Colgate Magazine Winter 2023

EXTRA CURRICULAR

Students benefit from hands-on learning P.36

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

The slope in front of James B. Colgate Hall and Case Library is small but mighty. Sometimes, it’s best to take a rest and gaze up at the passing clouds.

52 Reasons to Love Colgate

There’s

By Chance and By Choice

Extra Curricular

Become a 19th-century naturalist, present a monetary policy to the Federal Reserve, fact-check Vladimir Putin. These are just a few of the ways students gained experiential learning in the fall.

Cover: Students in Professor William Peck’s Geology Outdoors class found brachiopods and other fossils at a nearby quarry.

Photo by Mark DiOrio

Patrick Bobst ’84

What a Girl Wants

Vice President for Communications

L. Hazel Jack

Managing Editor Aleta Mayne

Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter

Senior Director, Communications and Strategic Initiatives

Mark Walden

Senior Art Director

Karen Luciani

University Photographer

Mark DiOrio

Communications Specialist

Kathy Jipson

Contributors: Omar Ricardo Aquije, athletics communications manager; Kelli Ariel, web manager; Daniel DeVries, senior director, communications and media relations; Jordan Doroshenko, director, athletic communications; Garrett Mutz, graphic designer; Brian Ness, University video producer; Kristin Putman, senior social media strategist

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

Colgate Magazine

Volume LII 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

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, acting Title IX coordinator and vice president for equity and inclusion, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7014.

Katelyn Burke ’10 Tinius, p. 87

Hopkins … had never pitched in the major leagues before. Now he was about to make his debut in Yankee Stadium against Babe Ruth.

Author Bill Bryson, p. 97

Hopkins ’27

President’s Message

Academic rigor is a guiding north star of this University. It is a founding principle, a point of distinction that has seen this University through two centuries. It will also guide us through the dynamism of our present day. You cannot claim to be an excellent university without having the pursuit of academic excellence as a condition of every day, a guide to every decision.

While a commitment to scholarly excellence has been ever-present on this campus, its form has necessarily evolved with new discoveries — with disciplines, pedagogy, and the needs of society. This edition of Colgate Magazine invites you into Colgate classrooms for a sample a reminder — of the breadth of the University’s course o erings as they engage the undergraduate of today.

Students of Russian culture, who traveled to former Soviet republics during their undergraduate days in the 1960s or to Moscow itself at any point in the last several decades, will note that Colgate continues to o er courses that explore the history, culture, and identity of that country. But faculty members are careful to look at its Tsarist period and its Cold War identity, as well as its present incarnation: a country that can disrupt global food and energy markets in its pursuit of violent expansion.

Similarly, the course catalog still features classes on biology and virology, but professors today apply a multidisciplinary perspective to these fields by asking students to consider disease spread as a kind of social network. The same approach can be applied to topics in the social sciences. Colgate students study music as soundscapes, interconnected with social politics. They engage with geology, ecology, ethics, and literature in the real world and on the written page. They analyze the U.S. economy and o er concrete recommendations on monetary policy to the Federal Reserve (and they win awards for the e ort). Read more in “Extra Curricular,” on page 36.

Generations of Colgate alumni graduate with this academic foundation and build careers upon it. Their openness to — and even excitement for — new ideas often serves as a source of personal transformation at some point along their career path. Colgate Magazine editors reached out to several individuals who embraced the risk of professional and personal transformation, and you will find their stories here. They prove that the true test of a quality liberal arts education is its capacity to teach the skill of learning. Read more in “By Chance and By Choice,” on page 26.

The experience of pursuing a liberal arts education in a residential environment creates a profound bond between Colgate and its alumni. Courses evolve, new buildings rise, assistant professors achieve emeritus status, but relationships and memories persevere. They cause graduates to travel thousands of miles to attend reunion in Hamilton, to network with fellow graduates online, to give to the Colgate Fund, or turn out for

athletics events when the Raiders compete in the area. Colgate’s 34,000+ living alumni are all likely to have their own reasons to love this place. Colgate Magazine catalogs 52 of them in this edition — one for each week of the year, or 13 for each season, depending on how you prefer to count them. Read more in “52 Reasons to Love Colgate,” on page 22.

The University’s ambitions, outlined in the ThirdCentury Plan, are built upon long-standing strengths, and it is accepted that, even in the midst of this transformation, the spirit of the institution, known to generations of alumni, remains unchanged.

When I started as a swimmer in college, I noticed early on that our coach put the fastest swimmers — the athletes I admired — in lane 3. I wanted to be in lane 3. I worked hard in training, and I started to move up. Lane 5. Lane 4. Until, one day at practice, my coach finally said, “Casey, go to lane 3.” I took my place, and we started the workout. I had achieved my goal, but it was only when that initial euphoria was replaced by the realities of physical exertion that I realized, “Oh, wait, this lane is hard. I have to work even harder now that I am in this lane.”

Colgate is not alone in educating future generations for leadership in a complex world. It pursues its mission alongside a small cadre of other legendary colleges and universities, whose legacies are also tied to the full history of America and American thought. Colgate has

earned a place in their ranks, and now that it is there, the community must continuously work even harder to demonstrate the rigor, energy, and capacity for greatness that is the hallmark of this nation’s elite institutions of higher education.

It is the mandate of the Third Century to remember Colgate’s traditions and carry them forward in a way that inspires the Class of 2026 as much as they energized the Class of 1966. Colgate produced its Third-Century Plan as a long-term road map that gives form to the intention and grounds it in well-established campus governance structures. That is how great universities become even greater, how they ensure their longevity in the competitive sphere Colgate inhabits. More than simply keeping pace, this University will stand out from the rest because it carries out its mission with, as they say here, profound determination as you will see when you turn the pages of this magazine. Enjoy.

Brian W. Casey

For news and updates on the Third-Century Plan, see p. 17 and visit thirdcenturycampaign. colgate.edu.

The experience of pursuing a liberal arts education in a residential environment creates a profound bond between Colgate and its alumni.

Love for Langel

In response to Colgate Magazine’s autumn ’22 cover:

Coach [Matt] Langel is a phenomenal leader and mentor. Someone who cares deeply about basketball, but also deeply about the Colgate players and community. We hit the jackpot no doubt! #GoGate

Austin Tillotson ’16

The players not only play with passion, but with Coach Langel they now seem to have greater confidence that they can win, and it shows in the results. Another win at ’Cuse is gravy.

Larry Trink ’77

Extraordinary coach and leader. And an amazing ambassador for the school — well beyond basketball. Such well-deserved recognition!

Peter Farnsworth ’92

Matt has accomplished this with great personal belief in his system, hiring great assistant coaches and relying upon them, and recruiting and supporting players who buy into the system. Colgate is so fortunate to have him as he has both restored pride in the program and led it to unparalleled success.

John McGrath ’72

The Legendary Doc Miller In the autumn issue, Doctor Merrill Miller was honored as a trailblazer in the piece “A Look Back at Women’s Sports” (p. 16). Online, the Colgate community remembered how they’ve benefited from her support:

A great doctor and person! So kind, dedicated, and helpful to me and my husband [Karl Blumenberg ’84, football player], my lacrosse player son, and daughter during our time there. Dr. Miller is a treasure to Colgate!

Carole Stockmon ’84 Blumenberg

Thanks for being great, Dr. Miller!

Kimberly A. Sass ’12

Doc is simply the best doctor and human! Colgate would never be the same without her!

Pilar Mejía-Barrera, senior lecturer in Spanish

She stitched me up during halftime of our Patriot League Championship game against Navy so I could finish out the game. No scar! And we went on to win. Truly one of the best!

Sarah (Mirza) ’01 Kehrt

Thank you, Dr. Miller, for your early and continuing support of Colgate women’s ice hockey.

Madeline Bayliss ’76

What a tremendous career, Dr. Miller! Thanks for helping me stay on the field during my Colgate years.

Steve Calabria ’85

One of my favorite people.

Patrick Doyle ’90

Dr. Miller is foundational to every student-athlete’s success at Colgate, directly or indirectly. She is undeniably gifted in her craft and fostering a safe, positive environment for health. No words to capture the gratitude that I and thousands of others have to this day for her dedication (and fantastic sense of humor!).

Courtney O'Connell ’13

It was nice to have a woman in this role at Colgate. I think she was also a small gift to me getting introduced to my eventual husband at Colgate. We both had slight injuries at the same time. LOL. Little angel wings.

Sheila (Marino) Gill ’85

Doc Miller was a significant part of our team and shared in our successes. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition. Thank you for taking such good care of us!

Bill Cullen ’84

when illnesses were spreading around campus to get us back on the field not only quickly but also in full health!

Patrick Letourneau ’13

She truly is an extraordinary woman. Loved her when I was there.

Christina (Weinwurm) ’99 Anderson

Dr. Miller is an absolute legend amongst our student population! She took care of me and some of my teammates

Field Hockey Flashback

A photo of women’s field hockey in the 1970s appeared in the autumn ’22 issue (p. 14). A reader identified the players: Lynne Wertz ’81 is in the center, taking the penalty shot; Martha Kurtz ’80 is the goalie; Cindy Petty ’81 is on the far right; and Sandy Jackson ’81 is standing in the center behind Wertz.

A Force

I was associated with The Media Unit for a number of years. Walt [Shepperd ’62, “In Tribute,” summer 2022, p. 56] was a force of nature. He could be cranky, loving, and supportive all at the same time. He will be missed.

Kevin Sio ’73

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

She truly is an extraordinary woman.

Christina (Weinwurm) ’99 Anderson

Conversations in the Hallway Still Linger

Ihad started reading voraciously and writing poems and stories in high school, my limited pocket money spent almost entirely at a used bookstore. I had an inkling that I wanted to be a writer, and at Colgate, I had a professor who was one of the best writers I’ve ever read.

That professor happened to be John McGahern, who is considered the greatest Irish novelist and short story writer since James Joyce. He’s known for his novels, including The Barracks, The Dark, Amongst Women, and his Collected Stories. Some say he was among the finest prose writers of the 20th century. John Updike once wrote: “McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth — the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.”

For a few years during the late 1970s, I studied creative writing and Irish literature and took an independent study course with McGahern. I would meet him in the hallways or in his office hours, where I gained a sense of how he thought and met his own rigorous standards. I learned as much from those conversations about writing and literature as anything I learned in class.

Because I would write for weekly classes, I always kept my own writing short and sharp — core scenes that were unique and interesting and could be developed into

Voices

something larger. He said that he himself worked this way. Every now and then he would purposefully write the sharpest two pages he could — what he called a “tuning fork” to make sure that all the writing was consistently at a high level.

McGahern was known for his truth telling and storytelling, his beautiful sentences that floated rhythmically on the page and into the reader’s own consciousness, and his ability to make the language rise to stunning moments of understanding.

He would privately read our work and put check marks next to things he liked. Once I used song lyrics in a story as background, but he suggested that the lyrics too explicitly

reflected my purpose. It would be better to write 100 pages that captured that focus and feeling. This was the approach he used to scaffold his own new book, The Pornographer, which he said had one simple theme: “how the young go to the city to live and the old stay in the country to die.”

The amount of time I had with him — during class, independent study, and office hours — has influenced me for more than 40 years. McGahern showed me how fiction writers read closely and gather a store of language, aesthetic convictions, and approaches to storytelling that they draw from writers of the past to add powerful dimensions to their work. If his novels and

John McGahern received an honorary doctorate from Colgate in 2004.

short stories were just autobiography, they would be far less consequential. But he carefully built his luminous, painstaking prose by borrowing from antiquity to the late 20th century, while hiding those influences in his scenes and sentences.

For McGahern — who had lost his mother at age 10 and was then raised in a police barracks by a brutal but colorful father — writing was a way to relive and relieve the past. He once told me that as he grew older, what he learned most as a writer was “to get to the pain faster.” His own aesthetic view was close to that of the painter John Butler Yeats. The painter once wrote that all art is dreamland, built “all out of our spiritual pain for if the bricks be not mortised by actual suffering, they will not hold together.”

McGahern was not a rule follower himself. (I once asked him how he could teach Willa Cather’s My Antonia in a course on “The Contemporary Novel.” To which he responded: “There’s nothing more contemporary than good writing.”)

But from McGahern I learned scores of rules that helped codify what he was teaching, that I’ve since made my own, using them in different ways in life and my career:

→ Write through suggestion, not statement.

→ Allow the rhythm of life to motivate the language, giving movement and order to life’s stasis and randomness.

→ Learn from your material. It develops organically from hidden or unresolved conflict, various rites of passage, and other factors that are present from the beginning.

→ Keep at it. Your biggest weaknesses can become your greatest strength.

McGahern taught at Colgate eight times, sometimes for whole academic years, spanning each decade from 1969 through 2001. His first stint provided him refuge when he was sacked from his Catholic school teaching job for a combination of marrying outside the church and writing a second novel that, in part, exposed sexual abuse in Ireland and challenged the church’s power. That second book was banned in Ireland.

Anyone wondering how he transformed his life — not just the hardscrabble youth but also the tranquil later years — into fiction can learn more from the Letters of John McGahern (Faber, February 2022).

The book includes many letters to Colgate faculty colleagues. It brought me back to other teachers I knew. For example, George Hudson taught me 19th-century British, Southern, and Japanese literature; he led my Japan Study Group to Kyoto and gave us a tour of Russian art museums in Moscow

The

Letters from John McGahern (Faber, February 2022)

14 February

Russell and Volkening Papers

Next Thursday I get my Chevalier’s medal from the French. I get to wear a ribbon like thousands of old fellows.13 Trinity College give [sic] me a doctorate in July and it is now settled that I go back to Colgate for the Fall term. Tell Susan that the delights of Fred Busch’s prose awaits me.

I enclose this piece which was commissioned for a special issue of a magazine for young people, ‘In Dublin’. ‘The Telegraph’ will publish it in London when the paperback of Amongst Women appears in May. I think ‘Liberation’ will publish it in France. I’m sending it in case Miriam might think of some place that it could interest in the States; but it may well be too local.13

With all good wishes

John

Do you have memories of how a Colgate professor positively influenced you?

Write to magazine@ colgate.edu.

and St. Petersburg during the height of the Cold War. (Sometimes I even helped him fix the roof of his farmhouse in Hubbardsville.) McGahern also frequently references Joe Slater, my adviser. In addition, McGahern and his wife, Madeline, were especially close with English department faculty members Wil Albrecht and Neill Joy and also friendly with historian Doc Reading ’33.

The things I learned from my professors affected my career decisions. I studied fiction writing with McGahern, and those skills landed me my first job, as assistant to the book review editor of Books & Arts, a national review publication.

Hudson inspired my long-term romance with Japan and my ability to write about other cultures. I’ve written a book-length series of articles on Japanese education for Education Week, and I am just publishing a poetry book about Japan in a Japanese style that is mortised with some of my own painful experience there.

The lessons I learned studying American literature with Slater and from numerous history professors not only helped me to be able to write a book-length poem about the genocide of the New England Algonquians but also to analyze any piece of writing, take stock of new movements and trends, and

advance new ideas in education.

My experiences with McGahern, Hudson, and others remind me that students who study literature, history, philosophy, and other disciplines at Colgate gain as much from their relationships with the college’s humanities faculty as our peers in the social and hard sciences gain from close interactions with faculty research mentors. Those who study the humanities at Colgate get a close-up view of how their professors think, internalize lessons from their engagement with great ideas and the world, and apply what they know to their teaching, scholarship, and creative works.

This essay isn’t about me or John McGahern. It is about Colgate and how it changes you. To me, the faculty at Colgate are the institution’s strength and vitality, its heart and humanity.

Sheppard Ranbom ’79 is president of CommunicationWorks, LLC in Washington, D.C., and author of two books of poetry, King Philip’s War and I Didn’t Know Kyoto. If you have stories about McGahern and his teaching, email Ranbom (sranbom@communicationworks.com) so that he may share them with McGahern’s biographer.

SCENE

Living-learning

‘The Home We Had Been Looking For’

For more than 40 years, the Harlem Renaissance Center (HRC) has been a vital source of inclusivity, learning, and growth on campus. Founded in November 1989 by Erick Bowen ’84 and Kenneth Frazier ’85, the HRC was born from the desire for a space where students of color, specifically Black students, could feel at home on Colgate’s predominately white campus.

“Your dining table and where you lay your head are very intimate spaces,” Bowen says.

“Our hope was to create a space for ourselves and for people like us at Colgate, where we could feel safe, grow our confidence, and be unapologetically Black in the way that we interacted with one another. The HRC became the home we had been looking for.”

Initially, just 20 Black and 15 white students expressed interest in living in the HRC, but interest in the center grew. Today, nearly 50 students live in the residence hall.

In its first few years on campus, the center sparked debate regarding its purpose. While the HRC’s intended goals were to increase awareness of Black culture and interactions between the Black community and the rest of campus, HRC and Maroon-News records from the time state that some members of the Colgate community feared the center would become

a separatist organization. However, those fears soon proved to be unfounded, as rather than serving to segregate Black students from their white peers, the HRC became the only residence hall on Colgate’s campus to have a roughly even ratio of Black and white students.

In the decades that followed, the HRC has not only been instrumental to the experiences of countless students but also the culture of Colgate as a whole. “From its inception, the Harlem Renaissance Center has played a key role in promoting self-discovery, learning, and leadership in its residents and creating a rich, intellectual, and social atmosphere where students can find comfort,”

says Rahneke Worrell ’25. “For me and other HRC residents, the center continues to be instrumental to both our Colgate experience and personal development.”

While the HRC now primarily functions as a living-learning community, the space had various purposes throughout the years, serving as a meeting place for clubs like the Black Student Union, housing for an African diaspora–focused Sophomore Residential Seminar, and even transforming into a museum of African American history at one point. Currently, members also plan activities for other groups on campus and facilitate discussions with other dormitories on the topics

of race, politics, and social activism.

Last fall, during homecoming weekend, the Colgate community came together to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the HRC. This celebration included a range of activities, including panel discussions, workshops, tours of the center, a film screening, and an anniversary dinner featuring speeches from students and alumni.

Dean of Students Dorsey Spencer delivered the celebration’s closing remarks, sharing his hopes for the future of the HRC. “In the years to come, the HRC will be what the students want it to be and what they need it to be,” began Spencer. “Alongside students, we will continue to develop the HRC as a nexus of learning, cocurricular social engagement, cultural celebration, mentoring, and leadership development. We will create new initiatives and forge new opportunities for alumni and student interactions. And most of all, we will ensure that the HRC thrives.”

Bri Liddell ’25

Repatriation

Funerary Objects Returned to Oneida Indian Nation

During a repatriation ceremony at Chapel House in November, Colgate returned more than 1,500 funerary objects to the Oneida Indian Nation. The collection is composed of items once buried with ancestral remains, including ceramic pots and figurines. It represents one of the largest single repatriations in New York State history.

Many of the sacred belongings came into the University’s possession through a collection acquired in 1959 from the family of an amateur archaeologist. Housed in the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, “it should never have been acquired,” said President Brian W. Casey.

The event marks the fifth repatriation undertaken in partnership with the Oneida Indian Nation since 1995, and “it will not be the University’s last,” Casey added. “The work to do what is right continues.”

Initiative Swipes for Support

To alleviate food insecurity among the student body, Colgate Dining Services launched a new program on the GET Mobile app. Students who have remaining swipes on their meal plans and want to support their peers who are struggling with food insecurity can donate to the program. Funds for the meals will be held in a discretionary account to be distributed to other students who do not have meals due to unforeseen or challenging circumstances.

Those who are in need of meal swipes can apply for emergency support by filling out an online request form. Meals will be provided on a short-term basis until another long-term solution to ensure consistent access to meals can be secured.

“The initiative began after many discussions with students and faculty and staff members about the challenges some students face when it comes to securing meals,” says Dean of Students Dorsey Spencer, whose office runs the program.

“After exploring a variety of options, a meal swipe donation program emerged as the top choice because it allows students in need to receive assistance without impacting their financial aid or requiring them to know how to prepare and cook food.”

During the 2020–21 academic school year, founding members led several meetings, with the help of Spencer, to involve other organizations on campus in the project, including the ALANA Cultural Center, the Shaw Wellness Center, and the Max A. Shacknai Center for Outreach, Volunteerism, and Education.

“The meal swipe donation program highlights the spirit of the community at Colgate,”

Spencer says. “This initiative was developed by listening to various stakeholders and is truly a community effort to assist students in need. Fellow students and Chartwells [Colgate Dining Services’ supplier] are contributing to the common good by providing support in the form of meal swipes.”

In addition to this program, other efforts address food insecurity on campus. Throughout the last year, the Office of the Dean of Students has worked closely with Shaw Wellness Institute to develop and enhance a network of food pantries that are located in various locations. Currently, there are food pantries in the Shaw Wellness Institute, the ALANA Cultural Center, and the Office of International Student Services. Additionally, the University’s dietitian provides recipes that are available to students for food preparation ideas.

Tess Dunkel ’24

13 bits

1

Gold star: The University earned a gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

2

Pop band Echosmith, rapper Sean Kingston, and Punk Fest all entertained in October.

3

Campus Safety hosts Taco Tuesday each week to get to know students.

4

First-years competed in a scavenger hunt to find their Commons’ mascots: red fox, owl, black bear, and river otter.

5

Members of the Syrian Emergency Task Force led a campus discussion on Ukraine.

6

Dance workshops, teaching the samba, merengue, and waltz, are being led by Professor Mahadevi Ramakrishnan.

Illustrations by Toby Triumph

President Brian Casey and Ray Halbritter, representative of the Oneida Indian Nation

7

Q&A A Conversation With Lyosha Gorshkov, Director of LGBTQ+ Initiatives

Originally from Russia, Lyosha Gorshkov holds a PhD in political science from Perm State University (Russia). In 2014, Gorshkov was forced to leave Russia after being persecuted as an openly queer professor and advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights. Prior to coming to Colgate, Gorshkov served as a tenured faculty member at Perm State University; care manager at the Alliance for Positive Change (New York); visiting scholar at Indiana University (Bloomington); and assistant director of Pride Center and Women’s Center at Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania).

have fun. We’ve also done some concerts. That’s part of the entertainment aspect of programming, which is important because it can unite people regardless of their identities. But we also want people to be comfortable with sex and sexuality, and that’s why we launched the Sex Museum. We work with the Shaw Wellness Institute, Haven, Integrated Health Services, and student organizations to focus the Sex Museum on a different topic each semester. It’s part of a continuous effort to help students feel comfortable with their bodies and with the bodies of others.

Office of the Chaplains, and the Department of Campus Safety. It’s a work in progress, nothing can be changed overnight, but we’re taking very meaningful steps.

CM: Tell us more about the Rainbow Room.

11

Colgate Magazine: Since you arrived at Colgate, you have injected a lot of energy into the LGBTQ+ office and into the community. Tell us about your programming and where you get your ideas.

12

13

Lyosha Gorshkov: I get my ideas from working with students directly. It’s crucial for me to ask them to generate ideas and events that are applicable to them. That’s how we came up with the trans-wellbeing panels. We also did the first Pride walk in March 2022. There was a lot of support from across campus. Students were leaning out their windows and cheering. We’re trying to make all of our initiatives for everyone, regardless of identity. For example, the drag show, some people might think, why drag? But if you think about it, art is a creative form to build alliances. It’s not just an LGBTQ+-focused event. Students who might never think they would go to something like this come, and they feel at ease, and they

CM: How have you been working with campus partners?

LG: I’ve been developing a relationship with athletics; I go to all the games. It’s a way to show support and raise visibility, and maybe I can inspire studentathletes who might be struggling or questioning. If you think strategically, you may change someone’s life just by being there. I’ve also been working with Greek life organizations. Several of them have asked me to do workshops with them to help disrupt stereotypes. I work with Haven Sexual Violence Resource Center, the

LG: The Rainbow Room has been around roughly 20 years. Before, it was like a secret society, and only people who had the punch code could access it. It was intended as a confidential, safe space for LGBTQ+ students. My intention when I was hired was to make the Rainbow Room open and visible on campus. Now we have events and gatherings there, and it’s accessible not only to LGBTQ+-identified students, but to allies as well.

CM: What made you choose to work at Colgate?

LG: I love the people and the relationships. Also, I think Colgate is a very mission-driven institution — the Third-Century Plan really resonates with me. I feel like there’s an opportunity to make a difference here. And I love the natural landscape of the campus, it’s a bit like a fairy tale. — Jasmine Kellogg

For the National First-Generation College Celebration, First@Colgate sponsored a slate of events, from bowling to community service.

8

Hot dog! The Canine Science Conference, organized by biology professor Ana Jimenez, brought to campus approximately 100 researchers from around the world.

9

Sweet treat: Students learned how to make babka with professional bakers in ALANA. 10

The Hindu Student Association hosted a late-night event with chai, henna, and games in the chapel.

WRCU partnered with Colgate Live Music Collective to air intimate shows featuring emerging artists.

In small-group coffee chats with alumni at Barclays, students learned about the finance industry.

The Thirteen and the D.C. alumni club joined in the nation’s capital for the Walk to End Alzheimer’s, in honor of two former University presidents: Rebecca Chopp and the late George Langdon.

Brenna Merritt

Agreeing to Disagree

Students and professors gathered at Donovan’s Pub in October to hear faculty and staff members’ opinions related to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. Panelists discussed the morality and justifications of abortion in the United States as well as the modern world as a whole.

Titled “Agree to Disagree: The Morality of Abortion and the Dobbs Decision,” the panel discussion was moderated by Spencer Kelly, Hurley Family Chair and professor of psychological and brain sciences and neuroscience. Panelists included David Dudrick, George Carleton Jr. Professor of philosophy; Jenna Reinbold, associate professor of religion; and Renee Madison, vice president for equity and inclusion.

As an introduction, Kelly emphasized that rather than debating, the panelists would talk about their individual perspectives and attempt to understand one another.

“My moral position is tied very closely to certain kinds of discomforts I have with our political system, our legal system, and who makes laws and policies in our country,” Reinbold said. “I agree with one aspect of [the Dobbs decision] in the sense that it is a situation in which it involves two lives, and it is a great tragedy in the discourse around abortion that it has become politically difficult to talk about and acknowledge these two lives that are at stake here. I also agree with part of the dissent in that decision, that people who can get pregnant

must be given a substantial amount of choice in how they navigate their situation.”

Coming from a law background, Madison shared her thoughts: “I look at it in terms of oppressive restriction and control over the right to liberty. With the opinion that abortion should be a state’s choice, my concern is that we are not well represented in Congress. [Women] are only about 27%, speaking in binary terms of folks who identify as women in Congress. A disproportionate representation of half of the population is significantly outnumbered; we are asking folks to make decisions on things they can never experience.”

Dudrick defended a pro-life standpoint. “It is morally wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings,” he said. “The second premise is that abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being, and, therefore, abortion is morally wrong. This argument is what philosophers call ‘valid,’ which means that if the premises are true then the conclusion has to be true.”

Having discourse across differences is really important, Dudrick added. “We who have the privilege to be at universities have, I think, the duty to engage in reasoned discourse about difficult topics, and to do so in a spirit of genuine curiosity and truth-seeking.”

Tess Dunkel ’24

The discussion was sponsored by the Forum on Philosophy and Religion, the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization, Dart Colegrove Commons, and Hancock Commons.

Sustainability ‘How Much Meat Should We Eat?’

Humans should be eating significantly less meat, according to a faculty panel discussion in October at the Edge Café. Three professors, from environmental, philosophical, and natural science backgrounds, led the conversation that was presented by Hancock Commons and the Sustainability Council.

Panelists Rebecca Metzler, associate professor of physics, and Ben Lennertz, assistant professor of philosophy, represented a vegetarian point of view.

Metzler, a strict vegetarian since middle school, told the story of her English teacher showing a video of a slaughterhouse, and how her eating habits have been changed ever since.

“In that video, showing cows and pigs, it was quite clear that the animals knew that something was not right,” Metzler said. “All of these animals have a central nervous system, and can feel, perceive, react, and try to avoid that pain.”

Lennertz added: “Usually [people] are vegetarians for one of four reasons. There are health-based vegetarians, religious vegetarians, those centered in animal rights

or environmental-related vegetarians.” Lennertz chose to discuss the latter two reasons in depth, as they focus on moral standards and living habits. “It just seems wrong to look at a creature, and then injure it, kill it, then eat its flesh. Some people may not agree, but we can look at the state of food production to make these judgments clear. These animals deserve not to be killed, and almost all of us can fulfill our nutritional needs in other ways.”

Chris Henke, professor of sociology and environmental studies, focused on sustainability issues related to meat production. Agricultural land use, methane emissions, and labor exploitation were factors Henke mentioned as contributors to a lack of sustainability within the industry. He expressed his worries for future generations, saying, “We can still meet the needs of the present generation without limiting the abilities of future communities to have a quality of life that we would want for ourselves. We want them to not be limited in the future to have a good quality of life because we did too much in our time on Earth that created negative impacts.”

centered in animal and welfare, and sustainable Dunkel ’24

Installation

A Tiny House With a Larger Meaning

Nestled within Little Hall’s Clifford Gallery, a small white house with two windows, two doors, and an array of tiny portraits was installed in the fall. The structure itself, a one-room building with white painted wood, may appear simple at the outset, but the complexity of emotions that can be felt while standing within those four walls is far from it.

This installation, titled The Little House, opened with a lecture and reception in September. It was the result of a collaboration between lecturer in art and art history Samuel Guy and multidisciplinary artist Marissa Graziano. While Guy and Graziano have been creating art side by side since graduate school, The Little House marks the first time that the two have combined their artistic specialties to create an intersectional installation.

Guy specializes in painting, and Graziano focuses on works across painting, drawing, and visualization.

Through Graziano’s blocking of the house from floor to nonexistent ceiling and Guy’s striking portraits within, the exhibit came to life as a space bordering between a gallery and a home. “The Little House is an

alienated space,” explains Guy. “Structurally, it’s a one-to-one replica of a living space, but it has all the character removed to preserve the sense that it is a gallery. In this way, it lives somewhere in between.”

The origins of The Little House go back to March 2020 at a lakeside cottage in Afton, N.Y. When Graziano and Guy took up residence in the little cabin, they had no idea that the COVID-19 pandemic would make it their unexpected home for the next six months. In this state of limbo, Graziano experienced a shift in her way of thinking and viewing the world — one that would ultimately serve as the inspiration for The Little House.

“During those six months, I had to learn how to renavigate the world,” explains Graziano. “I couldn’t feel quite comfortable at the cottage, and I began to think about the lake in relation to traditional horror tropes, such as surveillance.”

One night, Guy and Graziano were taking a walk and realized that most of their neighbors did not close their curtains and, thus, the inner workings of their homes were visible to all.

“It was a fascinating glimpse into domestic life, and I wanted to create something that could emulate the sense of discomfort and fascination that one feels looking in on others and being looked in upon.”

One way that Guy and Graziano achieved this dynamic of being both the viewer and the viewed is through the installation’s two handmade windows. Despite being barely large enough to peer through, these windows were a source of much discussion and consideration between the two artists.

In her previous exhibits, Graziano traditionally employed peepholes as a way for visitors to experience the installation, almost as spectators. On the other hand, Guy preferred not to have the portraits within the installation viewed in such a voyeuristic manner. As a compromise, they chose to create small windows and place them parallel to important features of the room, such as the main entryway. By using windows as a visual entry point for the installation, Guy and Graziano created a restricted

viewing experience similar to that of peepholes but without the negative connotations that accompany the term.

Destiny Sambrano ’21 says she was taken aback by the power of the windows to make her aware that she was both observing the gallery around her and also being observed. “Being inside of the room, I felt as if I was part of the art. Perhaps what I appreciated most were the moments of connection I felt as I peered out the windows and made eye contact with those looking in. Simultaneously, both I and they were the exhibit.”

Bri Liddell ’25

The Little House exhibition in Clifford Gallery, by Samuel Guy and Marissa Graziano

The origins of The Little House go back to March 2020 at a lakeside cottage in Afton, N.Y.

Processing Grief With Visiting Artist/ Nurse devynn emory

The workshop began with simple breathing exercises. More than 20 students and faculty and staff members stood in a circle, gazing at each other above their masks. Inhale. Bring the hands up in front of the body. Exhale. Lower the hands. Visiting artist devynn emory led the synchronization of breath through the movement of the hands and arms. Soon, the group was breathing as one. With a background in dance, choreography, holistic healing, and Western medicine, emory embodies a rare space at the junction of art, ancient knowledge, and modern medicine.

In the fall of 2022, emory, who uses they/them pronouns, completed a visiting

artist residency at Colgate through a collaboration between the Colgate theater department and SUNY Upstate Medical University. In addition to the workshop, “land somatics: moving grief and re-connecting,” there was a screening of the short film deadbird Because emory is a registered nurse, they made this film inspired partly by the medical mannequins they learned from in nursing school, and partly by their experience providing end-of-life care during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The residency culminated in “can anybody help me hold this body,” a public grief altar project accompanying the film as it is screened across Turtle Island (North America).

“In my Indigenous lineage, change, which is death, is very common; it is an honor, and change is all around us,” says emory. “I wanted to create a space

for us to be in conversation about death before the moment of crisis, which is where I often see it in the Western medical setting at the bedside.”

In the workshop, breath and movement are used to process grief. emory lost both of their grandmothers to COVID-19, and their time working as a nurse during the pandemic made them witness to many deaths. In an effort to process these losses, emory turned to their roots in dance and holistic medicine. This workshop is a way of passing on the learning and release emory gained from those days of enforced social isolation. “The masks are not only a practical defense against the spread of disease, they are symbolic of connection to others, even while they isolate and enclose us within the sphere of our own breath,” says emory.

Gentle music surrounded the group. Emory bid each participant to move in their own time, allowing their bodies to release their own unique expression of grief. Individual sequences of gestures developed, and were repeated. In pairs, the participants taught one another the patterns of their gestures and breath. Combining the sequences, each pair danced their mingled patterns for the surrounding circle.

— Jasmine Kellogg

art history

“When the yoginis are together, a story begins to unfold that is imperceptible when they are apart. When brought together, you begin to see them as a crew, as a dynamic gang who are surging quietly on their perches and dancing to the song that Shiva is playing on his veena.”

— Professor Padma Kaimal during the symposium Reuniting the Tamil Yoginis II about an exhibition to bring the scattered 9th-10th–century sculptures back together

devynn emory is a choreographer/dance artist, dual-licensed bodyworker, ritual guide, medium, and registered nurse — practicing in the fields of acute/critical care, hospice, COVID-19, and integrative health in New York City.

Artist devynn emory facilitated a public grief altar in the fall.

Marilú Lopez Fretts

Basketball Colgate Sets Dome Record in Win Over Syracuse

With 19 made 3-pointers — the most by any team inside Syracuse’s JMA Wireless Dome — the Raiders set a record when they beat the Orange 80–68 on Nov. 15. Colgate nearly led from start to finish in its secondstraight victory over Syracuse in

the 174th meeting between the two programs.

Tucker Richardson ’23 led the Raiders with a career-high 30 points on 10 of 15 from the field and eight of 12 from behind the arc. Ryan Moffatt ’23 scored 15 points with four made 3-pointers, and Oliver Lynch-Daniels ’23

finished with 12 points on four of eight from behind the arc. Jeff Woodward ’24 took advantage of Syracuse’s zone defense with a career-high seven assists.

Colgate made 18 3-pointers in its 2021 win over Syracuse, 100–85. This year’s total tied the program record and was the second most in Patriot League history. Five different players made at least one triple as Colgate shot 47.5% overall (28-of-59) and 50% (19-of-38) from behind the arc in the win.

This is the first time Colgate

has won back-to-back games over Syracuse since the Raiders beat the Orange four straight over a two-year span from 1960–62.

“Our team has deserved confidence,” says Head Coach Matt Langel. “They’ve won a lot of games and the experience pays off. It comes with a lot of responsibility — to prepare well and concentrate on the details of the game — but they’re built to take what the defense gives them and that’s what we did.”

— Jordan Doroshenko

Tucker Richardson ’23 (#15) led the Raiders with a career-high 30 points on 10 of 15 from the field and eight of 12 from behind the arc.

Volleyball Raiders Win Seventh PL Championship

Colgate’s Patriot League supremacy took another stride when the Raiders fended off Navy 3–2 in a five-set thriller to win their second consecutive conference championship.

With the win, Colgate claimed its seventh all-time Patriot League championship, and Ryan Baker became the first head coach in program history to win three conference tournament titles. Baker earned Patriot League Coach of the Year for the fourth time.

Also, Harper Snyder ’24 was named the Patriot League Tournament Most Valuable Player.

The team concluded its season in the first round of the NCAA tournament with a 3–0 loss to No. 6 Pittsburgh on Dec. 2. The Raiders finished their season 24–6 overall.

— Jordan Doroshenko

Harper Snyder ’24 (#11) was named the Patriot League Tournament Most Valuable Player, tallying 10 kills and 7 blocks, to go with a .286 hitting percentage.

Olivia Hokanson

Profile

Student, Teacher, Competitor

As an undergraduate, Julia Kurowski ’22 won league championships and battled the nation’s best in the 2021 NCAA volleyball tournament. This academic year, she came back to do it once again for the 2022 season. Kurowski is the first graduate student to play for Head Coach Ryan Baker in his 17 seasons at Colgate. She’s aced her tests both on and off the court.

Having graduated with an educational studies and psychological science degree, she is currently enrolled in Colgate’s master of arts in teaching (MAT) graduate program. She finished her final volleyball season at Colgate as the Patriot League Player and Setter of the Year.

It’s an echo of her undergraduate days. Kurowski became Colgate’s first-ever Patriot League Setter of the Year in 2020 and then repeated the honor in 2021. She was also named the Patriot League MVP after the win against American in the 2021 season’s championship match. Her awards include four First Team All-Patriot League honors and one Academic AllPatriot League nod.

In Colgate’s October 2022 win over Bucknell, Kurowski broke the program record for career assists with 3,955 (breaking a record that had stood for more than a decade).

She’s experienced winning seasons every year at Colgate, making the NCAA tournament twice and the NIVC in her

sophomore year campaign.

“The word that defines this team is ‘tough,’” says Kurowski, who was captain this year.

“Every team has progressively gotten better and better. But this year, the discipline, the toughness, and the togetherness is what glues us together.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree, Kurowski said she wanted to return to Colgate to win another championship and enter the MAT program. She never considered going anywhere else.

She credits a lot of her achievements to her family. “My family comes to every single game that they can, which tends to be all of them,” she says.

Other attendees at Kurowski’s games: her Hamilton Central School sixth-grade students, whom she’s teaching through the MAT program.

“They were like, ‘You’re a superstar, could we come to your games?’” Kurowski says.

“Later on they surprised me by showing up at our game against Army, and I cried from happiness. They have been amazing with me and are very respectful.”

The MAT program typically takes a year to complete, and Kurowski isn’t sure she’ll jump next. She already gotten looks to sign professional overseas but she’s going to take time to consider her options.

sure where next. She says she’s gotten looks to with volleyball teams but she’s to take consider her to think she small a in my or

“It’s crazy that there’s life after Colgate,” she says. “This small town holds such a large spot in heart. I have loved every experience I’ve had here, whether it be volleyball or academics.”

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Colgate studentathletes earned a 97% graduation success rate (GSR), once again ranking among the nation’s best, according to the latest NCAA reports released in November. The University was one of 36 institutions with a GSR score of 97% or better.

Women’s hockey Mentors Connect With Young Athletes

On a Sunday afternoon in September, 50 exhilarated girls arrived at the Class of 1965 Arena to meet their new mentors — members of the women’s hockey team.

The event kicked off a new program called Rising Raiders, which connects each of the 25 members of the women’s hockey team with local girls ages 6–14.

“We want our players to be role models whom young girls can look up to and aspire to be one day,” says Assistant Women’s Hockey Coach Chelsea Walkland. “It wasn’t too long ago that [our players] were kids themselves, and could probably pinpoint someone who inspired them to pursue their path.”

Walkland recruited Sydney Marsh, the team’s director of player support and creative media, and team captain Danielle Serdachny ’23 to help her bring Rising Raiders to life. They contacted the heads of youth hockey programs within a two-hour radius of Hamilton, asking them to spread the word. When registration began, all 50 spots were filled in days.

The program allows each participant to attend a home game as either a “Raider of the Day” or “Youth Manager of the Game.” Children selected as a “Raider of the Day” their names announced during the starting lineup and join the team on “Youth Manager of the works behind the scenes arranging pucks and sticks, and bringing water bottles to the bench. The child also on-ice warm-ups from the Raiders’ bench. give our participants as many opportunities to interact directly with our team as possible,” Marsh says.

have their names announced the and the team on the ice. The “Youth Manager of the Game” scenes by and and to watches warm-ups from the

“The goal is to our as many to interact our team as Marsh says. pull back the see

“We curtain and let them and their families see what our players see as they for Serdachny adds: also think it’s an awesome opportunity to help the

what our see as prepare game day.” adds: “We an awesome to grow game.”

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Omar Ricardo

Neena Brick ’25 (right) participated in the new Rising Raiders mentorship program.

Athletics

Glendenings Endow Rowing Coach Position

Colgate’s Department of Athletics announced that the men’s rowing coach position will be renamed the Khaled Sanad Endowed Head Men’s Rowing Coach.

The endowed position was made possible thanks to the generosity of Robert Long Glendening ’71 and Beverly B. Glendening, who are providing a permanent endowment fund to help cover men’s rowing expenses, including but not limited to operating costs, administrative support, recruiting, and travel.

The gift, made in honor of Sanad, comes on the 20th anniversary of the Glendening Boathouse dedication. The news was announced during a team breakfast in Boston, when the Raiders competed at the Head of the Charles in October.

Men’s rowing joins football, swimming and diving, men’s hockey, and men’s soccer as the only Colgate sports with coaching positions named after coaches who had a major influence on their programs.

“I’m stunned and extremely grateful to the Glendening family,” Sanad said. “I’ve known Bob and Beverly for more than 20 years. In addition to being dedicated supporters of Colgate and Colgate rowing, I consider them close friends. Their generosity means so much to me, our students-athletes, our program, and the Colgate rowing community.”

Robert Glendening said his family wanted to recognize Sanad for building a proud rowing program. “We want to honor and recognize Coach Sanad for all his years of coaching service and elevating the Colgate rowing program to a level that makes us all Colgate proud.”

Nicki Moore, then–vice president and director of athletics, applauded the Glendening Family for the gift. “The Glendenings have demonstrated their

The Third-century plan

love for Colgate and their belief in the value of the sport of rowing relative to the mission of the University time and time again,” Moore said. “From the funding of our beautiful boathouse to the establishment of Colgate scholarships, the Glendening Family is helping to position Colgate rowing for national prominence.”

Moore thanked the Glendenings for choosing to name the endowed coaching position after Sanad. “Coach Sanad has built and led this program,” Moore said. “He has shaped and inspired young men and women to work harder than they believed they could and to achieve at a level akin to some of the most venerable collegiate rowing programs in the country. The success of Coach Sanad’s teams are worthy of this recognition, and I look forward to the continued evolution and success of this program whose head coaching position will hence forth bear Coach Sanad’s name.”

Sanad completed his 22nd year at the helm in 2021–22, a season in which Colgate’s varsity eight earned a top-20 finish at the IRA National Championship for a thirdstraight year.

The IRA outcome capped off a big year that included first-place finishes at the Knecht Cup Regatta and Southern Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championship. The varsity eight also earned a bronze medal at the Dad Vail Regatta.

then finished No. 1 again at the same race the following year.

Using his knowledge of the sport and innovation in coaching, Sanad has guided men’s rowing, a non-scholarship program, to perennial success against programs with tremendous advantages in funding and tradition.

in in 2000 the team transition status to varsity-level has since IRA 10 times and team earn a total of 18

Sanad arrived in Hamilton in 2000 and helped the team transition from club status to program. He has since guided the Raiders to the IRA National Championship helped the team earn medals at Dad Vail.

Four years after he Sanad recorded the first national championship when his team IRA in 2004. The the Raiders earned the silver in the event.

was hired, in Colgate team won the gold the following year, earned the silver

In the 2005–06 season, Colgate earned its first gold at the Head of the Charles,

Sanad, who studied at the Sports Science School in Cairo, is a former member of the Egyptian national rowing team. In Egypt, he was a boxer and soldier, working as an engineer for the army. He began his coaching career with a position at Grand Valley conducting in

at Grand University while research physiology. He also coached the Penn AC elite, prestigious rowing club in the U.S., and he later coached the Egyptian National Team.

Omar Ricardo

The gift, made in honor of Sanad, comes on the 20th anniversary of the Glendening Boathouse dedication.

Discover

Targeting Addiction With Medication

Addiction is a disease of the brain. Yet, while scientists have developed drugs to address countless other diseases, they’ve struggled to find medications that prevent or treat addiction.

When it comes to cocaine use disorder, for instance, “Even though we’ve done 60 years of research, we still do not have any FDA-approved therapeutic,” says Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Ewa Galaj. She hopes her latest work is a small step toward that goal.

In her lab, Galaj uses rats and mice to study the neurobiology of addiction. In experimental chambers, her animals can press a lever to receive intravenous cocaine or other drugs. “We give rats access to the drug, but they voluntarily choose to take the drug or not,” Galaj says. “Just like people, they learn the rewarding effects, and they actually will seek that drug.”

For a paper published last July in Translational Psychiatry, Galaj and her colleagues tested a new compound to see if it could treat cocaine addiction by targeting the pleasure and reward system in animals’ brains. They found that animals receiving the treatment were less motivated to use cocaine.

Part of the difficulty in developing a treatment like this lies in how cocaine and other addictive drugs affect a person’s brain. Deep in the brain, in the ventral tegmental area, lies a pocket of dopamine neurons. Some of these long brain cells, Galaj explains, stretch into another brain area

called the nucleus accumbens, where they release the chemical dopamine.

The circuit between these two brain areas is active whenever we experience something rewarding, Galaj says: good food, music, sex, exercise, recreational drugs. “Whatever gives us pleasure activates those dopamine neurons.”

Researchers have tried to counteract the addictive nature of drugs by targeting this reward system. “For many, many years, we tried to directly block this dopamine signal,” Galaj says. Molecules such as dopamine deliver their signals by slotting into molecular keyholes called receptors. A medication can block a signal in the brain by wedging itself into that keyhole instead.

The trouble is, dopamine isn’t only in our brains to make us feel good. It’s also critical for other things, like our mood and our ability to move our muscles. When scientists have developed drugs to block dopamine receptors, Galaj explains, “oftentimes those compounds give us wonderful results in preclinical studies. But then, when they move to clinical trials” — in other words, they are tested in real people — “they often fail.” Their side effects, for example, may be unacceptably severe.

More recently, scientists have tried another avenue to fight drug addiction by targeting the dopamine system indirectly, instead of head-on. This strategy takes advantage of another set of molecular

keyholes called CB1 receptors. The keys for these locks are signaling molecules called endocannabinoids. (If that word sounds like “cannabis,” it’s because the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, also fits into the CB1 keyholes.)

“So we had this beautiful idea,” Galaj says. Blocking the CB1 signal could be a gentler way to turn off the rewarding effect of drugs in the brain. Yet, when researchers tested a drug called rimonabant, which did just that, they found that it produced severe side effects, such as suicidal ideation and depression.

In their study, Galaj and her colleagues tested a new compound called PIMSR. It also blocks CB1 receptors, which, in turn, should dial down dopamine activity in the brain’s reward pathway. But unlike the other treatments that have been tested, Galaj says, PIMSR just “puts the brake” on this system — it doesn’t completely shut it off.

The results were encouraging. Rodents that had received a dose of PIMSR didn’t hit the cocaine lever as often. In other experiments, animals were taken away from their drugs for a while, like a person getting clean. When researchers put the animals back into the setting where they’d been using cocaine, the animals that had received

PIMSR were less likely to relapse and start pressing the lever again.

The researchers also wanted to make sure the treatment itself wasn’t likely to be addictive or to produce unwanted side effects. “Neither of these scenarios would be good for us,” Galaj says — ideally, researchers want to develop a treatment for humans that won’t be abused and doesn’t make people ill. They were glad to see that neither of these were the case. The animals didn’t dislike PIMSR, but they didn’t seek it out, either.

“We are very excited and hopeful for this drug,” Galaj says, “but we have to do more testing.” For example, they want to see if it works against other drugs such as methamphetamine.

Galaj hopes that her passion for her work will inspire a similar enthusiasm for research in her students. Seeking new

treatments for drug addiction is just one part of Galaj’s research. She’s also interested in the mechanics how addiction works the brain and how drug and alcohol use affect person’s brain and behavior.

For example, another recent study, Galaj and her co-authors explored the mechanics how the stores memories related to cocaine use. Memories about drug experiences, Galaj explains,

are an important factor in addiction. The circumstances around a person’s drug use the setting, the paraphernalia — become memory cues. “These drug cues become very powerful,” Galaj says. “They can trigger relapse; they can trigger cravings.”

Already, therapists who treat patients with PTSD, for example, work to weaken the links between cues in a person’s environment and painful memories or associations. Galaj imagines that scientists could likewise develop a treatment to disrupt drug-related memories, which might help treat addiction.

With this kind of tool, doctors could “reshape the brain,” Galaj says, “and form new memories on that synaptic level.” She hopes that one day her research contributes to solving drug and alcohol addiction — so that these problems, too, are only a memory.

— Elizabeth Preston

Geosciences

Monitoring Changes in Campus Climate

To understand the interaction between the climate, hydrology, and the Colgate community, a newly installed natural laboratory is now collecting data through specialized monitoring stations on campus and in a local creek. Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Geosciences Joe Levy, Professor of Geography Adam Burnett, and students installed the custom climate monitoring stations.

The largest, with the most numerous systems for measuring various climate processes, is located at Colgate’s Harry H. Lang Cross Country and Fitness Trail. “It has sensors to measure energy balance — both ultraviolet and infrared rays, and photosynthetically active radiation — temperature, humidity, wind speed and

Professor Joe Levy with a climate monitoring station

direction, precipitation, and snow depth,” Levy says of the station situated near the trails behind Chapel House above Colgate’s campus. “And there are even cameras for phenology, so we can capture the timing of when leaves fall and return each year.”

Two smaller weather stations have been placed to better understand campus microclimates — one in the forest above campus and the other in the village center atop the Colgate Bookstore. While the weather stations measure rainfall and snow, special instruments have been placed in Payne Creek to monitor the change in water level, water temperature, and salinity in order to help determine flooding risk. Groundwater and soil moisture sensors are scheduled for deployment in the spring.

The Colgate University Climate Network was created to help researchers better understand the nuances of the local climate on campus and how things like snowfall, rainfall, wind, humidity, and sunshine affect various ecosystems, ranging from the top of Colgate’s old ski slope down to the bottom of the hill, where Payne Creek feeds into Taylor Lake and ultimately into the Chenango River. The northeast United States is forecast to become rainier and stormier in future years, putting pressure on communities adjacent to rivers and lakes.

“We can access that data from the cloud, and then we can monitor data that are updated every hour,” explains Izzy King ’23, a geology major from Wilton, Conn. “The locations were chosen so we can get a full picture of the watershed, from high elevation to low.”

Levy says it will take some time before the data become useful for campus and village planners seeking to understand how the area’s watershed impacts drainage near Taylor Lake and Payne Creek — mostly because this is the first time that Colgate will have regular monitoring of important data points related to climate change and our place in it.

“We don’t really have a sense of what is normal in a year,” Levy said. “Once we have a few years of data, we’ll be able to compare those statistics with other data that have been collected in the region, and then we’ll have a better handle on what might be coming down the pike.”

— Dan DeVries

← The equipment, which cost about $60,000, was funded by the Colgate Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute, the Geology Boyce Fund, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Geosciences.

Paleontology

Fossil Maven

Christy Visaggi ’02 finds creative ways to convey her love and knowledge of the ancient earth to others.

Christy Visaggi ’02 was traipsing through a creek at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi when she happened upon a fossil of a trilobite — an arthropod resembling a giant pill bug that lived several hundred million years ago. Visaggi was supervising Megan Rich, her master’s student at Georgia State University, who was in Vicksburg doing work that started through Paleontology in the Parks. That program is Visaggi’s brainchild — a way for students to conduct research on fossils in U.S. national parks.

“I was incredibly excited, and went over to Megan and the park’s natural resources manager, and said, ‘Is this what I think it is?’” Visaggi recalls. She recognized the fossil from her undergrad years at Colgate, when she saw them on outcroppings at Seven Oaks driving range; but this time, it shouldn’t have been found that far south in much younger rocks. “We were all like, ‘This is amazing!’” Eventually, they concluded that the trilobite fossil had ridden down Mississippi creek beds in gravels carried by ancient glaciers from the upper Midwest, adding new evidence to the fossil record of the region.

Visaggi founded Paleontology in the Parks a year and a half ago with the Paleontological Society and the National Park Service as an innovative way to explore an under-examined part of our national heritage and to give students a chance to perform hands-on research. The creative intersection between research and teaching is at the heart of everything Visaggi does as senior lecturer and undergraduate director in geosciences at Georgia State University.

“I enjoy research, but it’s really doing research with people that is fun and exciting,” Visaggi says. “I love guiding students through making discoveries.” Her own passion for paleontology was sparked at age 5 when she found a fossil of a 350-year-old mollusk-like shell in her gravel driveway in New Jersey. She began going on trips with her family to hunt for ancient sea creatures, comparing them to their modern descendants on the Jersey Shore. Visaggi continued that exploration at Colgate under the tutelage of geology professor Connie Soja, who helped her and other students co-author a paper about ancient marine life from Alaska.

“Connie led us in an active exploration of unknowns, where I could contribute to unravelling a mystery … adding a piece to the scientific puzzle,” Visaggi says. She follows that example at Georgia State, where she engages students in her research on marine fossils, including them as authors on papers or presenters at academic conferences. For Visaggi, the fossils aren’t just ancient history; they can also help answer modern-day questions about environmental issues such as climate change and species loss. “Paleontology is not just studying dusty specimens in a museum,” she says. “It has applications to modern conservation issues.” Mastodons, for example, started to die out soon after humans appeared, but paleontologists are still exploring whether it was due to overhunting, disease, or habitat change, and what that might teach

The locations were chosen so we can get a full picture of the watershed...

us about our own interactions with species. Visaggi also strives to make earth sciences engaging for Georgia State’s diverse student body, which includes many first-generation students from urban environments. Although there are no fossils exposed in the area, she brings them to downtown Atlanta to show them buildings with fossils in the

walls quarried from all over the country. “I teach with a recognition of culture in mind,” she says. “I talk about how an enslaved individual found a mammoth bone that went on to become the state fossil of South Carolina, or how fossils were used as jewelry in Native American cultures.”

She emphasizes similar cultural connections through parks such as Vicksburg, where English geologist Charles Lyell and French naturalist Charles Lesueur made discoveries providing evidence to help correlate fossils of ancient life across both sides of the Atlantic. “There are so many reasons why it’s important to understand the earth’s history,” she says. “Fossils hold a wealth of information about the past that can ultimately tell us how better to prepare for the future.”

— Michael Blanding

Recent accolades:

→ The Geological Society of America honored Visaggi with the Biggs Earth Science Teaching Award, which “recognizes innovative and effective teaching in college-level earth science.”

→ She was elected president of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

→ Visaggi was also recognized for her excellence in education and outreach with an invited lecture award from the American Geophysical Union.

Visaggi in her lab at Georgia State University

For Visaggi, the fossils aren’t just ancient history; they can also help answer modernday questions about environmental issues.

52 REASONS TO LOVE COLGATE

It’s no secret: Colgate people love Colgate. They love to talk about Colgate with each other and tell other people about the University. So Colgate Magazine decided to put it down in writing — all of the amazing, special, unique (enter your adjective here) reasons why we are who we are. This panegyric follows celebrations for Colgate Day on Jan. 13 and, more recently, Valentine’s Day (cheers to you, alumni couples). In the spirit of Colgate people coming together, this list is a community effort, with contributions from alumni, students, and faculty and staff members.

Illustrations by Toby Triumph

1

The beauty of the campus — it cannot be stated often enough

2

The sense of place and tight community

5

The Colgate connection: friendships that begin at Colgate and continue throughout a lifetime.

“It’s where I met my forever friends,” one graduate says.

6

Walks on Willow Path in any season

7

Spirit: games and tailgates

8

10

A commitment to sustainability. In April 2019, Colgate became the first institution of higher education in the state of New York to achieve carbon neutrality.

11

Student-coach relationships, on and off the courts, fields, and ice

12

Alumni support — through a variety of ways, including mentorship, volunteerism, and providing financial opportunities to students

13

The number 13

14

Hiking, biking, and strolling on the Harry H. Lang Cross Country and Fitness Trail

16

Summer funding for internships and fellowships

17

Supporting students by providing aid through the Colgate Commitment

18

World-class facilities, including the Robert H.N. Ho Science Center with its Vis Lab

3

Traditions: core courses, latenight slices, taters, kissing on Willow Path, sledding in front of JBC, seniors revisiting their first-year dorm rooms, Gospel Fest, ALANApalooza, and more

4 The Colgate Hello

The village of Hamilton: the Colgate Bookstore, the farmer’s market, the movie theater, and restaurants

9

Opportunities for students to conduct hands-on research with world-class faculty members, which often paves the way for impressive career paths

15

Off-campus study experiences to more than 50 countries

19

Countless love stories, marriages, and partnerships that begin on campus

20

The treasures at the Robert M. Linsley Geology Museum, like the oviraptor dinosaur egg

21 Robust services offered at Case-Geyer Library, including the Special Collections and University Archives, Digital Learning and Media Center, and makerspace

22

An ongoing commitment to the sciences, as evidenced by the Olin Hall renovations

23

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are a priority. Colgate recently welcomed the most diverse and academically talented class in University history.

24

A healthy living-learning experience through the Residential Commons, which helps students to flourish and lays the foundation for lifelong connections to the University

25

Faculty members who become mentors

26

Programs like Benton Scholars, Alumni Memorial Scholars, and Sophomore Residential Seminars

27

Outstanding students doing remarkable things to make the world a better place

29

Chapel House: a place of peace and comfort

35

Student-athletes compete on the national stage while obtaining an unparalleled educational experience, and some have the opportunity to play professionally after graduation.

36

More than 250 student clubs and organizations, from the long-standing Outdoor Education Program and Black Student Union to new groups like the Cheese & Culture Club

30

Career services that are game-changers in students’ futures

31

37

Music from a cappella groups: The Colgate Thirteen, Swinging ’Gates, Dischords, Mantiphondrakes, Resolutions

28

A strong spiritual community that welcomes all

The University’s effective COVID-19 pandemic response and plan (as highlighted on CBS)

32 Our growing reputation; as a result, applications are up 146% in two years

33

Thought Into Action, which inspires and launches entrepreneurs

34

Supporting vets, from Vetville after World War II to the Yellow Ribbon Program

38

WRCU, on the air since 1951

39

Global leaders visiting campus: President Joe Biden, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, the Dalai Lama

44

“Colgate has always displayed the best of both worlds: your degree is a bachelor of arts, but it could also be a bachelor of science degree because of the rigor of Colgate’s science courses.” 45

“Thorough assistance with fellowships, even after graduating.”

46

“It is where I learned about differences in every measure but mostly that diversity of thought isn’t bad.”

47

“It is a physical place that is Mother Nature in her splendor in every season.”

48

“It is where I learned humility, how to work really hard, how to feel victorious, and how a failure could motivate me.”

49

“It is where I learned that I didn’t have to be the smartest, but I had to be the most motivated if I was going to succeed.”

50

“It is a place that will evolve with time, but its essence will remain.”

51

“It is where I learned how to think.”

52

“It is my happy place.”

By Rebecca Docter

By Chance and By Choice Change.

Sometimes it comes when you realize your long-term career doesn’t bring you the same great zest for life it once did. Or a health scare forces you to reevaluate the way you live your life. In the following stories shared by alumni, these moments don’t serve as interruptions — rather, they’re the introductions to new chapters.

Michael Wilson

Giving Thanks

When it comes to her career, Ellen Bissett ’93 DeRiggi isn’t one to watch paint dry. Thankfully, there’s already some great wallpaper at the White House Inn.

In the grand hallway of the Greek Revivalstyle mansion in Wilmington, Vt., that wallpaper has welcomed guests since the inn’s infancy, more than 100 years ago. It’s so central to the building’s long history, new owner DeRiggi centered the hotel’s recent renovation around the wallpaper’s pastoral 18th-century scene.

DeRiggi, a longtime resident of Long Island, had been traveling to southern Vermont with her children for years, enjoying skiing expeditions during their cozy winter vacations. One annual tradition that was never missed: Thanksgiving at the White House Inn. Sitting atop a hill overlooking the Deerfield Valley, the hotel is renowned for its detailed architecture and historical features including a bank vault, original built-in telephones, hidden staircases, numerous fireplaces, and antique woodwork. There’s even rumored to be a resident ghost floating through the posh hallways. “There’s something really charming about this inn that draws people in,” DeRiggi says.

Maybe the force of the place is what drew her in. At a moment of sweet serendipity, DeRiggi found herself back at the White House Inn in December 2021 — this time, as its owner. The tale reads like the plot of a Hallmark movie. During the COVID-19 lockdown, a busy, big-city lawyer began researching real estate listings, dreaming of owning a historic inn in a snow-covered, quaint country village. Then, she learned that the sprawling white mansion was recently in foreclosure and was listed for sale. It’s where she spent so many special times — wouldn’t it be so nice to go back to those days?

With her brother-in-law, DeRiggi decided to take the leap and buy the property.

“Probably a lot of [my family and friends] think I’m crazy and really don’t have the nerve to tell me to my face,” DeRiggi laughs. “I never would’ve thought in a million years that this would be something that I would’ve done. I feel that it was meant to be.”

It’s safe to say, Thanksgiving this year will be at the White House Inn.

“There’s something really charming about this inn that draws people in,” says Ellen Bissett ’93 DeRiggi, owner of the White House Inn in Wilmington, Vt.

The White House Inn was built in 1915 and offers 18 guestrooms. It sits on a 20-acre property in Wilmington, Vt.

The inn’s restaurant, Clara’s Cucina Italiana, is named after the original woman of the house, Clara Brown. She’s said to still haunt the hotel.

Property managementisn’t new to DeRiggi. Though the inn was her first big purchase, she previously worked in her family business, overseeing the Long Island Aquarium and a Hyatt Place Hotel, and is also part owner of the Fire Island Beach House, a beach resort property on Fire Island, N.Y.

Renovating the hotel is a long-term process. “After years of neglect, there has been a lot of work to do to restore the property to its former glory,” DeRiggi says.

The wallpaper, created by the French company Zuber et Cie, is hand-painted from 19th-century wooden blocks.

‘It’s All Dovetailing’

In the late ’90s, Patrick Bobst ’84 was living in Charlottesville, Va., working in software development, when an electric little thought bolted through his mind. What if I went into social work? He’d always been a people person, the man jumping at the chance to help others through tough situations at work.

Bobst became enamored with the idea: “I went so far as to go talk to some people at James Madison University, which is about an hour and a half away from me,” he remembers.

But the way his nuclear family unit was structured, in which he acted as the breadwinner with his wife as homemaker, Bobst was apprehensive to make a move. The financial element of the deal was paramount in the final decision: He’d have to shell out approximately $50,000 (nearly $100,000 in today’s money) for tuition, along with taking a significant pay cut. “It seemed untenable,” he says.

Bobst set the idea aside and carried on with his life, which looked like this: After graduating with a computer science degree from Colgate, Bobst began working in information technology as a coder. He enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of his job, relishing getting called in to take corrective action when a piece of technology went wonky.

Fast forward to 2017: Bobst’s company, Retrieval Systems Inc., had just been acquired by a private equity firm, which outsourced the business’ work. After the sale, Bobst, who had worked his way up to a management position, was tasked with getting the outsource team up and running — he enjoyed the personable aspects of the merger, like building new relationships and implementing new mechanisms to increase company success. But the merger also came with significant pressure to “cut cost to the bone without disrupting service,” he remembers. “It was just brutal.”

Bobst stuck it out for a few years, while his children went off to college and he underwent an unexpected divorce. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he looked around to find himself alone. But, sometimes, loneliness breeds opportunity. He felt a thought prickle in the back of his mind: The structure of his life had changed, so why couldn’t his career?

Next year, Bobst will graduate with his master’s in mental health counseling. He’s currently completing his internship at Empowerment Therapy Center, rotating through cases from teenagers to the elderly. After graduation, he’d like to focus on people like the previous version of himself: “people going through the corporate grind.”

A series of events had to happen for Bobst to be in this position, and he says he’s thankful to be providing mental health resources in an era with so many challenges. “It’s all dovetailing,” he says of the timing. “I can’t overstate how important it feels to give back, particularly in these days.”

He felt a thought prickle in the back of his mind: The structure of his life had changed, so why couldn’t his career?

André Chung

The Journey

The voices had become too loud.

Shock jocks had taken over the radio waves, producing content that was often sexually explicit or more generally indecent. “There was a lot of the residual or ancillary Howard Stern effect, which is ‘How outrageous can you be in order to get people to tune in, to listen, to stay listening?’”

Chuck Dickemann ’78 says of radio in the early ’90s. As someone who’d spent decades in the industry — spanning music, sports, and news, both on and off the air — some of the best moments in Dickemann’s life happened because he worked in radio. To him, it was a place to introduce new, eclectic music to listeners, or give them access to the final seconds of a raucous sporting event.

When he realized that shock jocks, who chose to spend their time on-air telling offcolor jokes, were there to stay, he reached a tipping point. The way the industry was moving wasn’t an example he wanted to

model for his grade school–aged children.

He sat at the dinner table across from his wife after work one evening. “Leslie, I can’t do it,” he told her. “I can’t go to work every day and encourage these people to be outrageous and stop just short of setting somebody’s hair on fire, then come home and with you raise two boys to be something other than what I’m doing during the day.

“I’m living two lives, and I can’t do that.”

Two roads had diverged: “I keep coming back to the most important part of that journey,” Dickemann says.

Pause for a commercial break: Dickemann’s road to radio started in the basement of the Kendrick-Eaton-Dodge complex, then-home of WRCU. At that time, the radio station’s focus had shifted mainly to music, and Dickemann played “new medium rock” and “popular flavor” during his show. “From high school, I was enthralled with the broadcast industry and spent most of my free time at Colgate in the WRCU studios,” he says.

After graduation, Dickemann spent a decade on-air at radio stations around the country, like WASH-FM in Washington, D.C., and WWYZ-FM in Hartford, Conn. At the same time, he honed his talents as

a program director, managing the on-air staff and fine-tuning the stations’ musical content — an area in which he’d later focus his career. The Colgate psychology major eventually transitioned to a full-time management role and married his wife, a programming assistant and co-worker at a D.C.-based nostalgia radio station. Then, Dickemann took an assistant program director job at news station WBZ in Boston. “That was really the first change; it was just a difference in format. I had left the music part behind and gotten into news and talk [radio].” Then, a host of cities: Pittsburgh, Houston, Minneapolis.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming: “I started sending out résumés like crazy,” says Dickemann, 120 to be exact. He was looking for a natural leap — a job in media. The couple also wanted to move back home to Virginia, so they could be close to their parents while raising their boys. The job market was tough, though, and no one was biting.

“We need to turn this over to the Lord,” thought Dickemann, who is a devout Christian. He and his wife prayed daily, asking for additional prayers from members of their Minneapolis congregation. Within 14 days, his prayers were answered. Dickemann had an offer from a company that developed software to create advertising placements in audio and video streaming. It was the early days of platforms like Pandora, which relied on ad revenue to steam free music for users. In short, he’d landed a role in a booming field. The credit, he says, goes to God. “It turned out I had to rely on my faith in the Lord … once I did that, all these things started falling into place one after another, after another, after another,” Dickemann says.

Credits: Dickemann has since moved on from that job and now works as a project manager for the federal government, managing technology changes for agencies like the TSA. He took the position after a brief try at retirement. But before he accepted the post, he had a conversation with God. He does so before any big change: “I just say, ‘I don’t know how this is going to pan out, but I know you have a plan.’”

“It turned out I had to rely on my faith in the Lord."

André Chung

The Rest Is History

Genevieve Kocienda ’86 wants you to know that the archives at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School aren’t in some dusty old closet. “It’s not some sort of sanctum sanctorum where no one is allowed in, either,” she says.

A 223-year history is kept in the institution’s expansive collection space, and with Kocienda at the helm, the door is always open. Objects within the institution’s

collections contain a window into the school’s past: photographs of women students conducting a science experiment in a 1960s lab, 19th-century needlepoint, and documentation about people enslaved during the organization’s history. As the school archivist and someone who believes in hands-on learning, Kocienda tries each day to entice students to enter the archives “and delve into the school’s long and important history,” she says. Kocienda is the sole archivist at the school, a role referred to in the archives field as a “lone arranger,” and is responsible for a host of duties. Among them: accessioning new donations; organizing, preserving, and cataloging existing collections; creating exhibits about the school’s history; and engaging the

interest of students, faculty, staff, alumnae, and independent researchers.

In addition to her regular archival duties and providing instruction in the archives, Kocienda contributes to an ongoing project documenting the history of enslaved people at Georgetown Visitation. For her part, Kocienda is helping to identify archival records that will be used in creating a curriculum for students about the subject. “There’s a lot of grappling with that history,” she says. She’s also led the charge to digitize ledgers detailing the buying and selling of enslaved people by the school, both for transparency’s sake, and so they’re easily available for researchers. “Archives must tell everyone’s story with as much honesty and accuracy as possible,” Kocienda notes.

Kocienda thought back to times in her life when she’d found the courage to make a change.

André Chung

Four years ago, her life looked more like this: Seated at a desk in her East Greenwich, R.I., home, Kocienda tap tap tapped away on her keyboard. She was on deadline for yet another short-term freelance project, her umpteenth in the last 16 years. Writing and editing educational materials for publishers was once her passion, but the hustle of participating in the gig economy had taken away the autonomy she had over her time. She often juggled five projects at once and had to cancel long-awaited vacations to meet updated deadlines. “A lot of times that [meant] putting my own life aside, and that got really old,” Kocienda remembers.

Kocienda thought back to times in her life when she’d found the courage to make a change. There was the time she flew to Japan on a Colgate study group, then stayed and taught ESL because she wanted something different from her life in the States. There was the grind of going to culinary school at night, followed by working long hours at the four-star Tribeca restaurant Chanterelle as a pastry chef, to shift out of her daytime editing job at Oxford University Press. There was earning her master’s in anthropology from SUNY Buffalo, to give herself the chance to move careers if she desired.

But, then, there was that one change she skipped, back in 1991.

“My mother saw an ad in the New York Times for an NYU one-year master’s program for information science, which was a newish field at that time,” Kocienda remembers. “She said, ‘I think this is what you should do.’” The thought of slogging through more lengthy research papers and acquiring more debt made Kocienda groan. Without hesitation, she told her mother it wasn’t in the cards. Knowingly, her mother said, “Well, I think this is the future…” Kocienda shook her head.

But, as fate would have it, it’d be her future.

“I thought I was too old to start yet another career, but as my husband said, ‘You’re going to turn 54 no matter what you do, you might as well bet on yourself,’” Kocienda remembers. So, in 2019, Kocienda got up from her keyboard and attended the University of Maryland’s master’s program in library and information science. She graduated in 2021 after completing an internship at the Library of Congress and an archives field study at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. Though it looked like a 180-degree turn from the outside, it was just another example of a time when Kocienda took a chance on herself. Looking back, “I’ve [had] a lot of transformation,” she says.

Authentication Successful

The responsibilities of life can become heavy and can hinder us from being truly authentic,” says Jennifer Braak ’86 Salem. It was that realization that led her on the ultimate journey: traveling the country in her Winnebago Solis Pocket — a 17-foot camper van — hoping to tap into her deepest self.

→ She’s chronicling her journey in the Facebook group Jennifer Salem’s Roadtrip. At this point, Salem doesn’t have an end date to her travels.

Like many people, 2020 was a difficult year for Salem, but the years following proved to be even more strenuous. After nearly 28 years of marriage, she and her husband divorced, and they sold their large family home. Then, in early 2022, she underwent two spinal surgeries, including a spinal fusion. After recovery, she looked around: Her children had begun their adult lives, one attending medical school and the other planning a wedding. She was alone for the first time in a long time, thinking

about the last time she flew solo: “I traveled by myself for a month while on my junior year study abroad and took other camping and European trips by myself,” she says. “I used to be independent and brave.” A voice inside told her she could do it again.

“What am I waiting for?” she asked herself.

On Sept. 7, 2022, after terminating her rental lease, downsizing her belongings and putting everything else into storage, and loaning her Subaru to her daughter, she set out on the open road.

Why an RV van?

“People hit the road for so many different reasons,” Salem says. For her, she wanted to see parts of the country on her bucket list (such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga.). Additionally, she says she never felt like she fit in with her local community, which made leaving easier. She’d done a four-week national park road trip a few years prior, sleeping in a tent, so she felt comfortable traveling long distances alone. Her small van allows her easy access to cities and standard parking spots.

En Route

Salem started out traveling north along the California and Oregon coasts. She then headed to the East Coast to see the southeastern seaboard and is now traveling along the southern seaboard.

The Specs

In her Winnebago, which is shorter than a Chevy Suburban, Salem lives with the bare necessities — sometimes people are surprised at how “home-like” her setup is, she says. “Interestingly, women especially seem to be hung up on there not being a bathroom in the van,” she laughs. “I do have a bucket toilet with a comfortable seat that hides away in a cabinet.” She has both an indoor and outdoor stove to heat up water for food, drinks, and washing her face; most campgrounds have bathrooms with showers. Her electrical and solar setup are also key: She works remotely full-time as the director of research at a nonprofit.

For My Mom

The van’s name is Annie, after Salem’s mother. “She worked so hard with plans of retiring at 65 and traveling, and she got a cancer diagnosis soon after her 64th birthday and died four months later,” Salem says. “I don’t want to say ‘What if.’”

“For a California girl, this landscape is why I wanted to come to the southeastern seaboard.”

How a Broken Leg and a Broken Brain Became a Beautiful Book

By Michelle Cohen ’15

In April of my freshman year, I suddenly went from being healthy one day to hospitalized the next. Thanks to what doctors called a “perfect storm” of estrogenbased birth control, two genetic abnormalities I didn’t know about (May-Thurner syndrome and antiphospholipid syndrome), and an injury from falling down at Bellydancing Club, I developed a blood clot extending from my left knee to my hip.

I was transported via ambulance from Community Memorial Hospital to Crouse Hospital in Syracuse. There, I spent five days undergoing three awake surgical procedures to remove the clot, fix my venous deformity, and restore blood flow to the bottom half of my leg — especially my foot, which didn’t have a pulse when I first arrived.

As soon as I was out of the ICU and the danger to my life had passed, I prepared to return to Colgate. I had several new medical concerns — I was now required to take blood thinning medication for the rest of my life to prevent future clots, and because all three procedures took place in an incision at the back of my knee, bending my knee was excruciatingly painful and I couldn’t walk well.

When I returned to campus, I experienced Colgate’s encompassing kindness. My professors didn’t just offer me extensions on papers — they also gave me extra time to get to class and makeup sessions for the work I’d missed.

Dr. Merrill Miller called me daily to dose my blood thinners, and she offered advice and resources to my family back in Atlanta. Campus police officers drove me up and down the hill.

At an ice cream social where everyone was supposed to only get one scoop, a volunteer saw me limping and gave me three.

As soon as my knee healed, I became determined to put this all behind me. But what I didn’t know is that — as per a 2021 study from the National Blood Clot Association — 80% of surveyed blood clot survivors logged symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with 77% of respondents reporting moderate, moderately high, or high severity.

Until my junior year, I was able to repress the trauma of the week when my health changed so drastically, but suddenly, the

memories I’d tried to forget overwhelmed me. I could hardly eat, sleep, or do anything other than relive what had happened.

It didn’t help that I had been battling obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since I was diagnosed at age 3. Combined with the more recent trauma, it was now creating an acute state of distress that therapy and medication weren’t fixing. I tried explaining this to others, but people did not understand.

My professors didn’t know whether to give me extensions for daily panic attacks. I was kicked off the board of my favorite student club for “calling my psychiatrist too often” and “not being fun enough.” And aside from my best friend, my peers distanced themselves from me when I was hurting so badly that I began to experience intrusive thoughts telling me that death was the only way to escape this level of pain.

I was confused why people were willing to help when I experienced a physical illness, but when I experienced a flare-up of a mental illness — that was no less life threatening — I felt alone.

I didn’t need people to help me walk to class, but I did need my best friend to sit beside me on the floor of my room in Cushman House and encourage me to eat a bowl of Rice Krispies one by one when I hadn’t had an appetite for days due to panic attacks.

While on my study group in Washington, D.C., I underwent intensive cognitive behavioral therapy and started a new medicine that helped me regain control of my thoughts and my life — but I couldn’t help but feel that there was still something missing.

When I returned to Colgate for my senior year, I became determined to address the problem I experienced: between the stigma of mental illness and a lack of education, people were afraid of things they didn’t understand.

As I was deep in my mental health crisis, I didn’t know how to explain that suicidal ideation is not about wanting to die, it’s about wanting to not live in that kind of pain and not knowing how to feel better. I didn’t know how to explain that I felt afraid of my own thoughts — even though I never wanted or planned to hurt anyone — and had to constantly repeat the mantra “thoughts are thoughts, not threats.”

So, when it became time to write my thesis for my English major, I wanted to create stories that opened windows into the lives of people living with mental illness. I started with fiction and fantasy, and, after several years, I was willing to share my own journey.

Four years ago, I became the head blogger of No Shame On U, a Chicago-based organization working to destigmatize mental illness and make it more understandable to

“...suddenly, the memories I’d tried to forget overwhelmed me. I could hardly eat, sleep, or do anything other than relive what had happened.”

the general public.

In weekly posts, I write about milestones like the party I had this year to celebrate 10 years clot-free and eight years in trauma recovery, and also how OCD influences everyday activities like going to work, eating in restaurants, and making friends.

This year, I started speaking publicly about my experiences and writing articles for organizations like the National Alliance

on Mental Illness and the National Blood Clot Association.

And most importantly, I’ve found a way to combine my lifelong dream of publishing a book with the advocacy that’s become so important to me. My Colgate experience is a turning point in I Eat French Fries With a Fork: OCD, DVT, and learning to love myself, letters and all. While I search for a publisher, I hope that one day, I can bring my work to

the place that transformed me so greatly.

As someone who fought so hard to live from both physical and mental illnesses during my time at Colgate, it is one of my deepest desires to return to the place where everything started and offer hope to students embroiled in their own fights.

Cohen runs a Facebook page for OCD advocacy called I Eat French Fries With a Fork.

CURRICULAR EXTRA

by aleta mayne

photography by mark diorio

Ben Mitchell ’26 and Professor William Peck search for fossils.

In a matter of just four months last semester, students: sifted through fossils like 19th-century naturalists, presented a U.S. monetary policy to the Federal Reserve, and fact-checked Vladimir Putin — not to mention the caretaking of 2,000 red wiggler worms.

To experience what it’s like to take a Colgate course these days, lace up your hiking boots, jump into a University van, and ride to a nearby quarry for your first class, Geology Outdoors.

Peck brings students to the quarry on Colgate’s campus to observe the sandstone deposited when the Hamilton area was covered by shallow seas 389 million years ago.

Many of Colgate’s early buildings (e.g., West Hall, Hascall Hall) were built from sandstone quarried here.

You found a trilobutt,”

Field Notes

Geology Outdoors (Geol 110/FSEM 177)

Professor William Peck tells Madison Cammarata ’26, as other students gather to look.

“You found a trilobutt? The butt of a trilobite?” one student wisecracks. And yet, that is, basically, what Cammarata discovered.

“You see the little spines? That’s the Greenop’s pygidium [posterior],” Peck explains. “Good eye.”

In a hidden quarry near Lebanon Reservoir, 15 minutes from Hamilton, these types of exchanges — alternated with excited exclamations when fossils are found — pop up throughout the twohour class.

The 14 students clamber up and slide down mounds of shale as they scan the ground, rummage through rocks, and gather their treasures.

Boots, or at least rugged sneakers, are required. So is an inquisitive nature.

“If we find a lot of these rocks were oxidized, it probably means they had oxygen while the rocks were forming, right?” Alexis Rodgers ’26 asks Stella Strassburg ’26.

“Why are there so many fossils here?” Peck inquires further. This quarry in the town of Eaton, filled with brachiopods, bivalves, coral, and trilobites, shows the ecosystem of the shallow sea that covered central New York during the mid-Devonian times, he explains.

The students bounce ideas off of their partners while scribbling field notes. Peck poses questions to the larger group: “What site is this most like?” he asks, prompting the class to compare the quarry to their trips to look at sedimentary rocks Morrisville, Munnsville, and Clinton.

compare the quarry to at

Peck wants his students to adopt the mindset of 19th-century naturalists in the field, articulating their observations and posing hypotheses about the rocks, rivers, and landscapes they visit each week. They then consult their textbooks and take in a wider perspective from Google Earth before hunkering down to write a 3,000-word paper on each subject. “They’re looking at their data and trying to pull out a story,” explains Peck, who has been teaching the course for approximately 14 years. “That idea that you can come up with a big story out of small- to medium-sized observations, it really speaks to them. It’s a powerful insight.”

Back in the quarry, Ben Mitchell ’26 finds a brachiopod. “Oh, that’s a good one,” Peck says. “That’s beautiful. I love the razor look of the Mucrospirifer.”

Open-book test: What’s the difference between a brachiopod and a bivalve? “If you put a mirror down the middle of a brachiopod, the right and the left would be the same,” Peck says. “They all have a mirror plane. But if you imagine a bivalve, like an oyster, they’re all curved.”

Did you know? Trilobites can be found on the Seven Oaks driving range. Professor William Peck’s student Ben Mitchell ’26 recently found one. On p. 20, paleontologist Christy Visaggi ’02 remembers when she discovered them there as a student.

A student's field notebook drawing of Chittenango creek (above) and Chittenango Falls (below).

Brachiopod Spinocyrtia

‘We’re Going to Be Policymakers Today’

Fed Challenge (Econ 353)

Inflation is on everyone’s minds and mouths right now. While most of us are digesting the topic in our daily news reports, students in Professor Michael Connolly’s class were eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner last fall.

To prepare for the 2022 College Fed Challenge — a nationwide competition — Connolly’s students spent the semester analyzing economic and financial conditions in order to present a monetary policy recommendation to the Federal Reserve.

“From the first few weeks, it was a sprint to the finish,” Connolly says.

“It really did go from 0 to 60, starting early on,” confirms Nikola Duka ’24, an economics major from Worcester, Mass.

In the beginning of the semester, the class voted on who would comprise the fiveperson presentation team and who would be on the research team.

The class then spent a month reading, analyzing, deliberating, and practicing. “I push my students; I don’t hold back,” Connolly asserts. “I say, ‘We’re going to be policymakers today.’”

On Oct. 6, they submitted their 15-minute video presentation for the first round of competition. “Basically, they covered the key themes that the Fed cares about: inflation, labor market, real economy, financial markets,” Connolly explains, “and then they made a policy proposal based on different scenarios that might occur going forward.”

If the team were to succeed, they’d advance to the second, and final, round. “It was really well done,” Connolly says.

Turns out, the Fed agreed. The morning of Nov. 9, the presentation team logged on to Zoom, preparing to be grilled for 15 minutes by four judges from the Fed while their professor and research teammates watched. They listened to the intro and told the judges their team number — assigned, to retain anonymity in the 18-team finals. The group’s strategy involved splitting into “tortoises” and “hares.” “Hares would jump on the question; they would give a broad overview and give the tortoises time to think,” explains Duka, a tortoise.

Max Parrott ’24, who was also a tortoise, adds: “We divided it into inflation, labor,

finance/policy, and output. We had two tortoises and one hare for each, but with an understanding that we’ve all looked at the topics so much that if someone missed something, anyone else could jump in. There’s a bit of an art to it.”

Afterward, still trying to remember all that happened in the rapid-fire round, Duka reflects, “It was intense.” Still, the group felt prepared. “There was nothing that we hadn’t discussed at least once,” adds Parrott, an

Clockwise from left: Chang Liu ’24, Nikola Duka ’24, Koryn Lafferty ’24, Hailey Wilkinson ’23, Will Heller ’24, Kimberly Caruso ’23, Mike Van Demark ’24, Max Parrott ’24

economics major from Bedford, N.Y. “I was really proud of the team.”

As campus was about to depart for Thanksgiving break, the team learned that they won first place in the New York District; the other finalists were RutgersNew Brunswick and SUNY Geneseo. The Colgate team also received an honorable mention in the nationals, alongside University of Notre Dame and UCLA.

“They put in a tremendous amount of

work this semester and it paid off,” Connolly says.

Parrott concludes: “It’s by far the most I’ve ever walked away from a class where I’ve thought, ‘Not only do I feel like I learned about this economic topic, but I also understand the world a lot better.’”

More about the professor: Connolly taught Fed Challenge for the first time in the fall, but it wasn’t his first experience

with the competition. He competed twice as a student at Rutgers, where his team made it to the finals both times. “It was the most rewarding experience of my undergraduate education,” he says. “Seeing how much that mattered for my career and my friends who competed, I knew this had tremendous value,” adds Connolly, whose first job after college was at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Colgate has advanced in the Fed Challenge twice in previous years. In 2019 the team earned second place for the New York district. The 2017 team received an honorable mention for the New York district.

Book Lovers Unite

Living Writers (FSEM 164 and Engl 360)

Apassion for reading is the only prerequisite, according to the syllabi for Professor Jennifer Brice’s Living Writers classes.

That requirement resonates with Leah (Werner) ’96 Schultz, who has been participating in the course every year since she took it as a student with Professor Frederick Busch.

“I like reading a lot,” says Schultz, who was one of approximately 6,500 alumni, parents, and community members signed up for the fall not-for-credit program. “And I like being introduced to books I normally wouldn’t stumble across.”

This year was special for Schultz because she took the course with her daughter, Lily ’26. Leah had recommended it, saying, “Even if you’re not going to be an English major, it’s very interesting for writing in general, which is important at Colgate.” Throughout the semester, they’d see each other on Zoom in some of the open sessions, and they’d discuss the books privately.

The course has changed since Leah was a junior, with more opportunities now for students to interact with the authors, as well as a podcast, a website, and Mondayevening Zoom sessions featuring faculty members who can speak to that week’s topic.

“It’s sort of flipping the classroom,” Brice says. “They read the book, they have a really intense conversation with me about it, but they’re also expected to listen to the podcast, come to Zoom discussions, and read book reviews, interviews, and biographies — it’s a lot of work.”

For Lily, it’s paying off: “It’s been making me appreciate the books I’m reading a lot more,” she says. “I’m learning what questions to be asking about literature and how to analyze it from the standpoint of not just the reader, but also what the author might have been thinking when they were writing.”

Brice spends significant class time on how to prepare questions for the authors, pushing students to be specific. “No lazy questions,” the professor emphasizes.

For Leah, it’s about more than the books: “It’s the community,” she says. “The feeling that I’m still involved in Colgate.... It’s a connection back to the school, and I’m doing something I love to do.”

Fall ’22 readings

Severance, Ling Ma

The Crane Wife, CJ Hauser

How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue

The Stone Loves the World, Brian Hall

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid

Essex Clay, Sir Andrew Motion

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander

Tentacle, Rita Indiana

Possessing Harriet, Kyle Bass

Weather, Jenny Offill

This year, in addition to the usual 300-level Living Writers course, Brice offered it as an FSEM. In that version of the class, students read a slightly abridged version of the full 10-book list.

The Living Writers conversation continues online through social media: #ColgateLivingWriters

Networks: Friends, Terrorists, and Epidemics is a new class, taught for the first time last fall by Professor Ahmet Ay (pictured).

The Linked World

Networks: Friends, Terrorists, and Epidemics (Core S195)

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon — it’s a well-known concept. But that basic principle, when applied through network science, has the ability to extend our knowledge far beyond simply connecting actors in movies. Researchers can predict the spread of disease, find terrorists, and comprehend complex financial systems, just to cite a few examples.

Graph theory, a branch of mathematics used in network science, plots out the relationship between nodes (or vertices) and links (or edges). Using Facebook as an example, Professor Ahmet Ay explains: “People are the nodes and their friendships are links.”

In his class, Ay and his students analyzed data to make conclusions about a variety of situations, ranging from the fantasy realm to the theoretical to actual global events. They created a Game of Thrones network by scanning the books to see how closely characters are located to each other in the text (within 15 words), measuring characters’ centrality by noting how many links that person has, and ultimately deducing which character is the most important in each book.

Using a real-world example, the class looked at the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. “The ideal terrorist networks are star-shaped,” Ay explains. “There is one key person in the middle who talks to everyone, but they try to reduce the amount of talking between the other members so that the information will not get out.”

A biologist as well as a mathematician, Ay is most interested in biological networks. “If you want to cure diseases and understand

how to develop a drug, you have to look at how it would impact the rest of the system,” he says. “So you need to know the connections between the genes and how changing one of them will have an effect.”

For their take-home project, each student chose a data set to analyze. One student scrutinized the corruption in the Mexican political system. Another compared the dolphin social network to humans.

Available data sets were one option for students, or they could collect their own. Kas Betinol ’24 gathered data, confidentially, from a Colgate varsity team to determine who would be the best fit for captain. “I was able to calculate [players’] positions in the network, their popularity, and how well they were connected to other well-connected people,” she says, “trying to find out who would be the best leader for the team.” In her findings, Betinol learned that the top two candidates for this (anonymous) team’s leaders were the student-athletes with the highest scores on their ability to influence others.

“The idea is to learn about life from these different networks,” Ay says.

A critical takeaway from network science is that we’re all more closely related than we realize. Rather than six degrees of separation, it’s been shown that strangers can actually be connected in three to four links on Facebook. “We call this the ultra-small world effect,” Ay says.

Daenerys Targaryen Tyrion Lannister

Jon Snow Stannis Baratheon

Scot Brown is a National Endowment for the Humanities visiting associate professor of Africana and Latin American studies. He visits from UCLA’s African American studies department. Brown is a scholar and author, as well as a musician under the name Dr. Scot Brown.

We’ve Got the Funk

Funky Stories: Memoirs and Black Popular Music (ALST 313)

Every time Professor Scot Brown hears “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson, he smells strawberries. Brown was in sixth grade when the song came out on 45. With a prized dollar, he walked to his neighborhood music store in Rochester, N.Y., where he proudly purchased the record. The label in the center of the 45 had a strawberry-fragranced scratch-and-sniff coating, which Brown still remembers today.

In Brown’s Funky Stories class, “students gain a greater understanding about the power of music in our lives,” he says of

the course taught in the fall and again this spring.

They read books about musicians like Maurice White, Grace Jones, George Clinton, and Faith Evans. “The course is an engagement with those memoirs,” Brown says, “for learning the methodologies and techniques of incorporating and infusing sound, life experience, and visual references to music [into writing].”

Students also learn the connections between music, social politics, and historical contexts. “They’re getting urban history, and they’re getting stories about Black

communities, which these artists are from … in many different environments and contexts.”

For the final project, students create their own music memoirs, reflecting on their personal experiences with sound in a multimedia essay about their life experience. Brown says it’s important to him that his students work on a project that has “life value.” He adds, “So that they’re getting a journey that’s very rich and, at the same time, they come out of it, hopefully, with some techniques they can use and deploy beyond this classroom.”

Fact-Checking Putin

Russia at the Crossroads (Core C187)

When thinking about how to approach her Core Russia course last fall, Alice Nakhimovsky knew the Russian invasion of Ukraine “had to come front and center,” she says.

The class began with the history of Ukraine and Russia and then looked at how Vladimir Putin presents that past. “The origin story of Ukraine versus Russia is murky because it is the distant past and interpreted differently [by Putin versus Ukraine],” Nakhimovsky says. “In other words, is Kyiv the origin of Russia or the origin of Ukraine?”

To take a closer look at the truthfulness of Putin’s narrative, the professor asked her students to fact-check his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin’s website in 2021. The essay “elaborates on his frequently stated assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are ‘one people,’” explains Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute.

“We looked at how [Putin] perpetuated Russian creation myths and how that gave a false narrative of how Ukraine is tied to Russia,” says Ethan Hamlin ’25. “He would bring up a lot of religious symbolism to evoke that feeling of unity between Russia and Ukraine because he basically wanted to give the Russian people a sense that they had some sort of ownership over Ukraine, in

order to justify trying to occupy them.”

Nakhimovsky estimates that she’s been teaching the class for 35 years, and although it’s changed throughout the decades, it’s always provided a historical perspective of Russia. “A lot of the world’s crises seem to emanate from there,” she says. “So it’s worth knowing about in all its complexity.”

In addition, Core Russia delves into the role of literature and art as it relates to the history and politics of the region. As the syllabus outlines: In Gogol, we have bureaucracy … and the little man. In Dostoevsky, we have a philosophical reaction against liberalism and an examination of human nature — all against the background of Russian bureaucracy.

“Literature is a way of examining people in society,” Nakhimovsky says. “[It] often gets overlooked as peripheral, and I don’t think it’s peripheral. I think it can be highly explanatory.”

Hamlin decided to enroll in Core Russia after taking Nakhimovsky’s Russian literature class in spring 2022. “I learned a lot, and it made me curious about Russian history in general,” he says.

“Professor Nakhimovsky’s classes are very interdisciplinary — we read textbooks, we watch videos, we listen to music. That type of well-rounded syllabus makes it easier to tie the class into other classes in unexpected ways.”

Enlightenment

Ethics (Philosophy 111)

Are ethics rooted in God? Is morality objective?

What obligations do we have to others?

These are some of the questions Professor David McCabe explores with students as an introduction to ethics and philosophy.

“We talk about big-scale issues, and then I hope to have said enough about them so that the students actually can work out for themselves which normative theory they think is correct,” McCabe, who is the Richard J. and Joan Head Chair in philosophy, says. “A normative ethical theory fundamentally answers questions about what makes acts right and wrong, and, in doing so, it will often give us an account of what is a good life, what is of value in a human life.” That last question, McCabe says, presents the chance for students to ask probing questions at a time in their lives when they’re formulating ideas that shape their adult selves.

Students discuss their own views in class and also study what McCabe calls “the various candidates that have stood the test of time”: utilitarianism, the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant, and virtue ethics, which is rooted in Aristotle.

The goal is for students to know the various arguments “and decide for themselves,” he says.

In addition to Professor Alice Nakhimovsky (pictured), two other professors also taught Russia at the Crossroads in the fall: Ukrainian scholar Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, who is a visiting professor at Colgate, and political science professor Masha Hedberg.

But whatever they decide, students should acknowledge that all the views they encounter “have great strengths and serious weaknesses,” he emphasizes.

That’s why philosophy is so important now: “There’s a tendency to demonize people we disagree with, who are on the other sides of issues. We’re finding it harder and harder to talk with each other and easier and easier simply to dismiss people who disagree.”

By acknowledging the complexities and challenges with all of the views discussed, “the result of it, I think — this is true of philosophy generally — is to instill a certain kind of humility in people,” he says. “The study of philosophy, if it’s done properly, should work to open your mind to ideas you might have rejected too hastily.”

To that point, McCabe last fall expanded what has been traditionally taught in the class and spent time discussing “issues students are especially interested in now, which are race and gender.”

Including these areas, as well as current topics like abortion, “seems to me an important thing to do,” McCabe says, “to let students see quite directly how the abstract ethical reflection that we’re carrying out in the class should affect the ways they approach the various challenges in their lives.”

Black Gold Eco-Art (FSEM 160)

At the end of dinner at Frank Dining Hall, Kim Gates ’26 fills a cup with a piece of watermelon, a carrot, and some cereal. It’s not a snack for later — it’s for her pet worms.

She returns to her Drake Hall common room, where she chops the food into tiny bits and sprinkles it into a bin filled with hundreds of red wigglers that have been waiting for their weekly feeding. Then she’ll rip paper into shreds for the bin and spray it all with water. “We have to make sure the bins are moist,” Gates says. She and her group members from Eco-Art take turns or team up to care for the worms.

Ecological art is a contemporary social arts practice that brings living things into relationship with one another, the syllabus explains. “I wanted the students to have a process-based engagement with something beyond the human,” says Professor Margaretha Haughwout. “The worm bins seemed like a great way to do that

and to have collaboration between the students.”

The class groups cared for three bins that began with a total of 2,000 worms. (“If they’re doing well, they’ll multiply,” Haughwout says.) The compact containers only a couple of feet in width and height — ultimately produced compost for Haughwout’s Food Forest Studio at the Paul J. Schupf ’58 Studio Arts Center. “In permaculture circles, we call [vermicompost] ‘black gold’ because it’s incredibly nutritious and really good for your gardens,” Haughwout says.

Students have told her that it’s been a meaningful project, to have something to care for that’s not just themselves.

Gates also sees it as an easy sustainability effort. “These ways that don’t take much of our time or energy — it just goes to show the little simple measures that we can take to do things for the environment.”

The class’ worms came from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm, owned by James Shaw ’83.

Aristotle, iStock Grafissimo

Endeavor

spending a year recutting the film with the help of reshoots, Super Troopers hit theaters in February 2002 and went on to gross $23 million with glowing audience reviews (and $80 million on home video, per the filmmaker). Reviewers were not as enthusiastic. “The paper I read every morning, the New York Times, didn’t love the movie, which is totally fine. It is what’s expected when you have highfalutin reviewers writing about R-rated comedies. Reviewers often tee off on comedy and horror because they can, and they get more notice and likes when they are mean.”

Many were mean to Super Troopers, proven by the film’s 36% rotten score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But Chandrasekhar isn’t here to rail on reviewers. “To be 100% clear, I have no problem with reviewers, and there is a value to them,” he notes. “But I remember thinking at the time, ‘Who is a reviewer?’ Oftentimes, they are great writers with immense power at newspapers who get to watch movies for a living and recommend them to their readers. But, at the end of the day, they’re strangers. When was the last time you walked up to a stranger on the street and asked them what movie you should see?”

“It’s the Instagram of recommendations,” Chandrasekhar says about his new app.

Media

Jay Chandrasekhar Launches

To fully understand why comedy guru Jay Chandrasekhar ’90 launched a new app called Vouch Vault, the filmmaker digs deep in his memory vault to recall the events surrounding the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. His raucous comedy Super Troopers — about five prank-loving Vermont state troopers who try to save their jobs by outdoing the local police department in solving a crime — debuted at the wintry

That’s why the value, for him, came as an inspiration to create a new kind of platform that put the power of recommending films back into the hands of the people. “About three years ago, I started outlining what I hoped would be my revenge app to supplant the way Rotten Tomatoes influences the film business,” details Chandrasekhar. “I came up with the idea, met with two app developers, and probably had 10 meetings over Zoom. I was about to write a check to them to help me build the app, and then they told me that they had been harboring similar views about reviews on Yelp and Amazon, asking, ‘Who are these people writing reviews?’ So, we combined forces and built this machine.”

“Take recommendation power from

Park City festival, where it landed with series of warm embraces. “The Sundance experience was incredible,” Chandrasekhar explains. “We had three midnight screenings, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and each was better than the next. packed, wild, and incredible what happened next because we sold the film to Searchlight by Sunday night. It was the first and only film to sell for a week. It was glorious.”

Chandrasekhar was

What happened next? Less so. After

Social

‘Revenge App’ to Give Power of Reviews, Recommendations Back to People

anonymous strangers and give it to the people whose tastes you know and trust.” It’s a social media platform on which users share just about anything they love — movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, hotels, restaurants, cars, products, museums, services, etc. — in any city.

Chandrasekhar personally vouches for his Tesla, Osteria La Buca restaurant in L.A., Randolph Beer in Brooklyn, and the sound experts at King Soundworks for postproduction services.

“It’s the Instagram of recommendations,” he says. “You follow friends and famous people and see what they like and recommend. The real purity of this will come from friends and finding out what your friends like so you can check it out.”

The app has a special feature called a “Try Vault,” where users can bookmark recommendations that they want to try at a later date, and Chandrasekhar says searching hashtags can be a user-friendly way to find recommendations in other cities. Want to find the best burger in Paris, search a hashtag. But beyond burgers, Chandrasekhar also sees it as a “memory machine” of sorts that will allow users to store a digital record of everything they like for friends and family.

“I’m hoping this will obviously be a success but also offer another way to have a collective memory bank of all the great pop culture pieces that you might want to share with your kids someday,” explains the filmmaker, whose [newest] film, Easter Sunday, starring stand-up superstar Jo Koy, came out Aug. 5.

Speaking of success, Chandrasekhar has invested some of his own money to make it work, along with investments from his fellow developers, some family members, and friends. The app could be monetized through advertising and affiliate links, and though it’s still in the early stages, he has big plans to expand with the possible addition of video features. He even hopes to get talents like Quentin Tarantino or Willie Nelson (a longtime friend he met while directing 2005’s The Dukes of Hazzard) to offer their Vaults. (About Nelson: “He’s a valuable fountain of information that will not always be there.”)

Asked to sum up his ultimate hopes for the venture, Chandrasekhar throws a curveball and gets political in closing. “I really believe Vouch Vault can have a unifying effect. If you see Republicans and Democrats all liking the same films, we need that. We need unity in our culture.” That goes for reviewers, too.

— Reprinted from the Hollywood Reporter, article by Chris Gardner

Entrepreneurship What a Girl Wants

nothing that feels inclusive. It’s feeding on their insecurities and not really pumping them up.” So, collaborating with Neda Talebian (the wife of Brian Funk ’97), she created her e-commerce platform to provide fashionable, well-made clothing to tween and teen girls. To counteract the negative practices of fast fashion, and recognizing that sustainability is important to this generation’s future, clothing is made largely from recycled materials and organic cotton. Because teens often change sizes and styles, Woodley + Lowe offers a trade-in program. The items that are returned through this effort are upcycled, resold, or donated.

n the internet, there’s a vintagestyle T-shirt with a little green alien. The alien is throwing the peace sign and is surrounded by clouds, rainbows, butterflies, stars, and Ring Pops. The text on the shirt reads, in a graffiti-like font, “It was all a dream.”

Rachel Schifter ’97 Thebault didn’t buy this shirt three decades ago — she manufactured it in 2022, through her teen-focused, e-commerce clothing company Woodley + Lowe. Alongside the aforementioned vintage tee, every Woodley + Lowe item follows the ’90s and early aughts aesthetic that’s taken over the fashion industry in recent years: baby doll tees, pleated miniskirts, and matching tracksuits. “Gen Z is so comfort driven, and how things feel on their body is so much more important than for previous generations,” Thebault notes.

She created Woodley + Lowe in part because she saw a hole in the market: “As the mall went away, no one came in and filled in these favorite teen apparel brands,” says Thebault. The days of mall browsing are dead (e-commerce sales grew by 50% during the pandemic, according to Forbes, with 39% growth in the clothing and clothing accessories category.

Also, teens are mostly shopping at fastfashion stores, the Colgate economics major explains, which are notorious for providing cheaply made garments. “There are so many pain points,” she says. “Nothing fits them well. The quality’s poor. The brand messaging is kind of reprehensible. There’s

Thebault’s ’90s dreamland isn’t built on off-the-cuff decisions. She relies on qualitative data provided by 150 teenage W+L ambassadors who are recruited to give feedback on new clothing items or design choices. Thebault uses the teens as a focus group to help decide what ultimately ends up on the website. “At first, we assumed these girls [weren’t] into pastels,” Thebault says. “And then we found out very quickly, oh yes, they love a pastel aesthetic, but then they love pops of color too.” Thebault jumps in to try to enter the mind of Gen Z girls in other ways — she’s constantly lurking on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and BeReal to figure out what that generation is listening to, what’s trending, and what emojis they’re using. She uses that information to inspire new designs for both clothing and the Woodley + Lowe website. It helps that Thebault has three girls of her own, who act as live-in guides to what it means to be a teen girl in the 2020s. “It’s an automatic litmus test,” she laughs.

Woodley + Lowe isn’t Thebault’s first foray into the business world — she’s adept at career pivots, spending seven years in the investment banking world before deciding to follow her passion and earn a degree from the Institute of Culinary Education. She then owned and operated the successful dessert company Tribeca Treats, crafting colorful kids’ birthday cakes, personalized cookies, and holiday confections before closing that chapter in 2018. “There are dozens of things easier about running a website than a physical store, but customer acquisition and marketing require a lot more work and planning,” she told Authority Magazine last year. Getting into the mind of today’s teen has helped focus Thebault’s mission of bringing ethically made closet staples to Gen Z closets. “[To run a successful business,] you have to be a risk-taker but you also have to be able to listen to people,” she says.

— Rebecca Docter

Rachel is married to Robert “Robin” Thebault ’99.

With her e-commerce clothing brand, Rachel Schifter ’97 Thebault is outfitting the next generation.

SALMAGUNDI

The Remarkable Paul Hopkins ’27 and Babe Ruth Connection

By Bri Liddell ’25

At age 23, Paul Hopkins ’27, P’56 stood on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium, facing Babe Ruth at the plate. It was Sept. 29, 1927: Hopkins was on the verge of the most memorable moment in his career.

Hopkins was a righthand relief pitcher for the Washington Senators. Ruth needed only one more home run to tie his own record — 59 homers in a single season.

It was the bottom of the fifth inning, with the bases loaded and two outs. In the bleachers, 7,500 fans buzzed with anticipation.

The larger-than-life Ruth stood with his bat at the ready. The only thing standing between him and his new record was Hopkins, who had just been pulled in from the bullpen by Senators manager Bucky Harris.

“Hopkins was an unexpected choice, and no doubt caused many a spectator to turn to the nearest person with a scorecard for enlightenment,” Bill Bryson recounts in his book One Summer: 1927 “Hopkins had never pitched in the major leagues before. Now he was about to make his debut in Yankee Stadium against Babe Ruth.”

The pitcher managed to get two strikes on Ruth with wellplaced curveballs. Perhaps it would be a mistake in going to that same pitch one more time,

but it was the curveball that had gotten the slugger twice already. Hopkins delivered his final curveball, hoping to strike the Sultan of Swat out for good, but Ruth would not be denied.

“At first Babe seemed fooled by it,” Hopkins recalled to Sports Illustrated 70 years later. “Ruth started to swing and then hesitated, hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he came through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second — put everything behind it. I can still hear the crack of the bat. I can still see the swing.”

The ball soared over the outfielders and landed halfway up the right field bleacher — an undeniable home run. As the

Hopkins pitched only 10 more games in the major leagues before retiring from baseball in 1930 and returning to his home state of Connecticut. He became a successful banker and raised a family of future baseball players, including son Peter ’56 who was a catcher for Colgate’s 1955 College World Series team.

new these ecstatic

realization struck that Ruth had just set a new record, the cheering of the crowd reached frenzied heights. (Little did these ecstatic fans know that The Great Bambino would once again break this record the very next day in another game against the Washington Senators, where he delivered his 60th and final home run of the season.)

Following Ruth’s recordsetting home run, Hopkins pitched to one more batter, Lou Gehrig, striking him out and ending the inning. Years later, Hopkins would recall bursting into tears as he returned to the bench, overcome with emotion over what had just happened.

In the years that followed,

Living to the age of 99, Hopkins shared the story of his fateful pitch against Ruth until the very end. As a bookend to Hopkins’ baseball career, he found himself connected with yet another baseball record: In the days leading up to his death, he had become the oldest major leaguer alive. While Hopkins’ pitching career may have been short, the impact he had on baseball history is undeniable, and his name will be remembered alongside Babe Ruth’s forever.

William Wade Hinshaw’s production of “The Impresario,” Mozart’s opera comique, at the Sheldon Opera House on last Friday evening gave Hamilton a most charming introduction to a class of entertainment which heretofore it has been impossible to bring here because of the large financial outlay involved. By special arrangements through the kindness of Morris Hindus, Colgate ’15, “The Impresario” was booked under satisfactory financial terms.

Paul Hopkins, photographed in the ’90s

↑ Baseball signed by Hopkins