The Final Frontier T

he day before Ripon begins its fall semester (Monday, Aug. 21, 2017) the United States will experience a total solar eclipse, visible for the first time coastto-coast in almost a century. While the best viewing spots won’t be in Wisconsin (southern Illinois, however, is right on the eclipse’s pathway), it will be an opportunity for Americans to again be reminded of the vastness of our solar system and our desire to understand its mysteries.

Ripon (and Green Lake, too) are great places for amateur astronomers to observe the nighttime skies. And when I look at the heavens during a Wisconsin summertime evening, arrayed full of stars, I think of a favorite poem by Elizabeth Bishop, an American who had a special connection to Brazil. Describing the paper fire balloons that Brazilians launch into the skies to celebrate St. John’s Day every June 24, which also happens to be my birthday, she wrote in The Armadillo :

Once up against the sky it’s hard to tell them from the stars — planets, that is — the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it’s still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous.”

For those of us who view space with amateur wonder, Ripon College’s achievements in the sciences, including space exploration and discovery, are remarkable. In this issue, you’ll get to read about some of the College’s amazing stories. For example, William F. Meggers (Class of 1910) has a crater on the moon named after him. Students of Associate Professor of Art Mollie Oblinger, with assistance of astronomy students of Assistant Professor of Physics

Leah Simon, recently completed an interactive planet walk for local stargazers on the prairie just west of campus. Jeffrey Bantle (Class of 1980) is a former NASA flight engineer. Jennifer White (Class of 2003) is engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility. There is even a remarkable group of alumni who all took the same physics class at Ripon, interconnected throughout their lives and now all work for NASA. And Spencer Reisbick (Class of 2014) is attending a Ph.D. program in chemical physics and material science at the University of Minnesota where he’s doing research on electronic device materials so small they cannot be seen by most microscopes. Of course, make sure to check out the incredible array of graduate schools and job opportunities that the Class of 2017 lists as their next destinations. Is there a space traveler in the group? As the 21st century progresses, it sure seems possible. To keep the analogy going, every spring Ripon College launches newly minted grads into the galaxies, so to speak. We are proud that our graduates will push the boundaries and new frontiers of research, teaching and discovery, whether it is in space, poetry, law or medicine. So here’s to the Class of 2017! Live long and prosper. And may the force (of Ripon) be with you, always.

Little is known about these beautiful, cyanotype prints from 1906, except that they were taken of Ripon College students on a sunny, gorgeous day. The location is Tuleta Hills on the southern shore of Green Lake, about seven miles from the College.

NEW FRONTIERS IN LEARNING: The pathway to creating a Catalyst course

The Catalyst curriculum is a five-course Concentration in Applied Innovation that launched in the fall of 2016. Catalyst consists of five seminars, two in the first year, two in the sophomore year, and the applied innovation seminar in the junior year. It rigorously develops the 21st-century skills that employers seek while streamlining the path to graduation.

The first semester of 210 Catalyst courses — focusing on intercultural competence — begins in the fall of 2017. The courses all are new and are designed to help students identify and challenge biases and assumptions, and become attentive to ways in which our own cultural assumptions shape perception. The courses also begin to develop awareness of and empathy for the worldviews of other cultures.

One new course is “Pickers and Artists: Culture in Antiques and Art,” team-taught by Associate Professor of Sociology Jacqueline Clark and Associate Professor of Art Mollie Oblinger. They are combining their mutual love of antiquing and collecting with expertise in their diverse subject areas to offer students a unique way of looking at issues of cultural diversity, power and inequalities.

“Given our overlapping interests and how collectibles and art both offer representations of different groups and people, we thought it would be an interesting way to look at different cultural and ethnic groups, differences in power between the cultural groups and getting students to see life from the perspectives of people who are different from themselves,” Clark says.

Some of the examined groups will be racial and ethnic groups, such as minorities in our country, the “hillbilly” or “redneck,” women and Native Americans.

“We are deciding which specific groups to include and gathering popular imagery related to that,” Clark says. “How are these people represented by these objects? Who creates the art or objects and who gets to make decisions about how groups are represented?”

She says some of these stereotypes represented by historical art and objects are deeply embedded in our society and can be derogatory. “We want students to think about objects that are collected, antiques, art and the stories behind those objects to counter stereotypes.”

The two faculty members are pulling together academic readings and planning assignments.

“Jackie and I have been talking about the issues the course will be addressing for several years,” Oblinger says. “I am very excited to be teaching with her.”

“It’s a ton of work, but this will be fun and challenging because this is a true collaboration and is truly interdisciplinary,” Clark says. “I work in sociology, and Mollie works in art. By working together, we can offer the students something that, individually, we couldn’t do.”