Hampshire College Non Satis Scire Fall 2018

FALL 2018

Non Satis Scire THE HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS

ANCESTRAL SEEDS and other Hampshire kernels

Sacred Inheritance

Co-Evolutionary Dance The sustainability of land and crops, and of a Hampshire education, coalesced last July when Rowen White 97F returned to her educational home as keynote speaker of the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference, held on campus. Of Mohawk descent, she was “grateful to stand on this very land” in Amherst, where “the sprouting of my love for our traditional food ways,” originated. She founded Sierra Seeds in North San Juan, California, a nonprofit dedicated to regenerating seeds that were the “sacred inheritance” of her Native American forebears.

These indigenous seeds made their way across the country, she explains, “on long journeys and in smoky buckskin pouches upon the necks of people who were forced to relocate from the lands of their births and their ancestral grounds.” She aims to preserve the “legacy of American seeds” and their biodiversity from the ravages of commercial farming. “Corn, beans, and squash are a magnificent result of the thousands of years of the co-evolutionary dance between humans and plants,” White said. “Reverence, and love, and passion are at the heart of our collective decisions to create access to food and seed.”

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Contents

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SACRED INHERITANCE

Co-Evolutionary Dance EVOLVING EDUCATION

Renewal THE RINGER

Resplendent Ritual (As a Subversive Act) PLAINS SPEAKING

How Lynn Saw It OPEN MIC

You Pay Attention ROCK STARS

They Were a Force of Nature TWEETSTORM

What Do You Tell Your Kids About Borders?

HAMPSHIRE DIARIST

Confessions of a Class Notes Fanatic. Or, a Life in Pieces INVALUABLE GIFT

Kindness, Followed Closely by Honesty Hampshire News Books Notes from Alums In Memoriam Book and Bell

COVER, PREVIOUS PAGES “I’m a mother and I’m an indigenous farmer and I’m a sacred seed keeper,” said

Rowen White, who returned to Hampshire to talk about her work regenerating the seeds of her ancestors.

“We’re on the brink of a new and multilayered chapter of the organic and food-resilience movement.”

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Evolving Education

Renewal.

BY MIRIAM NELSON

Because this is my opening letter to you since being named president, may I take a moment to tell you why I’m here?

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Evolving Education

I’m here late, for starters. Had I known about Hampshire when I was a high school student in Pennsylvania, Hampshire would have been my top choice — I know now that this would have been the perfect place for me. I’m here because of the learningintensive environment. I’ve never seen undergraduates so deeply engaged and faculty and staff so intellectually nimble, supportive, and on mission. I’m here because our alums are living proof that critical thinking plus imagination plus the nerve to act can make progress for humankind and our planet. Hampshire people are courageous, that’s something I’ve learned from the many conversations I’ve had over the past many months. I think that’s because it takes guts for one to decide to be here — to study, teach, work, or send kids to a school that follows questions into unmapped regions instead of traveling familiar and well-worn paths. As a student, I encountered that only when I got to graduate school, so I find it thrilling to see — and now to help advance — this work at the college level.

Inquiry-driven, learner-centered education isn’t easy.

But is there any better preparation for tackling the world’s great challenges? I don’t think so.

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Evolving Education

So many of you have known that for years. A big part of my job will be to ensure that it’s well known outside our campus.

Recently I was in touch with the head of a foundation that shares Hampshire’s values. I’ll be doing that a lot, speaking with potential funders who might support our efforts, in addition to the many discussions I’ll continue to have on campus and with our alums. I explained how Hampshire was established during the tumult of the 1960s to be an intellectual and moral force in a changing culture, and how our two institutions were kindred spirits that way.

I mentioned that our students, faculty, staff, and alums are unusually committed to social causes no matter their academic disciplines or professions, to resisting injustice in all its toxic forms, and to building equitable communities. I explained that we work to live our values: How as a college we invest ethically, the first to divest from fossil fuels and from South Africa. That we put education within the reach of underserved populations and first-generation students.

That we’re committed to the environment and environmental justice, through 100 percent solar-energy generation and a campus Living Building, the R.W. Kern Center, the 17th structure of its kind in the world.

“One of America’s great educational treasures” is what this colleague called us, clearly aware of who we are and what we stand for. “Your history and mission are an inspiration to all who care about justice in America and the world.”

I know we’re all thinking about our history and mission right now, as we approach the 50th anniversary of our opening day, when we welcomed our first class. And soon, together, we’ll plan how to commemorate this landmark through a rich series of events. But if I were to sum up in a sentence my highest aspirations for Hampshire on the eve of our 50th year, it would be this: I want us as a community to rededicate ourselves to our principles of inquiry-based learning and artistic expression in service to a just and sustainable world.

We have work to do. Almost six decades after our founding, this country and world are, sadly, still in the throes of the social and environmental ills of those days. The stakes couldn’t be higher. I see our anniversary not only as a cause for celebration (and we’ll celebrate!), but also as a crucial means of visibility and influence around the true potential of higher education in this country, especially in these times.

We can and we must take this leadership role. It’s why we were founded. It’s in our DNA. We know the huge challenges facing the liberal arts, too.

Demographic trends, anti-intellectualism, doubts about our very purpose let alone effectiveness: those are all too real.

But as I told the presidential search committee last spring, I

believe this is Hampshire’s time.

It’s Hampshire’s time because we’re not just any liberal arts college. It’s Hampshire’s time because no other undergraduate institution approaches learning this way to the degree that we do, and I’m convinced that there’s no academic model better geared to meet the challenges ahead than ours.

But this has to be our starting point. We have new work to do. This is an era of major disruption in higher education, and by all serious accounts, the field will look a lot different in five to ten years from how it does now.

What will Hampshire’s future look like?

I’ll be asking the wider Hampshire community to engage with me, and with our trustees, in exploring that question.

This must be a visioning year for us, a year to envision our future based firmly on our values and core principles and greatest strengths and highest potential. This is about evolving education, and the moment is before us.

I can’t think of a more Hampshire undertaking to launch us into our next half century.

As we anticipate the promise of our 50th, we shouldn’t forget that this year is also a Hampshire anniversary, and one of equal importance. Exactly 60 years ago, our founding text was published: The New College Plan: A Proposal for a Major Departure in Higher Education. In all my readings about Hampshire, a single line has stood out for me with clarity like no other, and it came from this amazing, visionary little booklet. In fact, it was the very first sentence:

It is acknowledged on all sides that American higher education is facing a crisis and that if we are to continue “the pursuit of excellence” on which our society’s growth, health, and safety depend, we shall have to bring to bear both great resources and great imagination.

I want us to think that boldly as together we’ll take on the awesome, exhilarating responsibility of evolving education at Hampshire. I know it won’t be easy and I expect it will be disruptive. But I can’t think of a community more suited to accomplish this work than ours. Who better understands the process of discovery — in all its dynamic, creative, and emergent messiness — that begins with asking a question both incredibly simple and frustratingly complex?

We’ve begun to put that process in motion. I feel privileged to be working side by side with you in this effort, and am excited to see where it leads.

Adapted from President Nelson’s letters sent this fall to the campus and alumni communities.

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RESPLENDENT

RITUAL

{ AS A SUBVERSIVE ACT } “Your job, Jon, is to find the bell.”

BY JOHN COURTMANCHE

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The Ringer

The Ringer

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing FROM “CHIMES OF FREEDOM,” BOB DYLAN, 1964

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or weeks every spring, the Div-Free Bell clangs jubilantly from Hampshire’s campus across the trap-rock ridge of the Holyoke Mountains, heard for miles around, day and night. Few who know Hampshire will be surprised to learn that the inspiration for this tradition, some 35 years ago, was an act of empathy.

At a college where all students for their final year of studies plan, complete, and defend an advanced, intensive independent project before a faculty committee, every tolling represents an undergraduate released from the final evaluation meeting with an assessment of having passed the last degree requirement.

Giving students a bell to chime was not a decision of a college trying to imitate other school traditions, such as William & Mary seniors ringing their Wren Bell to begin commencement festivities, Colgate seniors throwing torches in a fire pit, Wellesley seniors competing at wooden-hoop rolling (and dousing the winner in the lake), and Liberty

University nursing students making a bonfire of their scrubs.

Rather, it began as a student sensing a need. “It was spring 1981 and I had passed my Division III and was sitting in the Bridge Café,” remembers Jonathan Frank. “A student approached me, someone who I kind of knew but not well. She was so excited, she just got out of her committee meeting and had passed Div III. You could just see how excited she was. I didn’t really know her. She didn’t have anywhere to go with her excitement but she came up to me and told me her news. I said, ‘Oh, great, congratulations.’”

Frank, who entered Hampshire in the fall of 1976, knew the feeling: He had just completed his Division III, its centerpiece a thesis titled “The Question of Sovereignty over Jerusalem.” And he’d been told by his committee — Penina Glazer (chair), Bob Rakoff, and Leonard Glick — that he’d passed. He described the feeling as a massive buildup of anxiety and excitement and relief, and then nowhere to go with it.

“There was nothing that brought people together to celebrate,” he says.

In those days, students could celebrate in Prescott Tavern, as the drinking age was 18, but that was it.

Frank wanted to find a way for students to rejoice. Returning home to Chicago after graduation, he eventually landed on the idea of a bell to ring, a common way for communities to mark festivities. He imagined that Hampshire students who heard the bell no matter where in their studies they were would be encouraged that they could complete their journey and graduate.

And he also thought of a popular Dylan song that he liked, “Chimes of Freedom,” and its hopeful message in common with Hampshire’s zeitgeist, of freedom for people suffering oppression and injustice. In the lyric,

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The Ringer

It was a big old brass ship’s bell.

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the narrator hears bells of thunder toll and lightning strike for refugees and wrongful convicts, for outcasts and the disabled, for single mothers and broken-hearted lovers, and for “every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.”

Fra n k h a d ab o u t $ 750 a f te r graduation and decided to use it for a bell. He called Dyan Sublett, who was managing College fund-raising and parent relations. Sublett knew Frank through his mom, Joan Harris, one of the many parents in those early days of the College who volunteered to serve on the board of trustees.

She remembers Frank as a playful, joyful student.

“He called me and said, ‘I’d love to donate a bell, something that every student could use to celebrate,’” Sublett says. “Jonathan knew what an enduring gift might mean, and he wanted to make a gift for every student who had the same feeling of wanting to recognize such an achievement.”

Sublett loved the idea and thought it fit the College’s New England setting, where bells ring from white spired churches. She pitched Jonathan’s idea of the Div-Free Bell to President Adele Simmons, other campus leaders, the library, and facilities.

She went back to him and said, “I promise you we’ll get it installed. Your job, Jon, is to find the bell.”

Frank started shopping at antique stores outside Chicago, in northern Illinois, and in southern Michigan. He finally found the right one: “It was a big old brass ship’s bell,” he says. “It read Olinda, the name of the ship.”

Ship bells had both practical and ceremonial uses: to help crews on watch mark their time; as alarms or signals during fog; and for ceremonies such as visits from officers and dignitaries, New Year’s Eve, and baptisms.

Frank had someone build a shipping crate for it, and he transported it via

the Greyhound Bus Company. Two years after Frank and his muse had graduated, the bell was hung in the portico. At first the College kept its cable locked to the column, and a student could ring it by getting the key from the faculty chair or from the central records office. The College also mounted a plaque recognizing Frank as the donor.

“It felt like a private hurrah for me,” Frank said. “It was the most subversive thing I could possibly do.”

He had introduced a tradition in a community that usually rebelled against them. “It was a lesson for me,” he said. “People have needs. It’s not enough to be iconoclastic, or revolutionary. We all want a little affirmation.” The bell was adopted immediately.

Tim Shary, who entered Hampshire in 1986, three years after the bell was hung, said, “Scheduling one’s bell ringing had already become quite a tradition by the time I was there. I remember some people treating the bell with sacred reverence — many students believed that you didn’t touch the rope or even walk under the bell until you were truly Div-Free.” In fact, for that reason, the College soon found that it no longer needed to lock the rope.

Shary, who as a student wrote A History of Student Activities and Achievements 1969–91, has not forgotten his bell ringing. “I invited all my friends a couple of hours after my final Div III meeting, had lots of champagne, and played Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ on speakers from media services. I was a little ostentatious,” he says.

Once it was up, Frank returned to campus to ring it as well.

Over the course of 35 years, it has become the College’s most practiced tradition, even more so

The Ringer

than Halloween. Students plan their own bell-ringing to their liking: an intimate event, with one or a few loved ones and faculty committee members; a large party with lots of friends; naked in the dark of night and posting a photo to social media; a gathering with family during Commencement weekend. Some students bring food and bubbly or other spirits.

In 2003, when the original bell developed a crack, students raised funds matched by a College disbursement to replace it with a new, larger one, which was installed in April 2004.

Now the chief information officer at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school for childhood development studies cofounded by his stepfather, Irving Harris, Frank has been pleased to see that over the years Hampshire has embraced the tradition in a range of ways. The bell image has been used in artwork for Commencement and other special events. This year, Hampshire has extended the bell tradition to Orientation: For the first time, new students entering fall 2018 were invited to celebrate the start of their college journey at a Book and Bell Dinner attended by President Miriam Nelson, Dean of Students Gloria Lopez, and Orientation students and staff.

For gifts, students received small bells to symbolize what they could look forward to. After dinner, they stood outside the dining commons and rang them together, representing the start of an adventure now bookended by ceremonial bell-ringings.

This year, to mark the end of his term at the College, President Jonathan Lash rang it, as did board members Ken Rosenthal and Bob McCarthy to commemorate the end of their service as well. It was a special moment in particular for McCarthy, who graduated from Hampshire prebell, in 1978.

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The tradition has made Frank into a campus star. About seven years ago, he said, he went to an alumni get-together at Adele Simmons’s house, introducing Jonathan Lash as the new president. At the end of the night, as he was leaving, he met a young alum, and somehow it came up that he had donated the bell. “I’ll never forget his reaction. He pulled out his cell phone and said, ‘You’re kidding, I’m telling my friends I just met you.’”

Five years ago and weeks apart, Frank brought a son and daughter, two of his triplets, for separate admissions tours. Nomi’s tour was second, and by the time she arrived on campus with her father, word had spread of who he was.

“We walked into the admissions office,” Nomi 14F remembers, “and everyone got really excited and said, ‘It’s the bell guy!’” After a few minutes of being the center of attention, Frank had to stop the admissions team and remind them that his daughter really deserved their attention. Nomi recalls his gesturing toward her: “Ummm, this is my daughter, she’s here to visit.”

Nomi was so amused that when she got back home she made her dad a T-shirt with a bell on it and the words IT’S THE GUY!

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omi enrolled at Hampshire, and she says seeing the plaque on the library wall with his name on it made her excited to ring the bell. And as she heard it ringing throughout her four years of studies, she said she understood why her father thought fellow students could use the encouragement. “ I fo u n d t h e a c a d e m i c s a t Hampshire to be underratedly hard,” she said. “Kids have said to me, ‘I came

Everyone got excited. “It’s the bell guy! ”

The Ringer

to Hampshire so I wouldn’t have to do any work.’ And I thought, Good luck with that.”

Nomi says she appreciated how difficult Hampshire was. “Taking classes without having to worry about a grade, it was very freeing. As I wrote my reflection papers, required as part of evaluations, in the process I’d realize I was learning, and I’d be like, ‘Wait, I just learned something.’

Academically, I loved Hampshire.”

For her Division III, Nomi studied the science and visual representations of sound waves; her thesis was titled “Cymatics: The Study of Sound Wave Phenomena, Vibration, and Their Visual Representation.” Her work involved designing sound projects, such as building her own chladni, and experimenting with a range of supplies, such as audio speakers, electromagnets and circuits, ferrofluid, and magnetic particles.

Through it all she kept a “mad scientist” journal of all her findings and experiments so she could identify and learn from her mistakes and make improvements to her projects, as well as for regular presentations to her faculty committee. (During Commencement weekend, Nomi presented her thesis at the Division III showcase.)

This spring, as Nomi completed her Division III project, she called her dad and asked if he wanted her to wait and ring the bell with him at Commencement weekend. His response: “No, it’s meant for you to ring when you pass Div III. You can ring it a second time with me.”

So as she and a best friend prepared for their Div III pass meetings, they planned a casual ceremony. “We had our pass meetings back to back; I was first and then she had hers. We waited for each other to go ring the bell together. We got a cheap bottle of champagne. It was fun to plan. I

invited my faculty committee, John Slepian and Peter Kallok, and staff member Amy Putnam, who helped me through Div III. She was an honorary committee member.”

Nomi says that looking back, the ringing felt like it was more of a graduation ceremony than the actual Commencement, which was more for family. “For a student, physically being able to ring the bell is the important graduation ceremony,” she said. “It means successfully completing all your hard work at Hampshire.”

At Commencement were Jonathan Frank and the family matriarch — Nomi’s grandma Joan Harris, former Hampshire trustee and recent recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama for her work as a leader and philanthropist in the arts community. Grandma and Mom and some cousins, aunts, and other grandparents ventured over to the front of the library, crowded with graduates ringing the bell for their loved ones and taking pictures.

Nomi’s family then watched her and “the bell guy” ring the Div-Free Bell together.

Christy and Jonathan Frank with then new graduate Nomi and her brother Noah, on campus last spring for Commencement. With her family, committee, and a supportive staff member gathered around, Nomi — and her father — rang the bell.

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Plains Speaking

How Lynn Saw It LYNN MILLER, 1932–2018

Lynn Miller cultured individual cells in test tubes and he cultivated a decillion cells in the classroom: that’s 37.2 trillion cells per student multiplied by however many hundreds of students he taught during his 48 years as a professor of biology at Hampshire. If you don’t know what “decillion” is, get off your keister and look it up. And if you don’t care what a decillion is, you should: at least, that’s how Lynn would have seen it.

W h e n s tu d e n t s s h o w e d u p unprepared to ask questions about assigned reading (mind you, “ask,” not “answer”), he’d exit the room with “Okay, that’s it.” That’s it? Well, that’s it until they wrapped their minds around the Miller method: questioning truisms and stepping into the role of actual scientists, microbe hunters.

For Lynn, learning began with a question and proceeded to a selfdesigned project followed by a mastering of the lab techniques required for scientific investigation. After months of toil and some rending of garments (aka a Div III), a theory formed and . . . led to more questions. That was Lynn’s template for learning.

He rejected the model of education as consumption. He reviled the notion that students are sponges absorbing (not very well or enthusiastically) information delivered by professors.

That was the road map of lesser schools, the ones priding themselves on hallowed hallways and tradition. It was education as entrapment, leading to a point of no return. He advocated — no, insisted — that students chart their own way. That was the route to freedom.

“We’re trying to get them to learn

by themselves, to teach themselves how to learn, so there’ll be no problem they can’t ever attack,” Lynn said in an interview.

A lifelong student of microbiology, genetics, and evolution, he himself originated on the Great Plains.

Born in 1932, in McCook, Nebraska — Willa Cather country — he migrated to California to study under microbiologist C. B. van Niel at Stanford, then packed his bags for the Northeast. Once established, he turned his attention to an educational experiment called Hampshire College.

He helped found the school, and laid the groundwork for the department of natural sciences.

His courses, such as Human Gene Therapy: Proceed with Caution and The Natural History of Infectious Disease, mutated many of his charges into lifelong academics, giving them, in the words of one, “the confidence I needed to believe I could become a scientist.”

He also mentored new faculty by stripping away the illusion that students are vessels into which “knowledge” is poured. Says one mentee, “It’s all about making the shift from students being information consumers to being information producers and utilizers. I learned that from Lynn.”

Lynn spent 85 years on Earth, the majority of those facilitating the growth of the mind. He took great pride that his best lessons lingered in the decillion questions he inspired in others. Then he left the room, leaving the door to disquisition unlocked.

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Carpe Diem!

My apologies to Virgil Thomson and J. A. Symonds, Cole Porter, and Scholars Everywhere for what you’re about to hear!

LYNN MILLER, COMMENCEMENT, MAY 22, 2010

Gaudeamus Igitur Juvenes Dum Sumus [Let us live then, and be glad, While young life’s before us] Let us live then, and be glad, While young life’s before us!

Before we too become Mom and Dad, Before Old age hard and sad, Today, let no one ignore us.

Long Live this College, Those that Learning nourish; Long Live each member of the same, Long live all that bear its name, Let them ever flourish.

Perish cares that pule and pine!

Perish envious blamers!

Die the Devil, thine and mine!

Die the starch-necked Philistine!

Scoffers and defamers!

Let us now in youth rejoice, None can justly blame us; Gone are all our childish woes, Gone are all the professors no’s, Go to Hell, just don’t FLAME us!

ANY QUESTIONS? Cole porter wrote: At words poetic, I’m so pathetic That I have always found it best, Instead of getting ’em off my chest, To let them rest unexpressed, I hate parading my serenading As I’ll probably miss a bar, But if this ditty is not so pretty At least it’ll tell you how great you are.

YOU’RE THE TOP.

Refrain 1 You’re the top! You’re the colosseum, You’re the Yiddish Book Museum, You’re 3G, you’re ornia, you’re ubuntu, You’re funk, jam, and indie, postmodern theory, You’re autotuned!

You’re the top, you’re on Roberta’s good side, You’re the top, cream of the crop, locally supplied, I’m an aged prof who is fated soon to drop, But if, Baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

Refrain 2 You’re the top! You’re the number one hipster, Your tight skinny jeans just barely zipper, You’ve met the Dalai Lama, You’ve voted in Barack Obama, You Know It All! You’re the Farm, you’re organic chard, You’ve rung the bell, you’ve partied hard, I’m a frightened frog that can find no log to hop, But if, Baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

Refrain 3 You’re the top! You’re under construction, You’re the top! You’re a Div III production, You’re a quantum thinker, P B R drinker, underage, You’re the Centrum Gallery, you’re Mark Spiro’s salary, You’re the rage!

You’re deconstructionist, you’re reconstructionist, You’re a star! You’re Div three bliss, Division-Free, a Grad — Yippee — Don’t Stop!

But if, Baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

TO THE GRADUATES: CARPE DIEM! [Seize the Day!]

Selections from Virgil Thomson’s “Dance in Praise,” lyrics by J. A. Symonds; from Cole Porter. Most of the rhymes are from various students, graduates, and friends. Several Hampsters, among them Clemma Jacobsen, Amy Saurer, Toby Stillman, Suzanne Barkan, Ivor Miller, Beth Day, Bonnie Obremski, Sam Singer, and, more recently, Samanthe Lobosco and Siena Mayers, contributed phrases, lines, and rhymes. This version was scripted by Marissa Baker-Wagner, Jamie Moody, and Martina Risech Neyman. A few of the lines, rhymes are mine (Lynn Miller).

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Plains Speaking

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Open Mic

You Pay Attention

BY MARIANA VALENCIA 02F

Brooklyn-based dance artist Mariana Valencia thought that, as she put it, she’d “put ethnography and writing to sleep.”

But when a space opened up at an open mic, she decided to read from her dance journal. The process helped her to realize something: “I’ve been writing this whole time; it’s just become dances.” Valencia won a Bessie Award this year for Outstanding Breakthrough Choreographer, one of the industry’s highest honors. Here she is discussing a moment from Album (2018), a dance piece that incorporates spoken text, memoir, and song.

Who gets space? Who gets written?

Who gets to do something? Who gets to talk?

I would love to read more books that people like me have written. What does that mean? I looked at the big picture — who gets to write books? Mostly people not like me. Who are books written about? Again, most likely people who are not me. So I started thinking, “It seems I’m going to have to take this into my own hands. I don’t know who will write my history, so I’d better start now so someone can have good notes in the future if they want to write it.”

So that’s where the dance comes from.

The section of Album that I consider to be my manifesto is entitled “My Stance on Dance.” It’s the first moment when I’m actually claiming this as a performance work. I’m defining myself as the performer within the work. Up until then I’ve been sharing things — some things are funny, some things are anecdotal, some things are jokes, but this is the first time when I say, “Let’s

talk about this thing we’re doing here.”

Because of that shift in the tone, I’m able to turn away in a way that feels new. I’m also able to create a language landscape that other people can adapt their own manifesto, maybe, to their perceptions of my stance on dance.

I say, “If we work together, we can also work against together.” That could be a political statement, that could be about a specific relationship, but to me, that’s my position on my dance-making.

Is it really eventually about me? In the end it’s not. It’s about everything that surrounds the thing that has become me.

The entire show is like that. These are people who encountered me, or whom I’ve encountered. And this is how you keep them in your life — you pay attention. You’re in proximity to them — you keep paying attention. They come up — you keep trying to see them.

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Rock Stars

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THEY WERE A FORCE OF NATURE

BY ABIGAIL MEISEL

CATCHING UP WITH THE UNSTOPPABLE ALDERSONS

Rock Stars

WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT HAMPSHIRE WITH THEIR YELLOW LAB, JED, GLENNA AND EARL FOUND NO AVAILABLE HOUSING. NO PROBLEM. THEY PITCHED A TENT

BY A POND ON CAMPUS.

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When you meet Glenna and Earl Alderson for the first time, you really wish you could hate them. They’re a living rebuke to middle-age lumpiness, undeniable proof that if you’d stuck to even a tenth of your New Year’s resolutions (to get outdoors, to switch from IPAs to seltzer, to just put on some sunscreen, for God’s sake), you, too — in your 50s — could look like you’re in the best shape of your life.

To make matters worse, the Aldersons are immediately likable. They exude the kind of cheerful levelheadedness that’s a prerequisite to, say, taking eight college kids, mostly city slickers, on a 15-day rafting trip on the Colorado River in the dead of winter, paddling up to 20 miles each day in the Grand Canyon through 40-degree whitewater.

“That was our second winter-term trip, and we were still in our twenties, but we were on duty with the students twenty-four/seven,” Glenna says. “If there’d been an emergency, the only way out was by helicopter. When we got back, everyone asked ‘How was your vacation?’ — that’s a question we get a lot.”

“There are always risks,” Earl adds, “but that’s how the students bond. They look out for each other.”

During the Colorado excursion, they were just warming up (figuratively speaking). That trip marked the onset of more than 560 weekend and extended trips — paddling, hiking, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, and mountain biking — led by the Aldersons during their 31-year careers as instructors in Outdoor Programs Recreation and Athletics (OPRA).

The duo were unstoppable. The Aldersons hauled students across the globe to plant Hampshire’s flag in Cuba, Greece, Spain, Mexico, Belize’s Silk Islands, Quebec, and even Kentucky, among dozens of other exotic locales.

Pausing for breath, they’d head over to Deerfield or zip up Route 63 for some kayaking on the rivers in Deerfield and Millers Falls.

Ever on the hunt for new territory on land and sea, no whitewater, snowdrift, mountain, lava fall, or ice-faced cliff fazed them. They were a force of nature within nature, and they inspired their charges to similar fortitude.

“It’s about grace under pressure,” Earl says.

That Hemingwayesque spirit perhaps shone brightest in students with serious physical challenges who nevertheless signed on for the Aldersons’ trips, knowing they would be both welcome and supported. “Absolutely courageous,” Glenna calls them, recalling one student who, she says, “used solar technology to charge the batteries that were essential for running his breathing treatments” in a remote area for days at a time. Another, Ross Newton 04F, had grown up kayaking, but a spinal-cord injury meant that instead of “hopping in a kayak,” he says, “I had to

My husband and I are in business together, and I always remembered how Glenna and Earl managed themselves and their relationship in both personal and professional settings. They showed me how a couple who live can work together.

GAIA (THURSTON-SHAINE) MARRS 99F

I went on a sixteen-day river trip with them in 1997 and spent time with Glenna, Earl, and their friends and family.

I was a different person after that trip. When you’re running rapids with your friends and being afraid, and talking each other through your fears, it gives you energy to live the rest of your life.

NATE CONNOLLY 93F

Rock Stars

THE ALDERSONS HAULED STUDENTS ACROSS THE GLOBE TO PLANT HAMPSHIRE’S FLAG IN CUBA, GREECE, SPAIN, MEXICO, BELIZE’S SILK ISLANDS, QUEBEC, AND EVEN KENTUCKY, AMONG DOZENS OF OTHER EXOTIC LOCALES.

adapt things. Glenna and Earl were receptive to adaptive recreation, and while I was at Hampshire, I was able to get on the water.”

It was Earl’s relish for kayaking that first sparked the couple’s attraction to each other.

A Tennessee native, he spent a year as a visiting student at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, where he presented to a class a slideshow about kayaking. Glenna, a teaching assistant, fastened on the images of kayaks plunging off waterfalls and thought “I have to do that.” Earl offered to get her started. He had her at “Let’s roll a kayak.”

They became friends. Then he got her a job at Whitewater Limited, for which he led rafting and kayaking trips on the Chattooga River (where Deliverance was filmed). Romance blossomed after paddling season, when they went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail for a month. “I call that our first date,” Earl says.

They married in Columbia, Tennessee, in 1989.

In August 1987, when they were still dating, they joined a historic trip down the Katun River, in Siberia, with the organization Russians and Americans for Teamwork (Project RAFT), a kind of paddlers glasnost at the tail end of the Cold War and the first of their many activities with this group. During the journey, they stopped at villages on the river and remote towns bordering Mongolia.

At riverbank campsites, they kept meeting up with another guide, Bruce Conover 81F, who was in charge of navigating a team from National Geographic down the same river.

“The National Geographic trip was supposed to be the maiden voyage of Westerners on the river, but the RAFT people kept passing us and were a younger and cooler group,” Conover recalls. “I wanted to hang out with them at the campsites.”

Conover had signed on to teach kayaking at Hampshire that September but, passing through Moscow en route to Siberia, had wrangled a job as a cameraman at the CNN bureau there, working for Peter Arnett. (Conover, who had studied Russian in college and was fluent, stayed at the network’s Moscow bureau for 14 years, as part of a “go team” dispatched to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, and other breaking news.)

In Siberia, he recalls, he was in a “sticky situation and needed to find a last-minute replacement for the Hampshire job before he backed out of it. Hanging out with the RAFT group, he clocked Earl and Glenna doing what they do best: being “great with people,” he says, “and they were a tight couple, a good team. So I told them about the opening. There was a big kayaking scene around the Pioneer Valley and people would have killed for that job,” he says.

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Rock Stars

ROMANCE BLOSSOMED AFTER PADDLING SEASON, WHEN THEY WENT BACKPACKING ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL FOR A MONTH. “I CALL THAT OUR FIRST DATE,” EARL SAYS.

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But that’s not the Alderson way. Instead, they waited for Conover to refer them and then hoped for a phone call from Hampshire inviting them to teach. The job seemed a step up from the seasonal guiding trips they’d been leading out West.

In late August, a hair’s breadth from orientation, Earl got a call, not to welcome him to the staff, exactly, but to offer a three-month contract for the fall term while Hampshire’s hiring committee for the job — which likely consisted of people who exercised by reaching for a book on a high shelf — conducted an exhaustive search for a permanent outdoors instructor for kids who didn’t identify as jocks.

“Start driving to Colorado and give us a call when you get there,” a voice on the other end of the phone instructed them. “We’ll let you know then if we can hire you.”

Earl got the gig — with a caveat. Hampshire wanted him on campus in two days to lead pre-orientation kayaking trips. When they arrived with their yellow Lab, Jed, Glenna and Earl found no available housing. No problem. They pitched a tent by a pond on campus.

“When it was cold at night, we took our sleeping bags into the office,” Earl says.

For three months, they adapted to the New England elements, making friends with the dogs — pets of students and faculty — that ran wild on campus. In December, life improved. The school offered both Earl and Glenna fulltime jobs, and the Aldersons found a rental in Belchertown, just as their first Massachusetts winter set in.

They also took to the family feeling of the staff, faculty, and students.

Better yet, they realized they were in tune with the singular philosophy of Hampshire’s outdoors program: experiential physical education. This meant introducing students to new experiences, some scary like whitewater kayaking, in a supportive class that would enable students to get comfortable at every stage of their skill building.

Patience is critical to this approach, and the Aldersons supplied that in abundance.

Hampshire’s kayaking program wasn’t always that chill.

It was launched in 1972 by Jay Evans, who coached the U.S. Olympic kayaking team at Hampshire’s pool that year — the first (and last) time the school touched Olympic glory.

Evans’s focus on racing — fierce competition, pressure to perform, and exacting numerical evaluation — was antithetical to the school’s philosophy, yet somehow slipped under the radar. In Hampshire’s constitution, The New College Plan: A Proposal for a Major Departure in Higher Education (1958), the writers cautioned against “the building up of empires which results when particular [athletic] activities have their own buildings” encouraging

I was very lucky to be in Glenna’s advanced kayaking class with a small group of women. She constantly asked us to apply the skills we learned in the water to every facet of our life. She told us to lift our vision and look ahead, to have a goal and never stop struggling to reach it, whether that goal was an eddy in a rapid or an accomplishment academically.

ZOE PORTMAN 08F

Earl and Glenna guided me in my time at Hampshire and have continued to be great friends and provide our family constant inspiration. Two of the biggest lessons I learned from them were [the importance of] loving the work you do and finding a way to give back to your community. The life lessons and friendship that Earl and Glenna give are priceless.

MATT CAPOZZI 93F

Rock Stars

only “[those] sports . . . which groups can play informally together.” (After decades of resistance, in 2011 Hampshire finally relented to the student demand for competitive sports and joined the United States Collegiate Athletic Association. It also joined the Yankee Small College Conference for varsity sports.)

The Aldersons admired Evans’s legacy but hewed to the far gentler experiential physical education philosophy.

Soon the word spread around campus and across the other four colleges that Hampshire had some cool young instructors who wouldn’t bellow directions at them as they tried to right their kayak or dangled from a cliff face.

“The outdoors challenges are a metaphor for living,” says Glenna. “You learn how to weather adversity. I think about what we do as metaphors for navigating the adult life. You’re going down a river, and it’s calm, and then you tip over. How do you process risk? How do you process stress?”

On the van trips to trailheads, and lakes, and rock faces, the pair found that students wanted to know more than how to tell a clove hitch from a chock. They wanted to learn real-life stuff. How do you balance a checkbook? How do you decide whether to make your parents happy by going right into grad school after college or make yourself happy by hightailing it to Alaska to guide kayaking trips? How do you maintain a marriage? (The Aldersons’ answer: “Respect.”)

“I teach them about starting a 401K and a Roth IRA, and why they should do it young,” Earl says. (He recalled bumping into an alum who’d become a financial adviser and traced his success back to Earl’s van seminars.)

“We call the van ‘the mini classroom,’” Glenna says.

In addition to leading trips and American Red Cross first aid and CPR, the Aldersons teach several semester-long classes. Earl’s are ice climbing, Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance, whitewater kayaking, and top rope–lead rope climbing. Glenna supervises the aquatics program, teaching swimming and lifeguarding. She instructs students in beginning and intermediate whitewater kayaking and crosscountry skiing, too. To whip staff and faculty into shape, she

leads open-community circuit-training sessions on campus and weekly hiking trips in the Pioneer Valley.

Off duty, the Aldersons made a name for themselves as athletes. Earl is widely admired as a whitewater rock star.

Glenna was saluted as a “local crag legend” by the climbing blog Crux Crush and made the cover of the April/May 2014 issue of Climberism magazine.

Over the years, they didn’t seem to age, but their students grew up. The Alderson imprimatur inspired some of them to alchemize their avocation into a vocation.

Gaia (Thurston-Shaine) Marrs 99 F, for example, returned to her native Alaska and now owns three outdoors-adventure businesses there: St. Elias Alpine Guides (hiking and backpacking); Copper Oar (single and multiday rafting trips); and Pangaea Adventures (kayaking).

A n o t h e r a l u m , M a tt Capozzi 93 F , signed on with Burton Snowboards after graduation, moved onto footwear companies, among them Nike, and then cofounded North Drinkware, a Portlandb a s e d c o m p a ny t h a t handcrafts crystalline miniatures of mountain ranges rising within tumblers and pints.

One of many former students across the country with whom they became friends, Nate Connolly 93F, headed to Bend, Oregon — a former logging town on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains — and, after a few years banging nails, founded Ridgeline Custom Homes, for which he’s the designer and lead carpenter.

“Once we realized we could afford to retire, we started visiting places that appealed to us,” Glenna says. “Matt Capozzi’s parents had a house in Bend because Matt and Nate are close friends, and they said, ‘After all you’ve done for Matt, feel free to stay at our home,’ so we lived there for a month this past summer” testing out Bend as a future home.

Nate is now building the Aldersons a Craftsman-style house there, not far from his home. They’re aiming to move there in December.

Glenna explains their plans to leave their jobs of three decades, pull up stakes, and move across the country in Alderson-ese: “It’s the next adventure.”

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What do you tell your kids about borders?

31 Tweets from Jeff Sharlet 90F 9:51 AM - 29 Jul 2018

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Tweetstorm

What do you tell your kids about borders? Crossing into Canada a few days ago, I warned my 9-yr-old, Saira (not her real name), not to giggle. Crossing was a breeze.

Coming back, I said, would take longer . . .

Entering U.S. involved a lot more questions. The guard questioned Saira. Who is, as I said, nine. But she smiled a lot and all was ok; then he told us to turn off the car, & Saira gasped. Border patrol were surrounding car next to us, hands on their guns, shouting . . .

Our guard had his hand on his gun, too, & his eyes on the car. “Out of the car!” a guard barked. I was confused. It’d pulled up after us. There’d been no search, no time for search. They couldn’t have found drugs. A woman emerged . . .

“About 28,” Saira later estimated. Wore a nice white tank top, glasses. Latinx. Hands in the air. Face stunned and scared. They made her walk backwards, grabbed her arms. “Are they going to — ” Saira asked. They did. They cuffed her.

They repeated the drill with the man in the passenger seat. He kept glancing over his shoulder as he walked back w/hands in air, & they kept yelling at him, but he didn’t want to fall. Not a time for any mistakes. That’s when I made mine . . .

I took pictures. There’s a sign on the border booth forbidding cameras, & I didn’t notice, so that part’s on me. The prohibition of documentation of armed agents of the state? That’s on the U.S. government. The guard, tho, blamed me . . .

He grabbed my phone. “I’m sorry,” I said. I was w/my daughter; not a time to invoke journalism. He held up his hand & then began scrolling. Well past the two pics I’d just taken. Which constitutes an illegal search, no? I was more worried about my daughter . . .

“Daddy,” she asked, “are you going to get arrested, too?” I sighed. “No,” I said, “I don’t think so, but I might lose my phone.” This distressed her, too — it was filled w/our vacation pictures. “Pull over,” the guard said. “Go through the green door.”

Inside was a room crowded, mostly with families. Not detained; paused. Some longer than others. There was no line. “You wait for them to call your name,” another dad explained. I noticed something; Saira noticed, too. They kept calling the white people . . .

Why were white people called before the many non-white families who’d been waiting longer? You can guess easily as my 9-yr-old did, but the journalist in me can’t say for sure. That’s part of power: evidence of discrimination without certainty.

Everyone guessing.

I’m not suggesting that the U.S. border guards had a deliberate plan to favor

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white people over non-whites. They just appeared to do so. They weren’t all white themselves. That’s how power works, too: the uniform is that of white supremacy.

I was worried about my daughter, of course. And that concern shaped something ugly in me: a hope that our whiteness would keep us out of further trouble. One more aspect of power’s control: it plucks the strings of the ugliest chords within you . . .

Sure enough, after awhile a guard called us — ahead of the black family & the Asian family in between which we’d been sitting, both waiting longer than us. I went to the counter, glad & guilty & furious. A guard held our passports & my phone . . .

I said what I believed needed to be said, especially with my 9-yr-old holding my hand: “I’m sorry. I was stupid.” The guard nodded, & handed over our passports & my phone. “We deleted the pictures you took,” he said . . .

Now, I can imagine some folks saying, “I can’t believe you apologized to those fascists!” To which I’ll say: That’s how power works. It makes you complicit. It makes you craven. I’ve experienced it before . . .

I’ve reported in countries where men with guns forbid pictures, & I’ve had men point their guns at me & order me to delete my pictures. But before I was a journalist, when I was 20, I crossed the Sahara with my older sister. We ran into trouble in Algeria . . .

This was in 1992. A civil war broke out while we were there. An Islamic party had won a fair election, & the gov’t had responded w/tanks. Some 100,000 would die, but we didn’t see any fighting: just a vast crowd, trying to flee, like us, at a remote desert crossing . . .

We were visibly American. A soldier separated us from the crowd. His rifle strap was too big for his frame, & as he walked the gun slapped his ass. Bap, bap, bap. I was 20, dumb, & I laughed. Bad move. My sister began apologizing. Then she said something in Arabic; he laughed . . .

I asked her what she’d said. “I said, ‘My brother’s an idiot,’” she told me. Soon, more soldiers surrounded us: delighted by the young American woman fluent in Arabic.

(She’s an Arabic lit scholar.) They let me stand, but they made her tea . . .

They offered her sugar & asked if she was married & what kind of man she wanted to marry & if she might marry an Algerian man. She smiled. After three hours, they let us cross. Everyone else remained, inside the country collapsing into war. That’s how power works . . .

The power of gender, of the men w/guns who demanded flirtation as the price of

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crossing the border, & of empire, the American one, that brought us to the front of the line, & of borders, that put little tyrants in charge of lines in the sand . . .

So even with the guns & the yelling & the confiscated phone, crossing back into the U.S. was a lot easier than out of Algeria, & for that I was glad, & ashamed. “What happened to the couple?” my 9-yr-old asked. I had to tell her I didn’t know, that I was afraid we couldn’t know . . .

I’m not reporting here, I’m just talking about crossing the border yesterday, on vacation w/my daughter. Maybe that couple was wanted for real crimes, for all I know. But their car wasn’t searched. “Was it like the kids?” my daughter asked. She meant on the Mexican border . . .

“It might have been,” I said. She asked if we’d done something wrong taking pictures.

“No,” I said. She pointed out I’d said it was stupid. “Stupid because I got caught,” I said. “Stupid because I was with you. I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” she said. Which was true . . .

The night before we’d watched the Hunger Games. (I know, a little much for a 9-yrold. But she’d read the books, so . . .) We both thought of the evil “Peackeepers” & their white uniforms, & the shouting border guards in their black uniforms . . .

When we got to St. Albans, VT, we pulled over and went for a walk. I asked my daughter if she’d been afraid. She surprised me. “No,” she said. She thought for a moment. “Mostly, I was burning with anger.”

Jeff Sharlet @JeffSharlet

NYT bestselling author (The Family, C St, Sweet Heaven When I Die), magazinist (@nytmag, @esquire, @vqr), prof (@dartmouth). Coming 2019: THE DARKNESS SHOW.

My daughter knew we were lucky. She knew if she weren’t 9, I might have had a harder time, that if we weren’t white we might still be there. But the anger was personal, too. It was all mixed up. That’s how power works.

Later we came to a covered bridge on which someone had chalked “Love=Rage.”

That fit her mood, & the chalk was still there, so she added her own message: “Keep our country colorful.” That helped, but she was still mad.

Because here’s the thing: We got off “easy,” right? White privilege, right? *Yes.* & still it sucked, because of what happened & because of the slime of fear & complicity it left on us. I hear white liberals talk sometimes as if they’ve nothing to fear . . . . . . as if the power of authoritarianism threatens only people of color. It threatens POC more; but it threatens *everybody.* That’s what authoritarianism is. You do nobody any favors by imagining you’re immune.

As my daughter saw at the border, authoritarianism targets POC first & most severely; the secondary goal of white supremacy, tho, is to keep white subjects in line through a mix of privilege & subtle punishment for questioning that privilege.

11,275 Retweets 19,934 Likes

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Hampshire Diarist

Confessions of a Class Notes Fanatic.

Or, a Life in Pieces Wherein Steve Nadis 73F pens an autobiography (about himself, this time) culled from two decades of dutiful “Notes from Alums” submissions.

In the course of my not quite illustrious writing career (though

not wholly unsuccessful either), I’ve been asked to pen countless biographical sketches, as well as a 300-page “autobiography” of someone else. But I haven’t been asked, until now, to render a complete account of my own life since Hampshire. I gamely accepted this assignment, guided in the task by archival material gleaned from the journal of record, Non Satis Scire, and especially the “Notes from Alums” section, oft referred to as this publication’s “Jewel in the Crown.”

The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, were spotty, but started nonetheless with the fall 1995 issue — leaving a pronounced gap in my personal history between 1977, the year I graduated, and the mid-1990s. We’re going to gloss over this period: my “Dark Ages,” my “Lost Years,” a time, evidently, when I was still “Finding Myself.” Being un-self-reflective at this stage of my development, I was a doer of deeds rather than a recorder of deeds; an actor, not a pontificator.

Fast-forward, if you will, to my very first entry, where I discussed the vagaries of the freelance existence. “My main publishing outlet, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, has gone out of print, never to be reproduced again. Its successor, The Annals of Improbable Research, tells me that the

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publication of my latest work is ‘quite probable.’” In spring 1996, I reported on my decision not to seek the presidency of the Cambridge Cribbage Association (CCA), recognizing that I couldn’t “give 110 percent to my family, 110 percent to the CCA, and still have 110 percent left over for my principal avocation, volleyball.” A year later (spring 1997), I had, like fellow author Richard Ford, “settled into my Existence Period, a time when I am trying to focus more on being and less on nothingness.” In fall 1977, I began a journalism fellowship at MIT, an appointment with enough built-in flexibility that it “should not interfere with my volleyball career, although I do intend to explore other athletic opportunities.” In spring 1998, I pledged to avoid drawing undue attention to my Scientific American article on radioactive-waste disposal, applying “the same discretion to the (well-received) talk I gave at the Marine Biological Laboratories” on said subject.

You can go up only so long, and by

spring 1999 I was due for a fall, though I bounced back in fall 1999 with a successful bumper sticker — HOW’S MY BREATH? — “arguably the three most lucrative words ever penned in the English language.”

The new millennium, as recounted in spring 2000, ushered in changes, among them the emergence of my

Hampshire Diarist

daughter, then four months old, about whose intellectual prowess (“she finds Kierkegaard stimulating but Heidegger tiresome”) I couldn’t help but boast.

Later that year, in fall 2000, I unveiled two more bumper stickers — ONE LESS BIKE and PLEASE DON’T KILL ME! — as well as an idea for a reality TV show: “Who Wants to Marry a Fat, Balding, Middle-Aged Man of Modest Means?” For some reason, spring 2001 marked a more contemplative (dare I say poetic?) time: “Holding fast in rushing water. Staying the course.

Stability, status quo: the watchwords of the day. Life is calm but hectic.”

This breakneck pace continued into fall 2001 with the release of a new line of bumper stickers geared to aging boomers: MALE PATTERN BALDNESS IS SEXY. LOVE HANDLES ARE SEXY. STRETCH MARKS ARE SEXY.

In spring 2002, I coined a word, illiteragentsia, which, I’m sorry to say, still hasn’t taken hold. Two years later, in spring 2004, I announced a new product line, Crib Stickers. I also took a moment to lament my overly busy (“25/8”) schedule, wondering whether future historians might say: “There’s

a guy who didn’t spend enough time playing volleyball.” Bumper stickers swept me headlong into winter 2004: THINK GLOBALLY, ACT STUPIDLY and its companion piece, WHO CARES WHAT YOU THINK?

“Sorry if my prose seems more labored than usual,” I wrote in winter

2005, “but I’m not myself these days.

Which begs the question: If I’m not myself, who is?”

My identity crisis had passed by summer 2005, when I instead talked about turning 50, traditionally a time for taking stock. “A blunt, no-holdsbarred assessment has yielded this startling conclusion: I’m a success!”

Winter 2006 saw renewed productivity on the bumper-sticker front: GIVE WAR A CHANCE. EVERY MAN FOR HIS OR HERSELF. HONK IF YOU BELIEVE IN ATHEISM! I’M NOT DRUNK; I’M JUST TIRED. Spring 2007: “I became a

blogger, which is a sure sign that I’ve given up any ambition of amounting to anything in life.” Winter 2008: I’d been assigned a regular humor column in the Cambridge Chronicle, the oldest surviving weekly newspaper in the

United States. “The Chronicle,” I wrote, “is pretty much where my freelance writing began and now, it appears, pretty much where it will end.”

Summer 2008: On my blog, I faithfully chart “my steady slide into irrelevance.”

Continuing into winter 2010 (of my discontent): “I keep up with my blog, floss regularly, and resist daily efforts by so-called friends to get me to join Facebook.” In spring 2011, I reported on the school’s 40th anniversary, struck by this observation: “My contemporaries are getting pretty darn old. And yet, amazingly, from everything that was said, we look exactly the same.”

“I’ve finally made something of myself!” I wrote in winter 2011. “I’m in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online) under the second definition for weird.”

I’m still there:https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/weird), still weird after all these years! Summer 2013: “I recently started playing handball with a guy once called ‘the best average player in America.’ I’ve even taken some games off this guy, which, by my reckoning, places me at the apex of mediocrity.” Fall 2017: “CVS Pharmacy has put me in an elite category, somewhere in ‘the state’s top 3 percent of savers.’ My only regret is the usual one: It’s lonely at the top.”

And that strikes me as a pretty good note to end on. But I’d first like

to thank Hampshire for molding me from an unformed, 18-year-old lump of clay into the chiseled figure I’ve since become. Also thanks for providing a forum during which, twice annually, we get the chance to air our thoughts.

If you ever want to figure out whether you’ve actually done something with your life in the years since college and not squandered the great launch pad Hampshire provided for you, “Notes from Alums” may be the best place to start.

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Invaluable Gift

I knew Kirk for 40 years, having met him in 1978 when I moved to New York from L.A. He and I were the same age, and when I began freelancing at the film company for which Kirk worked, he was kind enough to befriend me, the new kid in town. He introduced me to the work of the photographers he admired (and for whom he made prints), such as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, whose works he purchased on my behalf and gave me as presents, thus beginning a lifelong interest of mine. Kirk also introduced me to Maker’s Mark, good wine, and many restaurants in the West Village, giving me the invaluable gift of his company.

Eventually, I sublet his West Village apartment and lived there for six years (alas, he took the cat, after which the mice appeared, but Kirk, ever diligent, got me an exterminator).

As the years passed, his talent evolved, and he became one of the most

productive, fascinating, and committed documentary filmmakers of his era, producing work that reflected his curiosity, generosity of spirit, tireless interest in people, and great kindness.

Kindness was his most pronounced and enduring characteristic, followed closely by honesty. I remember being in Jamaica, in the bar of my hotel, on the night he won his Oscar, and, exploding with surprise and pleasure, I bought a round for everyone, insisting that we all lift a glass to my talented friend and celebrate this much-deserved honor.

Kirk’s death was a terrible shock and is a terrible tragedy, for his family, his friends, and everyone else who had known him. He took a part of my own life — one of the best parts — with him when he went. Gone much too soon, but never to be forgotten.

Marc Kristal, filmmaker and writer, in his May 21, 2018, eulogy to his friend

Kindness, Followed Kirk Robert Simon Closely by Honesty 1954–2018 In 2010, when Kirk Simon 72F won an Academy Award for his documentary short Strangers No More — a film detailing the struggles of refugee and immigrant children at a school in Tel Aviv — he devoted part of his Oscar speech to “the children who opened their hearts to us.” That shout-out exemplified his generosity of spirit and dedication to making mission-driven films. His filmography includes a National Geographic documentary about Jane Goodall (Chimps Like Us, 1990), an MTV reality series detailing the struggles of gay men and lesbians (Coming Out Stories, 2006), and an HBO, Emmy-nominated series that featured leading artists — Wynton Marsalis, Kathleen Turner, and Bill T. Jones among them — mentoring high school students (Masterclass, 2010–2014).

Kirk’s foray into filmmaking began in a Hampshire class with Jerome Liebling. He and a fellow student, Ken Burns 71F, collaborated on a short documentary about Old Sturbridge Village, a project Burns called “my baptism into the world of filmmaking and history.”

From his student films to his final project — a profile of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for the PBS series American Masters, to which he contributed regularly — Kirk probed topics with intelligence and integrity. He invited us to do the same.

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September 1973, Kirk Simon as a first-year sitting for Professor Elaine Mayes for her series of hand-colored black-and-white portraits, “Registration Day.”

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Hampshire News

THE MUSEUM OF THE OLD COLONY Two photographs depicting a parade in early 20th-century Puerto Rico are among the enlarged, carefully-sequenced reproductions of archival images now at the Hampshire College Art Gallery as part of the conceptual installation The Museum of the Old Colony, by Pablo Delano, a Hartford-based artist. This ironic “museum” is named after the popular island soda Old Colony and alludes to Puerto Rico’s relationship to the mainland United States, invoking the imperial logic of traditional historical and anthropological museums built to celebrate the so-called achievements of Empire, and to construct a sense of superiority of European colonial culture.

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Hampshire News

National Science Foundation Grant to Study Brain Function RESEARCHERS FROM UMass and Hampshire, among them Assistant Professor of Statistics Ethan Meyers, were awarded a four-year, $953,000 grant from the National Science Foundation as part of a nationwide study of deep-brain function for new insights into neural and cognitive systems. The research is expected to develop new methods with potential application to diseases that affect neuromotor control, such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. The five-member team, which includes four researchers at UMass, where the project is based, merges expertise in data science, cognitive neuroscience, and hardware engineering.

After implanting tiny hardware into the brains of rats and mice, the team will both record and control their movements, observing how the brain functions at a cellular level when animals are in motion and deciding, for example, to move to the left or to the right. They will trace complex animal behaviors to groups of individual neurons. Meyers will analyze the animals’ activity in real time using algorithms he created.

“I work a lot in collaboration with neuroscientists. They collect data and

I use statistical methods and machine learning to analyze it,” he says. “In this study, we hope to ultimately understand more about neuromotor function at a cellular level. We’re using implantable devices that can not only measure but also manipulate neural activity from many cells simultaneously.”

Meyers and his collaborators comprise one of 18 teams across the country that will receive $16 million from the NSF to advance the frontiers of foundational research in cognition. The Hampshire/ UMass project reflects the type of deepbrain studies Meyers has conducted with neuroscientists since earning his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2010.

S AV E T H E D A T E

Hampshire’s 50th Anniversary All-Class Reunion Weekend June 4-7 | 2020

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HAMPSHIRE WINS INTERNATIONAL CAMPUS SUSTAINABILITY AWARD FOR THE R.W. KERN CENTER The College won a 2018 Campus Sustainability Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) for the R.W. Kern Center, the 17th Living Certified Building in the world.

AASHE received more than 300 entries this year that resulted in 11 winners, three receiving Achievement Awards: Hampshire, Emory, and Bow Valley College, in Alberta, Canada. The organization bestows its prestigious awards on institutions and individuals internationally who are helping to lead higher education to a sustainable future.

Opened in 2016, the R.W. Kern Center is a multipurpose Living Building that generates its own energy, captures and treats its own water, and processes and recycles its waste.

Last April, Hampshire and the architectural firm Bruner/Cott and Associates announced that the Kern Center had been certified as a Living Building by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), making it the 17th Living Building and largest Living Certified highereducation project in the world. ILFI’s Living Building certification is the most advanced green-building standard on the planet.

In its construction, the architects partnered with Wright Builders and its founder, Jonathan Wright 70F, who was construction manager for the project. The building’s $10.4 million cost, which included $7.4 million in construction, was fully funded by gifts from more than 100 donors, led by the Kern family and alum Bill Kern 75F. This year, Hampshire hired its first R.W. Kern Center director, Sara Draper, to advance the building’s mission as an educational laboratory for sustainable design and operation.

AASHE has an online library with hundreds of detailed case studies on higher education sustainability initiatives; that of the R.W. Kern Center is one of them.

In May, Hampshire earned a STARS Gold rating from AASHE, recognizing the College’s sustainability achievements across academics, operations, and leadership. Only 135 colleges and universities worldwide earned a Gold or Platinum rating, out of more than 800 participants in 30 countries. The STARS tool is the most widely recognized framework for reporting sustainability performance in higher ed and the basis for the annual Sierra Magazine Cool School rankings. Since 2011, Hampshire has been dedicated to transforming its operations, curriculum, food systems, and culture to achieve holistic campus sustainability.

Hampshire News

Cianfrani, left, and Hews in the lab

Professors Earn Whiting Foundation Grants for Research and Teaching Assistant Professor Tammy Owens is traveling through New York and New Jersey documenting the experiences of young black girls working as domestic laborers in the 20th century, while Professor Annie Rogers will visit Canada and England to interview an artist with psychosis and study his works. They are two of six faculty whose Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation fellowships will enhance their courses and student mentoring.

Christina Cianfrani, associate professor of hydrology, and Sarah Hews, assistant professor of mathematics, in the School of Natural Science, are working to connect the living and built environments and will visit 10 sites in the U.S. Northwest and Northeast with innovative green designs relating to water-supply treatment. They will develop a research/teaching program to augment their Integrated Sciences tutorial courses for first-year students.

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Claudio Nolasco, assistant professor of photography, School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, will attend Paris Photo 2018, where he’ll observe the latest in photo practice. He’ll incorporate what he learns into his courses, widen the scope of student advising, and work

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with staff in the library and art gallery to showcase new contemporary works.

Tammy Owens, assistant professor of diasporic youth cultures, School of Critical Social Inquiry, is examining the histories of black girls in the domestic labor market, centering on intersections of race, gender, and child labor in the 20th century. In mid-Atlantic locations, she’ll take photos, record videos of routes the girls walked, and acquire maps and documents to create a digital archive of black girlhood to augment her courses.

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n Monique Roelofs, professor of philosophy, School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, is researching urban sites and architectural designs that are the focal

points in books by Alejo Carpentier and Julio Cortázar. In Havana and Buenos Aires she’ll study decolonial, cosmopolitan, and aesthetic interaction catalyzed by the characters in their books. Returning to Hampshire, she’ll revise three courses and strengthen a partnership Hampshire recently formed with the Alejo Carpentier Foundation, in Havana.

Annie Rogers, professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology, School of Critical Social Inquiry, will travel to Canada and England to study the effects of psychosis.

She’ll interview John Devlin, a man who experienced a psychotic break in the 1980s and has been creating art and writing about it, as well as visit the person who has the biggest collection of his works.

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Hampshire News

Florence Ladd, Former Board Chair, Wins Harvard’s Du Bois Award In Florence Ladd’s latest novel, The Spirit of Josephine: A Family Reunion in Paris, the narrator calls Josephine Baker her “inspiration,” a word that applies equally to the author. Ladd inspired the Hampshire community for 13 years as a trustee and, later in her tenure, as board chair. Her influence reaches well beyond campus, spanning nations and generations with her gifts as an artist, educator, psychologist, and advocate for social justice.

ON OCTOBER 11, Harvard’s Hutchins

Center for African and African American Research awarded Ladd the W.E.B. Du Bois medal for contributions to African and African American history and culture. Among her fellow laureates: Colin Kaepernick and Dave Chappelle.

That accolade will take its place among many others, like the 1997 Leadership Award of the American Council on Education.

But no parchment, no medal, no trophy is worthy of her contributions to Hampshire — the greatest of which is her son, Michael Ladd 88F. She performed the nearly miraculous feat of winning the trust and respect of a spirited community with a culture of,

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let’s say, frank outspokenness. “That’s no easy task,” says former trustee Sigmund (Sig) Roos 73F, who succeeded Ladd as chair in 2008. “Florence was fair, and everyone at Hampshire felt heard and respected by her throughout her stewardship. She was unflappable.

She was just what you’d want a chair to be.”

Her energy and optimism buoyed her during a mission that would exhaust most mortals. Unstoppable, she brought her considerable abilities to other colleges and universities, too, serving as associate dean at MIT, dean of students at Wellesley, and director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Sometimes Ladd needed a

break from the demands of academia.

In between her stints at Wellesley and Radcliffe, she geared down for a decade to work as research consultant with the Institute of International Education’s South African Education Program. She was soon recruited by Oxfam America, to be associate executive director and liaison to the United Nations.

In her spare time, Ladd writes poetry and fiction. Among her published works are two novels: Sarah’s Psalm (Scribner, 1996), which won the Best Fiction Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus in 1997; and The Spirit of Josephine (Côte d’Or Press, 2014). Both works evoke her second country, France.

She lives part time in Burgundy.

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Hampshire News

Scholarship Fund to Honor Professor Emerita Carollee Bengelsdorf Victor Fresco 76F and Scott Gortikov 76F didn’t plan to concentrate their Hampshire studies on U.S. foreign policy.

Then they took a course with Carollee Bengelsdorf, and they were hooked. A professor of politics who joined the faculty in 1973, three years before Gortikov and Fresco arrived, Bengelsdorf peppered her teaching with stories and lessons drawn from her experiences participating in the anti–Vietnam War and anti-apartheid movements and working in countries in Africa and Latin America, including an illegal trip to Cuba in 1969.

AFTER THAT COURSE , Gortikov tried to take every class Bengelsdorf taught: on the Russian and Cuban revolutions, American foreign policy and the Third World, African politics, modern and postmodern political/social theory. He asked her to chair his Division II and Division III work, the latter on economic development in Cuba. Fresco ended up concentrating his Division II on economics and politics, and also asked her to chair his divisional committees.

Both of them joined student trips to Cuba during President Carter’s term.

Now the two friends are showing their appreciation for her influence

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by creating a scholarship fund in her honor. The grants will support the work of Hampshire students in the School of Critical Social Inquiry whose studies center on the social, political, and cultural impact of the United States on countries in Latin America, including field studies. Fresco and Gortikov each made a gift to the College, matched by an anonymous donor, to establish an endowment for the Carollee Bengelsdorf Scholarship Fund. It will provide grants for tuition, room, and board to promising students with the greatest financial need. The classmates are asking alums and friends to contribute to the fund,

to increase its reach and impact.

As an undergraduate, Bengelsdorf worked in community-development in Peru, Honduras, and Kenya. She then began her graduate studies in Russian history at Harvard, but left to work in the anti–Vietnam War movement.

“My goal, however successful, has been to impress on my students that demonstrations and protests are usually one-shot affairs if they’re not informed by knowledge and the ability to see one’s smaller and larger worlds through a critical lens,” she says. “Actions taken in the face of injustices have to be informed.”

Hampshire News

MIRIAM NELSON AND TEAM OF SCIENTISTS PUBLISH STUDY ON THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF DIETARY GUIDELINES Scientists from Tufts University, University of New Hampshire, and Hampshire College recently published their findings revealing the environmental impact of recommended diets in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

President Miriam Nelson is senior author of the paper, which advances sustainability through findings that could inform and shape food policy nationally and globally.

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization defines sustainable diets as those with low environmental impacts, which ensure the security of food sources and will advance healthy human life for generations. Such diets also maintain and protect environmental ecosystems and optimize natural resources, are socially just, and provide sound nutrition.

The research, published in the August issue of The Lancet Planetary Health, analyzed environmental impacts of the healthy diet patterns recommended in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans: specifically, their impact on climate change, land use, water use, water quality (fresh and marine), and air quality. The study found the vegetarian diet had lower impacts on the environment (42 to 84 percent lower) than did those containing animal proteins.

“Our health is affected not only by the food we eat but also by the health of the environment where we live and work,” Nelson says. “It’s vital that we understand sustainability of our choices in the broad sense, spanning environmentalism and, just as important, social justice, inclusive prosperity, and equity for our neighbors.”

EDITOR David Gibson COEDITOR Melissa Mills-Dick 01F ART DIRECTOR Mary Zyskowski CLASS NOTES MANAGER Matt Krefting 99F CONTRIBUTORS John Courtmanche, Abigail Meisel, Jenna Baillargeon CHANGE OF ADDRESS alumni@hampshire.edu

Timothy Zimmerman Appointed to Endowed Professorship

TIMOTHY ZIMMERMAN has been named

to the first Jonathan Lash Endowed Chair in Environmental Education, founded last year by the Board of Trustees and the Academic Affairs Division to honor President Lash’s tenure.

Zimmerman joined Hampshire in 2013 as a visiting professor of cognition and education from Rutgers University, where he was an assistant professor of science education. “In his almost five years at Hampshire, Tim has been fully engaged in our campus community,” says Dean of Faculty Eva Rueschmann, “mentoring students, serving on many committees, developing and teaching courses on such topics as environmental education, environmental action, and sustainability.”

After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in marine biology,

Non Satis Scire is published twice a year by the Office of Alumni and Family Relations and mailed to alums, students and parents, donors, and friends of the College. Diverse views are presented in these pages and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official Hampshire policies. Please send correspondence to communications@ hampshire.edu or Non Satis Scire, Office of Communications, Hampshire College, 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002. You can reach Alumni and Family Relations at 413.559.6638 or alumni@hampshire.edu.

Non Satis Scire is printed on FSC-certified paper and is produced by 100% Green-ecertified renewable energy.

Zimmerman earned a PhD in science education from the University of California Berkeley. Over the past 17 years, his research and teaching have centered on designing curricula that promote environmental stewardship.

He’s taught in the higher-education, museum-and aquarium-education, and environmental-education sectors.

“I’m honored and humbled to carry on the legacy of Jonathan Lash’s efforts to protect the natural world and promote justice,” Zimmerman says of his appointment. “Hampshire’s commitment to academic rigor and real-world experience, its dedication to environmental sustainability, and its ongoing social-justice work make it the perfect place for fostering the next generation of environmentaleducation change-makers.”

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART Andrew Hart; Ian Douglas; Brett Davis, thelessoncollective.com; Glenna and Earl Alderson; Jon Chase, Harvard Gazette; Pablo Delano, The Museum of the Old Colony; Eben Hall; Jason Drill 14F; Yasmine Albulhab 10F; C. Watts; B. Wood COVER Indigenous kernels and seeds, Hampshire College Farm

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New Alumni Benefit: Online Journal Access Good news for all you lifelong learners! We’ve recently been able to extend access to several electronic journal resources to alums through the Harold F. Johnson Library.

What’s available: SAGE | SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 1,000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas.

Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies, and video.

Project MUSE | Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Since 1995, the MUSE journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source for complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies; 120 publishers currently participate.

Springer | Springer provides researchers with access to millions of scientific documents from journals, books, series, protocols, and reference works.

How you can get access | You’ll need an active Hampshire email account to use these resources. To activate or request a Hampshire ID and email address, contact the IT HelpDesk (www.hampshire.edu/it/information-technology-help-desk).

Occasionally journal links may change. If you ever have a problem accessing databases or want an update on what might be available to you, please email libtech@hampshire.edu.

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Books

by Hampshire Alums and Faculty

SPECULATIVE IMPERIALISMS: MONSTROSITY AND MASQUERADE IN POSTRACIAL TIMES by Susana Loza. Lexington Books, 2017. Professor Loza explores the colonial ideologies underpinning the monstrous imaginings of contemporary popular culture in Britain and the United States.

DARWIN’S DAUGHTER by Faith Shearin 87S. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018.

Darwin’s Daughter takes the advancement of science, the preservation of human morale, and the observation of the human condition and places them under a microscope.

Shearin’s artful word choice and prose phrasing make her poems come alive.

FUGITIVE LIFE: THE QUEER POLITICS OF THE PRISON STATE BY by Assistant Professor Stephen Dillon. Duke University Press, 2018. During the 1970s in the United States, hundreds of feminist, queer, and antiracism activists were imprisoned as they fought U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and a repressive racial state.

THE CUBA ARCHIVE by Tria Giovan 78F. Damiani, 2017.

Twenty years after the publication of her first book of Cuban photographs, Cuba: The Elusive Island, Giovan has returned to these images, rediscovering in them a record of a Cuba that no longer exists. The Cuba Archive selects 120 of these images, many of which have never before been shown.

WAR AND MORAL INJURY: A READER edited by Professor Robert E. Meagher and Douglas A. Pryer, with forewords by Christa Davis Acampora and William P. Nash. Cascade Books, 2018.

What is moral injury and what are its causes and consequences? A collection of authoritative and accessible writings on the topic.

THE PERFECT PILLOW by Eric Pinder 88F. DisneyHyperion 2018. In his strange new room on his big new bed, Brody tosses and turns, holding his stuffed dragon named Horst. Young readers will enjoy floating along with Brody and Horst in this friendly nocturnal adventure with all the makings of a bedtime classic.

JANET DONCASTER edited

by Professor Lise Shapiro Sanders 90F. Victorian Secrets; Critical Edition, 2017.

Janet Doncaster chronicles a young woman’s struggle for independence. This new edition includes a critical introduction by Sanders and selected writings by Millicent Garrett Fawcett and other early feminist activists.

SECRETS HAUNT THE LOBSTERS’ SEA by Charlene D’Avanzo, professor emerita.

Maine Authors Publishing, 2018.

When a lobsterman’s body is found under his aquaculture raft, Mara Tusconi’s cousin Gordy is the number one suspect. But to investigate, Mara must visit Macomek Island, Maine’s wild, wild west, where lobstermen practice their own rule of law.

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A NICE RING TO IT “Book and Bell,� that is, the beginnings of a ritual to welcome new students to Hampshire. The book: a ledger all first-years signed to record their membership in a singular, intellectual community. The bell: to mark the start of their academic and artistic journey to Div-Free. How that bell got here, see page 8.

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Hampshire College

Alumni and Family Relations 893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002-3359

“Hampshire College will be bold enough to make no small plans.”

THE MAKING OF A COLLEGE

To Our Alums, Parents, and Friends, Five decades later we have new bold plans to make.

During this visioning year, we’re defining what we treasure most about this College so we can make Hampshire a “more effective intellectual and moral force in a changing culture.”

Your support is more important than ever.

Thank you.

| Non Satis Scire Every Day | donate.hampshire.edu