43 minute read
The Hub
thehub
CMC Professors Heather Ferguson and Jon Shields are the inaugural co-directors of The Open Academy.
To learn more about The Open Academy, visit:
theopenacademy.cmc.edu
DYNAMIC CONVERSATION:
The Open Academy
In keeping with CMC’s mission to educate students for thoughtful and productive lives and for roles in responsible leadership, CMC’s Open Academy is a critical response to the educational imperative of our time: Overcoming what divides us to solve the world’s most challenging problems.
The Open Academy is rooted in three CMC Commitments that are foundational to the College’s academic experience and programs: Freedom of Expression and Open Inquiry, Diversity of Viewpoint and Experience, and Constructive Dialogue. This spring, Professors Heather Ferguson and Jon Shields were tapped as the inaugural faculty codirectors of The Open Academy. “As faculty co-directors of The Open Academy, Heather and Jon are each committed and highly qualified to make powerful contributions to The Open Academy and expand its impact on our campus and nationally,” said Heather Antecol, vice president for academic affairs and the dean of the faculty. Ferguson is an associate professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. Her teaching resonates with students, who honored her in 2021 with the Glenn R. Huntoon Award for Superior Teaching. Her scholarship has also been recognized, earning the 2019 Koprülu Book Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses, as well a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. In addition, Ferguson has taken on leadership roles across The Claremont Colleges, including her selection as a 2018 7C Claremont Faculty Leadership fellow.
Shields, a professor of government, teaches courses on controversial issues, such as policing, free speech, and culture wars. He is the author of three books on the American right, including Trump’s Democrats (coauthored with Stephanie Muravchik). His writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Shields, who will serve as chair of CMC’s Government department next year, is also a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and Heterodox Academy. “As faculty leaders and inaugural co-directors, Heather and Jon exemplify and champion our Open Academy commitments in all ways,” said President Hiram Chodosh. “We are all moved by the enormous promise of their appointments and critical roles in the future of CMC, the academy, and our efforts to bolster the educational foundations of our democracy.” Shortly after being named as co-directors of The Open Academy, Ferguson and Shields engaged in a spirited conversation about their shared values, the importance of teaching openness to new ideas, and the necessity of encouraging diverse viewpoints across campus. The following is an edited version of their conversation:
Congratulations! What are you looking forward to as you shape the direction of The Open Academy at CMC?
SHIELDS: I think we have a lot of room to put our heads together and think in new, innovative ways about how to enhance the curriculum and pull a lot of other faculty members into this conversation.
FERGUSON: Jon and I are both eager to make sure that The Open Academy is truly a College-wide effort, with every individual in our community feeling like they have a place and even some kind of ownership. Moreover, our hope is that their participation will somehow embody who they are, and reflect perspectives emerging from whatever their own individual status or role is at the College. So, whether it’s a student, a faculty or staff member, or somebody who’s leading an institute, that everyone feels like they have shared goals in building multivocality on campus, and the potential to impact the shape of The Open Academy. These will be the conversations that are important for changing the campus learning environment, so that The Open Academy becomes a vehicle through which ideas for how to think about free speech and potentially contentious issues both nationally and globally can be productively explored on campus.
How do you do that? What’s your approach?
SHIELDS: The challenge is to try to cultivate a culture of open inquiry, and that includes norms that can facilitate the pursuit of knowledge and truth. That’s challenging because I think the wider culture encourages us to be self-righteous. And there’s a space for that in politics, but I think at the College we have a more countercultural mission. And we want students to appreciate that mission and to embrace it.
FERGUSON: It’s also the casual conversations that are really important—the grassroots, ground-up approach. This is what I do in the classroom. I always want to ensure that every class contains multiple perspectives about any given issue, and that students are led through those diverse viewpoints and lived experiences. It’s not necessarily about adopting one or the other perspective but rather giving students the framework necessary for them to make their own moral and ethical choices about how they first understand and then act on a given issue.
What makes CMC unique in its focus in comparison to other liberal arts colleges?
SHIELDS: We are trying to push this in a more formal, programmatic way than a lot of other institutions, particularly other liberal arts colleges. I think we’re ahead of the curve, as we are developing resources to support this and trying to develop leadership around it. FERGUSON: I agree 100 percent. And, because CMC is a place where a spectrum of voices is represented, that also puts us ahead of the game on creating the institutional space for embedding those voices into every level of what we’re doing. We are thinking about curriculum development, student leadership, and community-building in ways that enhance these skills. Making the choice to have Jon and me as co-directors is, I think, an effort to suggest that the spectrum of voices and perspectives is also represented in the very structure of The Open Academy. When we institutionalize multiple voices in conversation, something more dynamic emerges.
Core Commitment
On June 18, 2020, President Hiram E. Chodosh announced CMC’s Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America. The Presidential Initiative aspires to develop a vision, strategy, action plan, and accountable measures for a “long-term, structural, integrated educational response to racism, inequality, and inequity.” This work, a core priority of the College, is challenging and vital to CMC’s shared success. Even through the pandemic, we made progress in 2020-21—and we will build on this progress “until we have developed a community that no longer needs The Presidential Initiative,” according to President Chodosh.
Core Commitments
The Initiative was created not just to support our Black community, but to expand it. Not just to study racism, but to find effective ways to end it. President Chodosh identified the following in his 2020 letter to the community: • We learn best when we own it. This is our work, our shared responsibility. • We learn by doing. This is a learning experience. • Change is effective when centrally embedded in our daily work. This is a fully integral educational response. • What’s measured gets done. This is about outcomes.
Faculty Impact
The College implemented new coursework, workshops, research collaborations, and institutional resources to bolster our commitments, most notably through a robust Faculty Fellows program with a cohort of 14 faculty and an additional five funded Course Development Grants.
Learning Experience
Several programs concretely strengthened the learning experience at CMC in grappling with the role of race and racism and its impacts. This touched all parts of campus life, including Dean of Students training and engagement, CMS Athletics outreach, and Athenaeum programming.
Shared Responsibility
The Presidential Initiative is committed to a collaborative, community effort. Our leadership team, through work with engaged steering committees for students, faculty, staff, and alumni, has established a foundation of achievement and a pathway for future actions in pursuit of clear outcomes.
The Road Ahead
By synthesizing recommendations within our community and learning from and building upon the accomplishments and challenges faced in the first phase of The Presidential Initiative, we will continue to pursue key priorities in the year ahead. To find out more about The Presidential Initiative, visit: presidentialinitiative.cmc.edu
Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine?
With the world on the brink of nuclear war, Dr. Fiona Hill and Prof. Hilary Appel grappled with the major questions in a discussion at the Ath
In early March, mere weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, instigating the largest military conflict since World War II, Dr. Fiona Hill analyzed the crisis for a packed audience at CMC’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.
Hill shared her deep expertise on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, based on her years serving three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019.
Hilary Appel, the Podlich Family Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow, and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, moderated the conversation.
The Ath discussion and the student Q&A covered a breadth of issues from the U.S. response, to China’s part in the crisis, and the potential legacies of this war, with Appel drawing upon questions that arose during her own classroom discussions. “So, why did Russia invade Ukraine?” Appel asked Hill.
That viewpoint has its roots in history, Hill said, going back to the 17th century and the Treaty of Andrusovo when parts of Ukraine were given to Russia. She added, “Putin clearly believes that there needs to be some kind of reversal of the consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union” in 1991, which he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
Appel shared that she feels “Putin… has so much to lose if he fails in Ukraine. If he fails in Ukraine, he cannot survive as the Russian president…. He will fight to the bitter end, and he will use every weapon at his disposal to do so. Given the danger of escalation, what can the United States do to prevent… a nuclear catastrophe?”
Heard at The Ath
– Dr. Fiona Hill,
at the Ath on March 9, 2022
“That’s definitely what’s keeping me up at night,” Hill said. “He’s already shown that he’s willing to do really nasty, ruthless things and to use unusual and cruel punishments… You can be sure he’s trying to figure out some way of escalating the situation so that we de-escalate…. He wants to get us to the negotiating table. He wants to change the conversation from just being about Ukraine to about the future of nuclear war.”
That unified front needs to start with our own polity, Hill suggested in response to a student question.
“I’m worried about the party infighting, the political performances that we started seeing, the lack of responsibility in people’s rhetoric, and this tendency that we always have to fall upon each other at times like this. Because again, I think this is precisely why Putin thought he could get away with this,” Hill said.
Before appearing at the Ath, Hill, who is currently a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institute, met with a group of Appel’s students, who are majoring in international relations and government for an in-depth discussion inside the Keck Center Library.
Timely Talks
During the Ukraine crisis, the CMC community called upon two of the College’s own renowned experts, Professors Wendy Lower and Hilary Appel to answer questions and apply context to events as they were unfolding.
Lower and Appel each appeared on the Ath patio for spontaneous conversations with faculty, students, and staff.
Lower, as a Holocaust historian and director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, has spent significant time in the Ukraine conducting research. In her work, Appel, who is director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, examines the politics behind post-Communist economic reforms, policies of retrospective justice, and the role of the EU and NATO in Eastern Europe.
Appel
Lower
PHOTO BY MAXIMILIAN WEIRAUCH ‘22
CMC Model UN Makes History
The CMC Model United Nations (MUN) team has scored another historic success, ranking fourth in the nation, and earning its highest national ranking ever.
In addition, team members topped their West Coast competitors by taking the No. 1 slot—becoming “Best in the West.”
The team first broke into the Top 5 in the Best Delegate rankings in 2019-2020, landing fifth in the nation and first on the West
Coast. After a year without in-person conferences during the pandemic, the CMC MUN team—which has always emphasized teamwork and camaraderie over awards—looked at 2021-2022 as a year for rebuilding. “We had not one, but two classes, so half of our team were newbies and had never been to a single in-person conference,” CMC MUN
President Kelsey Clarke ’22 said. “So, our expectations were that we wanted to rebuild to make sure that we had a solid foundation to work our way back up to Top 5 in future years.”
Instead they surpassed expectations, and ranked fourth in the
United States, in the company of the University of Chicago,
American University, and Georgetown University, according to the Best Delegate’s Fall 2021 North American College Model UN rankings. “To get to fourth in the nation right off the bat was surprising, and so rewarding!” Clarke said. “It goes a long way to show how much preparation we’ve done. We’ve taken time to revamp our team over COVID, and we modified and strengthened our training program for both General Assembly and Crisis Committee training. As a result, we’ve had a much stronger presence on the circuit.” CMC Prof. Jennifer Taw, the team’s faculty advisor, acknowledged the challenges that CMC MUN overcame. “The MUN leadership and team members showed remarkable resiliency and dedication after the frustration of trying to train, team-build, and attend conferences online for over a year,” she said. “Despite all, the MUN organization rebounded, bringing on fantastic first years and sophomores, refreshing and building up everyone’s skills, and creating a strong team dynamic,” Taw continued. “It was a pleasure working with Kelsey and Calder (Altman ’22, CMC MUN vice president) as they navigated unusual challenges and worked hard to maximize the team’s strengths.”
Some of the accomplishments that earned CMC MUN their highest ranking ever were winning delegation awards at three of the five conferences the team attended. They swept the West Coast—Berkeley, UCLA, USC and UCSB—with a pair of Best Large Delegation awards at Trojan MUN and SBI MUN, and received an Outstanding Small at NCSC. Beyond the training, Clarke said they fared so well because they are a “culture-first, award-second type of team.” “We have this tight-knit community that we foster. Our motto is ‘team comes first.’ It doesn’t matter who’s winning these individual awards. All that matters are delegation awards,” said Clarke.
Membership fluctuates between 30 and 36 members, with a high percentage of international relations, PPE, and economics majors, and everyone gets to participate.
– CMC MUN PRESIDENT KELSEY CLARKE ’22
“A lot of teams on the circuit are way bigger than ours, and only the best are allowed to travel and to compete at conferences,” she said. “With us, if you’re on the team, you get to go and compete—thanks to President Chodosh making sure we’ve always been well funded.” The CMC MUN team has tackled topics such as political elections and cybersecurity, the European refugee crisis, and sex trafficking, as well as historical committees on the Arab Spring and the Cold War. “The thing that I love, more than anything, is that these issues are real and they’re happening,” Clarke said. “And we go beyond understanding and talking about the issues to actually thinking of our own solutions. It could be the IsraelPalestine issue or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We ask, ‘What can we do to solve this?’”
Prestigious Schwarzman Scholarships Awarded
Two Claremont McKenna College graduates were awarded prestigious Schwarzman Scholarships, recognizing their exemplary leadership qualities and potential for bridging cultural and political differences.
As Schwarzman Scholars, Stz-Tsung (Stone) Han ’21 and Andrew Ciacci ’20 will be fully funded to pursue a one-year master’s degree in global affairs at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, one of China’s oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher learning.
Launched in 2015 and inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship, the Schwarzman Scholarship has previously been awarded to only one other CMC graduate—William Cullen ’19.
The mission of the Schwarzman Scholars Program is to develop global leaders who understand the economic, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to China’s increasing importance as a global power.
Han
Ciacci
Highly competitive, the Schwarzman Scholars program annually supports up to 200 Scholars. This year, out of nearly 3,000 applicants, 151 Scholars were chosen, representing 33 countries and 106 universities, with a roughly equal proportion of American, Chinese, and international Scholars.
“Having one Schwarzman Scholar is a distinct honor for CMC— having two in the same year is a remarkable achievement, and truly showcases how competitive and successful CMC students are on the international stage,” said Brian Davidson ’08, director of Fellowships Advising at CMC’s Center for Global Education.
Beginning August 2022, Han and Ciacci will live in Beijing for a year of rigorous study of global affairs with a core curriculum emphasizing leadership, China, and global affairs; immersion in Chinese commerce and culture; and personal and professional development opportunities, including internships. Scholars are taught by faculty at Tsinghua and other leading international institutions.
Entering an Elite Cadre
Jennifer Feitosa is named a Fulbright Scholar
CMC Prof. Jennifer Feitosa has joined an elite cadre, having recently been recognized with a prestigious U.S. Scholar Fulbright grant.
“The CMC community is incredibly proud of Prof. Feitosa,” said Heather Antecol, CMC’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “This award is a career-changer for her, as earning a Fulbright will allow Prof. Feitosa to expand her research and further develop her teaching. In addition, CMC will benefit from the valuable network that she will be building.”
Fulbright Scholars receive a grant to teach and/ or conduct research in a foreign country. The program started in 1946 to promote goodwill through cultural exchange among students, educators, and professionals. A total of 36 CMC faculty members have been named Fulbright Scholars, including most recently Gretchen Edwalds-Gilbert and Albert L. Park.
For Feitosa, who has long dreamed of becoming “a citizen of the world,” this award means that she is a little closer to fulfilling that dream, as she heads to Madrid for the 2022-23 academic year.
Feitosa, who is an assistant professor of psychology and director of CMC’s METRICS lab, will deepen her research and teaching, which is focused on workplace diversity, teamwork, training, and measurement.
“It is a lot easier to appreciate and understand people when we immerse ourselves in their world and culture, and practice perspective-taking,” she said. “My time in Madrid will not only enhance my professional identity related to understanding diverse teams but also personally, as I form relationships with people in other parts of the world.”
Spain, she explains, is an ideal site for her work, given that it is a leading country for expatriates, who comprise 15% of the workforce.
“Teaching and researching abroad in Spain, a country whose workforce is significantly impacted by increased diversity in workplaces in general, and teams in particular, will contribute to the development of evidence-based practices to support the pressing needs of belonging,” said Feitosa. “Moreover, these
practices need to be developed from cultural- and linguistic-diverse perspectives as well.”
Feitosa said she was grateful for the support and advice from Prof. Park, a four-time recipient of Fulbright Fellowships for Research, as she assembled her own Fulbright proposal.
“Prof. Feitosa had a strong research proposal and a dynamic record of scholarship that made her a fantastic applicant for this prestigious fellowship,” said Park, who is the Bank of America Associate Professor of Pacific Basin Studies at CMC.
“I am confident that Prof. Feitosa will gain so much from this Fulbright experience, especially building networks of collaboration that will further enhance her research and help her to break new ground in her fields of study,” he said, noting that his Fulbright fellowships allowed him to conduct vital research to write his book on environmentalism in South Korea.
In addition to working on her research project, “Integrative Team Belonging Training: An Inclusive Research and Teaching Perspective” (originally codeveloped with Claremont Graduate University Prof. M. Glória González-Morales), at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Feitosa will teach an organizational behavior course to MBA students and will lead case studies. Upon her return to CMC, Feitosa hopes that her students will be inspired by her Fulbright experience to embark on their own overseas learning opportunities and that she’ll be able to bring what she’ll learn in Madrid back to her classroom and METRICS research lab.
Feitosa, who is originally from Brazil, understands the value of exploring diverse cultures. She is trilingual (Portuguese, English, and Spanish), and spent time during her high school years in a small town in Minnesota, eventually earning her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida.
Casting an eye to the future, Feitosa said she would love to spend research time incorporating other cultural diversity components to teams. “There is still a big divide in our Western/Eastern as well as Northern/Southern knowledge, thus a continuous push for debunking some of our scientific findings is necessary,” she said.
Dan Krauss Earns Mentor and Teaching Award
An enthusiastic and devoted professor, who also leads CMC’s Psychology and Law Policy Lab, Daniel Krauss was recently honored with the Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award for 2022 from the American Psychology-Law Society. His nomination was supported by letters from several colleagues and former students who are now in graduate school or the professions and continue to interact with him long past their graduation from CMC. In one nomination letter, a former student wrote: “Dr. Krauss is incredibly engaging and consistently interweaves his own personal practice experiences with the academic material. He is approachable, with an excellent sense of humor, and he makes himself readily available for students to visit his office, talk after class, or discuss topics by email.” Despite his approachability, students commented that Krauss is not an “easy” professor. “His exams were difficult, and he rigorously graded papers, but if a student invested energy into the class, she would reap the benefits. “
Colleagues are equally enthusiastic about Krauss’ teaching, with one writing, “From the first time he stepped into a classroom at CMC, Dan has been an exceptional teacher…. Students appreciate his knowledge, enthusiasm, caring, and his ability to present both complex research findings and intriguing clinical case studies. Dan is not only a terrific teacher, he is also an incredibly caring and capable mentor. “ Krauss said he is honored by the award. “My goal has always been to provide excellent teaching, research, clinical training, and mentoring to my students, but more importantly to help them develop the critical thinking skills and experiences that make them better people whatever career path they pursue.”
Finding Value in Real Estate
As part of a new, first-of-its-kind experiential learning program, a team of nine CMC students spent hours throughout their fall— often in front of the Hub—collaborating on commercial real estate pitches, development plans, and financial models.
This student team came together through a special partnership between CMC’s Soll Center for Student Opportunity and Project Destined, a national commercial real estate program that delivers hands-on experience through project-based learning and pitch competitions.
Project Destined trains diverse students in commercial real estate fundamentals through mentorship and a rigorous curriculum. To reinforce what they’ve learned, students take part in “Shark Tank-style” pitch competitions with rival corporate-sponsored teams from other colleges and universities. To further prepare for the competitions, student teams work with leading executives to evaluate live deals in their community and create pitch presentations.
Executives from a leading commercial real estate firm, Marcus & Millichap, served as mentors for the CMC team. Each student also virtually attended a series of lectures featuring industry executives focused on a specific part of a real estate transaction.
To apply what they learned, the team worked on a live deal—based on a real multifamily property in Pomona—and presented it to a group of judges who are real estate professionals. To complete the project, team members collaborated to create an offering memorandum, which includes an investment risk profile for the property, an understanding of the property’s location and tenant base, as well as a renovation plan to upgrade each unit.
For team member Sabrina Zhou ’23, the program has been “transformational.” Zhou, who is currently working toward her BA in economics and an MA in finance, credits her Project Destined experience with sparking her interest in real estate as a potential profession. She shifted her employment recruitment efforts to real estate and recently accepted an offer to join Mack Real Estate Group as a 2022 summer analyst.
Winter Standouts
Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Athletics enjoyed a successful set of accomplishments as teams concluded their winter seasons. Here are a few notables:
• Men’s Swimming and Diving: Won its 39th SCIAC Championship in program history. The team also came in eighth place at the NCAA Division III Championships with its highest point total since 1998. Frank Applebaum ’24 won a national championship in the 200-yard butterfly in NCAA Division III record time (1:44.01); while Lucas Lang
HMC ’25 came in second in the 1,650-yard freestyle. Nick Tekieli HMC ’24 was third in the 100-yard backstroke;
Applebaum fifth in the 100-yard butterfly; and Marco Conati HMC ’22 seventh in the 100-yard butterfly for individual first-team All-America performances. Three relay teams (200-yard medley relay, 400yard medley relay, 400-yard freestyle relay) also earned first-team All-America distinction.
• Women’s Swimming and Diving: Finished 11th at the NCAA Division III
Championships, the program’s highest finish since 2012. Augusta Lewis ’22 was a first-team All-American in three different events, finishing second in the 400-yard individual medley, third in the 200-yard individual medley, and fourth in the 200-yard breaststroke. Ava Sealander SCR ’22 was sixth in the 100 fly, and
Jameson Mitchum ’23 was seventh in the 200 backstroke, earning first-team
All-America honors with top-eight finishes.
• Women’s Indoor Track and Field: Brooke Simon ’23 and Meredith Bloss HMC ’23 earned All-America honors at the NCAA Division III Indoor Track and Field
Championships in Winston-Salem, N.C. Simon came in sixth place in the pole vault by matching her personal best at 3.80 meters, while Bloss was in seventh place in the 5,000 meters, after previously earning All-America honors during cross-country season in the fall, when she led CMS to a second-place finish.
• Men’s Basketball: Josh Angle ’23 earned Academic All-America honors for the Stags when he was named to the third team after leading CMS in scoring (18.8 points per game) and helping the Stags to a 17-8 final record and a third-place finish in SCIAC. Angle, who carries over a 3.9 grade point average in economics, became the fourth player in program history to earn Academic All-America distinction and was one of only two non-seniors out of 15 chosen to the three Academic All-America teams.
Applebaum
— Ran Libeskind-Hadas CMC Founding Chair for the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences
Prof. Cathy Reed’s PURSUE Project
ourtney Hooks ’23 is the face of the future. Her career goal is to play a leadership role in the therapeutics industry. To succeed, she’ll need to stretch beyond biology, her undergraduate major. She’ll also need all the tools a liberal arts education can bestow.
Claremont McKenna College keeps pushing Hooks “outside my comfort zone.” She’s discovered a love of Middle Eastern art and history. “I am also getting a great deal of leadership experience—much more than I would have gotten at a larger school,” said Hooks, who plans to pursue graduate study in biochemistry and is head consultant with the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and an Appel Fellow.
In blending disciplines, Hooks is doing it right, and CMC is ensuring that all students make the most of their liberal arts education to thrive in their chosen professions. (Read more about Courtney Hooks ’23 in Student Spotlight on page 23.)
To that end, the College is working to transform the way that science is taught in a liberal arts context, beginning with a the creation of an innovative general education sequence that will be taken by all CMC students. These courses will provide students with powerful and general approaches to problem-solving scientific reasoning, while continuing to engage future scientists.
“We live in a world in which scientific discovery, computational breakthroughs, and the technological applications of them are infusing almost everything we do,” said CMC President Hiram E. Chodosh. “Responsible leadership means leading in response to the socio-scientific grand challenges and opportunities. It is our
responsibility to prepare students for the intersections that haven’t yet been reached.”
Breakthroughs in genomics, neuroscience, and renewable energy come with increasingly complex societal, economic, political, legal, and ethical implications. Tomorrow’s legal experts, policymakers, consultants—not to mention CEOs—will need fluency to participate in a science-rich discourse that increasingly touches every decision.
The key lies in integrated sciences. When so much is connected to science and big data, a siloed model of undergraduate education rooted in the 19th century no longer works.
Integrated sciences break down those boundaries, and CMC has embraced the concept in a paradigm-shifting way. Building on its core strengths and foundational liberal arts and leadership mission, CMC is becoming a national model.
Alumni of the future will reflect on 2021-22 as the most significant academic year in the College’s history, a transformational moment. The year opened with the College recruiting Ran Libeskind-Hadas as the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences founding chair, and Muriel Poston to fill the newly created position of vice president of strategic initiatives. Libeskind-Hadas and Poston worked closely with Heather Antecol and Emily Wiley, respectively CMC’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty and associate dean of faculty, to develop an expansive vision and ambitious implementation plan.
“To be successful in a complicated world requires a multidisciplinary approach. It is not just a concept, it’s how you teach students to think, because we don’t live in silos. Everything is connected. Introducing CMC students on how to integrate concepts such as policy and data science is incredibly important.”
Tracy Wang ’04
Senior Research Program Manager Microsoft’s Azure Engineering
(Read more about Tracy Wang on p. 58.)
“Education is about teaching students how to think and to problem solve. To have the ability to address questions about the ownership of genomic findings, the sanctity and privacy of personal data, the conflicts between technologies that advance commerce while harming the environment.… Ethical consideration has to be part of everything we do, not just in technology, but in the humanities, in politics, and in science. In every field.”
Henry Kravis ’67
CMC Trustee Co-Founder and Executive Co-Chairman Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Students during their EnviroLab Asia Clinic Trip in Borneo
Health, Brain, Planet
CMC’s Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences program will build a “common on-ramp to the sciences” through general education courses and create meaningful conversations around the impact of science on society.
The program will be organized around three major socio-scientific grand challenges: health, brain, and planet.
Several of the facets of these grand challenges were highlighted by the National Science Foundation in 2021 as among “the most important challenges that humankind has ever faced.”
The three priorities interrelate with one another and provide opportunities for important intersections with the study of psychological sciences, history, economics and business, government and policy, philosophy and ethics, and other disciplines at CMC.
The Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences’ three foci will prepare students for myriad pathways upon graduation.
• Health (Genomics, Systems Biology, and
Health)—the exploration of molecular data to understand the function and regulation of genes, the biological systems that they control, and the development of predictive models that ultimately contribute to improving human health; • Brain (Brain, Learning, and Decision)—the investigation of mental processes, behavior, and decision-making, including aspects of neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning; and
• Planet (Climate, Energy, and the
Environment)—the examination of atmospheric processes and the chemical, physical, and biological aspects of climate change, and the interactions of human activities and the natural and built environments.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19
After 18 months of remarkable challenges due to the pandemic, the CMC community made a triumphant return to campus and realized our vision by implementing the 2019 CMC Strategy Report through a significant investment in integrated sciences. By the end of the fall semester return to campus, CMC unveiled plans for an iconic structure to house the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences. Known as the Robert Day Sciences Center, the 140,000-square-foot facility honors Robert Day ’65 P’12, a 50-year CMC trustee, and W.M. Keck Foundation Chair and Chief Executive Officer. It is supported by a $40 million lead gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and generous investments from foundations affiliated with the Robert Day family. The College announced the naming of the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences to kick off 2022. Philanthropist, trustee, and alumnus Henry Kravis ’67 and his wife, Marie-Josée, made a transformative commitment of up to $215 million in support of CMC’s vision for a next-generation program. “A liberal arts education is about teaching students how to think and to problem- solve. It’s imperative for both science and humanities majors to receive a broad education. Ethical consideration has to be part of everything we do, not just in technology, but in the humanities, in politics, and in science. In every field,” Kravis said.
The Kravises’ gift will support the appointment of 25 world-class liberal arts faculty, including 12 Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences chairs. The new integrated sciences faculty seek to blur the boundaries between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, embracing computation as a tool to explore contemporary questions. Together, the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences and the Robert Day Sciences Center represent an educational evolution in how the College will prepare CMCers—one that deliberately and coherently integrates sciences and computation with the humanities and social sciences to address big thematic priorities in scientific discovery and application: such as (i) health, including genomics, systems biology; (ii) brain, including brain health, as well as learning and decision sciences; and (iii) planet, including climate, energy, and the environment.
“The opportunity to be a participant in building an entirely new science program in the middle of the 21st century is absolutely exciting,” says Poston, an environmental biologist and an authority on science education public policy who has filled major leadership roles at the National Science Foundation.
Libeskind-Hadas shares Poston’s excitement.
“Our approach is a real game-changer for CMC,” says the computer scientist, formerly the R. Michael Shanahan Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College.
CONTINUES ON PAGE 26
Tina Daniels ’93
CMC Trustee and Chair, Kravis Leadership Institute Advisory Board Managing Director, Analytics & Measurement, Google
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
In classic CMC fashion, Courtney Hooks ’23 is pursuing a wide variety of academic interests. Although Hooks is a biology major, she is deeply passionate about Middle Eastern art and history. “The plethora of opportunities at CMC has pushed me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to get involved in activities both familiar and completely new,” she said. “I am also getting a great deal of leadership experience, much more than I would have gotten at a larger school.” Hooks is the head consultant with CMC’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse, holds an Appel fellowship, and participates in clubs and activities, which have helped her stretch herself in a similar way. She highlights Prof. Heather Ferguson as one of her most “impactful” mentors at CMC. “I took her Graphic Novel and Middle Eastern History class my first semester of CMC, and she was also my advisor for the Appel fellowship,” Hooks said. “She is very encouraging and gives great advice.” While Hooks’ interests still range wide, her long-term aspirations have already taken a clear direction. She plans to attend graduate school and study biochemistry, with the goal of pursuing a therapeutics industry career in research and development. Eventually, Hooks hopes to “work in a capacity that directly impacts underserved communities in my hometown of Los Angeles, and address disparities in access to life-saving treatments and therapeutics in clinical trials,” she said.
“The leadership of our nation, and globally, will need to have a clear understanding of the process of science, the way in which the data that science generates can be interpreted and modeled, and to understand the kinds of processes and skills that it takes, particularly computational skills, to be predictive about what may happen next. And that’s what we hope to foster so that CMC will be producing leaders who have these basic skill sets of understanding how data can become predictive and, most importantly, where data comes from, in order to be able to apply that to the scientific challenges of the 21st century.”
Muriel Poston
CMC Vice President for Strategic Initiatives
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Aditi Chitre ’22 is passionate about building a more scienceinclusive campus culture at CMC. Which explains why her hand was among the first to go up when CMC administrators requested student volunteers to offer feedback on how CMC should shape the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, to be housed in the new Robert Day Sciences Center. “I hope that my contributions from a student perspective make the CMC experience more fulfilling for future students, those pursuing a career in science and those who aren’t,” she said. “The Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences proposes to offer more courses at the intersection of STEM and the humanities, which naturally appeals to me as a neurophilosophy major.” In her time at CMC, Chitre has also worked as an undergraduate research assistant with Prof. Cathy Reed in the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and served as president of the Claremont Colleges Emergency Medical Services (CCEMS) club. With CCEMS, Chitre created public health education initiatives, research discussion groups, healthcare speaker panels, and a nationwide virtual free tutoring/mentoring network for K-12 students. The Claremont native’s future plans involve working in the healthcare industry before heading to medical school. “CMC’s approach to science is what our students need,” Chitre said. “Some of the most important issues society faces—and will continue to face—have to do with public health crises, climate change, and artificial intelligence. The integrated sciences department will equip CMC students, both in science and non-science, with the skills needed to tackle these challenges.”
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23
Libeskind-Hadas and Poston both speak from experience. He co-chaired the committee that led to the most recent revision of Harvey Mudd’s core curriculum. Poston developed Howard University’s initial environmental science program.
Faculty searches will commence as early as the 2022–23 academic year, and the first handful of Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences appointments may arrive as soon as the fall of 2023. When fully constituted, the 25-member department will organize and integrate science education around socio-scientific grand challenges falling under the broad themes of health, brain, and planet (see sidebar p. 21). New interdisciplinary majors will be proposed and launched under each theme.
Our future leaders—be they economists, politicians, journalists, consultants, or CEOs—will learn science by doing science. Because computational methods are now ubiquitous to all knowledge, everyone will study the foundations of programming, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning. According to Libeskind-Hadas, few other liberal arts colleges in the country currently provide this level of computing and quantitative literacy for all students.
Because the program is organized around overlapping foci rather than traditional scientific disciplinary units, the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences will instill confidence in all CMC graduates to take on novel problems that do not neatly fit into traditional silos and embolden them, throughout their careers, to employ whatever methods and concepts may apply.
CMC’s program will respond to a growing need for computationally-rich science curricula, hands-on learning opportunities, and “science in the public sphere,” especially for non-science majors. This will include building a “common on-ramp to the sciences” through general education courses and creating meaningful conversations around the impact of science on society—for instance, in cross-disciplinary areas like neuroeconomics, climate policy, bioethics, science journalism, and the ethics of algorithms.
“Our program is unique in creating a common science experience for all students,” LibeskindHadas says. “We want to make everyone a better thinker, so they’re able to synthesize the complexities of the world, which simply don’t arrive in neat and tidy disciplinary boxes.
“Our integrated approach will provide all our majors with cross-cutting problem-solving skills,” Libeskind-Hadas said.
– Diane Krieger
Fundamental Principles
A unique feature of the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences program is a general education sequence called IIS: Introduction to Integrated Sciences. Informally, the course is being conceived as “The Code of Life”–where “code” is a double entendre referring both to the genetic code and to computer code.
In this course, students will learn fundamental principles of biology beginning with the transcription and translation of genes to the cells and complex biological systems that they regulate and control. Students will also learn to program in Python to analyze and make inferences from the data that they collect in their lab work as well as to design and implement computational models that can serve to explain and predict the behavior of biological systems.
The envisioned course will be organized around a sequence of month-long microcosm research modules, each one presenting a compelling and current openended question and providing students with both the scientific and computational tools required to design, conduct, and analyze experiments to discover their own answers to the question. In many cases, these questions will have important connections to ethics, policy, and other human and societal connections that will provide rich opportunities for engagement with the humanities and social sciences.
Students will also learn to present data in clear and meaningful ways and to communicate their findings to a broad audience. In a typical module, students may make a podcast or infographic presentation of their findings and conclusions. At the end of the IIS sequence, students will have an opportunity to work on a capstone research project and present their results at a College-wide poster session.
By the end of this course, students will have developed an understanding of the processes of scientific discovery through first-hand experiences. They will also have a powerful toolkit in computing and data science that can be leveraged in many other contexts beyond the sciences. Finally, they will have developed the skills to reason and communicate scientific results—and their impacts and relationship to society—to a broad audience.
E. David Hetz ’80 P’10
CMC Vice Chair of the Board CEO, Prager & Co., LLC
CMC has named 13 highly accomplished scientists and science educators to its inaugural Integrated Sciences Advisory Council. “It’s an incredible cohort, and we’re very excited about what they see as the big challenges and opportunities for undergraduate science education in this country,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, founding chair, Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, who convened the council’s first meeting in March.
David Asai Howard Hughes Medical Institute Senior Director, Science Education
Harriet B. Nembhard ’91 University of Iowa Dean, College of Engineering CMC Trustee
Pavel Pevzner University of California San Diego Ronald R. Taylor Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Director, NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry Lynn Stein Olin College of Engineering Professor of Computing and Cognitive Science Robert Gentleman Harvard Medical School Founding Executive Director, Center for Computational Biomedicine Andrew Dessler Texas A&M University Professor, Reta A. Haynes Chair in Geosciences Karen Willcox University of Texas at Austin Director, The Oden Institute Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems Ted Abel University of Iowa Director, Iowa Neuroscience Institute Roy J. Carver Chair in Neuroscience Department Executive Officer, Neuroscience and Pharmacology Steve Willard P’23 Member, National Science Board Former CEO, Cellphire Therapeutics Mark Kamlet Carnegie Mellon University University Professor, Economics and Public Policy Provost Emeritus
Linda Hyman Marine Biological Laboratory Burroughs Wellcome Director of Education
Carl Wieman Stanford University Professor, Physics and Graduate School of Education
Ajit Singh Partner, Artiman White Space Investments Adjunct Professor, Stanford School of Medicine
Aditi Chitre ’22
(Read more about Aditi Chitre ’22 in Student Spotlight on page 25.)
Harriet B. Nembhard ’91
CMC Trustee Dean of the University of Iowa College of Engineering
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Before graduating CMC with a neuroscience degree, Bryan Marin ’22 had already landed a job as a software engineer at Palantir, a tech company with a global presence. Bryan said he was ready, thanks to his liberal arts education and residential campus experience. “Being on a campus like CMC’s prepares you for working with all kinds of people,” he said. “I learned a lot just talking to my friends from a wide range of majors.” While at CMC, Bryan switched from majoring in computer science to neuroscience, although he ranks the algorithms course co-taught by Xanda Schofield and Ran Libeskind-Hadas as one of his all-time favorite courses. LibeskindHadas—now founding chair of the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences at CMC —also served as Bryan’s advisor. While Palantir had been on his radar since his middle school days in Hollywood, Florida, Bryan learned about the job through 1Gen, a CMC support group for first-generation college students. Now his brother Kevin ’25 has joined him on campus, pursuing a degree in data science. “I came to CMC because Bryan was having such a high-quality experience,” Kevin says. “I want to work in coding,” he adds, noting that his favorite class is “Computing for the Web” with mathematics professor Michael Izbicki. “I’m thankful to have Bryan to guide me. He’s introduced me to so many opportunities on campus.”
An Iconic Space
Designed by the world-renowned architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, the Robert Day Sciences Center’s open and light-filled design is a metaphor for conversations between core disciplines and the College’s innovation of undergraduate integrated sciences education.
“Transformational programs require equally powerful facilities,” said President Hiram E. Chodosh.
The 140,000-square-foot center is BIG’s latest foray into higher education. In addition to the CMC project, BIG is working on a number of buildings throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. BIG’s architectural designs emerge out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes.
Upon entering, students will find themselves in a full-height atrium with open spaces that invite collaborative activity. Composed of mostly glass walls, the building will convey a sense of transparency needed to foster dynamic interaction between students, faculty, staff, and experts.
Inside the Center, more high-trafficked areas—the Workshop, the Innovation Hub, and the Agora—will provide spaces for study, group projects, multidisciplinary work, presentations, and virtual convenings throughout the facility.
There will be classrooms, offices for faculty, and teaching and research labs—all flexibly designed to adapt to multiple uses. Plans also call for terraces allowing easy access to the outdoors, visibility to the main atrium, plenty of natural light, and space for public art.
Located on the eastern edge of the current campus footprint at the corner of Ninth Street and Claremont Boulevard, the Robert Day Sciences Center will create a strong presence and gateway on Claremont Boulevard, while launching a series of campus developments and improvements to prepare CMC for its next chapter.
Construction is expected to begin this summer, with an estimated two-year build timeline.
