Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

WINTER 2024

Classroom

Introducing a new Liberal Arts Core Curriculum P.22 Voices

Latitude Adjustment P.6 Alumni

SUNRISE TO SUNSET Spend a day on the Hill through photos capturing life at Colgate. P.30

Mapping Uncharted Waters P.20

mark diorio

look “We sing the alma mater song [lyrics], ‘when through thy valley,’ and this is a valley that was carved by glaciers,” says Joe Levy, associate professor of earth and environmental geosciences. In the fall, Levy taught Advanced Topics: Cryosphere, during which he introduced student researchers to the Earth’s icy regions — the cryosphere. Their survey of the frozen and increasingly melting parts of Earth included valleys within the Hamilton area. “Every person who drives to Colgate sees evidence of the ice age,” Levy says.

“It defines what soils we’re building on and where the hills are.

The giant boulders, steep valleys, and lakes are all glacier markers embedded in the landscape here.

The rivers and streams follow those old valleys.”

Read this issue and all previous issues at colgate.edu/magazine.

Winter 2024

Colgate Magazine

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Contents

WINTER 2024

Colgate’s Core: Where Conversations Begin, Continue, and Change The new Liberal Arts Core Curriculum that began this fall maintains the Colgate tradition while introducing fresh perspectives.

President’s Message

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letters

5

Discover

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Looking for Evidence in Eruptions Erika Rader ’07 searches for clues about Mars’ ancient past in lava flows closer to home.

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‘Millions of People Are Affected by More Than One of These Issues’ Voices

Latitude Adjustment

A more equitable system can be achieved when intersectionality is factored into policymaking decisions, writes Margaret Perez Brower ’11 in her new book.

19

With grit and determination, Danielle Cheifetz ’05 tested her navigation skills during a grueling endurance rally through the desert.

Mapping Uncharted Waters

Scene

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6

Colgate News 8

Che Ku Kyet ’24, p. 11

As a NOAA-commissioned officer, Rob Sobelsohn ’19 is helping to plot the ocean floor off the coast of Alaska.

Wrestling With the Bomb Through two fellowships on issues around nuclear weapons, historian Anna Pluff ’20 looks to explore alternative futures.

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Cover: Dale Lepper ’25 and the men’s soccer team run drills during practice one evening in September. Photo by Laura Barisonzi.

See more on p. 30.

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Sunrise to Sunset on the Hill Spend a day capturing life at Colgate with photographer Laura Barisonzi.

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Vice President for University Outreach and Chief of Staff to the President L. Hazel Jack Managing Editor Aleta Mayne

We can remember the goodness of humanity. We can have empathy.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa p. 8

Endeavor

Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Assistant Vice President, University Communications and Strategic Initiatives Mark Walden Senior Art Director Karen Luciani University Photographer Mark DiOrio Communications Specialist Kathy Jipson

Taking His Shot Jon Lopez ’06 praises the athletes and shows his love of basketball through videography and photography for clients like the New York Knicks.

Contributors: Omar Ricardo Aquije, athletics communications manager; Kelli Ariel, web manager; Daniel DeVries, assistant vice president, university communications and media relations; Mary Donofrio, advancement communications dir.; Jordan Doroshenko, dir., athletic communications; Bernie Freytag, art dir.; Garrett Mutz, sr. designer; Brian Ness, sr. multimedia producer; Kristin Putman, sr. social media strategist; Amber Springer, web content specialist

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Changing the World Through Behavioral Science Jessica Li ’15 works with a global nonprofit to evaluate and solve social problems.

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Printed and mailed from Lane Press in South Burlington, Vt.

William Andrews ’16 p. 83

Alumni News

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Colgate Magazine Volume LIII Number 2 Colgate Magazine is a quarterly publication of Colgate University.

Online: colgate.edu/magazine Email: magazine@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7407 Change of Address: Alumni Records Clerk, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398 Email: alumnirecords@colgate.edu Telephone: 315-228-7453

‘Remembering Is a Duty’ A lifelong journey of chronicling the lives of blues musicians has led to a new book by Margo Cooper ’76.

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She Hit the Right Note The smooth and sultry songs of Ria Curley ’81 cover complex topics.

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From the archives

Salmagundi

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Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the University, the publishers, or the editors. Colgate University does not discriminate in its programs and activities because of race, color, sex, pregnancy, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. For inquiries regarding the University’s non‑discrimination policies, contact Renee Madison, Title IX coordinator and vice president for equity and inclusion, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

Winter 2024 Colgate Magazine

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President’s Message

When Universities Speak

4 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

Colgate’s Statement on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression offers two paragraphs that show the potential tensions a university faces when a crisis emerges, and when voices on and off the campus are raised.

Visit colgate.edu/ president

mark diorio

M

y Colgate Magazine columns are typically written many weeks, and sometimes months, before the magazine reaches the mailboxes and inboxes of Colgate alumni and friends.

As a result, these columns ordinarily do not speak to current events. Conditions on the ground change too rapidly, and the circumstances surrounding such events can, and often do, shift. Any attempt to speak to the issue of the day will inevitably lead to essays that are dated. Or, simply, wrong.

I note all of this because, as I write this column in late November, we are in a moment of great importance internationally. And, relatedly, we are coming through (or might still be very much in) a period in which people have asked universities to speak on current events — specifically to issue statements on the crisis in the Middle East. (Note: Colgate did issue a statement, which can be found at colgate.edu/middle-east-statement.)

This has also been a period in which what a college or university says has been scrutinized at levels I have never before seen.

This all leads to the question: When should universities speak?

A small number of colleges and universities, as their official position, do not issue statements about current events. These institutions state that they will only speak on matters that directly impact the college itself.

The University of Chicago is perhaps the most famous of the institutions that seek to hold this line. A small number of others have sought to follow this position.

But even these colleges and universities have, in other ways, spoken about the Middle East, often by noting the impact that events there might have on students’ well-being.

Such a position — to say nothing about events beyond

the campus — would seem to be extremely tempting.

It could be argued that issuing a formal statement on any matter might have a chilling effect on the very thing universities are designed to support: that is, free and open discourse and discovery on any and all matters in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and clarity.

Yet, with the Middle East situation, and others, people wished — expected — Colgate to issue some statement. Within days of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, my inbox began receiving questions about the University’s position. There was an expectation that in matters of great national and international importance — and this was an important set of events — Colgate must stand for something. And, it follows, it must say something.

In the days that followed, after our original statement was sent to the campus, I received ever more calls for additional statements about the crisis — from all sides.

I also received calls to make sure some ideas were not expressed on the campus. These same tensions were rising on hundreds of other college campuses. In short, a crisis in the Middle East had become a crisis of expression on American campuses.

Again, one comes to certain questions: When should universities speak? And how should they speak? What happens when statements are issued? Are universities always neutral actors, places that simply provide a forum for any and all debates? Or are universities ethical actors, with positions derived from a set of commonly held values?

We have wrestled with many of these questions at Colgate. In 2017 I charged a large task force — composed of faculty members, trustees, students, and alumni — to consider issues of academic freedom and freedom of expression at Colgate. At the time, I could sense that there was no consensus — at Colgate or around the country — about how expression was to operate on a campus. In an era when it seems people are more divided than ever on many issues, could we come to a basic understanding of how speech should operate at Colgate?

The task force met for more than a year. They

considered the by-then famous statement on free expression that the University of Chicago had issued (and that had been endorsed by a number of universities). The task force, wisely, concluded that a simple endorsement of another university’s statement would have little meaningful impact at Colgate. Surely we could create our own.

By the 2018–19 academic year, the task force’s statement was complete and then endorsed by the University faculty, the Board of Trustees, the Alumni Council, and the Student Government. It is worth a careful reading by all Colgate alumni. You can find this statement at colgate.edu/freedom-statement.

Colgate’s Statement on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression offers two paragraphs that show the potential tensions a university faces when a crisis emerges, and when voices on and off the campus are raised. The first offers this: A community dedicated to a mission such as Colgate’s must stand upon the bedrock principles of intellectual freedom — freedom of expression and academic freedom. This freedom to speak, to write, to listen, to question, to challenge, and to examine any problem that engages one’s interest is essential for living thought. Such freedom is not only a crucial means for the pursuit of knowledge, but a constitutive part of it….

Accordingly, the University should support a climate of debate and deliberation that is open and robust, and must not suppress ideas because some consider them wrong, immoral, or offensive.

The University’s statement, however, also offers this important point: The Task Force also recognizes that the principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom are not without boundaries. There are certain forms of expression that stand outside the law, constitute no part of the search for truth, and, accordingly, find no shelter here. These include expressions that falsely defame a specific individual, that constitute true threats or harassment, that unjustifiably invade substantial interests of privacy or confidentiality, or that incite imminent lawless action.

There is a legitimate tension here. On the one hand, this University relies on robust debate and discourse. On the other hand, we are a community in which the care and well-being of its members is of paramount importance.

What happens, though, when the University itself is called on to speak? Do official statements silence the community? But when the University is silent in the face of a great national or international crisis, is that silence its own statement — a silence that can harm? All of these questions arose in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023.

I offer these thoughts to indicate that I believe we are in an important moment in American higher education — a time when the nation is asking about the values that are held on a campus, and the ways in which those values come into play during a crisis.

How we navigate this moment will be important not only to our students and alumni, but to our future as well. I hope to find ways to continue a discussion of these matters both on the campus and beyond. And I look forward to your involvement in these discussions.

We must, as always, consider important matters with care, intelligence, and grace.

— Brian W. Casey

Letters Bringing Alumni Together Thank you for the alumni stories that make connections. The autumn 2023 “Voices” story by Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda (“The Kindness of Strangers,” p. 10) was of personal interest because I have known Jean since living on the same floor in KED freshman year. It was wonderful to learn more about both her family past and her current service to her community.

Additionally, the cover story two years ago about Kimber Clark ’87 Baldwin and her Fiber Optic Yarns business (“Color Ways,” winter 2022, p. 48) has rekindled a connection after 25 years. In her interview, Kimber mentioned having visited the store my mom owned back in the 1980s and how that (and my teaching her to knit) inspired her. I was able to find contact information for Kimber and learned that she has been visiting Maryland, only about 10 miles from where I live, for the past 15 years. We connected last year during the annual festival in Maryland. As a return visit, I took my mom to Ohio so we could visit Kimber’s store. It has been wonderful to reestablish a connection with Kimber.

And on a related interest, our class editor recently shared information regarding classmate Billy Jalbert in Maui. I did not know Billy while at Colgate, but was pleased to establish a connection that permitted me to provide support after the fires.

These stories provide opportunities to connect and support each other and are truly appreciated.

Sharon Hefter ’87 Loving Appreciative of an Alumna What a great article (“For the Greater Good,” summer 2023, p.

79). As a forensic psychologist, I am so appreciative of mental

health professionals [like Kianna Cole ’99] who work in reentry programs and other areas that serve the severely mentally ill.

Anna Lawler ’95

Commending the Cattle Queen So great to see Faith [Hamlin ’18] highlighted in the Colgate Magazine (“Cattle Queen,” summer 2023, p. 84). She was one of my all-time favorite students when I taught high school (am I allowed to say that?!). Wonderful to see her find her own place in the family business and then take it to the next level. Although nobody who knows her would expect any less!

Kenny Hadden ’04 Additional Remembrance In the autumn 2023 issue, alumni remembered the day JFK was assassinated (p. 96). Here’s an additional remembrance: The day and hour that President John F. Kennedy was shot, I was sitting in my car at the traffic light in the center of Hamilton, N.Y., heading for my room at Professor Mundt’s home off campus. It was on the radio live; I immediately turned around and drove back to the Beta house to watch it.

Charles Callahan ’64

To share your thoughts on this issue, email magazine@colgate.edu, or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Winter 2024

Colgate Magazine

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Danielle Cheifetz plots checkpoints in the early hours before hitting the starting line of the Rebelle Rally.

Fortitude

Latitude Adjustment With grit and determination, Danielle Cheifetz ’05 tests her navigation skills during a grueling endurance rally.

6 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

I

Nicole Dreon

Voices

t’s early, still dark outside.

Through blurred eyes I read 3 a.m. on my faintly glowing wristwatch. I hardly need the timestamp; Mother Nature herself is groaning for five more minutes. The desert air inside my tent is brisk, flirting with 50°F. Normally, I’d find this a bit chilly, but compared with the below-freezing temps we endured a few days ago in the Sierra Nevadas, it feels downright balmy.

I stretch, take a breath, and remind myself — again — that today is a new day. Yesterday is behind me, so that’s where I’ll leave it.

OK, reset.

Dressed, I wearily make my way to the main tent and the coffee inside. I’ve checked my map and compass at least three times now, but give in to the anxiety once more and take a peek. Map, check. Compass, check.

Backup compass, check. Backup to the backup compass, check. I can’t stop thinking about the woman who dropped hers down the latrine. It was her only one. The rumor is she retrieved it.

The sun hasn’t yet risen, and already the tent is bustling with activity. Women gather around tables, studiously plotting waypoints.

It’s so quiet, you can hear the pencils as they scratch out sleepy calculations of speed-overdistance pacing. A few ladies are crowded around a giant wall-hung map, fingers tracing the day’s approved roads and boundary lines like fine golden tapestry threads.

It is Day 3 — no, Day 4 — of navigating in the longest off-road rally in the entire United States, and my brain has never been this tired. (And that’s saying something, since my day job as a video producer in San Francisco has turned me into a certified logistics wrangler.) Longitude and latitude numbers are bouncing off the sides of my skull and my body has moved past the point of exhaustion, only to circle back around to straight adrenaline again. I am so laser-focused on the task in front of me that it actually startles me. That must be the technology detox kicking in.

Oh God, I have four more days of this.

When I agreed to participate in the 2023 Rebelle Rally, I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. I blame Lani, my friend and colleague who asked me to play navigator to her driver during the event.

Granted, I liked the idea of participating in a women’s-only endurance rally dedicated to precision and skill, and I expected it to be intense. Hunting hidden checkpoints across 1,500 miles of unforgiving terrain in Nevada and California with no cellphones or GPS devices isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

I was, admittedly, intimidated by the days of backcountry camping, and I knew the

Paolo Baraldi (2)

countless hours spent bouncing over trails in a stock Ford Bronco would likely leave me with a few new bruises.

But planning is what I do, I thought. And so, I planned.

I researched camping gear and recovery tools, joined off-roading groups, and met with veteran Rebelle competitors. Lani and I took driving and navigating classes, signed up for official training events, and explored the terrain where the event would take place.

We wrote sponsorship letters and filmed a donation video, endured many nos and celebrated some yeses — including Firestone Tires, an accomplishment in itself since the partnership made us the first-ever Rebelle Rally team to garner the company’s support.

As the training got tougher, so did we.

While Lani and I set expectations early in the game to work hard but still have fun (and remain friends), we wanted to be the most prepared rookies on that starting line. I spent an entire year learning how to plot out geofenced coordinates located in remote checkpoints using only analog tools. I ate freeze-dried meals and protein bars, wore moisture-wicking clothing and a Snell helmet while I lounged on the couch. I planned for stress, prepared for discomfort. I made laminated checklists.

Somewhere around Day 2 that all went out the window. (Figuratively speaking, of course, since we also became well versed in Leave No Trace principles.)

In filmmaking, every production essentially starts with a million little hurdles. There’s the Big Idea — the end goal, the finish line — and then there are all the things standing in the way of turning that vision into reality. Budget, permits, conflicting schedules. My job as a producer is to systematically solve each of those problems, one by one. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Competing in the Rebelle Rally felt strangely, maniacally like trying to build an entire city not just on a shortened timeline but also with only Popsicle sticks for construction materials. And halfway through the endeavor, you realize the ground site is unsteady, the blueprints are actually in Greek, and the entire crew is just as lost as you are.

How do you plan for something that cannot be replicated outside of its very unique pressure cooker environment?

The Rebelle Rally is more than its physical and mental exertion. It is these elements combined with the stress of maintaining a vehicle over unrelenting terrain and the shock of waking up to frost after battling triple digits the day before. It is confusing maps and fuzzy math, frustration and failure.

Cheifetz’s third “teammate,” a Ford Bronco named Hank.

Inset: Cheifetz uses a sighting compass.

Over, and over, and over again.

If I had known all of this going in — truly understood it — I’m not sure I would have done it. Like most people, I don’t exactly have a great relationship with defeat. It’s not a feeling I like to hang around with, certainly not over a prolonged period of time, nor after I’ve specifically made preparations to avoid it. After running into it several times over eight days, however, I don’t hide my face anymore.

Distance lends perspective, and as I get further from the rally, I can see the lessons taking shape. How to manage frustration — the big, nebulous kind that threatens to bog you down in a dark place. How to drown out negativity with the sound of your own inner cheerleader. How to find — and choose — laughter when screaming into the void is so very tempting. How to breathe. How to bounce back.

About three-quarters through the final day of the competition, our third teammate, Hank (the Bronco), had a run-in with a sand dune and lost a ring gear tooth.

With no four-wheel drive and no way to diagnose the problem at the time, Lani and I contemplated heading back to base camp and forfeiting our last big green checkpoint — leaving 19 available points on the table.

Could we get through this scorching-hot silty sand without getting stuck? Doubtful, but we didn’t want to give up. It was our last day and by this point, we were absolutely committed to squeezing every last drop from the experience.

As if sensing our determination, Fate intervened. Another team emerged from the dunes and drove over to us. We explained our predicament and they informed us the final checkpoint wasn’t too far away; they even offered to follow us in and help if we got stuck. We did, they did, and we got that last green.

Our journey over the finish line had a

bittersweet taste, due to Hank’s condition.

We had finished — we did it! But after the high fives and relieved sighs, we still had work to do; mechanics to consult with, rental car arrangements to make. Perhaps it was a fitting conclusion to such a grueling endeavor — one more challenge, just to see if you can take it. I signed up to push myself, after all.

When the dust settled and the scores tallied, we finished in the top 50% of what veteran competitors said was the hardest rally they’d ever experienced. Our team, Dead Reckoning, ranked 26th out of 54 in the 4x4 class (open to four-wheel-drive vehicles with a two-speed transfer case), and sixth out of 26 rookie teams.

While the numbers are nice, it’s the behind-the-scenes bits I’ll be carrying with me. The lessons, the laughter, the landscapes.

The risks and payoffs, the frustrations, and yes, even the defeats. There’s a common belief these days that the world is lacking motivation; it’s lost its grit. Well, I found it — in the desert and in myself. (Also in my teeth, my hair, my sleeping bag, my shoes…)

Truly, anything else is easy after this. The next time I think a four-day/12-hour shoot is hard, I’ll simply ask myself, “Well, is it harder than that time we broke down in the dunes?”

Danielle Cheifetz ’05 is the founder of Kraken Cove Productions, a San Francisco video production company specializing in tailored support for any style film shoot. A deliberate planner, her philosophy is that efficiency doesn’t matter if you’re not doing the right things with the right people — which is why she’s proud to say that, even when unpredictability strikes on set, her team can always recover. Cheifetz can be reached at dc@krakencoveproductions.com.

Winter 2024

Colgate Magazine

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SCENE Global Leaders

‘The Ground Under Our Feet Is Churning’

W

hile detailing the profound dangers of today’s digital landscape, Nobel Peace Prize winner, journalist, and author Maria Ressa ultimately delivered a hopeful message during her talk at Colgate on Oct. 28, 2023.

“We’re living in a time where the ground under our feet is churning. And part of that is because of that godlike technology,” Ressa explained, referencing sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. “But the other part is, we can control our Paleolithic emotions. We can remember the goodness of humanity. We can have empathy.”

Ressa’s visit was part of The Kerschner Family Series Global Leaders at Colgate, as well as a highlight of the University’s annual family weekend. In a conversation moderated by Associate Professor of History Alexander Karn, Ressa shared stories from her early life in the Philippines and the United States, her experiences as an immigrant at Princeton, and her career as a journalist with CNN and later Rappler, the online news site she co-founded in 2012.

As Rappler’s CEO, Ressa worked to expose Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs that killed more than 7,000 people in 2016 and 2017. As a result of her journalism, she has faced multiple charges and

8 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

was convicted of violating the Philippines’ cyber libel laws in June 2020. She is currently out on bail.

Her investigation into Duterte’s presidency and her subsequent criminal prosecution were the subjects of her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, which was chosen as Colgate’s 2023 Community Read.

Throughout her talk, Ressa reinforced the importance of speaking truth to power and explained why she has devoted her career to studying the impact of disinformation — and the danger it poses to democracy.

“A lie pounded a million times becomes a fact… If we do not fix our information ecosystem, the

world will tip,” she said. “This could be the tipping point for the end of democracy.”

Before the Global Leaders event, Ressa met with students for an hour-long question-andanswer session, where she cautioned students to be aware of social media algorithms and their manipulative nature.

“The only thing you can control in the world is yourself.

That’s what I try to do. How can I take my own fears and be constructive about them? How can we use what we’re afraid of to become stronger?” Ressa said. “The one thing social media forgets to tell you is that people are basically good.”

Ressa’s visit was a highlight of a family weekend with

various events, including an improv comedy show hosted

by Broken Lizard alumni Jay Chandrasekhar ’90 and Kevin Heffernan ’90 and featuring Colgate’s Charred Goosebeak student organization.

A family weekend tradition, the University’s a cappella groups performed at Colgate Memorial Chapel. Later, the annual ALANA Multicultural Fashion Show highlighted the diversity of cultures on campus.

On Saturday, in addition to a number of athletics events and academic open houses throughout the day, guests and students learned about Colgate’s recently revised Liberal Arts Core Curriculum in a faculty panel discussion.

Interactive events, such as a printmaking workshop with University museum ambassadors and a waltz lesson from the Colgate Ballroom Dancers, were also popular among students and their guests.

— Mary Donofrio

See more photos from Family Weekend 2023: www.flickr.com/ photos/colgateuniversity/albums

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa (right) delivered a talk moderated by Professor Alexander Karn (left).

mark diorio (2)

CAMPUS LIFE | ART | ATHLETICS | INITIATIVES | CULTURE | GLOBAL REACH

13 bits 1 Political science professor Nina Moore was appointed to serve on the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

2 Campus speed limit signs were recently changed to 13 MPH.

Elannah De La O ’24 (center) teaches other students how to make sopa de albondigas.

ALANA

Cooking Series Tastes Like Family History

A

n aromatic ladle of sopa de albondigas, or meatball soup, is made from more than beef, onions, and jalapeño. For Elannah De La O ’24, it represents a history of recipes passed down through her Mexican-American family.

To share her story in a bowl, De La O hosted a group of curious students in her installment of ALANA’s Cooking Around the World series. Each event gathers students in ALANA’s kitchen space to share and celebrate their heritage through cuisine.

My main job as an ambassador is to connect people to other people.

Illustrations by Toby Triumph

The series began when ALANA Director Esther Rosbrook joined the team in 2019. A year later, she welcomed De La O to her team of ALANA Ambassadors: a crew of students who represent and support the center. De La O was later promoted to an ambassador lead, and now serves as the main point of contact for ALANA’s student team.

“My main job as an ambassador is to connect people to other people,” says De La O. “Cooking Around the World allows me to foster those connections — October is Latinx heritage month, and I am Latina.

This event is a celebration of my culture with the student body.”

De La O, who is from the Northern California area, attributes her long-held passion for cooking to her family. Their sopa de albondigas recipe tells a story through the ingredients.

“How we cook the dish is telling of how my family uses seasonings,” she says. “We make a flavorful broth that can be used across many different soups.”

This versatile broth of chicken stock, tomato, garlic, and onion meets De La O’s aim to teach students a “simple, low-budget, but very flavorful recipe.” To it, she adds hearty vegetables and beans: potato,

garbanzo beans, and carrots.

Next come the soup’s namesake meatballs, to which De La O adds two special ingredients: jalapeño and mint.

“The mint is included not just for flavor, but also to aid with digestion,” she explains. “And a lot of people think the jalapeño will just be spicy, but what I try to showcase is that the chili has its own distinct flavor.”

These personal touches make De La O’s dish her and her family’s own. The way she sees it, sopa de albondigas is a comfort meal. “Whether you’re sick or coming home from a long day of classes, the dish cheers people up,” she says.

This personal connection to food, Rosbrook contends, is what makes the event one of ALANA’s programming staples.

“Cooking Around the World is not just a culinary program,” says Rosbrook. “It’s a warm and inviting space where friendships are forged and a sense of belonging flourishes.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

3 First@Colgate celebrated First-Gen week with the hashtag #FirstandFlourishing and an event series.

4 Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez ’98 received a Mellon Foundation fellowship to explore how graphic novels can affect interdisciplinary scholarship.

5 The Office of Equity and Diversity hosted its first Indigenous Nations Festival on Oct. 21.

6 On Nov. 16, Professor Amy Leventer jetted to Antarctica with a National Science Foundation group to study changing environmental conditions.

Other Cooking Around the World events this academic year include sessions led by Nicole Carvel, Indigenous and Native American programs coordinator, and the South Asian Cultural Club.

▼ Winter 2024

Colgate Magazine

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SCENE

▼

Lee Brown Coye (American, 1907– 81), Train Going Off the Tracks, 1949. Pen and ink on wove paper, edition 6 of 49.

Gift of Bob Coye ’54 and Norma Coye. © Estate of Lee Brown Coye

7 Men’s rowing started its fall season at the Head of the Charles, where the varsity eight placed eighth out of 42 boats.

8 Students can learn about Asian tea culture through the Tea Club, which meets in the Japanese Studies Center.

9 In October, guitarist Yasmin Williams performed for the Live Music Collective, a campus group bringing live music to the University community.

Picker Art Gallery

The Ghastly and Grand World of Lee Brown Coye

10 President Brian W. Casey and Graham Wyatt, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, penned an op-ed in the Times Higher Education about transforming campus spaces.

11 Tech Talks: 10 students traveled to Orlando for the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest conference for women and nonbinary people in tech.

12 The 13 Machine — a versatile, mobile pop-up shop — is now available for students’ and staff members’ campus events.

13 Poet Amanda Gorman will deliver the keynote address during Arts, Creativity, and Innovation Weekend in April.

S

tepping into the Picker Art Gallery, visitors are greeted by a diverse collection of artworks — ones that tell tales both ghastly and grand, spanning from horror illustrations to evocative landscapes. The exhibition, Tales of Terra: A Lee Brown Coye Retrospective, offers an immersive look into the mind and works of central New York artist Lee Brown Coye (1907–81).

Coye, born in Syracuse and having familial roots in central New York, was renowned for his eerie illustrations in the pages of horror anthologies and pulp magazines like Weird Tales.

Over the course of his career, Coye’s illustrations even graced the covers of works by such legendary horror writers as H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury.

Tales of Terra not only explores Coye’s influence on the world of horror art but also the influence that the places Coye called home had on his art. “One of the reasons we are doing this show

10 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

is because of Lee Brown Coye’s importance to the Hamilton community,” explains Kali Steinberg, curatorial assistant of the Picker Art Gallery.

One section of the exhibition focuses on Coye’s relocation from Syracuse to Hamilton in 1959. It was in Hamilton that Coye built his own art studio, where he collaborated with other local artists for the remainder of his career. One of the most fruitful of these collaborations was with Colgate Professor of Fine Art Alfred Krakusin, with whom Coye worked for many years to create a series of bronze, copper, and aluminum panels replicating sculpted reliefs found on ancient Egyptian monuments. During the process, Colgate students had the opportunity to work under Coye and Krakusin.

These sculpted panels were but one example of Coye’s artistic prowess outside the medium of illustration.

“While Coye is best known for his influential illustrations for horror stories and pulp magazines, he also produced many drawings, paintings, sculptures, murals, and metalworks of both horror and other subjects,” explains

Steinberg. These lesser-known works were often inspired by local folklore, legends, literature, architecture, and history. After Coye’s death, his sister Helen, and later his son, Bob Coye ’54, donated a substantial collection of his works to the Picker, making it home to the largest collection of Coye artistry in the world. The works on display for Tales of Terra are only about 10% of Colgate’s total collection of Coye’s work.

Visitors who attended the exhibition’s opening reception on Sept. 21 had the opportunity to hear Coye’s grandson Rob share his memories of visiting the Hamilton art studio as a child. One of Rob’s fondest memories was of playing with the many pet rabbits that Coye kept loose in his studio.

This was the second Lee Brown Coye retrospective that the Picker Art Gallery has hosted, the first taking place in 1968. This current retrospective demonstrates the timeless appeal of Coye’s works and his indelible mark on the artistic world of central New York.

— Bri Liddell ’25 Tales of Terra is on exhibit until March 3.

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TIA

15 Years Ago, Che Ku Kyet ’24 Immigrated to Utica.

Today, She Gives Back.

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mark diorio

hen Che Ku Kyet ’24 was 6 years old, her family emigrated from Thailand to America and arrived at The Center, a refugee resettlement space in Utica, N.Y. She then entered the public school system, and

at this critical time in her life, The Center provided her with a backpack full of school supplies, including notebooks and pencils.

Today, Kyet works to reciprocate The Center’s generosity as the president of the Thought Into Action (TIA) venture Backpacks For Kids (BFK).

“My parents couldn’t have known what [my three siblings and I] needed or where to get it,” she recalls. “Receiving backpacks relieved stress on my family in the already traumatizing process of resettlement.”

With the books included in her backpack, Kyet began reading to familiarize herself with the English language. She excelled in her early education, for which she was later recognized by the Young Scholars Liberty Partnership Program.

At Colgate, Kyet is on the pre-med track with hopes of becoming a surgeon and returning to Thailand to provide health care aid within refugee camps. She joined BFK last spring, when she learned of the organization’s aim to help refugees.

These kinds of backpacks relieve financial burdens and allow refugee children to feel a sense of safety.

“I was drawn to BFK because I want to be able to give back the help that I received,” says Kyet. “These kinds of backpacks relieve financial burdens and allow refugee children to feel a sense of safety.”

BFK’s board currently consists of 13 members who direct fundraising, grant writing, and public relations for the nonprofit venture, which was founded in 2020 by three students: Jillian Holiday ’23, Raina Jung ’23, and Marie Goodrich ’23. When their volunteers arrive at The Center, they donate backpacks filled with educational and hygienic supplies such as books, combs, and toothbrushes.

The backpacks also provide children with toys and coloring supplies. “Some refugee youth

are transported from shelter to shelter, so coloring distracts the kids on their long rides,” says Taryn Lane ’26, who directs fundraising for BFK. “And if they’re traveling with a group, this is an activity they can bond over with the youth on board.”

Beyond their material impact, BFK also aims to spread awareness of their cause on campus through film screenings and dialogues about the refugee presence in Utica. And with the resources of TIA’s mentorship program, the group is supported by a robust alumni network.

“With TIA’s support and encouragement, we’ve been able to make Backpacks For Kids happen,” says Kyet. “The program has allowed us to make a tangible change.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

Che Ku Kyet ’24, third from right, is president of the TIA venture Backpacks For Kids, which donates educational and hygienic supplies to refugee children in the Utica area.

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Yariv Amir ’01 Named Colgate VP and Director of Athletics

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eteran Division I athletics administrator Yariv Amir ’01 has been appointed as Colgate’s 11th vice president and director of athletics, leading the University’s 25 NCAA Division I varsity sports.

Football and track

This Student Tackles Two Varsity Sports

N

ick Johnson ’24 doesn’t have an offseason.

In the fall, he’s an offensive lineman on the football team. When the season ends, he trades in his shoulder pads and helmet for discus and throwing shoes. Track will keep him busy through the spring.

Johnson, an economics major from Dallas, Texas, is a rare example of a Colgate studentathlete who plays two varsity sports. While others have done it before, he’s the only one at the moment.

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served on the NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Committee and the Men’s Hockey National Recruiting Committee.

On the Colgate campus, he serves on the Academic Affairs Board, Cabinet, Dean’s Advisory Council, Committee on Athletics, University Property Committee, and on the OAK Initiative. He previously served on the University’s Faculty Affairs Board and the Committee on Information Technology, and he was the athletics representative on Colgate’s Middle States Accreditation Self Study Steering Committee.

Before returning to his alma mater in the summer of 2015, Amir served for 13 years in the department of athletics at Princeton University. There he served in various roles, including as the assistant athletic director for marketing. While at Princeton, he served on the Ivy League Digital Strategies Committee and was an NCAA Women’s Water Polo Committee member.

Amir graduated from Colgate in 2001 with degrees in economics and international relations. He was also a captain of the men’s rowing team. He earned his master of business administration from the Rutgers University Business School in 2010, specializing in marketing.

Amir resides in Hamilton with his wife, Elizabeth Wood Amir ’00, and their two children, Morgan and Alie.

While the football and track seasons don’t conflict, offseason activities will sometimes overlap each other. In such instances, Johnson gives his full commitment to the sport that’s in-season, but will continue to attend noncontact practices and meetings for the other sport — all without compromising his grades.

“Balancing the academics and the sports, it’s a challenge,” says Johnson, who also has a minor in educational studies. “But it forces you to have time management.”

Johnson was a track recruit when he enrolled at Colgate, and continued with one sport until February of his junior year, when the football coaches asked if he was interested in joining the program. “I said, ’As long as I don’t have to give up track, I’d

Olivia Hokanson (Amir portrait and football); Mike Scott (track and field)

Cabinet

“Yariv has served Colgate extraordinarily well during his tenure on this campus, and even more so when he stepped into the role of interim vice president and director of athletics earlier this year,” says President Brian W. Casey. “His commitment to our student-athletes is unwavering, and he has proven to be a remarkably effective and caring leader for his alma mater.”

Amir has held extensive leadership roles in college athletics, including the last eight years at Colgate. Prior to his stint as interim vice president and director of athletics, Amir served as the deputy athletics director and worked as the senior associate athletics director for finance and operations as well as senior associate athletics director for external operations.

As interim vice president and director of athletics, Amir successfully led national searches for the head coaches for golf, women’s rowing, and men’s hockey. In his role as the athletics’ CFO, Amir oversaw business operations, facilities and event operations, capital projects, equipment services, and the department’s external operations, including communications, multimedia, and marketing. He has served as the sport administrator for nine athletics programs during his tenure at Colgate.

Nationally, Amir serves on the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Ice Hockey Rules Committee and the ECAC Hockey Administrators Committee. He previously

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Olivia Hokanson

love to,’” he recalls. “I jumped right on the opportunity.”

But his return to football — which he hadn’t played since high school — wasn’t as simple as putting on his uniform and equipment. First, he had to bulk up to be ready to battle at the line of scrimmage. As a result, the 6-foot-7 Johnson added roughly 40 pounds in the spring to bring him to 300 pounds.

He also had to work on his mobility. And he had to learn the playbook. It took considerable work, but Johnson was more

than happy for the opportunity to play football again.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed football until I got back into it,” he says.

For Johnson, adding football was icing on the cake for what has been an incredible Colgate experience. On the track team, he’s competed in high-level tournaments as a member of the throws unit while having the time of his life.

In the classroom, Johnson has thrived. His interest in numbers led him to studying

economics. He’s also taken advantage of the liberal arts curriculum by studying a wide range of topics, including two semesters of Hebrew and a course in contemporary dance.

He has completed internships with investment banking firms and wants to pursue a career in finance.

“Colgate has an incredibly unique combination of elite academics paired with DI athletics,” he says.

The University also has a special place with his family. His

parents, Robert ’94 and Kelly (Lehmann) ’94 Johnson, were Colgate students and members of the track team when they met. Their daughter, Carlyn Johnson ’26, is a biology major.

When Johnson was offered the chance to play football, his parents were thrilled with the idea — but wondered if it might be too much of a burden on his schedule. “They asked if I had time to balance my classes with all of it,” Johnson remembers. “I like to prove to them that I can.”

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Going toe to toe in the NCAA tournament: Colgate squared off against Creighton in the first round of the NCAA tournament at the Omaha, Neb., university’s arena Dec. 1, 2023. The Raiders scored more points than any opponent facing the Bluejays on the road since early September, but the Raiders couldn’t quite finish in a 3–0 decision. Colgate concluded its season with their third-consecutive Patriot League title and fourth regular season championship in five years under head coach Ryan Baker, who earned his fifth Patriot League Coach of the Year honor in 2023.

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Hockey

H

e’s Ross Mitton ’24 (#17): a forward with his eye on the prize.

He skates for Colgate in each game and has a reputation for ending nail-biters against Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton with last-minute victories.

“I’ll get hard in the corners and do whatever it takes to get the puck back, skate to the open ice, and find my teammates in front of the net,” says Mitton, whose 18 assists in the 2022 season tied him for the 11th-most in the ECAC division for the year.

Six days a week, you’ll find Mitton on the ice, where his philosophy is to “practice how you play.” His devotion to performance has influenced his teammates, who selected him as one their captains for

the 2023–24 season.

“It’s important for me to lead by example,” he says. “I work hard on and off the ice, and push my teammates to work harder — that just makes us better as a whole.”

When class is in session, Mitton majors in economics, and he is one of 13 Presidential Ambassadors who represent Colgate to distinguished guests.

And as he does on the ice, he’s always thinking about the next step. He plans to get his MBA after he graduates and dreams of landing on Wall Street. He is also an active member of Raiders of Color Connect, an organization where athletes share dialogue and meals.

Over time, Mitton has learned a thing or two about balancing his academics with his game. To the younger members

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of the hockey team, he imparts his three-step plan: “Go to office hours, don’t fall behind, and always speak up.” He values his position as a mentor and gets talkative with the team. “I ask the [first-years] every day how school is going, and check in on the younger guys to make sure they’re doing alright,” he says.

In the summertime, Mitton fishes off the coast of Long Island, where his story began.

He’s played hockey since the age of 6, when he joined his first team, the Long Island Royals.

At 8, he was up to four sports at once — hockey, of course, but also soccer, football, and baseball.

But hockey ran in the family, and it wasn’t long before he was matching up with his uncle while his grandmother scolded them to stop scratching the hardwood floor with their sticks.

In high school, Mitton began playing hockey at the professional level. In 2017, he was drafted into the Fargo Force: a Tier I team in the United States Hockey League (USHL). His time with the USHL brought him across the U.S., where he traveled with teams in Nebraska (the Omaha Lancers and the Lincoln Stars).

These days, Mitton refers to himself as a “gentle giant” who cares deeply for his family and teammates. But sometimes, they seem all the same.

“This [Colgate men’s hockey] is the closest team I’ve been on in my entire life,” he says. “Everyone loves each other like a brother.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

mark diorio

Assisting Teammates Both On and Off the Ice

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Endowment

The Bright Side of the Dark

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eff Bary loves darkness. And for good reason: As associate professor of physics and astronomy, Bary understands how light pollution — the excessive use of artificial, man-made light — can block our view of the stars.

“In towns and cities where you have lots of artificial light, the light scatters and creates a bright background through which to see the stars. The brighter the light, the fainter and fainter the stars become,” Bary says. “What that amounts to, is that in some places, you have entire generations of children who will grow up never seeing a dark sky teeming with stars or the fuzzy Milky Way running like a river through the sky.”

Once only a problem in heavily populated urban areas, says Bary, increased use of LED and high-intensity lighting is beginning to impact more rural areas — including his home state of West Virginia.

It’s an issue he’s been passionate about for years, despite its loose intersection with his main discipline of astrophysics.

So when Bary, a member of Colgate’s physics and astronomy faculty since 2008, got the call for proposals for the Sweet Family Chair endowed position, he knew his dark sky passion project might make him the perfect fit.

Established by Andrew W. Sweet ’93 in 2022, this permanent endowment fund was created to “recognize and support a Colgate faculty member’s continued scholarly development in new areas of intellectual inquiry through sustained immersion into knowledge beyond their current discipline.” It is one of roughly

two dozen endowed chairs that will be established during the Campaign for the Third Century.

Bary submitted a proposal detailing his dark sky work and, in spring 2022, was awarded the prestigious position.

“The endowed chair has been incredible in that it has allowed me the time and funding to do more of this research and bring it back to my students,” says Bary.

With the course release and research funding provided by the endowment, Bary’s dark sky advocacy work has since expanded to explore the relationship between the night sky and Appalachian residents’ sense of place, using literature and film to illustrate the importance of preserving our view of the stars. He is hosting a symposium at Colgate on the topic in April, titled Dark Skies in Appalachian Identity, Culture, and Sense of Place. The panel of speakers, which includes artists, authors, musicians, and scientists, will explore the connection people have, either consciously or subconsciously, with the night sky.

“It’s kind of funny, because once I started thinking about this, I realized I could pick up any book written by an Appalachian author and find an interesting reference to the night sky,” Bary says. “In books like Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and novels

by Silas House, the night sky is almost its own character, with lots of references to the darkness of the sky in Appalachia, as opposed to other parts of the United States.”

Helping raise awareness about light pollution and protecting dark sky areas has its obvious benefits for scientists like Bary, but it can also come with economic advantages for struggling parts of rural Appalachia.

Through his work with the Appalachian Studies Association, a group of scholars and activists dedicated to preserving Appalachian history and culture, Bary is working to earn an International Dark Sky Place designation

All Third-Century Plan articles written by Mary Donofrio

for a site in Calhoun County, W.Va. The official designation, he says, can help the region become a tourist destination for star-seekers worldwide.

“There are so few dark sky areas, especially in the eastern part of the country, that the very few become astrotourist attractions,” he says. “That creates a real economic opportunity for these rural communities.”

Back at Colgate and supported by the Sweet Family Chair, Bary is sharing his research with the Colgate community

in presentations — including a talk last September, part of Colgate’s Lifelong Learning Program, and the upcoming symposium — and hoping his message resonates. “[Light pollution] is not a climate change–scale problem in that it’s easy to fix,” he says, citing how simple adjustments to the wattage, direction, and color of lighting can significantly reduce the damaging effects.

“It’s just about making people aware of the cultural significance of the night sky and that it is something we should all be invested in protecting.”

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Campaign

Siegel Professorship Supports Provost and Dean of the Faculty

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he University has announced the creation of a new endowed professorship, made possible through a $2.5 million gift from Mark S. Siegel ’73. The Mark S. Siegel University Professorship will always be held by the provost and dean of the faculty at Colgate and thus will be held by Colgate’s current provost and dean of the faculty, Lesleigh Cushing. In addition to being the Mark S. Siegel University Professor and provost and dean of the faculty, Cushing is also professor of Jewish studies and professor of religion.

The Siegel Professorship will underscore the standing of the provost’s position as the University’s chief academic officer.

The University set a goal through the Campaign for the Third Century to create 25 new endowed professorships — to celebrate, attract, and retain leading teacher-scholars, who have long been a point of distinction for the institution and a source of connection for students.

Generous alumni and friends have already funded the creation of 12 new endowed faculty chairs.

Siegel, the founder and president of ReMY Investors & Consultants, Inc., graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Colgate with a degree in philosophy. In 2009, he established a

Leadership from the provost and dean of the faculty will ensure that the University advances a wide range of goals set out in the Third-Century Plan.

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sizable yearly endowed prize at Colgate for great undergraduate teaching, named in honor of his favorite philosophy professor, the late Jerry Balmuth, Harry Emerson Fosdick Professor of philosophy and religion emeritus. Siegel received an honorary degree in May 2023 — in recognition of his long history of leadership and philanthropy, especially his contributions in support of Colgate’s faculty.

“Leadership from the provost and dean of the faculty will ensure that the University advances a wide range of goals set out in the Third-Century Plan,” says Siegel. “I hope this endowed award serves to recognize and support the provost’s efforts to develop scholar-teachers who engage with students in meaningful ways and to ensure Colgate’s commitment to academic excellence.”

The inaugural recipient of the Mark S. Siegel University Professorship, Cushing was named provost and dean of the faculty in July 2022. She arrived at Colgate in 2002 after receiving a BA in English literature and religious studies from McGill University, a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD in religion and literature from Boston University. In 2015, she was named Murray W. and Mildred K. Finard Associate Professor in Jewish studies and associate professor of religion. She was promoted to the rank of full professor at Colgate in 2018.

Between 2017 and 2021, Cushing served as associate dean of the faculty, focusing on faculty recruitment and development.

In that role, she worked with many campus colleagues to develop several of the academic dimensions of the Third-Century Plan, including the Middle Campus Plan for Arts, Creativity, and Innovation.

“I am honored to be the inaugural recipient of this endowed professorship and to continue working with President Casey and the faculty to pursue excellence in all of Colgate’s teaching, research, and creative endeavors,” says Cushing.

President Brian W. Casey also extended his gratitude to Mark S. Siegel — and shared his hope for the future of the endowed professorship.

“Thanks to Mark Siegel’s generosity and vision, I am confident that this endowed professorship will help elevate Colgate’s reputation as the University fully realizes The Clearing is “a its Third-Century ambition to become place to gather, to read aanational leader in higher education — book on a warm day, and the and most important undergraduate to stop look up.” institution in the country,” he says.

Two buildings at a time will undergo renovation, expansion, or complete replacement.

Residential Life

An Update on the Lower Campus Initiative

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his summer, 66 and 70 Broad St. — The Loj and Delta Upsilon fraternity (respectively) — will be renovated and both will receive significant additions.

They are the first pair of buildings to be renovated as part of the University’s Lower Campus initiative.

Lower Campus, the area running alongside Broad Street (Route 12B), is currently a series of disconnected residential buildings ranging from large fraternity and sorority houses to apartments and smaller multiroom residential buildings with a wide array of architectural styles and internal layouts.

Lower Campus buildings also vary in their age and state of repair. University records show the oldest building along Broad Street (40 Broad St.) was constructed between 1816 and 1825, and the newest (113 Broad St.) was built in 1967. In fact, all of the buildings on Broad Street predate the University’s move to become coeducational in 1970. While

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Middle Campus

Contemporaneous Ensemble Begins Residency at Colgate

C The social center, a focal point of the reimagined Lower Campus

Stratos

these buildings have undergone regular maintenance through the years, most need major updates or repairs.

Moving forward, two buildings at a time will undergo renovation, expansion, or complete replacement.

Lower Campus Initial Priorities → All residential buildings on the Lower Campus will be renovated or replaced to greatly improve accessibility and fire safety. → Renovation and construction work will ensure all future seniors will have the option of living in single rooms if they so choose. → Nearly half (40%) of all juniors will have the option to live in singles. → New social spaces will be created for all students. → A new common social center will be created. → New dining options and meal plans will be introduced to reflect an improved dining experience. → New academic spaces for study and classes will be created. → The Lower Campus will have increased walkability and expanded green spaces. → New pathways will connect junior and senior housing on College Street.

olgate’s music department welcomed New York City–based ensemble Contemporaneous for a three-year residency at the University.

Currently composed of 23 musicians, Contemporaneous was founded by students at Bard College. Known for their innovative educational programs, the group performs and promotes the work of living composers through concerts, commissions, and recordings. Their liberal arts background, says Assistant Professor of Music Ryan Chase, helps the musicians relate to Colgate students.

“The musicians have a real understanding of what our students encounter every day in their curriculum. They understand that, in the morning, students are scientists. In the afternoon, they might be painting or sculpting,” says Chase. “So the musicians really connect with students on that level.”

The group first visited Colgate in spring 2023, when they worked with students in Chase’s MUSI 245: Composition class. In addition to working with the musicians one-on-one, students composed a piece for Contemporaneous to play live in a public

concert at the end of the semester.

“They really learned a lot in those three days. You could see that their skill levels, especially among our music majors, just shot up over the course of a weekend,” says Chase. “Students are very excited to have them back and get that sort of ‘booster shot’ of inspiration to keep them going.”

During their residency at Colgate, Contemporaneous will provide numerous opportunities to work with campus and community members, including playing alongside students in workshops focused on improvisation. In line with the Third-Century Plan’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration within the Middle Campus, Chase hopes to incorporate studio art, theater, and dance students into Contemporaneous’ work, perhaps creating visual art installations or performance pieces based on the group’s improvisation.

For Chase, the visit from Contemporaneous highlights the value of having visiting teachers and scholars share their knowledge and experience with students — especially those in the arts.

“All artists are very individual in the paths that they forge,” says Chase.

“So to be able to see how a group like Contemporaneous functions, how they work together, how they cooperate, how they communicate with one another and with students — that’s invaluable.”

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Discover Planetary Science

Looking for Evidence in Eruptions Erika Rader ’07 searches for clues about Mars’ ancient past in lava flows closer to home.

hat can crystals and glass on Earth tell us about the history of Mars? That’s one of the many questions that Erika Rader ’07 is hoping to answer through her interdisciplinary research that melds volcanology, planetary science, and igneous petrology, or the study of rocks that form from cooling lava and magma.

Since the inception of space missions to Mars in the 1960s, researchers have been driven by a central question: Could the planet ever have sustained life? While we now have evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet, environmental factors like temperature and seasonality of water would have also played a key role in habitability. This is where studies of lava come in.

“There’s a lot of debate about whether Mars was hot and wet, or cold and dry, or some other combination,” says Rader, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences at the University of Idaho. “We don't have the opportunity, necessarily, to analyze planetary samples that can tell us those things about past environments. But Mars does have lava that you can see from satellites.”

And the appearance of cooled lava can give important information about the environment into which it flowed. For example, if lava cools quickly due to an interaction with water, the surface will appear dark and glassy. But if it flows into

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Erika Rader explores Derrick Cave in Lake County, Ore.

Bryce DuCharme

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a desert where there’s not a lot of water and it cools in an ambient air temperature environment, there will be crystals evident in the texture of the surface, Rader explains.

She and members of her lab have been building an image library of lava flows on Earth, using specialized imaging instruments called spectrometers, along with data from detailed rock studies that show the type of crystals and proportion of crystals to glass for those flows. In a recent study, Rader and a student of hers tested the use of a visible near-infrared (VNIR) spectrometer to investigate a relatively young lava flow at Jordan Craters, Ore. VNIR tools operate at wavelengths that can help see textures and mineral content in the rock, indicating lava-water interactions. By comparing images taken in the field to the analysis of samples that they took back to the lab, the team found that the imaging technique worked well at providing on-site data, adding a new tool to their arsenal.

“We can now make fundamental measurements of the amount of crystals in solid lava rock without having to break and take the rock to a laboratory,” says Rader.

“This is helpful for quickly scanning surfaces for evidence of lava-water interactions.”

The long-term goal is to be able to match up images from Earth to images taken of the Martian landscape by satellite and roverbased spectrometers to help pinpoint where and how much water may have existed on the planet. This type of information could inform sampling locations for future missions, giving scientists a better idea of where they might find signatures of past life on Mars.

While planetary science is a major thrust of her lab, Rader explores a wide range of questions in her work, including how to mitigate the hazards of volcanic eruptions.

She says many of these inquiries arose in her first class in volcanology at Colgate — where she majored in geology — that solidified her career path. She remembers compiling a long list that she shared with professors Karen Harpp (earth and environmental geosciences and peace and conflict studies) and William Peck (Department of Earth and Environmental Geosciences).

“My work does tie back to that wild Word document full of questions,” says Rader.

“The things that interested me then are the things that I can now actually pursue, which blows my mind. They are the things I am interested in to the point of pushing the boundaries of what we know.”

— Katie Neith Rader was awarded the University of Idaho’s 2023 College of Science Early Career Faculty Award.

Advocacy

‘Millions of People Are Affected by More Than One of These Issues’ A more equitable system can be achieved when intersectionality is factored into policymaking decisions, writes Margaret Perez Brower ’11 in her new book.

n 1996 Mariella Batista, a Cuban immigrant, was afraid for her life when she asked for a protection order against her estranged partner who had abused her for years. Legal Services Corp. (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit, rejected her appeal because LSC could not assist anyone who was not a citizen or lawful permanent resident. A week after her request was denied, Batista was fatally shot by the man in front of their 9-year-old son as they were heading into a Riverside, Calif., courthouse for a child custody hearing.

What happened to Batista “illuminates what policy gaps do to people who are marginalized,” says Margaret Perez Brower ’11, who tells the story in her new book, Intersectional Advocacy: Redrawing Policy Boundaries Around Gender, Race, and Class (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The book shines a light on activist groups that are “changing how we think about public policy [by] linking together issues like genderbased violence, housing, immigration, mass incarceration, and health care,” Perez Brower explains. “Millions of people are affected by more than one of these issues at the same time, so by linking these issues together, these advocacy groups are helping us have a policy system that comprehensively and holistically is taking care of people.”

Perez Brower’s book comes from her award-winning dissertation at the University of Chicago. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, she joined the University of Washington in fall 2023 as an assistant professor of political science and gender, women, and sexuality studies.

Her teaching is inspired by the late Colgate professor Joseph Wagner, who taught political science and helped develop what is today called the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) program.

Participating in OUS “was an entryway for me to get an amazing educational

I

experience,” says Perez Brower. And because she was interested in assessing how programs work, Perez Brower received a stipend during her junior year to support a summer research project for which she conducted interviews with OUS students and staff members. “It was giving back to a community I cared deeply about, and it put me on a trajectory of thinking about how research can do really important things,” adds Perez Brower, who majored in political science and educational studies. “Even for programs that you love, [research] can help transform them and make them better. And that really stuck with me, so I don’t think it’s surprising that I wrote a book about advocacy groups that are similarly doing empowering things.”

More from Perez Brower: I’ve been thinking about intersectionality since I became aware of how my experiences mapped onto my identity as a woman of color living in this world. Intersectionality is something I personally experience, and that I see people in my community and my family experiencing.

When you’re a first-generation college student, you become aware of how much there are these systems, these benefits that are pretty exclusive. I learned at a very young age that certain people are just more prepared and supported to thrive. When I was at Colgate, I felt incredibly grateful to have access to that world because I realized I would be able to do important and powerful things.

[OUS] was a structure in which I could empathize and connect with other

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discover students who were people of color, firstgeneration, [and/or] low-income. We move through this world, sometimes a little bit lonely, not knowing if our experiences are similar to others’. Having that sense of community was really important to me.

[In the book] I look at organizations across geography and different policy spaces. Some of them are working at a federal level through places like congressional hearings, others are working at a state level in state coalitions, and then there are local advocacy groups. These activist groups are shaping public policy in a transformative way that is better for democracy if we care about justice, equity, and fairness.

It was my hope that I could write a book that would be rigorous and have empirical evidence, but that someone like my mother or my sister, who aren’t in academia, could understand and use.

There is also a lot in there for organizations — how they could support intersectional advocacy. And then I also have some guides for policymakers.

My [forthcoming] book is about the COVID-19 pandemic, but also recessions in general. When you have something like the COVID-19 pandemic — which was a particular type of recession and shock to the retail, hospitality, and food service industries — how do the most vulnerable workers get affected? And what role does the government play? Since the Great Depression, the government has been doing these relief policies, which are supposed to help people most in need. What we’re trying to do (I’m working on this project with Jamila Michener at Cornell University) is figure out, to what extent do [these relief policies] reach the most vulnerable workers?

I’ve been conducting interviews with women across race and ethnicity to learn about their experiences.

I see academia as a powerful tool because it gives you this language, these concepts, these research tools to be able to take lived experiences and amplify them, make them visible, understand them in ways that make intersectionality not necessarily a marginalized experience, but something that could be more empowering for people. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t think it had the potential to actually change systems of inequality and long-standing forms of oppression.

— Aleta Mayne

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Seamanship

Mapping Uncharted Waters Rob Sobelsohn ’19 is helping to plot the ocean floor.

nsign Rob Sobelsohn ’19 of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Commissioned Officer Corps typically begins his day at the bridge of the NOAA Ship Fairweather, piloting the 231-foot research craft over uncharted seas off the southern coast of Alaska.

Sobelsohn and the crew of the Fairweather are currently plotting the marine floor of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) waters, which extend up to 200 miles from shore, revealing geographic features and gathering data in areas that have yet to be fully explored. “In uncharted waters, we have no idea what the soundings are, or what the rock formations are down below.

We’re putting that information in the chart for the first time,” says Sobelsohn, who majored in environmental geography at Colgate. “It’s pretty exciting.”

In addition to filling the gaps on unknown regions, Sobelsohn explains that areas of the EEZ that have been mapped in the past are subject to change. Storm frequency, ocean current velocity, shipwrecks, and marine debris accumulation can cause hazards for sea traffic and are part of the Fairweather’s assessments. “As goods travel, it is critical that the maritime highways are charted

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and free of hazards for efficient and safe trade,” he says.

While on the bridge, Sobelsohn guides the Fairweather through the sometimes tricky waters off southeast Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. “The primary role of the NOAA Officer Corps is safe navigation, so as officer of the deck, I’m conning the ship and issuing rudder commands,” he explains.

In addition, he is overseeing the navigation for the survey operations, ensuring the ship is covering the areas to be mapped as efficiently as possible.

The NOAA Officer Corps is, along with the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, the only uniformed corps that are not part of the armed forces.

There are only about 330 NOAA Corps officers, who operate ships, perform mapping and scientific research, and fly aircraft. Training is intense, and handson. “You work in tandem with the Coast Guard, and the second half of the training is seamanship,” Sobelsohn explains.

“You’re in a junior role for the first several months, and eventually you act as the commanding officers’ designee on the bridge. It’s a lot of responsibility in a short period of time.”

Once he is relieved from his post on the bridge, Sobelsohn will often go below deck to work with the hydrographer in charge and help with the acquisition and analysis of the mapping data coming in from the multibeam echo sounders that ping sonar waves off the ocean floor. The crew gathers information on characteristics like water conductivity and temperature across depths, which is shared with other research and governmental agencies. The data is used to inform commercial fishing concerns, better understand the ocean habitats, and aid geological studies by providing detailed profiles of the ocean floor. “There’s a lot of overlap in terms of the clients we work to help,” says Sobelsohn, “but at the end of the day, our real clients are the American people.”

Despite growing up in New York City, it was clear early on that Sobelsohn was headed for an open-air workplace. He volunteered in Central Park while in high school and visited his grandmother on Shelter Island — where he spent summer days roving around woods and beaches, and helping out the Nature Conservancy. Alaska suits him just fine. “There’s abundant wildlife. I’ve photographed Kodiak grizzlies, puffins, and whales,” Sobelsohn says. “The beauty here is something that’s hard to find in the contiguous states, and it amazes me every single day.”

— Chris Quirk

discover

Research

Wrestling With the Bomb Through two fellowships on issues around nuclear weapons, historian Anna Pluff ’20 looks to explore alternative futures. hen the acclaimed biopic Oppenheimer came out last summer, some viewers were surprised to see how the “father of the atomic bomb” later warned against moral implications of the nuclear arms race. But not Anna Pluff ’20. As part of the inaugural cohort for the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship, launched by the Federation of American Scientists, Pluff has been delving into archives to research the views of Manhattan Project scientists on nuclear weapons. “Many of them are some of the most eccentrically brilliant scientists you could study,” Pluff says.

“And they cared very deeply about the implications of [their] work.”

In fact, after the atomic bomb was first tested in 1945, many of these scientists became politically active, advocating for nuclear “one worldism,” Pluff says. “They essentially thought the best way to protect the world moving forward was to form a world government that would have the sole authority over nuclear weapons.”

While that idea might seem naïve in a postCold War world, Pluff says the scientists garnered support from many politicians and policymakers at the time and influenced later attempts to regulate nuclear weapons.

“It’s not just about a movement that ultimately failed,” Pluff says. “By looking at these early nuclear-era solutions, we can also begin to conceptualize new imagined futures.”

Pluff has been imagining the future of nuclear weapons through not one but two fellowships — she is also pursuing a graduate fellowship through the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the government agency in charge of nuclear security and stockpile management. In that role, she is getting a hands-on look at how the government ships and stores nuclear waste and how it is modernizing its nuclear weapons stockpile. While Pluff is hesitant to advocate for increased nuclear weapons buildup, the fellowship has helped her better understand competing issues around maintaining the nation’s nuclear deterrent

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environmental geoscience, peace and and how to keep us all safe. conflict studies), that got her obsessed with She first grew to love history in Syracuse, the scientists behind the creation of nuclear N.Y., where she was inspired by her high weapons. “It just opened up a whole can of school teacher, Thomas Bennett ’72. On worms in the questions I wanted to study,” the very first day of her AP History class, she says. he asked students to list triumphs and The questions have only become more tragedies in American history. “Without being cynical, there were a lot more tragedies urgent recently with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine once again putting the issue of than triumphs,” she says. “It made me think, nuclear weapons into the spotlight. Pluff is the whole point of studying the past is not hoping that by looking at both current realities necessarily to inspire and create this perfect of the issue and past ideas on how to better blueprint for the future, it’s also to put manage it, she can meaningfully contribute things in perspective and better understand to the conversation about reducing nuclear humanity and why we do the things we do.” threats in the future. “I am motivated by the Bennett encouraged her to apply to idea that we have a responsibility through Colgate, specifically to the London History creating this weapon to protect people — Study Group, where she dove into studying especially communities that are not often A.K. Chesterton, a controversial British neofascist after World War II. Though historians heard or protected,” she says. “It’s exciting for me to publish research with a historical angle have often labeled Chesterton as a fascist, into policymaking today.”

Pluff wanted to delve into the nuances of his political evolution. The program gave — Michael Blanding her the opportunity to spend hours in the archives with Pluff in front of the Department of original sources, trying to Energy sculpture Chthonodynamis, better understand what which is “a reminder of the danger caused Chesterton to engage that mankind's ravenous appetite for with extremist ideology. energy may take the world to burnout,” “Especially as we see the rise according to the Washington Post. of extremists today in places like Hungary and even the United States,” Pluff says, “we need to know what fascism looks like in practice and how we define it, rather than just using it as a blanket term over everything. Doing so allows us to mitigate these dangers moving forward more effectively.”

Inspired by a Colgate history class on Borderlands of North America with Professor Ryan Hall, she continued to study history in grad school at the University of Chicago, looking at how a coalition of Lakota activists, anti-nuclear activists, and white ranchers were able to defeat uranium mining in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1980s. “It was awesome to see how environmental issues in these nuclear borderlands could create a cultural understanding and ultimately this multiethnic alliance,” she says.

It was another Colgate class, the Advent of the Atomic Bomb with Professor Karen Harpp (earth and Winter 2024 Colgate Magazine

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On the class blog for Professor Meg Worley’s Conversations course, one student commented about their learning process with Antigone. “Although I felt connected to the story when reading it, I did not feel as strong emotions or understand the text as clearly as I did today. The play really came to life when we performed it.”

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C O L G AT E ’ S C O R E

Where Conversations Begin, Continue, and Change Students in the fall semester participated in the official launch of the new Liberal Arts Core Curriculum.

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By Aleta Mayne

In the shared space of 113 Broad Street one night in mid-October, a group of students — some wearing pajamas, one wearing a bedsheet toga — gathered to rehearse Antigone in preparation for the next day’s performance, which was their midterm for Professor Meg Worley’s Conversations course. They contemplated their lines, scribbled on note cards, adjusted their positions, and smoothed out the bumps in their delivery.

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The Core Curriculum inspires community in many ways at Colgate, with this scene being just one example.

Core Conversations is one of three components, along with Core Communities and Core Sciences, in the new curriculum that officially launched in the fall. In addition to the components (three courses completed in any sequence during the first two years), students must take three “areas of inquiry” courses and five “liberal arts practice” courses at any time in their four years.

The number of Core courses stayed the same in this revision — a process the University initiates every 10 years to evaluate the curriculum — and the emphasis on lifelong learning is unchanged, but as Colgate encourages students to think about thoughtful citizenship, there is now greater attention being paid to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We’ve maintained the traditions of the Core in terms of trying to promote a holistic view of human knowledge and skills for citizenship at the same time that we’ve tried to make it more inclusive,” says Chris Henke, director of the Division of University Studies and Christian A. Johnson Chair in liberal arts studies.

Professor Maura Tumulty, Department of Philosophy chair, adds that the opportunity to reevaluate the Core Curriculum every 10 years is “genuinely pedagogically and intellectually exciting.” Not only do disciplines change, but also students are different and new faculty members bring fresh perspectives.

“It’s important to do this every 10 years because it’s the centerpiece of our curriculum at Colgate. It’s one of the things that makes us distinct,” says Henke. “If you have something that’s that important, you’ve got to take a look at it. Knowledge changes, and there’s constant innovation in scholarship, with new fields emerging and new interpretations. So you have to reassess and see what those new interpretations tell us and whether our existing understandings of what we’re telling our students still hold. In a lot of cases, it does, and that’s why we have these elements we’ve maintained over time — as well as elements that we’ve introduced, because we’re not standing still.”

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Every 10 years, the University reevaluates the Core Curriculum.

$100,000

The Mellon Foundation awarded a $100,000 discretionary New Presidents Grant to Brian W. Casey in 2017, which he dedicated to the Core revision process.

1946

The Core was founded as a way to integrate the curriculum across both departmental and divisional lines.

Then and Now

Originating in 1946, the Core was founded as a way “to integrate the curriculum across both departmental and divisional lines,” according to Becoming Colgate by Jim Smith ’70. That mission continues today, and other similarities can be drawn to those early days.

In the wake of World War II­, the University realized the importance of teaching students about other countries and cultures to increase their knowledge of the world.

“The Third-Century Plan, as I read it, is about taking the liberal arts tradition that is Colgate’s hallmark and building on that tradition in a way that responds to the world around us now, a world that is increasingly globalized, increasingly polarized, where information proliferates but is less reliable, and where you need the kinds of habits of mind that a liberal arts education can instill,” says Christian DuComb, who was a member of the Core Revision Committee and is associate dean of the faculty for faculty recruitment and development. It’s also important for our students to encounter “forms of

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Watch a video about the Core Curriculum at colgate.edu/ CoreConvo.

knowledge from across the globe because our students — although they are still mostly domestic U.S. students — do come from just about everywhere. They’re a diverse bunch in terms of race, class, ethnicity, gender, et cetera. It is a much more diverse group of people than you would’ve found on this campus 100, or 50, or even 20 years ago.”

Today, the curriculum aims to facilitate students’ understanding of the world in which they live by redefining “community” and “communities” in ways that break out of geographic boundaries.

The theme of community carries throughout the Core, but it is most explicitly addressed in the Core Communities component. As outlined in the course catalog, the communities explored in these classes take a variety of shapes that may include nations and societies; geographic regions; historical communities; transregional or transnational communities; communities of practice; or communities emerging through things, technologies, or markets. These courses emphasize three pedagogical goals: 1. Gain academic and empathetic understanding of the experience of people in communities that may be different from one’s own; 2. Understand the cultural, ethical, economic, and political significance of living in community; and 3. Explain dynamics of power that shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion within a community, with attention to the histories and contemporary implications of those patterns.

“Community isn’t a thing that just automatically happens or is eternal or is somehow genetic; it’s a thing that people do,” says Padma Kaimal, a member of the Core Revision Committee who was then-University Studies division director. “Communities are constructs.

People achieve communities through processes of inclusion and also processes of exclusion. All people do them, all over the globe.”

Dominique Hill ’05, assistant professor of women’s studies, teaches a Core Communities class called Black Youth, which “thinks thematically about and across spaces that Black youth take up and engage in, with a focus on education, activism, and art,” she explains.

To delve into the layers of this community, some questions she poses in her class include: How do we look at the racial category of Black? How do we look at the population of youth? How do we look at that particular combination? “It’s having students sit with the complexity of this population,” she says. “How do we think about the nexus of Blackness, youthfulness, and criminality? How do those things run together to create both popular narratives about Black youth, inform Black youths’ actual lived experience, but then also, how do we turn an eye to what Black youth have to say about that and what they’ve been doing to live and survive amid these social dynamics?”

Students in Hill’s class must hone their critical media literacy skills by examining news articles to think about how stories get told, what’s left out of those stories, and

ELEMENTS OF THE CURRICULUM

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FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR & THE LIVING AND LEARNING WORKSHOP

02

CORE COMPONENTS

• Core Communities • Core Conversations • Core Sciences

LIBERAL ARTS PRACTICES

• Confronting Collective Challenges • The Process of Writing • Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning • Language Study • Artistic Practice and Interpretation

03 04

AREAS OF INQUIRY

05

PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND WELLNESS

• Human Thought and Expression • Natural Sciences and Mathematics • Social Relations, Institutions, and Agents

2 Courses

“The Core is something faculty and alumni rightly take a lot of pride in,” says Christian DuComb, Core Revision Committee member and associate dean of the faculty for faculty recruitment and development. He explains that one of the significant changes in the new Core falls under the Liberal Arts Practices. “Now there are a number of more specific requirements, like language study, a writing-intensive course, quantitative and algorithmic reasoning, artistic practice and interpretation, and confronting collective challenges. The thought behind this was, on the one hand, to make the curriculum a bit more flexible by keeping the number of requirements the same and giving students more pathways to fulfill them, but also being more directed in some of the things we want them to do.”

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“With the opportunity of the new Core, I wanted to create a course that asks us to engage in community and think about how a community is built.”

the political ramifications of storytelling.

She also asks them to analyze, privately, their own assumptions and how they may have changed or stayed the same throughout the course.

“With the opportunity of the new Core,” Hill says, “I wanted to create a course that asks us to engage in community and think about how a community is built while also troubling the idea of community, such as the very notion of who gets to determine what is a community.”

Dominique Hill ’05, assistant professor of women’s studies

Other Core Communities classes this fall included: Wilderness with Professor Andy Pattison: A multidisciplinary engagement with the idea of wilderness and the lived experience of the people and communities that have been shaped and reshaped by the local, regional, and global forces involved in the conservation and preservation movements in the U.S. and internationally.

Pre-Modern Households with Professor Lynn Staley: Readings include philosophical, political, historical, and literary texts from approximately 800 BCE–1500 CE that offer pictures of rural, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic households, which prompt considerations of both the nature of power and the realities of gender, class, and race in relation to that power.

Haudenosaunee with Professor Chris Vecsey: Students examine the archaeology, culture, history, economics, religion, literature, arts, politics, law, and individual lives of the Haudenosaunee — Colgate’s closest Native American neighbors — from the period before European contact to the present day.

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Professor Dominique Hill ’05 teaches a Core Communities course titled Black Youth.

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A Shared Experience

As alumni know, conversations that begin in Core courses can continue years later over lunch or spontaneously pop up under a reunion tent.

“The Core is something alumni remember,” says Xan Karn, university professor for first-year seminars. “They talk, in particular, about that sense of commonality; they feel like they were part of something that several thousand people went through with them. The questions that were raised and the search for answers, it

built an intellectual family that alumni say has lasted past graduation.”

In the new Core Conversations class, students will have this shared experience as they all explore five texts: Antigone, the Tao Te Ching, Frankenstein, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Paris Is Burning.

“What we’re focused on is this sense that, on this campus, there will always be other people who are thinking about these exact books, ideas, writers, and places,” says Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing, “and to create the opportunity

for cross-campus conversations. You could run into somebody in the dining hall who happens to be reading the same book in a totally different section and be able to talk about it.”

Tumulty adds: “You’re unified with your fellow students across class years in that endeavor, but also, as the new Core keeps going, you’re unified with increasing numbers of alumni who also will have done that.”

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acts as a moderator. When Worley teaches Confucius, students debate the nuances of the word “gentleman,” and in the Plato segment, they write a serious Socratic dialogue on the topic of whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

Grace Schrader ’27 is one student who took those questions back to her residence hall: “A lot of times, I’ll ask my roommates, ‘What do you think about this?’ Because it’s still in my head.”

Emma Senglaub ’25, who took Tumulty’s pilot Conversations class last spring, echoed the sentiment: “You learn from your peers instead of only the professor, because it can lead to conversations outside of class and it can lead to working with each other, even though you may have a different professor or be in a different section. It helps foster community and learning as a whole.”

Science and Society

In the previous version of the Core Curriculum, Scientific Perspectives examined how science interacts with society. The new Core Curriculum takes that one step further, and the Core Sciences courses “investigate the scientific process and the relationship between science and society, while engaging with the histories, inequities, or social differences that can be and have been associated with science,” explains Professor Doug Johnson, dean of

academic and curricular affairs.

In his Psychology of Sport and Exercise class, Johnson has students read the history of the field and consider who is — and isn’t — represented. Introductory books, for example, tend to focus on philosophical backgrounds associated with Western traditions, and most people who are cited are white males, Johnson explains. His class has conversations about how “there were other people doing similar work who don’t get cited as being some of the founders of the field. Why? It’s not because of the science they were producing. It’s because of other social issues at the time.”

Johnson’s class can be described in three questions: What is science? Why is psychology, when it’s done right, a science?

And what does it mean to talk about the psychology of exercise and the psychology of sport from a scientific lens?

“When you look at what exercise does for people, the data are excruciatingly clear that exercise is just generally positive,” he says. “It’s good for your heart, it lowers your risk of dying of cancer, it lowers your risk of having cardiovascular disease, and it also meaningfully lowers your risk of being depressed or being anxious.”

As the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of psychological and brain sciences, Johnson explains how the class relates to the Robert Hung Ngai Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior

Other Core Sciences classes this fall included: Origami and Creative Coding (pictured) with Professor David Perkins. A first course in programming languages that uses origami as a metaphorical parallel to programming and generative art. Students learn and practice elementary programming techniques such as loops, conditionals, and functions, as well as the abstraction of objects.

Molecules, Energy, and Environment with Professor Anthony Chianese. When reduced to fundamentals, virtually all of our environmental problems deal with chemicals in the wrong place: noxious and reactive gasses in our atmosphere, insecticides and toxic metals in our ground and drinking water, and spilled nuclear waste.

Coursework explores the chemistry behind some of our more pressing environmental dilemmas.

The Science of Music with Professor Ryan Chase. Where there is music, there is sound; and where there is sound, there is physics. Students explore the underlying principles of the musical phenomena, including acoustics of musical instruments, formation of scales, and perception of sound.

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to promote wide-ranging discussions, anchored in the past and directed toward the present. The term “text” is not limited to written work; it includes intellectual and creative expression from multiple disciplines — for example, Antigone is a play, Braiding Sweetgrass is a book of essays, and Paris Is Burning is a documentary. The works are from pre-modern and modern worlds as well as Western and non-Western cultures.

“Those of us on the Core Revision Committee realized that there would have to be a representative selection that would give students an introduction to some different knowledge systems,” explains DuComb.

The texts were determined after several professors presented their ideas — some of which were piloted during spring semester classes — and then the slates were put to a vote during a Core pedagogy retreat last May. “It was a really thoughtful, in-depth process,” Henke says.

With the texts serving as the backbone of the course, “each individual faculty member can put the flesh on the bones around it,” says Cushing.

“Everybody’s adding different kinds of connective tissue to find a path through it and around it that grabs them, that they can imagine getting students excited about,” adds Tumulty, who taught one of the spring pilot classes and is now teaching Core Conversations.

“Different people have found different themes, which is what we wanted,” explains Worley, who is the university professor for Core Conversations and thereby helped to implement this new component. She decided to take what she considered the best parts of her Core 151 Legacies of the Ancient World class and incorporate them into her Conversations class. Worley began the fall class readings with the Bible, which ushered in Antigone and discussions about civil law versus religious law. From there, the class read Plato, Confucius, and then the Tao Te Ching, followed by one Chinese graphic novel and a Chinese-American one. Worley concluded the semester with Paris Is Burning and Frankenstein. Meanwhile, she sprinkled the essays that comprise Braiding Sweetgrass throughout the semester; Worley used that book “almost as a clothesline” from which everything else hung.

“The new course does more with texts across time,” reflects Worley, “and how they are all in conversation with one another.”

Both Worley and Tumulty shake up the conventional classroom format by having students hold engaged conversations — actively listening to and bouncing ideas off of each other — while the professor

Initiative: “You’re linking together the bidirectional relationship regarding how exercise can change how your mind works and yet your mindset can change how much you exercise — and/or how there can be two people with the same sets of physical abilities and one of them can perform better than the other in competition based on psychological skills.”

There can also be sociological and economic barriers to exercise, Johnson points out. Not everyone has affordable access to a gym or lives in an area where it’s safe to run outside. “There’s a problem getting people to exercise, and we’re talking about that too, but some of the problems with getting people to exercise are connected to socioeconomic factors,” he says.

Welcome to the Intellectual Portal

Because Worley’s Conversations class was taught as a first-year seminar (FSEM) in the fall, those students have known each other since the start of their Colgate educations.

They met during orientation, and they live in Hancock Commons — making it easier for them to come together for gatherings like a late-night rehearsal of Antigone.

The FSEM is “the intellectual portal that brings them into the community,” explains Karn.

Karn has helped develop a new piece of the Core called the Living and Learning

Workshops, which he has been planning and implementing with Vice President and Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin II. “The first aim of the workshops is to introduce an ongoing orientation experience,” Karn explains. “It’s also about community building; how we can help students to find their way on campus, to find opportunities that are important to them here while also giving them a sense of inclusion in what is a pretty diverse and dynamic community.”

The Living and Learning Workshop currently comprises four sessions: 1. Self-Awareness and DecisionMaking 2. Holistic Health and Wellness 3. Identity, Campus Culture, and Interpersonal Violence 4. Citizenship and Community Involvement The workshops are staffed primarily by those working within the Dean of the College division, who have expertise in these areas.

“This new Core aims to foster a more meaningful connection between academic and residential spaces,” Karn says. “The

“ On this campus, there will always be other people who are thinking about these exact books, ideas, writers, and places.”

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lesleigh Cushing

hope is that by keeping these cohorts together and moving them through the curriculum and through the residence halls together, a deeper set of bonds is created that allows for more meaningful conversations and, therefore, better learning outcomes.”

Schrader adds the student perspective, based on her Conversations class: “We’ve known each other since that very first week when we were all stressed and panicked and trying to meet people. We’ve seen everyone come together and grow and get used to being a first-year on a college campus.

We’ve made those connections, and we’re able to have lighthearted moments in class, but also, people share some pretty serious things, and I think that’s what has made the discussion good, because we’re all putting in what we want to get out of it.”

Tell us about your experience with the Core and how it played a role in your life beyond graduation. Write to magazine@colgate.edu.

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SUNRISE TO SUNSET ON THE HILL From the sleepy early morning hours in the village to the energy radiating off the University’s athletics fields as the sun descended, photographer Laura Barisonzi captured the character of Colgate as she dashed around snapping scenes one day in mid-September. → 30 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

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Observing Bee-havior People usually avoid being in the proximity of bees, but these students migrated toward them in order to gather data on foraging behavior and pollination. Bees are slower in the morning, making it easier to observe them among the goldenrod and purple knapweed near the Harry H. Lang Cross Country and Fitness Trail.

The Evolution, Ecology, and Diversity Lab students spread out, homed in on particular bees, and used their phones to

time how long the insects would spend on a flower before moving on to another. Honeybees are incredibly preferential and often stick to one type of flower, explains laboratory instructor Christine LaFave, who has been teaching this lab for 25 years now. That’s why there are certain types of honey, like clover and wildflower.

Pictured below (left to right): Gill Lustenberger ’27, Juliana Way ’26, and Sloan Petersohn ’26. Pictured right: Nathan Rioboli ’26 and Cutter LaPine ’26.

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The Craft of Storytelling Students including Zul Ahmed ’24 and Thomas Cernosia ’24 (top photo, left to right) participated in a zine-making workshop led by visual artist Chitra Ganesh (bottom photo), whose fall visit also included painting a wallsized mural in Clifford Gallery.

In the workshop, students learned DIY techniques for making foldable books out of simple materials, as well as how to develop their own style in telling a story or sharing information. Ganesh showed a range of visual approaches along with some of her own work in this medium. “It was meant to correspond to and echo her orientation toward graphic novels and comics that is so active in the [mural] exhibition,” explains Associate Professor of Art Margaretha Haughwout.

Bestselling novelist Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility), pictured below and right, answered students’ questions in an intimate classroom setting before she delivered her Living Writers talk in Persson Hall auditorium.

In a podcast with Professor Jennifer Brice (pictured right), Mandel said nearly all of her fiction boils down to “the question of what it means to be a decent person in trying times.” Sea of Tranquility was one of nine works of literature in the 2023 Living Writers series, in which more than 6,000 students, alumni, and friends of Colgate participated.

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In the Coop Community Garden Manager Beth Roy (left, top left) sells luscious flowers and produce at the weekly stand.

Liam Davis ’27 (left, top right), from East Stroudsburg, Pa., takes a midday break for coffee and journaling. Davis, a member of the track and field and cross country teams, plans to major in computer science.

Caroline Gaskin ’24 (left, bottom, middle) was grabbing a meal in the Coop when she ran into her friends Andrew Choi ’24 (left of Gaskin) and Toviel Francis ’24 (right of Gaskin).

The three decided to catch up with each other and study together.

Cooper Lowell ’25 (right), who is the general manager of WRCU, has been with the radio station since his first year at Colgate. In each episode of his show, called The Critter Corner, “I will choose a place, like a meadow or a city street, where one would find critters, and I play songs that would fit those critters’ vibes,” explains the English major from Free Union, Va. In one show, he played “Train Round the Bend”

by The Velvet Underground and talked about the rats in the New York City subway. In a segment about meadows, he played “Simulation Swarm” by Big Thief. “The lyrics in this song hold a certain whimsy that fits right with meadows,” he says.

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Laura Barisonzi is a New York City– and Los Angeles–based photographer and director who strives to capture natural action and genuine emotion. “My style is based on the beauty of real people and natural movement rather than stiff poses,” says Barisonzi, who studied at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Her wide-ranging clients include the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Runner’s World, CBS, the NFL, The Nature Conservancy, Calvin Klein, and Cartier.

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photography

Taking His Shot Photographer Jon Lopez ’06 has turned his love of basketball into a thriving career.

o matter where he is — Rio de Janeiro or Madison Square Garden — basketball photographer/ videographer Jon Lopez ’06 takes the playground with him. He calls the community basketball court a “transcendent space.” Playground ball, he says, is not about money. You’re there because, regardless of your background or circumstances, you love the game.

Lopez has channeled this lifelong passion into working with high-profile clients such as Nike, Wilson, and his beloved New York Knicks. In October, he held the exhibition Respect the Shooter: Droppin 40 in New York City, which covered “the love of the game” — basketball, of course — “and its

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manifestations from the playgrounds to the world’s biggest stage.” But it was also a reflection of the nonstop passion and work Lopez invested into his craft, and how that’s reflected in the work. It’s the difference between scoring 20 points in a game and, as the title suggests, dropping 40.

“Basketball is just two hoops, there’s a basketball, 10 players,” Lopez says. “There’s going to be dunks and crossovers. All the same ingredients make up these games. So, how do you keep it fresh, how do you tell the story a little bit differently? I think part of it is understanding that every game is different.”

Lopez knows. He grew up in New York City’s Lower East Side, where his mom, Edna, had to drag him off the basketball

At Colgate, Lopez was a practice player with the women’s basketball team.

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jon lopez

Endeavor

court. He would play in tournaments all over the city before heading back to the playground at night.

His introduction to photography came from Edna, the family documentarian, who always had a disposable or Polaroid camera in the apartment. That devotion stuck with him.

In high school, Lopez’s grandmother gave him an analog camera, so he took Intro to Darkroom Photography. The solace he found in that tiny space was similar to working on his game alone. When he made some money after college working at The Boys Club of New York as its assistant director of development and research, he bought a digital Rebel by Canon for fun.

Around 2007, the humorous email wrap-ups of his weekly pickup basketball game caught the attention of one of the participants, Bobbito Garcia, the NYC hoops legend, sneaker scholar, and DJ. Garcia asked Lopez if he wanted to write for his nowdefunct basketball magazine, Bounce.

Two loves unexpectedly aligned as a result. Photographers rarely showed up to shoot tournaments in the city’s playgrounds.

Lopez decided to document that scene and capture the moments he noticed as a player: the hustle, the trash talk and comradery, the poetry of the moves. Having little formal photography training, the courts became Lopez’s classroom.

“Photography, like basketball, is a universal language,” Lopez says. “You don’t need to know about the dialects. You don’t need to have an extensive vocabulary. You just understand it. You feel it when you see it, when you experience it.”

Lopez says after his work got noticed by Photo District News and Nike, which licensed his aerial shot of a teeming hoops crowd at Monsignor Kett Playground’s court, he didn’t have to change his game. He’s still about showing the “raw and real” side of basketball mixed with respect. “I’m praising the athlete,” he explains of his style. “I’m praising the landscape, and, hopefully, truly honoring the moment.”

Lopez didn’t make it to the arena as a player, but he’s there now as a photographer.

When the Knicks hired him to be a shooter/ editor to create content, video, and stills for the 2018–19 season, it felt like getting drafted.

Today, when Lopez sets up his equipment, he feels the butterflies, just like when he played.

Then he gets to live out a hoop dream he never envisioned as a kid. “I get emotional about it,” he says, “because I’m fully aware of exactly where this game has taken me.”

— Pete Croatto

tech

Changing the World Through Behavioral Science Jessica Li ’15 works with a global nonprofit to evaluate and solve social problems.

rom children’s health in Rwanda to unsustainable farming practices in Iowa, Jessica Li ’15 applies behavioral science to real-world challenges. “Behavioral science is all about understanding the context,” she says. “How do people’s environments or the design of a social program interact with their minds and their perceptions? How does that affect how they interact with a program?”

After earning her master’s in public policy analysis at the University of California, Berkeley — and a stint at The People Lab, where she honed her behavioral science skills — Li joined the nonprofit design and consulting firm ideas42. The organization works across many areas, including postsecondary education, global and domestic health, and safety and justice, in partnership with both public and private sector clients. Li is a senior behavioral designer on the firm’s Global Development

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Illustration by James Steinberg

team. “Each team applies behavioral science, but often in very different ways,” she says.

Every project starts with generating evidence-based design to address an existing problem. “Methodology is important,” Li says. “We first identify the behavioral problem, which often looks like people acting against their best interests, or having intentions to do something but

We target behavioral barriers that we believe exist and develop a series of hypotheses for how these barriers impact behavior.

struggling to follow through.” Then the team spends time interviewing people, collecting qualitative data, and creating hypotheses. “We target behavioral barriers that we believe exist and develop a series of hypotheses for how these barriers impact behavior.” After analyzing the data, they take it a step further — designing and presenting a new intervention. “We want to deliver value and be agile with our designs, and we seek to develop ones that are feasible and implementable at scale.”

Right now, Li is currently focusing on two projects that illustrate the wide reach of the organization’s impact. The first one is an effort to help the Rwandan government improve a program that fights stunting, a lack of growth caused by chronic malnutrition, by providing families with funds to purchase food. “They have a cash transfer program and wanted to see better results. To that end, we explored questions such as, ‘What are the contextual features that might prevent people from using this cash in the way the government — or even the constituents — want?’”

The other project Li is working on focuses on encouraging farmers in Iowa to embrace more sustainable agricultural practices.

While she and her team mostly meet with clients remotely, Li makes periodic site visits to understand the context and observe tests of new approaches. For Li, a typical day could include interviewing farmers in Iowa to understand the behavioral barriers to adopting a cash-subsidized sustainable agricultural practice — or analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to inform the design of a new social program or campaign. “This job is very applied,” she says.

“We spend a lot of time working directly with clients, going through the stages to generate a design that will address the problem.”

Prior to ideas42, Li’s career included a stint in local government and a fellowship with Princeton in Africa at a public health nonprofit in Zambia. There, she trained teachers in basic triage skills and coordinated with clinics to ensure school children received prompt health care. “Our goal was to make the system run more smoothly for people who need to access it,” Li explains. “It would help kids miss school less and be more engaged while they were there, helping to improve their education outcomes.”

Ultimately, Li hopes her work will make a positive difference in people’s lives.

“Behavioral science is a powerful tool for social or policy change.”

— Jessica Leigh Brown Winter 2024 Colgate Magazine

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endeavor

‘Remembering Is a Duty’ Margo Cooper ’76 brings readers into the lives of blues musicians in her new book, Deep Inside the Blues.

ne hot summer day in 1997, Margo Cooper ’76 found herself at a picnic in Gravel Springs, Miss., the smell of stewed goat meat wafting around her. The annual event was held by hill country music legend Otha Turner, who was known for his spirited, traditional fife and drum music. Friends, neighbors, and Turner’s grandchildren played drums alongside Turner’s fife, while community members dabbed sweat from their foreheads. Cooper would photograph Turner that day, planting the seeds of a

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friendship that would continue until the artist’s death in 2003.

Cooper’s connection to Turner and his legacy didn’t end when he passed away.

Turner’s portrait appears on the cover of Cooper’s latest photography book, Deep Inside the Blues (University of Mississippi Press, 2023), incorporating 160 photographs of and 34 interviews with musicians.

That day at the picnic, Cooper also met Turner’s 7-year-old granddaughter, Shardé Thomas, who is now a three-time Grammy nominee (and she’s now in charge of the annual goat festival). And, through the years, Cooper met a host of other blues musicians, like LC Ulmer, Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, and Sam Carr. She fostered these relationships, keeping in touch with the men until their deaths.

Throughout that time, Cooper recorded her conversations with musicians from the region and nearby areas, which she transcribed and submitted as oral histories for the Mississippi-based magazine Living Blues. Concurrently, she was working as a court-appointed attorney and guardian ad litem in New Hampshire’s juvenile and

the course of several years before their story was finalized, and I always remained in contact and would visit those musicians whom I wrote about,” Cooper says.

“The friendship would never end.”

— Rebecca Docter

Cooper’s next Living Blues project: An interview with Shardé Thomas.

Margo Cooper ’76 (3)

Books

family courts, and she would travel to the Magnolia State several times a year: “Although I didn’t have the time, I just said, ‘I will make the time to start working with musicians and writing their stories of their life, in their words,’” she recalls.

Cooper has been a fan of the blues since she was a teenager. In her early years as a solo law practitioner, the Colgate sociology and anthropology major would hang around blues clubs near Boston in the evenings, and sometimes she’d photograph the performers as a side gig. Many of those musicians were aging artists who’d grown up in the Jim Crow South and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Recognizing this history, Cooper wondered: “What was that experience like? What were the stories behind the music?

“I decided the only way to find out was to go to Mississippi,” she says.

The decision to travel down South to hear blues music and, by happenstance, attend Turner’s picnic would begin a lifelong journey of chronicling the lives and performances of blues artists.

“Remembering is a duty,” she says about her work. The musicians became like family to Cooper, and they let her into their inner circle, so it’s her responsibility to make sure their lives are remembered. “In some instances, I worked with a musician over

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music

She Hit the Right Note Vocal artist and songwriter Ria Curley ’81 covers complex topics.

hen she was a little girl, every Sunday Maria (Ria) Curley ’81 would pile into the family car with her parents and five siblings for a ride. Once everyone was settled in, her family would break into song — usually, in multipart harmony. A family favorite: “New York, New York” from the Broadway musical On the Town. Little did Curley know that, one day, she’d be on stage in New York City, among other locales, singing and songwriting as a career.

Performing under the name Ria Curley today, the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., singer, songwriter, composer, and digital artist frequents clubs and concert halls around the country. Her music — smooth and sultry, with elements of jazz and R&B — incorporates message-oriented lyrics expressing her opinions on global issues like climate change and more emotional ones like navigating life as a teenager (inspired by her nieces and nephews). She explored this type of writing during the COVID-19 lockdown, when her stage performances were canceled and she had more downtime to contemplate current world issues. Curley has always been a philosophical thinker, she says, and issues of poverty, climate change, and justice had been brewing for years. “I wrote a ton of songs, and a lot of them came out being about getting along and what’s going on in the world.”

Becoming a professional singersongwriter has been a lifelong journey for Curley. When she took piano lessons as a child (she wrote her first song at 12 and started performing publicly at 15), she laid the groundwork for a music career. Curley moved to New York City after graduating from Colgate, hoping to explore a career in the entertainment business. She auditioned for musical theater productions, earning roles in traveling shows like Godspell and Grease; appeared on soap operas; and sang with a rock gospel choir. All the while, she honed her talent for songwriting.

Several years later, Curley signed 22 of

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Illustration by Pushart

her songs to a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music and, over time, has focused more on songwriting and recording. In 1999, she recorded the song “Take Me,” which gained the attention of Vaughn Harper, a DJ at New York City radio station WBLS. The airtime gained her notoriety among listeners, and the success of the sultry, romantic track led her to record a critically acclaimed album of the same name. More recently, in 2023, Curley released three new singles — “Wanna Be There,” “Two Note Samba,” and “Thank God For You” — which will be part of her upcoming EP Wanna Be There.

Though Curley has always made music a big part of her career, she has also used her philosophical mindset for other endeavors.

The Colgate political science and Russian major entered law school at age 39, spurred by several attorneys for whom she worked part-time during her New York City days.

When she was accepted to Georgetown University Law Center, they were impressed by her musical acumen. “They thought that, as a creative person with unique life experiences to share, I would be an asset in the class.”

After graduating from Georgetown in 2002, Curley worked as a personal law clerk for a judge on the New York State Court of Appeals and continued with litigation and appellate work for several years before going out on her own. Now, she says, music makes up about 75% of her work and, in the rest of her time, she works freelance for other lawyers, writing briefs, doing legal research, and when time permits, taking pro bono cases for low-income clients.

Blending these two parts of her life is integral to her happiness, Curley notes. For this reason, she’s enthusiastic about the Third-Century Plan’s focus on arts, creativity, and innovation. “I am so excited about the notion that we could encourage the sciences and mathematics and the arts to all be embraced and promoted together,” Curley says. “It would be a great world if we didn’t separate those and we had our mathematicians and lawyers and doctors and techies and everybody focusing on their own creativity, because I think that, when we’re creating, we’re our most authentic, best selves.”

— Rebecca Docter

Winter 2024 Colgate Magazine

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SALMAGUNDI archives

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Fine Prints “Beauty is practical,” said H.M. O’Kane, a 20th-century craftswoman whose print-made art adorns books attributed to the Elston Press. Her work would introduce a new aesthetic to popular literature: artwork that expands the story and pleases the reader, causing them to linger on the page. Special Collections and University Archives presents her story, among other creatives, in its latest exhibition, Women of the Arts & Crafts Print Movement.

The showcase historicizes the Arts and Crafts movement, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century in response to an increasingly industrial era. It was led by crafters, who proved their dissent from the monotonous market of mass-produced goods by fashioning decorative wallpaper, furniture, ceramics, and textiles. They were inspired

by Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who saw crafting as an immersive art.

“It [crafting] uses your head, hands, and heart simultaneously,” says Special Collections Librarian Xena Becker, who curated the exhibition. “You’re not only thinking about a concept.

You’re making and experiencing something beautiful.”

As did O’Kane, the crafters also printed books (such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Henry David Thoreau’s Friendship) their shops.

“The women were often filled with intricate illustrations. relegated to the margins in this And although print shops were work, but in reality, they made a owned by men, women filled

88 Colgate Magazine Winter 2024

large impact,” Becker says.

On the second and third floors of Case Library, book pages, magazine covers, and

photographs from Colgate’s archives transport us to this creative period in American history.

Images courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives

Infamy

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Joseph Slattery: Colgate Expellee, Ex-Priest, and Con Artist Extraordinaire

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Women at Work Using a sewing frame, this woman stitches pages into a book. She is shown working at the Roycroft Press, a print shop that now stands as a historic site in East Aurora, N.Y. At Roycroft, women made pottery and jewelry alongside their bookbinding duties.

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Printing at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881 to shape self-reliant Black southerners, for whom he provided a collegiate and practical education. On the practical side, students learned about woodworking, domestic work, and print techniques. In their printing office, they joined art with handicraft and inspired several other workshops within the Arts and Crafts movement.

Beautiful and Practical H.M. O’Kane illustrated this cover for Vanity Fair in 1925, which she titled “A Woman and an Animal.” It was at this time when she began to branch her crafting skills into costume design — she would go on to create fashions for eight Broadway shows, including Hitchy-Koo.

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n the spring of 1887, a promising young man named Joseph Slattery arrived in Hamilton, N.Y., to become a student in the theological seminary at Madison University, now Colgate. Hailing from Ireland, Slattery had traveled far to continue his studies, and the school was eager to take him on.

As a graduate of the prestigious Maynooth Catholic College and a Roman Catholic priest of eight years, Slattery’s potential was clear — so much so that his training was paid for in full by the Baptist Education Society and his matriculation lauded in the April 20, 1889, issue of the Madisonensis. Young Slattery’s entry into the theological seminary looked to be an exciting new chapter in his life and the progression of his faith. There was just one problem: Nearly everything that Slattery had said about himself was a lie.

In reality, Slattery had not been educated at Maynooth, nor had he worked as a Roman Catholic priest for eight years.

Perhaps the only truthful part of his tale was his name. In reality, Slattery had been educated at the Limerick Seminary and later at St. Patrick’s College in Thurles, Ireland, but no record of him at Maynooth existed. Additionally, while Slattery had indeed worked as a priest in Thurles for a time, this stint had ended in disgrace, with Slattery dismissed from the priesthood for repeated intemperance.

Upon contacting the Thurles ministry for a standard verification of Slattery’s past, the theological seminary soon learned of Slattery’s true scandalous history. In an instant, the life that Slattery had fabricated for himself fell apart, and the ex-priest was expelled from the seminary.

In the years that followed his expulsion, Slattery married fellow con artist and infamous fake nun Mary Elizabeth McCabe and embarked on a decades-long spree of scams and sacrilege that took them around the world. According to an investigative series by the Anglo-Celt newspaper, the couple eventually settled in Boston, after a storied, if unsavory, career in crime.

— Bri Liddell ’25

“I” Love to Knit Becker refers to this image as an “inhabited initial,” in which a woman knitting a sock decorates the page. It leads into an article from the Craftsman, a magazine of the Arts and Crafts movement.

— Tate Fonda ’25

Illustration (Slattery) by Bernie Freytag

Winter 2024 Colgate Magazine

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13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Act out Antigone in your pajamas p.22

Work for Montana’s senior senator p.84

Hunt hidden checkpoints across 1,500 miles of desert p.6

Make music with a message p.45

Learn how to cook sopa de albondigas p.9

Photograph an elopement in the Rocky Mountains p.80

Illustrate the cover of a Ray Bradbury story p.10

Become a Buddhist monk after a career at IBM p.58

Stand up to a dictator p.8

Navigate a NOAA ship through Alaskan seas p.20

Chat with blues legends p.44 jill calder

Be the first DEI director at NYU’s school of social work p.68

Throw discus for track and be an offensive lineman for football p.12