ISTOCKPHOTO
wellesley magazine
SPRING 2013
WINDOW ON WELLESLEY
11
OBJECT OF OUR ATTENTION
Rocks of Ages to Associate Professor of Geosciences David Hawkins. In them, he can read the history of the Earth or determine the environment in which particular specimens were formed. Sit with him for a few moments, and he’ll read you an engrossing tale from the many samples in the geosciences department collection—whether it’s a greenish specimen or a rock studded with fossil shells that appear to be gold. The greenish sample, Hawkins says, is a chunk of the Earth’s mantle that was spewed up in an eruption from 60 kilometers below the surface of the planet. The minerals present—in this case, predominately olivine—give us some sense of the temperature and pressure where the rock originated in the Earth’s interior. The fossil, on the other hand, was formed on the planet’s surface, Hawkins explains. During the Cretaceous period, shallow seas covered Europe, and shelled animals like ammonites (similar to a squid with a shell) lived in the water columns. The unfortunate creatures who became this fossil sank to deep water and got buried in mud, an oxygen-poor environment. The calcium in their calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells was replaced by iron and the carbonite by sulphur. The result? Pyrite, or fool’s gold (FeS2). “This conversion to pyrite,” Hawkins says, “actually preserves the shells in great detail. … It’s really cool.” Specimens like this fossil are used in survey courses on the history of the Earth and in a biology course on evolution. Rocks such as these, Hawkins says, “are critical for reconstructing the history of the Earth and how the environments of the Earth have changed through time. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.” ROCKS ARE AN OPEN BOOK
Room for Debate a liberal, and a libertarian walk into a classroom. Waiting for the punch line? If Professor Tom Cushman’s hopes were realized, this would be the set-up for a great intellectual debate, not a bad joke. For a few years, the Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology has been trying to generate “more pluralism in the intellectual diversity on campus.” His 2013 Wintersession program, the Freedom Project, expands on that effort. The program, funded by a donation from Nancy Johnston Records ’56 and her husband, George, provided 15 students with a week’s worth of exposure to ideas related to freedom. It encouraged participants to engage in “intensive debate with scholars and practitioners whom students would not ordinarily meet in the course of their studies at Wellesley,” says Cushman: a libertarian philosopher and economist, an anarchist philosopher, a legal scholar with expertise in humanitarian intervention, and a leading libertarian journalist, among others. The political leanings of this year’s participants ranged from dyed-in-the-wool feminist A CONSERVATIVE,
liberal to libertarian to conservative, maybe even some moderates, but they shared a healthy respect for the process. “Even the students who were comfortably entrenched in their own viewpoints were willing and eager to hear the opinions of others,” says Bailey Desmond ’14, an economics and philosophy major. “The debate was good for everyone. There is truly nothing better to strengthen your own philosophy than hearing opposing arguments.” The real problem with political debate, both on campus and off, according to Cushman, “is that it gets polarized really quickly. So I’m trying to put up speed bumps so students will think rationally about their arguments instead of rushing to emotion or ideology.” One very effective speed bump for the week in January: The 15 participants all lived together, sharing meals and long days for the course of the week. Under those conditions, “everyone’s liable to be more considerate,” says Desmond, “since you couldn’t escape a person you insulted.”
—Alice Hummer
—Jennifer Flint
RICHARD HARD HOWARD HOWA