Hampshire Non Satis Scire Summer2017

SUMMER 2017

Non Satis Scire THE HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS

Inspirations

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Circular Reasoning

Suitable for Framing

BY JOHN COURTMANCHE

When Barbara Lancaster designed the Hampshire diploma for Commencement 1975, her graduation day, she expected the College to use it that once, retire it, then ask another student or professor to reimagine it for the following year. The practice dated back to the first Commencement, in 1971.

“Students had been coming up with some off-the-wall designs,” she says. “Artistic, yes, but they didn’t always look like diplomas.” That May, after she received one with her name on it, Lancaster 70F moved to California and didn’t give it another thought. Fast-forward to last year, when she was talking with Ken Rosenthal, a founding Hampshire employee and College historian, and learned that his daughter had graduated from Hampshire, too. “What does her diploma look like?” she asked, not sure exactly where the question came from. Ken texted a photo.

“Oh, my God,” she replied. “I designed that! I had no idea that all these years later they were still using it.”

The visual arts weren’t Lancaster’s area of study at the College. She was into psychology and cognitive science. But she dabbled. She felt at home in the studio and painted in oil and watercolor. She did calligraphy. She took a course with Arthur Hoener. Trained in the style of the Bauhaus movement under Josef Albers at Yale, Hoener was known for his circles. (“Professor of Small, Black-and-White Circles,” his students called him.) And then, somehow, she doesn’t remember how or by whom, Lancaster was invited to design the diploma. She jumped

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at the opportunity. “I wanted to make a contribution,” she says.

Lancaster worked in the round, settling on the theme of a circle to symbolize the Hampshire mission to prepare students for continuous and lifelong learning, the circle of knowledge. She borrowed a plate from the dining hall — living in Merrill House, it was faster than chasing down a compass in the art building — and traced it. Then, variation on a theme, she outlined the oval lid of a Bigelow tea tin, “Constant Comment,” her favorite. “I’ve always believed that less is more,” she says, true to her professor and to the Bauhaus. She contracted with a print shop in town, selected a nice 80# parchment, produced 50 sheets, and calligraphed the names of each of her classmates in loving precision and black ink. Because a special round die cut was too expensive for a fledgling school, Lancaster knew the circle would need to rest in a square field. She just had no idea, four decades later, it would still be there, revered for its timeless Hampshire-ness.

Kim Saal 70F is one of the reverent, perhaps more devoted than most. He was handed his diploma in 1974, a year before the inspired plate-and-tea-tin tracing, and it rankled. “The typeface was huge,” says the Hampshire trustee, “all caps, flush left, printed in gray and black.” Annoyance turned intolerable when he saw Lancaster’s design. “I called Hampshire and I lied,” he says. “I said I misplaced my diploma, and could they send me another one, with the circle.” He’s kept both, but only one has a frame and a place on his wall.

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In Retrospect

with

Eqbal

BY CHUCK COLLINS 79F

On his first visit to Hampshire, Eqbal Ahmad was billed as intellectual royalty, the kind of thinker-activist on the world’s stage whose talks you didn’t want to miss. On that autumn afternoon, none of us did.

FPH’s Main Lecture Hall was overflowing, not just with an eager audience but also with words — stories, critiques, questions from our guest on everything from the Algerian revolution, to Arab nationalism, to Reagan’s Middle East policy — all of it woven into beautiful paragraphs over 70 minutes without the benefit of notes. A friend of mine, years later, recalled how Eqbal started every lecture with two fibs: “I’m sorry I’m late” and “I’ll be brief.”

Well, he was worth the wait and kept us enrapt. Many of us had never heard from a Muslim scholar whose life experiences touched corners of the world we were only just learning about. And for days after, we quoted his commentaries and expressions. “The situation is absolutely banana,” he’d say.

We would, too, never in the plural.

In 1982, I was the student rep on the hiring committee that interviewed Eqbal for a faculty position. (For the next 15 years he would be professor of politics and Middle Eastern studies at Hampshire.) This is an intimate place, I informed him, and asked if he’d be available to meet with students outside class, knowing the demands on his time that came from . . . everywhere. He said he would, but probably not “sitting in cafés into the wee hours.” That seemed reasonable. Of course, we did

spend late evenings with him, not only in cafés but also in the Dakin living room, Eqbal sitting cross-legged and in his socks. He was both the analyst and the sparkling raconteur, talking for hours, moving from the Tunisian labor movement, to Palestinian aspirations, to the athletic feats of Pakistani badminton dynasties. It was from his most personal stories that I began to grasp the horrors of the 1947 Partition of India, the wrenching apart of families, the escalation of sectarian violence, the indifference of the region’s colonial masters.

When I was his teaching assistant for a seminar on world politics, he asked me to read an essay he’d just completed. (He often had me preview articles he was considering assigning in his classes.) I did. And I told him I didn’t think this piece was a good fit. “Thank you, Charles,” replied this passionate man, whom Edward Said called “perhaps the shrewdest, most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa” on the planet. “I was curious if you thought it was as bad as I did.”

CHUCK COLLINS is a researcher, activist, and storyteller based at the Institute for Policy Studies, the same Washington, D.C., think tank where Eqbal Ahmad spent a decade as senior fellow earlier in his career. He is also the coeditor of Inequality.org. His latest book, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, was published by Chelsea Green in 2016.

EQBAL AHMAD taught at Hampshire from 1982 to 1997. His faculty colleagues, former students, family, and friends from around the globe together created the Eqbal Ahmad Lecture, held annually in October, which honors his teaching, scholarship, and activism and continues to celebrate his life and work.

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Contents

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1 4 7 8 12 21 48 50 54 80 56 65 67 68

CIRCULAR REASONING

Suitable for Framing IN RETROSPECT

With Eqbal LIGHT READING

The Physics of Color IN DYNAMIC REPOSE

Depicted Space IN CONVERSATION

Enter the Line, See Where It Leads You CREATIVE COMMONS

Harnessing Curiosity, Channeling Passion, Setting Off to Explore NEILFEST 2017

Minds, Brains, and a Lot of Love SEEN AT NEILFEST

Artificial General Intelligence: Why Aren’t We There Yet? SEEN AT NEILFEST

How the Brain Learns Skills HIGHEST AIMS

The Bell Lap

Hampshire News Books Books on Tape Notes from Alums

FACING PAGE “These are my students investigating the reflection and refraction of light by transparent

materials to understand how light interacts with pigments used in painting and printing. The class is Physics of Color in the Context of the Visual Arts.” Kaća Bradonjić, visiting assistant professor of physics

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Light Reading

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In Dynamic Repose

BY MEQUITTA AHUJA 96S

In this photograph I’m standing in my studio, a room downstairs in our house. I constructed this image as source material for a painting not yet made, and which began with me thinking about Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

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In Dynamic Repose

Enigmatic, Velázquez’s painting depicts members of the Spanish court of King Philip IV and has compelled generations of artists for many reasons — one of which is the complex use of space as a narrative device, withholding and revealing critical information. For example, the way those most central Renaissance figures, king and queen, are posed just beyond the picture, revealed in a mirror.

Las Meninas has me thinking about paintings within paintings, depicted space versus actual space. My interest is also on the princess. Although she is visually centered, many argue that the painting is as much a portrait of Velázquez himself, the master of representation. In Picasso’s many riffs on Las Meninas, he focuses on the artist, whom he presents as king. But I’m thinking about the princess and how she might be cast as artist.

With that in mind, I position myself centrally in royal blue, posed as both model and artist simultaneously. The cascading fabric beneath my raised foot makes a pyramid of my stance.

I’m surrounded by my paintings, their maker presented to acknowledge my viewers, not actively painting.

Posed commandingly in my blue jogging suit, brush in hand and plastic painting gloves, I’m a parody mashup of the artist as worker and the art model as icon of beauty. The two paintings to my left are closely related to each other. The smaller one in front partially obscures the larger one, but it depicts the underlying structure of the figurative painting behind it.

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I, too, aim for mastery. I want to understand deeply the inner workings of pictures. Studying the history of art, I constantly discover painting in its diverse conceptions across time and geography. I get obsessed with little things, like Goya’s calling card clutched in a magpie’s beak and Zurbarán’s cartellino on a painting of the crucifixion. I ask myself a myriad of questions, such as: How can I make paintings that utilize a long view of the medium’s parameters — from Renaissance painting, to folk art, to geometric abstraction? At Hampshire, I gained the open-ended tools of selfeducation that every artist needs. They are the same intellectual tools I use in the studio each day: articulate my goals, strategize my approach, assess the results . . . and begin again.

MEQUITTA AHUJA is a painter based in Baltimore.

Her work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the National Portrait Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has received numerous fellowships and awards.

In Picasso’s many riffs on Las Meninas, he focuses on the artist, whom he presents as king. But I’m thinking about the princess, how she might be cast as artist.

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In Conversation

Enter the line, see where it leads you L. BROWN KENNEDY AND MEI ANN TEO

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THIS IS THE THIRD in a series of conversations between two members of the faculty, one with decades of experience at Hampshire, the other fairly new to the College. L. Brown Kennedy and Mei Ann Teo got together on April 19, with a camera rolling, on the second floor of the Kern Center. Brown is a professor of literature who arrived at Hampshire in 1973, during its earliest years. She has special interests in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture (Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Milton, Renaissance and Reformation cultural history, theology, and historiography). Among her other teaching and research interests are the literature and culture of the southern United States, women’s writing and the representation of gender, the representation of childhood and children’s literature, and Irish literature and culture. She is continuing a study of Virginia Woolf as a reader of Shakespeare, writing on Milton and the Temporality of Paradise Lost, and coediting, with Rachel Conrad, professor of childhood studies, a collection of essays: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. Mei Ann, an assistant professor of theater who joined the faculty two years ago, teaches directing and dramaturgy. She is a maker of theater and film whose many works have toured U.S. and international festivals in China, Singapore, Scotland, Belgium, and Canada. She was the former chair of drama and resident artist at Pacific Union College. Among the films she directed is the documentary Please Listen to Me, about marginalized and at-risk youth in Singapore. She also codirected and produced the short film Not Here, which received the Singapore Film Commission’s Short Film Grant and was screened internationally. She is currently directing the world premiere of Dim Sum Warriors, a new musical written by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, composed by Du Yun for Theatre Above in Shanghai, and is working on a film to be shot in Singapore.

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In Conversation

You can be completely prepared for a class, and then something very different happens in the room. You say to yourself, I came in here with this lovely woven thing — and they’ve just dismantled it!

You don’t get bored.

L. BROWN KENNEDY

Mei Ann: When you think about all the courses you’ve cotaught over the years, what’s one class that really surprised you . . . that was really fruitful?

Brown: I could actually pick from five or six. But here’s an early one. David Smith, who was a founding faculty member, set up an interdisciplinary seminar on the Seventeenth Century in England and the Americas. Penina Glazer was in political theory, Miriam Slater in feminist social history and the Renaissance, and David in American studies (a field that at that point didn’t really take Native Americans into account, which was one of the things David was working on). I had come out of graduate school with a multidisciplinary background, but I still thought I was doing something radical putting literature and social sciences together. Back then we had a different kind of Div III advanced learning requirement, which I liked, called an integrative seminar. In this case, we each brought three or four students into this seminar and they had to work with each other.

Mei Ann: A ratio of three or four students to each professor?

Brown: Well, that one time at least, to mix us all up and stir the soup. It was an investment, and a lot of good things grew out of it. Pedagogically, I learned a huge amount. You couldn’t just teach from a point of view. You were directing — getting people engaged with the material, seeing the kinds of questions they asked, different questions depending on people’s training. It was amazing. Another amazing moment, a few years later, was when Ellie Donkin came to one of my Shakespeare seminars. I thought I was going to get to sit there and watch . . . but not with Ellie.

Mei Ann: No? Brown: I’d never done theater. We were studying The Tempest and she assigned roles. She assigned me Prospero — which I didn’t want! — and had each of us pick one line and a gesture. We spent the next ten minutes going around the room repeating the same line and gesture. I don’t know why, but I picked “This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child.” And I discovered all kinds of interesting things were going on with gender in the play, with Prospero’s contempt, how twitchy Prospero was, how anxious. When

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I picked a gesture, and I don’t know where it came from, I picked this very jerky kind of movement. And suddenly I realized he’s really scared. Then we have Sycorax, who scares him a lot. Why does Sycorax scare him?

Mei Ann: That’s why I love theater. That’s exactly why I love theater. It’s all of the possibilities inside that line. I mean, that’s literature too, right? The way in which we each read something is going to be completely different.

I love Shakespeare as a drama test: there have been so many productions of Hamlet, and all of them are incredibly different from each other. Even if the directors all place Hamlet in World War II, even if the setting in itself is the same, the way we enter into that text and the complexity of how Shakespeare writes make the production completely different. We could even be sitting at the same performance and get a completely different read on the reasons these characters have chosen to do something. It’s what I try to do when I teach, to foreground the material and to get my students to enter it. I don’t foreground the argument for them. I let them find what the problems are in the moment, and they figure it out.

Brown: I think that’s the difference. Obviously it’s not a difference only about Hampshire teaching. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Marjorie Garber, at Harvard. She wrote an essay called “Shakespeare in Slow Motion.”

Mei Ann: I love that.

Brown: Her argument is that we tend to read in terms of a pre-set narrative, in terms of this theory or that argument, and that you need to enter the line when you’re teaching Shakespeare, enter the line and work with the line and see where it leads you. I think Hampshire teaching is like that, the way learning here is student led. As faculty, part of what we try to do is get students to understand that they can interpret. Nina Payne, who was one of our founding faculty in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts — a fabulous writing teacher and really exciting to be on committees with — used to say writing is a human wright, as in w-r. I think that’s true.

Writing is a human wright (as well as a human right). But I also think interpretation is a human wright. We’re trying to get students to understand that there’s something in there, in the text, that they need to be thinking about. It’s not just free form and anything goes. There’s something you’re trying to get at. And you’re trying to get at it in a community of readers. That’s another reason I love having theater students in my classes: they’re used to reading with each other and arguing about “where this ought to go.”

The line may hold all possibilities, but you can’t actualize all possibilities in one production simultaneously. “Well, if we take it this way, then these other things change.” What

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can change makes teaching plays so exciting. This is all very obvious to theater students in a way that, sometimes, literature students have to learn.

Mei Ann: Well, it’s about whether or not we’re serving an author’s vision or inhabiting what the author has offered to us — figuring out what that means in this moment for the audience we’re going to meet. Those are two very different perspectives. In addition, at Hampshire we’re able to critique things that in the mainstream might not be critiqued, right? We might also be looking at the impact that the worship of Shakespeare has had across the world.

For instance, I’m from Singapore. I’m from a British colony, and my theater education as a high schooler covered next to nothing about Asian theater. I learned the Greeks and Shakespeare. What I saw happen in my country is that new plays would feel the need to reference Shakespeare in all sorts of strange ways, as if it was necessary to validate. I don’t blame Shakespeare. I love being inside a room that’s rehearsing that text. It’s always thrilling — the ideas are so big, the emotions are so deep and powerful and passionate.

The language, I love the language. But I’ve also witnessed the impact of colonization, of mind and soul and body, in many different ways, which includes literature. If we look at the Shakespeare productions in this country and what people don’t produce because of, say, limited resources, we really need to investigate whose stories we’re telling again and again. Is it enough to put black and brown bodies into Shakespeare plays? And what does that actually mean? A mentor of mine, Leslie Ishii, talks about how she’s classically trained as an actor, and after some time she realized that all her opportunities to act would be in the classics because there wasn’t as much new work being produced by Asian playwrights for Asian bodies. She started to wonder if this was the only way they could see her now, in their frame.

She asked, “Am I recolonizing myself?” When she said that I was like, “Oh, my goodness. I had never even thought of that.” To think about the wide impact of how we raise one culture up, raise up one writer, is of great importance to me in my teaching.

Brown: I wish we had this conversation three days ago.

I would have asked you to come to my class. We Skyped with Delia Jarrett-Macauley and talked with her about her book Shakespeare, Race and Performance. She was involved at the University of Warwick with what they called the Multicultural Shakespeare project, which mapped the history of black and Asian Shakespeare performance in Britain. The book is a collection of essays by actors, producers . . . people who aren’t scholars, on doing Shakespeare in a black or Asian body and the effect that different kinds of audiences can have. One of the interesting things that came out in the conversation was a reference

In Conversation

to a production of Julius Caesar in Sierra Leone postwar.

The question I asked Delia, which I’ll also ask you, is what’s the difference between color-blind casting in the Royal Shakespeare Company, where you are, as you say, framed — you’re framed by a very definite context, it’s a national theater, it’s the national poet — and a production of Julius Caesar by kids in a village in Sierra Leone, where the actors are all from the community and the community all knows each other? They both could come under the broad heading of doing Shakespeare in a multicultural context. But they’re totally different. I guess my question for you is . . .

Mei Ann: . . . Does color-blind casting actually exist?

Brown: Not so much.

Mei Ann: And what is it, right?

Brown: Yes. Mei Ann: I think that, like with everything, we have to understand context, intent, and impact. That in each of these productions we’re looking at completely different context, completely different intent, and the different impact they have on a society and on people. If we don’t consider those, we’re talking apples and oranges. I don’t make rules like “That’s not allowed” and “That is allowed” in performance. I don’t think it’s useful for us. But I love the process of unpacking. This village, these people. I know of a producer/director who made Antigone in Burma.

Sometimes, in places that see more difficult circumstances than we do, it’s useful to use that frame to allow us a bit of space from what we experience. By taking on that frame or looking through that lens, it enables us to see ourselves in a safer way. But the resonance is always clear. Sometimes it’s a responsible thing to do, to have that separation.

•••

Mei Ann: So, what is the context of this color-blind casting, the actual context of it? Where are we doing it? It’s the Royal Shakespeare Company? Okay, well, what other actual stories do those bodies, those black and brown bodies, get to tell of their lives and their histories and their heritage? Until we have a context where that is alive and well and sustained and not tokenized, then we have a problem of simply placing these bodies into a color-blind situation where they’re supposed to be invisible. Where their very skin is supposed to be invisible.

Brown: It’s a funny term, “color-blind casting.”

Mei Ann: It’s a lie, that’s what it is. Is the intent to reveal the

way we have multicultural families in the world? Is it like, I want to have a world in which all of these people survive together? There are a lot of problems when you cast white Prosperos and black Calibans. What are we perpetuating?

Brown: Especially when you consider that the first black Caliban was in 1945, and that until then costuming of Caliban was as an animal.

Mei Ann: Exactly.

Brown: Caliban is not invariably cast as black, but you rarely have Prospero cast as black. Yesterday, one of my students mentioned that in New York recently they cast Prospero and Miranda as black and Caliban as white. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Mei Ann: Yes, I think that’s impact — intent, then impact.

Is that healing to watch? It could be.

•••

Brown: In preparing for our conversation today, I thought I’d ask you what you’ve gotten to do at Hampshire that you might not have gotten to do someplace else. I’m thinking of the freedom faculty have to try to figure out both what students think they want and what we as faculty think they may need. The way we build the curriculum by working with students. In the early ’70s, I was told I was being hired as the “traditionally trained” person in English. “Okay. That’s not how I think of myself, but if it gets me a job . . .” We’re talking 1973, the feminist movement, and all the young women and many of the young men wanted to read women writers. So how do I do that? In all my graduate training I had read one novel by a woman and no novel by a person of color. Not one! What can I do to teach this material and, honestly, keep one foot someplace where I have training, so I’m not completely skating onto thin ice and have some range of reading to fall back on. Miriam Slater came to my office in the basement of Dakin House (where there were then faculty offices) with a young woman, a wonderful Hampshire student, who wanted to do her Div III on Virginia Woolf. Miriam looked at me and told the student, “She’s not what you need, but she’s a trained professional!”

I thought, “Oh, my Lord, I’m a trained professional! What shall I do?” By that point I had studied one novel by Virginia Woolf. But that Div III trained me, and I fell in love with the writing. I decided I could develop a course on Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, setting those writers in conversation with each other, and have the students carry on that conversation. This discovery was incredibly interesting to me, though it doesn’t seem so radical now, changing up the “major authors” thing. I’m going back to our early

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There’s a beautiful saying that in theater, there is no small part. We each come with uniqueness, and understanding how to construct spaces for that uniqueness is the thing.

MEI ANN TEO

conversation now, how we can create spaces for arguing about what’s “not there” in a text. That if you have a couple of voices in dialogue over a semester you can discover that the great writers are wonderful and exciting, but don’t possess truth.

it’s protective. I admit it. But then I moved on to teach Faulkner and Toni Morrison in dialogue . . .

Mei Ann: Amazing. I want to take that class.

•••

Mei Ann: Tell me about this no possession of truth. I always think we read those writers to get at some truth.

Brown: The better the writer or the better the dramatist, the more aware you get that no one owns the truth. And the more the text is aware that it doesn’t own it. The text makes spaces for ambiguities.

Mei Ann: I totally agree. I think what they do is not possess the truth, as you say, but offer us a way of searching for it, right? We see the mechanism of how it’s searched for, and that’s actually what I hope to get better at. How do I search better, and how do I offer that to my students, to search better?

Brown: The thing about setting up two writers in dialogue,

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Mei Ann: This is a much more politically engaged campus than I’ve worked in. I taught at a conservative Christian school for seven years, Seventh-day Adventist, where the politics were very different, and controversy would start from rules like the faculty couldn’t wear earrings. The dorms weren’t co-ed and . . .

Brown: Let alone the bathrooms.

Mei Ann: Yes, no gender-neutral bathrooms. It is a very beautiful place, much like here, but educationally so different from Hampshire. At the end of my first year here, I participated in a workshop with faculty from across their campus to look at the narrative evaluations we write.

In Conversation

Of course, the conversation had to be brought back to our Hampshire pedagogy. What are we trying to do to help our students learn? How do we guide an entire learning process?

Brown: It’s not no earrings, it’s no grades.

Mei Ann: Yes, from no earrings to no grades! Is that progress? Let me ask myself . . .

Brown: Whenever I’ve worked on a co-teaching collaboration with one or two other faculty, we’ve found it important to find an hour a week to sit down with each other, without the students, and really talk through the pedagogy. I found it really helped, though it was hard with everybody’s schedule to find an hour. When I co-taught a course on the history and literature of childhood with Penina Glazer, then retiring as dean of faculty, and Rachel Conrad [professor of childhood studies], Penina would come in the hour before class and say, “Okay, what’s the pedagogy?” And we asked ourselves, “How are we going to do this? What are we going to have the students do? We’re not just going to sit there and talk to them, are we?”

Mei Ann: I love it.

Brown: And when you’re teaching with someone from another field, you realize that there are things you take for granted about your own pedagogy. It makes you step back and say, “Oh, why do I do it that way?”

Mei Ann: “How can I learn and grow?”

Brown: “What do you do that I don’t do?” A real difference about teaching at Hampshire is that cross-fertilization can happen so much faster.

Mei Ann: That’s what I’m really excited to learn more about. I’ll be co-teaching a class with Christopher Tinson [associate professor of Africana studies and history] about the flag, called “For Whom It Stands.” I’m developing a course with Uditi Sen [assistant professor of South Asian studies and history]. Lourdes Mattei [associate professor of clinical psychology] and I are starting to talk about how we can teach a class on the family.

Brown: Fabulous.

Mei Ann: Michele Hardesty [associate professor of U.S. literature and cultural studies] teaches graphic novels and I teach the staging of graphic novels and comic books for performance. I’m excited about all the possibilities to co-teach with different colleagues, as well as my own theater faculty.

Brown: It’s been the absolute super thing for me about Hampshire. You don’t get bored. In a similar way, you can be completely prepared for a class, and then something very different happens in the room. You say to yourself, “I came in here with this lovely woven thing — and they’ve just dismantled it!”

•••

Brown: I have a question for you, if you’re willing to go there. You said that you came from a conservative Christian background. When you first said it, I thought you meant your first teaching job. Then I thought you might also be talking about family.

Mei Ann: Oh, all of it, yes.

Brown: Because I do, too. I was thinking, Boy, you’re very direct about this, and comfortable saying it. For me, it’s what I’ve talked about the least.

Mei Ann: Why is it that I’m so open about it?

Brown: Well . . .

Mei Ann: I think it’s because I’m so new here and nobody knows about me and how I am in the world. But to be home here, I feel like I want people to know things about my history that seem contradictory. Like the fact that I have a finance degree from undergrad, and that I come from an extremely conservative Christian background. These are two things people don’t expect in a theater professor, or in someone who is so active in the scholarship that I work in. I think it’s partly me wanting to be seen in a way that might not fit the narrative of being a Hampshire professor, my way of being vulnerable. And I guess it’s through that vulnerability that I hope to connect with other people. I’m so glad you told me.

Brown: We can have a conversation.

Mei Ann: Another conversation! Where I am right now is, I’m deeply searching at the intersection of artistic, civic, and spiritual practice. That’s from where I wake up and live my life. Part of that is understanding history and . . .

Brown: . . . And talking about things that are really fraught right now. This is me speaking as a historian, the piece of me that’s done a lot of research on the U.S. South. I think what I’m most sad about at the moment is how . . . . What the civil rights movement was able to do was to draw on conservative Christianity and get people to speak from their best rather than worst instincts. But a kind of secularization

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In Conversation

or sexualization or whatever in the general culture has driven that away. It’s been a slow process. I don’t know the Seventh-day Adventist world at all, but I was raised Southern Baptist.

groups, mix them up, and assign roles. Or tell them that everybody has to take a turn directing, right?

Mei Ann: It’s very similar.

Brown: My utopian idea is that in theater it’s all very easy because everybody has a part to play.

Brown: My parents were first generation in college and taught in a small church-related school, both of them. This was in the South, and the community I grew up in was extremely open with respect to Muslim students, extremely open with respect to immigrant communities. Of course, it was only very slowly and painfully desegregated at all with respect to African Americans and whites. However, it feels to me that that piece of being conservative Christian that was seriously self-critical and with effort could change has broken down. I don’t know whether that’s true in the Seventh-day Adventist tradition.

Mei Ann: I’m no longer in the Seventh-day Adventist community.

Brown: . . . But for your family.

Mei Ann: I practice more in Buddhism and Taoism now, and even so in those communities there needs to be a healthy understanding of power and how power is wielded. I think that’s one of the big things right now, not only in the world but also on this campus: how my students resist power because of all the ways in which they’ve seen it manifest in a toxic way. I teach “directing,” and my students will say, “I’m not directing this, I’m facilitating it.” So I say, “Okay, what is the role of the facilitator?” And they’ll describe exactly what the director does. Then I’d say, “Okay, what is the role of a director?” And they’ll say, “Oh, I guess it’s the same thing.” They want to step away from the title because they don’t want to perpetuate toxic patriarchy.

It’s such an important thing, for me too, to be self-critical, self-aware, and self-understanding. If it’s necessary that I wield power, then I wield power — but how can I do it with kindness and compassion and in a way that supports a goal of justice?

Brown: I think that’s the hardest part about making the chemistry of a class work. Because you have to let people who can lead lead, even if you want to say to them, directly or privately, “Tone down a little bit, give other people space.” Having enough energy and momentum so the class moves while giving people who don’t have confidence the room they need is the hardest thing. It’s also the reason that classes gel or don’t — not having a good mix of people who are able to both speak and listen, willing to listen. But there are things you can do. You can put them in small

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Mei Ann: Yes.

Mei Ann: There’s a beautiful saying that in theater “there is no small part.” We each come with uniqueness, and understanding how to construct spaces for that uniqueness is the thing. I get really large wait lists in my theater courses, so I construct scary things for the first few classes to do in order to weed out students who aren’t really going to go there with us! One of the assignments I have for “Directing Via Personal and Communal History” is to ask every student to tell every other student, one-to-one, their entire life story.

They need to figure out how to do that. I say, “It can be as long or as short as you want. But it’s the integrity and honesty you have toward your own life story that’s at play. How are you going to connect with the other person or with your own story?” They start to learn dramatic structure over unwieldy material that they’re expert on — their own life. No one can say to them, “You’re not telling your own story right.”

Brown: That’s brilliant. And they also learn that nobody is going to sit still for twenty-five minutes of this.

Mei Ann: They ramble on and, in a moment, they start to see the shifting, right? One of my mentors, the brilliant performance artist Ernesto Pujol, offered me this exercise.

As I was doing it, I was putting so much stock into my life story that after the third time none of the details mattered.

I had to ask myself, Why do I speak about my life? I found that to be so valuable. In Buddhism there’s the Eightfold Path, and one is Right Speech. What if at every moment the things that came out of our mouths were considered and true, necessary and kind? What if we all practiced that?

Brown: The world changes.

Mei Ann: The world just might change.

Brown: I think you’ll have an amazing time teaching with Lourdes. I hope you say to her, “Whatever else we do, I want to do this exercise.” Because how interesting it would be for someone trained in psychoanalytic theory to think about what’s going on in that repeated act of telling a life story.

Mei Ann: That’s a great idea. Brown, I feel like I could have this conversation go on forever.

Brown: Just say when you’re ready for us to quit.

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Harnessing curiosity, channeling passion, setting off to explore: A Div III Collage, 2017

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MIKAELA GONZĂ LEZ 13F

How can art honor the power of black and brown femmes in the struggle for liberation?

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Div III Title

SOURCE Wall of Resilience: A Site of Reclamation, Celebration, and Collaboration I wanted to show the power, connectivity, and divinity of femmes and trans femmes of color through art, its documentation, and unveiling. I chose muralism because it can express political realities through collective imagination. As both a monumental and a public installation, the mural is accessible and reflects community dialogue. I created it with members of SOURCE: Students of Under-Represented Cultures and Ethnicities. It values the voices of many as it simultaneously claims space.

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GAELYN LINDAUER 13F

How can art be used to create therapeutic nature experiences?

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Div III Title

Creating Restorative Environments: Connecting People to Nature Through Art A restorative environment supports a person’s ability to relax and recharge. I wanted to figure out how the healing qualities of nature could be curated into micro-experiences that were simple, accessible, and effective, all while being housed in an interior space because natural spaces are often inaccessible.

I had all these questions about how and why nature affects us.

That’s how I got started. I also have a deep connection to nature, and have always loved the miniature and whimsical.

In Conversation

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SARAH KLING 14F

How can I make an object move in real time and create other objects?

Div III Title

Viewing Mathematics Through Art: An Interactive View I’ve always been interested in mathematics and sculpture.

I wanted to make a physical object that could change shape while still actually feeling physical. I decided to explore the objecthood of light, and make an “object” better than real life that could move and change. So many surprises! I’m now an expert in soldering, wiring, electricity, and coding, skills I didn’t even know I would need. I think combining the arts and the sciences helps both disciplines move forward.

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EMILIANO CARRILLO-AUN 13F

What would it take to make a blade fit for a legendary king?

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Div III Title

Beowulf’s Sword: Re-Creating a Weapon That Never Was I was trying to understand what it was like to work ancient metal. And what would it take to make a blade for Beowulf?

I started by creating steel by the light of the moon, did that for a year, then forged a sword from that material based on an exquisite example from the sixth century. I got immersed in the original Old English text, in the archaeological record, and in the art of metallurgy. The sword is of a Scandinavian design and reminiscent of one Beowulf might have carried.

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MAIA HOLLOWAY 13F

Can jokes that perpetuate stereotypes help us understand how we deal with racism?

Div III Title

Why Laugh at Jokes When There Are White People: The Epistemology of Race and Racism in Stand-Up Comedy I’ve been doing stand-up for two years, I’m a nerd for critical race theory, and I love to read legal journals. In my thesis I lay out the foundation of “colorblind” racism and then examine whiteness, white feminism, and how racist jokes are used in white spaces. Stand-up is a perfect arena for analyzing white supremacy and racism since comedians talk so openly about race, to perpetuate stereotypes or to subvert them. Not every joke lands. But there’s room for people to unpack and reflect.

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JOSIA DECHIARA 13F AND RACHEL ROSENBERG 13F

How do large-scale photovoltaic arrays affect the New England agro-ecological landscape?

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Div III Title

Ecological Impacts of Photovoltaic Arrays Solar arrays require a large area for installation, and there is potential for notable ecosystem-level disturbance. Little previous research has been done on this, even though solar is the most rapidly increasing renewable energy globally.

We tried to fill in some of the research gaps. By examining the dynamics at play in these systems we can enable land managers to make more informed decisions to balance energy generation, agricultural production, and conservation.

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Creative Commons Rubber Match

SEAN SEID 15F

What does it mean to play authentically when the music is centuries old?

Div III Title

Interpretations of Colonial American Dance Music This is my take on popular music from the 18th century in Virginia.

It’s one part ethnography, one part composition. In the former, I wrote about the musicians I’ve worked with over the last six years at Colonial Williamsburg. The latter culminated in a recital at the Red Barn. I wrote chamber pieces inspired by 18th-century sensibilities and played several period dance tunes on mandolin, pennywhistle, German flute, and fiddle. The shared experience was an essential piece of it.

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FORD KELLY-RILEY 14F

To what extent does a laughtrack make something funny?

Div III Title

Sympathy for the Laughtrack: Using Technical Elements to Hint at Themes Beneath the Veneer I made a sitcom, had it performed in the library’s Studio G, and broadcast it live to an audience in Emily Dickinson Hall, working the laughtrack in real time. First, it just spurred them to laugh at unimpressive jokes. But as the drama got darker, I played it frequently, to their increasing discomfort. I was also recording them. At the end, I played back their laughs for them, recorded during one of the show’s darkest moments. Then we grappled with the laughtrack as a theatrical element worth discussing.

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VICTORIA LEE 13F

What can I design to better the lives of the local homeless community?

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Div III Title

Sleep Safe Pod: A Mobile Sleeping Shelter I personally needed to be in touch with homeless people to understand their specific needs. As a volunteer food server at the Amherst Survival Center, I noticed immediately how many people who made their way there were pushing large carts with their belongings. They never left their carts: everything they cared for was in them. By designing and fabricating a low-cost, lightweight, lockable shelter that attaches to a bicycle, we could protect them from the elements and provide personal safety.

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DANIELLE ALDRICH 13F

How can I challenge the conventions of theatrical design and explore audience immersive theater?

Div III Title

Creation from Chaos: How Designers Collaborate to Create an Immersive, Interactive, Narrative World I set out to investigate design-driven storytelling and how to cultivate fear through the lens of science fiction. Interacting with this set I created, and through the use of light and sound, the audience uncovers the story of a gas station and the fate of two scientists on a quest to study alien life. I worked within traditional elements of sci-fi to create a world that explored otherness from a feminist perspective. In good science fiction, aliens are not always the alien. Sometimes it’s humanity.

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SAMY SCHRADE 13F AND COURTNEY FULLER 13F

How do you create a hair-care, skin-care venture for products that are sustainably sourced, accessible, and affordable?

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Div III Title

Developing Diasporic Infrastructures: A Model for Ethical and International Business A lot of people have multiple chemical sensitivities, such as super-sensitive skin and hair. (Have you ever read the back of your shampoo bottle and tried to figure out what those ingredients are?) We’re developing all-natural skin and hair products and, having earned a spot from the Valley Ventures Collegiate Accelerator, will start a company. We’re expecting to incorporate lymph + honey soon. We began selling our first batch of products right after we rang the bell.

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Creative Commons Rubber Match

MAY HEMLER 13F

What does a disabled person need to look like to not be pitiful in the eyes of an abled person?

Div III Title

Be My Body, Read My Books This portrait series focuses on subversive and radical disabled people. It’s based on my own experience with disability, chronic pain, and trying to find ways to overcome pity to find power.

Large-format photography can give its subjects a heightened, more intense appearance, almost making them larger than life.

I want viewers to be taken aback by how whole these people look. This has been stirring in me for a while. It was important that I pull it together and have it come to the surface.

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JULIA RAUCH 13F

How does inflammation affect the way a nerve regenerates after it has been injured?

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Div III Title

Effects of Injury-Induced Histamine Release on Fibroblasts I’m interested in connective tissue disorders. Many people who have them suffer from pain disorders, too. I investigated how abnormalities in connective tissues can cause pain by looking at the inflammatory molecules that are released as a nerve is injured, and how collagen assembly works. In taking this path, I was able to research pain and neuroscience, connecting them by studying tissues. My real inspiration: I want to help people.

Factory accidents, the military, there are broad implications.

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NEILFEST 2017

NEIL * FEST

Minds, Brains, and a Lot of Love *

Here’s the question, because it always starts with the question. How do you honor Neil Stillings as he winds down a long and legendary career as professor of psychology at Hampshire College? The first thing you do is you don’t call it retirement because there’s nothing retiring (adjective: “shy and fond of being on one’s own”) about Neil Stillings, even as he plans to step away next June from the job he’s held since the first term of Nixon’s administration.

What you do is throw a party, call it NeilFest, of course, and invite a lot of people because Neil has touched the lives of a lot of people. He’s also helped them to think and given them space to reflect and to rethink and to create and to put themselves out there intellectually in ways that can bring about not only best selves, but also an improved world because of that.

So on April 1, 2017, they mingled, all these friends of Neil: colleagues and students and former students and staffers and founders and family members and neighbors whose ties to Neil and to the College go back a long, long way and, for some, not so long, say, to 16F. And they talked. They spent a day in the West Lecture Hall talking about geometric shapes and memory, about the perception of structure in music, about artificial intelligence, federal health-care regulation, and the auditory pathways that lead to speech. They kept ranging widely, and

(AS IN STILLINGS)

by late afternoon they’d meditated on neurotransmitters in the Bengalese finch, cadence in The Cat in the Hat, and hope in the clouds. They interrogated big ideas because, for many of them, it’s their life’s work, influenced in no small way by Neil, and because they were back at Hampshire.

If NeilFest was the rationale that brought them all together, Neil Stillings was the connector hub.

They also talked about Neil. How, in addition to his numerous scholarly achievements, he helped found things.

He helped found a field of study (cognitive science), a school (the School of Language and Communication, now the School of Cognitive Science), and even a college (Hampshire, that would be). And how his classes remain classics — Mind, Brains, and Machines; Music, Mind, and Brain — as does the definitive textbook he coauthored, the first undergraduate textbook on cognitive science, in 1978.

“Neil knows almost everything about almost everything,” said a colleague, glass raised at the Red Barn, where the assembly had decamped for dinner. “And he’s going to take you seriously, as an intellectual and as a person, regardless of where you’re coming from and where you’re going.”

One by one they stepped to the front of the room, including a daughter, Monica. “I watched some old family videos recently,” she said. “And there we

were, sitting at our little blue table with our little blue chairs — you remember, they were big back in the day — and my dad’s like, Okay, what shape is that?

How are you going to cut that out with the scissors? Here I thought we were having a family moment, then I realized, he’s testing my cognition!”

“Neil,” said a staffer who also went back years here, “I always thought of you as a kind of ethical touchstone, especially during difficult times for the College. Whether we agreed or disagreed, there was never a question that your first interest was what was best for Hampshire.”

Neil was given the first speaking slot that night, as everyone settled into a seat. But he also had the last word: “One of the reasons we’re getting together like this is because Hampshire’s reaching a watershed. Very few people who helped start this place are still here. Pretty soon the College will be completely steered by people whose view to the future far exceeds their view back. There won’t be any more founders to issue grumpy, agitated complaints about how we’ve lost sight of our mission. I’m one of those people.

I’m one of the last. This is sort of my Nixonian moment: You won’t have Neil Stillings to grouch at you anymore. But I wanted to have a party before I left. And this has been an absolutely wonderful party. And it’s all because of you.”

– David Gibson

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NEIL * FEST

Artificial General Intelligence: Why Aren’t We There Yet?

BY GARY MARCUS 86F

I was 16 years old, really not loving high school. I loved what I was doing outside of high school, which was computer programming and thinking about cognitive science. So I decided to drop out and go straight to college. I wrote to a bunch of schools, and Hampshire sent me a little booklet, an excerpt of a cognitive science text. The cognitive science book that Neil put together hadn’t quite come out yet — this was 1986. I came for a visit on January 27, and I know that because on January 26 the Patriots had lost the Super Bowl. To tell you how little I knew of Hampshire, I thought that game might be a problem, that maybe it wasn’t the best timing for an interview. It turned out no one at Hampshire cared about football. (It was later that I discovered the bumper sticker hampshire college football: undefeated since 1970.) Over lunch I had conversations with two professors — Mark Feinstein and Steve Weisler — about cognitive science and linguistics.

That was pretty exciting for a 16-yearold, and I knew I had found my college.

For decades people have been predicting that artificial intelligence is about 20 years out. They predicted that in 1950 — and in the 1960s. Somebody actually did a historical review of all the predictions, always 20 years away. I think of the Smurfs — “Are we there yet?” they keep asking, and Papa Smurf keeps saying,

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“Not far now.” And Kurzweil is standing by his prediction that AI is coming. I’m talking about strong AI. Not just AI that can help you find a better ad to sell at a particular moment, but the kind of AI that would be as smart as, say, a Star Trek computer, able to help you with arbitrary problems. Kurzweil still thinks that’s happening in 2029. Andrew Ng, of Stanford, takes a similarly optimistic view. “If a typical person,” he wrote in Harvard Business Review in December, “can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.” Using the cognitive science skills vested in me by this very institution, let’s analyze Ng’s claim. Can we get AI to do what people do in one second? Here are some experiments.

Can you describe Image A in a second?

You probably wouldn’t have trouble saying this is a group of young people playing Frisbee, right? Here’s another one, Image B, that’s not too hard.

It’s a person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road. Most of you could do that cognitive task in a second. Here’s one

that’s a bit more difficult, Image C. Most of you could figure it out eventually. It’s a no parking sign with stickers all over it. But here’s what Google’s captioning system came up with, which was shown on the front page of the New York Times. And it’s right out of the Oliver Sacks Hall of Fame: a refrigerator filled with food and drinks. It’s an example of what I call a Long Tail Problem. When you’ve seen a lot of pictures of kids playing Frisbee, you do pretty well in these systems.

But when there aren’t a lot of parking signs with stickers in your database, the systems don’t really work. Here’s another one, Image D. If you’re AlexNet, which everybody in the field has been talking about for the last few years, then you say it’s a school bus. (Everyone’s so excited that neural networks have been solving this thing called ImageNet, but if you take them slightly out of their game, they just fall apart completely.) Here’s another one, Image E. You think this is a digital clock, right?

Of course you don’t. But you would if

Seen at NeilFest

you were a contemporary AI system called Deep Learning, which is good at categorization but much more limited than most people recognize. You can train it to distinguish Tiger Woods from a golf ball, and probably also from Angelina Jolie. And that’s great.

It’s an example of using big data to get statistical approximations. And there’s something called a convolutional network, which was developed by my NYU colleague Yann LeCun, which has enormous practical application in both speech and object recognition. But just because it does a little piece of cognition doesn’t mean it does all of cognition.

Here’s another example, Image F, that I think would be quite challenging for the current systems.

First of all, recognizing there’s a dog here would be difficult because you don’t usually see ears in that orientation. And even if you rotated the image, it’s not that typical a dog.

I’d guess AlexNet would have some trouble with it. In any case, even if it could identify the dog and the barbell, it’s not going to be able to tell me what you could tell me — which is, it’s really unusual to see a dog doing a bench press. You might wonder, “Has it been taking classes?” You make a lot of inferences about what’s going on, not just identify the parts. So your perceptual system is pretty far beyond where current AI is.

•••

People talk a lot about the exponentials: that transistors have gotten smaller and cheaper, that machines have gotten faster. But if you look at AGI, artificial general intelligence, and if we plot the data for it, the bad news is there is no data for it because nobody’s agreed on the measure for what it would be. So I’ve made up some data to at least illustrate what you might imagine is the pace of the field.

This is Eliza, Image G, next page, which I learned about before coming to

IMAGE A

IMAGE B

IMAGE C

IMAGE D

IMAGE E

IMAGE F

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IMAGE G

Hampshire. It was a computer psychoanalyst that you could basically text message with. People would tell it their problems, and some of them would be fooled by it. But most wouldn’t be fooled for very long. And now we have Siri, which is a little bit better. Talk to Siri about movie ratings and sports scores, and it usually does pretty well. But when you move outside the predefined domains that they’ve had dozens of linguists working on for several years, it doesn’t work that well anymore. Siri hasn’t, I would argue, been real progress in artificial general intelligence.

We actually have some scalable AI now — Google search is scalable AI, using techniques to figure out what you might be looking for, and ad recommendation is scalable AI that you’re subject to when you do a Google search or go to Amazon. But at the same time, the applications are still limited.

They have speech recognition that works particularly in quiet rooms with native speakers, and they’re making some progress in noisy rooms.

And image recognition works with a limited set of objects, but not when it’s open-ended. (You can get systems to recognize that those stripes I showed you earlier are associated with a school bus, but they’re not intelligent enough to say no, that’s not really a school bus, just a texture that one would associate with a school bus.) But we still don’t have open-ended conversational interfaces, which we imagined in the 1950s would be here by now. When I was

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growing up in the 70s, I just assumed we would have solved that one by now.

People have been talking about automated scientific discoveries for years, but I don’t think there’s been real progress on that except in narrow slices of the problem, like identifying if one gene is similar to another gene.

Automated medical diagnosis is still struggling. There’s been a lot of progress in radiology, for example, where it’s based on an image, but AI is still pretty weak once you have to combine ideas, text, different symptoms, and so forth.

You could imagine, in fact Facebook has imagined, automated scene comprehension for blind people. But if you try out any of these apps, they’re limited. They can recognize a wineglass, but can’t recognize a wineglass in a dark restaurant with forks around it.

We all know Rosey the Robot. Okay, everyone my age who knows The Jetsons knows Rosey, a kind of arbitrary domestic robot. (Now that I have two kids, I would pay a lot of money for such a thing. Babysitters in New York — kind of dicey to find them on short notice — but Rosey would always be available. That would be awesome . . . ) We still don’t have domestic robots we could remotely trust. We don’t have driverless cars we can trust.

Lately, AlphaGo is probably the most impressive demonstration of AI. It’s the AI program that plays the board game Go, and extremely well, but it works because the rules never change, you can gather an infinite amount

IMAGE H

of data, and you just play it over and over again. It’s not open-ended. You don’t have to worry about the world changing. But when you move things into the real world, say driving a vehicle where there’s always a new situation, these techniques just don’t work as well. If all we want AI to do is target advertisements, then problem solved.

But if we don’t advance AI, then we may never build machines that can read open-ended text. Or cure cancer.

Because cancer involves so many different proteins, probably no human being can understand all that’s going on. We’ll want to couple the power of computation with the resourcefulness of human scientists, and we don’t know how to do that yet. We might never be able to understand the brain for the same reason, if we can’t build better AI. I opened this talk with a prediction from Andrew Ng: “If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.” So, here’s my version of it, which I think is more honest and definitely less pithy: If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought and we can gather an enormous amount of directly relevant data, we have a fighting chance, so long as the test data aren’t too terribly different from the training data and the domain doesn’t change too much over time. Unfortunately, for real-world problems, that’s rarely the case.

My biggest fear about AI right now

Seen at NeilFest

is that it’s actually getting stuck. This is what we call a local minimum. The idea is that you’re trying to get to the bottom of the hill, and you keep going down, taking small steps. If you have a smooth surface, that works. But if you have a complicated surface, you might get stuck in one valley when you really want to get below it. I have the sense that the AI field might be doing just that. On some tasks, I think we actually are getting to the bottom, like object recognition and speech recognition. We keep taking little steps toward doing better and better on these benchmarks, like recognizing a set of a thousand objects. We also might be getting close to theoretical best performance in speech recognition and object recognition, maybe language translation. But in other areas, I’m not sure that this technique is getting us to the right place. Like language understanding: it’s not clear to me that we’re making any real progress at all.

The risk is we could spend a lot of time on the task of AI and eventually only hit a wall. That depends again on what we’re trying to do. If AI recommendations for advertisements are 99.975 percent correct, for example — that is, they’re wrong one time out of 40 — it’s not a big deal. (To put it another way: If AI says, well, because you liked this Gary Marcus book you’ll like this other one, and you hate it, it’s just too bad.) But if AI does that for a pedestrian detector and one time out of 40 is wrong, that’s a whole other issue.

Same with domestic robots interacting with live humans. If you have an eldercare robot that puts your father in the bed 39 times but on the 40th time it misses, this is obviously not . . . optimal.

Why aren’t we there yet? I think one of the problems is that engineering with machine learning, which has become the dominant paradigm, is really hard. It’s difficult to debug it.

The paradigm is that you have a lot of training examples. You see inputs; you have outputs. But you don’t know

if when you get to the next set of data it’s going to be like the data you’ve seen before. There are wonderful talks by Peter Norvig in which he describes this in some detail. There’s also a paper

by D. Sculley and others, “Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt.” The idea is, it works on your problem and when your problem changes even a bit, you don’t know if it’s going to continue to work.

You incur “technical debt.” You could easily be out of luck later.

The second issue, I think, is that statistics is not the same thing as knowledge. All apparent AI progress has been driven by accumulating large amounts of statistical data. We have these big correlational models, but we don’t necessarily understand what’s underlying them. They don’t, for example, develop common sense.

Image H is the cover from an article I wrote recently with Ernie Davis on common sense: the robot sawing away on the wrong side of the tree limb. You don’t want to learn that that’s not the proper technique by having 10,000 trials or a million trials — this is not a big data problem. You want to have a very small amount of data and a very small amount of error.

Another issue is nature versus nurture. In the AI field, people seem to want to build things that are based completely on nurture and not on nature. In my talks I often show a video of a baby ibex climbing down a mountain. It can’t be that the baby ibex has had a million trials of climbing down. You can’t say that trial-bytrial learning is the right mechanism for explaining how well the ibex is doing there. You have to say that over evolutionary time, we’ve shaped some biology to allow the creature to do this.

In the spirit of comparison, this would be the state of the art for robots. To accomplish this I would look more to interdisciplinary collaboration (the way I learned at Hampshire) and to human children. For example, I have two kids,

Chloe, who is two years and ten months old, and Alexander, who is four. They do a lot of things that are popular machine learning, but they do them a lot better through active learning and novelty seeking. They have fantastic common-sense reasoning and natural language. I think we should be trying to understand how kids do that. I’ll give you just one more example.

A few weeks ago Chloe gave me a piece of artwork she made, and I said, “Let’s put it in Mama’s armoire.” Here’s what Chloe said, two years ten months old: “That way Mama doesn’t see it, but when she opens it she can see it.” Let’s take a look at that utterance. It’s fairly syntactically sophisticated for her age.

She’s inferring the intent behind Papa’s (that’s me) plan. She’s figuring out why I would want to do this, and then she’s able to articulate a complex idea in verbal language. She understands a potential future that she hasn’t directly observed. She doesn’t need the data, doesn’t need to see Mama encounter the artwork in the armoire. She gets the general idea.

For comparison, let’s ask Siri, “What happens when you put artwork in an armoire?” And the answer is, “Okay, I found this on the Web for what happens when you put artwork in an armoire.”

The first hit from Bing is what happens if you break an artwork, which is really not what I was talking to Chloe about.

I’ll end with a rhetorical question: Isn’t it time we learn more from human beings? This is, of course, exactly the kind of question I learned to ask here at Hampshire, with Neil Stillings as my Div II and Div III adviser.

GARY MARCUS 86F, scientist and entrepreneur, was a cofounder and the CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning start-up recently acquired by Uber. Trained by Neil Stillings and MIT’s Steven Pinker, he’s an awardwinning professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. He’s also the best-selling author of a number of books (Guitar Zero, Kluge, The Future of the Brain). He makes frequent appearances on radio and television.

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NEIL * FEST

How the Brain Learns Skills

BY ALYNDA WOOD 09F

When I applied to Hampshire, I didn’t intend to study anything about the brain.

I was going to study history. But in the space between deciding to come to the College and actually setting foot on campus, I discovered that the brain exists.

I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of. So I got here and promptly dropped all the classes the advising office had thoughtfully picked out for me. I went through the course catalog and saw “Minds, Brains, and Machines.” I Googled the professor, a guy named Neil Stillings, saw that he was the dean of cognitive science, and thought, “I should talk to him.” I didn’t know anything about neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology. I didn’t have a strong science background. So I sat down in Neil’s office and asked, “Can I do this?” He looked at me like I was really weird (to his credit, I was kind of weird), and he said, “Yes.” It’s been full speed ahead since then.

In our lab at Emory Neuroscience, in Atlanta, we’re interested in how the brain learns complex skills, how it controls your actions in a very precise or very fast way. Writing, playing the piano, shooting a basketball, learning to speak . . . your brain is controlling your muscles in a very precise way.

And these are all learned behaviors, not things you’re born knowing how to do. Broadly speaking, skill learning works like this: You send a neural

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command to the muscles, you take some sort of action, and then you get sensory feedback on how that action went. So, shooting a basketball. You shoot, and you see whether or not the ball goes into the hoop. With singing or talking, you hear your vocal output, your brain somehow evaluates it, and learning occurs. The next time you try to take that same action, you do it a little differently to get it to be more precise.

So here’s a really brief Neurobiology 101 interlude to remind you how neurons talk to each other. You have a neuron, and it has an electrical impulse that causes a chemical to get released from the axons. This is called a neurotransmitter. That neurotransmitter will bind to receptors on the receiving neuron, which will cause another electrical impulse and neurotransmitter release on the end of that neuron. And so on. This is also how neurons talk to muscles, for example. I’m bringing this up because there’s one neurotransmitter in particular that I’m really interested

in, and that’s dopamine.

We’ve seen evidence that dopamine is important for skill learning. We’ve learned from studies of Parkinson’s disease, and also from rodent studies, that when you manipulate dopamine levels, you get changes in skill-learning abilities. We’ve also seen some evidence in the neurophysiology of primates.

But this has been really, really hard to get at. That’s because dopamine gets released over the entire brain and the circuits that it acts on are all intertwined, despite the fact that they might be doing very different things.

We found a solution to that problem: the songbird, the Bengalese finch, to be precise.

We like songbirds as a model system because of their ability to learn. There are strong parallels between the way they learn their song and the way humans learn speech. Both are learned from an adult during a critical period.

Although you can learn in adulthood, it’s a little bit harder. The same way that it’s much harder to learn a second language in adulthood, it’s harder for

Seen at NeilFest

SONGBIRD BRAIN

songbirds to learn to change their song in that stage of life. Song is also highly quantifiable, which makes it a really nice behavioral study. And believe it or not, birds and humans have similar brain structure and neurochemistry gene expression.

What makes birds a great model organism is they possess a unique neuroanatomical organization, which makes them highly tractable for study.

Above are the songbird brain and the human brain.

The colors are just to show you homology, the relationship between the two structures. Songbirds have a cortex-like area and basal ganglia that are very, very similar to human basal ganglia. But they have what’s almost unique within the neural circuit: subregions. These subregions are involved only in either the learning or the production of song. For example, in human beings, we’re pretty sure that the basal ganglion (the pink area) is important for learning to speak — but it’s difficult to pinpoint the speech circuit. But for the songbirds, we have a discrete anatomical place where we can say, “That’s the part that does song learning.” We call that Area X. (Total digression here: The

HUMAN BRAIN

neuroanatomist who named it put in “X” as a placeholder variable and forgot to change it before he published his paper. That’s, like, my favorite story.)

So I can now bring this back to the role of dopamine, which, as I said before, has been linked to learning — but is so difficult to tease out because it affects so many actions, including movement. What we did is, we took this Area X and we used a chemical called 6-OHDA, or 6-hydroxydopamine, which lowers dopamine levels in this one area. We managed to reduce them by about 50 percent without hurting any other non-dopamine-related neurons there. So, we had two groups of songbirds: our 6-OHDA group that had the dopamine reduction and also what we called a sham group, a control group that was given simply a saline injection. I won’t go into all the details here, except to say we were getting adult birds to change the pitch of the notes they sang. Our work was published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, if you want to read the whole story.

For the sham group, there was really no change in their learning ability. But in the group that had the dopamine reduction, there was a big

decrease in their ability to learn to change the pitch of their song. That tells us that dopamine is playing a critical role in songbirds’ ability to learn. Our research represented the first time that anyone’s been able to identify a dopamine circuit that is just for learning.

•••

So, a thank-you to everyone in my lab, to my funding sources, and, of course, to Neil Stillings for giving me permission to study the brain as an undergrad and setting me on this crazy path. And a huge thanks to everyone in the schools of Cognitive Science and Natural Science and the program in Culture, Brain, and Development.

Those were my homes at Hampshire.

ALYNDA WOOD 09F received an Intramural

Research Post-Baccalaureate Training Award from the National Institutes of Health to study neural plasticity in the olfactory system. She is now in Emory University’s neuroscience doctoral program, studying the neurobiology of skill learning. She has coauthored articles in Learning & Memory and the Journal of Neuroscience and earned both a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and an ARCS Scholar Award.

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IN STEREOGRAPH: WINDOWS ON THE WORLD — A MIRROR OF PRECONCEPTION The California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside ARTSblock, is presenting a special exhibition (running through July 15) of stereographic photographs chosen

by Michael Lesy, professor of literary journalism, from his latest book, Looking Backward. The images show a world opening to the 20th century as viewed through an immensely popular piece of technology, the stereoscope, which shaped perceptions about race, class, and gender for many millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren.

The “3D” images were not just windows on the world, “but mirrors reflecting acknowledged and unacknowledged prejudices and preconceptions of the company that published them and its mostly middle-class viewers,” says Lesy, who eventually curated 250 images from among the museum’s 300,000.

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Hampshire News

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HAMPSHIRE AWARDED MAJOR NSF GRANT FOR SPECTROMETER FOR STUDENT, FACULTY RESEARCH

Hampshire Named a Top Producer of Fulbright Scholars

For two decades, Hampshire students

Education have named Hampshire a top producer of Fulbright Scholars for 2016–17. The College is one of eleven bachelor’s institutions to receive the designation this year and qualified after two employees received Fulbright Scholar grants.

Byron McCrae, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, was selected to attend the Fulbright International Education Administrators Program in Germany and Katie Irwin, director of global education, took part in the same program in India. The administrators attended seminars in the host countries, learned about international education systems, and exchanged learning with educators from across the US and overseas. The program is open to Hampshire College alums and current students who fulfill the eligibility requirements: An applicant must be an American citizen, have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent by the start of the grant, have no more than five years’ professional experience, and not have earned a doctorate. The Fulbright Program is advised by Rachel Rubinstein, dean for academic support, and Carin Rank, director of the Career Options Resource Center.

studying science have had rare access to a mass spectrometer for analyzing chemical properties of solid objects. Now this year the National Science Foundation has awarded the College a major research grant to acquire the latest iteration of the instrument, great news for students and faculty who want to be trained in its use.

Hampshire’s inductively coupled plasma

mass spectrometer, matched with a laser ablation system, generates minute particles from a solid object for analysis in chemical research projects, with applications across nanoscience, anthropology, environmental science, forensics, and more. It’s rare for undergrads to have access to an instrument like this. But even first-years at Hampshire

THE STATE Department and the Chronicle of Higher

use it. In Natural Science, 20 percent of students who complete their Div III are accepted to present at conferences.

STUDENT PRESENTS ORIGINAL DIV III RESEARCH AT AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM For her Div III, Hannah Huggins used the College’s mass spectrometer to investigate Mayan teeth and to assess the degree to which the Spanish, who invaded in the 16th century, had affected Mayan health. “Teeth grow like tree rings and are highly inorganic, so trace elements from the environment are captured in teeth in an incremental way. With this instrument I was able to access each point along the tooth,” she says, “and reconstruct exposures Mayan children had at different points in their lives. In doing so, we can assess whether their health changed when the Spanish invaded their territory.”

Professor of Biological Anthropology Alan Goodman served on Huggins’s faculty committee and says her findings reinforce a theory that this particular group of Maya resisted colonization because, although the Spanish imported lead goods to the region, Huggins didn’t find lead in the children’s teeth. Huggins presented her findings at an American Chemical Society symposium.

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David Shulkin Appointed US Secretary of Veterans Affairs DAVID SHULKIN 77F, one of the

most accomplished physicians and medical executives in the nation, was unanimously confirmed (across party lines) by the Senate in February and is now serving as US Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

As the Washington Post reported, Shulkin manages the second-largest agency in the federal government: “350,000 employees, an $82 billion budget, and almost 2,000 clinics and medical centers overwhelmed with demands for care.”

Shulkin was originally appointed to the Department of Veterans Affairs

by President Barack Obama, in 2015.

As the Under Secretary for Health and Chief Executive of the Veterans Health Administration, he oversaw an agency that cares for nine million military veterans and managed the nation’s largest health care system and the largest provider of graduate medical education.

Professor Emeritus Ray Coppinger, one of Shulkin’s faculty advisers,

remembers that Shulkin had wanted to become a doctor, so together they designed a personalized premed program. Shulkin earned his B.A. from Hampshire in 1982 and a medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania. He’s among the high proportion of Hampshire alums who graduate from the College and progress to earn the most advanced degree in their field. Federal data in 2017 show Hampshire in the top 1.4 percent of US colleges whose alums earn a terminal degree.

Hampshire News

HampHack Students Tackle 21st-Century Problems in 24 Hours A robot that monitors Antarctic ice rifts, a brain-controlled video game, an automatic stock-trading algorithm.

These were among the projects pushing boundaries in technology, art, design, and fabrication at the College’s HampHack Two, held on campus April 14 and 15. Whereas hackathons typically focus on technology alone, HampHack, for its second year running, has embraced Hampshire’s interdisciplinary ethic to bring together student teams from a host of different backgrounds. The organizers received over 500 applications for this year’s competition, and hackers came from schools throughout the Northeast to take part in an event cofounder Nirman Dave 15F says “gives their unique idea an escape velocity into reality.”

Participants used technology that ranged from Microsoft’s HoloLens to Facebook’s virtual reality device Oculus to create potentially viable products, tackling problems in environmental sustainability, brain sciences, artificial intelligence, health sciences, life hacks, and other themes that were shaped in

part by sponsoring companies such as Major League Hacking, Viacom, MassMutual Financial Services, and the Roddenberry Foundation. Those organizations provided over $27,000 in awards for projects such as: Come Back Bees, Environmental Sustainability Award winner that was developed by students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and UMass Lowell to educate the public on ways to help the bee population.

The Antarctic Rover, the Fantasy Hack Award winner, an autonomous bot developed to help scientists better understand and monitor rifts in

Antarctic glaciers and ice landmasses.

Digiface, an artificial-intelligencebased security system that won the Artificial Intelligence and Life Hacks awards.

Renew, the Nutrition and Health Award winner designed by Hampshire and Tufts students. It’s a heart-rate and movement monitoring bracelet.

“We went from a pipe dream to the beginnings of a functioning product in twenty-four hours,” Grace Montgomery said. “One of us studies creative writing and theater, the other comp sci and economics. It was interesting to see what we accomplished together.”

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Hampshire News

INNOVATION STRATEGIES CLASS HOSTS ALUM ENTREPRENEURS LIZ D’ALOIA AND DICK CANTWELL Liz D’Aloia had a message for students about entrepreneurship: “Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.” Dick Cantwell did, too: “To think that you don’t need a brand for your product is to think a person doesn’t need a personality.”

D’Aloia 83F and Cantwell 74F returned

to Hampshire on separate days last spring to speak to a class led by Bret Golann 71F, who coordinates the Entrepreneurship Program. Cantwell is a lead player in the

Doing the Math (Sturmian Sequences) in Santo Domingo RECIPIENT OF a $164,000 grant, Assistant

Professor of Mathematics Geremías Polanco Encarnación is sharing his approach to teaching mathematics with colleagues and students in his home country, the Dominican Republic.

He mentors professors and master’s students at Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo on an algorithm related to Sturmian sequences, which he introduced in his dissertation at the University of Illinois in 2012.

“Sturmian sequences can be applied in biology, gaming and numbers theory, computer networks and graphics, as

well as other areas,” he says. “They’re versatile.” The research he and his team at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo are conducting may not have practical applications at first, but new uses are always being developed. Encarnación cites the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Dan Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals using a model related to Sturmian sequences he created in the 1950s. “He found a use for it thirty years later,” he says. Encarnación has worked with several of his Hampshire students researching the algorithm.

craft-beer movement, an author, and the cofounder of Elysian Brewing Company.

D’Aloia is a lawyer and the founder of HR Virtuoso, which creates mobile recruiting tools.

D’Aloia stressed the importance of

building a network, not only for finding partners and customers, but for getting

“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing,” D’Aloia told the class. Cantwell spoke to the necessity of brand. advice and perspective on overcoming challenges. Cantwell talked about the importance of marketing products in increasingly crowded industries. “When I graduated from Hampshire, there were

Fund to Support Research on Women Named for Helen Astin

about forty breweries in the US. There are forty-eight hundred now,” he said.

“It’s important, in this age of necessity of

IN HONOR of his late wife, Helen Astin, Hampshire parent Alexander “Sandy”

differentiation, to express the personality

Astin has established The Helen S. Astin Fund for Research on Women at the College. The Astins are parents of alum John A. Astin 82F. The $100,000 fund is dedicated to research that will contribute to women’s leadership development and enhance understanding of societal structures that inhibit women from achieving their potential. Funding will support primary-research projects, speakers, initiatives, and related academic projects by faculty and students.

Helen Astin — known by her friends and colleagues as Lena — cofounded and directed UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, helped start its Women’s Studies program, and served as associate provost of its College of Letters and Science. Lena was one of Hampshire’s earliest trustees, from 1973 to 1980. She was the first elected president of the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Women. “Lena dedicated her life to research and activism on behalf of women and their education,” said Sandy Astin. “This fund will enable Hampshire faculty and students to continue this important work.”

of a company — everything you do is an

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expression of your sensibilities.” They spoke to Golann’s “Innovation Strategies for Entrepreneurial Impact” class.

The Entrepreneurship Program invites

guests to talk with students throughout the year. D’Aloia and Cantwell, Golann said, exemplify primary ways that entrepreneurs find opportunity. For Liz, it was recognizing challenges of recruiting excellent employees in the service-based businesses sector and developing solutions.

For Dick, it was creating better products to attract customers in a competitive market.

WAYFINDING Wall sculptures by Bill Brayton, professor of art, are on view in the exhibit Wayfinding, in the new R.W. Kern Center gallery. Inspired by Polynesian nautical stick charts, the works are presented in dialogue with etchings by Assistant Professor of Sustainable Design Naomi Darling, whose pieces feature layered historical maps and geological surveys of the Connecticut River Valley and Long Island Sound. Wayfinding will be on display in the center’s first-floor gallery through summer.

‘For Freedoms’ Earns ICP Infinity Award For his political-art campaign, launched during the 2016 presidential election, Visiting Professor Eric Gottesman was honored by the International Center of Photography with its Infinity Award, the leading distinction for achievement in photography and the visual arts.

GOTTESMAN and project partner Hank Willis Thomas were recognized in the spring for cofounding For Freedoms, the first artist-led super PAC (political action committee) to use art to promote political engagement. The organization invited artists to partner with them to create advertisements, exhibits, and other works to spark discussion about democratic values and freedoms.

“We believe it’s time for artists to be more involved in the political process,” they wrote, describing their super PAC on their website. Among the past recipients of Infinity Awards are James Nachtwey, Sebastião Salgado, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Daidō Moriyama, Mario Testino, and

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Ai Weiwei. The International Center of Photography is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture.

For Freedoms has increasingly been recognized following the presidential election. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, hosted the campaign as an artist residency at its Queens site, MoMA PS1, which ran during the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

The residency began with the display of a billboard created by For Freedoms and posted in Mississippi, and evolved organically throughout the course of the project, which ran until April 19.

The For Freedoms residency space at MoMA PS1 also hosted a town hall on the state of federal arts funding, in

partnership with Creative Capital, a philanthropic organization supporting projects through a commitment to freedom of expression.

Gottesman is a visiting assistant professor in film, photography, and video and taught two classes last year: Photography as Translation and The Photobook and Beyond. He writes, makes videos, photographs, teaches, and uses art as a vehicle to engage people in conversation about social structures. He is also a visiting professor at Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Project. Gottesman’s work is held in various collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hampshire News

Hampshire Named Top 10 School for Studying Game Design PRINCETON REVIEW and PC Gamer

rank Hampshire #6 on their list of the top 50 undergraduate schools at which to study game design for 2017. They chose the schools based on their 2016 survey of 150 institutions that offer game-design course work or degrees in the US, Canada, and some countries abroad. The 40-question survey asked schools to report on everything from their academic offerings and faculty credentials to their graduates’ starting salaries and employment experience.

Among the criteria they weighed to make their selections were a school’s academics, facilities, career services, and technology.

This is the fifth consecutive year in which Princeton Review has teamed

up with PC Gamer magazine as its reporting partner on this project.

PC Gamer published a feature about the list in its May issue, which was available on newsstands in March.

The feature has information on some of the schools’ distinctive programs, class offerings, prominent professors, and alums.

Princeton Review developed its “Top Schools to Study Game Design” project in 2009 with assistance from a national advisory board that helped design the survey instrument and the methodology. Board members included administrators and faculty members from respected game-design programs as well as professionals from some of the top gaming companies.

GLORIA LOPEZ NAMED INTERIM VICE PRESIDENT FOR STUDENT AFFAIRS AND DEAN OF STUDENTS

President Jonathan Lash has appointed Gloria Lopez as interim vice president for student affairs and dean of students, a two-year term. Among her priorities will be to advance work in progress to strengthen ties between the academic program and student life and to create a coordinated and integrated first-year experience. The search for a permanent

Challenging, Independent, Committed to Community

vice president will be deferred until a new president is appointed, in 2018.

“Gloria brings a deep commitment

to the values of diversity, engagement, and inquiry,” Lash said, “and will provide vision, leadership, and strategic direction to the Division of Student Life.” She will begin work in June.

Lopez succeeds Byron McCrae, who

was named vice president and dean of students at Davidson College, in North Carolina. “I am grateful to Byron for his leadership,” Lash wrote in a letter to the campus community. “During his four years at Hampshire, Byron has been a steady advocate for the needs of all IN A WIDELY consulted national survey

that measures the quality of a higher education, students’ responses reveal that a Hampshire education is more challenging, independent, connected to community service, and collaborative with faculty than an education from hundreds of comparison colleges. The National Survey of Student Engagement is given to students at more than 500 colleges nationwide each year to assess two critical features of the quality of a higher education: how much time

students.” McCrae expanded wellness

and effort students devote to their work and how a college deploys its academic resources toward activities that matter to student learning, such as research with faculty, learning outside the classroom, and senior capstone projects.

The responses from Hampshire students were compared with those from students at 150 of Hampshire’s closest peer institutions, among them Bard College, Pitzer College, The New School, and Boston University.

and recovery programming, created new Living and Learning Communities, raised money for antiracism programming and a student emergency fund, and more.

Lopez has been the vice president

and dean of students at Northampton Community College, in Pennsylvania, site director at The Posse Foundation, and provided support to youth seeking GEDs and bachelor’s degrees. She has a BA in psychology from Dartmouth College and an MSW with a certification in management from Boston University.

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Hampshire News

TEACHING BRAIN IMAGING: COG SCIENCE DEAN ON TEAM CREATING NATIONAL MODEL Undergraduates around the country will soon benefit from a curriculum on brainimaging neuroscience technology being developed at Hampshire, supported by a $600,000 National Science Foundation grant awarded to a team that includes Jane Couperus, dean of the School of Cognitive Science and associate professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

The grant was awarded through the

The Neil Stilling Scholarship for Cognitive Science Students HAMPSHIRE College has created a student scholarship fund to honor Professor of Psychology Neil Stillings, who is planning to retire next June (see “NeilFest,” page 48). Stillings helped define the field of cognitive science, coauthored the definitive undergraduate textbook on the subject, and was one of Hampshire’s founding faculty. Judy Bornstein 82F established the Neil Stillings Scholarship Fund with a gift of $50,000 in honor of her Division III chair. The gift was matched by Board of Trustees Chair Gaye Hill.

“Neil helped me to become a student scholar,” says Bornstein. “He taught me how to conduct research in a rigorous way and to bring meaning to analysis. This scholarship is a means of saying thank-you, and of continuing his generosity in some way.” For details: Clay Ballantine at cballantine@hampshire.edu.

NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program.

Couperus is collaborating with two

colleagues, lead researcher Cindy Bukach, from the University of Richmond, and

First Ikeda Soka Scholarship for Peace Building Awarded

co-primary investigator Cathy Reed, from Claremont McKenna College. They are creating the curriculum that will make electroencephalography/event-related potentials (EEG/ERP) brain-imaging technology accessible to undergraduates, and will also hire students as research associates to help develop the training.

“We sought the grant to explore the

best ways to teach EEG/ERP technology at small institutions, and train students in places that don’t have the resources to purchase this equipment,” Couperus says. “ERP is really effective for teaching undergraduates brain imaging, and for getting students interested in STEM. It can give them a leg up for graduate research, internships, and jobs.” Hampshire is one of the few colleges where students can lead their own research in brain activity.

EDITOR David Gibson COEDITOR Melissa Mills-Dick 01F ART DIRECTOR Mary Zyskowski CLASS NOTES MANAGER Matt Krefting 99F CONTRIBUTORS John Courtmanche, Joshua Murray, Michael Medeiros, Andrew Hart, Jim Collins COPY EDITOR Doris Troy CHANGE OF ADDRESS alumni@hampshire.edu

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THIRD-YEAR student Natalie Murphy Strohm has been awarded the first Ikeda Soka Scholarship, created with gifts totaling $500,000 to aid students whose academic work relates to peace building, developing greater humanity in self and society, and the science of mind–body health.

The endowment was created by Elisabeth Carter 82F, whose gift was matched by a trustee whom Carter named the scholarship in honor of: Daisaku Ikeda, an acclaimed Buddhist peace-builder, writer, and educator.

The Japanese term soka means “value creation” and refers to the capacity to contribute to the well-being of others.

Strohm, a Div II, has concentrated on children and families, mind–body

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.

health, and how compassion and empathy can be teachable practices that improve physical and mental health and can foster positive social change. She works in developmental neuroscience, psychology, childhood learning, and anthropology and applies these to community-based programs and education. Strohm has taught in a preschool classroom, worked with Holyoke Early Literacy Initiative, collaborated with Water Protectors in North Dakota, and cocreated Youth Empowerment through Safer Sexuality, providing resources and workshops for teens in Thailand and Massachusetts.

“I believe in Hampshire students’ ability to create change,” said Carter.

PHOTOS Andrew Hart, John Courtmanche, Amanda Schwengel, Hampshire College Archives, Mequitta Ahuja, Madrid Museo Nacionale del Prado, Javier Brosch Shutterstock, Die Zeit Hamburg, Peter Crowther Associates, Zina Deretsky National Science Foundation, Hamp Hack Film Team, UCR/California Museum of Photography Archive, VA.gov, and ForFreedoms.org COVER “Inspirations”: Dishware by the Dining Commons, Photography by Andrew Hart

Books

by Hampshire Alums and Faculty

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A LIST OF FURTHER POSSIBILITIES by Chen Chen 07F Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, LTD, 2017. This collection — winner of the 15th-annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize — investigates inherited forms of love and family from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives.

THE YEARNING LIFE by Regina Walton 96F Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2016.

Winner of the 2016 Phyllis Tickle Prize in Poetry, Walton explores meditation and spirituality in this collection of poems examining the Christian faith. The poems invite readers to analyze life and search for stronger truths.

RAY & JOAN by Lisa Napoli 80F New York: Dutton, 2016. The true tale of the McDonald’s fast-food billionaire Ray Kroc and his wife Joan — ”the man who made the McDonald’s fortune, and the woman who gave it all away.” A quintessentially American story of big money, big love, and big giving.

THE CAPYBARA CONSPIRACY

by Erica S. Perl 86F New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Olive Henry wants recognition for her school’s nonathletic clubs, so she hatches a plan: kidnap Cappy the capybara, the school mascot, and return it heroically.

But things, of course, will not go as smoothly as she anticipates.

QUEER CINEMA IN THE WORLD by Karl Schoonover 86F and Rosalind Galt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Schoonover and Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making.

NAVIGATING THE WHITEWATER RAPIDS OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS

by Bret Golann 71F Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016. Faculty associate Golann describes how to overcome two challenges that successful entrepreneurs can face: developing a company given resource constraints and doing this without losing creativity and spirit.

THE DOULAS: RADICAL CARE FOR PREGNANT PEOPLE by Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell 03F New York: The Feminist Press, 2016. This philosophical manifesto leads the charge to transform reproductive-justice rhetoric into a revolutionary practice through stories of care and an activist how-to guide.

WHAT FREUD REALLY MEANT: A CHRONOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF HIS THEORY OF THE MIND

by Susan Sugarman 70F. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Sugarman reconstructs eleven of Freud’s theoretical writings, examining his reasoning leading to each and revealing what may have been their true intent.

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Books

GLOP: NONTOXIC, EXPENSIVE IDEAS THAT WILL MAKE YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS AND FEEL PRETENTIOUS by Gabrielle Moss 00F. New York: Dey St., 2016. This satirical “superior wellness adventure” provides tips on how to attain the life of a truly pretentious person and “strongly, critically suggests how you should be living your best life.“

TUESDAY’S PROMISE: ONE VETERAN, ONE DOG, AND THEIR BOLD QUEST TO CHANGE LIVES by Luis Carlos Montalván and Ellis Henican 76F. New York: Hachette Books, 2017. Veteran Luis Carlos Montalván takes to the road with his beloved golden retriever service dog, Tuesday, advocating for America’s wounded warriors and for each other.

ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY

by Q.M. Zhang (Professor Kimberly Chang). Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2017. Professor of Cultural Psychology Kimberly Chang pieces together the mystery of her father’s exodus from China to the United States during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution.

MY MRS. BROWN by William Norwich 73F. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

Sometimes a dress isn’t just a dress. Emilia Brown leaves behind her restrained, smalltown life with three friends in a quest for a dress that is not a mere garment, but a vehicle for her own self-expression.

What follows is a revelatory quest for all involved.

If you would like your recently released book to be considered for the Books section of the next issue of Non Satis Scire, please send a copy to: Alumni and Family Relations NSS Books Hampshire College 893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002

HOW TO KILL A CITY

by Peter Moskowitz 06F. New York: Nation Books, 2017. In his debut book, journalist Moskowitz explains gentrification in cities, from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised.

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SOUTH–SOUTH TRADE AND FINANCE IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY by Omar Dahi, and Firat Demir. New York: Anthem Press, 2016.

Economics Professor Dahi coauthored this book, which is based on a decade of joint research and collaboration on economic relations in the countries of the global south.

THIN MINT MEMORIES by Shelley Johnson Carey 72F. Charleston, SC: Clear Message Press, 2016. Thin Mint Memories celebrates the Girl Scout cookie program by examining the first century of the cookie’s history, and exploring how each box of cookies helps girls develop important life skills.

Note: Non Satis Scire publishes every six months. Because of space limitations, books will not be included if they are not recent publications. All books can be posted online at frogbook.hampshire.edu.

Analog Devices

The Harold F. Johnson Library has acquired posters from back in the day, this spoof among them. The collection was a gift from Hannah Doherty, daughter of Phillip 73F and Kathryn (Perna) Doherty 77F.

Highest Aims

THE BELL LAP “I was humbled when I was offered the opportunity to join this special community. I still am. As I remarked at my inaugural, leadership is about service, and the meaning of life is about making a difference for good. I believe that. As an institution, Hampshire aspires to the same. Those have to be the highest aims for a school that cherishes the intersection of learning and life, and that sees art, culture, science, and justice not as alternatives but as interlinked parts of humanity.”

President Jonathan Lash, who announced in February that he’ll retire after the 2018 academic year.

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

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Find ways to reconnect with your alumni network at

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