Prospect, Spring 2011

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the magazine of elmhurst college spring 2011

Office of Communications and Public Affairs 190 Prospect Avenue Elmhurst, Illinois 60126-3296

the magazine of elmhurst college spring 2011

REINHOLD NIEBUHR NOW Elmhurst’s great alumnus still informs the national conversation on war, morality, public life and “the nature and destiny of man.”

the magazine of elmhurst college spring 2011 volume 10, number 2

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Danielle Dobies, an art major from Aurora, Ohio, not only visited but also volunteered at the Northern Illinois Food Bank. These portraits are among the tangible results of her time there.

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If one of Dobies’ goals was to spread word about the food bank, she succeeded. In the days leading up to her show, the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald ran stories on the project. WBEZ radio called with questions. A news crew from Channel 7 paid her a visit on campus.

Her project was the result of a grant by the Thing 1 2 3 Foundation (it takes its name from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat), an Elmhurst nonprofit organization that supports the food bank. Last year, it invited Elmhurst students to submit proposals for projects to help the food bank. Dobies’ idea surprised the foundation’s leadership.

“We thought we’d get a great logistics project or something to do with marketing,” said the foundation’s Jim Ruprecht. “We had no idea we’d get something as magnificent as this, from a student who put her whole heart and soul into the project.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

A student spends much of a year at a food bank, earning the trust of the people there and capturing their lives in sensitive portraits.

prospect Features 22 The Stubborn Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr Elmhurst’s great alumnus tra≈cked in enduring truths about the nature of God and the limits of humanity. By David Brooks

28 Seeing Evil, Plain and Clear Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism acknowledges evil in the depths of human character. But it also asks us not to forget God’s promise of mercy. By Gustav Niebuhr

32 Still Speaking: Of Niebuhr and Faith With a jam-packed forum and lecture on Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy, the College begins a year of dialogue across religious lines. By Andrew Santella

36 The Finishing Touches On the eve of emeritus, John Pitman Weber, professor of art, creates a series of campus mosaics that will add to his outsized legacy. By Jonathan Black

42 Quick Studies Six short takes on a season at Elmhurst, from our own new campus blog. By Andrew Santella 54 A Talent for Listening In 23 tough years as a leader at Oberlin College and as a longtime trustee at Elmhurst, George Langeler ’49 has earned the enduring trust of students and faculty. By Andrew Santella

Departments 02 News The challenges of first-generation college students, a trustee’s gift, the work of a professor and her students on cancer research, a January class in Antarctica, and more.

52 Alumni Spotlight In an era of intense medical sub-specialization, Dr. Brenda Fann ’88 argues that the humble family physician may represent the salvation of the American health-care system.

60 A Thousand Words A student artist’s portraits from the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

Editor Jim Winters Managing Editor Judith Crown Contributing Editor Andrew Santella Copy Editing and Research Margaret Currie, Linda Reiselt Art Direction Matthew Stone, Marcel Maas Design and Production Anilou Price­, Sandbox Studio, Chicago

news student engagement

First in the Family First-generation college students face particular ďŹ nancial, social and academic challenges. At Elmhurst, they ďŹ nd the support they need to make family history.

Photos: Roark Johnson

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First-generation college students Pamela Silva, Romison Saint-Louis and Francisco Silva

For more information on the Direct Connect program, contact Roger Moreano in the O≈ce of Intercultural Student AΩairs: rmoreano@elmhurst.edu

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hen Francisco Silva was 10 students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years old, he moved with his years. Among their peers, the figure is 55 percent. parents from Guadalajara, Bridging this gap is essential for the United Mexico, to the suburbs west States to become a more innovative, productive of Chicago. Silva’s parents made the move so and equitable society. their son could get the kind of education they So why is Silva thriving when so many others never had. Years later, Silva discovered that stumble? being the first in your family to attend college He points to the support he has found at is a dream and a privilege, but it comes with its Elmhurst through programs like Direct Connect, own particular challenges. a pre-orientation session for first-generation A junior at Elmhurst, Silva is an aspiring students that aims to link the newcomers to all teacher, majoring in music education. Like the people and resources they need to succeed nearly all first-generation college students, he in undergraduate life. The students meet other has to work hard to finance his education. A first-gens, get an advance glimpse of campus strong student in high school, he earned a Dean’s life, and learn how to find the people who can Scholarship, took out student loans and works answer their questions. By the time he’d begun 25 hours a week at Starbucks. his first term at Elmhurst, Silva says, he already Another challenge for Silva is less tangible, felt at home. He now sings tenor in the Choral and more specific to first-generation students.

Union and is active in HABLAMOS, the Latino When the going gets tough in college, he wishes student group. he could turn to his family for advice. But nobody That’s the kind of engagement the College in his family has ever experienced anything like wants to encourage, says Roger Moreano, the what he’s going through. “You’re alone, basically,” director of intercultural student aΩairs who he says. “You face everything new.” oversees Direct Connect. A couple of decades Making the transition from high school to ago, Moreano himself was a first-generation college is tough enough for any student, but student at Northern Illinois University. He the challenges are especially daunting for those remembers feeling uneasy about entering campus with no family history in higher education. life. “I knew I wanted to be involved on campus, Like Silva, many “first-gens” face financial pres- but I didn’t know who to talk to.” sures, especially when family members lack Pamela Silva, a sophomore first-generation personal experience in navigating the maze of student (and no relation to Francisco), credits federal, state, private and institutional financial Direct Connect with helping her make the aid options. transition to college and get involved on campus.

According to a study published in The College “Direct Connect broke the ice for me. It gave Student Journal, first-gens also are more likely me a feel for what college is about and it gave to come from a low-income household, more me an idea of what to expect,” Silva says. “You likely to be a minority, and more likely to speak go in saying, ‘I don’t know anyone’ and ‘I’m a language other than English at home. Some not sure how this works,’ and you end up feeling struggle to embrace their new college lives ‘Yeah, this is a good place for me.’” without alienating parents who never had the Romison Saint-Louis knows the feeling. A opportunity for a good education. Some say native of Haiti, Saint-Louis moved with his they feel guilty about pursuing a costly college family to suburban Niles, Illinois, when he was degree while their families continue to struggle 7. Like Silva and Moreano, he became the first financially. member of his family to attend college. The It all is enough to derail a surprising portion prospect was daunting. “When I saw some of the of first-generation students. According to the gpas and test scores of other students, I freaked Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in out,” he says. “I wasn’t sure about matching up Education, just 11 percent of first-generation to some of the really smart kids.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

Like Silva, Saint-Louis plans to become a teacher. He’s now a senior majoring in elementary education. He says his own teachers and advisers helped build his confidence. “I kept hearing the faculty and staΩ here really care and want to help,” he says. “So I went and talked to people. It made a huge diΩerence.” He played football for a while, and the team made a diΩerence, too. These days, Saint-Louis is the president of the College chapter of Habitat for Humanity, the vice president of Lambda Chi Alpha, an active member of the Global Poverty Club, and a resident adviser in Niebuhr Hall.

Some first-generation students say it can be di≈cult to embrace their new college lives without alienating parents who never had the opportunity to attend college. “That cultural separation from home is something other students don’t necessarily have to worry about,” says Rabia Khan ’98, a former first-gen at Elmhurst who is now assistant director of residence life at Loyola University Chicago. “First-generation students sometimes have to educate their parents about college. They have to explain why it’s important to live on campus, for example, or just how much work they have to do as a college student.”

One of the biggest predictors of success for first-generation students is the type of college they choose. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, first-gens are more likely than others to start out at community colleges, probably for financial reasons. This factor reduces their chances of ultimately earning a baccalaureate degree. The research also shows that such students are more likely to complete a four-year degree if they start at a four-year college.

That is no surprise to Khan. She recalls the kind of support she found at Elmhurst, and seeks to provide the same kind of support to students at Loyola. “People at Elmhurst who didn’t even know me worked to help me to succeed,” she says. “That’s why I’m in this profession now. I would never pass up a chance to help a student.”

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news student life

The Art of Walking Backwards

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n most places, jaywalkers can get a ticket a prospect with a casual interest in Elmhurst from overzealous cops. At Elmhurst, into an applicant, and ultimately into an engaged Jaywalkers get paid (though not much). student and loyal alumnus. For applicants who Tra≈c is unaΩected, however, and nobody already are leaning Elmhurst’s way, a tour often gets hurt. seals the deal.

Elmhurst’s “Jaywalkers” are the enthusiastic According to a survey of prospective students student tour guides that the admission o≈ce by the admission o≈ce, among the wide employs to lead prospective first-year and transfer variety of communications tactics that the o≈ce students around the College Mall and through employs, campus tours rank second in terms of the Frick Center, the library, the athletic facilities influencing prospects to become applicants. and the residence halls. The group’s name is a (The College web site ranks first.) And unlike a play on the varsity teams’ moniker, the Bluejays. print or electronic publication, a tour, while only Jaywalkers are also known as “Student Ambassometimes individual, is always highly personal. sadors,” and their work is no walk in the park.

“It’s about fit,” says Rolando Chacón, the Among other things, they need to learn to walk admission counselor who oversees the Jaywalkbackwards without bumping into lampposts, ers. “If prospective students take a tour, feel trees, professors, fellow students or some combi- like they fit in with the campus environment nation thereof. They also need to master minute and believe they can see themselves here, they details about campus facilities and architecture, are much more likely to attend.” learn the history of the College since 1871, and Student ambassadors become adept at walkprepare to answer arcane or otherwise curveing backwards during tours so they can maintain ball questions from prospective students and eye contact and fluid conversations. “It’s quite their parents. tricky,” says Julie Provenza, a senior from A visitor once asked Jaywalker Tyler Wernecke, Mount Prospect. During one backwards walk a sophomore from Decatur, Illinois, if playing through the cafeteria, she bumped a set of Pokémon was a college requirement, since the garbage cans, causing another student to miss potential applicant had noticed several Elmhurst a bin and spill her tray all over the floor. Not a students playing it. (Answer: no.) great way to say “Welcome to Elmhurst!” While Like Pokémon, the campus tour is not a giving a tour in the rain, Allyson Vertigan, a requirement, but it also is not a game. It is a vital, junior from upstate New York, lost her sandals often decisive, hands-on way for prospective and fell on the sidewalk. The ambassadors students to connect with the College and see must also learn the art of the graceful recovery. if it’s a fit for them. The tour frequently turns “I just laugh it oΩ and make a joke about how

Photos: Roark Johnson

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Meet the Jaywalkers—the student ambassadors who show soon-to-be students around Elmhurst, showing oΩ the campus and giving it a friendly face.

walking backwards isn’t on my résumé,” says Vertigan.

Jaywalkers not only walk the walk, they talk the talk. This requires them to memorize a mountain of information, found in the Jaywalkers Tour Manual, about campus highlights, academic departments and extracurricular activities.

The full-day training session—Jaywalking 101—includes team-building activities, an intercultural presentation, and guest speakers from various departments and o≈ces.

To perfect their presentation, new Jaywalkers spend time shadowing more experienced guides. “It took a while, but it’s just like practicing an instrument,” says Richard Palys, a junior from Crystal Lake, who should know; he’s majoring in jazz studies and music composition. For her first six tours, Genesis Jelkes, a senior from Chicago, secretly kept the Jaywalkers handbook in her back pocket. She also practiced by giving mini-tours to friends while walking to class, interjecting, “Did you know…?” as they passed some campus landmark.

Jaywalkers work in pairs. At least one guide lives in a residence hall, so future students can visit the room and glimpse campus living. During a morning huddle before a recent tour they did together, Provenza and Vertigan bantered about the dubious state of each of their rooms and debated which was the least oΩensive to show the prospect, all within earshot of wannabe Bluejay Zach Blaisdell and his parents, who couldn’t help but laugh.

Dean of Admission Gary Rold answers commonly asked questions about admission to Elmhurst College.

Go to elmhurst.edu/askdean.

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Most Jaywalkers try to inject humor into their tours. Many current students, Vertigan says, fondly recall the corny jokes of their long-ago tour guides. Wernecke has a routine in place when the tour arrives at the campus heating and cooling plant, which melts the snow and ice on the sidewalk and looks a little space age.

“When we get to it, I say, this is our launching pad and on average we launch five to seven rockets a year,” Wernecke says. “I get most people on the tour to believe me. I’m pretty good with the delivery.”

Overall, though, Jaywalkers must take their job seriously. Prospective students are nothing if not earnest; they really want to know the ins and outs of college life. Vertigan says her favorite spot on the tour is the Frick Center, where she shows oΩ the various ways Elmhurst students can get involved beyond the classroom: service groups, student government, fraternities, sororities, the newspaper, the radio station, athletic teams, music ensembles, dozens of clubs and organizations.

Wernecke’s favorite part of the tour takes place in a classroom, where he talks about the College’s academic rewards and challenges. “I love to talk about my experiences with the faculty.” He tells each newcomer, “They’re always willing to help you.” The most frequent question he gets: “Are classes hard?” (Answer: “definitely.”)

Beyond tours, the job requires Student Ambassadors to host prospective students overnight in the residence halls and to assist in Prospect/ Spring 2011

various admission programs, including panels, presentations and, eventually, student registration. Any student in good academic standing after at least a term at Elmhurst can apply to be an ambassador, but not everyone makes the cut. Chacón selects the final group of 25 Jaywalkers. “The perfect candidate speaks loudly, has an outgoing personality, believes in the Elmhurst Experience,” and can articulate that belief not only loudly but with conviction, he says. “I tell them that they are walking billboards for our institution.”

Jaywalkers do their best to engage prospective students personally and find out what subjects and activities are of interest to them.

Then they note the hundreds of academic courses and dozens of extracurricular activities that match up.

At the moment, Elmhurst is the top choice of prospect Zach Blaisdell. He hopes to major in computer game and entertainment technology.

The campus tour serves Blaisdell more as a confirming than a deciding factor. Provenza and Vertigan mention several activities the quiet high school senior might want to consider, such as trying out for his own show on WRSE-FM, the College radio station.

“Many students hide behind their curious, questioning parents and leave it all to them,” Jelkes says. “The way I handle those who aren’t so chatty is by going outside of the standard speech, by giving accounts of my own personal experience. Finding a subject that will finally

The tour frequently turns a prospect with a casual interest in Elmhurst into an applicant, and ultimately into an engaged student and loyal alumnus. prompt a question from a quiet student is gratifying.” Wernecke asks a lot of open-ended questions. “I always try to make the members of the group feel like they already are a part of Elmhurst. No matter who you are, I tell them, you will fit in here.”

Most Jaywalkers lead four or five tours a week.

Between them, Provenza and Vertigan also participate in 14 campus organizations. Each has studied abroad several times. They share these experiences at the end of their tour with Blaisdell, which, like all tours, ends in a classroom. They finish by writing some Elmhurst statistics on the blackboard: faculty to student ratio (13 to 1); average class size (18 students), number of courses taught by a graduate student or teaching assistant (0).

For Elmhurst’s Jaywalkers, the compensation is more than monetary. “Being a Jaywalker reminds me of everything I love about Elmhurst,” says Vertigan. “The best result I’ve gotten from a tour is seeing a student select Elmhurst College.”

by Rita Colorito

news board of trustees

A Walking Advertisement for Elmhurst Four decades ago, the College gave Dennis Patterson his start on a stellar career in health care. Now, his energy and generosity is driving the Science and Health Initiative, the largest capital eΩort in Elmhurst’s history.

Photo: Roark Johnson

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Dr. Dennis J. Patterson ’70

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ennis Patterson was no ordinary candidate for a doctorate. At 62, he was older than nearly every member of the faculty committee that reviewed his dissertation. What’s more, he knew his academic subject from personal experience in a way few graduate students, or even seasoned professionals, ever do.

Patterson’s dissertation studied the correlation between the personality traits of hospital chief executives and their ability to control their institution’s labor costs. He submitted his work to the faculty committee last summer as he moved toward completing his doctorate in education at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

The topic was a natural for him. By the time he started his doctoral studies, Patterson had built a distinguished career as a hospital executive and health-care consultant in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. He had earned a master’s degree in hospital administration at George Washington University. He had served as vice chairman of GW’s medical center, as a fellow of the Manchester University Health Unit in England, and as an associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. He had lectured internationally on health-care issues, and had written a book, Indexing Managed Care, a guide to interpreting market data for hospital administrators, published in 1997 by McGraw-Hill.

Beginning in the 1980s, Patterson specialized in turning around faltering hospitals and helping health-care executives achieve outstanding professional performance. When it came time to do his academic research, he was able to tap a network of hospital CEOs who for decades had known and respected his work. “If some

young researcher sends a questionnaire to a CEO, in most cases it’s going to end up in the trash,” Patterson says. “In my case it was, ‘Sure, Denny, I’d be glad to.’”

Patterson worked on the dissertation for almost three years: researching, writing, revising and struggling to interpret the obscure comments his advisers made on his draft chapters.

What he learned from his research, he jokes, is that “I’m not very much into research.” It was an experience unlike anything he’d known in a long and useful professional life. As a chief executive, he was accustomed to solving problems intuitively and moving quickly to the next crisis. In his doctoral work, he had to work on more esoteric issues and to take a more methodical approach to them.

Given the long record of achievement that Patterson brought to Pepperdine, the question needs to be asked: Why did he go for the degree at all? When he had little left to prove, why face such a daunting intellectual challenge so late in his career?

“I did it because I had promised myself I would,” Patterson says.

It seems that as a student at Elmhurst College more than four decades ago, Patterson had made three resolutions: He would write a book.

He would make a good living. And he would earn a doctorate. The degree, he says, “was the last thing left on my bucket list.”

One day in the 1960s, not long after he had left his parents’ home in New Jersey and had arrived at Elmhurst College, Denny Patterson indulged his emerging practice of setting goals for himself.

Walking along Chicago’s lakefront, he noticed a glassy, modernist black skyscraper with a graceful, eccentric shape. It was Lake Point Tower, one of the city’s more desirable addresses.

Patterson decided that he would live someday in Lake Point Tower.

Less than a decade later, he was living there.

When he sets out to do something, Patterson says matter-of-factly, he usually finds a way to do it.

In many ways, the latest Patterson enterprise is the most ambitious and forward looking of Prospect/ Spring 2011

The new Science Center will add classrooms and dramatically increase the space devoted to teaching labs and student-faculty research. It will house The Dr. Dennis J. Patterson Center for the Health

Professions, as well as a state-of-the-art nursing simulation laboratory. There will be specialized lab space for microbiology, botany, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, physics and astronomy.

his career. He wants to help transform the way the sciences and health professions are taught at his alma mater, which he has served as a trustee since 2006.

In October, Patterson pledged $2 million to the Science and Health Initiative, the largest capital project in the College’s 140-year history.

The gift is one of the largest ever received by the College. It will support the transformation of the Arthur J. Schaible Science Center, an aging campus workhorse, into a state-of-theart facility for research, teaching and learning.

The $46 million Science and Health Initiative aims to enhance and enlarge Schaible to accommodate the swelling number of Elmhurst students choosing to major in the sciences and health-related fields, and to support new and emerging styles of academic and professional preparation. About one in three Elmhurst students currently majors in a science or healthrelated discipline. Over the past five years, the number of students majoring in those areas has grown by more than 20 percent.

“Our goal is to create a first-rate facility that not only meets student demand but also embraces innovation and anticipates new pedagogies,” says President S. Alan Ray. “We intend to integrate the science and health disciplines in excellent spaces where students can easily put together their academic instruction with their eventual practice of service to patients. Dennis Patterson shares our dream, and his generosity will help to make it a reality.”

The College has named one of its most inventive academic units in Patterson’s honor. The Dr. Dennis J. Patterson Center for the Health Professions is a resource center for students intending to pursue careers in health-related fields. The Patterson Center cuts across organizational lines, bringing together students, faculty and working professionals from an array of disciplines: from biochemistry and molecular biology to neuroscience and nursing. It provides academic advising to students in a range of health fields, and provides them with connections to labs, clinics, hospitals and internships in the Chicago area and beyond.

“Dennis Patterson has dedicated his life to

the service of excellence in the delivery of health care,” says President Ray. “He continues to lead the way to excellence through his example of philanthropy at the highest level. It’s fitting that a vital center of the College’s intellectual life and student service will bear his name.”

Elmhurst’s ambitious blueprint for a new science center is a product of the strategic planning process that began to occupy the campus soon after the arrival of President Ray in 2008.

The plan clearly struck an early chord with Patterson. It includes new labs, classrooms, an advanced nursing simulation laboratory, and dramatically increased space for faculty-student collaborative research. The idea is to create more hands-on experiences that will allow students to fully integrate classroom learning and clinical practice.

“I like what Elmhurst is trying to do with science and the health professions,” says Patterson.

After decades spent on the front lines of the famously dynamic health-care world, he is impressed by the College’s focus on undergraduate research, pedagogical innovation and professional teamwork. It all resonates with the philosophies that for years have guided his work with health-care organizations.

In 1966, when Denny Patterson arrived as a freshman at Elmhurst, the Schaible Science Center had just opened on the south end of campus.

Patterson hailed from Lindenwold, a small, working-class community in southern New Jersey. His father, Joseph, was a machinist at RCA who had married his high school sweetheart. Neither Joseph nor Dorothy Patterson had attended college, but they were proud when Denny’s fifth-grade teacher told them that their son clearly was college material. He applied to Elmhurst on the recommendation of a high school counselor and, though he also was accepted at Villanova and Tulane universities, he chose Elmhurst without ever visiting. It oΩered the best package of financial aid.

When he finally got a glimpse of the campus, Patterson was impressed. “I had an idea of what a college was supposed to look like from movies and magazines,” he says. “Elmhurst looked

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news board of trustees

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When completed, the expanded and renovated Schaible Science Center will include 10,000 square feet of teaching laboratories and 4,500 square feet of space for faculty-student collaborative research.

like that.” The actual experience of college “was stunning to me. It was entirely diΩerent from anything I’d known.”

Amid the stately lawns and red-brick buildings, some executed in colonial style, one building stood out. To Patterson, the Science Center’s modern lines looked positively space age. A political science major, he took only one course there, in industrial psychology.

Patterson’s eventual career in health care grew, serendipitously, out of his undergraduate interest in politics. After his sophomore year, he landed an internship with the o≈ce of Richard B. Ogilvie, the president of the Cook County Board and a future governor of Illinois.

Working for the human resources department, Patterson often visited the o≈ces of various county agencies. What he saw at the county hospitals caught his attention. “The people who worked there seemed to be excited to come to work,” he says. “They knew they were doing something that people needed.” Patterson tagged along with orderlies and walked the halls of Cook County Hospital to get a feel for life in the wards. After graduation, he took a job in the president’s o≈ce at Oak Forest Hospital, a county facility in the south suburbs.

“That’s how I got interested in hospital administration,” he says simply. “At every turn, the College opened doors for me, doors I never would have opened for myself.”

Patterson’s early executive experiences came in large teaching hospitals in Canada. Later, as a partner in Ernst and Young’s London o≈ce, he oversaw the consultancy’s health-care operations in the U.K. In 1999, he helped launch the hospital management firm Wellspring Partners, which was sold in 2007 to Chicago-based Huron Consulting. Two years ago, he co-founded the Collaborative for Leadership Excellence, a firm that coaches senior executive teams in creating high-performance hospitals.

Turning around troubled hospitals became a Patterson specialty. At Wellspring, he helped save Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, a mainstay of health care on Chicago’s South Side.

Mercy is the oldest hospital in the city; it treated Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 after he was shot in Milwaukee. Following a period of mismanagement in the 1990s, Mercy was struggling to survive. Patterson cut costs and eliminated jobs to help restore the institution’s financial health. When community leaders from the surrounding neighborhoods voiced their dismay about the loss of badly needed jobs, Patterson took the time to describe to them in detail the hospital’s predicament. The situation was so dire, he said, that if the hospital failed to eliminate 40 jobs in the short term, the community would lose 1,000 jobs in the long term. “They came to see my dilemma,” he says.

Fran Brunelle has known Patterson for a

quarter-century. Together, the two launched the Collaborative for Leadership Excellence, which Brunelle now serves as president. “Denny is compelling in his ability to convince others of the merits of a desirable project,” Brunelle says. “He also is indefatigable.”

Ask Patterson about his latest ventures and he will talk about replacing internal competitiveness—a feature of the consulting partnerships in which he spent much of his career—with a more collaborative approach. His staΩ is required to share information about client contacts, documents created for presentations, even their calendars. “It’s a learning organization,” he says.

“Anybody in the organization can have access to all the knowledge of the organization.” It’s an approach Patterson says he’s wanted to implement for years; now, information technology has made it practical and aΩordable.

Two years ago, Patterson’s diverse experiences made him a natural choice to co-chair the Science and Health Initiative, along with his fellow trustee Jean Sander ’74, the associate dean of student aΩairs at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State. “Elmhurst oΩers the kind of personal education that builds the confidence of students and prepares them to take on the world,” Patterson says. “The new Science Center will allow us to oΩer state-ofthe-art equipment and the seamless, interdisciplinary approach to learning that’s necessary for success in today’s world. I see the initiative as a critical step in the College’s march to the forefront of the nation’s liberal arts colleges.”

The new Science Center is to be built in three phases. Patterson’s gift is an opening salvo on the required fundraising. He hopes his gift not only will move the Science Center project toward a successful conclusion but also will help to establish an enlarged culture of philanthropy among Elmhurst’s 23,000 alumni.

On just about any weekday, a visitor to the current Science Center will find clusters of students pouring out of its labs and classrooms to meet in improvised study spaces. It’s not unusual to see students take a seat on the floor along an unclaimed stretch of hallway. Demand for lab space is high. In a typical term, more than 1,400 students take classes in nursing, psychology and the physical sciences, totaling

“I felt it was time to give back to the place that gave me so much,” says Patterson. “I hope my gift challenges others to do the same.”

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some 8,500 credit hours. The Science and Health Initiative will create a new 70,000square-foot building to accommodate their work. More than 10,000 square feet will be devoted to teaching labs; some 4,500 square feet will be devoted to student-faculty research collaborations.

Those who know Patterson well call him a tireless promoter of his alma mater. Brunelle says that he had never heard of the College before meeting Patterson; now he is extremely well versed in Elmhurst lore. “Dennis has tremendous pride in Elmhurst and loves to talk about the quality of the education it provides,” Brunelle says. “He’s a walking advertisement for Elmhurst.”

Patterson has a simple explanation for his enthusiasm. “Elmhurst gave me a lifetime of opportunity,” he says, “and it’s doing the same for today’s students. I felt it was time to give something back to the place that gave me so much. I hope my gift challenges others to do the same.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

Harold E. Pendexter Jr. 1934–2011

An Irreplaceable Friend Hal Pendexter loved small colleges, big musicals, old friends, young protégés, the coast of Maine, his family and life itself. A man of wide interests and deep concern, he served Elmhurst College for more than 12 years as a trustee, benefactor and student mentor. Mr. Pendexter died on January 27 of complications from T-cell lymphoma. He was 76.

“Hal Pendexter is an irreplaceable trustee and friend,” said Elmhurst President S. Alan Ray. “His energy, dedication and generosity to our College—his sheer heart—were simply extraordinary. Hal will be sorely missed by me and by everyone who knew him.”

A native of Portland, Maine, Mr. Pendexter graduated from Bowdoin College in 1957. That same year he began a remarkable career with USG Corporation, the Chicago-based Fortune 500 company. He retired from USG in 2000 as senior executive vice president and chief administrative o≈cer.

His association with Elmhurst College began in the 1990s, when the College oΩered bachelor’s degree completion programs in business management at USG’s corporate headquarters in Chicago’s Loop. Mr. Pendexter worked with the family of the late Robert Day, USG’s chief executive o≈cer, to establish the Robert J. Day Endowed Memorial Scholarship at Elmhurst.

A member of the Board of Trustees since 1998, Mr. Pendexter served as chair of the admission and human resources committees. He took an abiding interest in the professional development of Elmhurst staΩ and in the personal development of Elmhurst students. “He was a loving taskmaster who cared deeply about students,” says Lawrence B. Carroll, executive director of the Center for Professional Excellence. “He wanted students to work hard, and if they didn’t, he called them on it.”

Mr. Pendexter sustained a lifelong passion for live theater. He served on the board of Victory Gardens Theater, the Tony-award-winning Chicago company, and was a regular audience member at productions from the Maine State Music Theatre to Lincoln Center.

Mr. Pendexter is survived by his wife, Marcia; their children John, Dianne and Stephanie; and six grandchildren.

news faculty & student research

Divining the Secrets of Cancer Cells In a new campus lab, Dr. Stacey Raimondi and her student researchers work to identify the genes and proteins that turn less invasive cancers into aggressive ones.

Photo: Roark Johnson

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The research of Stacey Raimondi (above right) is one of an increasing number of studies that examine genetic pathways in cancer cells for information that could point toward new treatment strategies.

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tacey Raimondi is looking for clues to the molecular mechanisms of breast cancer—clues that might ultimately yield ways to shut down the most aggressive and invasive kinds of cancer.

Given the seriousness of her enterprise, students new to Raimondi’s research laboratory sometimes are taken aback when they see how enthused she gets about the rapid growth of cancer cells in her culture lab. “I have to tell them, ‘That’s right, we’re trying to grow some

really nasty cancer in here,’” says Raimondi, an assistant professor of biology. “Those cancer cells are going to tell us all kinds of interesting things.”

Those cancer cells live in a tissue-cell incubator in Raimondi’s new lab, a compact, white, sterile space oΩ a corridor in the basement of the Schaible Science Center. Showing a visitor around one afternoon, Raimondi stopped to pull a pair of flasks from an incubator. It was time for her to check up on the cancer cells.

Peering into a microscope, she seemed pleased by what she saw. “Oh, you are very happy,” she said, not quite under her breath.

She saw that the cells were defining themselves by taking on one of two shapes. Some were rounded and globular. Others had stretched into a longish, spindle-like shape: a telltale sign of cancer poised to grow aggressively.

Understanding the molecular diΩerences between the two kinds of cells would help answer a central question of Raimondi’s research: What genes and proteins trigger aggressive growth in cancer cells, turning less invasive cancers into more invasive ones? The consequences could hardly be more crucial. The fiveyear survival rate for patients with localized breast cancer is 98 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute. Once the cancer has metastasized, the survival rate drops to 23 percent.

“If we find the proteins that make those circular cells stretch—that make the cancer more invasive—we’ve learned something very important clinically,” says Raimondi. “If we can figure out what makes cancer worse, then

Photo: Luis Bueno

The potential consequences of Raimondi’s research could hardly be more crucial. “If we can figure out what factors make cancer worse, then removing those factors should make it easier to treat.”

Founders Medal Awarded to Barbara Swords, Abner Ganet On December 5, the College awarded the 2010 Founders Medal to Professor Emerita Barbara W. Swords and Trustee Emeritus Abner S. Ganet at the President’s Appreciatiom Dinner.

removing that factor should make it better, or Raimondi does her work. She had previously easier to treat.” relied on an agreement with the University of Raimondi’s investigation is one of an increas- Chicago to provide materials for her research. ing number of studies that examine genetic The new setup, she said, gives her more control pathways in cancer cells for information that over the pace of her experiments. could point toward new treatment strategies.

It also makes it easier for the professor to Scientists know that aberrations in the way involve undergraduates in her work, providing genes are spliced inside cancer cells aΩect the them with prized research experiences. This way DNA and RNA translate into proteins in year, five students are working with Raimondi those cells. Raimondi explains that one aberon various aspects of her investigation. Dan rantly spliced gene—called DNMT3B7—appears Kelpsch, a junior who plans to pursue a Ph.D. in almost every kind of cancer cell, but is not in cancer biology, says his experiences in found in normal cells.

Elmhurst’s new facility give him an edge in In 2007, while working as a visiting scientist preparing for his graduate work. “I’m learning a at the University of Chicago, Raimondi noticed lot of the techniques and tricks of the trade,” that researchers trying to express that gene in he says. “Not all undergraduates have access cells were inadvertently producing unexpected to that kind of learning, especially at larger changes in the cells. Under the microscope, she universities.” could see the cells changing shapes in a way “Research really is imperative for students that suggested that the cells were changing their these days,” Raimondi observes. “If they don’t phenotype. have research experience, they won’t be com“I think you just made some very aggressive petitive for the best graduate programs and cancer cells,” Raimondi told her colleagues. medical schools. This lab gives our students the She has been pursuing the connection chance to learn more advanced techniques, between aberrantly spliced genes and the pro- and that gives them an edge.” What’s more, gression of tumors ever since. She wants to know there’s no substitute for working with live cells. if genes like DNMT3B7 are altering cellular “We can lecture about it, but if we don’t give signaling pathways in breast cancer—in eΩect, students experience with live cells, they’re triggering tumor progression. “The goal,” she only getting part of the picture.” As they search says, “is to determine the mechanisms and for cures for cancer, today’s researchers, and pathways that promote tumor progression with tomorrow’s, need to see the whole picture. the hope of turning them oΩ in aggressive cells.”

Raimondi’s eΩorts received a big boost last summer with the arrival on campus of a new tissue culture facility that allows her to maintain her own inventory of live cancer cells. The new lab changes nearly everything about the way Prospect/ Spring 2011

The medal is among the highest honors awarded by the institution.

Swords began teaching English at the College in 1960. She retired in 1989 and was named professor emerita in 1996. Beloved by her students, Swords had a reputation for intelligence, wit and patience. In 2006, she established the Robert Swords Memorial Fund in honor of her late husband, also a distinguished scholar and professor of English at the College.

Ganet, a retired accountant and former two-term mayor of Elmhurst, has had a remarkable life. Ganet’s Army unit liberated Jewish prisoners from concentration camps at the end of World War II. Years later—in 1994—he met Elie Wiesel when the Nobel Peace Prize winner was the guest speaker at the College’s annual Holocaust Education Project. Wiesel told Ganet that he would have been killed at Buchenwald had Ganet’s division not liberated the camp and encouraged him to tell his story. Ganet began speaking to school and civic groups about his Holocaust experience and donates funds received to the College.

A Correction A feature on iconic Elmhurst professors in the Summer 2010 issue, “The Lessons of the Masters,” incorrectly stated that Professor Barbara Swords retired in 1980. She retired in 1989. Also, writer Robert Goldsborough should have been credited for his 2006 interviews of Douglas Mayfield ’73 (on the late Robert Swords) and David Rasche ’66 (on Barbara Swords). Prospect regrets the error and omission.

news study abroad

Please Don’t Step on the Penguins On a January Term excursion to study climate change in Antarctica, Elmhurst students explore global warming and encounter a scene of incomparable beauty.

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ou don’t exactly think of Antarctica as a tropical destination. But when two Elmhurst juniors joined an excursion to the continent during a recent January Term, they found temperatures that were well above the mercury back home in the Midwest.

It was summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Our teacher, who was from St. Paul, had his computer with him and checked the weather reports from Minnesota,” said Erin Hennessy, an elementary education major from Oswego,

Photos: Joe Re

A glt quid mod et es eationsequia exceruntiam quam volorunda posaped quas atiur? Quis sust, adit, que id quam sus ut fuga. Nam repelis quosamet as dusdam num et quodigent eruptior apicipiciae omnihiciet qua.

Illinois. “One day, we had an outside temperature of 46 degrees Fahrenheit. It was in the single digits in the Twin Cities.”

Hennessy and Joe Re, a jazz studies major from Elmhurst, were among 12 students enrolled in the J-Term course called Penguins, Icebergs and Tropical Jungles: Understanding Climate Change around the Globe. Their three-week voyage included stops in Argentina and Costa Rica. It was part of an international program administered by the Upper Midwest Association for Intercultural Education (UMAIE), a

Antarctica has no native population. About 4,000 scientists live at research facilities during the short summer, when the continent sees around 30,000 tourists.

The students were surrounded by ice-covered mountains.

They maneuvered little motor boats next to seals resting atop icebergs. Whales would show themselves every day.

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consortium of six college and universities, including Elmhurst. The course was taught by Professor Terry Flower, chair of the physics department at Saint Catherine University in St. Paul.

The students examined the air and water temperatures in Costa Rica and Antarctica. In both locations, they also charted ultraviolet rays from the sun and took readings of electromagnetic forces.

Their journey by ship from Argentina took them through the stormy Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. “We crossed the roughest seas in the world. We spent four days rocking back and forth,” Hennessy recalled. “Many people got sick. But it was all worth it when we saw Antarctica’s beauty. We saw more penguins than we could count. Most of the time, we could smell them and hear them before we could see them. This trip has given me a thirst for adventure.”

“We were surrounded by icebergs and icecovered mountains at all times,” said Re, “with penguins by the hundreds just hanging out close to the shore, with their funny wobbles.

Whales would show themselves every day. We got to take little motor boats right next to lazy seals resting atop icebergs. When we went ashore, we had to be careful not to step on the penguins, there were so many of them. It was very easy to forget that we were taking a class in global warming, especially on the days when we went to lectures held outdoors in the hot tub on the top deck of the ship.”

by Robert Goldsborough Joe Re, a jazz studies major, took the J-Term course called Penguins, Icebergs and Tropical Jungles: Understanding Climate Change around the Globe. In Costa Rica and Antarctica, the students examined air and water temperatures, charted ultraviolet rays from the sun and took readings of electromagnetic forces. “We were surrounded by icebergs,” said Re, “with penguins just hanging out close to the shore.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

news alumni and alumnae

The Heart and Soul of the Place During her student days, Samantha Kiley ’07 had an awesome Elmhurst Experience. Now she’s transforming the ways the College engages and serves its 23,000 alumni.

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Photo: Roark Johnson

B

efore Samantha Kiley went to work for Elmhurst College, she went to school there. Her transformational experience as a student, she will tell you, pointed her decisively toward her current job as director of alumni relations.

When she arrived on campus in 2003, Kiley says, she was a shy first-year student from La Grange, Illinois, whose immediate goal was to get through freshman orientation without attracting too much notice to herself. Instead, she found herself being led by new friends to first meetings of student organizations. By the time she graduated four years later, she had served as the president of the Union Board, was an Orientation Student Leader and a member of Sigma Kappa sorority. She also had found a new professional goal: a career in higher education.

“This is the place that transformed me,” she says. “This is where I developed a new sense of confidence, discovered my career ambitions and met the people I knew would be lifelong friends. Being able to share my passion for the College in my current role truly is an honor.”

Peggy Sandgren, vice president for development and alumni relations, and Kiley are helping to reinvent the College’s alumni outreach. The two are implementing a strategic plan for alumni relations that calls for, among other things, heightened communications, expanded programming across the country and increased opportunities for professional networking. Developed in 2008, the plan is the product of an extensive set of surveys, interviews and focus groups meant to inform the College on the range of ways it can better serve, inform and engage its 23,000 alumni.

It’s the most ambitious plan for alumni ever devised at Elmhurst.

Peggy Sandgren, vice president for development and alumni relations, asked Samantha Kiley to head the alumni office in 2009. “She’s done an amazing job,” says Sandgren. “She’s taken us further, faster than we thought possible.”

“What we heard was that our alumni and alumnae want to be involved—and not just for parties, but for networking and volunteering, too,” Kiley says. “Our goal is to engage our alumni in meaningful volunteer opportunities, events and programs that ignite their fond memories of the College.”

Sandgren chose Kiley to lead the O≈ce of Alumni Relations in the fall of 2009. She had been working in the o≈ce since her student days, first as an intern, then, after graduation, as assistant director. When the director position became open, Kiley asked Sandgren to meet for lunch and made her pitch.

“I told her how much the College means to me and how I wanted to be part of moving it forward,” she remembers.

The pitch worked.

“Sam had all the qualities you look for in a professional,” says Sandgren, “and she has something that not everyone can oΩer. She understands the heart and soul of the College.

She’s done an amazing job. She’s taken us further, faster than we thought possible in just two years.”

Sandgren and Kiley have introduced more resources for alumni, and more ways for Elmhurst graduates to give back to the College.

Their increased focus on professional networking has resulted in new working relationships with the Center for Professional Excellence on campus and the Career Transition Center of Chicago. That means alumni can benefit from the same kind of advising, life coaching and

Bluejay Nation Extensive surveys revealed that Elmhurst alumni and alumnae want to be involved, and not just in parties but also in volunteering and networking. career counseling that students receive. They also can more readily help current students by acting as mentors, oΩering professional shadowing experiences and creating internships.

The alumni o≈ce is working with the admission staΩ to create a formal group of alumni volunteers that will assist in the recruitment of future Elmhurst students across the country.

Communication has come in for an overhaul, too. Working with the O≈ce of Communications and Public AΩairs, the alumni o≈ce launched FYI, a newsy magazine; a quarterly electronic newsletter and a meaty new web site (www.elmhurst.edu/alumni).

The College also is connecting with thousands of graduates through social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. The to-do list includes adding more programming in cities from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. “We want to establish a regional approach and bring the College to our alumni,” says Kiley. In collaboration with President S. Alan Ray, the Alumni Association Board and other College leaders, the o≈ce organizes alumni gatherings in Illinois and across the country with the near-future goal of creating self-sustaining regional clubs.

Of course, alumni, and thus the alumni o≈ce, also like parties. Kiley was made director just before Homecoming in 2009, which meant that one of her first tasks was to preside over the biggest alumni party of them all.

“It was a whirlwind,” she recalls. “Homecoming is an event that brings what we do full circle—you have alumni, students, faculty and staΩ all coming together to celebrate who we are. Being placed into this role at that time was perfect.Thinking of it reminds me why I do what I do.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

With innovative new tactics, the O≈ce of Alumni Relations reaches out to Elmhurst graduates and enables them to stay in touch with the College and one another. contact the Office of Alumni Relations at alumni@elmhurst.edu.

New publications

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The College now publishes a quarterly electronic newsletter and an expanded version of FYI, the sprightly alumni newsmagazine.

FYI features the stories of notable graduates

A redesigned web site

as well as class notes, faculty interviews,

Our new site makes it easy for alumni to catch

issues, the magazine has profiled David

up on campus news, learn about upcoming

Wills ’88, the play-by-play announcer for

events and check out the latest class notes.

baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays; Judy Paice ’79,

The new pages are easy to read, with wide col-

the director of the Cancer Pain Program at

umns; a clean, white background; and ample

Northwestern University’s Feinberg School

space between the lines. As with the rest of

of Medicine; and John Grollmus ’61, a

the redesigned College web site, navigation

prominent California neurosurgeon. Many

is easier; expanded internal links and a new

of the alumni interviewed in the pages of

A-Z index make it simple to get around.

FYI say they enjoy giving back to the College.

Within the site, alumni can learn what their

campus news and sports stories. In recent

“I genuinely get pleasure out of my volunteer

classmates are up to and read about or

activities,” says Rabia Khan ’98, assistant

listen to speakers they might have missed.

director of residence life at Loyola University

The updated pages also contain detailed

Chicago, who mentors Elmhurst students. “I

information about resources such as career

don’t ever want to forget the staff and faculty

services, alumni discounts and travel pro-

who cared about me and mentored me while

grams. Users can even reacquaint themselves

I was a student.”

with College songs and listen to a 1971 recording by the College choir. Check it out at www.elmhurst.edu/alumni.

Helping current students

t college

elmhurs

news alumspniring 2010

The alumni office works actively to facilitate alumni-student interactions. Alumni can assist the Office of Admission by helping to recruit prospective students. The Center for Professional Excellence offers opportunities for alumni to advise and mentor students and fellow alumni. The Alumni Association invites graduates to take on leadership roles. For more information,

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F Family

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news campus events

Eyeball to Eyeball When the candidates for governor debated on campus, Dr. Jennifer Boyle had a ringside seat, and tried to take the politicians beyond their sound bites.

Photo: Roark Johnson

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Two weeks before Governor Pat Quinn upset State Senator Bill Brady to retain the state’s top job, the candidates sparred before an SRO crowd in the chapel. Elmhurst faculty member Jennifer Boyle served on the panel, which also included Phil Ponce of WTTW and Bruce Dold of the Chicago Tribune. The debate was moderated by Steve Edwards.

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hen Jennifer Boyle, the chair of political science department, learned that she would be one of three panelists questioning the two major candidates for Governor of Illinois during last fall’s debate at Elmhurst, she got going on her homework. She read policy papers. She scrutinized web sites.

She pored over transcripts of previous debates.

Then she consulted one final authority: her students.

Boyle oΩered students in two of her courses— Introduction to Politics and a senior seminar— extra credit if they suggested questions for her to pose at the debate on a Sunday evening, October 17, in Hammerschmidt Memorial

Chapel. About 20 students took her up on the oΩer, and many of them were in the overflow audience to see Professor Boyle quiz the candidates.

It was just two weeks before Governor Pat Quinn squeaked past his Republican challenger, State Senator Bill Brady, to win the election on November 2 by one-half of one percent. (In late polls, Quinn had been trailing Brady by an average of 4.7 percent.) The two candidates exchanged barbs in a lively and often acrimonious debate sponsored by the College in collaboration with WBEZ-FM, the public radio station in Chicago, which broadcast the event live.

Boyle was joined on the panel by Bruce Dold, the editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune,

and Phil Ponce, the host of Chicago Tonight, the premier public aΩairs show on WTTWChannel 11. Steve Edwards of WBEZ served as moderator.

Boyle is in her 10th year on the Elmhurst faculty. A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross with a Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago, she is a scholar of comparative politics.

It didn’t escape her notice that she was the sole academic on the panel, and she was determined to speak to the interests of the academy. “I really wanted to reflect student concerns,” she says. “Talking to my students helped me to identify some issues that were important to cover.”

It didn’t take Boyle long to introduce those issues to the candidates. She started the debate

A Season of Distinguished Speakers “Few presidents are men for all seasons. The ones who make a diΩerence come along in times of crisis and lead us to a better place. Ronald Reagan did that.”

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who assessed the nation’s 40th president in a September 24 Schade Lecture in the chapel. This year is the centennial of Reagan’s birth.

by citing the state’s 10 percent unemployment rate, adding that college students were anxious about the job market waiting for them after graduation. She asked Brady and Quinn what they planned to do to create jobs.

Brady took the opportunity to attack the governor for proposing an increase in the state income tax. Quinn derided the senator’s plans as “nonsense.” It was a contentious beginning to a debate that would feature many similar clashes.

As the debate continued, Boyle asked the candidates about growing poverty rates in DuPage County and other suburban areas; about the inequities in public education that result from a reliance on property taxes for school funding; and about the candidates’ plans to protect state-funded scholarships like the Monetary Award Program (MAP), which helps about 140,000 college students in Illinois, including about 800 students at Elmhurst.

“My questions about poverty and educational disparities in particular were meant to reflect the social justice values of the College,” Boyle explained afterwards.

Posing a question, however, didn’t always mean getting it answered. The candidates frequently swept past questions to return to their favorite talking points. Those often took the form of attacks on the other candidate’s integrity. The two even sparred over the proper way to euthanize pets.

After the debate, Boyle was unfazed by the tone of it all. “It was interesting to be there live and up close,” she said, “and see them rolling their eyes at each other.”

“There are always negative ramifications of thinking you hold the truth in your hands.”

Rabbi Rachel Mikva, who delivered the Heschel Lecture, “Dangerous

Religious Ideas,” on October 27 in the Frick Center.

“If what they’re doing now is love, then they are loving lesbians and gay people to death. And it has to stop.”

Activist Harry Knox, observing that some religious leaders claim to love, even as they preach intolerance. Knox delivered the LGBT Guestship Lecture on October 13 in Illinois Hall.

“I know it sounds like witchcraft, but the book has to reveal itself to me. My books tell me as I go along what they want and need to be.”

Novelist Elizabeth Berg, discussing the process of writing fiction in her October 14 Quest Lecture in the chapel.

“We are the only country in the world that mixes athletics and academics. There are no prime-time games between Oxford and the Sorbonne.

College sports is our peculiar modern institution.”

Journalist Frank Deford, who weighed in on the hypocrisy of college sports in his Schade Lecture on November 7 in the chapel.

“The Gospel still has its power, but organized religion has lost its attractiveness for many young people.”

Rev. Geoffrey Black, general minister and president of the United Church

of Christ, in a special appearance on December 9 at the Frick Center.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

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news bluejay athletics

A Lot of Early Mornings Mark Corsello is earning a double major in nursing and psychology. He’s also an All-American wrestler and the second-ranked heavyweight in NCAA Division iii.

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Photos: Steve Woltmann

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teve Marianetti, Elmhurst’s wrestling coach, calls fourth-year heavyweight Mark Corsello one of his team’s hardest workers. Corsello’s work ethic has helped him earn two All-America honors and his current ranking as the nation’s second-ranked heavyweight in NCAA Division iii.

Most days last fall, however, when Corsello was rising at 5:00 a.m., it wasn’t to wrestle, lift weights or run sprints. It was to be on time for his nursing clinicals at Lutheran General Hospital.

Corsello is a nursing major—the only one to wrestle for Elmhurst in Marianetti’s nine seasons at the College—and he is even more serious about his studies than he is about his wrestling.

Nursing is a famously demanding major at Elmhurst. In addition to their extensive coursework and lab sessions, nursing students spend long hours in clinical rotations in Chicago-area hospitals. It is not the sort of schedule that allows a lot of time for an elite athlete chasing a national title, but Corsello seems unfazed.

“My girlfriend says that all I ever do is study and go to wrestling practice,” he says. “It means a lot of early mornings. But when I get into something I tend to go all in.”

Corsello has managed to thrive as both a student and an athlete. In 2010, he was honored as a scholar All-American by the National Wrestling Coaches Association.

But when he arrived at Elmhurst nearly four years ago, Corsello didn’t want to wrestle at all.

The College has launched three new ways to follow the Bluejays’ 18 athletic teams. Live video streaming of selected athletic contests is available at www.bluejaytv.com. The Bluejays also

have rolled out social media sites at both Facebook.com and Twitter.com. For details, visit www.elmhurstbluejays.com.

The winning for Corsello has been nearly nonstop at Elmhurst. He qualified for national championships in each of his first three seasons.

Defensive Back Scores National Honor Senior defensive back Kyle DeMus was named a 2010 first-team ESPN the Magazine Academic All-American, only the second Elmhurst football player ever to earn the distinction.

DeMus was one of four defensive backs named to the 24-player football team. The award, given annually by members of the College Sports Information Directors of America, recognizes student athletes for their contributions on the field and in the classroom.

“Kyle is a fantastic example of a student athlete,” said Elmhurst football coach Tim

He’d been competing since the fourth grade him to find the fun in wrestling again. Marianetti and had won a conference title at Maine South has guided the Bluejays to four top-15 national High School in Park Ridge. By the time he finishes, and was a national champion himself graduated from high school, he was ready to in 1995 at the University of Illinois at Urbana– focus on his studies and savor college life.

Champaign. To win the title, he defeated That plan didn’t last long.

University of Iowa great Lincoln McIlravy in “It was a little boring,” he says of life without one of the most storied matches in college wrestling. wrestling history.

Within a few months of his arrival on campus, “Steve’s a big inspiration to a lot of people,” Corsello was a wrestler again—and was enjoying Corsello says. “I didn’t know how big a deal he wrestling more than ever. “I remembered was until I got here. We’ve all seen that match how much fun it could be. Then I started beating on YouTube, and we like to give him a hard guys. That was even more fun.” time about it. But he’s been a great coach and The winning for Corsello has been nearly he always understands that we have school work non stop throughout his Elmhurst career. He to do.” has qualified for the national championships Whatever happens in Corsello’s final season in each of his first three seasons, finishing seventh of college wrestling, he knows his hard work at in his first year and second in his second year.

Elmhurst will not be complete. Because of his In 2010, he was working on an undefeated more-than-full academic load—he’s working season—with an eye on a national title—only on a second major in psychology—Corsello plans to end his season by losing two agonizingly close to continue his studies for a fifth year and to matches at the nationals. graduate in 2012.

“I can’t tell you how many times I thought He’ll have more time in his final year to about all the little things I could have done devote to his studies and nursing clinicals. diΩerently,” he admits. “Now I just focus on For Corsello, working with patients and medical pushing myself to do better. I don’t want that professionals can be the best part of his day. to happen again this year.”

“It’s one thing to learn stuΩ from books, but That’s one reason why Corsello puts in so it’s great to get to use what you learn to help many extra hours on the mat. Coach Marianetti people,” he says. “It really motivates you.” says the workouts have paid oΩ. “He’s so coachable and so intelligent. He has that ability to translate theory into practice.”

Corsello credits the coach with helping Prospect/ Spring 2011

Lester. “Through his hard work and dedication he developed into a two-year starter and team captain.”

DeMus started all 10 games of the season at free safety. He finished the season ranked fifth on the squad in total tackles, with 42. He returned one interception 37 yards for a touchdown against Wheaton College.

A three-time academic all-conference selection, DeMus also has served for four years on the team’s Leadership Council and is a member of three national honor societies.

DeMus is an accounting major and carries a 3.96 grade-point average.

DeMus is the 21st Elmhurst student athlete to earn Academic All-America honors since the 2000–01 season. He and other Elmhurst honorees competed in the All-America Team’s College Division, which includes non– Division I schools.

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The Inaugural Niebuhr Forum

What

Reinhold Niebuhr Means to Us

Forty years after his death, Elmhurst’s great alumnus continues to inform the American discussion on war, morality, public life and “the nature and destiny of man.” To mark the centennial of Niebuhr’s graduation, the College considers his formidable legacy.

Illustrations by Mark Summers

Prospect/ Spring 2011

The Inaugural Niebuhr Forum

22

The Stubborn Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr Elmhurst’s great alumnus tra≈cked in enduring truths about the nature of God and the limits of humanity. Forty years after his death, his work retains its intellectual strength and moral urgency. By David Brooks In the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr, Class of 1910, “was one of America’s most profound writers,” says David Brooks. “He wrote sweeping books that helped readers to connect their historical situations with broad truths about God and human nature.” Today, Brooks himself is a keen observer of American life and a savvy analyst of politics and foreign aΩairs. He began his career at the National Review and spent nine years at The Wall Street Journal. He currently appears regularly in the opinion pages of The New York Times and on PBS and National Public Radio. Brooks has written thoughtfully about Niebuhr’s legacy in both the Times and The Atlantic Monthly. On October 1, 2010, in Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel, he presented the keynote address at the inaugural Niebuhr Forum on Religion in Public Life. Brooks adapted this essay from his remarks.

R

einhold Niebuhr was a pessimistic optimist. He always was aware of both the sin and the goodness marbled through us.

I once wrote a column about him that was given a good headline: “The Man on the Gray Horse.” The man was, at the same time, a confident proponent of doing active good in the world and a human being who was deeply aware of

human limitations.

This made him unusual in happy, upbeat America. We are an insanely optimistic country. As the pioneers moved west, they would pass through a perfectly good valley because they were convinced something even better was over the next hill. That optimism is still part of the mindset of the confident, upbeat American people.

Niebuhr was much more of a realist than most Americans, but he shared the optimistic American spirit. He was confident that at least some of our problems could be solved; and he remains relevant today because he continues to help us to solve today’s problems. In particular, Niebuhr helps us to solve the problems of partisanship, permanence, rationalism and progressivism—and the problem of America itself.

The Problem of Partisanship

The first problem Niebuhr helps us to solve is the problem of partisanship.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

If you are in politics or the media in this country, you are divided into teams. People may come to Washington with an individual conscience, but if you are in the Senate, for example, you go every Tuesday to a Democratic or Republican policy lunch where they tell you what to say for the rest of the week. Individual conscience becomes secondary to team loyalty.

Partisans in this country have reached the point where they don’t even recognize the common humanity of partisans on the other side.

They don’t understand what the people on the other side are thinking, or recognize that those people have their doubts. They don’t really know much about the partisans on the other side, and they tend to dehumanize them.

Niebuhr warned us against the perils of group consciousness. He reminded us that individual morality and conscience is often superior to group morality and conscience. That is so because the individual can occasionally rise above self-interest, whereas groups rarely do.

Niebuhr himself rose above self-interest in his first major published writing, in 1916. He was a German American, and he wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly attacking German Americans for being insu≈ciently assimilated and not taking up the cause that would lead the United States to involvement in World War i.

He was a trenchant critic of his own team. Niebuhr was a liberal, but also a critic of liberalism. This should be a model for contemporary Americans: We should all be stern critics, especially of our own teams.

Today Niebuhr is quoted to support left-wing views, to support right-wing views, to support almost any view, because his thinking had all these nuances. But whenever people quote Niebuhr to support their own comfortable views, they probably are misusing him. He tried to make the people on his own team uncomfortable. He was a little like George Orwell in that regard.

The Problem of Permanence

The second problem Niebuhr helps us solve is the problem of permanence.

We live in an impermanent, high-tech environment where information flows at an incredible rate. I write a column for a daily newspaper that is gone in 24 hours, and daily newspapers are considered a slow medium.

Niebuhr is a remedy for the artificial pursuit of what’s hot. He also is a remedy for the idea that you only have to remember for five seconds anything you’ve read. Even when he wrote about contemporary aΩairs, Niebuhr always harkened back to the eternal truths and non-truths. He always brought you back to the world of permanence.

He also helps us see things from a broad perspective. In the media and in academia, we have a tendency to narrow down. Today’s academic reward system, for example, encourages extreme specialization.

If you look now at what university presses are publishing, you’ll find books called The Power and the Glory: Basketmaking in Amsterdam in 1527.

Niebuhr, on the other hand, worked in the golden age of American nonfiction. He was in his prime between 1945 and 1965. In those days,

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lower academics and higher journalists—people like Jane Jacobs, Daniel Bell and Isaiah Berlin—were taking up huge topics and being ambitious about them. Niebuhr wrote a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man. That’s a title that covers a lot of ground. Once you’ve written about that, what’s left?

You have to admire Niebuhr’s ambition, and the way he tied his subjects to theology and to the eternal issues of human nature. He continues to help us solve the problems that a√ict a culture where everything is judged by the standards of the last 15 seconds.

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The Problem of Rationalism

The third problem Niebuhr solves is the problem of rationalism.

We have a great rationalist tradition in our civilization. It goes back to Plato, who thought we behave best when reason subdues the emotions. It goes back to Descartes, to Bacon, to people who thought we could understand the world by adopting a dispassionate methodology.

This tradition explains many of the great scientific advances we all enjoy. But I think we made a mistake when we tried to take methodologies modeled on physics and apply them to human behavior, to reduce human beings to cogs in a mechaDavid Brooks nistic system. This leads not to science but to scientism. Irving Kristol called scientism “the elephantiasis of reason.”

It takes reason to the extreme.

In my policy world, we treat people as if they are individualistic homo-economic cogs. Then we build elaborate models on the supposition that people are selfmaximizing, perfectly rational individuals.

Whatever parts of human behavior don’t fall into the models, we chop oΩ and ignore. Economics has become the gateway between academia and policy making, and every policy decision is evaluated first on the basis of an economic model in which we run the numbers and predict human behavior. But people are not autonomous, perfectly rational, utility-maximizing cogs. Many of our policy-making errors come from this failure of understanding, this insistence on seeing people as perfectly rational creatures.

If you invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis will build up a civil society—or they would, if people were perfectly rational creatures. To implant capitalism in Russia, all you have to do is give the Russians a privatization plan and a currency plan, and order will arise spontaneously. To get us out of a deep

“In Niebuhr’s day, the great fight was against the mechanistic social engineering projects of Stalinism and Nazism. Niebuhr said they won’t work , because of this thing called human nature.”

recession, all you need to do is create a stimulus package of so-andso billion dollars. You run it through the model, it creates a certain number of jobs, and you enter a recovery.

Niebuhr knew that human beings are more complicated than any model allows. He emphasized the parts of humanity that are spiritual and soulful. He understood that people and their judgments are inherently moral. He kept talking about our need to remember what is bent and permanent about human nature.

In Niebuhr’s day, the fight was against the mechanistic social engineering projects of Stalinism and Nazism. Niebuhr said they won’t work, because of this thing called human nature. Something about human nature cannot be molded by social engineering. Niebuhr thought in ways that undermined a lot of the pretensions of modern social science. He emphasized things that are not computable by mathematics: the battles that people wage for prestige and recognition, the pervasive presence of sin in human behavior. He gave us a richer vocabulary to explain our behavior.

The Problem of Progressivism

The fourth problem Niebuhr helps us overcome is progressivism. I don’t mean progressivism in a political context. I mean the belief we have that social change will be easy if good-hearted people get together.

Niebuhr did not share this belief.

The problem of progressivism is illustrated well in The Stone of Hope

by David L. Chappell, a great book that describes two wings of the Civil Rights Movement. One wing was the educated class, mostly white and centered in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. It believed that the denial of civil rights in this country was rooted in ignorance.

If you could raise people’s consciousness—if you could get the white people in segregated regions to see how their treatment of African Americans violated the American creed of equality—then the white people would change their behavior. The problem of racism would be solved through education.

The other tradition of the Civil Rights Movement was more southern, more religious and more African American. It harkened back to the prophetic tradition and to Reinhold Niebuhr. It understood that education alone could not do the job, that racism is not merely a problem of ignorance—it is a problem of sin and the desire to dominate. To

conquer racism, therefore, you had to do more than just send out informative pamphlets and hold educational meetings. You had to force change. You had to be tough about it. Martin Luther King Jr. was part of this second tradition. He learned from Niebuhr.

Today we no longer have the particular problem of segregation to the degree we once had. But we still have people, especially in government, who think that solving similar problems is easy. They think that problems can be solved by material means, just by upgrading material surroundings.

I spent 30 years reporting on education reform. Until the last five years, a lot of what education reformers did was reshu√e bureaucratic structures. Big schools, small schools, charter schools, choice: they tried all sorts of bureaucratic reforms, and they tried spending diΩerent amounts of money. Most of their reforms yielded limited results.They were based on easy assumptions about how quickly we could change human nature by changing material conditions.

In the realm of education, we finally learned the Niebuhrian truth that it is not the nature of the classroom that matters. What matters is the spiritual connection between a teacher and a student. We learned that students learn from people they love. If such a connection isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how the school is structured. That’s a lesson that gets us beyond the idea that change is easy, or can be done according to a computer model. It brings us back to the sense that change is hard, and that it has to be done spiritually.

Sometimes we lose faith that social policy can get us anywhere. But Niebuhr did not lose faith. He balanced pessimism and optimism.

In 2007, when I asked the presidential candidate Barack Obama about Reinhold Niebuhr, this is the thing he had picked up. Obama said Niebuhr reminds us of the constant presence of hardship and pain.

“We should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things,” he said, “but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away from Niebuhr the sense that we have to make these eΩorts, knowing that they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism. That’s a good balance that Niebuhr gives you to get you there. It’s a view of human nature that is not too rosy but not too bitter, which is sort of a Goldilocks view.”

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historian friend of mine in Chattanooga named Wilfred McClay had a good description of how Niebuhr viewed human nature. “Niebuhr believed that man was not merely a sinner,” McClay wrote, “but also a splendidly endowed creature formed in God’s image, still capable of acts of wisdom, generosity and truth, and still able to balance the cause of social improvement.” That’s a good phrase: “a splendidly endowed creature formed in God’s image.”

Sometimes, in combating the excessive idealism of his liberal friends, Niebuhr veered into pessimism, but he did so as a counterpunch against a particular cultural climate. He balanced an awareness of sin with an emphasis on humanity’s “splendid endowment.” He arrived at hopefulness, which is slightly diΩerent from optimism, because it grows more deeply. It grows out of a faith that is aware of the whole.

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iebuhr urged us to work for change, knowing that it will be hard and gradual, that it won’t happen the way we expect it to. He paved the way for a belief that things will get better, but in ways that take in the wisdom of the past. One of my favorite expressions is, “Human nature doesn’t progress, institutions progress.” A school, a club, a college will learn from all the things that people put into it, and will get better.

Since I’m near Chicago, I should quote a great piece of moral philosophy I read recently. Ryne Sandberg, the Cubs’ former second baseman, gave a speech when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “When I went out and played baseball,” he said, “I was simply trying to live up to the example of the guys who had been there before and who stood on baseball fields decade after decade before I ever did. That meant when I hit a home run I didn’t watch it; I just took oΩ and jogged around the bases. That meant running around like the devil—because it wasn’t about me. I was just there representing the institution of baseball and trying to play the game the way they would have wanted it to be played.”

That’s a beautiful speech about the power of institutions to shape individual behavior. It’s a powerful example of how people who live by an institution, and who are willing to honor its traditions, can be improved by it, and how human progress can result.

The Problem of America

The fifth problem Niebuhr solves is the problem of America.

The United States was founded in a great burst of idealism, by people who thought God’s plan could be realized in this new land.

That idealism turned into a creed, an eschatology, almost a substitute religion, and the cause of America.

People often wonder why this country has never produced a real socialist movement. It is because the United States solved the needs of socialism by giving people a creed they could believe in—a creed that amounted to the end of history—that America was the last best hope of mankind.

This creed has made the United States a tremendously energetic nation. It has also made us a dangerous nation, because we get carried away in our own moral fervor.

Niebuhr commented on this phenomenon. He was more skeptical about America’s faith in its creed than many of us are today. He thought this faith led quickly to excessive idealism and righteousness.

It was a dangerous secular faith that rivaled and sometimes obliterated religious faith.

In this way, Niebuhr balanced out some of the nation’s great enthusiasms. As Obama said to me, Niebuhr prepared Americans for the idea that if you try to do good around the world, you will be corrupted by it. I think Niebuhr would not have been surprised by Abu Ghraib.

He understood that power and dominance a√icts those who exercise it, even when they exercise it for good. Still, he believed that our awareness that we can be corrupted by power should not lead us to

passivity. It should lead us instead to humility and realism, even in the exercise of power.

Niebuhr’s writings regarding America’s relations with the Soviet Union were starkly moral and sometimes aggressive. He said we must be wary of two forms of idealism: the idealism that says we are ultimate good and they are ultimate evil, and the idealism that says that we are so good, we don’t even need to fight them. He believed in a bloodyminded fighting. You fight with an awareness of what war is doing to you.

He wrote clearly, in startlingly raw terms, about the Cold War. In 1952, in The Irony of American History, he wrote: “We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice against a system that has demonically distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise of a higher justice.” I’m sure the word “demonically” as applied to the Soviet Union was carefully chosen. As someone who covered the Soviet Union, I think it was well chosen. It was an evil empire. Niebuhr was not afraid to call it such.

He counseled a need for action, but for cautious action, tempered by an awareness of what action would cost. In the same book, he wrote a passage that was very controversial but, I think, very wise: “We take and must continue to take morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power, but we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterest in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.” Niebuhr advised us to use power while knowing that our own views of our use of power will be distorted by our interests, that we will not see the evil we commit in the name of doing good.

Again, it’s a balancing act. Niebuhr still had great faith in the basic nobility of America, especially during the Cold War, when we were on the side of freedom and democracy, fighting a demonic foe. “Our lack of a lust for power makes the fulminations of our foes against us singularly inept,” he wrote. “On the other hand, we’ve been so deluded by the concept of our innocence that we are ill-prepared to deal with the temptations of power which now assail us.”

Here’s a word and a phrase that somebody should Google: Niebuhr and on the other hand. The phrase occurs in both Niebuhr’s and Obama’s prose to an excessive degree. Maybe it’s where they come together.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

“Niebuhr counseled Americans to act against evil, but to act cautiously, with an awareness of what the action would cost us. He knew that our use of power would be distorted by our own interests, that we would not see the evils we commit in the name of doing good.”

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’m going to close with a passage from a Niebuhr essay which is not much talked about, but which has always been valuable to me. It’s called “A View of Life on the Sidelines.”

He wrote it near the end of his life, after suΩering a series of strokes that increasingly debilitated him.

“The physical trauma I suΩered prompted at least three depressions, which my neurologist regarded as normal,” he wrote. His tone here is nice. He is describing serious depressions, and yet he is not self-dramatizing. It just, well, happens.

His wife and caregivers, he wrote, had to treat him “very intensely” for years. “The physical ills that confined me to the sidelines were productive in furnishing me with insights about human nature that had never occurred to me before. I learned to know the goodness of men and women who went out of their way to help an invalid. Among the persons who impressed me with their helpfulness were my doctors, nurses and therapists, my colleagues and friends in the realm of both politics and religion. I soon learned that some of these people who had entered my life professionally, and who served me non-professionally with visits and walks, showed an almost charismatic gift of love. And of course, my chief source of spiritual strength was my wife. She was my nurse, secretary, editor, counselor, and friendly critic through all those years. I had never measured the depth and breadth of her devotion until I was stricken.”

Niebuhr was a reticent writer, not a self-indulgent one. But in that final essay he dared to be a little self-revelatory and intimate. He had a tough-minded view of life, but in the end, he wrote about personal emotions. As he was dying, he unveiled parts of his emotional nature, while still keeping the realistic, modest, humble outlook that he had applied throughout his life. It was a final personal gift from a man who continues to help us cope with so many of the public problems we face.

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Seeing Evil, Plain and Clear Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism acknowledges evil in the depths of human character. But it also asks us not to forget God’s promise never to “shut the gates of mercy on mankind.” By Gustav Niebuhr The following essay is an expanded and somewhat edited version of a short speech I gave as moderator of a panel discussion, “The Persistence of Evil: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Message for Today’s World,” at Elmhurst College on October 1, 2010. I was delighted to participate in the inaugural Niebuhr Forum on Religion in Public Life, an event dedicated to the memory of my great-uncle, Reinhold Niebuhr, and my grandfather, H. Richard Niebuhr, Elmhurst’s president from 1924 to 1927. Neither man survived to my adulthood. I most clearly remember them as a child and an adolescent would do—as generous, attentive and much loved older relatives. But I also humbly consider myself a student of theirs, who has always found much to learn from their work. No doubt that will be a lifelong enterprise.

—Gustav Niebuhr

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vil, a quality alive and enduring in our world, is neither under-recognized nor underdiscussed. Indeed, the problem may be that the word is used with too much elasticity, is oΩered up too often as a way to cover that which is ill intentioned or upsetting or simply vile. We need to speak about evil with clarity, naming and describing the genuine darkness in humanity without diminishing its impact. We cannot aΩord to become distracted by “cheap evil”— the less-than-monumental travesties that so often are the passing concerns of our politics and journalism—lest we become unguarded about meeting the real thing. The work of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr can help us to be more precise and therefore more ready for the inevitable encounter.

Evil, as I would define it, is the willful eΩort to destroy human hope.

In our world, it employs all of tyranny’s tools to that end.

Biblically, one of evil’s most alarming appearances comes to us early in the story of Job: “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, ‘Whence comest thou?’ Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’” (Job 1: 6-7; King James Version) The passage chills us with its description of evil’s presence, persistence and unrestrained geographic scope. Evil is in the world. We can claim to recognize it through human acts, and sometimes through the language it uses.

I am reminded of a family story—evil glimpsed through the lens of my grandfather’s personal experience, then passed down through the generations.

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In 1931, after he had accepted an oΩer to teach at Yale Divinity School, H. Richard Niebuhr took his family to visit cousins in Germany.

There he chanced to hear a public speech by Hitler, who would come to power in less than two years. My grandfather had been raised with German and was fluent in it, and he received fully the verbal impact of the Nazi rhetoric. He returned from the event so distraught that my father—then only five years old—could vividly recall my grandfather’s emotional reaction six decades later. In telling me the story, my father spoke with a wonder that what H. Richard Niebuhr had so rightly understood as terrifying malevolence should not be utterly plain to others.

The Holocaust, the culmination of the Nazis’ fanatical obsession with ignorant theories of race and bloodlines, is without parallel. But as a historical event, it stands framed by other events planned with cruel intensity to destroy human hope, the quality that marks evil. The genocide meticulously carried out against the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 and the mass murder of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serbian militias at Srebrenica 80 years later neatly frame the political, racial and religious terror of the twentieth century. And yet somehow neither of those events, nor the massacre of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, prepared our imagination for the killing of 3,000 American civilians on September 11, 2001.

Part of evil’s power seems to lie in its strange capacity repeatedly to take us by surprise. In November 1978, when I was living and studying in Great Britain, I read a report in The Economist on the murders and suicides of nearly 1,000 devotees of Jim Jones in Guyana. The magazine boldly asked whether this was not clear evidence that evil still existed.

(The answer, to adapt a statement from the novelist Cormac McCarthy, would be, “Either, yes, this is evil—or it will do until evil gets here.”)

In that very year, the same question could be posed about the methodically lethal activities used by Argentina’s military rulers in their so-called Dirty War against that nation’s own citizens. The dictatorship’s assassins, operating with legal impunity from a fleet of Ford Falcons, cruised the streets of Buenos Aires, seeking out people to “disappear.”

They would claim up to 30,000 lives before democracy was returned to Argentina. The Economist’s question could also be asked—again, that same year—about the killing fields of Cambodia, which would swallow nearly 2 million people, victims of the rapacious violence of the Khmer Rouge. I read the overseas sections in newspapers very closely in those days, and the terrible events in those disparate countries deeply absorbed and troubled me.

In the broadest sense imaginable, evil is anti-life, as my father, the theologian Richard R. Niebuhr, once said to me. His powerfully succinct term remains as fresh in my mind as the day he spoke it. Evil does not simply attack God’s greatest creation, human beings. It also would deny human beings the possibility to live in awe and wonder of the world to which God opened humanity’s eyes when God first breathed life into us.

Early in his ministry, Reinhold Niebuhr discerned in human beings a tendency toward what he called “absolutism”: the narrow quest for an impossible ideal. In that tendency he located the seeds that could produce vast, tyrannical deeds. “Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a

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dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations,” he wrote in his first truly great book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). I cannot open that book without benefiting from its intellectual power and insights. Referring to this quality of absolutism, he continued: “In religion it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal.” Societies, he wrote, “risk the welfare of millions when they gamble for the attainment of the absolute. And, since coercion is an invariable instrument of their policy, absolutism transmutes this instrument into unbearable tyrannies and cruelties. The fanaticism, which in the individual may appear in the guise of a harmless or pathetic vagary, when expressed in political policy, shuts the gates of mercy on mankind.” Those last seven words have stood as a landmark for me in identifying human pretensions at their most dangerous.

Reinhold Niebuhr believed that evil demands a response, demands that we take action to mitigate or contain it. In each of those 30-yearold cases I cite above—Jonestown, the Dirty War, the Killing Fields— individuals attempted to reduce or thwart evil’s eΩects. Their successes were limited; and some came after the fact, in the form of literature or sweeping, detailed o≈cial inquiries. But that does not make such eΩorts to name evil, to rebuke it and evenGustav Niebuhr tually to bring its human actors to trial, any less worthy. Public inquiries and published, o≈cial reports have distinguished the constructive periods that followed apartheid in South Africa and dictatorships elsewhere.

Indeed, such projects may be the best we can do, out of the hope that they have a dignified meaning for all those—perhaps entire societies—that have emerged from evil’s ravages. What is important is to recognize how broadly evil actually aΩects a community. As the journalist Michael Herr, writing in Dispatches, his great book about the Vietnam War, said, “I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later.”

As human beings, we are limited, no matter what our aspirations may be. As both Niebuhr brothers reminded us, we are prone to pride, a sin of individuals and nations. At its most excessive, pride can trick us into believing ourselves— and especially our nations—incapable of evil. Any work for what we believe to be good must be bounded by humility.

“We cannot aΩord to become fascinated with evil, especially as evil would demand that fascination. That is how evil lures us, entrances us, tries to persuade us to accept its methods and values.”

I also believe, however, that evil cannot become our obsession. We know—or should know—what risks that entails. Morally vulnerable as we are, we cannot aΩord to become fascinated with evil, especially as evil would demand that fascination. That is how evil lures us, entrances us, tries to persuade us to accept its methods and values.

“Christian realism,” the critical analysis that Reinhold Niebuhr brought to viewing the world, demands that we steer a diΩerent and di≈cult course, like Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. The monsters we strive to avoid are naïvité on one side, and cynicism, bitterness and fear—especially fear—on the other.

Christian realism acknowledges evil in the depths of the human character. But I understand it also to ask that we not forget God’s promises, as set forth in the biblical story of Creation. Jews and Christians read in the opening of their Scriptures a remarkable account of humanity’s beginning, one that stands outside science and describes a unique beauty.

Remember what God does after making male and female in the divine image? God’s first act is to bless humanity, so that the very first words humans hear is God’s blessing upon them. That is worth remembering. The action takes place on the evening of the sixth day, and, as the first chapter of Genesis concludes, “God saw everything that [God] had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

Very good. How often do we describe the world in this way? The phrase is not a description of human character, nor does it come anywhere close to being a synonym for perfection. Within human life, there can be no such thing, as perfection belongs to God alone. The ruthless, supremely cruel challenge of evil is that it would badly wound— would seek to destroy—our ability to appreciate what is good. It would wreck our willingness to believe in the human capacity for justice and the necessity that we seek it.

That is why evidence of the perseverance of women and men in the face of evil, and their desire to bear witness to that resistance, are vitally important to our being human. Individuals such as the writer Elie Wiesel and the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu oΩer testimonies against the force of “anti-life,” to repeat my father’s phrase.

I found one such testimony recently, in reading the memoir of an Armenian priest who spent three years on the run, escaping the genocide against his people during World War i. “I wished to live, not for life’s frivolous pleasures—to which I had never attached value, even when I was 20,” wrote the priest, Grigoris Balakian, “but to gather up the shipwrecked survivors of the Armenian people and build a community

anew.” As a hunted man, he drew inspiration from the work of an Armenian poet, in particular the lines: And you will see exquisite mansions, Where now you see ashes.

I appreciate the United Church of Christ’s slogan, “God Is Still Speaking.” Within the phrase lies an active space for imagination and interpretation. God, first made known to us by the blessing bestowed in Eden, continues to speak to the world; we respond imperfectly.

The words of our sacred texts are not dry, but moist with the ink of inspiration, calling us, too, to speak, as we understand them, to the culture around us.

Among many distinctions, the United Church of Christ has an important story to tell of radical inclusion. It takes us back to the writing in 1700 of the Reverend Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph, the first anti-slavery tract published on American soil. All people have an equal right to liberty, Sewall wrote, with a remarkable directness, three-quarters of a century before the Declaration of Independence made a similar statement. But Sewall took his argument directly from the Bible: “Yet through the Indulgence of GOD to our First Parents after the Fall, the outward Estate of all and every of the children, remains the same, as to one another. So that Originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery.” Sewall spoke bluntly enough to call the enslavement of African men and women an evil. It would be more than a century and a half later that Lincoln, at Gettysburg, could speak of “a new birth of freedom” that would include the descendants of those slaves. It would be another century before Lyndon Johnson would sign their natural freedoms into federal law—guaranteeing what the Constitution had truly promised, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared during his speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

Does what started with Sewall represent a gradual progress away from what he correctly discerned as a massive evil? The word progress, used too often in such a way as to ignore basic human pretensions and failings, may be, as a description of the human condition, best left to an earlier era. But we may certainly call the movement toward a wider understanding and embrace of human rights worldwide—in the United States, South Africa, the Balkans, Southeast Asia, Latin America and many other places—a progression, one imbued with hope. That would fit, I believe, with Reinhold Niebuhr’s vision.

I quote him once again with a passage that has meant a great deal to many people, me among them: “Nothing that is worth doing can be completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful makes any complete sense in any context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.”

I read his words as a prayer, and add to it, Amen.

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Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr in their student days

Still Speaking: Of Niebuhr and Faith With a jam-packed forum and lecture on Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy, the College begins a year of dialogue across religious lines on the urgent issues that unite and divide believers and nonbelievers. By Andrew Santella

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ore than half a century after Time magazine anointed him as “America’s greatest Protestant theologian”—and ratified the claim by placing him on the cover of its twenty-fifth anniversary issue—intellectuals, journalists, politicians and even presidents still can’t get enough of Reinhold Niebuhr. It would have been hard to predict that a pastor and professor from Lincoln, Illinois, and an early alumnus of Elmhurst College would continue to inform political discourse in the United States 40 years after his death.

During his lifetime, Niebuhr was a great friend of such leading liberals as Hubert Humphrey and the labor hero Walter Reuther.

Martin Luther King Jr.—in his Letter from Birmingham Jail and elsewhere—drew liberally on Niebuhr’s thought while articulating his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. What is more remarkable is how Niebuhr’s influence has persisted since his death and even expanded across ideological lines. Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Barack Obama all have made it a point to discuss Niebuhr’s influence on their thinking—Obama called him “one of my favorite philosophers”—but so has John McCain. In the last decade, conservative thinkers like the columnist David Brooks and the historian Wilfred McClay, among others, quoted Niebuhr while arguing in favor of U.S. military action in Iraq. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quoted Niebuhr while arguing against it. In 2007, The Atlantic Monthly took note of the potent left-to-right Niebuhr revival. It titled the article “Everybody Loves Reinhold.”

Reinhold Niebuhr remains deeply relevant to contemporary American thought because so many see in our own times echoes of the midcentury world in which he lived, preached, taught and wrote. In the years leading up to the Holocaust and World War ii, and again at the height of the Cold War, Niebuhr argued for a robust response to the prominent evils of his own day, Nazism and Soviet Communism. His was a two-fisted faith that had little patience for moral complacency. At the same time, he warned those who would exercise American power in the name of idealism to guard against their own arrogance and self-righteousness.

In one of his most influential works, The Irony of American History (1952), Niebuhr articulated the challenge of his age of global upheaval: “We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice against a system which has, demonically, distilled injustice and Prospect/ Spring 2011

cruelty out of its original promise of higher justice.” In the wake of September 11, 2001, Niebuhr’s words resonated with many Americans who sought to define a new path for the United States in a world that seemed, once again, grossly disordered.

This academic year, Elmhurst College has undertaken an ambitious eΩort to assess the continuing impact on faith and public life of Reinhold Niebuhr and his brilliant brother and fellow theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr. The assessment will continue through 2012, and marks the centennial of the graduations of the Niebuhr brothers from the College.

(Reinhold graduated in 1910; Richard in 1912; Richard served memorably as president of Elmhurst from 1924 to 1927.)

On Friday, October 1, a group of scholars and journalists assembled on campus for the inaugural Niebuhr Forum on Religion in Public Life, the first of a series of public events focused on interfaith dialogue and engagement. “Still Speaking: Conversations on Faith” draws its title from a phrase deeply identified with the College’s a≈liated denomination, the United Church of Christ: “God Is Still Speaking.”

It also suggests that in a nation and world often riven by religious discord, the campus of Elmhurst College can serve as a place to engage across sectarian and ideological lines and find common ground.

The fall also brought appearances by Rabbi Rachel Mikva of the Chicago Theological Seminary and the Reverend GeoΩrey Black, president and general minister of the United Church of Christ. The spring brings to campus (among others) James Carroll, a novelist and former Roman Catholic priest who wrote a deeply felt history of relations between Christians and Jews; John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop whose provocative books have sold more than a million copies; and Walter Brueggemann ’55, one of the foremost Christian scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

The October Niebuhr Forum drew more than 1,200 people to campus on a late Friday afternoon and evening. The keynote lecturer, David Brooks, told an overflow audience in Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel that Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism “oΩers an antidote to the self-righteousness” of today’s stridently partisan politics. Brooks is a best-selling author, columnist for The New York Times, former writer for the National Review and Wall Street Journal, and regular contributor to NPR and PBS NewsHour. He noted that in discussing world aΩairs, Niebuhr had little patience for either naïve idealism or bitter pessimism. Instead, he occupied a more ambiguous and realistic middle ground. He engaged the world while recognizing that such engagement required moral compromises.

It was a lesson especially pertinent to Americans. “Our country was founded in a burst of idealism,” Brooks noted. “But Niebuhr reminds us of the danger of getting carried away in moral fervor and excessive pride. He prepares us for the idea that if you are trying to do good in the world, you will be corrupted by the world.”

Brooks is a practiced Niebuhr interpreter. In an Atlantic essay one year after the September 11 attacks, he argued that the time was ripe for a Niebuhr revival. He called Niebuhr “one of America’s most profound writers on war and international conflict.” He was also the journalist who prompted a prolonged discussion of Niebuhr’s thoughts from the presidential candidate Barack Obama during an interview in 2007.

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The Inaugural Niebuhr Forum

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The events and aftermath of September 11 inspired historians to revisit Niebuhr’s thought for new insights. Depending on their position on the political spectrum, the historians seem to have found diΩerent Niebuhrs. From the right, Wilfred McClay argued that Niebuhr’s philosophy ratified the arguments President George W. Bush used to justify a pre-emptive war in Iraq. Writing in the conservative journal First Things during the buildup to the war in 2002, McClay argued that the lesson to draw from Niebuhr is that “it is right and just for Christians to support this war. Indeed, they have an obligation to do so.” From the left, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quoted Niebuhr’s warnings against democracies engaging in “explicit preventive war.” A former aide to President John F. Kennedy, Schlesinger was a dear friend of Niebuhr who honored him as “the supreme American theologian” of the twentieth century. Writing in The New York Times in 2005, Schlesinger emphasized the theologian’s impatience with a religion that introduced into politics a “sense of infallibility” rather than humility. He cited this passage from Niebuhr’s writings: “Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.” (Schlesinger received the Niebuhr Medal from Elmhurst College in 2006; he died the next year.)

A version of Niebuhr’s humble but muscular Christianity has found a place in the current White House. Barack Obama drew on Niebuhr’s ideas both as candidate and as president, in particular in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. “We should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate evil,” he told Brooks during the campaign, oΩering a summary of Niebuhr. “But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”

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hese arguments over how to read Niebuhr are not only about how America should act in an age of global terror. They are also, more broadly, about how America uses religion to define itself.

In the standard version of American history—the one that begins roughly with the Pilgrims—God’s guiding hand is never far from the action. But the American creeds of religious freedom and pluralism always have had to contend with a stubborn tradition of religious intolerance and even violence. To some observers, for example, this year’s con-

Niebuhr noted the American tendency to claim a special relationship with the Almighty.

Americans, he wrote, tended “to claim God too simply” as the sanctifier of every act of the nation.

troversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” was nothing new; it recalled eighteenth-century resistance to the building of a Catholic church in lower Manhattan. Some New Yorkers of the time feared the church was a harbinger of an incipient papal assault on American democracy.

In 1806, a crowd of Protestants tried to break up the church’s Christmas Eve service; in the resulting melee, dozens were injured and a policeman was killed.

Niebuhr noted the American tendency to claim a special relationship with the Almighty. One of the working titles he considered for the book that became The Irony of American History was “This Nation Under God.” Americans, he wrote, “must guard against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire.”

At the Niebuhr Forum in the Frick Center on the afternoon of October 1, Alice Hunt, the president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, said Niebuhr challenged the utopian strain in American history that assumed the nation was aligned with God. “He warned us that we’ve become self-righteous, that we assume we are in the right,” Hunt said. “He asked us to probe our presuppositions. Niebuhr calls us to live in the middle of muddy ambiguity.” It is hardly a comforting message. Niebuhr’s fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, explored similar themes in his second inaugural address. He once observed, “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a diΩerence of purpose between the Almighty and them.”

In her remarks at the forum, Nancy Lee, Niebuhr Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Elmhurst, connected Niebuhr to the Old Testament prophetic tradition. “Niebuhr, like prophets of old, spoke to criticize his nation, its leaders and people, for sinful practices of injustice and oppression,” Lee said. “The Hebrew prophets uttered national self-criticism. It was one of the great gifts of Hebrew and Jewish tradition to humanity.” Niebuhr “addressed the wrongs of racism and industrial abuse of the labor force, which was so horrendous in the early part of the twentieth century. He protested the horrors of Hitler and the suΩering of the Jews.” Prophetic critique in the Niebuhr style is no less needed today, Lee said. “As we grow ever more weary of the vanities of self-serving political parties, spineless leaders and media fluΩ, we need a Niebuhrian realism that still holds out hope for the transformation of society.”

Lee wondered if contemporary America would sit still for such incisive criticism. In his keynote address that evening, David Brooks wondered, too. Niebuhr’s flinty realism might be needed in our polarized

political world, he said, but it would not be welcomed. The political current “war on terror,” such a distinction is crucial; innocent lives are landscape has changed dramatically since Niebuhr’s time, and not for at stake. “Once you label something as evil, you have to destroy it,” the better. According to Brooks, today’s politicians and journalists “are Patel noted. “If you declare something beyond redemption, beyond divided into teams” that conform rigidly to party lines. Niebuhr forgiveness, you had better be right.” lived in a time when bipartisanship was more possible, and Niebuhr The theme was taken up by R. Gustav Niebuhr, the afternoon panel’s himself was subtle, open and reflective about his own point of view. moderator, a former religion editor of The New York Times and a “Niebuhr was a liberal, but also a trenchant critic of liberalism. He was professor and director of the Religion and Society Program at Syracuse trying to make people on his own team uncomfortable.”

University. Gus Niebuhr is the grandson of H. Richard Niebuhr and The religious landscape also has changed appreciably since Niebuhr’s the great-nephew of Reinhold Niebuhr. He credited Reinhold with day. For the most part, he worked and wrote during a time of unquescreating “a clear way of speaking about evil.” That was important, he tioned Protestant dominance in the United States. In 1935, non-wasps said, because we are sometimes “too ready to cite evil” or to mistake were so rare in positions of power that when President Franklin D. “evil lite” for the genuine article. “We can’t aΩord cheap evil,” he said, Roosevelt included a Catholic and a Jew among his White House “lest we risk becoming unguarded about the real thing.” advisers, the news made the cover of Time. When John F. Kennedy ran If recent history oΩers any good news, it is that some groups once for president in 1960, he found it necessary to reassure an audience of widely demonized in the United States—Catholics and Jews, for ministers in Houston that it was possible to be both a Roman Catholic example—now are considered part of the American mainstream. Rabbi and a loyal American.

Herman E. Schaalman, adjunct professor of theology at Chicago The white-bread homogeneity of power in the postwar years began Theological Seminary, said that an event like the Niebuhr Forum, where to break down after the Immigration Act of 1965 brought a diverse scholars from diverse faiths gather to discuss a shared intellectual surge of newcomers to the United States, adding greatly to the nation’s heritage, “would have been unthinkable 40 years ago.” mix of nationalities and religious traditions. It is no coincidence that What explains the progress? How did hostility and fear become— contemporary observers, like the Harvard religion professor Diana at least to a degree—tolerance and understanding?

Eck, call the United States “the most religiously diverse nation on earth.”

American mobility may be part of the explanation. After World At around the same time as the Immigration Act, institutions like War ii, as more people moved out of urban ethnic and religious Elmhurst College were becoming more diverse in makeup and less enclaves and into suburbs or less settled parts of the country, they sectarian in perspective. The College was founded in 1871 as a prepainevsitably encountered, and began to understand, others unlike ratory seminary for the German Evangelical Church in North America; themselves. The American free market in worship may have helped, classes were taught in German into the early years of the twentieth too. When restless, open-minded believers crossed denominational century, and the preponderance of alumni entered the ministry. lines to find a service or a creed that suited them, they often brought Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother Richard were among the students stray bits of their own traditions along with them, cross-pollinating faiths. who advocated for the creation of a modern, fully American, liberal Believers in faiths who were once mutually hostile now find arts college at Elmhurst. Today, although the College remains proudly political common cause. In their recent book, American Grace, Robert a≈liated with the United Church of Christ (a descendant of the Putnam and David Campbell note that in the last decade, “how religious German Evangelical Church), nearly half of Elmhurst’s students are a person is had become more important as a political dividing line Roman Catholic. The campus community embraces the full range of than which denomination he or she belonged to.” Religious people of religious faith and non-faith. This year’s series of interfaith lectures, whatever stripe increasingly have come to feel that they are on the forums and service projects is just one manifestation of Elmhurst’s same team. The authors also cite this statistic: Americans average at extravagant openness to the varieties of religious experience. least two friends and at least one relative who do not share their own Of course, religious pluralism in the United States comes with its religious beliefs. This may be the simplest explanation for whatever own deep challenges. In the month before the Elmhurst forum, a growth in interreligious amity that we enjoy. It is hard to condemn a Florida pastor won national attention for his plans to burn the Koran group that includes people you care about. to protest the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” Not surprisingly, the Could Elmhurst’s extended focus on interfaith dialogue, which began American tendency to demonize less familiar groups was a prominent so strikingly with the Niebuhr Forum, be a part of this process? If so, it topic of conversation at the forum. would be a fitting extension of the eΩorts of its great alumnus, Reinhold Eboo Patel is the founder and executive director of the ChicagoNiebuhr, to bridge religious traditions and political divides. Familiarity, based Interfaith Youth Core, which brings together young people far from breeding contempt, just might encourage understanding. of diΩerent religious and moral traditions for cooperative service and dialogue around shared values. At the forum, Patel said that the Andrew Santella is a contributing editor of Prospect. His work has appeared challenge of every era is “to get the enemy right.” When Niebuhr urged in The New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, GQ and other national American intervention in World War ii, Patel noted, the theologian publications. was careful to distinguish between Germans and Nazis. Today the challenge is to distinguish between Muslims and extremists. In the Prospect/ Spring 2011

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The Finishing

Touches On the eve of emeritus, John Pitman Weber, professor of art, creates a series of campus mosaics that will add to his outsized legacy.

By Jonathan Black

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ost professors facing retirement might be con“I’ve done public art for decades,” he says, “and thought it was strange tent with a watch, a couple of speeches, a clap the campus only has what it has.” on the back. John Pitman Weber, however, is For many, Weber’s greatest legacy remains the third floor studio of not going quietly into the night. This past Old Main, where he patrols the forest of student easels as both grinch summer, he capped four decades of teaching and guru. “I’ve told you people over and over,” he exclaimed one day. with a six-week stint in the Basque city of “The lips and eyes do not have an outline. That is forbidden! Do them Vitoria as the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Envoy to Spain. Then in chiaroscuro. Put down that graphite. You should be using your Number he launched a grand farewell project: a series of stunning mosaics for 16 pencil. That pencil should be down to a stub!”

Old Main, the Schaible Science Center and other campus buildings.

The class, accustomed to Weber’s fulminations, didn’t cringe. It was “I wanted to make sure the College had something very special,” nothing personal. Later, wandering amid the easels, he was more genial Weber says. “I wanted art that’s seen as distinctive and important. I than gruΩ. “Very nice,” he said, and, “This is good, you’re doing great!” wanted to go out with a bang.”

And, good-naturedly, “What a challenge this is!”

He will surely get his wish. On his return from Spain in the fall, the At another class, a slide show of Dutch interiors demonstrated the Barbara A. Kieft Accelerator ArtSpace was transformed from an exhiplay of light. This prompted a lecture on mercantile ideology, the rise bition space into a group workshop. A dozen current and former students of perspective and the dualism of markets. plus three research assistants worked liked elves to devise the concepts “If my students wait for me to stop talking,” he says with a smile, “they’ll and execute the tiles. The results, laid out on tables beneath the ominous never start working!” soaring coils of the old accelerator, were a typical Weber mix of bold “When I first met Professor Weber I was terrified of him,” remembers graphic invention: snatches of language; images as varied as a Medieval Kevin Daley ’06, a printmaker and instructor of art at Moraine Valley cathedral and Lucille Ball; allusions Community College. “When the to science, art and religion. intimidation wore oΩ, I realized “That’s German for ‘In your how helpful his criticism was to light we see light,’” he explains, me as an aspiring artist. Despite peeling the cover oΩ a tile. “There his very busy schedule, he was are seven languages. Spanish, always selfless and accessible. He’s Korean, Latin, Arabic, English, been a great mentor and friend.”

Hebrew, German, Italian—wait, “He’s a dominant force as a that’s eight. And Zulu. Nine!” public artist,” says Suellen Rocca, (“In your light we shall see light” a pioneering Chicago Imagist and is the English translation of the curator and director of exhibits at Latin motto on the Elmhurst Elmhurst. “He’s a passionate and College seal.) dedicated teacher.”

The campus already is a showcase for Weber’s art, all done in colWeber says his long tenure at Elmhurst has given him a unique perlaboration with Elmhurst College students. His work “For the spective on the College and its students. “What I love about teaching Harmony of Man and Nature” is displayed on the lower level of the is seeing the change in the students. They can be kind of amorphous Frick Center. His best-known mural is in Daniels Hall, a sweep of when they start college, but almost all emerge as unique and interesting color embedded with quotes, words, phrases, even musical notes (from young adults by their junior year. Elmhurst is a school with a real a Mozart sonata) and a famous haiku in Japanese characters. commitment to students. The idea is to guarantee success, not in terms of Outside Elmhurst, Weber, 68, has long been acclaimed for his art. grade inflation, but in terms of learning and mastering the material.”

He has had 30 solo shows, five in New York City, and many retrospectives Weber’s own mastery got an early start, at age 15. A native New Yorker, of his work. He has created public art for a half-dozen major U.S. he attended a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx cities, and has pieces abroad in France, England and now Spain. and was struck by 1940s-era murals in the library and outside the gym.

In Chicago, his best-known mural, “Tilt” (also called “Together ProThat glimpse of public art sparked a lifelong passion. He painted in tect the Community”) transforms the wall above a Midas mu√er high school. He painted as an undergraduate at Harvard. He painted shop on Fullerton Avenue, depicting a neighborhood coming together during two years in France on a “Half Bright” (“I had a French governto cope with drug dealers, absentee landlords and corrupt politiment stipend for living expenses and Fulbright paid my travel.”) He cians. “People of the Future,” at the corner of North and Springfield, has painted throughout his time at Elmhurst College, where he has fused innovative techniques to suggest the dualism of nature and been on the faculty since 1968. culture. In 2009, he worked with local artists to complete a 3,000Public art, unlike portable art intended for galleries, museums and square-foot mosaic at the 47th Street underpass in Bronzeville; homes, is in situ work aimed at the street and the community. “It started it was supposed to be his swan song. But as retirement loomed, he as a way to make myself at home in Chicago, where I arrived as a stranger grew determined to leave a more memorable mark at Elmhurst. in 1966,” he says. “It was a way to build myself a big network.” It also

“The campus is a showcase for Professor Weber’s work, all done in collaboration with his students.”

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Prospect/ Spring 2011

40

suited Weber’s taste for social activism. He was struck by “The Wall of that he describes as “anti-rabbinical, anti-Zionist, atheist, secular and Respect,” a painting by 20 black artists on a semi-abandoned South social activist.” The extent of Weber’s own commitment was attending Side warehouse, and was soon spearheading a group of teenagers who “a bar mitzvah here and there.” That changed in 1982 after the Israeli were painting another wall in a church near Cabrini-Green. In the invasion of Lebanon. Appalled at subsequent massacres at refugee early 1970s, he co-founded the Chicago Mural Group (now known as camps, he began to do drawings and clay reliefs that depicted grievthe Chicago Public Art Group, or CPAG), and then co-wrote the classic ing; in 1993 he won a competition to design and paint an 80-foot wall 1977 book, Toward a People’s Art, which chronicled the early days of for a Jewish Community Center in Van Nuys, California—a “real what’s been called the community mural movement. turning point,” says Weber, because it enabled him to put the themes “Working in public gives you immediate feedback—everyone’s a critic! of exile, oppression and struggle into a Jewish/biblical context.

It’s an adrenaline rush to work big,” he says. “Once you’re hooked, it’s It was the Van Nuys mural, “Toward Freedom,” which dealt with hard to give up.” the story of Passover, that eventually led to Weber’s summer in Spain.

But public art has its downside, too. “You don’t get the big elite A young intern in Van Nuys, Veronica Werkmeister, reconnected commission for international work or downtown stuΩ,” he says. “The with Weber several years later as part of the Chicago Public Art Group, funding is limited to local sponsorship. There’s nothing prestigious then moved to Spain with her older sister to launch a public art program. about public art.”

For a major project last year—the fronts of two three-story buildings Weber’s decision to pursue public art in Chicago—instead of return- themed for music and gardens—they contacted CPAG, then submitted ing to New York after earning an MFA at the School of the Art Weber’s name and work to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid for a cultural Institute—likely cost him visibility as well as prestige. “From a career programming grant. standpoint,” he says, “I haven’t always made the smartest decisions.

“They put me up in student housing and gave me a bicycle to ride,” When I was a teenager, my father says Weber. “But I’ve been paid said everything he did in his life worse. I’d have done it for airfare was a mistake. At the time I and room and board.” thought that was a horrible thing He was eager, however, to return to say, a real downer. Later on I to Chicago and start the mosaic thought it was probably true. One project. Early attempts to create an could always make a better decioutdoor piece for the campus sion. It could always lead to had been frustrated by the cost. someplace better. Then again,” he Undaunted, Weber scraped together adds, “it might not.” private seed money, then landed This type of switch in viewa research grant and a $10,000 gift point pops up all the time in from art patron Ray Allen to create conversation with Weber. It’s the mosaics at a much lower cost. same impulse that informs his mistrust of a single perspective in art.

The working title for the mosaics is Indoor Public Art on the Campus Indeed, his life seems ruled by these intriguing dualisms. He could and in the Curriculum as a Site for Public Memory. “How’s that for have tried for broader recognition; he loves to work local. He’s a solemn grandiosity!” he says. moralist; he has a quick sense of humor and a wry view of himself.

He anticipates a gala spring dedication and even hopes that some He leads what he only half-facetiously calls a “double life”—teaching of the tiles will find their way back to the accelerator workshop when on a suburban campus while he paints and draws in Pilsen, where he it is restored as an exhibition space. Talk of a new building for the arts lives with his wife, Elsa, above a sprawling ground-floor studio. At on campus leaves him both skeptical and nostalgic. “There were artists Elmhurst, he’s Professor John Weber; in galleries, he’s John Pitman who jumped at the chance to work alongside this goofy old science Weber. He was brought up a secular humanist; he’s a stout defender fiction machine in such a memorable building,” he recalls. “It was like of Elmhurst’s ties to the United Church of Christ. working under the shadow of Michelangelo.”

At a faculty meeting during which several newer members of the Retiring from his tenured position isn’t the end of Weber’s presence faculty questioned that enduring connection, Weber stood up to enumer- on campus. In the fall he’ll teach a course on figure drawing. Whatever ate its benefits. Among them were the UCC students’ involvement regret he harbors is more than compensated for by all that’s changed as “joiners,” the large number of Catholics on campus, and the UCC’s thanks to his four-plus decades at the College. “I’ve now accomplished historical role in fostering American democracy. almost everything I wanted. We now oΩer a BFA,” Weber says proudly.

“Ironic,” says Weber with a smile, “that a secular Jew had to say this.”

“We have a bit more space, a bit more scholarship money, more majors Of late, Weber’s secular Judaism itself has undergone changes. He has and a stronger program. And, of course, the College will have the mosaics. become passionately engaged with Israel and the Middle East.

They’re my valedictory.”

“I’d avoided touching anything about Israel with a 10-foot pole,” says Weber, whose mother was a Russian Jew but came from a background

“Working in public art gives you immediate feedback.

Everybody’s a critic!” says Professor Weber.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

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Quick

Studies This year, we asked a veteran journalist to capture the rhythm of campus life on a new blog. Here’s six of his short takes on a memorable fall season at Elmhurst. By Andrew Santella

Illustrations by Gluekit

A semester is a marathon, not a sprint. On the first day of classes, those deadlines for papers and projects listed in the course syllabus seem wonderfully distant. Final exams are little more than an ugly rumor. Yet by semester’s end, when the last test booklets have been turned in, we can’t help but wonder how 14 weeks could have passed so quickly.

Last year, at the start of the Fall Term, we launched a blog on the College web site called Quick Studies. The idea was to take readers inside classrooms and labs, rehearsal spaces and studios, to tell the stories of Elmhurst people at work and at play.

We met, among others, a young songwriter on the cusp of his college career, a group of visual artists adding new visions to Old Main, and a political science professor playing a part in the drama of the race to become Illinois’ governor. And, of course, by term’s end we wondered how 14 weeks could have passed so quickly.

Here are just a few of the stories we told in Quick Studies last fall. Together they oΩer a glimpse of a season at Elmhurst, a time of achievement and adventure and what the College’s president, S. Alan Ray, called “those semi-unbridled occasions for what is called fun.”

To read about the Spring Term’s activities, go to Quick Studies at www.ecquickstudies.com.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

The Letting Go Amid the chores of Move-In Day, the most di≈cult task may be saying goodbye.

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By noon, a tiny village of new students had mostly moved in, and their parents had begun to face their own need to move on.

After all the pickups and U-Hauls and SUVs have been unloaded, and after the mini-fridges and Xbox systems have been lugged up the stairs, and after the beds and desks and bookshelves have been wrestled into place, then comes the hard part of move-in day at Elmhurst College. It’s time for parents to say goodbye.

Forget all the heavy lifting. Parents who helped the Class of 2014 lay claim to their new campus digs on the next-to-last Wednesday in August will tell you that the real challenge is letting go.

“I’ve been preparing for this moment for 18 years,” said David Kellen of Sandwich, Illinois, who was helping his son Matt move into Stanger Hall. He wasn’t talking about the challenge of navigating four flights of stairs while loaded down with Matt’s belongings. “It’s an emotional day. I know the house is going to seem really quiet when we get home.”

Over at Niebuhr Hall, Kim Dillon of St. Louis was admitting to anxiety about saying goodbye to her daughter Mackenzie. But Mackenzie predicted that when the time came for her parents to return home without her, it would be her father, Dan, who would cry.

Dad didn’t bother disputing the prediction.

Some 300 new students moved in on this Wednesday. About 100 of their classmates were on campus already, mostly student-athletes who had begun fall practice. They began arriving not long after sunup, cars filled to overflowing with bedding and clothing and books and snacks and every imaginable species of consumer electronics.

“Every boy has an Xbox,” said Amber Hitney, a junior from Chicago and a member of the Jay Crew, student volunteers on hand to help haul boxes and oΩer directions.

“Every year the computers and the phones get smaller, and the TVs get bigger,” said Christine Smith, associate dean of students and director of residence life. She was making the rounds and welcoming families with President S. Alan Ray and Dean of Students Eileen Sullivan. Some of the big screens they saw being installed in students’ rooms were about big enough to block out the sun.

Some families managed to get their carloads unpacked and upstairs only to find that they had been too ambitious in their packing, that some things just would not fit in the confines of a residence hall room. That foot locker and those storage bins would have to make the return ride home with Mom and Dad. “You don’t realize how much stuΩ you’ve packed until you have to carry it up three flights of stairs,” said Margie Winiecki of Des Plaines, who was moving her daughter Ainsley into Niebuhr Hall.

Amazingly enough, this small village of students was mostly moved into their new homes by noon. But if moving in goes smoothly, moving on can be more complicated. After families gather under an enormous white canopy on the College Mall for lunch, it’s time for parents to say their goodbyes.

It is a moment for which some parents are better prepared than

others. Some colleges have gone so far as to introduce formal parting ceremonies to separate over-involved Velcro parents from their oΩspring. The New York Times reported that new students at Morehouse College in Atlanta march as a group through the campus gates, which swing shut behind them, leaving parents outside. At Grinnell College in Iowa, students assemble on one side of the gym, parents on the other. The idea, apparently, is for parents to see how comfortable their children are with their own kind.

However creative educators get, some parents don’t want to let go. A dean at Colgate University in New York State told the Times that one student’s parents accompanied her to classes on the first day of school.

Elmhurst’s approach is to prepare parents for the big moment with a summer family orientation and a handbook that outlines what their students will be experiencing, month by month, during their first year.

“We want them to know that their children will be okay, that they will be supported here,” said Dean Sullivan. For those who need it, the dean recommends a book on parent-student relationships: Letting Go, by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger. (A college administrator blurbed that the book was “better than Valium” at easing parental anxieties.)

To help parents move on, Elmhurst’s schedule for move-in day is blunt. At 1:30 p.m., it’s “Time to Say Goodbye!” All around campus, you can see it happening: The long hugs, the students trying to reassure parents, the tears welling up.

As for the new students, there just isn’t much time for separation anxiety. By early afternoon, they have assembled in the chapel for New Student Convocation, sung the Alma Mater for the first time, and broken into groups of 18 to begin the College’s “Big Questions” orientation.

“By the weekend, they’ve bonded and they’ve found their pack. They have this group of new friends that will be with them all year, and they have someone to help guide them,” Sullivan said.

For most of them, Mom or Dad is just a text away—even if most of the parents have vowed to resist the temptation.

“I told her to tell me if I’m calling or texting too much,” says Chuck Mills of his daughter Melissa. “She’s an adult now, and I’ve got to let her go.”

AUGUST 26, 2010

A Needle, Grooves, the Whole Vibe A week into the term, a folksy new student from Nashville starts to find his place.

The first thing I noticed about Jake Davis when I met the first-year student on Move-In Day a couple weeks ago was that he was lugging a record turntable and a crate full of LPs. You expect to see students hauling every conceivable species of consumer electronics into their new residence hall rooms, but this was diΩerent. In this digital age, you don’t get a lot of freshly minted college students carting around their favorite music on vinyl.

It was only after I’d talked with Davis that I found out what that record collection means to him. Davis has been playing guitar since the sixth grade and writing songs since the ninth. For the last few years he has been the main creative force behind a band called Blue Cadet Three. The band’s rootsy, folk-tinged sound, in evidence on the full-length CD recorded and released this year, Palomino Wildfire, comes right out of the dusty old records Davis brought with him to Elmhurst.

There’s Dylan, there’s Creedence, there’s Johnny Cash. Davis has been learning from these masters for years now. Growing up in Nashville, where his father is a recording engineer, Davis was immersed in legendary American sounds. Even though he has left his family and his bandmates back home to study music business at Elmhurst, he wasn’t about to leave his vinyl heroes behind, too.

“I’ve always enjoyed listening to records, as opposed to just hitting ‘play’ on iTunes,” he explained to me. “I like that it’s physical, that there’s a needle and grooves, and that you have to take care of it. The whole vibe has always appealed to me.”

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So his record collection made the trip north, to serve both as inspiration and as comfort as Davis settled into his new home. But it was also, he admitted, a source of some anxiety. Davis had never been away from home by himself before. He had all the usual apprehensions about starting college. But there was this, too: He was pretty sure he’d be the only kid on campus listening to bluegrass and coΩee-house folk on 33s. What would people think?

“I was afraid that my roommate would take one look at my records and be, like, ‘What’s with this guy?’” Davis said.

Not every first-year student comes to college with tastes and talents as unique as Davis’, but most come with their own finely honed anxieties. Will they miss home? Who are they going to eat with? Have they found the right college? What happens if the laundry turns pink?

“This is a transition time for them, not just academically but also socially,” Desiree Collado, the assistant dean of students and director of student success, told me when I asked her about first-year jitters.

“The first term is a time of discovery, and one of the things they’re discovering is how and where they’ll fit in.”

With that in mind, I met up with Davis last week to find out how his first week on campus was going. He smiled even before I’d finished asking the question. His roommate, it turned out, had no problems with his taste in music, and the two have been getting along well. In fact, Davis had barely finished saying his goodbyes to his mother and stepfather on Move-In Day before Blue Cadet Three was getting a campus-wide shout-out from Elmhurst’s president, S. Alan Ray. Davis had presented Ray with a copy of the band’s self-produced CD earlier in the day. (The student clearly had already absorbed some lessons in music marketing and promotion.) That afternoon, in his address at New Student Convocation in Hammerschmidt Chapel, Ray cited some of the more noteworthy interests and avocations of the Class of 2014. On the list was a mention of Davis and his CD. “I wasn’t expecting that, but it definitely made me feel welcome,” Davis said.

He hasn’t had much time to be homesick. He liked the College’s four-day “Big Questions” orientation and he’s happy with his classes, even his 8:00 a.m. foray into Music Theory. (He goes back to his room to sleep after class.) But Davis is most excited about his FirstYear Seminar on the 1960s. “I love that period,” he says.

Davis has made some friends, has staked out a few favorite trees to sit under, and is feeling su≈ciently at home to start making plans for the rest of the term. He’s looking forward to a Sufjan Stevens show at the Chicago Theater; he’s hoping to host his own time-slot on the campus radio station soon; he wants to land an internship in the music business in Chicago. As for Blue Cadet Three, he’s thinking about recruiting some new bandmates from Elmhurst and environs, and taking the band on a modest tour this winter.

It has been the sort of first week that has Davis eager to see what comes next.

“I was sitting outside the other night with some friends and I started thinking about how my life is so diΩerent from what it was just a week ago,” Davis said. “It’s a pretty exciting time.”

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

The zine scene is a rarified world of coffee shops, obsessed artists and their self-produced, self-absorbed, underground publications.

Massive CaΩeine Intake and Sharpie Fumes Exploring the zine scene, a student learns about the indie publishing world and herself.

Megan Kirby calls herself a “literary geek,” the sort of student whose idea of a really great summer includes road trips to the Midwest’s best indie bookstores.

A junior English major and art minor, Kirby spent part of the summer rummaging through bookshelves from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Bloomington, Indiana. She was after more than a geeky good time.

Her travels were part of a research project that earned her an Honors Program summer fellowship and the $1,500 award that goes with it.

Kirby was investigating the world of “zines” (pronounced zeens), the self-produced, underground publications that chronicle the obsessions of their copy-shop-haunting creators. By the time her summer was complete, Kirby had visited the warehouse of the world’s foremost distributor of zines, talked with artists and writers at a Twin Cities zine festival, and produced her own zine—the result, she says, “of massive caΩeine intake and Sharpie fumes.”

Kirby’s zine, published in mid-September, is called CoΩee Spoons, a nod both to her growing latte habit and to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I have measured out my life with coΩee spoons”). It oΩers an endearing mix of her Lynda Barryinfluenced sketches and journal-like takes on her daily preoccupations.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

One piece focused on her failure to provoke parental disapproval with her new tattoo. “Maybe I’m not meant for rebellion,” she wrote.

Kirby launched the zine with a party for a hundred or so friends and supporters at That CoΩee Shop, near the tracks a few blocks from campus. The setting was appropriate, because the coΩee house had served as a kind of laboratory for her summer research project.

When Kirby wasn’t on the road, delving into the world of zines, she usually could be found at the coΩee house, writing and sketching in a spiral-bound notebook. The time on the road taught her plenty about the precarious business of independent publishing. The time spent perfecting her writing and drawing taught her just as much about herself.

“I had to teach myself to be patient,” Kirby said of her creative process. That meant mapping out her ideas in storyboards and revising relentlessly. “I left behind a trail of used Sharpies.”

Experiences like Kirby’s are becoming more common at Elmhurst and other colleges, because educators increasingly see undergraduate research as a particularly eΩective teaching tool. (Another Honors Program summer fellow, Michael Meaden, spent the summer in physics labs, investigating the structure of wakes created by objects placed in a liquid flow.) The National Conferences on Undergraduate Research reports that college students who participate in research are more likely to pursue graduate work than other students, and are better prepared to seek out information, analyze data and communicate findings.

“Students who go through trial and error, and get to understand the research experience, end up becoming so much more confident.

The learning becomes part of who they are,” said Mary Kay Mulvaney, director of the Honors Program. She said that Kirby’s proposal stood out both for its quality and the novelty of its topic. “Megan’s proposal was a little outside the box, but we want students to explore their passions and go beyond the traditional work they’ve already conquered.”

The day after the launch party for her zine, Kirby still seemed to be getting used to the idea that her work was now available for public consumption. It was for sale behind the counter of That CoΩee Shop, and a dozen or so of her sketches were mounted for exhibit on the shop’s walls. When she sat down to chat in the Frick Center, friends approached to ask where they could find their own copies of CoΩee Spoons.

“It has been such a personal project,” Kirby said, “and now anyone can read it.”

As it turned out, her zine was more than just a vehicle for Kirby’s self-deprecating wit and idiosyncratic world view. The summer she spent working on CoΩee Spoons was also an intensive education in art, design, writing and the business of independent publishing. “For my areas of study, I can’t think of any other subject matter that would teach me as much,” she said.

OCTOBER 5, 2010

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The Personal Touch For some high school seniors, applying to Elmhurst brings instant gratification.

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It’s college admission season in America, time for anxious high school kids all over the country—and their even more anxious parents— to send applications oΩ to their colleges of choice, then endure the seemingly interminable wait for a reply via U.S. Mail. Think of it as one of those timeless rituals that defines the passage to adult life.

Except it doesn’t have to be that way. Ask Blake Conrad.

Conrad is a senior at Lisle High School. I met him at Elmhurst’s admission open house on November 13 in the Frick Center, where he was one of about 200 prospective students checking out the College.

The high schoolers and their parents were chatting with some of the two dozen or so faculty at tables around the Founders Lounge, getting answers from admission staΩers about matters ranging from financial aid to meal plans, and walking the campus with some impressively enthusiastic student tour guides.

Not long after Conrad arrived, he handed oΩ a sheaf of papers to Tony Minestra, an admission counselor. It was his application to Elmhurst College.

“All set?” Minestra asked.

“Yep,” said Conrad, who sounded remarkably calm and confident for a teenager who had just handed over his permanent record for evaluation.

Conrad was taking the College up on an oΩer it began making this year: Turn in your completed application at the beginning of the open house, stick around for the day’s events, and before you head home, get a decision on your application. If your application is accepted, you walk away with an o≈cial admittance letter and, just possibly,

a scholarship oΩer. If not, you get advice about what you can do to improve your chances and reapply. Maybe retake a standardized test.

Maybe put in a year upping your grades at a community college.

“It’s almost like instant gratification,” Stephanie Levenson, the director of admission, told me. “It gives students an incentive to go ahead and complete the application, because they know we’ll give them a quick decision. We’ll sit down with them at the end of the day and tell them what we think. It’s very personal, and for us, very gratifying.”

On-site admission involves only a small share of the College’s enrollment total. (Overall, applications to the College are up 7 percent from this time last year, when the College enrolled the most qualified, and the third largest, first-year class in its history.) Levenson said the College oΩered admission to five students at an open house in October and to another 32 at a college fair that month run by Chicago Scholars, an organization for college-bound students.

It’s easy to see the appeal. For anyone who thinks that finding the right college has become a little too complicated, the simplicity of on-site admission is welcome. And for anyone who thinks the admission process, as practiced at some colleges, turns students into commodities, there is something appealing about getting straight, face-to-face answers from another human being.

You can count Blake Conrad among the fans of on-site admission.

“I like it because it doesn’t waste my time,” he told me at the open house. Busy with schoolwork and his part-time job at the local Jewel, he had little time for sweating out getting into college.

His mother, Sandra, a fourth-grade teacher, said the college search had already proved a trial. “You have to be a savvy parent,” she said.

“But there’s so much information, it can be overwhelming.” At Elmhurst’s open house, she and Blake were able to get answers to many of their questions from professors and financial aid o≈cers. She

When he learned he’d been admitted, Blake jumped about a foot in the air. He looked like a winner on a game show.

A (Not Quite) Magical Game What Harry Potter fan hasn’t dreamed of playing quidditch? Now, on the Mall, they can.

appreciated the personal touch. “My son is not a number. He’s more than a test score,” she said. “I like that we’ve talked to people face-toface. That doesn’t happen everywhere.”

Still, when Blake told her that he would get a decision from the College on his application that same day, she had her doubts. When Michelle DeFranco, an admission counselor, pulled the Conrads aside at the end of the open house, Sandra looked a little surprised.

Admission o≈cers had reviewed Blake’s application during the open house, and now they had an answer for the Conrads.

DeFranco walked them over to a quiet corner of the Founders Lounge and gave them the good news: Blake was in! Then DeFranco gave them some even better news: Elmhurst would oΩer him a onethird scholarship, worth more than $9,000.

Blake jumped about a foot in the air. His mother put both hands over her mouth. They could have passed for a pair of winners on a game show. There ensued a lot of hugging. “All that hard work you’ve been doing in school has paid oΩ,” DeFranco told Blake. His mom said, “I’m so proud of you.”

Later, DeFranco presented Blake with his o≈cial acceptance letter and the two posed for photographs. Then the Conrads set oΩ to celebrate.

“There’s nothing better than seeing that kind of reaction,” Levenson told me as she saw them oΩ. “You don’t get that when they open a letter in their living room.”

NOVEMBER 17, 2010 Prospect/ Spring 2011

The first meeting of Elmhurst’s newest student organization had just begun in the Frick Center, and already from a back corner of the Blume Board Room came a question. “Are we going to wear capes?” someone wanted to know.

You don’t ordinarily hear a lot of discussion of cape-wearing in the Frick Center, but then there is nothing very ordinary about the Elmhurst College Quidditch Society. Quidditch, of course, is Harry Potter’s favorite game, and the ECQS must be the only club on campus devoted to translating a fictional pastime into an actual one.

It won’t be easy. Harry Potter’s game is played above the rooftops by teams of wizards on flying brooms. The members of the ECQS, who lack Potter-like magical powers, will have to play a more earthbound version that has lately become popular on college campuses: Players race around a field with broomsticks between their legs, scoring points by whipping volleyballs through elevated hoops.

The prospect of playing quidditch on the College Mall—and of turning Elmhurst, even for a few brief shining moments, into a quasi-Hogwarts—was enough to inspire an impressive turnout for the club’s first meeting. Thirty-five new quidditch players signed up. “What Harry Potter fan hasn’t dreamed of playing quidditch?” asked first-year student Christopher Puenner, when I asked him about the game’s appeal. “I mean, not to be corny, but this is like a dream come true.”

The society is largely the work of Jessie Cardella, a junior nursing major. Like most of the members of her club—for that matter, like most members of her generation—Cardella grew up with Harry Potter. She started reading J.K. Rowling’s novels with her family when she was in third grade. Harry and his friends have been fixtures in her life ever since. She had heard talk of a quidditch club coming to Elmhurst before, and when nothing materialized, she decided to take action. She presented her plans to the Student Government Association in early November. “Once I explained that I wasn’t planning on actually flying, they thought it was a good idea,” she said. Her society was granted provisional recognition. (Other startups of the Fall Term: a baton-twirling group and a free-thought society.)

“This College is really accepting. You’re not going to hear someone say, ‘Oh, that’s stupid.’” said first-year student Christian Marty at the club’s first meeting. “It’s more like, ‘Go for it.’”

Cardella spread word about the club with fliers and table tents in the Frick Center. To drive attendance to the first meeting, she promised homemade cauldron cakes (“bewitchingly delicious”) and a screening of the sixth Harry Potter movie. The turnout surprised even her. “I’ve never started anything before,” she said, confessing to a little nervousness about running her first meeting. “I wasn’t expecting this much interest.”

Cardella also registered her society with the International Quidditch Association, the sport’s governing body. The IQA recently

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staged the fourth annual Quidditch World Cup in New York City, which was won by a team from Middlebury College. It was on the Vermont campus in 2005 that students first played a version of quidditch modified for the limitations of the non-magical. Since then, clubs have formed at 400 colleges and universities and at hundreds more high schools, according to the IQA. The sport even comes with corporate sponsorships now. (Alivan’s, maker of the o≈cial quidditch brooms of the IQA, cautions on its web site that their brooms don’t really fly: “Please do not attempt to use them for that purpose.”)

Cardella plans to organize a few scrimmage games on campus in the coming weeks to help players learn the game. For a sport that originated in a kids’ book, quidditch is said to get pretty rough.

“It’s like field hockey and rugby with a little dodgeball thrown in,” said Sam Bartlett, a first-year who played the game at Hinsdale Central High School. “It’s just good nerdy fun, but it still takes a little coordination.”

Some logistical problems remain to be solved. The society needs a home field. It needs funds. It needs to find three dozen quidditch brooms.

If all goes well, by Spring Term, Cardella may be organizing a full schedule of intramural games.

Capes, she said, will be optional.

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

It’s the last stressed-out hours of the semester, when term papers come due and final exams loom. Time to head for the Serenity Room.

Remember, Stressed Spelled Backwards Is Desserts When finals-week anxiety strikes, Elmhurst students find many ways to chill, some tasty.

In the last sleepless and stressed-out hours of the term, when term papers come due and final exams loom, even the Serenity Room can get a little frantic.

The Serenity Room is a lilac-walled refuge inside the Wellness Center in Niebuhr Hall, where students can find a few minutes of relief from deadline pressures and noisy roommates. These days it is totally booked.

“There’s a lot of anxiety and a little bit of panic at this time of year,” said Barbara Wittersheim, the director of student health services.

“Students come to us for help.”

In the Serenity Room, help often comes in the form of the fifteenminute “mini-massage” oΩered by registered nurse and massage therapist Donna Kline. She began oΩering the massages to frazzled students 10 years ago; they were an immediate hit. The demand grows every year. This term, Kline filled 90 appointment slots over the last two weeks of the term. The Student Government Association pays for the massages.

“I try to get them into a meditative state, so they can experience what it feels like to be relaxed,” Kline said after a full day of appointments. “Some are so stressed out they need to know that there is something they can do to help themselves.”

For some students, a Kline massage has become as much a part of finals week as studying. “They tell me it really helps them focus,” she said.

The Serenity Room isn’t the only campus destination that attracts students as exams approach. The Frick Center extends its hours for late-night study. Hammerschmidt Chapel draws an occasional student in search of quiet or, maybe, divine intervention. The Buehler Library routinely fills to capacity with students rushing to complete papers or commit a term’s worth of course notes to memory. Others come to the library looking for candy from the stash at the reference desk. “They come in with their haggard looks,” said Library Director Susan Swords SteΩen on a typically busy night during the last week of classes. “We’re here to help if they need a question answered, or even if they just need a paperclip for the paper they just finished.”

Finals week, counterintuitively, also features parties. The residence halls oΩer a full slate of game nights, yoga classes and snack breaks.

The president’s cabinet serves a late-night candelight breakfast in the cafeteria on December 14, the first night of finals.

Andrea Cladis, a senior and a member of the Panhellenic Council, the governing body for the College’s sororities and fraternities, organized a sequel to last year’s finals-week dessert party for stressedout students needing a break. “The idea being that when you spell stressed backwards, you get desserts,” she explained. She wants this term’s event to be bigger and better, figuring that students need it Prospect/ Spring 2011

more than ever. “This is a very challenging time for students,” she said.

Wittersheim says that college seems to be getting more stressful, and more and more students suΩer from anxiety and depression.

A dysfunctional economy only increases the pressure to succeed. Some hold down multiple jobs and many push themselves to squeeze in as many classes and activities as they can. “I hear them say, ‘I didn’t sleep well last night. I only got three hours and I usually sleep four,’” said Wittersheim. “It’s a juggling act.”

It’s enough to overwhelm any college student, but Kline says the few minutes of relief students find in the Serenity Room makes a difference.

“They’re learning to take care of themselves,” she said. “They come in with all kinds of stress. The first thing I tell them is, ‘We’re leaving all that on the doorstep.’”

DECEMBER 15, 2010

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alumni spotlight

Seeing Patients Whole

In an era of intense medical subspecialization, Dr. Brenda Fann ’88 argues that the humble family physician may represent the salvation of the American health care system.

By Andrew Santella

Photo: Roark Johnson

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hen it comes to making the case for family medicine, Dr. Brenda Fann knows what she’s up against. She knows family physicians suΩer from a paucity of respect that rivals Rodney Dangerfield’s. She knows they tend to earn less money and enjoy less prestige than their colleagues in medicine’s burgeoning subspecialties. “You hear things like, ‘Oh, you’re just a family doctor,’” she says. “We’re not the heroes you see on all the medical shows on TV.” What’s more, the number of students in American medical schools pursuing careers in family medicine has dropped by more than 50 percent since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Ten years from now, as the baby-boom generation ages, the nation will face a shortage of nearly 40,000 family practitioners.

“It’s a crisis,” says Fann, the director of the Family Medicine Residency Program at Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora.

The physician points to a stream of studies that shows that regular primary care produces excellent health outcomes at lower costs. She notes that some experts argue that the humble family doctor oΩers nothing less than the salvation of the American health care system, by emphasizing prevention, keeping people out of the emergency room, and helping them avoid costly interventions. The question, she says, is where to find all the family physicians we will need.

At Rush-Copley, Fann and her staΩ of attending physicians supervise a class of 12 freshly minted physicians who have defied the trends and chosen a career in family medicine. Residency is the last step before physicians can begin independent practice, and Fann says her job is all about making sure her residents are ready. “By the time their residency is complete, I need to have a sense of comfort that, yes, I would send a member of my family to see them,” she says.

Over the course of their three-year residency, new physicians learn at the bedside, treating patients under the supervision of attending physicians, assessing cases and defending their diagnoses on rounds.

As they advance, residents become more independent in their encounters with patients. “There’s no substitute for experience, for seeing a variety of patients and the full range of problems,” Fann says. “My job is to kick our residents closer and closer to the edge of the nest, so that when they graduate I know they’re ready to fly.”

Carrie Nelson, a physician and former colleague of Fann, says the powerful bonds Fann forms with residents are key to her success as an educator and mentor. “Because the residents know she cares about them so much, she has the credibility with them to be a tough, honest source of feedback,” says Nelson, the medical director of Your Healthcare Plus, a disease management support program run by the State of Illinois.

“She doesn’t shy away from being frank with them.”

Fann brings the same educational style to her work with pre-med students at her alma mater. The physician serves as a mentor to Elmhurst students through the Dr. Dennis J. Patterson Center for the Health Professions, which brings together students with varied but complementary career interests for pre-professional and research opportunities and more. In addition, students in the College’s medical humanities program work alongside Fann at Rush-Copley, participating in rounds with the doctor and her residents, conducting research and Prospect/ Spring 2011

Fann knows it’s a daunting challenge to convince today’s pre-med students to consider careers in family medicine. Top schools tend to promote subspecialties at the expense of family practice. presenting their findings. “Our students see medicine in action,” says Cheryl Leoni, the Patterson Center’s associate director. “They come back excited. Brenda treats them like residents. That’s the best part.

She’s a wonderful mentor for our pre-med students.”

Fann knows that it’s a daunting challenge to convince today’s medical and pre-med students to consider careers in family medicine. Top medical schools tend to promote subspecialties at the expense of family practice. Many, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, lack separate family medicine departments. Moreover, medical specialists may earn three or four times as much as primary care physicians. With medical school costing as much as $200,000, such numbers become a crucial consideration for aspiring doctors. “Students get a little scared when they hear that they won’t be able to pay oΩ their loans if they go into family medicine,” Fann says.

Family medicine also lacks a certain glamour. It’s no accident that television’s medical heroes tend to be specialists like brain surgeon Derek Shepherd, “Dr. McDreamy” on Grey’s Anatomy. To find a family physician on TV, you may have to go back to the 1970s and the not-sodreamy Marcus Welby, M.D. That is too bad, says Fann, because the work of family doctors, while admittedly less dramatic than that of specialized surgeons, is no less crucial to the well-being of patients. “I can do my best to prevent a heart attack—spending hours counseling a patient on diet and exercise and getting cholesterol down, helping him quit smoking, controlling blood pressure with medicine—and no one will ever know that we prevented a heart attack. We know that we kept chronic problems under control or minimized risk factors. But it’s not like auto insurance, where you get credit for an accident-free year.”

Fann found her way to family medicine 15 years ago at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and she has never looked back. She was inspired by the breadth of the school’s emphasis on primary care.

When the time came to choose a specialization, she was reluctant to leave behind any part of her training. “I didn’t want to be limited to a very narrow focus,” she says. “I wanted to use all I had learned.”

For Fann, family medicine has brought much more than intellectual satisfaction. She has been in practice long enough to see newborns she helped to deliver grow into grade-schoolers who come to her each year for their sports physicals. Stay with patients long enough, she says, and their problems become your problems, their stories part of your story. “Instead of seeing just a snapshot of the patient, you see the whole photo album,” she says. “I love the continuity you have with your patients.”

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A Talent for Listening

In 23 tough years as a leader at Oberlin College and as a longtime trustee at Elmhurst, George Langeler ’49 has earned the enduring trust of students and faculty alike, largely through the force of human decency.

By Andrew Santella

Prospect/ Spring 2011

Those who knew George Langeler as dean of students at Oberlin say that he never raised his voice in anger. He seemed to have a talent for defusing ugly situations.

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Dean Langeler knew that some saw student protestors as “a bunch of radical bums,” but he noticed other qualities in their characters.

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ou might be surprised to hear it, but what George Langeler wants you to know about his students at Oberlin College is how respectful and decorous they could be.

What makes this surprising is that Langeler’s long tenure as dean of students at the highly selective college and conservatory in Ohio included the student protest era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a charged time known more for impassioned challenges to authority than for courtly manners. Moreover, as the dean, Langeler stood near the head of the line of campus authorities to be challenged; and Oberlin was hardly removed from the restless spirit of the times. Founded in 1833 by a Presbyterian minister and a missionary, Oberlin already was famous for its historic commitment to social justice. It was the first college to grant bachelor’s degrees to both men and women, and was an early leader in oΩering higher education to African Americans. In Langeler’s heyday, when hundreds of institutions were roiling with discontent over the war in Vietnam and various social issues, Oberlin still managed to establish a conspicuous national reputation for student activism and unconventionality. To a reporter from Life magazine, another Oberlin administrator of the period complained that people “expect the Oberlin campus to be full of bomb-throwers, perverts and free-lovers.”

He felt compelled to clarify: “It’s not.”

Maybe not, but protests on the campus, 35 miles southwest of Cleveland, sometimes did get nasty. In 1969, students angry over the presence of military recruiters on campus marched on the o≈ce of Oberlin’s president, Robert Carr, chanting, “Work! Study! Get ahead!

Kill!” The campus radio station then recorded an incensed President Carr arguing with the students outside his o≈ce. On another occasion, antiwar undergraduates surrounded a car driven by a Navy recruiter on the Town of Oberlin’s Main Street; the police were summoned to disperse them.

In this overheated environment, it was Dean Langeler who managed to maintain the trust of Oberlin’s students, faculty and administrators alike. He did it, his colleagues remember, largely through the force of common decency. Those who knew Langeler at the time recall that he never raised his voice in anger. He seemed to have a talent for defusing ugly situations by simply listening. At a time when college administrators around the country were coming to grief because of their inability to maintain the campus calm, Langeler’s skills were easy to appreciate.

They also had a decisive impact on his campus. The historian Clayton Koppes, a former dean and acting president of Oberlin, says simply, “He helped hold this institution together.”

Langeler knew that some saw student protesters as “a bunch of radical bums.” But he noticed other qualities. One day Langeler arrived at Peters Hall, home to some of Oberlin’s administrative o≈ces, to find that student protesters had packed the corridors and stairways, and were not budging. A student leader met Langeler in front of the building. An ugly confrontation seemed possible.

“He said, ‘Good morning, Dean Langeler, we just want to let you know that there are so many students in the building that it’s hard to get in

and out,’” Langeler recalls. ‘But we’ll cut a path through for you.’” The dean thanked the student for his thoughtfulness and asked if he wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to the rest of the faculty and staΩ. The student agreed. Soon people were coming and going freely through the building. The takeover ended.

“George was able to bring that takeover to an end,” says Professor Koppes, “and if everyone didn’t quite walk out singing “Kumbaya,” at least everyone felt they had been heard. He encouraged us to listen.

He helped us all—faculty, students, everyone—to adapt in a time of tremendous change.”

Throughout his Oberlin tenure, Langeler deftly performed a balancing act. As dean, he alternated between advocating for students and allaying the concerns of faculty and trustees that the campus was careening toward chaos. He was often caught between what seemed like opposing camps, an unenviable position for anyone. Langeler responded by making himself a bridge between two sides.

It is a role he has played with consummate skill throughout nearly half a century in higher education. Langeler spent 34 years at Oberlin— as a biology professor, in a series of administrative posts, and finally and most famously as dean. He not only helped steer Oberlin through the kind of unrest that undid other campuses, but also helped institute innovations in campus life that would be widely imitated across the country. He introduced one of the nation’s first coed residence halls, in 1969. When drug abuse began to spread across campus in the early 1970s, he creatively enlisted students to counsel and confront their peers. He started a dispute-resolution program, one of the first on any campus. He adroitly managed the galaxy of student identity groups that began to spring up in the 1970s and 1980s.

Such changes inevitably come with controversy, even on a forwardlooking campus like Oberlin’s. But instead of being caught in a crossfire between constituencies, Langeler thrived by pulling opposing sides together. “I’ve tried to be a mediator, not a side-taker,” he says. “My goal has always been to keep people talking to one another.”

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n a steamy summer day, George Langeler is at his alma mater, making a circuit of the Founders Lounge in the Frick Center. In his ninth decade, he is trim and smartly dressed. As a concession to the heat, he has for the moment folded his blue sportcoat neatly over an arm bent at the elbow. His shirt seems impossibly unwrinkled.

Langeler is in search of a quiet corner for a conversation, but all the best spots have been taken by solitary students communing with iPhones or laptops. A sofa in the room’s far reaches looks promising until it turns out to be occupied by a sleeping figure. Undeterred, Langeler commandeers a pair of lounge chairs and wrestles them into new positions so that they face each other, an impromptu talk-show set.

Setting the stage for useful conversation has long been one of his notable talents. Langeler is at Elmhurst College for a meeting of the Board of Trustees, on which he has served for 36 years. Ask colleagues about his work on the board and the responses you hear echo what you have heard from Oberlin people about his years as dean there: George is a mediator, a negotiator, a unifier, a catalyst.

Prospect/ Spring 2011

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Langeler presided over the transition to “co-ed dorms” at Oberlin, an “intimate revolution” that made the cover of Life.

As the longtime chair of the board’s faculty and curriculum committee, Langeler says he tried to be a go-between, helping professors and trustees understand one another. Again, he made himself a bridge. George Thoma, a distinguished professor emeritus of economics, remembers that when the Elmhurst faculty was revising the general education curriculum back early in the 1990s, the board seemed to grow impatient with the pace of deliberations. It is a common conflict: board members from the corporate world, accustomed to e≈ciency and hierarchies, do not always appreciate the shared governance of academia, with its need for negotiation and consensus. Faculty, accustomed to the measured pace of committees and meetings, do not always buy the need for speed. Thoma says Langeler was able to persuade the board to give the professors time to get the curriculum right, while also prodding the faculty to move the process along. “He was an even-handed mediator, and he created a great deal of trust,” says Thoma, thus defusing “tensions between the board and the faculty. He was a very valuable guy.”

Langeler has been devoted to Elmhurst since his first days at the College, as a student in the fall of 1945. He had grown up a mile or so from campus, but admits that he enrolled somewhat reluctantly and when he arrived he “knew very little about the place.” His ambition had been to study agriculture at what is now Iowa State University.

But he reasoned that since he was likely to be drafted into the armed forces at any moment, it made more sense to study close to home.

He took to the College immediately. Painfully shy as a high schooler, he hit it oΩ with his classmates and professors. He built sets for the

At Elmhurst and Oberlin, Langeler learned that students need to feel they’re important to professors and administrators alike. “It’s one of the critical elements of education,” he says. “They have to know they matter.”

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student theatre group, joined the Future Teachers of America, and made more friends than he ever had before. He was elected president of his class, a position he still holds after more than 60 years. (He is routinely renominated and reelected whenever the class meets for reunions. “I’ve tried to propose term limits, but I’m always voted down.”)

At Elmhurst, Langeler discovered an interest in biology, sparked largely by the enthusiasm of one of his professors, Harvey DeBruine.

Watching DeBruine and his colleagues, Langeler came to realize that the best teachers oΩer more than academic expertise. “My professors at Elmhurst were not just competent but also caring,” he says. “That was important to me at the time, and it was something I remembered when I began my own career.”

He decided at Elmhurst to become a science teacher, and went on to complete a master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign. Then came a call from his old school, inviting him to return to Elmhurst to teach introductory biology. “It scared me,” says Langeler.

“I’d only been away one year. It occurred to me that I could end up teaching students who had recently been in class with me. I was so determined to be prepared. I got through that first year, but I never worked so hard in my life.”

He spent the next five years on the Elmhurst campus, teaching zoology, ornithology and other courses. He also became the faculty head resident in Irion Hall, at the time a dormitory for men. It was his introduction to what would become a storied career in student aΩairs.

After earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan, Langeler arrived at Oberlin College in 1959. He continued to teach, but also took on a series of trouble-shooting posts in administration during a time when the institution was reorganizing itself. He got the job as dean of students in 1966.

The new dean stepped into the role just as colleges and universities were making the transition away from the old-style in loco parentis policies—early curfews, moral codes, fierce control over student organizations—that had ruled for decades in American higher education.

The new style gave students a role in governing campus life and expanded their individual autonomy. Thus empowered, Oberlin’s students quickly took to questioning college policies, and their questions—some trivial, some personal, some momentous—often ended up on Langeler’s desk. Why do we have to wear shoes in class? What’s up with mandatory physical education? Why doesn’t the college oΩer gynecological services? Why are we hosting military recruiters? Where can I come down from an acid trip?

Langeler’s approach to such questions was a simple one. Talk it out.

Listen carefully. Search for agreement. The result was something of a revolution in Oberlin’s student life, but one arrived at not by confrontation but by consensus. In 1969, when Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the country to provide joint housing for men and women—“coed dorms”—it earned a big, splashy cover story in Life.

(What seems strange now about Life’s photographs of male and female students mingling together in the residence halls is the near ubiquity of beaded bell-bottom jeans.)

Langeler knew that plenty of people at Oberlin were not ready for the idea of coed dorms. He worried about what the alumni would say.

Just a few years earlier, Oberlin’s rules limited dorm visits between the sexes to a few hours on Sunday; women had to observe curfews. Men were housed on the north end of campus, women on the south. As late as the 1930s, men and women were not even allowed to sit next to each other in chapel. Yet when change came to the residence halls, it came mostly because “we couldn’t see any reason not to do it.” A year earlier, Crawford Hall had been turned into an experiment in kibbutzstyle living during the month-long winter term, with men on the first floor and women on the second. The experiment had gone well. Once the college decided to expand mixed housing across the campus, “it became a model for what was to follow” at other colleges.

The dean’s knack for building bridges should not be mistaken for an unhealthy aversion to conflict or controversy. He worked with student-identity groups and special program houses, both of which

inspired arguments on campus and beyond. He supported a study of the issues faced by gay and lesbian students long before such a thing was fashionable or even acceptable on many campuses. The very length of his tenure as dean of students at a cutting-edge college—23 years— speaks to his talent for weathering turbulent seas.

“I don’t know how he stood it for so long,” Koppes, his former colleague, says. “Dean of students is one of the most difficult jobs on any campus, and particularly at Oberlin, where students have such strong political motivations and such a strong desire to challenge authority. He somehow managed to navigate all that. He is genial and good-natured, but also very skillful.”

If all those disputatious students sometimes made his job complicated, they also made it worthwhile. “He clearly liked mentoring students,” says Dennis Rosenbaum, an Oberlin alumnus who as a student worked with Langeler on independent study projects in the early 1980s. “He asked a lot of questions, and he helped you find your own way. He had such a calmness about him that you can understand how he was able to work with such disparate groups over the years.”

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angeler says the first thing he noticed about his students was how engaged they were, how much they wanted to grapple with the world. Far from scaring him oΩ, that quality made Langeler feel he had found a home.

It was a little like his reaction to Elmhurst College when he arrived as a freshman. In most of his classes, he found veterans recently returned from service overseas. They had a worldliness about them unlike anything he and his sheltered peers from high school had known. “These veterans asked questions,” Langeler says. “They were curious about the world. I found people I was in sync with.”

Now, in retirement, Langeler keeps busy satisfying his own expansive curiosity about the world. For the last 20 years or so, he has spent most of each winter traveling in Asia. It all started in 1982, when Langeler visited China a few years after it had opened itself to Westerners.

He later taught at or consulted with colleges in India, Japan and Indonesia, and served on the board of an Asian-American educational exchange program.

He spends his summers in New Hampshire. Knee trouble has forced him to cut back on his beloved long hikes in the White Mountains, but he still canoes the local lakes and ponds. “He’s an energetic guy, and he seems to get more energetic every year,” Professor Thoma says.

“He’s not someone who is drifting into idleness.”

Back in the Frick Center, Langeler checks his schedule. The demands of his energetic retirement are bringing the meeting to an early close.

But like the mediator he has always been, he wants to keep the conversation going. He would like to talk about Elmhurst College, about how he’s encouraged by the institution’s direction. And he would like to talk some more about students. He is thinking back to the lessons he absorbed from Professor Harvey DeBruine and his Elmhurst colleagues more than half a century ago.

“Students have to feel they’re important,” George Langeler says, almost in summation. “It’s one of the critical elements of education.

They have to know they matter.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

In retirement, Langeler keeps busy satisfying his own expansive curiosity about the world, traveling to Tibet, Cambodia and Switzerland.

He spends most of each winter in Asia.

a thousand words images from campus

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Something Magnificent About Them

B

efore Danielle Dobies painted the portraits that make up her exhibition, “Faces of Sustenance,” she first had to tackle an equally daunting task. She had to get to know her subjects.

So Dobies, a 21-year-old art major from Aurora, Ohio, spent much of last year visiting and volunteering at food pantries, shelters and other sites served by the Northern Illinois Food Bank, which distributes food in 13 counties. Her plan was to educate herself about the food bank and its people, then use her art to spread word about its work. But the idea of painting a portrait didn’t seem nearly as di≈cult as the idea of asking a stranger to pose for one.

“I was really nervous about approaching people at first,” she said as she prepared the paintings for their first public showing. “I didn’t know if they would trust me.”

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried.

“People couldn’t have been more encouraging. When I explained what I was doing, everyone wanted to help.”

Dobies interviewed the clients, volunteers and staΩ she met at the food bank sites, then asked them to pose for photographs. A woman in her nineties told her stories of decades of volunteer work. A nineyear-old boy hammed it up for her camera. Later, when it came time to apply her oil paints and colored pencils to canvas, she tried to summon the characters she’d come to know.

“It was important for me to try to get their personalities and their stories in my work,” she said. “I really wanted to capture the people I met.”

The collection of seven canvasses that resulted was displayed during the fall at the Frick Center.

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Danielle Dobies, an art major from Aurora, Ohio, not only visited but also volunteered at the Northern Illinois Food Bank. These portraits are among the tangible results of her time there.

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If one of Dobies’ goals was to spread word about the food bank, she succeeded. In the days leading up to her show, the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald ran stories on the project. WBEZ radio called with questions. A news crew from Channel 7 paid her a visit on campus.

Her project was the result of a grant by the Thing 1 2 3 Foundation (it takes its name from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat), an Elmhurst nonprofit organization that supports the food bank. Last year, it invited Elmhurst students to submit proposals for projects to help the food bank. Dobies’ idea surprised the foundation’s leadership.

“We thought we’d get a great logistics project or something to do with marketing,” said the foundation’s Jim Ruprecht. “We had no idea we’d get something as magnificent as this, from a student who put her whole heart and soul into the project.”

Prospect/ Spring 2011

A student spends much of a year at a food bank, earning the trust of the people there and capturing their lives in sensitive portraits.

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the magazine of elmhurst college spring 2011

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the magazine of elmhurst college spring 2011

REINHOLD NIEBUHR NOW Elmhurst’s great alumnus still informs the national conversation on war, morality, public life and “the nature and destiny of man.”