of the beer barrels. Library at Brown University) as a central And while the brewery and performance location above the mile-long tunnel route, space were designed to invite people into Bailey-Ricci proposed extending the building her hidden city, the fact that this tunnel vertically, three floors below street level, to could be pressed again into its original house a pub, a restaurant adjoining an service – and the real need for an off-street intimate performance space for ballets or transit artery on the East Side – did not string orchestra concerts, and reaching escape Bailey-Ricci. Instead of a train, she down to what she calls “the jewel within the proposes driverless, battery-powered jewel” of her vision: the Burrowed Brewery, personal rapid transit vehicles called ULTra a microbrewery offering tours and tastings Pods (for Urban Light Transit), ideally suited as the centerpiece of her all-encompassing to handle the short route efficiently. arts experience. She describes this innovative transport Woven through her design are features – system – already implemented successfully “connective tissue,” she says – that would at London’s Heathrow Airport – as a cominglead visitors on a visual (as well as physical) of-age from trains to ULTra Pod systems: journey downward. Oval openings cut wide into the center of “It’s almost like the futuristic version of a subway, in compact form.” each floor would provide a long perspective like looking through the portholes of a ship,

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Seeing Red from Two Wheels Student: Drew Pennell | Project: New Biking Through Old

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INVISIBLE CITY

During a state-guided tour of the tunnel,

them and see what’s underneath,” he says. “Within the tunnel, I want people drawn to Drew Pennell got the sense that this passage – look up through the shafts to the surface.” dug 40 feet under College Hill, and in one part, With the early 20th century tunnel’s 100 feet below Prospect Street – had just historic value in mind, Pennell opted to “grown under the city.” retain the intact interior while imparting the Walking into the dank blackout and structure with a new identity – the contrast bouncing a flashlight beam over the charred of new against old, light illuminating dark, husk of a car, empty spray paint cans and sharp severing soft. A bike path would the enveloping arch of the 20-foot curved traverse a winding boardwalk embellished concrete walls pervaded him with a “dark, with stone through the passageway, with almost medieval feel – a primitive, seating areas stationed underneath the instinctual understanding of a place you luminous red sculptures. Tunnel walls would don’t know well.” be lined with angled polycarbonate panels Pennell built on that feeling by using imbued with mellow lighting, leaving the design to cultivate a curiosity among curved concrete arch exposed. above-ground passersby to investigate what Reusing the tunnel as a bike path would lies beneath. At six surface locations above expand the network of trails for a the tunnel, 10-foot-tall translucent red shafts transportation mode that’s doubled in would sprout from the ground like Providence since 1990, Pennell says. It could stalagmites – glowing beacons to attract connect to the East Bay Bike Path, for inquiring minds like moths to a flame. The example, linked via a path at India Point Park. polycarbonate structures would pierce the “This can be an icon as the city roof of the tunnel to infuse the subterranean encourages increased biking,” he says. space with light and air. “When people see these shafts, I want them to be drawn to them, to look down

Infusing the Ancient on the East Side Student: Virginia Rice | Project: Bringing the Surface Down to the Ground

India’s majestic stone stepwells – intricately at least once, the site of hundreds of partying college students dispersed by police officers), carved, centuries-old stairs that descend “it felt haunted,” she says. deep underground to reach aquifers – “You could see the footprint of people who inspired Virginia Rice to imagine an came before – it felt neglected and dirty. It inimitable sanctuary within her Invisible inspired me to create the opposite effect – a City. With the inverted pyramid of the work of art, rather than a space where people ancient wells in mind, Rice envisioned go to party and spray graffiti.” peeling back the surface and opening the Within the tunnel, Rice maintains the arch tunnel to the street like a sculpture. and train track, but would expand beyond the “Symbolically, the tunnel is the water walls to connect to an underground “park-andsource you’re reaching,” she says. As visitors descend the stairs, they would walk” at the North Main Street entrance, and to a 1,500-seat theater to attract marquee retreat farther and farther from the urban performers and productions. cacophony, perhaps pausing to sit in a The performance space would extend landscaped area, for a croissant at an beneath the Watson Institute for underground café, or just to admire the International Studies at Brown University; slanting sunlight animating the edifice. The classrooms and lecture halls could be expansive openings would allow the surface created within the space, adding squareto meet the tunnel in a novel way, she says. footage that the ever-expanding university Rice’s desire to convert the tunnel into a may not have considered, as well as a place comforting space was borne of her the local community could use for experience during the on-site tunnel tour. A popular destination for urban explorers (and, neighborhood meetings.

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INVISIBLE CITY One hundred feet inside the tunnel entrance from North Main Street

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From beach nuisance to beauty products, a second look at seaweed may change your perspective on the wet world’s fantastic flora

On any given sunny summer day, swimmers and sunbathers visiting Sachuest Beach in Middletown, R.I., are greeted by warm sand, welcoming surf and warbling seagulls scouting the shores for snacks. They are also met with seaweed. Lots of seaweed. In fact, such an overabundance of red algae has plagued Sachuest in the past few years that media

reports (and local myths) of the dreaded “red tide”– a harmful algal bloom that can kill fish and marine fauna, and has been known to cause respiratory illness in beachgoers – have run rampant. The reports are imprecise, according to Brian Wysor, a phycologist and associate professor of biology at Roger Williams University.

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While there is absolutely a tremendous volume of red algae underwater and ashore, he says, it’s really just a common seaweed species called Spermothamnion repens – a fuzzy red macroalgae. And yes, he agrees, it is a terrible nuisance. “People don’t like to be touched by things in the water because they can’t see what it is,” Wysor says. And even biologists, like him, aren’t immune. “I love the algae, but I would just as soon not swim through it when I want to swim.” But if people could see the beauty – and the many natural benefits – of marine flora, could seaweed be recast in a more positive light?

Building an Army of Algal Ambassadors One of the challenges to appreciating seaweed on the East Coast, Wysor says, is that our oceans lack what he calls “algal charisma.” “People want beautiful clear water,” he says. And on the aesthetic spectrum of macroalgae, the underwater forests of gigantic green kelp populating the Pacific and the Caribbean are leagues ahead in the public’s appreciation of seaweed. “If you go into the Monterey Bay Aquarium and look at the exhibit on the kelp forest, it’s breathtaking. Things don’t look like that out here – our waters are

darker. They’re not clear, so there’s a limitation on being able to recognize that it’s a forest.” Wysor says it’s part of his job as a phycologist (a scientist who studies algae) to help people see seaweed’s inherent beauty. It’s simply a matter of perspective. And he’s starting with his students, creating a generation of algal ambassadors to evangelize the virtues of seaweed. Step one? Change the language they use to talk about it. “When you ask people to describe seaweed, the first word they use is ‘slimy,’” Wysor says. “But a lot of them are just wet – most of it is not mucus producing. There’s nothing on your hands but water. I really challenge my students to reconsider how they communicate about algae.” Even using a more scientific term, like “marine flora” invokes the aesthetic ideal of flowers as opposed to weeds. And, Wysor says, the so-called flowers of the sea are not all that different from the flowers we buy our sweethearts. “We’ve got a whole floral industry that’s based around the sexual reproduction of plants, but people don’t recognize it as science. They see pretty flowers. That’s where we need to get – because people don’t perceive flowers or plants to be disgusting or slimy.” Like the plants at the florist, marine flora boasts a diversity of color, shape and texture. Though traditionally classified as

SEAWEED

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and Science

There’s more than a hint of irony that the same beachgoers who complain about the seaweed stuck to their skin after a swim will pay hundreds of dollars for seaweed wraps and algae facials at the spa and then extol its benefits for improving skin tone and reducing cellulite. Still, few people realize how frequently they encounter seaweed in their daily routines. From the bathroom to the kitchen, seaweed and its byproducts are stealth ingredients in a plethora of household products. Those pearly whites? You can thank seaweed. “Most people probably don’t even realize that we brush our teeth with seaweed every day,” says Courtney Anderson ’14, a marine biology major who came to Roger Williams with no interest in algae, only to discover her passion for sea plants working with Wysor in freshman phycology. “The diatoms [rigid microorganisms extracted from algae] act as a polishing agent in our toothpaste.” Can’t get enough ice cream? Carrageenan extracted from seaweed acts as a

Other unlikely uses: dental impressions, gelatin, popsicles, biofuel, fertilizer, wastewater treatment

Ingredient: Macrocystis pyrifera Extract Application: Increases shine

HAIR PRODUCTS

Ingredient: Diatoms Application: Plaque removal

TOOTHPASTE

Ingredient: Kelp Application: Clarifies skin and improves skin tone

FACE MASKS

Ingredient: Kelp Application: Fiber additive and promotion of healthy coat

From shampoo to pet food, seaweed has a number of surprising applications that impact our daily routines. Here are a handful:

CAT FOOD

Ingredient: Carrageenan Application: Stabilizer

ICE CREAM

WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT

being red, brown or green, a closer look reveals a much broader palette with hints of purple and yellow, pink and orange. And its applications transcend topping a table or serving as a centerpiece.

s e l b a t e g e Sea V

Visit PDQ@RWU for a wonderful panna cotta recipe!

essert!) D d n a ( inner

or D F s ’ t a h W The y’re

Miso seaweed soup Serves: 4 With a résumé that boasts some of coastal Rhode Island’s finest restaurants, Chef Jonathan Cambra – assistant director of culinary operations and head catering chef at Roger Williams – joined the University this year with a wellcultivated background in sustainable food sourcing. One natural substitute? Sea vegetables. “Why use gelatin or other processed foods when you can use a natural and sustainable ingredient like Irish moss to create the same consistency in a dish?” he muses. We couldn’t agree more. This savory soup recipe featuring (you guessed it) seaweed is the perfect primer for the adventurous amateur chef, courtesy of Chef Cambra and Bon Appétit Management, food services provider for RWU.

Ingredients: 6 oz. firm tofu 1 qt. vegetable stock 1 oz. dried seaweed 4 oz. shitake mushrooms, sliced 1 red bell pepper, cut into matchstick size pieces

4 T miso 1 T organic soy sauce 2 scallions, washed and thinly sliced Kosher salt (to taste) Black pepper (to taste)

Directions: 1. Wrap tofu in two layers of paper towels and place on a plate. Invert a second plate on top of the tofu and press. Leave for one hour, then cut the tofu into half-inch cubes. 2. Heat vegetable stock in a soup pot over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add miso, whisking until smooth. Place soup pot back on heat and add remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer and season to taste with salt and pepper. 3. Portion hot soup into four large soup bowls and serve.

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stabilizer, giving your favorite summer treat its signature smoothness. But the nutritional benefits of seaweed – or sea vegetables, as they’re called in the culinary community – far exceed enhancing food’s texture. In 2013, popular publications from Men’s Health to the Huffington Post were hailing it as the new superfood, boasting high concentrations of fiber and iodine – an element not naturally occurring in many food sources, according to chef and nutritionist Crystal Maderia, whose book, The New Seaweed Cookbook, introduces readers to the basics of sea vegetables and how easy they can be to incorporate into your diet, whether by adding dehydrated dulse flakes to a stir fry, boiling kombu in a broth or snacking on nori sheets (not to mention sushi rolls, which in most cases are the gateway to seaweed consumption). “If people knew more about sea vegetables, [they would discover that] they are really affordable foods and have medicinal properties,” Maderia says. “These foods are toning and nourishing to the body and have this amazing folklore around them – healing cancer or protecting the body from radiation and

chemotherapy. I believe that is true; I’ve seen the benefits in clients I’ve worked with and studies I’ve read.” More recently, the medicinal properties of seaweed have extended beyond nutritional treatment, according to Wysor. Take coralline, for example. This vibrant red species features calcified, rigid branches – almost like human bones. “They have calcium carbonate in their cell walls, just like we have in our bones and our teeth,” Wysor explains. “They give a very stiff texture, and actually that group of organisms is being investigated as a possible grafting matrix for bone grafts.” Oh, and those diatoms in the toothpaste? They serve another critical – albeit morbid – function: assisting a medical examiner in determining if somebody was a drowning victim or if they died on land and were dumped in the water.

All

Things

It may only be a matter of time before humans are walking around with seaweed patches on their bones, but there is no denying the immediate benefit we reap

every day: algae produces up to half of the oxygen we breath, according to Anderson. “It is the base of the food chain, and only requires sunlight to grow and work its way up into the system,” she says. “It doesn’t put toxins into the air, and it feeds everything. Seaweed only does good for the environment.” Yet the red algae bloom at Sachuest Beach continues to plague coastal management resources and could pose a threat to local beach economies. Since taking over as beach manager in 2013, Will Cronin ’92 has heard his share of complaints about the seaweed – both on shore and in the facilities, where patrons often misperceive the dried bits of algae as feces on the floor. Working with Wysor and a team of RWU students, Cronin is exploring options to educate visitors about the algae they encounter. Students have suggested a range of ideas, from signage on the back of lifeguard chairs to airplanes flying banners over the beach. “It’s really essential that people understand that this isn’t harmful,” Wysor says. “I think, in large part, the accumulations are a product of the logistics of the area. You’ve got these U-shaped basins, and there are prevailing currents and winds

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With the ban-the-bag movement in full swing in Barrington and beyond, RWU faculty and students go shopping for solutions By Ellen Liberman

PLASTIC S

cientists predicted the emergence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an assemblage of marine debris herded by rotating ocean currents into a calm center point – in 1988. Nine years later, racing boat captain Charles Moore documented its existence as he crossed the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre en route from Hawaii to California. Today, the vast soup of plastic micro-bits swirling beneath the surface is shorthand for ecological destruction. And though the Great Pacific Garbage Patch rotates some 5,000 miles away from Rhode Island’s coastal waters, it was uppermost in the mind of Joseph Roberts when he suggested that the Town of Barrington adopt a ban on plastic shopping bags. Roberts, an associate professor of politics and international relations at Roger Williams, was also a member of the Barrington Conservation Commission in early 2012, when he put together a whitepaper laying the foundation for his proposal.

“I teach a class that deals with humans and their place in the world – What role do humans play? – and we routinely end up talking about the Great Pacific Gyre,” Roberts says. “I had heard about plastic bag bans, but there wasn’t really one in New England. I thought, why not in Barrington? Let’s take the problem from the big-picture world and bring it down to my little town and see if we might make a difference. We’re a waterfront community – we ought to take the lead. And it’s something relatively easy for us to do.” Indeed, Roberts’s initiative moved swiftly from the Conservation Commission to the Town Council. In July 2012, the council voted to turn the recommendation into a two-year ordinance banning the distribution of plastic shopping bags. In December 2012, the new ordinance received final passage, and in January 2014, the ban celebrated its first-year anniversary.

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American consumers use more than 102 billion plastic shopping bags each year. 2009 U.S. International Trade Commission report

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A Town Divided Whether Barrington’s plastic bag ban will make the difference Roberts hoped may depend on whether the town agrees to continue it when the two-year trial expires on December 31. Political science major Erika Johnson, one of four RWU students who conducted a recent survey to gauge support, says that while it indicated widespread approval, the poll also revealed the underside of environmental policies that compel people to change their habits. “There were a lot more in favor of plastic bags than we thought,” Johnson says. “And other people called Professor Roberts a Marxist and a socialist. We got a lot of comments that our survey was biased. None of us were from Rhode Island. We had no agenda.” While supporters argue that plastic bags are cheaper to produce than alternatives, the freedom to carry your purchases in a single-use polyethylene bag has its price. Every minute, all over the world, 1 million plastic single-use carrier bags are pressed into service – that’s 1 trillion plastic bags annually. And American consumers use more than 102 billion each year, according to a 2009 U.S. International Trade Commission report. Many acknowledge that plastic is the curse of modern retail – a source of windblown litter that clogs storm drains, poisons wildlife, pollutes the oceans and grows more toxic as it degrades into ever smaller pieces. But less agreement exists on how to diminish the bags’ presence in the landscape and in the landfills and what should replace them. Each type of bag – plastic, paper and reusable – has a carbon footprint in production and transportation. Each has end-of-life challenges. Barrington Town Councilman Bill DeWitt was skeptical when the Conservation Commission proposed the ban; halfway through this environmental experiment, he remains unpersuaded of its value. He has fielded complaints from constituents inconvenienced by paper bags that disintegrate on rainy days. But his biggest objection is that the ban has not yet led Barrington to a better model of sustainability.

“Unfortunately, many people hoped that the plastic bags would be replaced by people using reusable bags,” he says, “What I think is happening is people are moving from plastic to paper.” A Global Movement The plastic bag ban movement began in 2007 in San Francisco, a city that has long led the nation in sustainability. Bangladesh became the first nation to ban the bags in 2002. To date, at least 44 countries (from Ireland to China to Germany to Mali) either ban plastic bags outright or impose a levy to discourage use. In the U.S., communities in at least 17 states have enacted bag ordinances. Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C., are the largest cities to forego plastic. And while no state has passed legislation to ban the bags, Hawaii has enjoyed a de facto ban since 2012 after all four major counties banned them. The movement is strongest on the West Coast, where dozens of Washington and California communities have imposed bans or levies. California is also ground zero in the legal battle to keep plastic bags in the stream of commerce. The industry has challenged fees on the bags as an unconstitutional tax and forced small municipalities to conduct costly environmental impact studies, required under a California state law for any project designed to protect health and safety. Such lawsuits have slowed, but not stopped, the spread of plastic bag ordinances, says Jennie R. Romer, Atlantic region director of the Clean Seas Coalition and founder of plasticbaglaws.org, a web clearinghouse for information about plastic bag legislation. In California, some communities have moved away from straightforward bag bans to ones that introduce a consumer surcharge when plastic bags are selected. The retailer keeps the fee; consumers are discouraged from taking a disposable bag. This approach was highly successful in Ireland, which in 2002 imposed a 20-cent fee per bag earmarked for an environmental fund. The levy led to 90 percent of shoppers using reusable bags and a 95 percent reduction in plastic bag litter. The government increased the levy to 22 cents in 2007 after plastic bag consumption began to rise.

Advocates say:

Eco-friendly

Convenient, inexpensive, durable

Durable, recyclable, reusable

Opponents say:

Disintegrate in rain

Destructive to environment, wildlife

Consumer cost, inconvenience

“This litigation has been going on for several years, and lessons have been learned,” Romer says. “In response, the ordinance language has been evolving, and that evolution has stood up to lawsuits.” Gaining Ground Barrington did not face an industry-backed lawsuit, or even opposition from retailers. Shaw’s supermarket, the town’s largest retailer, came out in favor of the ban as officials were weighing the proposal. CVS, the town’s other major national retailer, has complied without complaint. “It’s a very smooth transition,” says CVS Pharmacy spokesman Mike DeAngelis. “Our only challenge is when customers come from outside the town and are looking for plastic. Other municipalities where our stores are located have similar bans. In Barrington, they seem to be anecdotally supportive.” In December, Johnson, along with fellow RWU political science students Dylan Barrett, Nathan Mitchell and Nick Moon, presented more empirical evidence to the Town Council that a majority supported the ban. Tapped by Roberts for the independent research project, the team created and posted a survey on the town’s website to gauge reactions among residents and businesses.

“The process was interesting,” says Moon, a senior. “We went into it with the goal of assessing the results of our survey and understanding the value of statistics. It gave us a sense of what a community can do and whether a community will get behind a given measure.” Although only six businesses responded, about 350 citizens took the poll. The results showed that 57 percent supported the ban, 37 percent opposed it and six percent had no opinion. “I think it’s the beginning of a movement that picks up steam,” says Barrington Town Council President June Speakman, also a professor of political science at Roger Williams. “We took the first step, and I’m proud of Barrington. I do think it’s the way the world has to move.” Across Rhode Island, progress has been slow. Legislators have been filing statewide plastic bag ban bills since 2008, but none have survived. In February, state senator Frank Lombardo III (of Johnston, R.I.) introduced a plastic waste reduction bill that would prohibit large retailers from making plastic bags available at the checkout – an amended version of last year’s bill, which also required a 10-cent surcharge on paper

bags. Lombardo dropped the fee provision in response to the concerns of large retailers. “I’m optimistic that this will get through,” Lombardo says. “It usually takes four or five years before people get on board. People just don’t realize the harm that plastic is doing to our environment.” Scourge or Scapegoat? Each year, the Ocean Conservancy mobilizes hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide to collect and inventory garbage they find on or near the beaches or banks of other waterways. In 2012, they picked up more than 1 million plastic bags – the fourth most common item, behind plastic beverage bottles. (Cigarette butts were first on the list.) Farther offshore, scientists find the detritus of bags and other plastics. The Algalita Marine Research Institute, based in Long Beach, Calif., has been sampling the plastic content of the world’s oceans since 1999. It has measured plastic content by weight, density and the ratio to phytoplankton – microscopic organisms that form the basis of the marine food chain. In 2008, for example, a sample from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre demonstrated that the ratio of plastic to phytoplankton had increased by nearly 900 percent since 1999.

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“Let’s take the problem from the big-picture world and bring it down to my little town and see if we might make a difference.” – Associate Professor Joseph Roberts

“Our research over the last 15 years shows that every time we go out to pull surface samples, we are finding bits of plastic pieces,” says Algalita Executive Director Marieta Francis. “In some places, it’s gotten worse because the currents concentrate them in different areas. But, of the 1,100 samples we’ve pulled for all the world’s oceans, all but three contain plastic.” Still, despite the evidence mounted against them, the plastic bag industry counters that plastic bags are the environmental choice. According to the American Progressive Bag Alliance, plastic bags are recyclable (and are recycled), emit less greenhouse gas, and require less energy to produce and transport. Lee Califf, the organization’s executive director, calls bag bans “totally ineffective.” “When you are dealing with pollution on an overall basis, bag bans have no impact on the issue,” Califf says. “You are looking at less than 1.2 percent of the content of waste found in the environment. It’s such a small piece of it. When you are banning, you are not tackling the issue of garbage. You are only impacting the community making their living in our industry and people in grocery stores trying to get their purchases home.” Sarah Kite, director of recycling services for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, tries to steer a middle course. Loose plastic bags in the garbage are an operational nuisance – they become airborne and get stuck in the fences surrounding the facility. Plastic bags in the recycling bins are worse – wrapping themselves around the

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sorting screens and forcing workers to stop the process while they remove the bags. “Paper and plastic have their environmental benefits and negatives,” Kite says. “It really comes down to consumer choice. Both products are recyclable. There’s no doubt that we probably have many more plastic bags in the retail space than are actually needed, but I’m loathe to say that we should remove something from the recycling stream, because we are trying to grow that part of the economy.” Yet it is a woefully under-utilized revenue steam. Rhode Island law requires large retailers to collect and recycle plastic bags, but not enough shoppers make the effort to drop off their bags. In 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that only 12 percent of the category of plastics that includes bags, sacks and wraps were recycled. For Town Councilman DeWitt, the solution is obvious: “Let’s make plastic bags easier to recycle, instead of restricting people’s choice.” Joseph Roberts doesn’t see a retreat. While his scholarship at Roger Williams focuses on Middle Eastern politics, he’s now known as the Bag Ban Guy. And he wears his newfound reputation with a bit of pride. Taking plastic bags out of Barrington may be his best lesson yet on the role humans can play in their environment. “You have to start somewhere,” he says “If you get Barrington to do it, you make it easier for the next community to pursue it, then the state of Rhode Island, and then you are starting to make change.” RWU

In Barrington… 57% support the ban 37% oppose it 6% have no opinion Percentages based on the six businesses and 350 citizens who responded to a survey conducted by four RWU students

In Bristol, Rethinking Recycling “If we can recycle more, we’ll send less trash Occupying a claw-shaped peninsula that dips to landfill, our tipping fees go down, and we get between Narragansett and Mount Hope bays, the Town of Bristol is blessed with abundant natural more money on the rebate,” says Keith Maloney, chairman of Bristol Recycles. “The net effect is a beauty. But the stunning views and historic ties win-win for the town of Bristol.” to the water belie the town’s dirty little secret: Had Bristol met that 35 percent recycling target It’s a bad recycler. in the last five years, Maloney says, the town would In February 2013, the Rhode Island Resource have saved about $420,000 in tipping fees alone. Recovery Corporation’s recycling manager “Obviously, this is significant money.” reported to the Town Council that Bristol was More than a year ago, the Town Council asked one of the worst recyclers among the state’s Maloney and a group of volunteers to generate 39 cities and towns. In 2012, its rate for common ideas on improving the town’s recycling performance. recyclables (paper, bottles and cans) was Bristol Recycles, with no budget or authority, but a 17.5 percent – only half of the 35 percent that passion for the issue, turned to RWU’s Community municipalities are supposed to work toward. Partnerships Center for help. But it isn’t just the town’s reputation at stake. Last spring, Maloney met with eight Roger RIRRC caps the number of tons of trash each Williams students and Associate Professor of community can dump at the $32-per-ton rate. Biology Loren Byrne (also coordinator of the Exceed the maximum, and each extra ton costs University’s sustainability studies program) to $54. Last year, for the first time, Bristol exceeded discuss a three-pronged research project. As part its cap. And fewer recyclables means that the of a capstone project for the sustainability minor, town’s share of the revenue the state disburses Byrne’s students created a survey to determine from the sale of recyclable materials is less than town residents’ recycling attitudes, practices it should be. and concerns; developed a public outreach

and education plan; and prepared a report on recycling best practices elsewhere. Byrne sees a multitude of benefits beyond the recycling research the group conducted. “Working with stakeholders who have real needs gives students a deeper sense of how what we learn in the classroom can be applied to people out in the community,” he says. “It also gives them the skills for interpersonal communication that goes beyond their peers and professors. We want to cultivate that as they enter the workforce. But it’s not just about careers – we’re also teaching students how to be citizens.” For student Rebecca Rokicki ’15, the project dovetailed neatly with her own disposal habits: “A lot of people would like to recycle more, but don’t know how,” she says. “Yet, it’s such a simple step and has greater rewards for society.” Alicia Wilson ’15 is hoping their work sets Bristol on the path to other sustainability practices: “We want to motivate the people of Bristol to recycle more, but also learn how to be more sustainable,” she says. “And that’s good for the environment.” — EL

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Sports Center

Mission Critical

An All-American, ACL or No ACL Volleyball standout Krystie Luczynski ’14 spikes the competition in spite of recurring knee damage By Samantha Christopher ’14

The career-capping Cinderella season should have ended before it began. New England Volleyball Player of the Year, Academic All-District Honors, Academic AllAmerican, All-American – RWU’s first – are just a handful of the accolades that capped senior captain Krystie Luczynski’s final season on the court. Perhaps more remarkable is that she did it all on a torn ACL. But Luczynski is no stranger to overcoming injury. “My sophomore year I fell and blew out my knee and had surgery after the season, but I was only sidelined for a month or so,” Luczynski says. “Junior year I tore my meniscus two weeks before the season. And this season I came down weird during a match and immediately knew I did something to my left knee again.” Still, despite the series of injuries – and seasons cut short – that would have ended the most

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promising of athletic careers, Luczynski managed to lead the Commonwealth Coast Conference in kills per set (3.01) her sophomore year, and in her junior year topped her team in both kills (249) and hitting percentage (.274). Both seasons, plagued with pain, earned her spots on the All-Conference First Team and All-Academic Team. “Krystie is a competitor,” says Ben Somera, her coach. “What drives her is winning, a great quality to have when playing sports. The ability to focus on the task at hand and not make excuses can be a challenge for some, but she handled it really well.” So when her stellar senior season was jeopardized with the ACL tear, Luczynski stood firm: “Nothing would have stopped me,” she says. “It was my senior season and we were doing so well as a team. Everything was finally falling into place.” Athletic trainer Cory Viveiros, who worked closely with Luczynski throughout her collegiate

career, asserts that the middle blocker and outside hitter’s prior injuries, while devastating, gave her the confidence and ability to fight through her most recent one. “She’s definitely had her fair share of injuries, but that’s never stopped her from playing,” Viveiros says. “She’s been through so much, so she knows how it goes with injuries; that helped her this season.” And while she was able to play through the pain on most days, Luczynski says it was much more than her athletic prowess that pushed her to succeed. “It was all ‘mind over matter’ for me. I just kept thinking, ‘this is a situation I’ve been dealt, this is what I have to deal with, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It was about taking myself out of the equation and pushing through to do the best for my team and my teammates.” RWU

Hawks in Numbers:

ON THE RECORD

The Tickah

WITH HANNAH ZYDANOWICZ

If you can keep up with her, rising senior Hannah Zydanowicz is on track to become one of the standout runners in RWU cross country and track and field team history – and with another bid at nationals on the horizon, she’s set to leave the competition in the dust. Here’s a look back at some of Zydanowicz’s career highlights as she heads into her capstone season (more on www.rwuhawks.com):

2 4

5 6

Commonwealth Coast Conference Runner of the Year honors

Individual wins during the 2013 season

Individual school records held in track and field

Top times logged on the RWU all-time 6K list

School records broken in cross country and track and field during the 2013-14 academic year

Hannah’s place out of 275 runners at the 2013 NCAA Cross Country Championship, up 40 spots from her 2012 appearance

18:02.15

Zydanowicz’s school record 5K, set at Westfield State College in October 2013

Leaving It All on the Mat The 2014 Hawks wrestling team – including rising sophomore Alec Golner, pictured here taking a competitor to the mat during a 31-6 team victory over the Southern Maine Huskies on Feb. 8 – marked an outstanding season on the mat and in the classroom, capping a stellar 19-1 season with a 26th place finish at the NCAA Division III National Championships, where three wrestlers representing RWU earned All-American Honors. The Hawks also finished the season with 10 Scholar All-Americans and the sixth highest Team GPA in the National Wrestling Coaches Association rankings.

Sailing takes the Fowle Trophy, claiming the New England Team Race Championship for the first time in school history and earning a bid to the ICSA Team Race National Championships … Women’s basketball co-captain Kaitlyn Bovee, CCC Player of the Year and WBCA All-American, closes out her career as the all-time scoring leader in program history with 1,570 points … Women’s basketball enjoys its best season in program history, setting a new record for single-season wins (22) and making its first appearance in the CCC Championship Game and NCAA Tournament … Equestrian finishes the year as the reserve champion of Region 1 for the second year in a row … Men’s and women’s swimming and diving finish second at the New England Intercollegiate Swimming & Diving Association Championships, the first time that both teams finished second in the same year … Women’s volleyball sets single-season program record with 31 wins, along with its first NCAA Tournament win and fifth straight Commonwealth Coast Conference Championship … Wrestling ties the 1996-97 team for the most dual meet wins in program history, finishing the year with 19 victories and setting a new program mark for single-season winning percentage at .950 … With a continued commitment to community engagement, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee completes a third year of its annual Special Olympics Bocce Tournament. For more news, visit www.rwuhawks.com

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Maya Manna

Political Science / German ’07

Voices in Common

Alumni Profile

The Activist Journalist By Jill Rodrigues ’05 Maya Manna ’07 had always imagined herself working in the United Nations as a defender of essential human rights around the globe, or as an advocate for Amnesty International, taking on the gritty work of exposing injustice. Little did she expect her journey to land her in journalism. But in joining the ranks of her fellow watchdogs, Manna considers her unexpected career ideally suited to her desire to raise awareness of the very real, personal impact that global conflicts so often have on individuals in affected regions. “The power of journalism is amazing – the power of being that person who writes the news that so many people around the world listen to, to find out about what’s actually happening,” says Manna, who as head of the news department for RT Arabic, one of three 24-hour television news channels operated by Russia Today, develops the stories that reach 350 million viewers (and a robust online audience) in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Europe and North America. How did she get there? Growing up in Moscow, Manna was immersed in the social activism of her father, a native Palestinian, who continued to be remotely engaged in the political struggle in his 48

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homeland. When she was 16 years old, her family moved to Amman, and Manna attended the University of Jordan for three years. In 2005, a scholarship from the U.S. State Department brought her to Roger Williams to study political science and German via the PLUS Program, a post-9/11 initiative aimed at creating a cultural and educational exchange among young students from America and their counterparts in Muslim-majority countries, particularly in the Middle East. It was her experience at the University, particularly in Professor June Speakman’s political science classes, that motivated her “to become something,” Manna says, and that she credits with building her activist skills and channeling her into a life of action. Among other efforts, she joined the Model United Nations club; organized a service trip to New Orleans to help Hurricane Katrina victims rebuild homes; and landed an internship at the Embassy of Jordan in Washington, D.C., where she attended Congressional hearings and observed daily diplomatic work. “The PLUS program opened the door for some great students from across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia to come to Roger Williams to pursue their education,” says Katherine Greene,

“The experiences I gained at Roger Williams were essential in making me believe in myself and feel like nothing is impossible, as long as you put your heart and soul into it and work hard to get things done.” – Maya Manna ’07 director of international program development at RWU, who administered the program and worked closely with Manna and other PLUS students. “Maya took every opportunity that came her way, leveraged her time here to its fullest, and from that foundation has built an amazing path forward for herself doing exactly what she loves to do.” Equipped with a political science education and firsthand experience in the U.S., Manna felt it was time to take her knowledge of American society to the Middle East. She traveled first to Jordan, where she could not find work, and then to Moscow, where she landed a job as broadcast news writer with RT English. For the past year she has directed the RT Arabic news department from the RT headquarters in Moscow. Each morning in her office, she tunes her array of televisions to 14 global broadcast stations, gleaning

what’s making headlines, and then meets with her news team to plan the day’s programming. From chronicling the ongoing crisis in Syria to the Russia-Ukraine standoff, her work keeps her motivated to raise awareness about the human impact of international incidents through RT Arabic’s reporting – which has earned accolades from the Al-Ghadeer International Media Festival and third place in Forbes Middle East’s best online news site in the Arab world. “For us it’s very important to bring out the human side of the story – showing the people living through a crisis and again as it’s developing,” Manna says. “With international news, we try to show it from a personal perspective. How does the crisis in Syria affect someone in Damascus? Bread is more expensive; people can’t afford to fix their houses. Simple things like that – everyone can relate to those issues.” RWU

Alumni Events Calendar Reconnect with RWU at these upcoming events for alumni and families.

August 16 Boston Red Sox vs. Houston Astros; Reception preceding the game at House of Blues Boston Fenway Park Boston, Mass.

October 24-26 Homecoming & Family Weekend Bristol Campus · Intercultural Center Alumni Event · Women’s Leadership Network Meeting · Parents Council Meeting · Alumni Luncheon · 4th Annual Alumni Leadership Conference · Alumni Networking Event For additional details and event listings:

http://alumni.rwu.edu/alumni/events (800) 458-7144 x3005 • (401) 254-3005

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Six of the student investment fund managers celebrate the dual national championship with Professor of Finance and CAFE Director Michael Melton (far right).

For Student Investment Fund Managers, National Champions Times Two If these 21 finance students from Roger Williams were college basketball players instead of student investment fund managers, you might call their success a Cinderella story. With a 36.17 percent return on the investments managed during calendar year 2013 (and a risk-adjusted “alpha” of 11.86 percent), the student fund managers from the Center for Advanced Financial Education (CAFE) at the Mario J. Gabelli School of Business became national champions not once, but twice, this spring – March Madness, indeed! In late March, four students representing the CAFE program placed first in the undergraduate core investment strategy category of the student-managed portfolio competition at the Quinnipiac Global Asset Management Education (GAME) IV Forum held in New York City. A week later, two students from CAFE grabbed top honors (along with the Dragon Fund at Drexel University) in the same category at RISE 2014, the University of Dayton’s 14th annual student portfolio competition. The two events represent the pinnacle for the estimated 300 programs nationwide that allow students to make investment decisions with real money. The competitive field is hardly a pushover – the GAME Forum hosted

more than 1,000 students from 131 universities in 21 countries; RISE 2014 drew a similar pool of student investment managers from across the globe. Michael Melton, professor of finance and CAFE director, says the program’s real-world setting – students execute real-time trades with access to Bloomberg terminals and professionallevel security analysis technology – and its by-the-bootstraps approach set it apart from student investment efforts at other schools. “Student fund managers at most of our competitive institutions answer to an advisory board and run their recommendations past a team of professionals,” Melton says. “At Roger Williams, our students do absolutely everything independently – they make the choices, they make the trades, and all the credit goes to them for these two amazing victories on the national stage.”

According to Mario J. Gabelli School of Business Dean Jerry Dauterive, the CAFE program – which launched under Melton’s leadership in Fall 2004 and has sent alumni to successful finance careers for a full decade now – is a long-established example of the University’s commitment to project-based, experiential learning. “One of the hallmarks of an undergraduate education at Roger Williams is the opportunity to get involved in real-world, hands-on projects that prepare graduates to thrive professionally,” Dauterive says. “What better testament is there than our CAFE program? Dr. Melton and his student fund managers are proof that our undergrads can excel on the national stage with the best and brightest business students from across the country.” — Brian E. Clark

Please email information for Class Notes to: alumni@rwu.edu.

Voices in Common

Alumni Profile

Peter Bramante

Performance Studies ’84

Artist, Advocate When most of us think of the arts, the images that spring to mind are of performers – dancers, musicians, artists and actors sharing their talents for the entertainment and education of an appreciative audience. But for Peter Bramante ’84, the arts are more than just performances; the arts, he says, are about community. As the managing director for FirstWorks – a Providence-based nonprofit committed to bringing world-class performing arts programs to the Ocean State – Bramante has witnessed firsthand the transformative connection between the arts and the community, a two-way street. Since joining the organization in 2010, Bramante has (in the true spirit of his alma mater) focused on strengthening partnerships across the state. Collaborations with the City of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, along with more than 75 organizations from the arts, business, education and private sectors, have helped to connect hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders with leading artists, from acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble and jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to the Joffrey Ballet and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

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These performers are often brought in for residencies, Bramante says, and are immersed in the community for up to a week to supplement waning arts education programs – particularly in the inner city. “We should understand the intrinsic value the arts have in terms of developing whole societies and helping us be better human beings,” Bramante says. And Bramante is well positioned to understand this value – both as a performer and an unyielding advocate for the arts. After completing his degree in dance, performance studies and arts management at Roger Williams, Bramante formed his own dance company and later spent 10 years with the Arts and Business Council of Rhode Island raising the state’s profile as a cultural capital and center for artistic innovation. “It was a good balance of my beginnings as an artist and as a maker of work, as well as someone who’s interested in building an organization,” he says. As FirstWorks celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2014, Bramante says the organization is focused on growing access to arts education programs and continuing to develop the FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza, a

daylong series of performances funded by a National Endowment of the Arts Our Town grant that he sees as a catalyst to urban development after last year’s launch brought 40,000 people to downtown Providence. Through it all, Bramante says the breadth of experiences available to him as a student at Roger Williams – along with the flexibility to customize his own course of study within the performing arts program – helped him find his calling. Realizing that everything doesn’t have to be completely rigid has helped him make his way in the world, he says. “That has benefited my professional trajectory from day one.” — Leah Catania ’14

CONGRATULATIONS,

Class of 2014!

As the newest graduates of RWU, we’d like to welcome you to a proud legacy and powerful network of more than 22,000 alumni worldwide. The Roger Williams Alumni Association is your lifelong connection to your alma mater and is here to help you remain engaged with the University in ways that are meaningful to you. And regardless of where your journey takes you next, you will always have a place to call home at Roger Williams.

Erica Skoutas ’05M

Jaclyn Calovine Quinlan ’09

Criminal Justice Groton, Conn.

Communication Grafton, Mass.

In February, Erica started an independent publishing company and recently published her first children’s book, Mommy Are There Monsters? The book is currently available for purchase on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. For more information about Erica and her book, visit www.BluMonkeyPublishing.com.

Jacklyn and her husband, Brian Quinlan, were married Oct. 13, 2013, in Branford, Conn. It was a ceremony filled with Hawk Pride, with a number of RWU alumni in attendance.

Stacie Katz ’08 Psychology Woodcliff Lake, N.J. Stacie, a preschool teacher in Moonachie, N.J., got engaged to Johnathan Newman on April 5, 2014. Stacie and Johnathan are planning their wedding for the fall of 2015.

Adam Meshekow ’09 Business Management Brooklyn, N.Y. In February, Single Touch Systems announced the appointment of Adam as head of national retail sales. Adam was hired to strengthen the mobile media solutions provider’s direct sales and will collaborate with management to plan for future client engagement, product development and deployment.

Resilience.” Joe is currently a Ph.D. student at Texas State University and works for the Texas School Safety Center. He started his research on school safety issues while a student at RWU. Joe was honored for his work as youth preparedness camp coordinator for the Texas School Safety Center (TxSSC) at Texas State. He is responsible for the implementation and oversight of the statewide initiative that aims to prepare communities through their youth.

Mark O’Brien ’12 Pictured: Jaclyn Calovine Quinlan ’09, Alicia MerschenPerez ’09, Cassie Carlson’09, Devan LaChance ’09, Melissa Arroyo ’04, Meghan D’Mello ’09, Kate Lynn Sweeney ’08 and TJ Sweeney ’07.

2010s Joe McKenna ’11 Criminal Justice Mansfield, Mass. On Sept. 24, 2013, Joe was honored at the White House in Washington, D.C., as a “Champion of Change for Community Preparedness and

Biology Foxboro, Mass. Mark was recently accepted into the Peace Corps and departed for Guyana to begin training as a community health promoter. Mark’s early work involves living with a host family, adapting and developing the language and the cultural skills that will help him make a significant and lasting impact. Once sworn into office and assigned to a community in Guyana, he will serve for two years working in cooperation with local people and partner organizations to improve maternal and neonatal care while engaging in projects to fight chronic health issues.

Life After RWU: Career Dinner Conversations More than 60 alumni were invited to attend this year’s Career Dinner Conversations to share with students career planning tips, job search strategies and advice on how to land a job after graduation, among other key skills. The evening began with a “mocktail” reception, where students practiced networking skills with alumni from a variety of professional fields, and was followed with the perennial favorite Dining Etiquette Dinner – an annual skill-building event for students to learn the delicate nuances of how to engage in professional conversation while sharing a meal.

Eric Doremus ’13 Engineering East Greenwich, R.I. Eric was recently hired as a service technician at R&D Technologies – a New England reseller of the full Stratasys line of 3D printing

systems, headquartered in North Kingstown, R.I. In his new capacity, Eric is responsible for assisting with service bureau operations throughout the U.S., as well as technical support for R&D clients throughout New England.

Please email information for Class Notes to: alumni@rwu.edu.

Voices in Common

Alumni Profile

Patricia Page

Education ’06M

The Business of Education The average career path rarely runs straight and narrow – and alumna Patricia Page ’06M is walking proof that where you start is not always where you will finish. In fact, the 2014 Rhode Island Teacher of the Year carved out her early career in the business sector, first as management training and program coordinator for National Grid and subsequently as HR director for the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (now Commerce RI). Still, Page points to education as a persisting

undercurrent in her work: “Particularly when I was doing work in the organizational development and training field and I was doing a lot of competency models, working with higher education institutions to figure out what that skill gap was between what they were looking for and the skills and competencies being developed at that point in the higher education system,” she says. It was when she made the switch from the private to the public sector that Page was tasked with investigating the correlation

between what was required in the workforce and how students were being educated. “It was that work that served as a genesis for me to go back to school,” she says, “and in fact it was former Dean of Continuing Studies John Stout [now retired] who strongly suggested that I go back to get another master’s degree. And that was the beginning of it all.” Since completing her master’s in teaching at Roger Williams, Page has made education her business at the East Greenwich school department where she now teaches business and computer technologies to high schoolers. Her guiding principle is to connect the classroom to the real world. “It is important for teachers to look outside of their classroom for inspiration – to partner with people in other departments within academia, and go outside into the community, to the civic industry organizations, to determine what initiatives they are struggling with and what can be done in your own classroom to support it,” Page says. “That is the vantage point by which I approach my classes.” And like any outstanding educator, this Teacher of the Year has no plans to stop learning. As she continues to prepare high school students for college and careers – and work with state education commissioner Deborah Gist on education policy and teaching improvements – Page predicts a Ph.D. on her horizon. “I’m definitely going to be pursuing my doctorate degree, and I definitely see myself in the education arena.” — Jacob Nussbaum ’14

RWU Annual Fund Reaps Record Generosity on #GivingTuesday Have you heard of #GivingTuesday? It’s a global movement to create a day of giving each year – on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday – to kick off the giving season. Last year, RWU officially partnered with nonprofit organizations from around the world in the second annual #GivingTuesday held on December 3, 2013. The results? RWU received gifts totaling an incredible $115,540 from more than 201 generous donors. Donors included alumni, parents, faculty, staff, students and friends from Bristol, R.I., to Tokyo, Japan. In just one day, we raised 10 percent of our $1 million goal for the entire year and set a single day of giving record for the RWU Annual Fund! #GivingTuesday certainly proved that our University community can come together to make a significant difference in the lives of today’s students. 54

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Ashlyn Miller ’13

CHANGING OF THE GUARD: RWAA OFFICERS

Business Management

Ryan Freed ’13

Political Science/Legal Studies Southampton, N.J.

In Memoriam Cameron Dow ’16 December 1, 2013

David Finger ’68 February 17, 2014

Robert LaRoche ’91 November 3, 2013

Ryan and Ashlyn got engaged in July 2013 and plan to marry in Ocean City, N.J., where they met, in July 2015.

On behalf of the Alumni Association, new president Michael La Scala ’83 delivered a welcome to the Class of 2014 at Commencement in May.

After three years of dedicated leadership of the Roger Williams Alumni Association, Tim Yeaton ’80 and Tim Baxter ’83 are handing over the reigns to a new slate of officers, whose positions were confirmed at the RWAA board meeting on March 24. Michael La Scala ’83 has been selected to succeed Yeaton as Alumni Association president. Heather Culp Boujoulian ’97 will serve as vice president and Tom Comella, Jr. ’92 will serve as treasurer. “I would like to thank Tim Yeaton and Tim Baxter for their service as president and vice president of the Alumni Board since 2011 when we first reestablished the RWAA as a formal governing board for the University,” said Lisa Raiola, vice president for Institutional Advancement. “During the past three years they have provided significant leadership and guidance, and we are deeply appreciative of their service.” In accordance with the RWAA bylaws, La Scala will serve a two-year term as RWAA president. As vice president, Boujoulian will succeed LaScala as president in Summer 2016. All three officers have been actively engaged in alumni leadership, having served on the Alumni Executive Council and volunteered with various alumni initiatives across the University. “Being asked to serve as president of the Alumni Association is an incredible honor,” La Scala said. “The members of the RWAA board and I share a tremendous passion for this University and I look forward to helping grow and strengthen the entire alumni community, and tying it all back to the existing students. This is an exciting time to be an RWU alum and I am so pleased to be involved with this great community.” La Scala – the 2012 recipient of the Alumni Service Award – has worked closely with the Alumni Supporting Admissions Committee, helping to reach out and acquaint prospective and accepted students with Roger Williams, including hosting numerous Freshman Send-Offs at his home in Stamford, Conn. Having also served on the Construction Management Professional Advisory Board, Boujoulian was key in the formation of the RWAA Boston Chapter. Comella has remained engaged with the University for more than a decade and was instrumental in re-engaging the Class of 1992 for their 20th reunion in 2012. “I have utmost confidence in the newly elected leadership and their continued commitment to engaging our vast community of alumni in the life of the University,” Raiola said.

Three Decades of Men’s LAX Men’s lacrosse celebrated 30 years of Hawk Pride at an anniversary celebration on April 5. Current and past players united for a reception near the turf field following an alumni match and varsity win over the University of New England. Terry Kelly presented Ian Powers ’13 with the John Kelly “JK” Award, given annually to the team member who best embodies the spirit of Roger Williams University Men’s Lacrosse through commitment, desire, hard work and heart – both on and off the field – in memory of his brother, John Kelly ’98. Recent recipients Mitri Najjar ’12, Ryan Christensen ’10, Ian Powers ’13 and Dave Plescia ’07 are pictured here with Terry Kelly ’93 and Head Coach Marty Kelly.

From graduation gowns to wedding gowns – your dream waterfront wedding is now at your alma mater! Visit www.rwuweddings.com for additional information on packages and planning your special event at Global Heritage Hall.

What’s New With You? Let us – and your fellow alumni – know what you’re up to! Please send your name, class year, major, address and any professional degrees or certifications you hold along with your class note to alumni@rwu.edu. If you send a photo, please make sure it is at least 300 dpi at a print size of 4” x 6” or larger. You can also call us with your update at (401) 254-3005 or (800) 458-7144, x3005.

Please email information for Class Notes to: alumni@rwu.edu.

Tabula Rasa

17 Things

You Might Not Know About College Food at RWU

Greasy cheeseburgers and soggy fries hanging out in hot boxes? That’s not college food anymore – at least not at Roger Williams. Operated by Bon Appétit Management, the Dining Commons and retail cafés across campus regularly land honors in Best College Food surveys. The University even attracted the likes of celebrity food journalist Mark Bittman, who wrote about “The Future of Cafeteria Food” in the New York Times after a 2011 visit. If you haven’t nibbled or noshed on campus lately, here’s a taste of what you’re missing…

Pop into the Upper Commons kitchens and you’ll see cooks roasting bones and creating fresh stocks. Literally everything is made from scratch, which means more flavor, healthier dishes – plus, the ability to attract talented chefs from top-name restaurants.

With 1 million+ meals served annually, the volume of ingredients is astronomical. Tops on the list? Nearly 17,000 pounds of fresh chicken!

Students are locavores, whether they know it or not. Whether beef from Northeast Family Farms, veggies via the Farm Fresh RI delivery system or gourmet granola from the Providence Granola Project, Bon Appétit buys locally and adapts menus to what’s available.

Keeping the University community happily fed is no small undertaking. The first baker arrives by 4 a.m., and rotating shifts of 200+ employees work 23 out of 24 hours per day.

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The Steak & Lobster Dinner is so popular that the line can literally stretch to the Bayside complex – to pacify the mobs of hungry undergrads, Bon Appétit started taking reservations.

Dairy intolerant? Allergic to strawberries or peanut butter? Need a ketogenic diet? The dining folks at RWU are renowned for customizing dishes for students with special dietary needs, so much so that doctors actually refer future collegians to consider Roger Williams.

Scup chowder. Redfish tacos. Locally farmed oysters. Certainly not menu staples beyond the Ocean State, but you’ll find them at RWU. The University’s chefs buy all fish locally and focus on still-tasty alternatives to popular-butdeclining species like Atlantic cod.

Roger Williams makes the best pizza in the East Bay! Pies from the Lower Commons captured top honors in Pizza Wars, a studentrun, head-to-head competition that pitted local pizza makers against each other in front of 350 hungry student voters.

Partnering with the Food Recovery Network means that on designated nights, properly prepped leftovers don’t go to waste. Instead, they go to Lucy’s Hearth, a shelter for homeless women.

Only took one bite of that five-ounce hamburger? If you’re not a member of the clean plate club, you may find yourself confronted by a Bon Appétit manager for a quick lecture on food waste and social responsibility. A one-week plate-scraping campaign helps to educate, too.

Bon Appétit is going gluten free! The volume of GF requests has increased a hundred-fold, chefs say, so students now find specialty goods from EvaRuth’s Bakery, a GF soup of the day and new dessert recipes, among other items.

Like eggs? Try eating 399,840 of them. That’s the number used during a typical academic year – each one of them produced cage-free on farms right in Rhode Island.

Despite the focus on fresh, healthy, whole foods, students still love college food staples. The most popular menu item? Cap’n Crunch chicken, a go-to dish for some two decades.

Moms and dads, be warned – don’t read the next two sentences! Home-cooked food doesn’t cut it anymore. Word on the quad is that students return from breaks ravenous, pining for Bon Appétit’s wide variety of made-from-scratch meals.

Whether swapping out beef and dairy to lessen the University’s carbon “foodprint” or adjusting menus to educate students on seasonal eating, chefs at Roger Williams say that every meal offers a teachable moment.

Rhody Fresh Milk supplies all liquid dairy products. RWU’s commitment to Rhody Fresh in its early days helped jump-start the program, and now you’ll find milk from the co-op’s farms in stores across the state.

Bon Appétit’s secret mission is to expand student palates, and chefs can actually witness the evolution. Early each semester, burgers and pizza dominate; by mid-semester, volume is down at those stations as students progress to the global station and fresh, healthy specials.

Make a Difference – Support Scholarships! Willie Borkai Psychology Major Class of 2014

Please support RWU scholarships so that more of our students have the opportunities they need to fulfill their dreams. Originally from Liberia, Willie moved to Ghana and eventually settled in Providence, R.I. He was thrilled to be awarded a scholarship to RWU – a school at the top of his list – and he made the most of every opportunity it afforded him to learn and to give back. Willie took on an internship at Bradley Children’s Hospital and an externship at the Maher Center – a local nonprofit providing services for individuals with developmental disabilities. Willie spent plenty of time on campus, too. He was a resident assistant, a co-president of the Multicultural Student Union, and he worked in the admissions office where his enthusiasm for RWU was apparent on every tour he led. Willie says receiving the scholarship made a big difference in his life and that its impact will extend far beyond Commencement day, when he was honored with a President’s Core Values Medallion: “It helped me to fulfill my dream of obtaining my bachelor’s degree, so that one day I can help the community that I grew up in.”

Make a secure gift online at http://giving.rwu.edu/give or mail your gift (payable to RWU) to:

Trustees’ Scholarship Challenge

TWICE THE IMPACT: Gifts made before the end of the fiscal year

on June 30, 2014, will be matched dollar for dollar (up to $100K) by the Trustees’ Scholarship Challenge. Your gift will have double the positive impact for students in need and directly support RWU’s Affordable Excellence initiative.

Office of Annual Giving Roger Williams University One Old Ferry Road Bristol, R.I. 02809

Roger Williams University

Annual Fund

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For an evening of jazz, few venues can match the mix of intimacy and picturesque views – the bayside backdrop at Global Heritage Hall is legendary – than the Live@RWU concert stage in GHH’s atrium. The series celebrated its inaugural year by bringing jazz luminary Freddy Cole and rising star Aaron Diehl for performances. Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences Dean Robert Eisinger launched Live@RWU to expose enthusiasts and newcomers alike to what he calls America’s most significant cultural contribution to the world. Find More Online: http://pdq.rwu.edu/mag10

As part of our ongoing commitment to sustainability, Roger Williams University prints RWU Magazine entirely on paper certified to FSC® standards. By using FSC-certified paper, we’re sure that the raw materials used to produce this magazine come from forests that are managed according to FSC’s strict social and environmental standards.