Hofstra Horizons - Spring 2016

H O F S T R A

HORIZONS SPRING 2016

Restoring Anadromous Brook Trout and Alewives to Long Island’s Streams and Coastal Waters RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP PROMOTING EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AT HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

president’s COLUMN

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t Hofstra, scholars study a world in which change is a constant, in which innovation and invention are necessities.

This effort is led by our faculty, who devote themselves to teaching and mentoring our future leaders while pursuing their own scholarly research. In this issue of Hofstra Horizons, we celebrate faculty who help us understand ourselves and our society in an era defined by profound social change and technological growth.

Dr. Joseph Scardapane describes the unique benefits of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). This comprehensive treatment program is part of a training model for master’s and doctoral students at Hofstra’s Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center.

Drs. E. Christa Farmer, Elisabeth Ploran and Mary Anne Trasciatti deliver an informative summary of their research project on evacuation decision-making processes before Superstorm Sandy. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Storm Awareness Program, their project – which expanded on research started

by Dr. Trasciatti – seeks to better understand people’s motivations and what kinds of storm information urge people to make evacuation decisions.

In the third article, Dr. Jennifer Rich discusses her current research interest in cultural anxiety and what it means to be German today.

Dr. Rich is exploring generational differences among West German nationals and how the Holocaust changed contemporary Germans’ sense of themselves.

HOFSTRAhorizons Research and Scholarship at Hofstra University

table of contents

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The Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Clinic at the Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center

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Superstorm Sandy’s Legacy: Studying How Coastal Residents Decide Whether to Evacuate

Dr. Maura Mills details her findings on work-family research, offering long-term implications for the benefits of supportive work-family policies with regard to job satisfaction and home and family life.

The article by Dr. Julie Byrne previews her soon-to-be-released book, The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion. This book reflects the results of 10 years of research on independent Catholics and will be published by Columbia University Press.

Finally, Dr. Peter Daniel’s article reports on the lack of native fish in our coastal waters and, more importantly, sheds light on his research and efforts to protect and restore Long Island’s aquatic habitats.

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What, Me Worry? Anxiety as Influence

Stuart Rabinowitz, JD President

Our reputation as a university on the rise is due in no small part to the outstanding researchers and teachers who are the pulse of this institution.

We are proud to present their work in Hofstra Horizons.

Gail M. Simmons, PhD

Sincerely,

Sofia Kakoulidis, MBA

Stuart Rabinowitz, JD President

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Associate Provost for Research and Sponsored Programs

Alice Diaz-Bonhomme, BA Assistant Provost for Research and Sponsored Programs

provost’s COLUMN

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am honored to introduce our newest issue of Hofstra Horizons, which recognizes the fine scholarly work of our faculty. This issue highlights the diverse interests and expertise that our faculty scholars bring to both their teaching and their research endeavors.

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Making the Work-Family Interface Work (and Assessing When and Why It Doesn’t)

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Not All Catholics Are Roman Catholics: A Diverse Independent Movement Gains Attention in the Era of Pope Francis

The article by Dr. Joseph Scardapane details the components and treatment priorities of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) training and its application in helping clients balance acceptance and change while they engage in value-based living. DBT training is currently offered to Hofstra master’s and doctoral students, and treatment is provided to clients at the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Clinic at the Saltzman Center.

Drs. E. Christa Farmer, Elisabeth Ploran and Mary Anne Trasciatti present their research and ongoing efforts to determine the kinds of pre-storm messages that form the basis for people’s evacuation decisions. Their research seeks to understand why – despite remarkably accurate forecasts of the storm track and predicted impacts – many residents ignored evaluation warnings prior to Superstorm Sandy’s landfall.

Dr. Jennifer Rich contextualizes the manifestation of anxiety in the individual and the cultural products that define postmodern society. Drawing from a variety of seemingly disconnected works, Dr. Rich uses a forensic approach to provide a historical framework for us to understand how cultural anxiety leads to regression, disinterest and banality.

Dr. Maura Mills explores the importance of a successful work-family interface and the extent to which work-family experiences may differ by employee gender. Her research connects the workplace experience of men and women to their home lives, and indicates that positive work-family supportive policies correlate with increased employee well-being, improved employment engagement, and – from a cognitive and emotional perspective – a more positive home and family life.

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Restoring Anadromous Brook Trout and Alewives to Long Island’s Streams and Coastal Waters page 38 2 015 Hofstra University Mentor of the Year Award HOFSTRA HORIZONS is published annually by the Office for Research and Sponsored Programs, 144 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549-1440.

Each issue describes in lay language some of the many research and creative activities conducted at Hofstra.

The conclusions and opinions expressed by the investigators and writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect University policy. ©2016 by Hofstra University in the United States.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the consent of Hofstra University.

Inquiries and requests for permission to reprint material should be addressed to: Editor, Hofstra Horizons, Office for Research and Sponsored Programs, 144 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549-1440.

Telephone: 516-463-6810.

The article by Dr. Julie Byrne focuses on the expanding and increasingly diverse number of independent Catholic churches in the United States. As a scholar of U.S. Catholicism, Dr. Byrne has a particular interest in independent Catholics. By Dr. Byrne’s account, independent Catholicism offers an unusually liberal, mobile and creative version of Roman Catholicism, maintaining key Catholic traditions but incorporating modernist principles.

Dr. Peter Daniel’s article illustrates the delicate and once vibrant aquatic habitats of Long Island. Various factors – including overfishing, habitat degradation and dams – have depleted much of Long Island’s native anadromous brook trout and alewives.

Dr. Daniel’s brook trout study seeks to find solutions to the loss of native fish in Long Island’s streams and coastal waters.

Finally, in this issue we pay tribute to Dr. James E. Wiley, professor emeritus of global studies and geography, as Hofstra’s 2015 Mentor of the Year.

We are proud to recognize the work and achievements of our faculty. Congratulations to all our authors.

Sincerely,

Gail M. Simmons, PhD Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Clinic at the Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center Joseph R. Scardapane, PhD, Assistant Provost and Executive Director of the Saltzman Community Services Center, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Hofstra University

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n the late 1980s, early in my career as a psychologist, I was challenged in a unique manner by my work with certain people. I noticed that they could seem relatively well adjusted in certain situations and yet, in others, they had great difficulty functioning and even made situations worse through angry actions, self-mutilation or suicidal behavior. The typical strategies that I used in my cognitive behavioral therapy worked for a short period but then seemed to backfire, leaving both my client and me confused and desperate for answers. At the time, I was the chief psychologist at a local community mental health center, supervising doctoral interns and just launching my

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career as a clinical psychologist. I felt great pressure to figure out what to do with this subset of people who seemed to suffer so greatly and yet not respond to the traditional therapeutic interventions that I knew so well. I was beginning to doubt my abilities, as a large number of people with these kinds of problems began to apply for services in our clinic.

Around the time I was noticing this trend, I saw a flier promoting a lecture by a psychologist from the University of Washington whom I had never heard of before. Her name was Marsha Linehan, and she was working with people who were self-injurers and were often suicidal. The flier highlighted the fact

that often these clients don’t respond well to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. I knew I had to attend the lecture and drove straight into the city to listen to her speak. That day began a nearly 30-year involvement with a therapy now known as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

Eastern Spiritual Practices and Concepts Dr. Linehan spoke at length about the significant research she was doing to help people with these problems. She had added an acceptance-based component to traditional behavior therapy and incorporated Eastern spiritual practices and concepts into this

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therapy. She taught her clients mindfulness meditation and concepts such as impermanence of experience and the wisdom of their symptoms.

Impermanence means that the only constant in life is change. The nature of the world is constant movement and change in both the physical world and the world of emotions, mental images and thoughts. Thus much of getting stuck in them is related to actively holding on to them rather than letting them run their natural course. Her concept of understanding the wisdom of the symptoms has to do with recognizing that we are all products of our environments and biology. We learn how to soothe ourselves in both healthy and unhealthy ways. We could not have learned anything different up to this point. But now, with therapy, we can. Incorporating these concepts into a treatment model to use with clients was remarkable and extremely innovative at the time.

Dialectics Dr. Linehan described the overall philosophical basis of DBT as incorporating dialectics. She saw the importance of helping clients to recognize that opposites can coexist and be synthesized. One example of this is the central concept of Wise Mind, which is the synthesis of Logical Mind and Emotional Mind. Wise Mind incorporates aspects of both logic and emotion to view a given situation with both our reason and our hearts. Good decisions often come from a synthesis of these two.

She described the dialectic of balancing acceptance with change. This means that the therapist accepts the clients where they are and at the same time pushes them for change. The clients are then helped to accept their emotions when there are no reasonable alternatives and

Biosocial Model Dr. Linehan put forth a biosocial model.

This model highlights the idea that problems develop from the interface between biological factors such as emotional vulnerability and environmental factors such a trauma and invalidating environments.

This combination of biology and environment predisposes an individual to emotion dysregulation, which can be highly associated with self-injury and chronic suicidality. Clients are taught this biosocial theory to help them understand what may have led to their high levels of emotional responding and concomitant problematic responses.

Individual Therapy Individual therapy involves working one on one with the client to address the most serious target behaviors that threaten the individual’s life and relationships. A hierarchy of priorities is followed, in that the focus of the session must be on the priority that is most threatening. For these clients, the highest priority for treatment is suicidal behavior. This issue must be targeted before items that are lower on the hierarchy can be addressed. The hierarchy is as follows: 1) Self-injurious or suicidal behaviors 2) Therapy-interfering behaviors (exhibited by both client and therapist) 3) Quality of life issues 4) Skills acquisition 5) Individual goals

The Treatment: Dialectical Behavior Therapy DBT treatment is quite comprehensive and involves FOUR components: • Individual therapy • Group skills training classes • Between-session telephone coaching • Consultation team for therapists

Individual therapy sessions are aided by the use of a weekly diary card to help the clients track their target behaviors and to assess the events and thoughts and feelings that lead to their occurrence. This is known as performing a behavioral chain analysis.

Allowing the client and therapist to see

to change their behavior in response to their thoughts and feelings.

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the antecedents and consequences of life-threatening and self-injurious behavior allows them to work on understanding it with compassion and leads to the development of alternative ways of coping. The use of the diary card is an important part of the treatment and is the first order of business in all individual sessions.

Another important part of the therapy involves the labeling and analysis of the behaviors that interfere with the successful use of therapy. These behaviors could include not showing up for appointments and arriving late on the

part of the client. Since the philosophy of DBT involves the development of genuineness on the part of both client and therapist, it is important for the therapist to acknowledge when they, too, are engaging in therapy-threatening behaviors such as not paying close attention during sessions or not returning telephone calls. This is where the consultation team is so important to provide support and to help the therapist stay adherent to the principles of DBT. As a DBT program within a training clinic, the issue of therapy-interfering behaviors is so important. The students doing the therapy are well-trained, intelligent and connected to their clients. They also need to be aware of how difficult it can be to help people who are in great emotional pain and who engage in selfinjurious behaviors as a result.

The emotional toll on them as new therapists can be great and the support they receive from the consultation team and supervisor is crucial. All therapists may act in ways that are problematic for the therapeutic relationship.

When this happens, it is pointed out by either the consultation team or supervisor. Our students are encouraged to see themselves as human and vulnerable and prone to the same fears and concerns that their clients may have.

This also helps everyone involved develop compassion for the human condition. We strive to help our students accept their vulnerability as young professionals in training. The courage of our clients is matched by the courage of our students who are fully in the moment with the clients, helping them create lives worth living.

The third priority of treatment has to do with improving the quality of life in general for the clients. This includes maximizing use of their abilities so that they can maintain gainful employment or do well in school (depending on the age of the client). Learning how to engage in meaningful recreational and social activities is also stressed.

The fourth priority involves using the skills taught in the skills group classes.

This means helping the clients to find the correct skills to use in a given situation. The development of skill use involves the gradual shaping of behavior to be most effective in a given situation.

Finally, individual goals are addressed after the client has learned enough self-regulation to no longer self-harm or engage in quality of life interfering behaviors. This is often the focus of what is considered stage two of the treatment. While the target behaviors in this stage are important and serious, the client’s ability to self-regulate and not engage in suicidal behavior is relatively well-established.

Group Skills Training Classes Group skills training classes for adult clients usually consist of five to eight

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members. For adolescents, multi-family group classes are run so that parents can learn these skills along with the adolescent client. This increases the likelihood that the skills will generalize to the home environment since the parent is taught to use the skills for themselves and to apply them to their own lives. There are five or six families in each multi-family skills group.

There are five modules to the skills classes: Mindfulness skills: Learning to focus on experiencing reality as it is in the present moment without judging it or holding on to it.

Emotion regulation skills: Learning to understand the presence and function of emotions, to decrease unique and shared emotional vulnerabilities and, where possible, to reduce painful emotions.

Distress tolerance skills: Learning how to get through crises without making them worse and to accept painful emotions and events where necessary without judging, pushing away, or holding on to the experience.

Interpersonal effectiveness skills: Learning how to be effective and respectful with other people while maintaining self-respect. People learn to ask for what they need, say no when appropriate and cope with interpersonal conflict.

Middle path skills: Learning about dialectical dilemmas in life and applying the dialectic that two things that seem like opposites can both be true. Learning to look at the world in a less absolute way and accepting that the only constant in the world is change.

The five modules of skills help clients learn, relearn and overlearn behaviors that help decrease mood-dependent self-destructive behavior and intense

emotional arousal while helping to increase interpersonal and occupational/ educational competence.

Since the philosophy

Between-Session Telephone Coaching Between-session telephone coaching is an important way to help clients generalize the skills that they learn in therapy to real-world settings. Clients are encouraged to call when they need to use a skill in a given situation.

The therapist helps the client select an appropriate skill or skills to use and then encourages the implementation of it. These calls last 10-15 minutes and are focused on the situation at hand and the skill to be used.

of DBT involves the

Consultation Team for Therapists Another unique aspect of Linehan’s work was that she saw the need for therapists to have lots of support and created what is now called a DBT consultation team.

The purpose of this team is to give support and encouragement to the therapists because of the intensity of this work. As Linehan saw it, the treatment

behaviors such as not

development of genuineness on the part of both client and therapist, it is important for the therapist to acknowledge when they, too, are engaging in therapy-threatening paying close attention during sessions or not returning telephone calls.

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The family therapists on the DBT team incorporate an understanding of the DBT model and skills with their foundational knowledge of systems to help families address relational issues that threaten to undermine treatment.

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team is essential to support the therapists who are working with clients whose primary targets for treatment begin with reducing and eliminating suicide attempts and completions and stopping self-injury. Understandably, therapists often experience burnout when working with high-risk clients who are suicidal and/or engage in self-injurious behavior.

For many years I practiced “DBT informed therapy” without the support of a DBT consultation team. Although it was difficult work, the theory and the clients’ responses to this treatment motivated me to continue. As I began teaching DBT to some of the doctoral students and witnessed the same aha moments I had experienced myself, I sought out opportunities to get more specialized professional training in this area. Last year, Hofstra sponsored a number of the faculty and professional staff, Phyllis Ohr, PhD; Merry McVeyNoble, PhD; Teresa Grella-Hillebrand, LMFT; and me, along with doctoral students from the PhD Program in Clinical Psychology, to attend an intensive training in DBT at Columbia University. After the twoweek training was completed, our group returned with increased knowledge of the model and a renewed commitment to providing the most comprehensive DBT treatment we could offer to the community. Together we created a model-coherent DBT consultation team that now services over 20 adult and adolescent clients.

The current DBT team functions as an aspect of training in two of the clinics within the Saltzman Community Services Center: the Counseling and Mental Health Professions Clinic and

the Psychological Evaluation Research and Counseling Clinic. The doctoral and master’s level students in each of these clinics are afforded the unique opportunity to be trained in DBT, work with clients and their families, and be part of a DBT consultation team. We are one of very few doctoral and master’s training clinics in the country that offers a fully functioning DBT program and consultation team. The students involved in this clinic get supervision in the consultation team and then small group supervision to learn and get feedback on their ongoing cases. This is a very time-intensive endeavor and can be emotionally and intellectually challenging for all involved. That is why the experience of working as a team is so important for support, encouragement and understanding. The care we give to each other is then passed on to clients through their therapist. In the end, it is about creating a safe environment for both the client and the therapist and for both to go “where angels fear to tread.”

Family Therapy A unique aspect of our treatment package is that we have added a family therapy component to traditional DBT treatment in our clinic. Our treatment team currently has two clinical interns in the Marriage and Family Therapy program who are trained in DBT. A licensed marriage and family therapist, Teresa Grella-Hillebrand, who is also a member of the DBT team, supervises these clinical interns. The interns conduct all of the family sessions for the DBT clients who require them.

Although we are now aware that there are some researchers exploring the value of incorporating family therapy in DBT treatment, our decision to require it for some of our DBT client cases occurred in response to a number of referrals of young adolescents to the clinic. These adolescents range in age from 11 to 13,

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with histories that include prior suicide attempts and self-injurious behavior. A crucial piece of the biosocial model of DBT is the client’s environment. For the emerging adolescent, the family is often the most important environmental component.

The family component of teaching DBT skills is addressed in the multi-family skills class. However, it became apparent that the families of younger adolescents required more support than could be provided in a two-hour group setting with multiple families. Many of these families appeared to be caught in negative interactional patterns that had been reinforced over time, resulting in

relational wounds between family members. While the multi-family class teaches family members new skills to help individuals cope with difficult emotions and interpersonal interactions, family therapy addresses the underlying processes in a family that can block the use of new skills. The family therapists on the DBT team incorporate an understanding of the DBT model and skills with their foundational knowledge of systems to help families address relational issues that threaten to undermine treatment. At this time, family therapy is available to all adolescent and adult clients who are in DBT treatment on an “as needed” or “as requested” basis.

Creating a Life Worth Living The ultimate goal of dialectical behavior therapy is to help our clients and their families create a life worth living. This means accepting the pain that comes with life and all its struggles while engaging in value-based living.

These values and their meanings are determined by each client and are always placed at the forefront of the therapy. We do our best to meet our clients where they are and continue to push for change – being ever mindful that this balance of acceptance and change is a never-ending dance.

Joseph R. Scardapane has been a teaching administrator, supervising psychologist and researcher at Hofstra University since 1991. Currently assistant provost and executive director of the Joan and Arnold Saltzman Community Services Center and director of the Psychological Evaluation Research and Counseling (PERC) Clinic, Dr. Scardapane previously held the positions of school psychologist for the Board of Cooperative Educational Services for Southern Westchester and chief clinical psychologist at the Southeast Nassau Guidance Center in Seaford, New York. He has made presentations both nationally and internationally on topics ranging from the intellectual assessment of bilingual children to the use of acceptance-based techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy.

As director of a psychology training clinic, he serves two doctoral programs by teaching and supervising students in psychological assessment and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Under Dr. Scardapane’s direction, the PERC Clinic continues to provide cutting-edge services to the community while affording educational and research opportunities to doctoral students at Hofstra University. He has helped establish specialty clinics to train students in a comprehensive manner in the psychology faculty members’ areas of expertise, including the treatment of anger disorders, phobias, behavioral disorders of childhood and autism spectrum disorder. In addition, the Family Forensics Institute provides evaluations, therapy and visitation services for families referred from family court. Dr. Scardapane also directs the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Clinic and the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Clinic, which provide services to patients with various problems in living. These approaches focus on creating lives worth living and on mindfulness meditation and the development of an acceptance-oriented stance to certain life experiences.

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Long Beach, NY, after Superstorm Sandy. Courtesy of Hofstra University Library Special Collections.

Photograph by Amy D. Karofsky.

Superstorm Sandy’s Legacy: Studying How Coastal Residents Decide Whether to Evacuate E. Christa Farmer, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Geology, Environment and Sustainability, Hofstra University Elisabeth Ploran, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Hofstra University Mary Anne Trasciatti, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric, Hofstra University Impacts of Superstorm Sandy: “Superstorm” Sandy arrived on the East coast of the United States in late October 2012, leaving behind a swath of destruction in the Hofstra area that lingers to this day. Growing from a tropical depression to a tropical storm to a hurricane as the atmospheric disturbance crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the storm morphed into a “post-tropical cyclone” just before making landfall near Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 29, 2012. The storm’s enormous size (one of the largest ever recorded in the tropical Atlantic) and destructive power resulted in catastrophic impacts in 10

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New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and the surrounding areas: at least 72 deaths, over 650,000 houses damaged, and subway and other infrastructure systems brought to a standstill (Blake et al., 2013).

Dr. Mary Anne Trasciatti, Hofstra University associate professor of rhetoric and a resident of Long Beach, New York, was directly affected by the storm: the first floor of her house was filled with sewage-laden flood waters. The town was left without functioning sewer or water systems for weeks. In the process of cleaning up and trying to recover, she recognized the historic

importance of the storm. Wanting to help other residents of Long Beach record their experiences with the storm, she started an oral history project by recruiting neighbors at a local coffee shop, among other places, to tell her their stories. Sitting down over the next several months with dozens of Long Beach residents and a video camera, she created an invaluable historic archive.

This archive became an important resource for understanding the event.

Dr. E. Christa Farmer, Hofstra University associate professor of geology, environment and sustainability, was also directly affected by the storm.

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Having become involved with studying paleotempestology, or the geologic record of storms like hurricanes, she had moved out of Long Beach for what she thought was a safer area in the center of Long Island. Nevertheless, like many others, she found herself living with the loss of electricity for 13 days, some in near-freezing temperatures. Superstorm Sandy created a new set of geologic deposits in the barrier beach islands that she was studying, and analysis of those sediments became two chapters in a book titled Learning From the Impacts of Superstorm Sandy (Elsevier, 2014), which she co-edited with Dr. J Bret Bennington, professor and chair of the Hofstra University Department of Geology, Environment and Sustainability.

Dr. Elisabeth Ploran, Hofstra University assistant professor of psychology, spent the night that Superstorm Sandy made landfall huddled in her 11th floor apartment, wondering if the building’s windows would blow out from the wind.

Though saved from devastating direct effects to her home, the gasoline shortage that followed the storm left Dr. Ploran with limited means to commute to campus from Queens. As a cognitive neuroscientist, she has studied spatial cognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with virtual reality as well as in real-world settings at West Point. Her work focuses on how people think about space and make decisions regarding their use of or movement through space, particularly given multiple options.

Coastal Storm Awareness Program When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started the Coastal Storm Awareness Program (CSAP) in 2013, putting out a call to study evacuation decision-making during Sandy, the three of us jumped at the chance. We knew that Dr. Trasciatti’s interviews were a unique and powerful

archive that could be marshaled to try to answer this tough question: why didn’t more folks evacuate before the storm hit land? Despite remarkably successful forecasts of the storm track and predicted impacts (Gall et al., 2013; Samenow, 2012; Cohn, 2012; NHC/NWS), most residents largely ignored evacuation warnings. Unofficial estimates by the City of Long Beach suggested that less than one-third of city residents evacuated before the storm arrived, while an estimated 90 percent of residents left the city shortly after the storm. Although many studies of this question rely on data from surveys, Dr. Trasciatti’s interviews were unstructured and open-ended, and allowed subjects to elaborate on their thinking through telling their stories.

This approach allowed the interviews to be analyzed for much more in-depth information about the subjects’ decisionmaking processes.

Funded by CSAP through the Sea Grant programs of Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, our project began to expand the collection of interviews that Dr. Trasciatti had started after the storm hit. We hired an MFA student to operate

The storm’s enormous size (one of the largest ever recorded in the tropical Atlantic) and destructive power resulted in catastrophic impacts in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and the surrounding areas: at least 72 deaths, over 650,000 houses damaged, and subway and other infrastructure systems brought to a standstill (Blake et al., 2013).

Natural-color image of Sandy taken by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 13 on Oct 28, 2012: sandy_goe_2012302_1745_lrg.jpg from http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=79553

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the camera; we hired psychology graduate students to conduct the interviews; and we hired a transcriptionist to convert all the recordings into text so we could analyze them. We also hired an interpreter, with the goal of collecting additional interviews from the Spanish-speaking population in Long Beach. To find interviewees, we collaborated with Nelly Romero, program director at the Long Beach Latino Civic Association, who was an enthusiastic booster for our project. Unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of residency legalities, we were ultimately not able to recruit many Spanish-speaking people to share their stories about the storm. For now, the question of differences between native and non-native English speakers’ access and reaction to storm warnings remains an open question that should be investigated in the future.

Collecting Data Over the course of the project, we collected, transcribed and analyzed 52 interviews with residents of Long Beach, NY, about their experiences during Sandy, including eight Spanish-language interviews. A short sampling of some of the interview videos is available at the

Survey participant Lyle Chernoff taking Hofstra’s CSAP survey on May 1, 2015, at the NY Rising office in Island Park, NY.

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website of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University: hofstra.edu/ncsssandy. We hired several Hofstra undergraduate students to hand-code the transcriptions for themes or concerns shared by the interviewees. The findings indicated that residents talked much more about family and friends when describing their decision to evacuate than they talked about traditional authority figures. This interpersonal interaction included hearing about other people’s experiences with past hurricanes, such as Hurricane Irene in 2011, and their resulting attitude about the ability to stay in Long Beach during a storm event. The question remains, though, whether that data indicates greater influence of family and friends on the actual decision-making process, or whether people rely on the traditional authority figures for making their decision but talk more about the ramifications of the decision with regard to their family and friends.

Phase two of our study involved administering a survey to 291 adult participants in Long Beach, Island Park, Oceanside and Baldwin, NY, in order to test alternative wording and spokespeople for storm advisories. We wrote 34 survey questions, each posing a different coastal storm warning message; after reading each message, the participant was asked whether he or she would evacuate, consider leaving, or stay put. Having hired a dozen Hofstra undergraduate students to administer the survey, we sought out participants in locations such as coffee shops, public libraries, fitness centers, restaurants, ice cream shops, garden centers, dance centers, bagel shops, and grocery stores.

The students put in 919 hours over seven weeks, finding that the most successful locations for soliciting participants were public spaces like libraries and recreation centers, and independently

owned establishments like coffee shops, bagel shops, diners, and gyms, where the patrons were not in a big hurry.

Messages tested in the survey included exact transcriptions of “robo-calls” issued to residents of Long Beach, NY, in the days prior to Sandy’s landfall by City of Long Beach government officials; evacuation warnings made by major news outlets; specific statements about storm magnitude in terms of storm surge and wind speed; and general statements by (fictional) local figures outside of the traditional authority structure. These fictional characters included local store owners, longtime coastal residents, an “avid local fisherman,” a professor of atmospheric sciences at Stony Brook University, and superintendents of local school districts. The goal was to test what kinds of messages urged people to make an evacuation decision while imagining an oncoming hurricane.

Results Based on the language analysis of the interviews, which identified a heavy emphasis on the role of friends and family in evacuation decisions, we expected the nontraditional authority figures to be more persuasive in our survey. In fact, the top 10 scenarios in terms of persuasiveness included the governor, members of the local fire department, and the county executive.

Notably, none of the nontraditional authority figures made this list. The rest of the top 10 scenarios contained only storm magnitude information, or used the words “mandatory evacuation.” Also notable is the apparent importance of actions taken by authority figures, such as firefighters going door to door or police officers evacuating their own families. In addition to the messages from authorities and the information about the magnitude of the storm, there was some receptiveness to messaging about the potential loss of utilities, sewer

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systems, and other critical household supplies. These initial results will allow us to refine our messaging and guide local authorities toward the information that is most relevant to the public.

A Symposium on Superstorm Sandy and Preparedness On April 30, 2015, we presented some of this research at a symposium we organized at Hofstra University through the support of the Hofstra Cultural Center, titled Are We Ready for the Next Hurricane? A Symposium on Superstorm Sandy and Preparedness.

We convened two panels of experts to discuss the impacts of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and current steps being taken to recover and prepare for future similar events. The first panel included Adam Sobel, professor of atmospheric science at Columbia University and author of Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future; Amy Simonson, hydrologic technician for the U.S. Geological Survey and contributor to Learning From the Impacts of Superstorm Sandy (J Bret Bennington and E. Christa Farmer, eds.); Anthony Eramo, member of the Long Beach City Council; and Nelly Romero, program director of the Long Beach Latino Civic Association.

The first panel looked back at what happened during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Adam Sobel highlighted the accuracy of the short-term predictions of the storm’s track, size and intensity, but also discussed the problems with communication of those predictions and misunderstandings of the hazards presented by the storm. Because the storm was not technically a hurricane when it made landfall, many evacuation decisions were made late or not at all.

He also mentioned how the minimal impacts of Irene on this area reduced

The findings indicated that residents talked much more about family and friends when describing their decision to evacuate than they talked about traditional authority figures.

peoples’ likelihood to evacuate again for Sandy. He praised emergency management, however, saying that especially in comparison to Katrina, most of the right decisions were made in preparation for Sandy. He also pointed out that we aren’t as good at preparation for long-term changes, such as sea level rise. Amy Simonson presented some data that was collected by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to quantify the storm surge heights – agreeing with Adam Sobel that the predictions of Sandy were fairly accurate. She emphasized that all the data are available to the public through the USGS website (https://water.usgs.gov/floods/ events/2012/sandy/sandymapper.html).

Anthony Eramo, a resident of Long Beach, confirmed that his experience with Irene strongly influenced his decision not to evacuate for Sandy. He now regrets that decision, as his home was flooded with 60 inches of water and he felt his children were in danger. He noted how the city took several actions in preparation for the storm: a berm was built across the beach front, though most flooding came from the bay side; buses were put on bridges so as to be safe but available for post-storm evacuation; and

20,000 sand bags were distributed. He described the damage that Long Beach sustained: most houses were destroyed; sewer and water and cell phone service was disrupted; 200,000 cubic yards of sand was deposited in the city; and 300,000 cubic yards of debris (sheet rock, possessions, etc.) was removed afterward. He opined that sewer service is most important; one can always buy bottled water, although portable toilets were eventually installed.

Nelly Romero agreed that her experience with Irene led her not to evacuate for Sandy, and that she regretted that decision because she felt “parental guilt.”

She described a hellish atmosphere as the water rose, the power plant exploded, and darkness erupted, and suggested that evacuation should have been made mandatory somehow. She detailed the difficult adaptations she and her family had to make in the following months, and the many other organizations that she worked with professionally in order to assist local residents to recover.

The second panel included Erika Schaub, assistant director of public safety and emergency management officer at Hofstra University; Paul Wilders, director of emergency planning at the Nassau County Office of Emergency Management; John McNally, co-chair of the Long Beach Community Reconstruction Program and associate director of regional action for The Energeia Partnership at Molloy College; and Elisabeth Ploran, representing our project. This panel focused on efforts being made to prepare for future similar storm events. Erika Schaub described the process of preparing for all kinds of storms on the Hofstra campus, especially by visiting all the various departments to make specific plans. She was gratified to see hurricane plans that she previously wrote for the New York City Fire

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Panelists and organizers of the April 30, 2015, symposium, from left to right: John McNally, Paul Wilders, Anthony Eramo, Nelly Romero, Amy Simonson, Mary Anne Trasciatti, E. Christa Farmer, Erika Schaub, Adam Sobel, and Elisabeth Ploran.

Nelly Romero and Anthony Eramo discussing their experiences with Superstorm Sandy at the April 30, 2015, panel event at Hofstra.

Department implemented during Sandy’s landfall. Although the impacts of Sandy on the Hofstra campus were not terrible, she emphasized that the plans are available online (www.hofstra.edu/about/ publicsafety/emproc/index.html) for anyone to reference for future events.

Paul Wilders, who was the plans section chief for Nassau County’s Emergency Team during Superstorm Sandy, emphasized that while over 85,000 homes in Nassau County were touched by the sea, only 1,150 people were sheltered. He also outlined steps Nassau County has taken since Sandy to improve preparedness, including identifying community members who might play a larger role in preparedness.

John McNally discussed phases of the city’s response to Sandy: keeping the water out, and then removing what got in. He mentioned the age of Nassau County’s infrastructure as a problem, because there is flooding for even relatively common rainfall events.

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Elisabeth Ploran described the premise of the Coastal Storm Awareness Program: how can we better understand motivations behind peoples’ evacuation decisions? Storm information, which is communicated fairly effectively, is not the only basis for peoples’ evacuation decisions; they also consider their personal history with storms, their family’s personal history with storms, and the quality of their house and community, among other factors. She emphasized the importance of Mary Anne Trasciatti’s interviews as a resource for understanding decisionmaking because of the open-ended nature of their narratives. After both panels spoke, there were insightful and powerful observations and questions from the audience, which was composed primarily of Hofstra students and community members who were affected

by Sandy.

Next Steps Now that the data are all collected, we are completing more sophisticated analyses of what they mean. The research we did for this project was presented in Chicago, IL, at the Annual Conference of the Psychonomic Society in November 2015, in a poster session titled “The use of personal interviews to design and test new pre-storm

evacuation messages.” Incorporating feedback from that conference presentation, we are preparing a manuscript on the project for a peerreviewed scientific journal.

So, are we ready for the next hurricane?

Hofstra Cultural Center Event Coordinator Amy Trotta pointed out in the process of planning our April 2015 event that there was a Cultural Center event at Hofstra on November 5-7, 1992, titled The Next Long Island Hurricane: Are We Ready for the “Big One”? That event, more than 23 years ago, covered many of the same themes that our event covered last year. That the organizers of last year’s event did not know about the 1992 event only drives home the point that generational memory is so important when it comes to the decisions that individuals make in the urgent moment of disaster. Perhaps we need to remind each other, over and over again, of the impact of events such as Sandy, so that we never forget — and so that we can be better prepared for the next time.

References Blake, Eric S., Kimberlain, Todd B., Berg, Robert J., Cangialosi, John P., & Beven II, John L. National Hurricane Center (February 12, 2013) (PDF). Hurricane Sandy: October 22-29, 2012 (Tropical Cyclone Report). United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service http://www.nhc. noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012_Sandy.pdf (accessed 1 Oct 2015).

Cohn, Nate. October 30, 2012. “Weather Models Get Sandy Right,” The New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/blog/ electionate/109370/weather-models-getsandy-right (accessed 1 Oct 2015).

Gall, R., et al. (2013). “The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 94(3): 329-343.

National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Sandy,” 12 February 2013. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/ AL182012_Sandy.pdf.

Hofstra HORIZONS National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, “Hurricane Irene Advisory Archive,” last modified 17 July 2012. Accessed 16 November 2013 at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2011/ IRENE.shtml.

National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, “Hurricane Sandy Advisory Archive,” last modified 31 December 2012. Accessed 16 November 2013 at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ archive/2012/SANDY.shtml.

Samenow, Jason. November 6, 2012.

“National Hurricane Center hits bull’s-eye with dead-on early forecast for Sandy,” The Washington Post.

Acknowledgments Some of this data was collected by Hofstra University using federal funds under the Coastal Storm Awareness Program (NOAA awards NA13OAR4830227, NA13OAR4830228, NA13OAR4830229) from the National Sea Grant College Program, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The federal funds were provided via appropriations under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-2) and the Sea Grant Act (33 U.S.C. 1121 et seq.). Funding was

awarded to the financial hosts of the Sea Grant College Programs in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York via their financial host institutions, the University of Connecticut, the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium, and the Research Foundation of State University of New York, respectively. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Sea Grant College Program, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, or any of the other listed organizations.

E. Christa Farmer was one of the first students at Stanford University to graduate with a BS in earth systems (1994), an interdisciplinary environmental program that incorporates courses in biology, geology and economics. Now she is an associate professor in the Geology, Environment and Sustainability Department at Hofstra University. Her doctoral dissertation in paleoceanography at Columbia University (2005) introduced new high-resolution climate records from the Southern Hemisphere. More recently, she has been studying records of hurricanes in coastal sediments, and co-edited a book with J Bret Bennington, published in 2014 by Elsevier, titled Learning From the Impacts of Superstorm Sandy.

Elisabeth Ploran is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Hofstra University. She earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh in 2010, after publishing two papers that introduced a new methodology for studying incremental changes in decision-making through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Her postdoctoral fellowship at George Mason University, funded by the Office of Naval Research, focused on differences in approach to spatial navigation decisions by experts and novices. This shift in focus to more applicable cognitive problems is currently at the core of Dr. Ploran’s research interests, including projects on lupus patients, mindfulness interventions, and pre-storm messaging.

Mary Anne Trasciatti is an associate professor at Hofstra University, where she teaches courses in the Rhetoric, Women’s Studies, and Labor Studies programs. Her current scholarly, creative and activist work comprises three ventures: (1) a book about the free speech work of labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that illuminates how early 20th-century radicals created and used public space to advocate for economic justice; (2) an oral history project to record, preserve and represent stories about Superstorm Sandy as narrated by residents of the barrier island coastal community of Long Beach, NY; and (3) a campaign to remember the 146 victims (mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls) of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City and the resulting movement for workers’ rights and safety with a permanent public art memorial.

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What, Me Worry?

Anxiety as Influence Jennifer A. Rich, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Writing Studies and Composition, Hofstra University

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or the last 10 years, my research has been concerned with anxiety and the way in which it manifests in cultural products such as literature, essays, rhetoric, film and national identity. This focus on anxiety is deeply personal, as anxiety — what will go wrong, what can go wrong — is something that I experience in an acute form every day. The theoretical bent that I employ is a kind of anxious literary/ historical materialism. Historical materialism is best defined as “the doctrine that all forms of social thought, as art or philosophy, and institutions, as the family or the state, ... [are reflections of] the character of economic relations and are altered or modified as a result of

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class struggle.”1 In other words, historical materialism focuses on economic and social relations of production and how these factors influence the day-to-day lives and beliefs of individuals. In literary studies, historical materialism usually takes the form of re-contextualizing a work within the ideologies present at the time. These ideologies, in a materialist perspective, are determined by the demands of the status quo — those controlling the social relations of production. As a materialist, I am acutely concerned with the way in which texts and other cultural products reflect the conditions of existence that produced them. I consider, for example, how texts subvert or challenge dominant

ideologies. I ask how they register resistance to or anxiety of dominant and/ or subversive ideologies or changing perspectives. The theorist who has most influenced me is Theodor W. Adorno.

I’d like to say a word or two about his view of culture since my own work is so indebted to his analyses. (I should note that I published a critical study of Adorno with Humanities Ebooks in 2015.)

Adorno’s Critique of Culture Theodor Adorno was perhaps the most prominent member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Also known as the Institute for Social Research, the school was founded in 1923 by a committed (if wealthy) Marxist, Felix

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Weil. The school was established to forward Marxist analyses in sociology, history, literature and the arts.

In most of his work, Adorno attempts to understand the ways in which historical materialism — the analysis of how social structures are dependent upon particular historical and material conditions of exchange — affects cultural products (books, movies, TV, etc.). Within this general concern is a profound critique of enlightenment thinking. For Adorno, the enlightenment was a catastrophe for critical thinking, and its methods are what historical materialism must continually challenge.

This is somewhat counterintuitive because many view the enlightenment as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise constrained, superstitious and traditionalist historical context – one that was overwhelmed by religious dogma rather than critical thought.

Most thus see the enlightenment as freeing the individual by ushering in newfound freedoms of expression.

For Adorno and some of his colleagues (Max Horkheimer, especially), the enlightenment was instead protofascistic, bent on categorizing, analyzing, and ultimately imprisoning complex social and material relationships into prefabricated and facile boxes. Rather than promoting an understanding of the world, the enlightenment worked to tame the world, according to Adorno and his colleagues.

Adorno’s critique prompts one to test his overall question by generalizing it to other cultural forms. To what degree do cultural products have within them the seedbed of regression – a consciousness that will not challenge the status quo but will live by it and for it? And, most importantly, how might this regression be a manifestation of cultural anxiety?

Shock Corridors: The New Rhetoric of Horror in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant My analysis of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant grapples with the questions I ask above.

This film is a retelling of the tragedy of Columbine. Instead of placing the blame for Columbine squarely in the hands of the killers, the film, in part, implicates the audience in this act of terror. We are, after all, the repositories of banality – of boredom that fuels catastrophes such as Columbine. Because of our own banality, we become not the victims of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but their cinematic accomplices. I see banality as another form of anxiety and regression.

Rather than the horror of boredom, and the anxiety that boredom can give rise to — what am I doing? what should I do? — banality allows us to recuse ourselves from answering these questions. We are content to rest in what happens to us, rather than explore what we can do to alter the circumstances of our own boredom and disinterest. It is thus a retreat mechanism from anxiety.

We retreat to boredom and mask our anxiety with disinterest. This idea may best be understood if we look at my analysis of Elephant’s closing sequence.

... h istorical materialism focuses on economic and social relations of production and how these factors influence the day-to-day lives and beliefs of individuals.

Before the characters Eric and Alex (the cinematic equivalents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold) go on their shooting spree, they play a video game. This game eerily mirrors the film’s structure and its manipulation of the audience’s response to the school and its students.

Here I quote from my article: In this [video] game, the characters are stalked by the player in much the same way as we, via the camera, stalk the film’s characters. In both settings, we follow all of the characters knowing full well that they are to die at any moment.

Max Horkheimer, front left, Theodor Adorno, front right. Photograph taken in Heidelberg, April 1964.

Credit: Jeremy J. Shapiro, en.wikipedia

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Dresden, Germany, 1945

Since 1962, West

Although Adorno didn’t appreciate cinema much at all, he would have appreciated Van Sant’s critique of banality that the film forwards. In particular, he would delight in Van Sant’s implicit assumption about the audience: that we are, in some sense, bloodthirsty. For Adorno,

Gates of Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Germans have charged themselves with what we may understand to be a new categorical imperative: Intolerance, discrimination and persecution must never be perpetuated or even tolerated, in any form,

by Germans.

Banaled into affective submission, the viewer no longer really cares who dies next; instead, the audience is curious.

Indeed, one might say, that by this moment, the viewer too has become blood-thirsty: who dies no longer matters; it is only the act of killing itself that matters.2

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this hunger for relief from boredom — the bloodthirstiness of the banal — is what inevitably results when the culture industry is unquestioned, and when one’s own interpolation into the culture industry is met by indifference.

Current Project: What Does It Mean to Be German Today?

My present project takes me in a different direction, although it is still inflected with anxiety. 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This anniversary raised several questions for me, in part, because of my own family’s victimization during the Holocaust.

I wondered how it feels to be German today. What are some of the ways in which the experience of the war and the Holocaust changed contemporary Germans’ sense of themselves? Some historical background regarding Germany’s educational system is helpful here. Since 1962, West Germans have charged themselves with what

we may understand to be a new categorical imperative: Intolerance, discrimination and persecution must never be perpetuated or even tolerated, in any form, by Germans. The German word for this categorical imperative is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — a coming to terms with the past and a responsibility toward the future.

This coming to terms with the past was to be achieved by an unflinching self-examination of Germany’s own history of persecution and genocide.

Promoting this kind of introspection is the aim of secondary school education and public memorials of the Holocaust in Germany up to this day.

My study is in its early stages, but I have been able to interview West German nationals from two generations: those born between 1938 and 1950 (who would not have received this educational exposure) and Germans born between 1970 and 1990, who would have participated as students in this curriculum. My goal is to see if there is a salient difference between the two groups with regard to understanding German identity. Does the older generation feel a sense of historical responsibility; do they, in other words, share in this categorical imperative? Does the younger generation also feel compelled to ensure that Germany’s history never repeats itself? Once I collect interviews, I will investigate them for certain rhetorical signposts that signal either a sense of responsibility or forgetfulness. For example, I will consider how Germans answer the question, “What does it mean to be German?” Do they bring up the past when answering this question?

Do they ignore it? Do they convey via words a sense of responsibility or coming to terms with the past? My study will not assume that German identity is static but rather is in a

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continuous process of transformation.

Because of change, one question that I consider is whether the secondary school curriculum should alter its treatment of World War II and the Holocaust. Should high school students still learn about World War II and the Holocaust in the same way as they did in 1962? How should new immigrants learn about Germany’s history? What role should they assume (if any) in ensuring that Germany remains the democratic safe haven that it is now?

These questions are crucial for both Germany and Europe in light of recent geopolitical calamities, such as the Syrian immigration crisis and the rise of ISIS. In some sense, this study closes at least one loop with regard to Adorno’s concern with the enlightenment project.

Adorno’s vociferous critique of the enlightenment was powered by the rise of fascism in Germany, a catastrophe that he saw as the inevitable outcome of the confluence of capitalism, enlightenment thinking, and antiSemitism. It should be noted that, for Adorno, a major factor in the rise of fascism was also the bad faith of the German working class: their betrayal of the Marxist cause in favor of fascism.

The Holocaust, for Adorno, was the greatest proof of the devastating danger of enlightenment/categorical thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer famously remark on the first page of Dialectic of Enlightenment that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”3 To return to Germany is thus to return to the site of the enlightenment’s greatest catastrophe.

Yet I nervously choose to return to the Germany of 2015, 70 years after the gates of Auschwitz closed, to ask whether some of the lessons of history have any lasting effect. Confronted now by almost a million refugees at its doorstep, will the worst facets of the German enlightenment – the need for order and conformity – be repowered?

Or will a more nuanced and empathic collective response win the day? The new categorical imperative that I referred to above has, by extension, required Germany to behave in a way that no other European nation would when faced with this refugee crisis.

Germany’s decisions in this matter will affect other European countries in ways that we are as yet unaware, but that is a subject for another time.

Finally, I know that some readers will find the work described above diverse

and perhaps disconnected. My training in English literature and my current work in rhetoric has allowed me to bring together “texts” of different kinds — some sociological, some literary — and to investigate them for the way in which language, and in particular rhetoric, is deployed. Writing studies, apart from its concern with writing pedagogy, provides a kind of forensic attention to the text, whether it is a commercial, an interview, or a literary/nonliterary work. It is this forensic approach — the search for textual evidence in the form of rhetorical signposts and tropes — that constitutes my methodology of analysis, and that makes scholars in writing studies extremely versatile in their critical projects.

Endnotes 1 Zuidervaart, Lambert. “Theodor W.

Adorno,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2015/entries/adorno/>.

2 R ich, Jennifer. “Shock Corridors: The New Rhetoric of Horror in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant,” Journal of Popular Culture 45.6 (December 2012): 1310-1329.

3 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno.

“The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cummings.

New York: Continuum, 1994.

Jennifer A. Rich is associate professor of writing studies and composition at Hofstra University. She was born and raised in Manhattan and earned a BA at Oberlin College and a PhD in British literature from The Graduate Center/CUNY. She has published widely in cultural studies, Shakespeare, and rhetoric, and she has written three introductory texts on modern feminist theory (2008; 2014), critical theory (2007), and German philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (2015). All of the texts were published by Humanities Ebooks, UK, and are available on Amazon Kindle. When she is not worried about anxiety, she works on examining how effectively to integrate writing to learn heuristics in science courses, especially engineering. Apart from work, she enjoys watching zombie films and spending time with her family.

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Making the Work-Family Interface Work (and Assessing When and Why It Doesn’t) Maura J. Mills, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Hofstra University

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ncreasingly as of late, the United States is coming to recognize the importance of the work-family interface, and employees’ abilities to effectively navigate both of these central life responsibilities. Recently we have seen more media attention to this issue, and more private companies willing to “take the leap” and offer family-friendly benefits such as paid leaves. In the United States, we have a long way to go in terms of giving our working parents the support they need; however, while we are not “there” yet, we are climbing the ladder. In a country that holds the unenviable reputation as the only industrialized nation that does not offer paid maternity leaves, the only way to

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go is up. The good news is that we are moving in that direction. The bad news is that it is happening all too slowly.

Beneficiaries (Me? You? Who?) Work-family research has been one of my passions since long before I had a child of my own. However, while I always believed in the importance of this work, I found an even deeper passion for it after my son’s arrival in 2014. That said, work-family considerations affect everyone: By virtue of the fact that this is a larger societal issue with widespread and long-term implications, we are all beneficiaries (or victims) of our society’s work-family value system and subsequent actions and policies (or

lack thereof). For some (e.g., new parents), the relevance of the issue is more obvious, while for others (e.g., singles, individuals without children, individuals with grown children), the relevance may seem more distal.

Regardless, it is there.

The consideration of single employees without children is particularly interesting in light of the fact that this is arguably the subpopulation for whom the implications of work-family policies are least obvious (and, it has been charged, perhaps in the short-term these employees are those most likely to bear the burden of an increased workload when a co-worker is using family-related

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leave). In light of this, colleagues and I1 recently evaluated the impact of having a supervisor who evidences family-supportive behaviors (e.g., by allowing for schedule flexibility, offering interpersonal support, serving as a role model, etc.), and assessed whether (and if so, how) that impact may differ for “parent-employees” as compared to employees without dependent care responsibilities. We found that family-supportive supervisors positively affected subordinates’ feelings of self-efficacy as well as their emotional commitment to their company. In turn, this self-efficacy and commitment informed enhanced job performance, which is of prime importance to employers. Perhaps most interestingly, these findings remained true regardless of whether employees had children.

This is encouraging, indicating that family-supportive supervisors play a crucial role in enhancing not only the employee experience, but also the extent to which those employees are positively contributing to their company.

Companies can take this to mean that when they allow their managers the flexibility to help employees balance their work and family needs, they are not necessarily setting a precedent of preference for parent-employees, but rather are facilitating a resource that is beneficial to all employees, regardless of familial status.

I am continuing this focus in my current research, and my graduate students and I2 are further exploring the impact of companies’ work-family policies on their single and childless employees.

Our research is still ongoing, although initial results stand in line with my prior findings, indicating that having a supervisor who evidences familysupportive behaviors is just as predictive of job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment for singles

as it is for parents. Further, such familysupportive supervisor behaviors do not seem to predict turnover intentions or perceived exclusion for single employees – a heartening finding in favor of family-supportive policymaking and support across the board. Notably, it is likely that this finding is particularly evident when such family-supportive policies are not restricted to childcare responsibilities (e.g., when they are equally applied to spousal care, eldercare, etc.), as doing so recognizes the importance of non-work responsibilities in all employees’ lives, regardless of their parental status.

Lopsided by Gender The work-family research domain (and to a slower extent, its translation into practice) has become more widespread lately and more recognized as a need in the field. This is largely thanks to various controversial examples highlighted by the popular press, not the least of which have been the work-family positions taken by Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, who put an end to flexible work schedules in 2013 and more recently vowed to curtail her own maternity leave after the birth of her twins. These examples struck a chord with many working parents, and while Mayer’s policies are not as atypical as the media made them out to be, a large part of the reason they received such backlash is because of Mayer’s gender (the implication being that, as a woman, she should “know better”). With examples such as this, along with the steady shifting of societal gender norms, research on gender in the workplace has increased in recent years alongside the increase in work-family research.

Until recently, however, research had not sufficiently explored the extent to which such work-family experiences may differ by employee gender.

As such, my recent book, Gender and the Work-Family Experience: An Intersection of Two Domains,3 reviewed this important intersection of work-family/gender, critically evaluating it in light of relevant considerations that are oftentimes overlooked, and making recommendations for future research so that a more accurate picture can come to light, thereby informing more up-to-date corporate and governmental policies.

By virtue of the fact that this is a larger societal issue with widespread and long-term implications, we are all beneficiaries (or victims) of our society’s work-family value system and subsequent actions and policies (or lack thereof).

Mills’ edited book (Springer Publishing, 2015)

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Emotional Support

Instrumental Support

Role Model

Creative WF Management

Supervisor Work Effort Family-Supportive Organization Perceptions

Family-Supportive Supervisor Behaviors

Affective Commitment

Employee Performance

Job Self-Efficacy

You can probably imagine that, as a working mother, I believe in maternity work-family policies, regardless of my research stream. However, as someone holding tight to an egalitarian value system, I also believe in paternity work-family policies, the importance of which became even more evident to me after my son’s birth. From a personal perspective, I watched my husband struggle with an inflexible yet unpredictable work schedule, and yearn for paternity policies that could have allowed for him to be a more constant presence in our family’s day-to-day routines, particularly throughout our son’s earliest months. This struggle (part of which is gender-based [lack of paternity policies] and part of which is not [variable shiftwork]) is contextualized within an increasingly egalitarian society in which families are expecting more of men on the home front, but organizations are largely thwarting that by limiting the extent of work-family policies offered to male employees. On a broad level, the net result of gendered policies is that even though women still tend to do the majority of childcare and housework (even in dual-earner and egalitarian households), men are feeling comparable

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amounts of work-family conflict because corporate policies as well as societal stereotypes do not often support them in undertaking these home roles.4 To some extent, differential policies are understandable, given the physical complications presented by pregnancy and childbirth. However, organizational policies all too often use gender as a proxy for childbirth in framing their policies (presuming any such policies exist). According to the (legitimate) childbirth justification, any such extended leave options should be specified to link to the physical needs of childbirth/postpartum, as opposed to blanketed to women across the board simply by virtue of their gender: It is not a gender issue, per se – it is a childbirth issue. While the two often align, increasingly common family formations such as adoption, surrogacy, and the like assure us that they sometimes differ.

That said, however, it is also necessary to consider the fact that husbands (and partners more generally) often serve as a new mother’s only source of support after childbirth. This is especially true considering that, more so than ever

Model examined by Mills and colleagues in order to evaluate the impact that having a family-supportive supervisor has on important individual- and organizational-level outcomes.

The model was supported for employees with children as well as for those without children – a heartening finding emphasizing the importance of familysupportive supervisors for all employees, not just those with childcare responsibilities.

before, families are widely geographically dispersed, making family support beyond one’s partner minimal to nonexistent for many women post-birth. Particularly in the (not infrequent) cases of post-birth complications or surgery, or when there is an older child in need of care, such support is crucial. For instance, one-third of all births in the United States are via caesarean section, after which women are severely restricted in terms of various physical activities such as driving, traversing stairs, and lifting anything heavier than 7-10 pounds.

Especially if the family has one or more prior children still in need of care (a not unlikely circumstance, considering common sibling spacing of 2-3 years), a lack of paternity/partner policies leaves a mother recovering from major abdominal surgery (and other post-birth physical issues) alone to care for herself, a toddler (potentially), and an infant all without any support and under severe physical restrictions. It is therefore critical that paternity/partner leaves are not overlooked. Indeed, they are crucial to the overall well-being of the family, and are often the only way to ensure necessary postnatal support for both mother and child.

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Beyond Gender: Multiple Identities A slow outgrowth of the work-family/ gender research has been the recognition that additional facets of individuals’ identities are also likely to affect this relationship in various ways. Such research is still in its relative infancy; however, my book brought it to the forefront with specific theoretically driven and empirically supported arguments as to how and why further demographic identities such as socioeconomic status, race, LGBT status, and age/generation may change the nature of the work-family/gender intersection. In this vein, it highlights the risk of the “double jeopardy effect,” wherein an individual experiences more negative outcomes by virtue of identifying with multiple marginalized demographic groups. For instance, the scant research that exists at this threeway convergence has found relationships such as low-income single mothers lacking sufficient childcare support, and Hispanic individuals reporting more strain-based work-family interference than Caucasians.

From a generation perspective, although adolescent women espouse more egalitarian views than do adolescent men, when asked to forward-think to their ultimate familial and work goals, those women reported plans to work part-time (or not at all) and take on the majority of the home role, thereby bringing into question the ultimate efficacy of the increasingly espoused egalitarian views of this younger generation.

Western, primarily Caucasian, middleclass, professional employees. While this research provides a good starting point, more representative research is desperately warranted. This includes research on the above-mentioned gender-associated demographics, including socioeconomic status (the “feminization of poverty” delineates how women are more likely to fall into poverty than are men) and gendered jobs (e.g., military and STEM fields, which often by virtue of their inherent gender alignment subconsciously reinforce gendered stereotypes, limiting women’s options in managing the work-family domain in a way that is not as limiting for males’ options).

Assessing and Informing Action and Policy Work-family supportive policies have been integrated into organizations’ formal benefits offerings increasingly over the past two to three decades. From the United States’ Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) to the more extensive

On a broad level, the net result of gendered policies is that even though women still tend to do the majority of childcare and housework (even in dual-earner and egalitarian households), men are feeling comparable amounts of work-family conflict because corporate policies as well as societal stereotypes do not often support them in undertaking these home roles.

One’s propensity to talk about good work experiences affects the relationship between work engagement and work-family facilitation.

Moreover, so much of what we know about the work-family/ gender intersection is grounded in research from

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Dr. Mills discussing her work-family research and her book with interested students at Hofstra’s annual Faculty Research Day in September 2015. The topic tends to be well-received by students and others, as it is an issue that for many is naturally relatable.

work-family benefits found in other countries (including paid maternity and paternity leaves of up to a year, as well as federally funded childcare options), progress continues to be made.

This is even more accurate when we consider discretionary organizational policies such as paid leave, flexible work arrangements, and on-site childcare centers. The benefits of such policies are wide-ranging, including longer maternity leaves being associated with lower infant mortality (up to a plateau of 40 weeks paid leave, after which benefits drop off or even reverse). Similar health benefits may also be derived from paternity leaves, although perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent, as a result of maternity leaves in particular facilitating mother-specific offerings such as likelihood of breastfeeding success.

Notably, breastfeeding has varied health benefits for both baby (e.g., antibodies to stave off illnesses, reduced risk of asthma and allergies) and mother (e.g., decreased risk of breast and ovarian

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cancer), with the World Health Organization recommending breastfeeding until at least two years of age to reap the full extent of its benefits (a steep goal to meet while working full-time). On a broader level, colleagues and I5 have found various other benefits of family-supportive supervisors and family-friendly organizational policies, including increased employee well-being and improved employee engagement in their job tasks – benefits that are of clear import at the company level.

With this in mind, of foremost necessity moving forward are increased federally mandated paid leave options in developed countries such as the United States that are capable of supporting such efforts but heretofore have chosen not to do so. Most of the familysupportive policies recently seen in the United States have been at the hands of private companies rather than more widely applicable governmental

initiatives. An exception to this, however, is the proposed Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, currently on the table in the Senate, which would provide up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for workers upon the birth or adoption of a child, as well as for the illness of an immediate family member needing the employee’s care. In this vein, as we move throughout the development and implementation of new policies, it is crucial to ensure that such policies are not only equally applicable to both men and women in letter, but are also equally as available to both in light of the organizational and societal cultures within which those policies are housed. Indeed, it is these environmental contexts that are often even greater determinants of whether employees will feel able to utilize the policies than are the policies themselves.

Let’s End on a Positive Note It tends to be easiest for people to most readily associate with the idea that work has a tendency to negatively interfere with one’s family life – whether from a time-based perspective (e.g., more time at work means less time with family) or from a strain-based perspective (e.g., being stressed from work negatively affects peoples’ moods at home). While that is indeed one side of the picture (and the side that is often focused on, considering that it is where action is most needed in order to rectify the situation), another side is more heartening. That is, particularly from a cognitive and emotional perspective, employees’ experiences in the workplace can positively affect their home life, as well. For instance, my past research6 has indicated that being engaged in one’s work (and, less surprisingly, experiencing positive affectivity at work) can positively influence employees’ home and family lives.

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My collaborators and I also found that it is possible to maximize the extent to which this is the case by talking about positive work experiences and sharing them with family. Doing so encourages employees to savor such positive events and feelings, and to some extent such affect can also rub off on family members when they are invited to share in those positive emotions. This is good news for all of us, evidencing the positive ways in which work can influence home lives and family interactions, and recommending steps that we can take in order to maximize the extent to which this is likely to be true in our own homes, too.

I challenge you to go home tonight and share a positive work experience with your family. Do it today, do it tomorrow, and do it the day after that. The more it becomes a habit, the more we increase the likelihood that our work experiences will positively influence the quality of our home lives. Enjoy!

This “reader challenge” was inspired by the challenge presented in Jeff Froh’s Hofstra Horizons article (spring 2015 issue). If you missed Jeff’s article, I encourage you to read it, and I challenge you to accept both challenges! [ http://news.hofstra.edu/2015/05/04/ making-grateful-kids-good-manners/]

Endnotes 1 Mills,

M. J., Matthews, R. A., Henning, J. B., & Woo, V. A. (2014). Familysupportive organizations and supervisors: What difference do they make, and for whom? International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25, 1763-1785.

2 Rosiello, R. M., Tortez, L., & Mills, M. J. (in progress). Equal opportunity support: Examining the work-family experience for single, childless employees. Paper to be presented at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference.

Anaheim, California, April 2016.

3 Mills, M. J. (Ed.) (2015). Gender and the work-family experience: An intersection of two domains. New York, NY: Springer Publishing.

4 Mills,

M. J., & Grotto, A. R. (under review). Who can have it all and how? An empirical examination of gender and work-life experiences at the upper echelon.

Gender in Management:An International Journal.

5 Matthews, R. A., Mills, M. J., Trout, R., & English, L. (2014). Family-supportive supervisor behaviors, employee engagement, and subjective well-being: A contextually-dependent mediated process. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 19, 168-181.

6 Culbertson, S. S., Mills, M. J., & Fullagar, C. J. (2012). Work engagement and work-family facilitation: Making homes happier through positive affective spillover.

Human Relations, 65, 1155-1177.

Maura Mills is an assistant professor of industrial/organizational psychology at Hofstra University. She has taught at all degree levels, although her current primary teaching responsibilities fall within Hofstra’s MA and PhD programs in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Applied Organizational Psychology, respectively, and she currently serves as director of internships for the former. Dr. Mills has also taught for the undergraduate and MBA programs within Hofstra’s Frank G. Zarb School of Business. She earned a dual BA in psychology and English (corporate communications) from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and an MS and PhD in industrial/organizational psychology from Kansas State University. Dr. Mills’ research interests focus on positive organizational behavior, including the effective intersection of the work and non-work spheres, predicting positive employee and organizationally relevant outcomes of the employee experience, and the sound measurement of constructs within each of these domains. Her research has been published in journals such as Human Relations, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and Gender in Management. She has also written multiple book chapters, in addition to recently having served as editor for the book Gender and the Work-Family Experience: An Intersection of Two Domains (Springer Publishing). She can be reached at Maura.Mills@hofstra.edu or via her website at http://people.hofstra.edu/Maura_Mills/.

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Not All Catholics Are Roman Catholics: A Diverse Independent Movement Gains Attention in the Era of Pope Francis Julie E. Byrne, PhD, Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies, Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Hofstra University

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knew independent Catholics were different. But when I attended the Church of Antioch convocation in 2005 in Richmond, Virginia, I was still not prepared for its main event, a high mass featuring the consecration of three bishops.

doing contract gigs as operating room nurses. Reverend Kera Hamilton celebrated mass once a month for a fledgling parish of about 40 people in the Philadelphia suburbs. She was divorced and worked as a medical transcriptionist.

Three women bishops.

All three women were converts to Catholicism. All had found the Church of Antioch on winding paths through other religious groups. All had arrived in Richmond to take the next step in lives that seemed as much of a surprise to them as they were to me.

Reverend Patsy Grubbs hailed from Houston, where she worked as a spiritual counselor and held weekly healing services. She was married with children and grandchildren. Reverend Diana Phipps and her spouse, Kathy, had just opened a retreat center in the Texas Hill Country. Together the couple traveled in their camper 26

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With family and friends gathered, the mass commenced traditionally, using

liturgy dating to early centuries of Christianity. But when each woman had a Bible cracked open and laid across her shoulders; when the presiding bishop lovingly laid hands on heads; when he said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Be filled with the Holy Spiritâ&#x20AC;? and breathed upon anointed scalps; when each was given a ring and staff, then fitted with the miter and sweetly fussed with it to make sure the hair still looked good, somehow there was no avoiding the sense that this ancient ritual resounded afresh when performed on female bodies. By the end of the presentation of the episcopal insignia, the new bishops were in tears, and so was most of the church.

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Of course, by some lights the ordination of women is no big shock.

In the early 21st century, especially in North America and Europe, many Christian churches and other religious communities ordain women. But Catholics do not. At least not most Catholics. Yet here — in this small Richmond parish of the Church of Antioch, one of many U.S.-based independent Catholic bodies — a Catholic congregation gathered to make women bishops. It was an event that the Church of Antioch had repeated over a dozen times since 1974.

Some independent Catholic churches ordain women, and some do not.

Either way, numerous bodies of “other Catholics” operate separately from the biggest groups usually associated with Catholicism: the Roman Catholic Church headed by the pope, Orthodox churches recognized by the patriarch of Constantinople, and the Anglican Communion led by the archbishop of Canterbury. Across the United States today, there are at least 250 different independent Catholic “jurisdictions” — geographic areas headed by a bishop.

Prominent ones include the Church of Antioch mentioned above, as well as the Polish National Catholic Church, the Ecumenical Catholic Communion, the African Orthodox Church and Ascension Alliance. In the New York area alone, at least 30 independent Catholic congregations gather for mass every Sunday. In Europe, the Utrecht Union of Old Catholic Churches is the oldest and most prominent independent body, with 64 million members in 10 countries. It has been in full communion with the Anglican church since 1933. Hundreds of other independent Catholic churches dot the globe, from the Philippine Independent Church to the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil.

American independent Catholicism counts about a million adherents. But the small number is deceptive because its clergy serve millions more who are not members, especially Roman Catholics looking for the sacraments outside the rules of their own church. If a Roman Catholic same-sex couple wants their baby baptized, for example, they might call an independent Catholic priest. If a Roman Catholic marrying a Buddhist wants a mass at which all guests can take communion, they might google an independent priest’s wedding ministry — even if the Catholic goes back to the Roman church the next weekend.

U.S. independent Catholic churches speak to contemporary American concerns, but they were not “made in the USA.” Most of these churches trace their heritage to 1724, when Catholics in the Dutch city of Utrecht broke from the Roman church and later formed what is now known as the Utrecht Union. From early modern origins in the Netherlands to contemporary proliferation in the United States, these “other Catholics” represent an unusually liberal, mobile and creative version of the nation’s largest religion.

In the early 21st century, especially in North America and Europe, many Christian churches and other religious communities ordain women.

But Catholics do not. At least not most Catholics.

In short, not all Catholics are Roman Catholics.

The result of my 10 years of research on independent Catholics will be published this spring by Columbia University Press.

The book is titled The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion.

The “other Catholics” are actually very similar to Roman Catholics in some ways. They claim the word “Catholic” and practice seven sacraments, devotion to the saints and apostolic succession — that is, the idea that the church passes on

caption

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The Roman church condemned modernism and liberalism among a few clerics in 1898 and 1907, but since the 18th century, hundreds of reform-minded Catholics were founding and populating independent churches that incorporated modernist and liberal principles.

O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs,

by Julie Byrne (Columbia University Press, 2003).

The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion,

by Julie Byrne, will be published

by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2016.

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“succession” from 12 original apostles of Jesus to present-day bishops. But “other Catholics” “remake” Catholicism with levels of experimentation that would be unthinkable in the big bodies.

Among the left-leaning groups that I studied, no clergy draws a salary from the church — they all hold day jobs to pay the bills and do Catholic ministry on a voluntary basis. Other emphases include participatory governance, contemplative practices, interreligious mixing and —most especially — open sacraments. Anyone can take communion. Anyone who completes preparation for marriage can get married, including same-sex couples.

Anyone who completes preparation for ordination can get ordained, including women, married people and LGBT people.

Independent Catholicism therefore offers a dramatic and surprising contrast to Roman Catholicism. In the current Roman church, Pope Francis is fighting to soften traditional doctrines with a pastoral touch.

But his fellow Roman bishops push back with equal fervor to uphold the rules, for example that remarried Catholics who have not had their first marriages annulled should not receive communion.

Though Pope Francis wowed crowds in three American cities in his September tour of the East Coast, he barely persuaded bishops in October’s Synod on the Family to adopt a few minor changes. Independent Catholics continue to leap ahead of Roman reform, keeping key Catholic traditions but adding a progressive difference.

Leaders and theologians of the big communions know about independent Catholics. But most people do not.

Many Americans are startled to find

out that independent Catholics exist at all. What is the explanation for the lack of public knowledge?

The big reasons are numbers and power.

The Roman church is a transnational entity that encompasses a sixth of the world’s population. In the United States one out of five people are Roman Catholic, which translates to 66 million adherents. In comparison, independent Catholic groups are tiny with few resources, usually worshipping in leaders’ homes or renting space in Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues.

But independents are gaining attention.

In the past few decades, several groups have made headlines: St. Stanislaus Kostka in St. Louis, Missouri; Spiritus Christi in Rochester, New York; and the Imani Temple in Washington, D.C. In addition, the media-savvy guerrilla ordinations of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests follow the model of independents in ordaining women via lines of apostolic succession not recognized by the Roman church.

Many of these independents are accepted, however, by Rome-identified progressive organizations such as the Women’s Ordination Conference and CORPUS, a coalition of Roman Catholic married priests. This crossover adds organizational heft to all the ad hoc cooperation between independents and sympathetic Roman laypeople and priests over the years.

Once you start to see that independents have been around for a long time, the narrative arc and total shape of modern Western Catholicism changes. They add new dates to the Catholic historical timeline, and not just for women’s ordination and same-sex marriage.

The Roman church condemned modernism and liberalism among a

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few clerics in 1898 and 1907, but since the 18th century, hundreds of reformminded Catholics were founding and populating independent churches that incorporated modernist and liberal principles. Even when the U.S. Roman church repopulated its liberal ranks before and after Vatican II (1962-65), few ever challenged the papacy as such.

By contrast, left-leaning independents maintained a radical critique of papalism and acted on it, forming new churches with alternative authority structures.

In short, if you count independents, Catholics were part of progressive religion in the United States earlier, more radically and in greater numbers than is generally acknowledged.

Tiny independents sometimes have visible effects on the big bodies. In 2007 and 2010 Pope Benedict XVI issued harsh condemnations of “attempted” ordinations of women, largely because the Roman Catholic Womenpriests had attracted global attention for such ordinations. On the other hand, the “collegial” impulse of Pope Francis to redistribute church power among clergy and laity had early prophets in revolution-era independent Catholic churches of Europe. The most frequent changes happen at a micropolitical level. Every time a Roman Catholic churchgoer asks an independent Catholic priest to officiate her dream wedding on the beach — because Roman rules prohibit weddings outside Roman sanctuaries — the big church minutely shifts.

Whether the changes are vast or minute, Catholic leaders watch each other, talk about each other and sometimes work together. As a whole, they are having a much wider conversation than the one you hear if you listen only to the big bodies. Where is the church? Who is the pope? What is Catholic? And who says? The all-Catholic conversation

Left to right: Church of Antioch bishops Patsy Grubbs, Richard Gundrey, Kera Hamilton and Diana Phipps, Richmond VA, October 2005.

features appropriation and cooperation among the different institutions. It also involves silence and repudiation.

But all interactions continually morph small bodies and large churches in unpredictable ways. Clearly the bounds of Catholicism are not identical with any one church. You need to see all the churches to get the big picture.

As a scholar of U.S. Catholicism, I have found myself continually drawn to “odd angles” of approach that might reveal hidden realities and shift dominant narratives of Catholicism in America.

Where most narratives continue to focus on leadership ranks and religious practices of the Roman church, I have — with other scholars – tried to carve out a “new Catholic studies” that understands Catholicism (and religion in general) not as a sui generis phenomenon but rather one that is fully imbricated in

society and only artificially separated from it. That approach led to a first book focused on Philadelphia Catholic women basketball players (O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs, Columbia University Press, 2003). These precocious women’s athletic lives were at least as important to them as Catholicism. And basketball in the context of mid-20th-century Philadelphia is at least as illuminating for religion scholars as specifically “religious” practices, such as going to mass or joining the Rosary Society.

O God of Players was used in the making of the film The Mighty Macs (2009), directed by Tim Chambers and starring Ellen Burstyn, David Boreanaz and Carla Gugino. I doubt that this second book on independent Catholics will be made into a film, but one can always hope!

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There is a place for awesome digital tools, however. Scrivener is one.

I don’t know how I could have written the manuscript without Scrivener.

My sister, a playwright and novelist, told me about it. Scrivener is a writing program with vast capability for drafting, organizing, searching and switching between many different files with just a click. For everyone from creative writers keeping track of script drafts to researchers handling many files at once, Scrivener is revolutionary.

Getting at the odd angles of Catholic history means finding new archives.

For The Other Catholics, I focused on the Church of Antioch not only because it pioneered women’s ordination in the United States, but also because it kept unusually comprehensive records since its founding in 1959.

Getting at the odd angles also involves, for me, hearing the stories of participants themselves. I interviewed 46 people in 10 states from California to Virginia. I analyzed survey responses of over 400. I spent countless hours just hanging out in Church of Antioch communities. In ethnography, this is a research method formally known as “participant-observation.” Practically, it means observing and participating in whatever your subjects are doing, so you can give an account that has the benefit of direct experience. I went to mass, attended events, ate dinners and looked at photo albums in people’s living rooms. I tagged along as they lived the lives of independent Catholic leaders.

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The survey was administered via the online service SurveyMonkey.com, so the site automatically tabulated quantitative items. But the survey included many qualitative questions, too. In the interviews, all of my queries were open-ended. In addition, I had 10 years’ worth of field notes and hundreds of pages of notes on primary and secondary sources.

How do you organize all that data?

Very methodically.

There are software programs with word frequency counters and digital organizing tools, but for me crucial stages of the process must be analog. In looseleaf binders for each chapter, I make a note of the content and location of any bit of information that might be of use in writing. I make notes for almost everything, because to a certain extent I am listening for the sources themselves to tell me what to write about. I group the notes by topic, separated by tabs within binder chapter sections. Basically it amounts to creating an index of all primary and secondary sources by topic.

Far from research being objective and detached, most scholars can easily pinpoint the personal nexus of passions and perspectives that led them to their particular line of inquiry. In my case, I was raised Roman Catholic, including 13 years of Catholic schooling, but all my forebears were a little “other.” My mother graduated in the first Marquette University class that accepted women for the MA in Theology program, but she also failed to land a job as director of religious education at a Roman Catholic parish after she answered truthfully an interview question about her stance on artificial birth control. My father left Roman Catholic seminary training in 1962 and became a pioneer in the use of folklore and oral history in the study of American religion. My grandmother on one side married a Protestant, reared seven children, and then published poems and home ritual guides for the rest of her life. My greatuncle on the other side was the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dubuque, Iowa, who visited my childhood home. He had come to lay hands on my mother who was fast losing her eyesight, though charismatic healing is not the norm among Roman archbishops. I could go on. But this is enough to make the point: I know intimately that “other Catholics” come in all forms, not just in independent Catholicism.

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The family Catholics made me ask questions. I stopped going to mass and then spent seven years in “Bapticostal” black Protestant churches. Currently I don’t attend any religious services at all. But like others who answer “none” for “institutional affiliation” on surveys of American religious practice, “none” does not necessarily mean having no ties to any tradition. As many analysts have pointed out, most of the “nones” are “between,” “multiple” or “other” in ways that elude neat categories.

I am sure this Catholic “otherness” or “betweenness” is what led me to interest in independent Catholics, who seem to be posing and answering many of my own questions in unusual and often courageous ways.

I’m thinking about my next book.

Have you ever guarded thoughts of your next project so as not to expose it too soon — or overwhelm yourself?

That’s where I am with the third book.

But I can tell you that it involves local research. Through my students here at Hofstra I have become fascinated with the Catholicism of New York City and the suburbs — and its ex-Catholicism and “other” Catholicism. I’m interested in the parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents of these students, too.

Or is there a more complicated story that has to do with white ethnic Catholics’ changing position in American society — especially shifting class position and solidifying racial privilege? While Catholic class and race categories changed, what happened to popular Catholic ideas of masculinity and femininity? In the New York area, how did abundant pluralism and significant secularization affect these generations of local Catholic men and women?

What exactly has happened in American Catholicism in the last three generations? There are stark divides between liberals and conservatives, some fans of Pope Francis and others who wish Pope Benedict XVI had not resigned. Is it really all fallout from the Second Vatican Council, two conservative papacies, and an increasingly toxic U.S. political climate?

I am not yet sure how to answer these questions. But I have in mind a recent historical event that can serve as a focus and prism. So the summer of 2016 will see me again meeting with people for interviews, going to their churches, and trailing people in their everyday lives. You can find me in someone’s Long Island living room, looking at photo albums and listening to life stories.

Julie Byrne holds the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies and serves as associate professor in the Department of Religion at Hofstra University.

She earned a PhD in religious studies at Duke University in 2001. Before coming to Hofstra in September 2006, she taught at Duke University (2004-2006) and Texas Christian University (2000-2004). Prior to her academic career, she worked at Africa News Service and sold fish at Whole Foods in Durham, N.C. Dr. Byrne’s second book, The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion, will be released by Columbia University Press in spring 2016. Her first book, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs, was published by Columbia in 2003. In addition to Catholic studies, Dr. Byrne writes and teaches on subjects in American religion from gender and race to method and theory. Her courses include Religions in the United States, The Jesus Class, Demonology, Religion and Media, and Fieldwork in American Religion.

Dr. Byrne is a leader in the American Academy of Religion, recently serving as co-chair of the North American Religions section and now as a member of the program committee.

She also publishes popular articles and speaks frequently to the media. Find out more about Dr. Byrne at profjuliebyrne.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/julie.byrne.3388, on Twitter @JulieByrneHUCS, and at hofstra.academia.edu/JulieByrne.

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Shu Swamp and Beaver Brook near Oyster Bay in the spring. The undercut banks visible on the right provide excellent habitat for brook trout.

Restoring Anadromous Brook Trout and Alewives to Long Island’s Streams and Coastal Waters Peter Daniel, PhD, Professor, Department of Biology, Hofstra University

A

bout seven years ago I was contacted by John Fischer, a retired NYC cop who is an avid fisherman and active member of the Long Island Chapter of Trout Unlimited.

Trout Unlimited (TU) is a nationwide organization of trout-fishing enthusiasts dedicated to conserving, protecting, and restoring North America’s trout and salmon fisheries and their watersheds.

He was looking for projects we could collaborate on, as I was at the time director of our master’s program in biology. I was particularly interested in TU’s Trout-in-the-Classroom (TITC) program. This program allows elementary, middle school, and high school students to raise trout from eggs

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in classroom aquaria, and then release them into an approved local stream when they reach fingerling size, about 1 to 2 inches in length. The program teaches students about water quality and stream ecology with the help of volunteer classroom mentors. I saw this as an opportunity for some of our more aquatic-minded graduate students to get some internship experience. After providing several Hofstra graduate students as interns for the program, John and I starting thinking about future projects. After students release their trout, they have no idea what happens to them, so John and I thought it would be interesting if students could track young trout in a stream where TITC trout

were released. In 2011 I received funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) to do just that, and the “Adopt-A-Trout” project was “hatched.” Over the next four years my graduate students, Maryanne Grey and Brian Bartlett, and I placed radiotags in brook trout and released them into a preserve near Oyster Bay called Shu Swamp Nature Preserve. We tracked their movements and posted the results at www.adoptatrout.com, along with a complete series of lesson plans developed in collaboration with one of Dr. Jacqueline Grennon-Brooks’ (Hofstra’s School of Education) graduate students, Jessica Best. But this project turned into something much bigger, as

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I became drawn into the effort to find solutions to the loss of native fish in our coastal habitats.

The Europeans who settled the Atlantic coast in the 17th and 18th centuries found rivers and coastal waters teaming with fish, among them the alewife, a river herring that lives most of its life in the ocean but in the spring migrates up rivers to spawn. Fish that move between saltwater and freshwater (during their life cycles) have what is called a diadromous life history. Alewives, because they spawn in freshwater, exhibit a type of diadromy called anadromy (saltwater to freshwater).

During the spawning run, Native Americans and Europeans could count on an abundant harvest as this 17th century account of an alewife run in Plymouth, Massachusetts, by John Pory attests: In April and May come up another kind of fish which they call herring or old wives in infinite schools, into a small river running under town, and into a great pond or lake of a mile broad, where they cast their spawn, the water of the said river being in many places not about half a foot deep. Yea when a heap of stones is reared up against them a foot high above the water; they leap and tumble over and will not be beaten back with cudgels. Quoted in Douglas Watts, Alewife (2013).

Like New England, Long Island not only had abundant alewives but also a rich supply of Eastern brook trout, living in the small rivers that permeate the south and north shores. The brook trout of Long Island were a favorite pursuit of sport fishermen visiting from New York City. The most prized trout were the anadromous “salters,” fish that left the tiny rivers and entered Long Island Sound or Great South Bay, feeding on

larger prey and growing to enormous size for a brook trout. The most famous account is the possibly mythical “fish story” about Daniel Webster, senator from Massachusetts and U.S. secretary of state, catching a 14.5-pound brook trout in the early 1820s in the brackish waters near the mouth of Carmans River. If this story could ever be confirmed, it would tie the current world record set in 1915.

What ever happened to the swarms of alewives and super-sized salter brook trout? While there are a number of answers to this question, including overfishing and habitat degradation, the single greatest factor can be seen along every river of Long Island: dams.

It seems that as soon as the settlers had built shelters, the next building project was to dam the rivers. These were of practical value, providing power for mills, ice ponds and, particularly on Long Island, cranberry bogs.

Unfortunately the settlers’ gain was the migratory fishes’ loss. Herring runs

Like New England, Long Island not only had abundant alewives but also a rich supply of Eastern brook trout, living in the small rivers that permeate the south and north shores. The brook trout of Long Island were a favorite pursuit of sport fishermen visiting from New York City.

A young-of-the-year fingerling brook trout caught in Beaver Brook during a fish survey in May 2015.

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there are not only brook trout hatcheries on the East Coast, but also rainbow trout (native to the West) and brown trout (native to Europe) hatcheries.

Releasing the more aggressive nonnative trout to streams inhabited by brook trout may have driven some river populations to extinction. Only a few streams on Long Island have managed to retain what are reputed to be native populations, such as the upper reaches of the Carmans and Connetquot Rivers.

NYSDEC biologist Heidi O’Riordan preparing to PIT tag one of the 134 alewives we caught in the Peconic River and released below the Beaver Lake spillway in April 2015.

Shu Swamp Nature Preserve (also known as the Charles T. Church Nature Sanctuary), the focus of the Adopt-A-Trout Program, is a perfect example of a dammed waterway on Long Island. The 60-acre, privately owned preserve is located 1.5 miles west of Oyster Bay.

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disappeared and the populations collapsed with the loss of recruitment of young. Brook trout became “freshwaterlocked” and the huge salter truly became a fish story. Later, as these industries faded, many of the artificial ponds and lakes created by the dams became parks, but very few dams were dismantled. Today a springtime visitor to Woodhull Dam in Riverhead might see the water boiling with alewives attempting to navigate the impassable dam. But for most rivers the runs simply vanished or slowed to a trickle.

The brook trout confined to freshwater streams on Long Island have only suffered slightly less than their now very rare salter siblings. Overfishing, poor water quality, deforestation, and paving over streams greatly depleted our native populations. In the latter half of the 1800s, in an effort to meet growing sportfishing demand, fish hatcheries sprouted up all over the United States to grow desirable fish species in large numbers for release and eventual catch. In the case of trout,

Shu Swamp Nature Preserve (also known as the Charles T. Church Nature Sanctuary), the focus of the Adopt-ATrout Program, is a perfect example of a dammed waterway on Long Island.

The 60-acre, privately owned preserve is located 1.5 miles west of Oyster Bay. The watershed has been highlighted by the Long Island Sound Study Stewardship Initiative as a stewardship area and a New York state significant coastal wildlife fish and wildlife habitat.

Shu Swamp Nature Preserve has been specifically identified by the study as a potential freshwater wetlands habitat restoration site. Beaver Brook, which meanders for about one mile through the preserve, is fed by innumerable cold water seeps from underground springs and empties into 60-acre Beaver Lake.

Dense stands of mature tulip poplar and oak provide shade and, along with undercut banks, overhanging vegetation, and a series of pools and riffles, provide suitable habitat for brook trout. The quarter-mile Robert De Graaf Causeway forms an earthen dam at the downstream end of Beaver Lake. Water exits the lake via a concrete spillway and empties into the tidal and brackish Mill Creek. Mill Creek is a tributary of Oyster Bay. The spillway is impervious to upstream migration of fish except rarely during particularly high tides.

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At one time Beaver Brook, like many North Shore spring-fed streams, was host to native brook trout. However, the brook trout had long since been extirpated and replaced with brown trout. But beginning in 2000, Trout Unlimited (TU) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) removed the brown trout, and area students participating in TITC began releasing into Shu Swamp the fingerling brook trout that they had raised from eggs provided by the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery (CSHFH). While the purpose of the release is entirely educational and is not intended to return brook trout to a formerly native habitat, that is exactly what happened. By early spring 2008, young-of-the-year (YOY) brook trout began to be regularly observed in Beaver Brook. Thanks to TITC efforts, Beaver Brook now has a spawning population of brook trout.

My lab had two goals in our brook trout study. The first was to examine the acclimation of hatchery-reared trout released into their native habitat. We focused on movements of juvenile and adult brook trout following release.

Wild brook trout are known to establish territories in streams where they remain through most of the summer until fall when they move upstream to spawn.

Do released brook trout show the same site fidelity? If they do, what are characteristics of the habitats within the stream that they choose? The second goal was to determine whether trout in Beaver Brook could reach the spillway in Beaver Lake. If they could, this might suggest that once a fish passage is built at the spillway, some brook trout could adopt an anadromous life history.

To track the movements of brook trout, we used a technique called radiotelemetry.

This involves placing a radiotag on an animal. The tag releases a radio signal

A hatchery-reared trout tagged with a coded transmitter. The antenna of the radiotag is visible.

that can be picked up by a receiver.

We used two types of radiotags: coded transmitters, which are battery-powered and actively emit a radio signal, and passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags, which are not battery-powered and emit a signal only when activated as they pass by an antenna. Many people have some familiarity with PIT tags as they have commercial applications such as identifying livestock and missing pets, and preventing shoplifting. Very tiny versions of both tag types (as little as 1/100 ounce for a coded transmitter and 4/1000 ounce for a PIT tag) can be implanted in the body cavity. Because coded transmitters are constantly emitting a signal, a researcher can actively track the location of the tagged fish at least as long as the battery lasts, from 30 to 180 days for our research (depending on the tag model). A transmitter with a directional antenna is used to locate the signal based on the strength of the beep. As the tagged fish is approached, the signal gets more intense. Individual fish can be identified based on a code in the signal. Unlike

While the purpose of the release is entirely educational and is not intended to return brook trout to a formerly native habitat, that is exactly what happened.

coded transmitters, the much less expensive PIT tags do not require batteries. We can tag lots of fish cheaply, and the tag lasts as long as the fish is alive. However, the tag is detected only when the fish swims by an antenna. Antennas are placed semipermanently at specific locations.

As the tagged fish swims by, a computer records the date, time and tag identification number.

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And with few exceptions, week after week we found these trout right where we had released them. Occasionally we would sight the trout facing upstream swimming in place and waiting for bugs to float by. But more typically they would be hidden under some dense overhanging vegetation or underneath an undercut bank. A minority of the tagged residents were tracked for just a week or two before the signal disappeared, a possible sign of predation, but most were tracked for 100 or more days – close to the lifespan of the radiotag.

Beaver Lake spillway in winter. The spillway drops about six feet into the brackish Mill Neck Creek, which empties into Oyster Bay. A homemade and ineffective fish ladder is currently installed.

The recovery of our Long Island streams to once more allow the magnificent movement of diadromous fishes requires communitywide effort involving government agencies, environmental organization, citizen-scientists, and biologists like me.

To study movements and habitat choices of brook trout through the preserve and Beaver Lake, we used coded transmitters, and to determine whether brook trout were reaching the Beaver Lake spillway, we used PIT tags, placing one antenna at the point where Beaver Brook enters Beaver Lake and a second antenna at the spillway where Beaver Lake empties into Mill Creek.

From summer 2012 through summer 2015 we tagged with coded transmitters 27 hatchery-reared juveniles and five hatchery-reared adults and released them into the preserve. For comparison, we captured, tagged and released 10 trout resident to Beaver Brook. We also PIT-tagged and released 244 hatcheryreared adult trout.

Our resident trout behaved as though they had read the research literature.

After tagging them, we released them back to the spot they were captured.

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Hatchery-reared fish behaved quite differently. First, they dispersed upon release moving downstream. The adult fish moved en masse to the entrance of Beaver Lake, and a small number traversed all the way to the spillway – a distance of 0.5 to 1 mile downstream from the release sites. Most of these movements occurred within the first few days following release, and the small number that made it to the spillway turned around and went back into the preserve. Similar results were observed with hatchery-reared juvenile trout but over much smaller distances: they stayed within the preserve. Second, we lost a lot of fish tagged with the coded transmitters. The signal simply disappeared within a day or week of release. At least some of this “tag loss” may have been due to predation. For example, we tracked one tag to a largemouth bass which clearly had consumed one of our juveniles. Besides large predatory fish, brook trout might be susceptible to the many bird predators found in Beaver Brook, such as heron and egrets, as well as the family of river otters that frequent the stream. Third, among the hatcheryreared fish that managed to survive at least two weeks, they continued to be very mobile, moving both upstream and

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downstream several hundred yards at a time. They would occasionally stop for a few weeks and stay in one stream habitat, which appeared to be very similar to the habitats chosen by the resident fish. At least over the period we could monitor them, they continued to wander, not staying put long enough to “put down roots.” All of this wandering increased their chances of being sighted and caught by a predator.

The detection of a few trout at the spillway was encouraging, demonstrating that anadromous behavior may be limited only by the presence of the spillway. This can be resolved in two ways: remove the dam or build a ladder for fish below the dam to swim up and enter the lake. Fish ladders are exactly what they sound like, ramps with “rungs” where pools of water collect resulting in resting areas as the fish jump up each rung.

While dam removal is preferable, it has a number of drawbacks, not the least of which are angry shorefront homeowners who suddenly see their scenic lake vista turned into a mudflat! But a fish ladder is quite doable, which is exactly what The Nature Conservancy, a nationwide environmental organization dedicated to conserving habitat, plans to build this spring. I am a partner on its $300,000 grant (including matching) from NFWF and will provide monitoring to measure improvement in fish passage. This past April I, along with NYSDEC and CSHFH personnel, captured 134 alewives from the Peconic River spawning run and transported them 60 miles to Beaver Lake. There we implanted PIT tags and released them below the spillway. Only two alewives were detected at the top of the spillway, not a surprising result, but it gives an idea of how impervious the spillway currently is. For the next few years we

will continue to release tagged alewives with the hope that we will start to see a big uptick in the number that can make it into the lake to spawn. We are also adding a video camera in the ladder so we can observe movements of tagged and untagged fish (including brook trout) passing through.

The recovery of our Long Island streams to once more allow the magnificent movement of diadromous fishes requires communitywide effort involving government agencies, environmental organization, citizen-scientists, and biologists like me. In summer 2015 Hofstra sponsored the first fish passage workshop held on Long Island. I am proud to be involved in research that makes a small contribution to improving Long Island’s aquatic habitats.

Peter Daniel holds a BS in biology from the College of Charleston, a master’s in environmental and estuarine sciences from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in animal nutrition from the University of Maine. His dissertation was on chemical sensing in post-larval American lobsters. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate in Dr. Chuck Derby’s lab at Georgia State University, studying olfactory processing in Caribbean spiny lobsters.

Dr. Daniel joined the faculty in the Department of Biology at Hofstra University in 1992 and currently holds the record for longest-serving faculty member in the department. He teaches Animal Form and Function (the first core course for majors), Animal Physiology (a senior-level course), and Biostatistics. Besides the research described here on brook trout and alewives, Dr. Daniel studies chemosensory behavior in spiny lobsters and neural basis of behavior in starfish. When not otherwise engaged, he helps take care of his dog, Bourbon, and volunteers at the Bob Sweeney Sportfishing Education and Aquaculture Center at Cedar Beach Marina, where his wife, Lenora, is director of education. Dr. Daniel’s son, Ethan, is currently pursuing a BA in religious studies at Hofstra.

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Hofstra Honors Its 2015 Mentor of the Year MAY 15, 2015 • By Neena Samuel

James E. Wiley, PhD, professor emeritus of global studies and geography, was named the 2015 Mentor of the Year, the fourth recipient of an annual award that honors outstanding faculty supervision of advanced undergraduate research. He is the second professor from the Department of Global Studies and Geography to receive this honor, following Dr. Kari Jensen, who won the recognition last year.

“I am deeply honored to be the recipient of this award,” said Dr. Wiley. “To me, it is the most meaningful award I could have won as it involves the activity that I have found the most rewarding of all during my 24 years at Hofstra.” The Mentor of the Year award is given to a full-time faculty member who has guided students toward developing original ideas for research in any discipline — from the laboratory or clinic to the library, field or stage — which marks the transition of the student into graduate studies or professional life.

Dr. Wiley, who retired at the end of the spring 2015 semester, taught courses on world regional geography, population and migration geography, and geographic methodology. In January 2015, shortly after the normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations, he helped lead a group of 15 students on Hofstra’s first study abroad program in Cuba, where they gained a firsthand perspective on the Cuban people and took in historic sites such as the University of Havana and Revolution Square. He plans to continue as co-director of next year’s Hofstra in Cuba trip as well.

In addition to teaching, Dr. Wiley supervised students’ honors theses, senior research projects, and internships. “In our department, my colleagues and I place a great deal of emphasis on our individual work in helping students maximize their potential,” he said. “A big part of what I’ve viewed as my role in the mentoring process has been to try to convince students of just how capable they really are. I do this by working with them to expand their ideas of what is possible for them to accomplish.

In a department like ours, with its global orientation, that often involves helping students prepare themselves to do foreign research, which is a phenomenal accomplishment for undergraduate students. We’ve had students do field work in the Galápagos, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, among other places, with projects in India and Cambodia on tap this summer. We are very proud of this.”

Students and faculty who nominated Dr. Wiley all mentioned his devotion to his students and his ability to inspire: “Professor Wiley is one of the most dedicated, insightful members of the Hofstra family. He helped ignite my love of geography and has been a dependable mentor ever since.”

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“In a semester’s worth of classes, he’s capable of opening up a world that exists outside of the University, the state, the country — one that includes so many other cultures, so many other people and their histories, one that includes, well, the world.”

“I owe him my gratitude for encouraging me to go as far as the Dominican Republic to simultaneously investigate my research question firsthand, practice my Spanish in a foreign context, and familiarize myself with my father’s family in that country, to the delight of my parents and myself.”

“I am excited to nominate my colleague Dr. James Wiley for the Mentor of the Year award ... I have had the pleasure to serve on several of the honors committees of his students over the years, and I have been impressed by the high level of academic conversation between him and his students, and his always encouraging and listening style of mentorship.”

“Dr. Wiley encouraged me to go out and do research in my home country of Haiti ... and to accompany him on the study abroad trip in Cuba, which really was life-changing. Dr. Wiley has been immensely integral to my success here at Hofstra.”

Dr. Wiley joined Hofstra in 1991, and over the years added several new courses to the geography curriculum, including specific regional courses on Latin America, South America, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, Africa, and Australia and the Pacific. He was also the first director of Hofstra’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program. A world traveler, he has visited more than 120 countries and uses his photographs and notes to enrich the classroom experience for students.

“The annual award reaffirms Hofstra’s recognition of advanced undergraduate research and dedicated faculty supervision as part of its commitment to teaching excellence,” said Neil H. Donahue, assistant provost for undergraduate research and fellowships.

Dr. Wiley was presented with the Mentor of the Year award at the Honors Convocation on Sunday, May 17, 2015. In addition to Drs. Wiley and Jensen from Global Studies and Geography, previous winners of the award were Media Studies Professor Mary Ann Allison and Biology Professor Justin DiAngelo.

Hofstra HORIZONS

Hofstra at a Glance LOCATION Hempstead, Long Island, 25 miles east of New York City.

Telephone: 516-463-6600 CHARACTER A private, nonsectarian, coeducational university.

PRESIDENT Stuart Rabinowitz, JD COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS Frank G. Zarb School of Business; Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs; School of Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts; School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics); Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine at Hofstra University; Hofstra Northwell School of Graduate Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies at Hofstra University; Hofstra University Continuing Education; Honors College; Lawrence Herbert School of Communication; Maurice A. Deane School of Law; School of Education; School of Engineering and Applied Science; School of Health Professions and Human Services FACULTY There are 1,161 faculty members, of whom 498 are full-time. Ninety-two percent of full-time faculty hold the highest degree in their fields.

STUDENT BODY Undergraduate enrollment of 6,833. Total University enrollment, including graduate, School of Law and School of Medicine, is about 10,870. Undergraduate male-female ratio is 47-to-53.

PROGRAM OPTIONS Bachelorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degrees are offered in about 155 program options.

Graduate degrees, including PhD, EdD, PsyD, AuD, JD, and MD, advanced certificates and professional diplomas, are offered in about 170 program options.

THE HOFSTRA CAMPUS With 113 buildings and 240 acres, Hofstra is a member of the American Public Gardens Association.

LIBRARIES The Hofstra libraries contain 1 million+ volumes and provide 24/7 online access to more than 75,000 full-text journals and 160,000 electronic books.

ACCESSIBILITY Hofstra is 100 percent program accessible to persons with disabilities.

JANUARY AND SUMMER SESSIONS Hofstra offers a January session and three summer sessions between May and August.

Trustees of Hofstra University As of April 2016 OFFICERS Alan J. Bernon,* Chair Karen L. Lutz, Vice Chair David S. Mack,* Vice Chair Robert D. Rosenthal,* Vice Chair Peter G. Schiff, Secretary Stuart Rabinowitz, President MEMBERS Tejinder Bindra Kenneth Brodlieb James Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Addario* Helene Fortunoff Steven J. Freiberg* Arno H. Fried Martin B. Greenberg* Leo A. Guthart Peter S. Kalikow* Arthur J. Kremer Diana E. Lake* Elizabeth McCaul Janis M. Meyer* John D. Miller* Marilyn B. Monter* Martha S. Pope Julio A. Portalatin* James E. Quinn* Edwin C. Reed Michael Roberge* Debra A. Sandler* Thomas J. Sanzone* Donald M. Schaeffer Michael Seiman* Leonard H. Shapiro Joseph Sparacio* George James Tsunis Steven C. Witkoff* Frank G. Zarb* DELEGATES Stuart L. Bass,* Speaker of the Faculty Eugene Maccarrone,* Chair, University Senate Executive Committee William Nirode, Chair, University Senate Planning and Budget Committee Andrew F. Corrado,* President, Alumni Organization Alyson Guarino, President, Student Government Association Damian Gallagher, Vice President, Student Government Association James M. Shuart,* President Emeritus Wilbur Breslin, Trustee Emeritus Emil V. Cianciulli,* Chair Emeritus John J. Conefry, Jr., Chair Emeritus Maurice A. Deane,* Chair Emeritus George G. Dempster,* Chair Emeritus Joseph L. Dionne,* Trustee Emeritus Lawrence Herbert,* Trustee Emeritus Florence Kaufman, Trustee Emerita Walter B. Kissinger, Trustee Emeritus Ann M. Mallouk,* Chair Emerita Norman R. Tengstrom,* Trustee Emeritus *Hofstra alumni

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Superstorm Sandyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Legacy: Studying How Coastal Residents Decide Whether to Evacuate See page 10.

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