Colgate Magazine — Autumn 2020 by Colgate University

AUTUMN 2020

Feature

FIRST CLASS

Female students brought new life to Colgate when the University went coed. P.24

Beyond Measure: keeping the campus community safe P.40 Voices

Remembering civil rights icon John Lewis P.8 Discover

Not Loud, but Clear: communicating policy information P.18

Photo / Art Credit

look

mark diorio

A fresh perspective: Women from the first official coeducational class arrived in the fall of 1970, with a number of them moving into Stillman Hall. Today, Stillman is part of the Mabel Dart Colegrove Residential Commons — named after the first full-time female student at Colgate.

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

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 1

Contents

AUTUMN 2020 President’s Message

Editor’s Note

Ask a Professor Is zinc good for your memory? Assistant Professor of Chemistry Jacob Goldberg responds.

Letters

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Voices

Becca Asare ’97 is helping to support African farmers and protect the environment.

The Bridge Doug Parks ’60 remembers civil rights icon John Lewis and “Bloody Sunday.”

Communities as Classrooms Dianne Stewart ’90 writes about a defining journey, fueled by an immersion trip with Professor Marilyn Thie.

Scene

At What Cost? Restrictions on foreign students and skilled worker visas have economic disadvantages for the United States, explains Professor Chad Sparber.

First Class Female students brought new life to Colgate when the University went coed.

A Reimagination of Research From jumping worm invasions to gene expression variation, students’ summer studies developed through creative strategies.

And Away They Soared Find out where some of the alumnae from the early years of coeducation landed.

Colgate News 12

Discover

Not Loud, but Clear When policy information is communicated in a certain way, people can come to a common understanding, regardless of their political leanings.

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Unpacking Study Abroad

This Is What Progress Looks Like

A dialogue on global citizenship education and Colgate’s approach to this evolving field

Meaningful moments for women in Colgate’s history and a glimpse into the future

Cover: This portrait of Liz (Frazier) Fisher ’73 was part of a 1971 Salmagundi photo essay on coeducation. “I really liked Colgate,” remembers Fisher, who transferred to the University. “My professors were all forward thinking,” she says of the faculty members in her geology major. “And there was a lot of camaraderie.” Photographer Gess Ryan Jr. ’71 dug out the negatives from the Salmagundi shoot, shared them with Colgate Magazine, and was able to help identify Fisher.

Special Collections and University Archives

Beyond Measure Behind-the-scenes photos showing the campuswide efforts to keep the University community safe

Vice President for Communications Laura H. Jack Managing Editor Aleta Mayne Assistant Editor Rebecca Docter Communications Director Mark Walden Chief Creative Director Tim Horn Art Director Karen Luciani Designer Katriel Pritts University Photographer Mark DiOrio Production Assistant Kathy Jipson Contributors: Gordon Brillon, web content specialist; Daniel DeVries, media relations director; Sara Furlong, advancement communications manager; Jason Kammerdiener ’10, web manager; Katherine Laube, art director; Brian Ness, video journalism coordinator; John Painter, director of athletic communications; Kristin Putman, social media strategist

Endeavor

The Road Less Traveled Bob ’83 and Mack ’13 Woodruff adventure to unexpected destinations in their show Rogue Trip.

Good Reads From shopping to robber barons, alumni cover a range of topics in these new releases.

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

The struggle for voting rights and equality for all persons continues, and we all have a role to play in some fashion. Joel Rosen ’69, p. 60

In Style Kareem Khubchandani ’04 researches gay Indian nightlife.

mark diorio

Fiber Optics To foster a network for diverse artists and crafters in the United Kingdom, Alyson Chu ’13 created an interactive site.

Alumni News

Salmagundi

Colgate Magazine Volume L Number 1 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 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 Marilyn Rugg, Associate Provost for Equity and Diversity, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346; 315-228-7288.

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 3

President’s Message The Matter of Rankings

n late summer and early fall, a phenomenon occurs in higher education — one that causes great interest, occasional joy, and, often, great consternation among college administrators. In the early part of the academic year, as students are returning to campuses, college and university rankings are published by U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR), Money magazine, and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), whose rankings are produced together with the Times of London. Countless other lists are produced that offer rankings on how green one’s campus is, how nice the libraries are, and how happy the students feel. Colleges celebrate upward movements in the rankings and eschew rankings altogether if they slip. But, of course, it can’t actually be the case that the rankings matter only if they present good news. The rankings matter. They matter because they affect applications, the quality of student enrollment, and the general perception of the institution. If students still make decisions about where to apply and to attend, even in part, due to the rankings, they surely must matter. They also matter because they affect alumni spirits. Who doesn’t like to see their college leap a few spots up in the rankings? For years, many colleges and universities dismissed the rankings for being arbitrary, too focused on endowment, too easily manipulated. And you could ask: Are they measuring the right things? Recent ranking changes make me think, more than in the past, they are. In September, both the USN&WR and WSJ rankings were released. Colgate’s current position is 20th in USN&WR rankings and 50th in the WSJ list. Among private liberal arts colleges, WSJ ranks Colgate 12th. The shift in our USN&WR ranking from 17 to 20 was both surprising and disappointing. In almost every category that the magazine uses to determine the overall ranking — whether it be in measures of student quality, available faculty resources, or alumni giving — Colgate showed strong results. In several categories, Colgate showed increases from prior years’ rankings. Indeed, our overall ranking number (USN&WR assigns colleges and universities an absolute score) also went up. Our USN&WR ranking went down this year largely because a number of colleges showed stronger results in a new set of measurements that are of increasing importance to the magazine’s algorithm. (Our ranking was also hurt by the fact that two of the service academies — the Naval Academy and Army-West Point — suddenly moved into the top 15 ranked liberal arts colleges. When USN&WR first developed its rankings more than 30 years ago, results were driven almost

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exclusively by the “beauty pageant” measurement. This was a ranking of the perceived quality of the college based solely on the subjective votes of hundreds of college presidents, provosts, and deans. After several years, this variable declined in importance — though it still represents 20% of the overall score. Rising in importance for several years, starting in the 1990s, were admissions statistics. The rankings were driven increasingly by the number of applications a school received, the admissions rate of the college, and the standardized testing scores of enrolled students. These were the years in which you could see a number of institutions vigorously seeking to increase applications and doing all they could to boost test scores of both applicants and enrollees. We appear to be entering a new phase of USN&WR rankings, one increasingly concerned with the number of financially aided students enrolled (particularly the number of students eligible for the greatest level of federal support, Pell Grants), the graduation rate of these students compared to the unaided population, and the relative amount of resources expended by the institution. Overall institutional resources (endowment) remain important, as does the perceived quality of the faculty. And, again, overall perceived quality of the college remains important.

President Brian W. Casey

Figure 1 USN&WR Ranking Factors Publication Ranking Year 2018

2019

2020

2021

Graduation and retention rates

30% 35% 30% 30%

Pell recipient graduation rate

— — 5% 5%

Expert opinion

22.5% 20% 20% 20%

Faculty resources

20% 20% 20% 20%

Financial resources

10% 10% 10% 10%

Student excellence

12.5% 10% 10% 7%

Graduate debt

— — — 5%

Alumni giving

5% 5% 5% 3%

I think it’s wiser for the University to reflect upon the fact that two of the most important ranking entities seem increasingly focused on how wide the composition of our student body and how well they fare at Colgate both in graduation rates and in outcomes.

The WSJ ranking was released Sept. 17. This ranking has some overlapping factors with USN&WR (outcomes and resources), some different factors (student engagement and institutional environment), and ignored factors (student excellence and alumni giving). Figure 2 is a summary of its methodology. Colgate’s performance in student engagement is consistent with student survey results when asked to make a holistic judgment of their college choice and specific questions about the perceived value of their college education. It would be easy to discuss the USN&WR rankings and celebrate the WSJ rankings. But I think it’s wiser for the University to reflect upon the fact that two of the most important ranking entities seem increasingly focused on how wide the composition of our student body and how well they fare at Colgate both in graduation rates and in outcomes. These seem to be important statistics to measure and important points on which to focus our time and attention. This year, Colgate is launching an initiative to support all first-generation students. We also have joined with the QuestBridge partnership to help us identify a large number of applicants who normally would not consider Colgate. And recent enhancements in our financial aid support — including our no-loan initiative — will help bring to Colgate more students who otherwise would have found the price tag too formidable. Finally, the initiatives in our Third-Century Plan are designed to enrich life on the campus and bring more students into the world prepared for the complexities they will face. The rankings have come out again, and we received some good news as well as some news that has caused some concern. Given the new emphasis regarding rankings on matters that are legitimately important, I think they are excellent fodder for Colgate to consider and address. We will be stronger for it. — Brian W. Casey

Figure 2 WSJ Ranking Main Categories Factors (Percent of Total Score) (Percent of Total Score) Outcomes (40%)

⚫

Value added to graduate salary (12%)

⚫ Graduation rate (11%) ⚫ Academic reputation (10%) ⚫ Debt after graduation (7%) Resources (30%)

⚫ Finance

per student (11%)

⚫ Faculty per student (11%) ⚫ Research papers per faculty (8%) Engagement (20%) ⚫ Student engagement (7%) ⚫ Student recommendation (6%) ⚫ Interaction with teachers and students (4%) ⚫ Number of accredited programs (3%) Environment (10%) ⚫ Student diversity (3%) ⚫ Staff diversity (3%) ⚫ Proportion of international students (2%) ⚫ Student inclusion (2%)

Source: timeshighereducation.com/USmethodology2021 Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 5

Editor’s Note Celebrating Pioneers and Progress

elcome to the autumn Colgate Magazine. This is a noteworthy issue for several reasons. As Volume L Number 1, it is the publication’s 50th volume — albeit by a different name (the Colgate Scene Vol I Issue 1 published in July 1972). It’s a fun coincidence to have the 50th volume celebrate the 50th anniversary of Colgate’s first official coeducational class. The focus of this edition is special to me, having majored in women’s studies and magazine journalism in college. (No, I’m not a Colgate alumna; I attended Syracuse University — for which I’ve taken some ribbing from good-natured Colgate alumni over the years.) When working on the articles about coeducation, I was fortunate to interview many remarkable women, such as Covette Rooney ’74, who is the first woman and only African American chief administrative law judge for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. She and others I spoke to opened up about their experiences — the good and the bad — as some of the first women at Colgate. It’s important to note that “there were women at Colgate before there were women at Colgate,” to quote Professor Emerita Wanda Warren Berry. In addition to female faculty members and administrators, a number of female transfer students arrived before the first coeducational class came in 1970. Their experiences were perhaps even more varied. Elaine Matczak ’69 transferred to Colgate her senior year from Beaver College (now Arcadia University). She’d met Colgate professors and students during a joint orientation for a 1967 London study program. One of those students was Barnet Kellman ’69, whom she’d join in Hamilton and marry. Enrolling at Colgate in the fall of ’68, Matczak didn’t have a typical undergrad experience,

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being a married woman and living in a cottage in Earlville. “Professors were really open,” she says of her integrated academic and social life. “We had dinners at people’s houses and learned so much of how to live your intellect, your creativity, and your political orientation in dialogue with adults.” Leta Caplan Smith ’72, who transferred from Skidmore in the fall of ’69, remembers male students’ curiosity about the opposite sex. “As much as a lot of guys wanted to go out, they also just wanted to speak with a woman,” she says. “They’d be willing to go for a walk — a whole bunch of them at a time — just to talk and laugh and be with a female.” Smith filled a void in the classroom as well. “I felt my voice was heard and needed as another opinion, [because] most of the classes I took were taught by men with [only] guys in the classroom.” Of course, not all men — professors and students included — were accepting of women’s presence on campus. Some of the Black female students, especially, faced discrimination. They spoke of the difficulty of these times, but they supported each other and became even stronger. What many women from these early years share was a genuine excitement to be on campus — to learn and enjoy the beauty of the Chenango Valley. They joined student clubs and started new ones, created their own majors, excelled academically, and fought for equality. These women had grit. Former President Thomas Bartlett fondly describes seeing female students on their way to class, trudging through the snow in their army boots. (Bartlett himself should be commended for his progressive attitude, the time he spent persuading alumni who were against coeducation, and his push to enroll more women than the limited number recommended by the board.) As we all know, the value of examining the past is that we then evaluate the present and look to the future. At the time of this writing, Wall Street welcomed its first major female CEO, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, and the Pantone Color Institute unveiled a new shade inspired by the color of women’s periods. Speaking of destigmatizing menstruation, female Colgate students started a new group called Progress Period. In this issue, you can read about this organization and others that are being furthered by current female students who are working toward social justice. I hope you find inspiration in all of the women highlighted in this issue. Until next time, stay safe and please be kind to each other. — Aleta Mayne, managing editor

The photo above, dated 1973, shows a woman doing environmental studies in front of a terrarium. When we were doing archival photo research, we were able to identify some but not all of the people pictured. If you recognize this woman or any others in the coeducation feature, write to us: magazine@ colgate.edu.

Letters

13 Men The magazine (summer 2020) arrived today. I was intrigued by the expressions and attire of the workers as depicted in the photograph on the first two pages (Look, p. 2). I then counted the number of men! Steve Kulla ’85

Special Collections and University Archives (2)

Hard work, but solid mustache game. Nick Kokonas ’90

Liberal Arts Lesson Thanks for sharing Austin Murphy’s [Class of ’83] “Deliverance: A Laid-Off Sportswriter’s Roundabout Route to Reinvention” (summer 2020, p. 8). His story is like mine and probably many others. Who knows where one’s “liberal arts education” is going to lead? Wish I had known, myself, when I graduated with an AB in English literature and no plan whatsoever in 1976. An MS in business and almost 45 years later, the only career-related writing I did was résumés, emails, and memos. But the adventure included selling data and concepts, managing businesses, selling insurance, and building insurance agencies — and along the way, meeting a lot of wonderful people and clients. I wish I had Austin’s sense of humor and attitude during those frightful days after being laid off,

with a family to feed. Thank you, and him, for sharing the story, the attitude, and the ride. Jeffrey Plaut ’76 Austin Murphy’s article about his time as a laid-off sportswriter should be placed in the handbook of how to be an adult in America. Deriving “contentment,” “structure, purpose, and dignity” from a menial job is invaluable advice. Here’s to nominating Murphy for the position of liberal arts poster boy. An incredibly uplifting story by a very talented writer. Kenneth C. Tietgen Jr. ’64 Thanks for sharing, Austin. If capitalism is about creative destruction at a macro level, you’ve given us a way to think about it in a very personal way that can be inspiring. I can see you being a successful TED talker, career coach, and motivational speaker too. #gogate David Braunstein ’89

Thanks to Professor Sindima On “Get to Know: Harvey Sindima” (summer 2020, p. 17): African Traditional Religions as taught by Professor Sindima was a grounding and positive force during a difficult semester. I learned a great deal from Professor Sindima’s brilliance and grace. Kim wolf price ’92

Above Par As a Colgate golfer, I read with interest about the record of Ryan Skae ’20 that is noteworthy (summer 2020, p. 20). However, let’s not forget some of Colgate’s golfers of yesteryear! Donald C. Allen [’60] was a member of the 1965 and 1967 Walker Cup teams. Bob McCall ’51 lost in the final of the U.S. intercollegiate in 1951 to Fred Wampler of Purdue. Not a shabby couple of golfers indeed. William Edwards ’52 USA: Take Note [Reading “Sick in Singapore,” summer 2020, p. 10] I am amazed at the care and availability of testing [Sophia Coulter ’20] received. Those of us “left in Hamilton” did not have that kind of care available to us unless we were in serious condition. So happy to know [she was] well taken care of. The USA has lots to learn! JoDee Kogut On BLM for MLK Commemoration As an alumnus who has worked for this University for more than 20 years as a member of the Presidents’ Club, the Annual Fund, and the Alumni Admission Program, I was shocked and troubled to read the article titled “Unity, Reflection, and a Call to Action” (spring 2020, p. 14), which describes Black Lives Matter (BLM) cofounder Opal Tometi featured as a keynote speaker in the Chapel as part of the University’s commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. This objection has nothing to do with promoting social justice or racial equality — values that we all believe in — and everything to do with questioning the legitimacy of an organization that espouses violence to effect change. Surely, speakers are properly vetted before they are afforded the privilege of this venue. And yet, even a cursory look at BLM reveals a troubling window into an organization whose goals go far beyond what most people think. BLM, by their

own admission, is a Marxist movement whose members have been known to chant “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” and “what do we want, dead cops, when do we want them, now.” Does this truly do justice to the “light and vision of MLK” and strive for a “beloved community” and “to love each other to the best of our ability” as stated in this article? In fact, it represents the antithesis of everything that MLK stood for, his legacy of nonviolent protest and peaceful dissent to effect change. The presence of BLM on campus did nothing to honor his memory or legacy. The fact is, “black lives matter” is a matter of common decency entirely separate from the activist, ideological, left-wing agenda of the BLM group. Its goals include, without apology, the upending of American society while suppressing, even intimidating, the free speech of others in the process. It embraces Angela Davis, a member of the Black Panther Party, and Joanne Chesimard and Susan Rosenberg, convicted terrorists, as key mentors. It is therefore important that the public and the Colgate community, much of which thinks that by supporting BLM, they are backing obviously decent and humane reforms, know enough to make the distinction between the idea and the ideologues hijacking it. An academic institution of higher learning should rightfully permit diversity of opinion. I question whether such diversity should include those individuals and tenets delineated above. Clearly, the organizers of this event and those University officials who sanctioned it have much to learn about both BLM and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Jonathan H. Sherwyn ’78

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

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 7

Voices

History

The Bridge Remembering Civil Rights Icon John Lewis and “Bloody Sunday”

or six days at the end of July 2020, I sat transfixed as four presidents (Carter, by mail; Clinton; George W. Bush; Obama) and the nation paid tribute to civil rights icon John Lewis. Like so many people, I was an ardent admirer of Congressman Lewis. Some of us in the civil rights movement knew about him because of his involvement in the sit-in demonstrations in the South starting in 1960. He became better known

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for his brave efforts in leading Freedom Riders on interstate bus rides. But it was on Aug. 28, 1963, at the March on Washington that millions of people heard 23-year-old John Lewis deliver a fiery speech just before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. Those two speeches roused the nation. In 1965, I spent two of the most dramatic weeks of my life with John in Selma, Ala. I was 27 and had just finished my first 10

months as minister of Faith Presbyterian Church, a Black church in York, Pa. I was also the clergy coordinator for the State of Pennsylvania for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. King’s organization. In late February, I received a call from Dr. King asking if I could take a short leave of absence from my parish to help with a major voter registration drive in Selma. After getting permission from my church elders, I drove down on

Photo by William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

John Lewis (third from left) and Martin Luther King Jr. lead a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1965.

March 1, arrived at the Selma Motel in the Black section of town, and was given a room to share with comedian/activist Dick Gregory. The other organizers included people from SCLC and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a voter registration effort led by John. SNCC was mostly college students and veterans of the lunch counter sit-ins, with more of a youthful, militant attitude — but nonviolent. SCLC was run by activist clergy, also with a commitment to fighting racial segregation, with Christ-like and Mahatma Gandhian nonviolent tactics. Both groups needed each other to have a successful voter rights drive in Selma, and John was the bridge between the two. Every day, several of us would pick up those who wanted to register to vote and drive them to the courthouse. As I recall, the registrar’s office was supposed to be open 9 a.m.–3 p.m. But to suppress Black potential voters from registering, it only opened randomly for approximately one hour a day, and they demanded applicants take an exam (with questions like “Name all the judges in Dallas County”) and pay a poll tax. With all that time to kill every day, John and I engaged in some interesting conversations. We came from vastly different backgrounds. He was raised in Troy, Ala., where his parents were sharecroppers. He grew up picking cotton and caring for the livestock. That didn’t sound much like Pelham, N.Y., where my dad was a real estate broker and mom an interior decorator. But John was very warm, friendly, and curious, so together, we discovered that we had a few things in common. We had both graduated from seminary a few years before: he from American Baptist Seminary and College in Nashville, Tenn., and I from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. We had both been arrested many times in the last two years on trumped-up civil rights charges. And lastly, we both had faith and a constant vision about what interracial justice should look like. It was easy to like him, and I admired his spirit and fervor. During that first week of trying to register Black voters, more and more people started arriving. We held meetings, including one in which Dr. King allowed me to sit in on strategy planning for a march to Montgomery, 51 miles away. But just before we planned to leave, he was called to Atlanta because J. Edgar Hoover had sent a letter and tape to Coretta Scott King, trying to discredit her husband’s leadership and morality. Back in Selma, the desire to move forward was overwhelming. The march was on, with John representing the SNCC and Hosea Williams of the SCLC drawing the

short straws to lead. Dr. King, still in Atlanta, gave his approval to proceed. In what historians now call “Bloody Sunday,” on March 7, approximately 525 to 600 of us departed from Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopalian Church after prayers, speeches, and civil rights motivational songs. We lined up, two abreast, on the sidewalk and started off. It was only about five blocks to the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Built over the Alabama River, it had been a key route for the state’s plantation and cotton economy during slavery and Reconstruction. Edmund Pettus had been a brigadier general in the Confederate Army and the grand dragon of the Alabama KKK during the final year of Reconstruction. With that knowledge, we started over that long bridge. Reaching its apex, we could see the horrifying sight that awaited us on the east side. Approximately 150 state troopers were lined up in rows, with billy clubs and guns. Behind them, 17 more troopers sat on horseback. Out front, Sheriff Jim Clark stood with his police officers. Meanwhile, white crowds occupied both sides of the road, yelling and cursing

John exuded so much courage and determination that he inspired us all. at us. We followed John and Williams down to the end of the bridge, where we stopped. Clark announced, “You have two minutes to disburse.” We stood our ground, and John started to pray. In an instant, the troopers charged. As John turned and took a few steps, two or three troopers were immediately on him. One used a nightstick to fracture his skull. The rest of us turned and began running, but it was difficult. The marchers included many elderly people and young kids. People screamed and called out for help. I saw that people were bleeding, and the clouds of tear gas burned our eyes, noses, and throats. Many were on the ground as the troopers on horseback waded through us with whips, rubber hoses, and billy clubs. Back at Brown Chapel, it looked like a war zone. John and nearly 100 others were taken to the hospital. Some were tended to in the church pews. People poured water over our heads and into our eyes to stop the tear gas from burning. Reporters and photographers

were there, documenting the massacre. The evening news and front pages of papers shocked the world the next day. When Dr. King saw it on TV, he returned immediately. That night, in a joint meeting between the leadership of SNCC and SCLC, we decided to march again to demand equal voting rights. We also needed more help. Dr. King asked me to spread the word to my clergy contacts in Pennsylvania and New York City, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, and rabbis, priests, and nuns via WCBS, WNBC, and WABC news stations. We wanted as many people as possible to join us on Tuesday, March 9. In the meantime, Dr. King was on the phone, asking President Lyndon Johnson for National Guard protection and for Congress to do something to pass the Voting Rights Act. On Tuesday, our ranks had swelled threefold. People of all faiths and colors came from many parts of the country. And there was John, released from the hospital and ready to lead the march with Dr. King. Even bandaged up, John exuded so much courage and determination that he inspired us all. This time, we filled the streets. When we came to the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we saw the same sea of blue uniforms and then came face-to-face with Clark. I felt queasy. Dr. King surveyed the crowd and knelt down to pray. We all knelt down. Many prayed. When Dr. King arose, he turned around and started leading us back over the bridge. Back at Brown Chapel, he revealed that he saw that no federal protection had come to protect us and that God told him it would be another bloodbath. We continued with more voter registration attempts and planning for a third march — all the way to Montgomery, over five days. On March 21, we accomplished this with approximately 25,000 supporters from across the United States and with my two heroes, the Rev. John Lewis and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leading us. On Aug. 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. This past July, following John’s death, many were motivated to honor him. In the Senate, 47 Democrats and one Republican reintroduced the Voter Rights Act, under legislation bearing John’s name. Online, a petition to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge after John was renewed. I hope that both of these movements are successful in commemorating his legacy.

— Doug Parks ’60 is a retired minister in the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. He and his wife, Michele, live in Laguna Woods, Calif. Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 9

voices n January 1987, I enrolled in my first feminist studies J-term course, The Psychology of Women. The class was taught by Judith Allen, a young, white, female professor from the psychology department. I can recall rummaging through the Colgate Bookstore to acquire the course texts and wondering what Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development would reveal over the ensuing month of study. I soon discovered that the themes my professor introduced concerning women’s oppression, sexism, and patriarchy simply did not resonate with my Afro-Caribbean immigrant experience. I could not enter the conversation as I noticed my white female classmates nodding in affirmation when their experiences coincided with the theories and narratives we were unpacking during class lectures and discussions. After a few days of intensive reading and reflecting, I decided to approach my professor and explain the dissonance I was experiencing. I did not grow up internalizing many of the stereotypes we were reviewing about girls’ and women’s limitations based upon their anatomical “difference.” Nor had I been socialized to embrace the feminization of domesticity and the masculinization of the public sphere. Although my father had a full-time job, he did 98% of the cooking in my household and shouldered most of the other duties typically associated with domestic life. In fact, during my first year at Colgate, when the West Indian Students’ Association held our annual celebration event, my father was the lone dad who drove up from Hartford, Conn., to join an army of Caribbean moms in preparing the food for the main banquet. I had never received messages in my familial culture that I was inferior to males or that I should assume a subordinate role when interacting with my brothers and other males in my community. In fact, I now know that my working-class African Jamaican cultural heritage, while in no way immune to patriarchy and sexism, had strong vestiges of West and Central African matricentric traditions. I felt quite relieved when the professor immediately affirmed my reality and referenced a body of literature by Black feminist scholars who had been framing their studies of sexism, patriarchy, and women’s experience with attention to racism, classism, and the history of slavery and segregation in America. She admitted that the range of materials she assigned aligned with her expertise and encouraged

Stewart at Colgate’s 2018 symposium honoring professors emeritae Marilyn Thie and Wanda Warren Berry.

Inspiration

Communities as Classrooms While experiencing daily life in the American global south, Dianne Stewart ’90 became immersed in the real-world meaning of feminism.

10 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Justin Kunz

voices me to explore Black feminist scholarship in my final paper. While my experience in the course was pleasant enough, I was a bit hesitant to pursue feminist studies after my first-year J-term course because offerings centering on the scholarship of Black feminists and other feminists of color were scant. I did, however, find that Colgate’s philosophy and religion department was moving in exactly this direction of exposing students to Black feminist and womanist resources. Although I was not a religion major, I took many courses in the department with Professor Josiah Young, who introduced me and other students to African feminist theology, especially the works of Mercy Amba Oduyoye. Professor Young also told us about a new womanist theology that was on the horizon pioneered by Jacqueline Grant. However, it was Professor Marilyn Thie who facilitated my intellectual immersion into feminist thought and praxis. Professor Thie’s expansive pedagogical vision for teaching feminism led her to organize a semester-long study abroad program for students to focus on Latin American feminist theology in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Guatemala during the spring of 1990. As a participant, I not only benefited from experiencing daily life in the cities and rural communities of the American global south, but I was also afforded the opportunity, quite early in my academic career, to decouple feminism from the invisible yet overdetermining modifier “white.” The significance of this pedagogical experience to my entire trajectory as a womanist scholar with commitments to the wellness and thriving of Black women and Black communities within and beyond the United States cannot be overstated. For months, I was baptized in the epistemic orientation of, for the most part, untutored mothers who were battling structural injustice at multiple levels: imperialism, militarism, low-intensity conflict and other strategies of war, political repression and censorship, disappearances, domestic and intimate violence, inadequate resources, and economic deprivation. On this study abroad program in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the base Christian communities were our classrooms and our teachers were the Mothers of the Disappeared (parents of missing social justice activists who organized themselves to demand political change). Professor Thie created a learning experience for me and my classmates that was only possible through personal risk taking and courageous exploration. This, in turn, allowed us to have a profound sense of the immense risk taking and

courageous activism of those who were teaching us that “feminism is accessing clean water for my children,” as Leah, one of our leading teachers, declared during our first class session. Feminism, the mothers taught us, was organizing to eliminate war and violence in their communities, and feminism was dismantling sexist and abusive behaviors of their spouses and male comrades who had often been socialized to adopt and promote toxic masculinity in their dealings with women, children, and even with one another. My experience in the Latin American Feminist Theology study abroad program became a compass of sorts, directing my path to feminist and womanist study once I entered graduate school and eventually the professoriate. The mothers and other feminist activists we encountered had gifted me a new starting place for constructing liberation theology centered upon women of color. I went on to study theology and culture at Harvard Divinity School and Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In many respects, they inspired my creative consideration of sources beyond the normative tools of theology when reflecting on African Caribbean and African American women’s religious experience. And as my scholarly focus has broadened beyond a narrow focus on Africana Christian studies to Africana religious studies over the years, I often find myself returning to the lessons learned during my experience in Mexico/Central America under Professor Thie’s pedagogical guidance.

— Dianne M. Stewart ’90 is an Emory University associate professor of religion and African American studies, specializing in African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She teaches and produces academic and public scholarship about feminism(s) with the aim of decolonizing women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and teaching/researching womanism within and beyond the confines of theology. This essay has been excerpted from Women and Religion, Philosophy and Feminism (2019, Colgate University Press), which was edited by Professor Christopher Vecsey. The book is a compilation of talks from the April 2018 symposium by the same name, which honored professors emeritae Marilyn Thie and Wanda Warren Berry.

Find links to watch the symposium on the colgatemagazine.com version of this article.

IN THE MEDIA

I’m willing to have an alternate freshman year if that’s what it takes. — Mariana Lemon ’24 on CBS This Morning about embracing Colgate’s new safety procedures

“It’s important to cultivate positive relationships so that you have respect and a sense of camaraderie when you do hit hard times… you can lean on the strength of those relationships and the mutual trust that you’ve established.” — Denise Battles ’85, SUNY Geneseo president, on leadership and innovation in the age of COVID-19 for Syracuse.com

“It’s almost cutthroat just how competitive and different these guys are, but it’s fun.” — Mason Caldwell ’23 on being one of Guam’s few collegiate-level tennis players for Postguam.com

“Under our system of checks and balances, a president who has abused his power or behaved in ways incompatible with the office should generate some kind of pushback from Congress. A bipartisan resolution of censure could serve as a warning to such a president that his or her behavior is inappropriate and needs to change.” — Michael T. Hayes, political science professor, on syracuse. com about the failure of the impeachment system against sitting presidents and the possibility of censure as an alternative way of demonstrating disapproval of a president’s actions Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 11

SCENE Class of 2024

Introducing the First-Years

hen Mehri Hamrokulova started looking at colleges, the Baltimore, Md., resident was drawn to Colgate after interacting with its faculty members. “I reached out to them with questions during my application process, and they never hesitated to help,” she says. While Hamrokulova is planning on studies that will put her on a path to medical school, she is also planning on continuing her work running a nonprofit organization that supports educational tutoring for girls in Uzbekistan. Daniel Pablo Rodriguez, an Early Decision applicant from Arizona, first learned of Colgate through a 5th-grade teacher who attended a training program at the University. Rodriguez says he was looking for schools with a good international relations program because he would like to be involved with diplomacy in the future. He also runs a charity, which he started at age 13, called Jesus to the Children of the World. The organization raises money for school supplies and snacks for youth in Cuba and Haiti. His first fundraising effort resulted in the purchase of 100 Bibles and 100 baseballs for students. He was also successful in lobbying his local city council to build a monument to immigrants, and

they put him in charge of the commission to see the project through to completion. “I’m excited to talk with other Latino students,” Rodriguez says. He is also interested in exploring other cultures and engaging with the issues of the day. “One of my biggest passions is learning to understand the social issues. Being educated on those topics is the best thing you can do to help improve situations.” Darius Hagyan, from Miami, Fla., was drawn to Colgate for its liberal arts model of education and because of Colgate’s first-year seminar (FSEM). “I don’t see many other schools with a program similar to that in any regard,” Hagyan

says. “There’s such a large variety of FSEMs you can take. It allows you to build a close connection with your FSEM instructor, who could essentially become a mentor. I’m really looking forward to having that experience so early in college.” “The immense level of talent and the highly distinctive but widely varying achievements present in the class are very well represented in Mehri, Daniel, and Darius,” says Gary Ross, the Jones and Wood Family Vice President for admission and financial aid. “We are excited for those three students and each of their classmates as they begin their Colgate journey.” — Dan DeVries

⚫ 8,582 — from 48 states and 122 countries — applied ⚫ 790 students enrolled, as of June 1 ⚫ Self-identified domestic students of color represent 25% ⚫ International students represent 10.5% ⚫ 12% identify as first-generation students ⚫ The average GPA is 3.69 ⚫ The number of students applying for Early Decision admission increased by 9.8% over last year

Caption ebissim de simendus eos id quam faccus dolutem quis re con exeruptus aut

In lieu of an in-person convocation ceremony this year, the University welcomed the Class of 2024 to Colgate virtually on Aug. 26. Watch at colgate.edu/convocation2020.

12 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Back to School

13 bits

Campuswide Effort Kicks Off the Academic Year

1 For Women’s Equality Day, Memorial Chapel joined local bell towers in ringing 19 times at 6:19 p.m. to celebrate the 19th amendment.

Students participate in outdoor activity during campuswide quarantine.

2 The New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium named President Brian W. Casey as its chair.

3 Teaching about Gender Diversity is a new publication co-edited by Susan Woolley, professor of educational studies and director of the LGBTQ Studies Program.

4 Juneteenth will be a holiday for Colgate faculty and staff members and students, beginning in 2021.

DId you know?

mark diorio

Universal quarantine is something new in Colgate history, but the coronavirus itself has a longer past. According to Associate Professor of Biology Geoff Holm, the first disease identified to be caused by a coronavirus was an infectious respiratory disease in chickens, in North Dakota in 1931. The virus, infectious bronchitis, was isolated in 1933. Illustrations by Toby Triumph

The Urban Land Institute’s Foundations of Real Estate, which debuted at Colgate last year, offers online curriculum for students interested in real estate careers.

6 Students and Alumni Council members participated in “13 Tables of 13,” which discussed topics ranging from Colgate traditions to the 2020 election.

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Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 13

scene

▼ 7

Newcomers

The Board of Trustees voted to expand from 35 to 38 members to increase its racial diversity.

Joining the Faculty This Fall

8 Hamilton has been certified as a Climate Smart Community based on actions — and efforts by Colgate members — that mitigate climate change.

9 Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Emerita Margaret Darby published The Hothouse Flower: Nurturing Women in the Victorian Conservatory, which grew out of two courses.

10 Rob Stone ’91 of Fox Sports, Alan Flowers ’88 of the NFL, and other alumni contributed to “The Intersection of Sports and Entertainment” online in August.

11 Colgate is among Condé Nast Traveler’s 50 Most Beautiful College Campuses in America.

Research interests include: African American women’s history, carceral studies, critical race studies, the South in the 20th century, and Black feminist theory

Teaching specialties include: introductory economics and gender economics Research interests include: development economics, labor economics, and gender economics

Jenny Peeler, assistant professor of chemistry Comes to Colgate from: Boston College, where she served as a postdoc in the chemistry department

hese are just some of the new faces Colgate welcomed this semester. For a full list, visit colgate.edu.

Noah Apthorpe, assistant professor of computer science Comes to Colgate from: Princeton University

Ramesh Adhikari, assistant professor of physics and astronomy Comes to Colgate from: Jacksonville University, where he served as an assistant professor of physics

Research interests include: privacy and security, humancomputer interaction, applied machine learning, and computer networks

Teaching specialties include: physics core courses at all levels. He is also interested in integrating active learning pedagogies to make learning physics more interactive Research interests include: working on projects that involve using biodegradable and sustainable materials for construction of electronic components and energy harvesting

T. Dionne Bailey, assistant professor of Africana and Latin American studies Comes to Colgate from: the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, where she served as a teaching and research postdoctoral fellow Teaching specialties include: racial and social injustice, history of mass incarceration, Black feminist theory, gender and hiphop, Southern culture

Teaching specialties include: biochemistry Research interests include: chemical biology, especially the use of genetic code expansion to study post-translational modifications and selenoprotein biology Brent Rodriguez-Plate, Gretchen Hoadley Burke Endowed Chair for regional studies Comes to Colgate from: Hamilton College, where he served as professor of religious studies and cinema and media studies by special appointment Teaching specialties include: religion and visual culture and religion and media Research interests include: theories of religion, comparative religion, media studies, and sense perception

Fatima Aqeel, assistant professor of economics Comes to Colgate from: Boston University

12 Konosioni donated $1,976 to the Community Action Partnership, helping families in need during the pandemic.

13 quROARantine: Dart Colegrove Commons marked the end of quarantine with a synchronized scream Sept. 8.

Noah Apthorpe

T. Dionne Bailey

14 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Fatima Aqeel

scene

The Third-century plan

updates

Diverse Efforts Toward Equity and Inclusion

t the end of July, President Brian W. Casey delivered the inaugural report on Colgate’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to the University community. “Even as we are addressing the significant challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Casey wrote, “it is important to continue to communicate to all members of the University about these crucial efforts.” The Third-Century Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan (the DEI Plan) was adopted by the institution in 2019 at the same time it published The Third-Century Plan and Sustainability Plan. In this context, the steps that Colgate is taking to combat racism are foundational to its pursuit of excellence across all areas of the University. Administrative Changes In accordance with the DEI Plan, Colgate has begun a national search for a chief diversity officer (CDO), who will report directly to the president and sit on the cabinet. The CDO, charged with the implementation and updating of the DEI Plan, will work across all divisions to ensure racism is addressed and equity of opportunity is ensured on campus. A new DEI Advisory Group and DEI Coordination Group will work alongside the CDO. The DEI Advisory Group, composed of DEI practitioners from across campus, will oversee the day-to-day operations of DEI implementation and provide mutual support. It will connect departmental and student program efforts with the DEI and Third-Century plans and oversee the process by which the DEI Plan is updated and communicated to campus. Meanwhile, the DEI Coordination Group will ensure that the University remains compliant with its legal, regulatory, and other commitments. This group will also carry information, updates, and policy decisions from the CDO to University employees. Universitywide Initiatives As part of its 2019–2020 review of Colgate’s residential life experience, the Board of Trustees began to consider how best to provide appropriate residential and social space for all Colgate students — particularly juniors and seniors. Colgate engaged RAMSA, WXY, and the Sasaki Group to consider current conditions for these class years, review Colgate’s past residential life studies, and survey housing and social options available at other institutions. These reviews should be completed during the fall semester, allowing for the development of long-range plans. Colgate will also support plans for new programming and improvements in the Harlem Renaissance Center, including a dedicated Sophomore Residential Seminar associated with Hancock Commons. New Financial Support and New Programs Three new funds will help support DEI efforts: the Henry

Livingston Simpson Fund, named after Colgate’s first Black graduate; the Alumni of Color Third-Century Fund; and the President’s DEI Discretionary Fund, created with a gift from trustee Giovanni Cutaia ’94 and his wife, Maree. The President’s DEI Discretionary Fund has already covered peer-to-peer programming offered through the ALANA Cultural Center, summer internship funding, and financial support for applications to graduate schools and national fellowship programs for students of color. The Partnership for Racial Progress, a group of alumni of color who seek to enhance life at the University and promote a sense of community among Colgate graduates, helped to launch the Mosaic Program Fund. President’s DEI Discretionary Fund dollars will enhance this program as well. National Partnerships and Programs Colgate has joined Questbridge and the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) to enhance admission efforts and help diversify its faculty. Colgate has also joined the American Talent Initiative, which works with select colleges and universities toward a goal of graduating 50,000 high-achieving, low- and moderateincome students. The University’s first Questbridge cohort was accepted for the 2021 academic year. CFD scholars will come directly into Colgate’s classrooms through new postdoctoral fellowships. The Board of Trustees’ DEI Steps The Board of Trustees will provide oversight as Colgate integrates DEI principles and objectives into The Third-Century Plan. Meanwhile, the board and its Nominating, Governance, and Trustee Development Committee are keenly focused on improving the overall diversity of membership as promptly as possible. To that end, the body has initiated a process to diversify by expanding its total membership. Trustee development will be augmented to include diversity and implicit bias training and education. A new board DEI committee will coordinate efforts to improve the board’s diversity, operations with respect to diversity and inclusion, and those programs designed to enhance both board and University DEI efforts. America’s colleges and universities are entering what Casey called, “a period of great trial and testing,” as the country confronts not only a pandemic but also a legacy of racism and injustice. “I believe that those colleges and universities that are willing to confront these challenges and seek to improve themselves in the face of them have the chance to ultimately meet their mission with greater purpose and commitment,” Casey said. “To do so will surely be difficult at times. Not to do so, however, is a greater risk.”

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 15

scene

elvin Moody had an early vocation. Growing up in the Pentecostal-Holiness Church where his grandmother preached, he was compelled to follow her path. “I felt called to impart a message, to become a minister,” he says. By 13, he was leading services and was profiled in his hometown paper, the Utica Observer-Dispatch. “That foundation later would turn into not just preaching about a social revolutionary — a Palestinian Jew by the name of Jesus — but moreso, as [the theologian] Walter Rauschenbusch would put it, preaching the social gospel, and seeing how faith was a precursor of social activism,” Moody says. Today, combining his faith, intellect, and personal drive to revitalize his community, Moody is pursuing a master’s in political

theology at Colgate while also representing his Cornhill neighbors on Utica’s Common Council. He’s the youngestever elected official of the city and the youngest elected Black official in New York State. “I felt that people were missing a heavy component in the conversation of, how do we transform the inner city? I had a few ideas, and I earnestly felt I was the best person to represent Cornhill,” he says. “Together with meditation and prayer and talking with family, [I knew] it was time to step forward and become a public servant.” In Colgate’s Department of Religion, he’s researching the interplay of politics and religion “through the lens of the African American experience, particularly looking at the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina as well as Africanized slave religions in the Antebellum South,” he explains. Moody’s graduate adviser, Professor Harvey Sindima, says: “Delvin’s view that religion is a liberating force, especially within the prophetic tradition of Black Christianity in America, is not simply a matter of intellectual interest, but the very

embodiment of his being.” A well-known figure in Utica since his youth, Moody benefited from three regional programs, Young Scholars Liberty Partnerships Program, Junior Frontiers of the Mohawk Valley, and On Point for College. The latter honored him with its student Star Award at its banquet last year, where he offered the opening and closing prayers. Now he’s paying those opportunities forward through his day job as a program specialist for Mohawk Valley Community College’s Gear Up program, helping middle schoolers prepare for high school, explore college options, and become career ready. “From 9 to 5, I help kids become viable citizens, and then from 5 to 9 I help their parents,” he chuckled. In all his pursuits, Moody goes by the motto: “The worst anybody can tell you is no. If I have a vision that I feel strongly about, my faith tells me there are going to be provisions somewhere down the road. I live by that.” — Rebecca Downing

the part of Colgate to identify the remains as human and link them to the Nation. Officials at the University had discovered the remains while completing an updated inventory of the museum’s archives and notified the Nation to set the process of repatriation in motion. “The Longyear Museum has taken great pains to reexamine our collection and to act in accordance with national statutes governing the repatriation of remains, but this work is also part of our own ethical obligation to the Oneida people and to their ancestral lands,” says President Brian W. Casey. The remains were originally recovered by avocational archaeologists working with the New York State Archaeological

Association–Chenango Chapter at various sites throughout ancestral Oneida homelands, sometime during the 20th century. One of the recovery sites, located near Poolville, N.Y., is believed to have been occupied by Oneida over several millennia until colonial times, with another village site dating back to approximately 1625 to 1640. Colgate acquired the remains through collections donated or purchased between 1959 and 2000, only recently discovering the items were not part of earlier repatriations made to the Nation in 1995 and 2003. Jordan Kerber, professor of anthropology and Native American studies and curator of archaeological collections at the museum, was able to identify 10 remains representing at least six

individuals, with the assistance of a local bioarchaeologist and forensic anthropologist. The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act set forth guidelines for cooperation between museums and American Indian nations to allow for the repatriation of certain American Indian human remains, funerary objects, and other sacred objects. Colgate operated in compliance of those guidelines to assist the Nation in reclaiming not only ancestral remains, but also other archaeological dig finds. “We truly appreciate Colgate University for coming forward with this discovery so that our ancestors may receive a proper reinterment,” says Oneida Indian Nation Representative Ray Halbritter. — Dan DeVries

Master’s Student

Acts of Faith Utica’s youngest-ever elected official and the youngest elected Black official in New York State

Longyear Museum

Repatriating Ancestral Oneida Remains

one fragments determined to be the ancestral remains of at least six individuals will be returned to the Oneida Indian Nation by Colgate. These ancestral remains were found within the collection of the University’s Longyear Museum of Anthropology, where they have been held after being recovered from archaeological sites decades ago. The repatriation follows a period of extensive research on

16 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Hear more from Moody at colgate. edu/delvinmoody.

scene

Basketball

Rayman Goes Pro in Europe

ill Rayman ’20 is taking his professional journey to Europe, where he signed a contract with Tartu Ülikool in the Latvian-Estonian League. The league, which consists of 14 teams, holds its 40-game regular season from September–April. Rayman is one of two American players on the team’s roster “My main goal is to prove that I am able to play at the highest level,” Rayman says. One of the most successful organizations in Estonia, Tartu Ülikool has claimed 26 Estonian Championships since its inception in 1938. They most recently captured the 2014–15 title after competing in the newly established FIBA Europe Cup. The team was ranked eighth in the conference in 2019–20 before the season was suspended. The latest signing marks Rayman’s second stop in professional basketball after playing for Boeheim’s Army this summer in The Basketball Tournament — the annual $1 million, winner-take-all summer basketball event on ESPN networks. A two-year captain for the Raiders, Rayman earned Patriot League postseason honors in all four years. He was named the Patriot League Rookie of the Year in 2017, then posted back-to-back All-League Second Team seasons, before wrapping up his career with Defensive Player of the Year and First Team honors in 2020. The New York City native averaged 13.7 points and 6.7 rebounds per game in a Colgate uniform. Rayman etched his name in the Raider record books as the all-time program leader in career starts, games played, and minutes played, plus he is the only player in Raider history to score 1,800 points and 900 rebounds. — Jordan Doroshenko

Women’s hockey

Returning to the NWHL

ormer Raider Kiira Dosdall-Arena ’09 has signed to play again in the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL). A 2020 AllStar defender, she is returning to the Metropolitan Riveters for her sixth season. Dosdall-Arena is second all-time in Riveters history in games played (80), penalty minutes (60), and points among defenders (25). She helped to win the Isobel Cup championship with the team in 2018. Prior to joining the NWHL, Dosdall-Arena played professional hockey in the Elite Women’s Hockey League with EHV Sabres Wien and in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League for the Boston Blades. At Colgate, she was named the team’s most valuable defensive player in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Dosdall-Arena was captain in her senior season in 2008–09.

Men’s hockey

Spink Twins Sign in Germany

Bottom Right: mark diorio; TOP Right: Troy Parla

yson ’16 and Tylor ’16 Spink have inked contracts with the Schwenninger Wild Wings of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga to extend their professional hockey careers. They signed with the top league in Germany after most recently competing with Ässät in the Liiga league for the 2019–20 campaign, where Tylor finished with 32 points in the season’s 52 games (13 goals and 19 assists), while Tyson totaled 35 points in 50 games with 16 goals and 19 assists. Natives of Williamstown, Ontario, the twins began their professional careers with the Toledo Walleye of the ECHL in 2016–17, where Tyson notched 79 points across 74 games played. Tylor appeared in 73 games with the Walleye, where he posted 85 career points while also lacing up on seven occasions in the AHL for the Toronto Marlies, Milwaukee Admirals, Albany Devils, and Grand Rapids Griffins. The forwards went on to play two seasons with Örebro HK of the Swedish Hockey League, which was led by current Schwenninger coach Niklas Sundblad. Tylor found success in his 99 games played with 28 total points, while Tyson marked 23 points in 84 games played. While at Colgate, Tyson finished his career with 128 points, was selected as a Top-20 candidate for the Senior CLASS Award, and was a nominee for the Hobey Baker Award. Tylor finished his career with 115 total points. The pair were named co-recipients of the Coaches Award as seniors. — Jenna Jorgensen Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 17

Discover

Politics

Not Loud, but Clear How do Americans react when policy issues are communicated in a nonpartisan way?

18 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

n America’s highly charged partisan atmosphere, it can be difficult to hear the signal through the noise — to discern facts through the spin and rancor often generated on both sides of the political aisle. But could there be a form of communication that would allow Republicans and Democrats to draw similar conclusions when choosing between policy options? Assistant Professor of Political Science Matthew Luttig asked this question, with coauthor Philip Chen of Beloit College, in the paper, “Communicating policy information in a partisan environment: the importance of causal policy narratives in political persuasion,” which appeared in the August 2019 issue of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. Luttig studies the intersection of politics and psychology, particularly the concept of partisan-motivated reasoning. “A person’s group identity is important to their wellbeing,” he explains. “Because of that, people tend to hold beliefs and opinions that make their own political party look good in contrast to the opposing party.” This holds true even on topics that can be objectively quantified, like the federal budget. “We’ve seen a lot of this kind of partisan-motivated reasoning over the past several months in regard to COVID-19,” he says. Luttig and his coauthor designed a study to, in their words, “upset” this type of thought process. They provided subjects with information from nonpartisan experts that communicated a clear link between a particular policy and a societal outcome. “The assumption behind our hypothesis,” he says, “was that, if we gave people clear information, they would be persuaded by it and ignore the position adopted by their affiliated party’s leaders.” Their first experiment looked at the issue of funding for Head Start, a federal program that provides pre-K education for children from low-income families. Their second experiment focused on national education standards in STEM fields. “We purposely chose less salient issues,” Luttig says. “People are likely to not have given these topics as much thought, so it’s a test case for what happens when an issue emerges, and it provides more potential for people to be persuaded in that context.” The concept of outcome preference also influenced which two issues they selected. “Both Democrats and Republicans want more equality and better education,” Luttig says. “But they disagree over which policies will produce those outcomes.” Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the first condition

Illustration by Doug Chayka

people were given no information about where party leaders stood on the issue. In the second, people were told that Democrats supported the issue and Republicans opposed it. In the third condition, respondents were told that Republicans supported the issue and Democrats opposed it. In addition, participants were also given clear or unclear information from nonpartisan experts on whether the policy results in the broader social goal it aims to accomplish. The results showed that, when it’s unclear whether a policy will achieve a desired outcome, most people will revert to their party’s position. But when people are told a clear narrative linking a policy to a desired outcome, support for that policy rises, even when partisan cues direct people to oppose that policy. “We found that everyone, regardless of how strongly partisan they were, was at least somewhat persuaded by

It is important to think about not only the science and evidence that those experts have to share, but also how they communicate their findings. nonpartisan experts when they claimed a clear link,” Luttig says. An example of Luttig’s results is playing out in real time, as guidance on mask use has evolved during the pandemic. “[Initially], the communication about masks was not very clear,” he says. “The lack of clear communication made what the party leaders were saying and doing all the more influential. As the guidance has become more clear, more people are now wearing masks.” The study put into starker relief for Luttig just how influential political leaders are in their choices and recommendations and how crucial it is for them to be well-informed. “We want experts to have an important say in government policy,” he says. “Our results show that it is important to think about not only the science and evidence that those experts have to share, but also how they communicate their findings.” — Kristin Baird Rattini Luttig is incorporating his study findings into his upcoming book, tentatively titled The Bipartisan Closing of the Partisan Mind.

8–11

Current USDA recommended allowances for zinc are in the range of 8–11 milligrams per day for healthy adults. →

ASK A PROFESSOR

Is zinc good for your memory? A: That question is perhaps more easily answered after considering the general role of zinc in nutrition. It was not until the early 1960s that zinc was first identified as an essential micronutrient in humans. Because the human body cannot manufacture zinc, it must be obtained from dietary sources or vitamin supplements. Current USDA recommended allowances are in the range of 8–11 milligrams per day for healthy adults, an amount that can be obtained by eating balanced meals or a bowl of certain breakfast cereals. Curiously, individuals suffering from chronic zinc deficiency exhibit a variety of symptoms ranging from skin disorders to diminished growth and development to cognitive dysfunction, depending on the severity of the condition. That zinc contributes to overall brain health is not necessarily surprising, especially given its emerging role as a modulator of neurotransmission. There is mounting evidence that suggests zinc modifies communication between certain neurons, particularly within the hippocampus — a region of the brain strongly engaged in learning and memory formation — as well as in other parts of the brain that govern olfactory, auditory, and somatosensory perception. Mice genetically engineered in such a way that their hippocampal neurons cannot accumulate zinc tend to develop comparably to normal mice, but have impaired spatial, contextual, and social memory function — particularly when auditory or visual cues are required. Such data indicate zinc is probably beneficial for memory formation. On the other hand, like many things in life, too much zinc can also be problematic. Mice dosed with artificially high levels of zinc in water over a three-

month period actually exhibited a net reduction in the amount of zinc in the hippocampus, as well as a decrease in receptors and other proteins that facilitate neurotransmission. These mice had significantly impaired performance in tests designed to measure spatial memory and other behavioral assays relative to control groups. The findings from this study suggest that, at least in mice, excessive zinc consumption can have deleterious effects. The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Medicine recommends a tolerable upper intake level of 40 milligrams per day for adults across all dietary and supplementary sources in the absence of other medical advice. Taken together, the best evidence supports that adequate zinc intake is important for learning and memory formation, but in moderation. — Jacob M. Goldberg is an assistant professor of chemistry. His research interests span the fields of chemical biology, bioinorganic chemistry, and metalloneurochemistry. He and a collaborator from the University of Pittsburgh recently received an award of $134,000 from the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute for their project “Chemical Probes for Synaptic Zinc.” They will develop and prepare a new generation of small-molecule sensors that will be used to detect and quantitate zinc ions in the brain.

Do you have a big-picture question for a faculty member? Write to us at: magazine@colgate.edu.

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 19

DISCOVER landscape. Led by Asare, this effort has produced significant results — including the 2017 development and adoption of the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Program (GCFRP), the first commodity-based emissions reduction program on the continent. (REDD+ refers to efforts to reduce emissions from

There has to be a plan that makes life better for the people involved. Becca (Ashley) Asare ’97

Becca Asare (third from front) doing field work in Ghana

Environmentalism

Seeing the Forest for the Trees Becca (Ashley) Asare ’97 is helping to support African farmers and protect the environment.

he next time you bite into a Hershey’s chocolate bar, consider this: Chances are, the cocoa beans used to make it were grown and harvested by one of the 800,000 cocoa farmers in the West African country of Ghana. Ghana is the second-largest producer of cocoa beans in the world, and the crop has become an annual $2 billion industry there — but it sometimes comes at the expense of the country’s high forests. That’s because farmers long believed that the forest canopy made their cocoa trees less productive. For decades, deforestation has increased alongside cocoa yields — and that, in turn, has diminished regional biodiversity as well as some of the forest ecosystem’s key benefits, such as carbon storage. But linking tree cover to low cocoa productivity is a mistake, says Becca (Ashley) Asare ’97, director of programs and research at the Nature Conservation Research Centre (NCRC) in Accra, Ghana’s coastal capital city.

20 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Asare has spent more than 15 years studying the complex interface of agriculture, forests, and farmers’ well-being in many African countries. Her research has shown that, contrary to popular belief, proximity to forests and tree cover on farms (along with proper soil management and pollination) actually bolsters cocoa crop yield. At NCRC, she’s using such research to promote climatesmart cocoa production at landscape scales. To do so, Asare relies on one of NCRC’s core principles: community-based conservation — which is both rooted in local culture and economically viable. “You can’t just do conservation because it feels good,” she says. “There has to be a plan that makes life better for the people involved.” At NCRC, that approach takes the form of community resource management areas (CREMAs). CREMAs have now been established on approximately 500,000 hectares in the south, where cocoa farming is widespread, to encourage forest maintenance in the midst of the farming

deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.) Under this plan, as a member of the World Bank’s Carbon Fund, Ghana stands to receive millions of dollars in return for reduced deforestation, dollars that will then be funneled back to the CREMA communities. Months after the World Bank signed on, the global cocoa industry as a whole committed to a no-deforestation supply chain. Arriving at the GCFRP required that Asare lead diverse — and divergent — stakeholders to a consensus. To do so, she asked herself the question that has always driven her research: Why do people do the things they do? “If we can understand what drives people’s behaviors and decision making,” she says, “we are in a much better position to effect change.” She also ensured that NCRC’s research resonated with everybody — from farmers to government agents to chocolate execs. “You can be as academic as you like, but let’s make sure the questions we’re asking have relevance on the ground and can help to drive and inform the issues we’re facing,” she says. Today Asare applies her knowledge of research, policy, and practice to the oversight of two Hotspot Intervention Areas (HIAs) in Ghana, the country she’s called home since 2005. On HIAs, cocoa communities perform land-use planning and management and explore additional revenue streams; NCRC colleagues monitor biodiversity and economic and social consequences; and companies including Hershey support farmers in climate-smart practices. Though creating change in West Africa is not a speedy process, Asare says, you can have real impact: “It takes patience. It takes commitment. It takes a thousand small steps. But if you just start walking, you’ll get there.” — Sarah C. Baldwin

DISCOVER

Economics

At What Cost? Professor contributes to case against ICE regulations

STUDY TIME → Aubreya Adams, Geology and Environmental Studies National Science Foundation

n July 6, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued new guidelines that would require foreign students to leave the country should their American colleges and universities move to remote education, Colgate joined dozens of its peers in condemning these guidelines. In support of a lawsuit filed by Harvard and MIT, Colgate signed an amicus brief. Chad Sparber, W. Bradford Wiley Chair in international economics at Colgate, contributed further support to the successful legal challenge in the form of policy briefs that he compiled with colleagues from the University of California– Davis and Queens College–CUNY. One brief, “The Devastating Economic Consequences of Pushing Foreign Students out of the Country,” was published through UC Davis. “This abrupt and arbitrary change to migration and education policy will inflict lasting and unnecessary damage to international students, and risk massive economic losses to U.S. higher education and to the U.S. economy overall,” the experts noted. The paper went on to detail the consequences of ICE action. In the short term, those included an immediate reduction in the $41 billion and 450,000 jobs that foreign students have historically generated for the U.S. economy. Taking a broader view, Sparber and his colleagues noted that the barring of foreign students could also impact higher education as an intellectual commodity that currently generates financial returns “roughly equivalent to total exports of wheat, corn, coal, and natural gas.” Although ICE rescinded its policy on student visas in mid-July, at press time, the Trump administration policy was still suspending processing of skilled worker visas such as the H-1B or L. “This will not only affect many of our students as they enter the workforce,” Sparber says, “but it also impacts Colgate’s hiring as well.” As part of an ongoing legal challenge, he has filed an evidentiary declaration with the District Court of the District of Columbia outlining the economic benefits of immigration. — Mark Walden

A Reimagination of Research

A SAMPLING OF RECENT FACULTY-SPONSORED RESEARCH GRANT AWARDS

When COVID-19 upended summer opportunities, Colgate students devised creative strategies.

Lithospheric Velocity Structure and Anisotropy of the Alaskan Subduction Margin → Tom Balonek, Physics &

Astronomy NASA via Cornell University

Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, 2020–24 → Kiko Galvez, Physics &

Astronomy National Science Foundation

Three-dimensional spatial and polarization modes in classical and quantum light fields → Karen Harpp, Geology and Peace and Conflict Studies National Science Foundation

RUI: The Effect of a Mid-Ocean Ridge-Centered Environment on a Zoned Mantle Plume and Associated Secondary Magmatism (collaborative research with Ithaca College) → Joe Levy, Geology National Science Foundation

CAREER: Linking Antarctic Cold Desert Groundwater to Thermokarst & Chemical Weathering in Partnership with the Geoscience UAV Academy → Anne Perring, Chemistry

Jumping worm invasions shoot through forests, devastating local ecologies. Determined to better understand these volatile animals, biology major Kaleigh Gale ’21 researched the impact of jumping worms in the Northeast. She focused on the effect they have on soil, plants, and other earthworm species. After developing and sending a survey to master gardener programs across the Northeast, she discovered that jumping worms are more prevalent than had been previously thought. Realizing the importance of spreading awareness, she submitted her results for publication.

In Aztec Mexico, cotton was spun, woven, and embellished to construct textiles for clothing. Anna Brown ’21 embarked on an intensive study of Aztec cotton cloth production, drawing on her experiences as an anthropology and Spanish double major. Homing in on late post-classic Mexico, she reviewed archaeological data and the pertinent literature on the subject. She plans to expand on her research by studying 3D images of late post-classic spindle whorls at Colgate.

University of Colorado Boulder

Aerosol Delivery for Rapid Disinfection of the Built Environment: Real-time Monitoring for Guiding the Mitigation of Infectious Bioaerosols and Fomites

For more on faculty research, visit news.colgate.edu/ researchmagazine.

For Vani Kanoria ’22, the intersection of biology and technology presented an exciting chance to study an organic regulatory network. Putting her applied mathematics major to work, she practiced innovative methods of mathematical modeling to recreate real-life processes in cells. Using probability and differential equations in lines of code, she was able to mimic natural biological behavior. Her endeavors culminated in new knowledge surrounding gene expression variation. — Celine Turkyilmaz ’21 Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 21

DISCOVER

Dialogue

Unpacking Study Abroad Research Into Global Citizenship Education

oming to college, I always dreamed of studying abroad. I aspired to travel to beautiful places rich in culture, meet people diverse in background and thought, and acquire valuable assets that might be beneficial for life after college. What I had never thought about, though, were the foundations of study abroad, who benefits from it, or how it relates to history and racial politics. These are the questions that, in today’s sociopolitical climate, those of us who are racially privileged (i.e., white) should be confronting. My summer research fellowship intended to do just that: explore institutional elitism and racism in study abroad programs. To consider these questions, I examined the relationships Colgate students had with their abroad experiences by exploring an archive of interviews and literature on international education. Professor Mark Stern (educational studies), one of my first-year professors in the Benton Scholars Program, oversaw this Colgate Summer Research Fellowship. He asked my Benton cohort to consider how colonial pasts remained present in the physical, political, and ideological triangle of New York, the Netherlands, and South Africa (the Dutch being the connection). In preparation for our trip to Amsterdam and Cape Town (which was canceled due to COVID-19), the class read literature about the industry of global citizenship and conducted interviews with alumni as well as current Benton scholars about their abroad experiences. Global citizenship education has come to refer to a curriculum that attempts to offer students cross-cultural experience. While many may cite employability, cultural understanding, widened perspectives, and immersive language experience among the advantages of studying abroad, some scholars offer more critical interpretations. Critical global citizenship education literature focuses on both highlighting and

22 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

dismantling the colonial legacies in study abroad programs. These critiques often place the origins of study abroad and global education in a long tradition of colonial practices: universities utilizing their capital to send students to historic colonies to be educated in ways that reify concepts of “otherness” and the hegemony of the global North. As I listened to the interviews during my fellowship, I began to see how some themes from the literature resonated with students’ experiences. For example, one student suggests, “There was no stepping outside of your comfort zone. There was no self-reflection about positionality, because it was just the same [experience,] except in a different country.” So, when we talk about the concept of studying abroad, we should consider: Are students really experiencing what it’s like to be abroad if they just surround themselves with each other?

In relation to this exploratory research, it would be interesting to see how we, as a progressive university community, might reimagine the way students study abroad. Through Colgate’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Plan, we have a unique opportunity to grow as an institution, by adding a critical lens to study groups. We must ask: Are students consciously attempting to reach outside their comfort zones to combat implicit bias? Are they engaging in diverse conversations and literature? And are they contextualizing new material locally, or within a globalized society?

— Erin Flannery ’23, from Warwick, N.Y., is an international relations major planning to minor in geography. She is a member of the Colgate Equestrian Team and the Club Ski Team. Last year, she was a senator for the Class of 2023 in the Student Government Association.

DISCOVER

The University’s Approach to an Evolving Field

Colgate students take a tour of the University of the West Indies at Mona as part of a study abroad program in Kingston, Jamaica.

Critical global citizenship education literature focuses on both highlighting and dismantling the colonial legacies in study abroad programs.

Erin Flannery’s thoughtful essay has identified many of the complexities of education abroad programs. Education abroad is a field of active research in its own right that seeks to critically examine and improve the educational experience for all. Some of the central questions for the field include: Why are we conducting study abroad? Who are these programs benefiting? How can we help students to actively and thoughtfully engage with these new communities in which they will be living? How can we prepare them to do so safely and ethically? In the approximately 150 years that universities have sent students abroad, answers to these questions have changed and will continue to do so as our understanding of the world and our place in it evolve. As Flannery notes, Colgate’s focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (as part of its Third-Century Plan) provides an important opportunity for the institution to reexamine its approach to off-campus study to address these issues. Colgate has already made some important strides in these areas. For many years, Colgate has extended financial aid to cover extra costs associated with its own study groups. Five years ago, we extended these financial policies to cover external (approved) programs as well, in order to allow students to select the program that is the best academic fit for them, regardless of their financial situation. This is one important step to broadening who has access to these educational experiences. Colgate also continues to evaluate how to improve its own programs and the diversity of programs available to students. Beginning last year, all students in approved programs in a location where English is not the primary language are required to take a course in that language. Such courses can enhance students’ ability to engage more deeply in the local communities in which they live. We have also worked with academic departments to increase the geographic and academic diversity of Colgate study groups and approved programs. Colgate study groups in diverse locations such as Santa Fe, N.M.; Japan; South Africa; and others are purposefully designed to deeply engage with the communities and cultures in which students will be living. This includes predeparture classes to prepare students for life in diverse locations. Certainly, this work is constantly evolving, and we will continue our efforts to enhance students’ ability to engage with these important issues. Finally, it is important to recognize that students come to these programs with a range of interests, expectations, and comfort levels. Study groups also have different academic goals and purposes. But, ultimately, we can and must do more to make deep and thoughtful cultural engagement and critical evaluation about the study abroad experience important aspects of all Colgate off-campus study programs. The Office of Off-Campus Study will continue to work with academic departments and students to enhance our efforts in these areas and continue to evolve our approach to the lessons of living and learning abroad.

mark diorio

— Joanna Holvey Bowles, director, Office of Off-Campus Study Colgate study groups in Santa Fe, N.M.; Spain; Germany; Japan; South Africa; and other locations are designed to engage with the communities and cultures in which students will be living. Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 23

CLASS F

Female students brought new life to Colgate when the University went coed. By Aleta Mayne Images courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives

YEARS

C E L E B R AT I O N OF WOMEN AT C O LG AT E

24 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

our young women from Philadelphia, their parents, and a U-Haul stuffed with piles of clothing, record players, and a TV made their way north to Hamilton on Sept. 6, 1970. “We had gone to an antique shop to buy fur coats, and we had all kinds of boots, because we knew how cold it was,” remembers Covette Rooney ’74. She and her twin sister, Cozette (Rooney) Ferron ’74, rode in the back seat of their parents’ baby blue Rambler, while their high school friends Angela Nolan-Cooper ’74 and Deborah (Booker) Matthews ’74 traveled separately with their parents. This was the second time the four friends from Overbrook High School were coming to Colgate together. They’d visited the winter of their senior year, upon the invitation of Stephen Bradsher ’74. He was a recent Overbrook graduate who’d returned to his high school with another Colgate student to recruit women during a college fair. “It took some convincing for our parents to allow us to take a trip to Colgate with these two guys [that winter],” Covette remembers. “It was so pretty,” recalls Rae Scott-Jones ’74, whom they knew through church and invited to the prefreshmen weekend. “There were icicles on the trees, like you see on Christmas cards. I had never seen that before in my life.” “It was beautiful, and it was my top choice,” adds Matthews, who’d also applied to Penn State, Yale, and Indiana State. “It was a totally different experience that I felt I needed to be a part of.” Come autumn, the five friends would join 10 other Black women who had been accepted as part of Colgate’s first coeducational class. They moved into their suites on the fourth floor of Center Stillman, above three other floors divided by gender and race.

Rae Scott-Jones ’74 and her four friends from Philadelphia were among the 15 Black women who enrolled in Colgate’s first official coeducational class.

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 25

THE WORLD WAS ADJUSTING, AND SO WERE THEY

In those early September days, “War” by Edwin Starr was the No. 1 single. More than 100 Vietnam veterans were marching in an 80-mile antiwar protest en route to a Labor Day peace rally in Valley Forge, Pa. (featured speakers would include John Kerry and Jane Fonda). Closer to campus, Syracuse City Hall had just been taken over by women participating in the National Women’s Strike for Equality, sponsored by NOW. And Colgate students looked forward to Gloria Steinem’s coming visit as the Union Board Lecture Series’ first speaker of the semester. The Class of 1974 comprised 132 women and 452 men. More than 600 women applied, and 235 were accepted. Of the 20 Black women who applied, 15 were accepted and they all enrolled. “We came to Colgate because we knew we were going to get a good education,” Diane Ciccone ’74, P’10 said in an oral history interview. Having attended high school in West Winfield, N.Y., she had taken Colgate classes through a program for gifted students from area schools. Ciccone was Cozette’s roommate who ended up forming a close friendship with the twins and their cohort. Although the idea of segregating students’ residential assignments by race sounds irrational today, “I felt comfortable because everyone on that floor looked like me,” Matthews says. “Coming from a predominantly Black high school, I could meet people who maybe shared the same experience I had.” “I thought of it as a positive thing,” Scott-Jones adds. “I didn’t feel so foreign, so strange. I had a group of folks whom I knew, and it was going to be all right.” The women also remember the University’s preparations — or the lack thereof, as some would say — for female students. The first semester, only one full-length mirror was available, in the bathroom, for 15 of them to share. Nolan-Cooper, for one, didn’t consider it a limitation. “We were very natural,” she says. “I don’t think any of us wore makeup.” “They weren’t ready for us,” counters Matthews. “You had to make sure you showered around other people’s times because they didn’t have enough [facilities].” A number of women from the Class of 1974 — even those in other residence halls — also remember the urinals in their bathrooms, which were “decorated” with plastic rhododendron pots. “On one hand, I could understand it because it had been all male,” Scott-Jones says. “But on the other hand, I thought, [they knew we] were coming, so get those bathrooms in order.” After Thanksgiving break, the fourth floor Stillman women returned to find mirrors in their individual rooms. Over time, the University would begin to square up with its new identity.

THE CLASS OF 1974 COMPRISED 132 WOMEN AND 452 MEN. 26 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Summer orientation for students and their parents on the Merrill House lawn, 1972

Then-President Thomas Bartlett (right) spent much time fundraising in order to build Colgate’s endowment.

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

Then-President Thomas Bartlett admits, “We did have a housing problem” — but he’s referring to the number of rooms, not their accoutrements. “Colgate didn’t have adequate housing for the students it already had, let alone to grow, but we made do the best we could.” That fall, the University started its final planning stages to build more housing units. Bartlett, now 90, recalls his focus to be “the mechanics: housing arrangements, selection processes, getting the word out and applications in.” He also spent much of his early presidency traveling to alumni gettogethers, in order to discuss Colgate’s coeducation and alleviate concerns. “I would get some naïve questions,” he says. “[Once,] someone in the audience asked me, straight-faced, ‘How will the coeds hang their long gowns in the short closets?’ I was amused by that as I watched our very robust [female students] going to class, marching by in the snow in their army boots. The last thing I was worried about was how to deal with ‘these poor delicate females.’ I’d always been in coeducational institutions, and nothing like that was an issue.” The University recruited Bartlett in 1969 when he was president of the American University in Cairo (Egypt). Having grown up in Oregon and been involved with four academic institutions that were all coeducational, Bartlett didn’t “understand this particular eastern

phenomenon.” Indeed, when the possibility of Colgate going coed began to gain traction in 1963, a number of single-sex colleges in the East — including Dartmouth, Bowdoin, and Amherst — were still holding out. A poll of Colgate faculty members showed that 91 of 108 were in favor of coeducation, according to a Nov. 4, 1964, Maroon article. John Rexine, associate professor of the classics, said the presence of women would raise classroom spirit, provide academic incentive for both sexes, and result in a heightened competitive standard. Huntington Terrell, associate professor of philosophy and religion, said, “All for it!” Herman Brautigam, also of philosophy and religion, commented that the idea “represents a certain amount of cultural lag.” English professor Russell Spiers argued for the social advantages of coeducation: “It’s in the air today — inevitable — a good thing,” he told the Maroon. “Any young man with good red blood is going to be interested in some young thing with good red lips … there’s no good in trying to interrupt the process by segregating the sexes.” Wanting to move the University in the direction of coeducation faster, Colgate’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors established an independent study group, according to Becoming Colgate by James Allen Smith ’70. The president at the time, Vincent Barnett, was displeased with the faculty’s action, so he created a separate committee. As the University began weighing its options, two choices became apparent: Colgate could either restructure to become a coeducational institution or

establish a coordinate women’s college, similar to the Brown/Pembroke model. A Committee to Study Coeducation formed in 1965. The required cost for either model was a primary concern, but the committee considered the future of education and determined that coeducation was valuable for the academic experience as well as society in general. It initially favored a coordinate college model, Smith wrote in Becoming Colgate, but Board of Trustees Chairman Warren “Andy” Anderson “intervened to dismiss that idea outright, recommending that Colgate move toward a fully coeducational campus, and despite their skepticism, he was able to bring the board along.” (Read more about Anderson’s life in this issue’s “Flashback” on p. 53.) When Bartlett assumed his post as the new president, “we had virtually no endowment,” he recalls. “The thing that picked up the deficit was that Colgate had one of the most loyal and committed alumni bodies of any institution in the country,” Bartlett says. Although many alumni were supportive of the move to coeducation, some were not. Consequently, Bartlett “spent a lot of time on an airplane” to ensure that alumni continued to support the changing institution. Margaret (Digan) Sinclair ’74 remembers making fundraising calls: “Some of the alumni did not care for the fact that females were at the University,” she says. “You’d make calls to solicit them for money, and you’d have to convince them that you didn’t have horns. It helped [when I said] ‘I had a grandfather and a greatgrandfather attend Colgate, 1890 and 1917.’”

Female students weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and embrace the learning opportunities Colgate offered.

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 27

GROWING PAINS

Providing facilities and extracurricular activities for women was not just a budgetary concern, Bartlett remembers, but also a process. As the student body began to include more women and the University gained a sense of what those women needed and wanted, Colgate would be better informed to expand its offerings. “The numbers had to build up, and the response had to come,” he says. “Unless you have the money to do all of those things in advance, it becomes an action and reaction growing process, because that’s all you can afford.” Leta Caplan Smith ’72, who came to Colgate from Skidmore on an exchange program in ’69, remembers running through the snow dripping wet after swimming. “There were no women’s locker rooms or changing areas,” she says, “so it was just ‘let your hair flow and freeze’” as you sprinted back to your room. By the fall of 1970, the University had converted the former sophomore locker room into a women’s locker room and “ordered hairdryers for feminine use,” according to the Sept. 6, 1970, Maroon.

28 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

An Afro-Latin Festival workshop with funk artist Roy Ayers (left). L to R: Jeannette Burgos ’77, Angela Nolan ’74, Covette Rooney ’74, Theda Wiles ’74, and Veleria Thompson ’76

The administration’s strategy of letting the new firstyear women drive their own extracurriculars worked, to some extent. The Rooney twins and Matthews had been cheerleaders at Overbrook High, while Nolan-Cooper was a majorette, so they decided to form their own group at Colgate. They picked up their pom-poms and batons and proudly led the band. “If you could have seen the faces on the alumni [watching] these young Black women with big afros marching out on the field,” Nolan-Cooper says. “The students didn’t have any problems with it that I recall, but the alumni sure were taken aback.” A few of the Philadelphia women also started an African dance troupe and produced a publication called Speak, Brother, Speak. “No matter what we asked, they never said no,” Nolan-Cooper says of the administration’s support. “I don’t think the University was ever malicious. I think they just didn’t think some things through,” Gay Clark Jennings ’74, H’15 said in an oral history interview. She was on the first volleyball team, and one of the issues she remembered fighting for was equal medical coverage as an athlete. Denise Cashmere ’74 was part of the group of women who went to the athletic director and said, “We want

intercollegiate sports.” She’d played volleyball, softball, and basketball in high school, and she continued to play all three at Colgate. “The first two years we played as club status,” she said in an oral history interview. “We had whatever coach was around. We didn’t have uniforms. They brought out the men’s old basketball shirts, but that didn’t work because they went down to our knees and the scoop necks went almost down to our waists.” In her junior year, they hired a volleyball and basketball coach for the women and bought uniforms. “They ordered these little short cheerleader skirts,” she recalled. “Imagine dribbling a basketball while wearing a little short skirt.” Of course, some women joined Colgate’s already established extracurriculars. Gloria Borger ’74, P’10 was one of the first women to join the Maroon staff and became the first female editor. Susan (Venarde) Mahoney ’73, P’12,’14, who transferred from Northwestern as a sophomore, was one of the first female DJs for WRCU. “I think they were open to having women DJs,” she says. “I just thought it would be really fun to choose what kind of music was being played on the radio… The whole Spear House was covered with shelves and shelves of albums. You could delve back into the jazz section because Robert Blackmore [’41, English professor and WRCU adviser] was there and he loved jazz. That aspect of it was really fun.”

THE WEEKENDERS

In a 2014 commencement speech, Borger joked about the University putting ironing boards in the women’s rooms. “Although, to this day, as my family can attest, I still have no idea what the ironing boards were for,” she said. “We wore jeans and T-shirts, so I don’t know what we would have ironed,” Susan (Kornfeld) Kennedy ’74 adds. “It was the busloads of girls who came in from the girls’ schools who had everything ironed and looking pretty.” Kennedy is referring to the women from nearby colleges (such as Skidmore and Cazenovia) who came to Colgate on the weekends to socialize with the male students. Before Colgate’s first class of women, and even in the early years of coeducation, the men often vacated campus to travel to other schools for dates. “Especially in the beginning, the older guys left on the weekends or they’d invite their off-campus girlfriends in,” Laura (Macomber) Weeks ’74 said in an oral history interview. “So there was a feeling of, ‘Hey, what about us?’” “The one thing that bothered us most was party weekends — all these women from other colleges were bussed in,” Cashmere remembered. “The busses stopped [coming] as we became upperclassmen because there were more women on campus.” The Colgate students did also date amongst themselves, of course. Kennedy, for example, ended up marrying an upperclassman, Paul Kennedy ’72. And Mahoney married her classmate, William Mahoney ’73. Paul Kennedy was a Phi Psi, so Susan went to some of that fraternity’s parties. But she and others note

that there were other fraternities women knew to avoid because of rape culture, excessive partying, and dangerous behavior in general. “It just scared me,” Kennedy says. For the most part, “the Black women did not socialize with white men [at first],” according to Ciccone. “The [Black] male students, the ones who came before us, were so protective of us,” Nolan-Cooper says. “We pretty much stayed in that little clique,” Matthews adds. The cultural center (now ALANA), which was the result of campus protests at the end of the ’60s, was their social hub. “It was a great environment because we were able to cook foods that we were used to eating, like soul food,” Nolan-Cooper says. “We were able to bring African American jazz artists… And we brought Nikki Giovanni.”

CLASS MISS-DISSED

As a class, “the women are considered academically superior to the men,” Dean of Students Guy Martin said in the Sept. 6 Maroon. Martin had overseen the selection of the 1974 class as dean of admission the previous year. “While the mean SAT verbal score for entering men was 618, the mean score for women was 635. In the SAT math scoring, however, the men surpassed the women 639 to 620,” according to the Maroon. “And while one half of the women who applied qualified for [the] War Memorial Scholarship, only one out of every seven male students did so.”

Despite the female students’ academic strength, their classroom experiences were not all positive, depending on the professor. “I sensed that some of the older male professors were not that happy to have women,” says Mahoney, who majored in art and art history and English. Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 29

An art exhibition as part of the Women’s Cultural Festival in 1974

From a faculty member’s perspective, James Clarke, professor of education and social science emeritus, remembers, “There were those who were old boys and wanted to keep it old boys, but they were few and far between.” Jennings, a sociology major, remembered: “I had some great professors who were really attentive, and there wasn’t any difference between the men and women. Then there was a longtime history professor, who refused to call on women, so most women avoided his class. You could sit there an entire semester and he refused to acknowledge women’s presence because he was against coeducation.” Carmela (McCain) Simmons ’74 said in an oral history interview that she took classes from a biology professor who was close to retiring, and “he thought women were idiots.” She’d been warned by her upperclassmen friends not to take his class, and “it was the lowest grade I ever got at Colgate.” Several women interviewed report either receiving low grades or failing classes, which they believe was because of their gender, and in some cases, their race. “Even though I had gone to a small, [majority] white, rural high school and got exceptional grades, at Colgate, they just saw me as this Black girl who didn’t have the same intellectual capacity as the white students,” Ciccone said. “Either you were ignored or you were called upon to give the definitive answer on growing up Black.” As a political science major, she felt that certain professors treated her as though she didn’t belong in the department. “I had professors who were really

30 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

wonderful, really saw me. But there were professors who [didn’t].” Kennedy remembers being literally chased around the table by a well-known English professor. “His classes were really good,” she says, “but he had a reputation with the women of being a little handsy.” The sense among the women if they reported any of this behavior to the administration, she says, was that the response would be “Boys will be boys. That’s just how it is.” On the other hand, [literature professor] Frederick Busch, Kennedy says, “was the best teacher I ever had at any level,” and she kept in contact with him until his death. “He wasn’t easy on me, but he guided me in a really loving way. My writing improved phenomenally, and I [used that skill] professionally in the rest of my career.” Numerous professors like Busch had a lifelong impact on their female students. Ferron entered Colgate wanting to become a teacher, but there was no educational studies major. “Professor Clarke,” she says, “saved me.” Hired in 1962, he’d been pushing for the program to be accredited as a major. Although “it started out very gradually,” and “not easily,” it did eventually come about, remembers Clarke, who is now 89 years old. He was also able to develop a teaching intern program through which Ferron and others could practice fieldwork at a local high school. Still today, Clarke believes in the importance of not just teacher training, but also giving students a well-rounded liberal arts education. “He was the one who really got me thinking outside of the box,” Ferron says. “He combined philosophy and stressed inclusiveness — creating a utopia where everyone benefits.”

“[We were] inventing how to be a teacher without pipe or wife,” Professor Jane Pinchin recalled during a Bicentennial event about coeducation.

Meanwhile, Simmons recalled, philosophy and religion professor Jerry Balmuth heard students talking about Gloria Steinem, made a point to read Steinem’s work, and incorporated it into his next syllabus. “He said, ‘I want to know what you all are thinking about,’” Simmons said. “[And] Jane Pinchin was a wonderful English teacher who went out of her way to incorporate women’s studies into the English department.”

SISTERHOOD FOR LIFE

The alumnae from the Class of 1974 have different comfort levels with calling themselves “pioneers” or even “feminists.” But one thing they can agree on is, despite the ups and downs of their Colgate experiences, they relied on themselves — and each other — to thrive. “I’m closer than sisters with some of these women,” Simmons said. “We went through a unique time in history…. We were very close and we still are.” “We didn’t have mentors,” Ferron says, “so we mentored each other.” Her former professor, Clarke, comments on Ferron and her friends: “They were some of the first Black women who came to Colgate, so they had additional burdens, not so much because of prejudice but because when they walked around campus, they looked different than all the white guys. They were very good at adapting to that because they were fun and intelligent.” Ciccone said that her Colgate experience prepared her for law school at Hofstra University: “I went from a predominantly male undergrad experience to a predominantly male graduate experience. I learned that I can’t get by on my merits. I had to be three times better, and I had to learn to accept that.” She went on to have a career in law and journalism, and she has served on both the Alumni Council and the University’s Board of Trustees. Scott-Jones, Nolan-Cooper, and Rooney also went into law, while Matthews and Ferron had successful careers in education. They’ve all stayed friends over the years — standing up in each other’s weddings and becoming godmothers to some of their children — and they contributed to founding Colgate’s Alumni of Color group. “We’re still very connected,” Matthews says.

On the 13th of every month this academic year, the University will host an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of coeducation. The first event, in September, was a panel discussion moderated by Lee Woodruff ’82, H’07, P’13 and featured Tom Bartlett, Colgate’s 11th president; Jill Harsin, Thomas A. Bartlett Chair and Professor of history and director of the Division of Social Sciences; and Jane Pinchin, Thomas A. Bartlett Chair and Professor of English emerita. Visit colgate.edu/coeducation for the full list of events.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK Professors Jane Pinchin, Wanda Warren Berry, and a handful of other female faculty members were pioneers in their own right — and they, too, faced uphill battles. Pinchin and German professor Johanna Henry were the first two female full-time faculty members hired in the mid-’60s (until that point, all of the female faculty members were part time). “I was 23,” Pinchin recalled in an oral history interview. “Wherever I was, people knew who I was…. Being a woman on the faculty was a strangeness of that year.” She wryly remembers one of her first classes, a literature course that included Aristotle’s Poetics, and a student asking her about classical sensibility and homosexuality. “It was quite clear that what he was doing was seeing whether this teacher would fold, and it was so funny the way he presented it with such naivete,” she said. “It was a wonderful way to begin teaching, and in some ways, completely confidence building, not confidence destroying. Certainly, there was gender in the mix of that beginning.” Berry was fighting to prove her intellectual capacity as soon as she arrived in Hamilton with her husband, Donald, in 1957 when he joined the faculty as assistant university chaplain and member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. “I had just finished a three-year graduate theological degree at Yale, so I had had some experience with dominantly male institutions,” she wrote in her 2003 essay, “Hoping with Our Feet: Forty Years of Women at Colgate and Beyond.” Nevertheless, she added, “I soon learned that the small-town culture of the day was no more ready for professional women than was the college.” An example she shared in that essay “to epitomize the way things were when I first encountered Colgate,” was that she’d asked a religion and psychology professor to audit his course, because she had been working in that field. The professor obliged her, but midway through the term, the dean’s office sent her a message saying that as a woman, she was not supposed to be in the classroom. “It was as if I might open a floodgate — or somehow dilute the intellectual exchange,” Berry wrote. In the fall of 1962, she and Gretchen Kreuter (whose husband was in the history department) were invited to teach sections of two core courses. The Kreuters did not stay at Colgate long, Berry noted, but Berry built a 40-year-career at the University. She is now professor of philosophy and religion emerita, and in 2018 (15 years after retiring) she was given Colgate’s AAUP Professor of the Year Award for her service on behalf of affirmative action. The University hired two more women in the fall of 1970: Carol Bleser, associate professor of history, and Wanda Williamson, instructor of romance languages. The feeling among the female faculty members at the time was that they had no voice or power in the University’s decision making — not only to speak up for their own status but also as Colgate transitioned to coeducation. Berry and others formed the Colgate-Hamilton Women’s Caucus because “we thought there should be a conscious and visible presence of women here when the first-years arrived,” she wrote in her essay. That academic year, the caucus sponsored programs, held discussions, and “asked to be on the agenda of the Committee on Admissions in order to challenge the fact that the plan for coeducation placed a quota on the presence of women in the student body.” “The Year of the Woman” came about in 1974 when the faculty adopted an affirmative action policy. Five women were hired into tenure-stream faculty positions: Marilyn Thie (philosophy and religion), Margaret Maurer and Lynn Staley (English), Myra Smith (psychology), and Mary Bufwack (sociology and anthropology). By the end of that decade, 43 women (20%) taught at Colgate, but only 27 were full time. Berry noted that the tenuring process was slow over the next 20 years or so. Today, women make up approximately 46% of the faculty (at press time).

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 31

A N D AWAY T H E Y

SOA After graduating, alumnae from the early years of coeducation became judges, CEOs, professors, and painters. Here are 13 women of Colgate. →

32 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Covette Rooney ’74 Amy Lennard Goehner ’74 Claudia Miner ’74 Sandy Carr ’74 Lori Gross ’75 Paulette Bernd ’75 Stephanie Edwards ’75 Madeline Bayliss ’76 Barbara Callender-Hayes ’76 Donna Faltitschek Selby ’76 Nancy (Norris) O’Dowd ’77 Deborah (Plumb) Devendorf ’77

RED

Marji Lipshez Shapiro ’77

1 Covette Rooney ’74

amy lennard goehner ’74

Major: English

fter graduating, Goehner joined the Peace Corps and spent nearly three years teaching middle school and later high school equivalency on a U.S. Army base in South Korea. Those years in Korea eventually led to her dream job as a reporter at Sports Illustrated — when Seoul was chosen to host the 1988 Olympics. “Covering those games was a career highlight, as was covering boxing and horse racing at the magazine,” she says. “I couldn’t believe I was paid to go to the Kentucky Derby or interview boxers like Marvin Hagler.” Goehner later moved to Time magazine as the head arts reporter, where her beat was theater. She’s been freelancing steadily since leaving Time in 2009. Goehner has written many articles on special needs for different publications, often personal stories as the mom of a child (now young adult) with autism. Two firsts this year: “I was interviewed for an upcoming boxing documentary, and I have an essay in a book called Fast Funny Women.” “The greatest influence on my career was my favorite professor, Fred Busch. He taught me how to read: to always be aware of perspective; through whose lens are you seeing the action unfold? That powerful lesson has stayed with me in everything I read and every story I report.”

Major: political science

s the chief administrative law judge for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, Rooney is the first woman and only African American to hold this title. She began her career with the U.S. Department of Labor, serving as regional counsel for the Mine Safety and Health Administration and Black Lung Benefits Program. Rooney learned about coal mining on the job by traveling to small towns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. In 1994, she left her position as the supervising attorney for mine safety and became the first female U.S. administrative law judge in Mississippi. Today, Rooney is based in Washington, D.C., and is responsible for the management and administrative supervision of the administrative law judges in the Review Commission’s National Office as well as two regional offices. “I attribute the strength and boldness I developed to when I was at Colgate, because when I left there, I never felt that if there was something I wanted to pursue, that I could not succeed.”

3 Claudia Miner ’74

Major: history

iner is executive director and co-founder of Waterford Upstart, a free, online kindergartenreadiness program geared toward 4-year-olds from low-income families. Based in Utah, the nonprofit program has served more than 100,000 children in 25 states. There are 2.2 million U.S. children — more than half of the 4-year-olds in the country — without access to early education, Miner says. Those children will likely not be ready for school; children who start school without basic skills are 25% more likely to drop out, 40% more likely to become teen parents, and 60% less likely to attend college. “I knew we had to do something to help,” Miner says. Waterford Upstart is designed to overcome barriers like geography, transportation, and cost, and it engages children’s first teachers — parents — to get children ready for success in school. Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 33

Greatest motivation: “The children and families we serve. You truly need to be interested in people. Theories of management and finance are important, but until you understand what it takes to put them into practice and get to the level that you are really helping people, you’ll never have passion for what you’re doing, and that passion gets you through the long days of hard work.”

Lori Gross ’75

Advice to current female students: “Don’t worry about being career oriented; what you’re going to do for the rest of your work life might not even exist yet. Enjoy every moment of Colgate by taking history, literature, geology, and philosophy courses and anything else that interests you. That will prepare you for anything. Doors will open for women like that.”

he associate provost for arts and culture at Harvard, Gross works with initiatives and institutions across the university, including the Harvard Art Museums, American Repertory Theater, Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University Press, Villa I Tatti, and the Arnold Arboretum, on issues ranging from dayto-day operational matters to strategic planning. She works with the Harvard Committee on the Arts, Office for the Arts, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University Native American Program, Graduate School of Design, Harvard Divinity School, and Division of Arts and Humanities in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences on cross-university issues and initiatives involving the arts and humanities. Gross previously served as director of arts initiatives and adviser to the associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A recent highlight of my work was a project with the artist Teresita Fernandez to create a temporary, large-scale public art project titled “Autumn (…Nothing Personal),” based on the James Baldwin essay. The artist transformed Harvard Yard, making it into a beautiful space for both contemplation and active programming. It was both magical and profound for the university and the community, and its presence has been felt long after the physical piece left.”

Sandy Carr ’74

Major: French literature

perfumer and the owner of BLUEHILL Fragrances in Boston, Mass., Carr became an entrepreneur after a successful career in multimedia and technology at Harvard Business School. In 2013, she attended the Grasse Institute of Perfumery in France, studying both synthetic and natural ingredients. There she learned the families of scent and how to recreate the formulas for classic French accords (combinations). She founded BLUEHILL Fragrances in 2014. When the retail market began suffering due to COVID-19, Carr turned to social media for marketing and has brought wider brand awareness to her perfumes. This year, her sales have been better than any previous year. “I absolutely love to smell things. I have more than 300 raw materials I work with and am constantly amazed at the new accords that can be made by adding one to another.” Advice to current female students: “Be open to all kinds of professional opportunities when you look toward graduation. Most paths are not direct to your dreams in the working world. One step leads to another, another takes a left or right turn, and so it goes as you find new directions and opportunities to keep you challenged and happy.”

34 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Major: art and art history

Gross worked with musician Wynton Marsalis during a three-year period to bring a series of lectureperformances to Harvard.

Her motivation: “My belief in the power of the arts to create safe spaces for conversations and the energizing effect that artists can have on communities and individuals to think outside of their own perspectives to change both themselves and their communities.” Colgate influences: “There were so many faculty members teaching in art history who impacted my trajectory, but a few deserve special mention: Edward Bryant, then director of the Picker Art Gallery; Shirley Blum; and Flora and Patrick Clancy — all of whom opened my eyes to the arts and showed me how to truly see. I curated my first exhibition at the Picker, and it convinced me to follow my passion.”

Stephanie Edwards ’75

H Paulette Bernd ’75

Major: biology

professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Bernd has led and transformed the Gross Anatomy course. The centerpiece of the course is an interactive electronic dissection manual created by Bernd, which was featured in the Wall Street Journal. She was also a key member of the design team for the new Vagelos Education Center and personally oversaw the outfitting of the anatomy and surgical skills laboratories. For more than 20 years, she has researched the role of neurotrophins during development, publishing more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and contributing chapters to five books. Bernd has mentored five doctoral students. “I have been interested in science since I was a child, and that fascination led to my choice to pursue a PhD in anatomy. Conducting research in combination with teaching has been an exciting and gratifying career; I have always loved both aspects of what I was doing. More recently, I have developed interactive teaching modalities to encourage active learning and retention of information. Continuing to evolve and challenge yourself is crucial to retaining enthusiasm in your profession.” Advice to current female students: “Aim as high as you can. Do not let anyone discourage you from a career. Do not let a glass ceiling hold you back.”

Major: German

aving been with L’Oreal for 21 years, Edwards has held various positions within the company. She started out in forecasting (known today as demand planning), which serves multiple functions, including projecting sales of new products and the effect on current declining brands. She then moved to forecasting skin products, which was a new, growing division. Afterward, she joined operations and was placed on a large supply chain project to incorporate the SAP software system into L’Oreal operations. Her role in that project was incorporating customer data information. Once that large initiative was executed, Edwards moved to product data information, which is critical to retailers and consumers. She is presently involved in another large supply chain project on new software, which will align product information around the globe in order to help L’Oreal affiliates worldwide. “I am passionate about working with people of other disciplines that bring their viewpoints to a common solution. As the initiative is being executed, and even post-execution, I like to be involved in the training to the business community so that our initiatives operate well in the field. When issues arise, I am motivated to analyze and find solutions.” “The Colgate experience helped me to think critically. In the extensive writing required for my language courses, I was constantly challenged to write out my thoughts in a rational, logical flow. This has helped me in my everyday interaction with my peers to challenge and/or support arguments and new ideas.” Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 35

8 Madeline Bayliss ’76

Barbara Callender-Hayes ’76

Major: human communications (independent major)

Major: English

At Colgate, Bayliss was the first female editor-in-chief of the Colgate News, a WRCU news producer, a cofounder of the women’s ice hockey team, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Konosioni.

Left to right: Madeline Bayliss, Barbara Callender-Hayes, Donna Faltitschek Selby

t IBM, Bayliss is the software client leader (SCL) for the Department of Homeland Security. As SCL, she collaborates with the government and IBM partners to make innovation and technology advance the agency mission. Technology is the third industry for Bayliss. She started in nonprofit work at United Way of NYC, in development and marketing roles. An executive volunteer connection led to an 18-year period in marketing and sales management in corporate financial services. Located in Yardley, Pa., she now has spent 24 years in technology with multiple companies, including being a member of the management team that sold an innovation firm to IBM in 2012. “I am driven by curiosity. In a professional setting, this means I am motivated to discover new ideas and opportunities, create insights, and cocreate solutions with customers, partners, and employees. Being able to make a difference and be essential to others is tremendously rewarding.” “Colgate reinforced a learning and try-new-things approach, which is how my career has played out. When Rebecca Chopp, Colgate’s first female president, asked me if Colgate shaped me or I was the person I am when I came to Colgate, my answer was, ‘Colgate allowed me to be myself and give me a place to grow.’” Advice to a current female Colgate student: “Become connected. Three connections that can make a lifelong difference are having a mentor(s), being engaged in your industry/profession, and maintaining a personal network.”

allender-Hayes worked as an award-winning marketing communications executive with key positions within the sports television, consumer electronics, and publishing industries. For more than 35 years, she crafted print, on-air, online, and promotional materials for elite corporations. Upon retirement, she published a children’s book, Meet Quincy Quahog of Chappaquiddick, because encouraging youth literacy is a personal passion. Based in Orlando, Fla., Callender-Hayes says that, in addition to wanting success in helping her clients accomplish their business goals, her personal goal “was to be a strong teacher or mentor to my staff throughout my career. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing people grow professionally.” Advice to current female students: “Be patient with the process of figuring out what you want to be when you’re grown up. It’s a journey to find the right professional fit, career, and fulfillment.”

Donna Faltitschek Selby ’76 Majors: French and Spanish language; literature

fter graduating from Colgate, Selby earned an MS from Boston University in public communication. She then accepted a job opportunity with a leading media consulting firm in New York City, producing TV and radio commercials for national and international political campaigns. That led to a 20-year career at CBS Television as the director of technical operations, providing technical support for CBS Sports (NFL, NCAA, and the Winter Olympics) and CBS News programming. Changing directions 10 years ago, she is now an elementary school educator in northern New Jersey. Her motivation: “To nurture and expand my expertise in public communication, specifically electronic media. Since my early days at Colgate, I have been fascinated by the power of the written and spoken word.” “I have to credit Professor Robert Hathaway (whom we lost in 2013) as the one who most influenced my career path. His great love of Cervantes’ Don Quixote left an indelible impression on me to pursue and live my dreams.”

36 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Nancy (Norris) O’Dowd ’77

Marji Lipshez Shapiro ’77

Major: English

Major: psychology

’Dowd was an FBI special agent from 1981–2012. After earning her JD from Villanova Law School, she began her FBI career in the Philadelphia division. Marrying a fellow agent in 1982, the two of them worked in the Memphis division until 1985, when they transferred to New York. O’Dowd’s husband died in the line of duty in 1987, so she and her two children moved back to Philadelphia, where she worked until Sept. 11, 2001. That year, she began a new assignment working with the CIA on counterterrorism/intelligence, traveling around the country training FBI agents post-9/11. She also served as the co-chair for the Female Special Agent Advisory Committee to the FBI director beginning 2008, facilitating meetings at headquarters that pertained to issues affecting female agents. “Colgate prepared us to be independent, welleducated, and motivated to attain lofty career goals.”

Deborah (Plumb) Devendorf ’77

Major: biology

evendorf is a neonatologist at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Va. After graduating from the Medical College of Virginia in 1981, she completed a residency in pediatrics in 1984 at North Shore University Hospital/Cornell. She then did a neonatal fellowship at Duke University, where she performed research in neonatal pulmonary development. Since 1987, she has been affiliated with the Children’s Specialty Group, working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Children’s Hospital.

ipshez Shapiro is the deputy director of the Connecticut Office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where she has devoted her career to fighting prejudice, racism, antiSemitism, and bullying. In her 30-year career at the ADL, Lipshez Shapiro has provided anti-bias training for thousands of students, educators, parents, and leaders. Among her accomplishments at the ADL is her creation of two initiatives: the Names Can Really Hurt Us anti-bullying assembly program, which has reached more than 300,000 students, and a Muslim Jewish women’s group. Lipshez Shapiro also served for many years as a member of the ADL National education staff and an adjunct professor at Southern Connecticut State University. She began her career in higher education at Cornell University, ultimately becoming a dean of residence life at Connecticut College. “When I was 12 years old, the girl who sat behind me in English class mentioned that her father, John Muyskens, was the dean of admission at Yale. My parents did not go to college, so I thought her father must be the most important person around since Yale was such a prestigious place and Dean Muyskens got to decide who was admitted there. I asked her where her father went to college and she replied, ‘Colgate.’ [Muyskens was Class of ’44.] I promptly went home and announced to my parents that I was going to Colgate and becoming a dean. And I did.” “‘A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.’ Professor Tom Chase wrote those words [by Henry Adams] on the board during my Psych 101 class, and they have resonated with me ever since. I will always remember his passion for teaching, ability to connect with students through spirited lectures, and true talent for bringing a topic to life. My Colgate education taught me to be curious, to never stop asking questions, and to pursue my dreams.”

Lipshez Shapiro has been recognized as Multicultural Educator of the Year in Connecticut and a SHero in her hometown of Guilford.

“What drives my work is knowing I can make a difference in a child’s life. Our work in the NICU plays a major role in the outcome of a critically ill child. This impacts the well-being of the entire family.” Advice to a current female Colgate student studying medicine: “Find the field of medicine that you love; you will know this because you will be drawn to it.”

Left to right: Deborah (Plumb) Devendorf, Marji Lipshez Shapiro

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 37

1878 1878

1965 1965

1967 1967

Jane Pinchin becomes Board of becomes Board of Dart becomesJane Pinchin Mabel Dart Mabel becomes onetwo of the first two full-timeTrustees one of the first full-time Trustees the first the first woman to woman to female faculty members hired. female faculty members hired. endorses endorses officially officially enroll and enroll and coeducation. coeducation. pursue studies. pursue studies.

1972 1972

1974 1974

1970 1970 132 female 132 female students — students — — join the first 29% — join 29% the first coed class. coed class.

1979 19791990 1990 1994 1994

TitleasIXpart passed Title IX passed of as part of“The Year of“The Women’s Women’s Center for Center for Year of the Woman,” the Woman,” First sororityFirst sorority theAmendments, Education Amendments, the Education studiesWomen’s Studies referred to as such because referred to as such because established,established,studies Women’s Studies protecting protecting people frompeople from the University major isopens in Eastopens thecommitted University committed Delta Nu. Delta Nu. major is Hall. in East Hall. discrimination discrimination based on based on to hiring more accredited. accredited. to women hiring more as women as sex in education programs tenure-stream sex in education programs tenure-stream faculty. faculty. or activities. or activities.

1997 1997 Women’s hockey Women’s hockey becomes a becomes a varsity sport.varsity sport.

2015 2015 Haven,violence the sexual violence support Haven, the sexual support center, opens. center, opens. Although theAlthough center the center supports everyone, not just female supports everyone, not just female students, sexual violence happens students, sexual violence happens more often to women. more often to women.

*Admission number as of June 1

38 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

2002 2002

2012 2012

Rebecca Chopp Rebecca Chopp becomes becomes Colgate’s Colgate’s first female first female president. president.

Vicky Chun Vicky ’91, Chun ’91, MA’94 is named MA’94 is named first female first female director of director of athletics. athletics.

2017 2017 2019 2019 2020 2020 424 women424 — women — Tracey Tracey Hucks ’87, Hucks ’87, Progress Period, Progress Period, 53% — join the 53% — join the MA’90 MA’90 becomes thebecomesathe a student group student group Class of 2024.* Class of 2024.* first Black woman first Black woman that works tothat works to to be namedto be named destigmatizedestigmatize provost and provost dean and dean menstruation, menstruation, of the faculty. of the faculty. forms. forms.

THIS IS WHAT PROGRESS LOOKS LIKE Meaningful moments for women in Colgate’s history and a glimpse into the future By Aleta Mayne Illustrations by Peter Hoey

n the fall of 1964, Dean of Students William Griffith commented that both the curricula and activities at coeducational institutions were slanted in favor of male students. In these colleges, “90 per cent of student body presidents and student leaders are men,” he told the Maroon in an article debating Colgate’s coeducational future. In his opinion, “equal opportunities for both sexes in the university” was not a realistic goal. When Colgate’s first female class did join the student body in 1970, the women didn’t bat an eyelash about becoming key members of organizations and starting their own initiatives to enrich their experiences. Today, the list of numerous female student leaders at the University includes two editors-in-chief of the MaroonNews, the SGA president, three women leading WRCU, and several others who have started new groups to bring about change. As we recognize the pivotal events that have given women a seat at the University’s table, we also introduce three current student leaders who are working to make Colgate a better place for all.

TAKING THE LEAD

Jaritza Núñez ’21 Jartiza Núñez worked forNunez the ALANA Cultural Center as an ambassador during her first two years; and she became an ALANA social justice peer educator as a junior. She is an Office of Undergraduate Studies Scholar, a partner of Colgate Student Coalition, a cofounder of Colgate’s Unheard (increasing BIPOC artists/voices), a coleader and social chair of We Are Enough (a community of low-income Colgate members), the social chair for LAMBDA (queer student organization), and a member of Link staff. “I want to create a more inclusive Colgate where members of underrepresented groups can not only survive, but thrive,” she says. A sociology and educational studies major from Lamont, Calif., Núñez will also work as a senior intern for the Office of Admission this spring.

Keelah Dixon ’21 “To further analyze societal oppression and its consequences,” Dixon designed a topical major in natural science and mathematics. In her studies, she examines how to bridge an analysis of multidimensional oppression through mathematical means. A women’s basketball player, Dixon works closely with varsity athletics and the ALANA Cultural Center. She is an ambassador for Raiders of Color Connect, the vice president of Athletics Wellness Advocates, and Colgate’s student representative for the Patriot League Anti-Racism Commission. Hailing from Boston, Mass., Dixon is an ambassador for Shaw Wellness, a Bystander Intervention facilitator, and a member of Konosioni. “I want to make a better environment for students and community members,” she says, “especially those who have unique identities and come from marginalized communities.”

Flora Zhang ’22 Flora As the copresident Zhangof the Organization of Asian Sisters in Solidarity (OASIS+) and the Minority Association for Premedical Students (MAPS), Zhang’s “goal is to provide support and space for traditionally underrepresented students to voice what they need on campus,” she says. “OASIS+ and MAPS became spaces where I felt comfortable to be entirely myself as both a student of color and first-generation college student,” she says. “I found an incredible amount of support, love, and mentorship from these clubs, so I applied for leadership positions to ensure that these safe spaces and resources continue.” Zhang is a molecular biology and women’s studies major from San Francisco who is also part of the Link staff, First Generation Initiative, and Sipsam dance group. Keelah Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 39 Dixon

Beyond Measure Working Toward Keeping the University Community Safe Photography by Mark DiOrio

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin famously said. It’s difficult to quantify all of the efforts Colgate has made — and continues to make — to protect the more than 2,500 students who have returned to campus. But photographer Mark DiOrio, who has been documenting the universitywide efforts, provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Colgate’s commitment in action. The following photos were taken throughout the summer as the University prepared for students to arrive in August. “Everywhere I went, people were stepping out of their traditional roles and taking on new responsibilities to not only keep the community safe, but also to adjust to this new reality and prepare for Colgate life to go on,” says DiOrio. “All were working toward something that was not about them, but about all of us,” he adds. “It is who we are.”

*Admission number as of June 1

40 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

As of mid-September, more than 7,100 COVID-19 tests were administered on campus; 1,529 tests were the most done in one day (Aug. 31). Staff hours dedicated to testing through the end of the quarantine period totaled 1,554. Autumn 2020â&#x20AC;&#x192; Colgate Magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x192; 41

42â&#x20AC;&#x192; Colgate Magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x192; Autumn 2020

Custodial staff members disinfecting and sanitizing bathrooms. Top: Custodian Eileen Buell uses a Storm backpack sprayer in Curtis Hall. Bottom: Custodian Rodney Pearson in Benton Hall

Athletics department staff members help move student belongings that have been stored in Starr Rink since the University closed last March.

Assistant Football Coach Jordan Belfiori carries furniture into the Phi Kappa Tau house on Broad Street.

Head Football Coach Dan Hunt loads his pickup truck with items to bring to student housing.

Autumn 2020â&#x20AC;&#x192; Colgate Magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x192; 43

44 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Operations Manager Dan McCoach surveys pallets of concentrated disinfectant used to sanitize buildings. Autumn 2020â&#x20AC;&#x192; Colgate Magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x192; 45

Geoffrey Holm, associate professor of biology, and Michelle Landstrom, a newly hired surveillance and monitoring technician, collect wastewater samples to test for detection of COVID-19. Because RNA from SARSCoV2 appears in wastewater prior to outward signs of infection in an individual, this method of testing can help discover potential outbreaks before they would normally be detected, and the early notice can give the University critical time to conduct testing on locations that become a concern. Studies have indicated that viral RNA shows up about a week before symptoms occur. Seven locations across campus are designated as collection sites where biology lab technicians and Landstrom collect samples every 24 hours. The sampling system takes small amounts of wastewater every 15 minutes from the source pipes, and that collected sample is then analyzed.

46â&#x20AC;&#x192; Colgate Magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x192; Autumn 2020

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 47

Endeavor Mack ’13 (center) and Bob ’83 (right) Woodruff ride through Ethiopia's Aledeghi Wildlife Reserve during their Rogue Trip show.

Television

The Road Less Traveled hen Bob ’83 and Mack ’13 Woodruff hit the road for their new travel show Rogue Trip, they weren’t taking your typical family vacation. In Ethiopia, the fatherand-son team allowed a hyena whisperer to dangle meat so close to their necks that the wild hyenas nuzzled them. When in Papua New Guinea, they hunted crocodiles. In Ukraine, they visited the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

48 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

They saw parts of these countries — and others — most Americans have never seen: the verdant mountains of Ethiopia, the stunning Attabad Lake in Pakistan, and the forests of Lebanon. That’s the whole point of the show. “These are important parts of the world that Americans need to know about,” Bob says. “Not just because they experienced conflict or were engaged in war.” For Bob, this is an especially important message. While Mack was growing up at

home with his sisters and mother, Lee McConaughy Woodruff ’82, Bob was an ABC war correspondent. He covered conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, and most famously in Iraq, where he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2006. As Bob reported on wars, famines, and environmental collapse, he knew the media reports didn’t show the full story. The countries he covered are also places where people live, have deep traditions, and take

DisneY Enterprises, Inc.

Father-son team shows the beauty of destinations your travel agent would never recommend.

pride and joy in their homeland. So when an ABC colleague suggested that Bob do a National Geographic show revisiting former conflict zones, Bob jumped at the idea. He soon realized he needed a traveling partner as adventurous as he was: his son, Mack. “I wanted him to see that I wasn’t risking my life all the time, despite the fact that I had four awesome little kids at home,” says Bob, “just for the adrenaline.” The six-episode show, which began streaming on Disney+ in July, follows the duo as they visit three countries that Bob previously covered — Lebanon, Pakistan, and Colombia — and three he’d always wanted to see: Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, and Ukraine. Rogue Trip has a Bourdain-esque feel, as the Woodruffs deliberately bypass tourist destinations and focus on the authentic, unique, or just plain adventurous — so yes, there’s adrenaline. It’s also filled with the poignancy, humor, and frustrations of the father-son relationship, while showcasing each man’s talents. After graduating from Colgate with a philosophy degree, Mack worked in the NBA’s marketing department, where he “fell in love with production.” He became a full-time video producer and photographer for a meditation app before moving to Sydney, Australia, to be a freelance photographer. In Rogue Trip, his captivating photos of people and places are interspersed throughout. Bob and Mack visited the six countries in four months, from July to October of 2019. “We roughed it a lot,” Mack says. The two always shared a room, often in 95-degree heat and bunking beneath mosquito netting. Sometimes, they woke covered in bug bites or to discover they were cohabitating with bedbugs. In Pakistan, they took multiple 13-hour car trips on perilous mountain roads. Bob and Mack learned a few things about each other while they were on the road. Bob witnessed Mack’s work ethic and passion behind the camera — and that “he brings a lot of shoes.” Mack saw his dad’s “incredibly disarming way of going up to people, not being intimidated, and just asking them any question he thinks will help tell a good story.” In the end, both men wanted to show that these countries recovered from difficult times, a theme that feels particularly resonant now. “Everyone’s so resilient,” Mack says. “That’s one of the messages we wanted to convey, and that is especially important in this COVID time. All these countries bounced back, and we will too.”

— Laura Hilgers ’85

Nonfiction

Good Reads From shopping to robber barons, alumni cover a range of topics.

Revolutionary: George Washington at War Robert O’Connell ’66 (Random House, 2019) Raise your hand if you popped on a wig and portrayed the Father of Our Country in a school play. Chances are, that performance didn’t give you the full picture of America’s first president, but in Revolutionary, more can be learned about the soldier who faced the British and helped found the Land of the Free. Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews Rachel Levin ’96 and Evan Bloom (Chronicle Books, 2020) You look hungry. You should (read) Eat Something. The book walks hungry people through seasons of life, from “The Early Years” to “The Snowbird Years,” providing twists on Jewish favorites like the fusion pastrami carbonara and warming traditions like matzo balls and potato kugel. In between recipes are accounts of humor and nostalgia describing what it means to celebrate Jewish culture. Written by food journalist Rachel Levin in conjunction with Evan Bloom, owner of San Francisco’s Wise Sons delicatessen, the food and words this book provide are meant to be savored.

The book’s dedication: “For our parents and their parents.”

Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America Lauren Kerby ’11 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

More than 25 million people visit the National Mall each year, and a fraction of that number comes from a surprising source: Christian heritage tourism. In Saving History, Kerby finds that, while white evangelicals visit the same historical sites as their secular counterparts they do so in search of evidence that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. A Harvard Divinity School lecturer, Kerby discusses how white evangelicals come to understand history. Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Emily Orr ’06 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) It’s easy to surf the web to find the exact pair of Adidas Ultraboosts you didn’t know you needed, but at the turn of the 20th century, it was the job of department stores to show you what was in fashion. Author Emily Orr investigates the processes by which those hubs of American commerce displayed items, as well as the tools used to showcase them. Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America Michael Hiltzik ’73 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) In the late 19th century, America’s railways chugged with opportunity. But not all opportunities are good: Robber barons who poured their wealth into the railroad industry like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan were fiercely competitive. Their push to modernize travel “sparked stock market crashes; provoked strikes; transformed the nation’s geography; and culminated in a two-man battle that produced dramatic changes in the interplay of business and government.” Go along for the ride as Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik explores the many sides of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 49

endeavor

Q&A

In Style Kareem Khubchandani ’04 discusses his research into gay Indian nightlife.

n a densely packed Chicago bar, with Bollywood music blaring, Kareem Khubchandani ’04 danced to the beat. Grooving along with him were dozens of gay Indian men, many of them dressed in drag. He didn’t plan the gathering to take a break from his graduate studies at Northwestern University — it was part of his book research. Now a professor in Tufts University’s Department of Drama & Dance and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Khubchandani recently released Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020). The book, which he started working on in 2009, chronicles his time researching the subject in Chicago and Bangalore, India, by organizing parties and appearing in drag, thereby fostering a community. The foundation of the book: how nightlife allows gay Indian men to express their authentic selves. The title, Ishtyle, is an accented way of saying the word “style” in some Indian regions. To Khubchandani, it’s also a metaphor for the way gay Indian men have to change themselves to fit in with social standards. “It speaks to the overcompensation of style that migrants have to do in order to fit into the local cosmopolitan ‘cool’ world,” he says. Learn more about his research below.

How did you determine the subject matter for Ishtyle? When I was an LGBT international student [at Colgate], I would travel to New York [City], to queer Bollywood dance parties to be in a space where I didn’t feel like I was the only one. Being in those spaces was transformative; it made me realize there are others like me. That’s where this project was built from. I saw [parties] like that in Chicago [while at Northwestern], and I saw others like it in Toronto and London. That got me thinking, “What of the rapid globalization allowed the transnational move of these professional

50 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

migrants?” It is about global labor markets and these men who are made mobile by the economic borders opening, by the U.S. demand for flexible labor. It’s the economic trade and the migration of workers that allows these men to live in cities away from their homes, and practice their sexuality and creativity and pleasures, independently. You recently wrote about the concept of “fun” as a research method in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Why should research be fun? The stereotype of the academic is that we’re boring and stuck in “teach world.” But I had a lot of fun doing my research, and I had a lot of fun writing the book. To play with ideas is fun, to describe beautiful things is fun. And then, to dance till 4 or 5 in the morning was also fun, and that was research. Khubchandani majored in sociology and anthropology at Colgate and earned an MA and PhD in performance studies from Northwestern.

Criticism is often understood as the thing that kills joy, [but] I think it is actually an opportunity to create relationships. [What’s] also fun is getting feedback on work. It’s an opportunity to learn things. It’s freeing. Why did you decide to incorporate a playlist into Ishtyle? I’m interested in form, and the book thinks of dance as a form that can change the structure [and atmosphere] of the nightclub and what happens there. The book asks, ‘What happens when you bring the wrong kind of dance scene (drag queens) to the nightclub?’ Alternatively, what happens when I bring the ‘wrong’ form of writing (a playlist) into an academic book? This was my own play with style.

— Rebecca Docter

endeavor “It was just a static page on her blog, and I immediately thought, ‘This could be so much more.’ I think it was my love of data that saw [the list wasn’t] being optimized.” Armed with her web development expertise, Chu connected with Sloan, and together they jump-started a more user-friendly, updatable directory of makers of color.

This “Millennial Pink Headband” is the first piece Chu ever designed. She offers the pattern for free on her website, alysonchu.com.

innovation

Fiber Optics Alyson Chu ’13 is helping to create a network for diverse artists and makers.

n early 2019, there was a reckoning. That term may sound dramatic for a community of knitters and crocheters, but when an offensive remark from a fiber blogger in early 2019 brought racism against BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) makers to light, it signaled a shift that would change careers. One resulting initiative was the website BIPOC in Fiber, a platform developed by Alyson Chu ’13 to create a global network for diverse fiber artists. Learn more about Chu, her work on BIPOC in Fiber, and her artistry.

Creating Fiber Diversity Online Based in the United Kingdom, BIPOC in Fiber serves primarily as a directory of people of color working in the fiber industry. When the movement to support diversity in this space started gaining momentum in mid2019, Chu came across an online list of creatives compiled by Jeanette Sloan, a knit designer living in Brighton and Hove, England. Sloan “started the list to address the distinct lack of BIPOC representation in fiber publications and in the wider industry, and a misconception that people of color don’t knit/ craft,” Chu says.

Facilitating Connections Using her self-taught coding experience, Chu designed BIPOC in Fiber, keeping in mind user experience as well as aesthetics. Day-to-day, she adds new entries to the site, keeping the list of artists growing. As an interactive directory that includes hundreds of fiber artists, photographers, and stylists, BIPOC in Fiber is a virtual meeting place to forge connections and build support in the creative community. The site’s audience comprises “consumers who are looking to support a more diverse range of people, as well as people within the industry, event organizers, and magazine editors who are looking to commission projects or invite vendors,” Chu says. Since starting work on the site last year, Chu and the BIPOC in Fiber team have crowdfunded £30,000. With that funding, they’re able to cover the cost of the website and pay Chu, Sloan, and other team members. “It was fabulous, the response we got both from knitters and crocheters, and people in the community and industry as well. Yarn companies, magazines, and individuals were able to support with funding,” she says. Funding Scottish Arts Through Data When she’s not maintaining the back end of BIPOC in Fiber, Chu works part time as a statistics and reporting assistant in the knowledge and research department of Creative Scotland, the public

body responsible for arts development in the country. Day-to-day, she looks internally at project funding and does external research to assess the impact of Creative Scotland’s funding. For example, a recent study looking into a touring theater and dance project led to a designated touring fund. “The research is important because it helps with our funding decisions,” she says. Merging Two Talents A member of the BIPOC fiber community herself, Chu crochets everything from headbands to blankets. A blue and mustard cowl she fashioned was recently shortlisted for a design competition at the yarn festival Unravel. “My mom was always crafting with us,” Chu says. “She taught us how to sew and knit and crochet. We did soap making. We played with clay — literally everything.” She picked the hobby back up while completing her master’s at the University of the Arts in London and now designs patterns and pieces. “It’s a creative process, but also a really mathematical process. [I’ve] got my Excel spreadsheets to figure out how many stitches [are needed] to scale things up to different sizes.” Crocheting on Air “Hi, I’m Alyson the crocheter.” “And I’m Vivian the knitter,” starts each episode of Keep Calm and Carry Yarn, the podcast hosted by Chu and her mother. The duo chats about their crochet and knitting projects, TV shows, and other hobbies. Released a couple of times a month, the transatlantic show (recorded by Chu in Scotland and her mom in Virginia) was created in part to keep them connected even though they live thousands of miles apart.

— Rebecca Docter Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 51

SALMAGUNDI

The Glee Club (circa 1893), full of glee

By now, you may know that Johnny Marks, Class of 1931, was “Mr. Christmas,” giving us several seasonal favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” But the University’s musical traditions go far beyond that fun fact. As early as 1848, when the Sacred Music Society was formed, Colgate students have made music part of their daily lives. The proof is in the songs. Learn more about the history of music at the University with these tidbits from Tom Vincent ’53, author of the 21st Century Colgate Songbook.

After graduation, Lindol French, Class of 1902, entered a Colgatesponsored alma mater song contest. Not a musician, he wrote a lyric for a favorite song, “Juanita,” and sent it in. It’s been honoring Colgate since 1903.

Old Alums

Brothers Glen and Ramsay Harris, both from the Class of 1923, wrote “The Old Maroon.” “Something sort of bubbled up in me,” Ramsay told the LA Times in 1988. “The melody came into my mind, and it stuck.” Ramsay also wrote “March on California” at Berkeley grad school, while Glen, who was in concert orchestra at Colgate, worked as a technical writer at Boeing.

96 Colgate Magazine Autumn 2020

Real Pro

Floyd Hubbard, Class of 1905, was our most prolific composer, with four songs: “To thy Valley, Fair Chenango,” “Alma Mater, Mother Dear,” “Fight, Fight, Fight,” and “Colgate Marching Song.” A lawyer and tax expert, he later drafted the first income tax portion of the U.S. Revenue Act of 1918.

Mr. 1819

Robert Ingraham, Class of 1913, wrote “In 1819.” He edited the 1912, 1923, 1932, and 1958 songbooks and taught music on the Hill for seven years. The Robert G. Ingraham Memorial Music Prize for the graduating senior who has “done the most to stimulate good music” has been awarded since 1969.

A Change of Tune

In the 1970s, coeducation arrived. As a result, the alma mater’s “yearly roam thy loving sons” lyric was logically changed to “loving ones.” As with most formerly all-male institutions, however, other traditional song lyrics remained as written.

TOP: Special Collections and University Archives; Bottom: andrew daddio

Take Notes

Grad Writer

13 Words (or fewer)

Clipped Whose great idea was From the Colgate Maroon, 3, 1970 itNov. to buy the black and white Twister boards? — Jeff Gibelius ’86

Come on, let’s twist again, like we did last summer… In the previous issue of the magazine, we published this photo from May 5, 1984, when 1,036 Colgate students broke the Guinness record for the world’s largest game of Twister. Readers submitted their captions — including many jokes about someone losing a contact lens and comments about this close activity being unimaginable during our current pandemic. These are the three caption winners:

“Voters Go to the

The 1st Annual Polls Today as Bitter Campaign Ends” Flatulists Contest drew a massive The New York State campaign has reflected campus turnout the national trend of …asmoking was lack of issues. The gubernatorial race seems prohibited!

Whose great idea was it to buy the black and white Twister boards?

COVID-19: Students try to connect the dots in contact tracing exercise.

— Jeff Gibelius ’86

— Bruce A. Healey ’84

to have evolved into a

—Gregory W. Preston case of who could’77 project

the most benevolent paternal image. The senatorial race has felt COVID-19: Students the impact of [Spiro] try to connect the dots Agnew’s crusade against permissiveness, inpot, contact tracingand pornography.

exercise.

— Bruce A. Healey ’84

Special Collections and University Archives

The 1st Annual Flatulists Contest drew a massive campus turnout … smoking was prohibited! — Gregory W. Preston ’77

Autumn 2020 Colgate Magazine 97

13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346-1398

In This Issue

Stroll through a carpet of golden leaves on your way to class p.1

Find feminism Meet the Class with Professor of 2024 Emerita p.12 Marilyn Thie p.10

Spend your weekdays at NASA and your weekends as a cowboy p.58

Study the economic benefits of immigration p.21

Lug your record player and vinyl up the Stillman stairs on move-in day p.24

Harvest cocoa beans in Ghana p.20

See behindthe-scenes protection efforts on campus p.40

Rewind to Score goals the 1960s and with Tyson ’16 join civil rights and Tylor ’16 efforts in the Spink South p.17 p.60 Travel to unexpected places with Bob ’83 and Mack ’13 Woodruff p.48

Dance to the beat of Bollywood p.50

jill calder

Crunch numbers for the 2020 U.S. Census p.89