Letters to the Editor

Bulletin | Winter 2021/22

General Series 610, Bulletin Series 516 A publication for alumni, parents, and friends.

REACH OUT TO THE BULLETIN

We’d like to hear from you! The Colorado College Bulletin is distributed to alumni, parents, and friends, and seeks to portray the people, experiences, and topics that best reflect a CC education. We welcome your comments, feedback, items of interest, class notes, letters to the editor, story suggestions, etc.

Send to: bulletin@coloradocollege.edu, or Bulletin/Communications, Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3294

CC Connections: Have you unexpectedly encountered a fellow Tiger somewhere in the world? Let us know!

Class notes, obituaries, weddings and

celebrations, births and adoptions: Information submitted should be for the current or previous year only. Please send digital photos (JPGs at 300 dpi and minimum of 3.5 x 5 inches) or prints at a similar size. Information should include the location, date, and circumstance, and people in the photo should be identified from left to right.

For information: (719) 389-6603

Vice President for Communications

Jane Turnis

Assistant Vice President for Communications

Stephanie Wurtz

Assistant Vice President for Communications/Creative Director & Design

Felix A. Sanchez ’93

Editor

Leslie Weddell

Production & Editing

Brenda Gillen

Photographer & Photo Editor

Lonnie Timmons III

Copy Editing

Jen Kulier Helen Richardson Rhonda Van Pelt

Contributing Writers

Kirsten Akens ’96 Jessi Burns ’06 Claire Oberon Garcia Katie Grant ’92 Jeremy Jones Caryn Maconi Doug McPherson Joe Paisley Jane Turnis Leslie Weddell

THE COLORADO COLLEGE BULLETIN (122-860) is published four times per calendar year by Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3294. PERIODICALS postage paid at Colorado Springs 80901-9998 and at additional offices.

The Bulletin also is available online at coloradocollege.edu/ bulletin. To stop receiving a printed copy, email bulletin@ coloradocollege.edu and let us know.

POSTMASTER: Please send ADDRESS CHANGES to Colorado College Bulletin, Alumni Records, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903-3294. Ed. Note: This letter has been edited for length. Read it in its entirety at https://2cc.co/winter2022letters.

I’m reading through the Colorado College Summer Bulletin and am gobsmacked to realize I am within days of hitting 50 years since I left Oregon to embrace Colorado College and its groundbreaking/unusual/weird Block Plan, then only in its second year.

Today I am overwhelmed by memories. I am struck for the millionth time that I didn’t learn anything at CC. Make that I didn’t learn any THING. Rather, I learned to think. I watch “Jeopardy” regularly and I’m depressed at how few questions I can answer — oops, I mean how many answers I can question. Where do these people put all this information? My brain is full of process. There is little room for factoids.

A painting by Donna (Dwigans/Liewer) Cohen in 1975

“What if…” still drives me. I am struck by President L. Song Richardson’s first article in the Bulletin, where she refers to Professor Emeritus Glenn Brooks explaining that “the Block Plan wasn’t something that was fully conceived when it began — they just jumped in, tried things out, and improvised.”

I am convinced that the Block Plan’s immersion theory of education actually better prepared me for real life than a traditional college curriculum would have. Life is immersion.

Another article in the Bulletin features Assistant Professor Natanya Pulley as she used collages to create her way through the worst of the pandemic. She looks for “anything that gives me a chance to fail and start over or try new things.” She embraces what she calls “low-stakes processes” where being able to work with “whims and half-baked ideas is a gift we can always give to ourselves and one another.”

This is also the message of the Block Plan. Jump in, try things out, improvise, embrace whims and half-baked ideas. Who knows what our ovens will produce? I visited the college a few years ago and was enthralled to visit Packard Hall. It was constructed the year after I graduated; unlike today’s senior art majors, my own art studio had been my dorm room in Montgomery Hall. What a change since I studied painting with Jim Trissel and Bernard Arnest and printmaking with Mary Chenoweth! I introduced myself to the student security guard and announced proudly, “Class of ’75.” She was polite but looked at me as if I was really old, and I suddenly realized I sort of am. I have had a dynamic and unpredictable lifetime, longer than some of my peers, built on the values that were explored and concretized at CC.

I jumped in, I tried things out. I made mistakes, learned new things, and have tried to nudge our world to be a bit kinder than it was when I first became a grownup at CC. I read the Bulletin and shake my head in delight at how many women are college administrators, at CC’s carbon-neutral commitment, at the fresh new faces of the young people who will become themselves in this new Class of 2025.

Has it really been 50 years?

DONNA (DWIGANS/LIEWER) COHEN ’75

I attended CC in the late 1960s. I’m “senior” and on my way out. But I have a 6-year-old granddaughter. When I read between the lines of the new president’s message, and some of the accompanying articles in the most recent issue, I have to wonder whether the college has lost a view of its primary mission. I have always thought that the primary mission is to teach the students skills of critical thinking that will enrich the rest of their lives and the lives of those with whom they work in their careers.

What I read suggests an emphasis on what I would describe as social engineering — inculcating an objective that has nothing to do with critical thinking, but rather focuses on outcomes that, in the current-day vernacular, embody “equity,” “diversity,” “equality,” and, in an overriding sense, not achievement, excellence, or intellectual accomplishment, but indoctrination in a preferred imagination of the state of the world.

This seems like the antithesis of critical thinking. In fact, it preempts that very essence of education. If CC is to remain true to its spirit of innovation, it appears there is an opportunity to return to the roots of the educational mission, resist the pressure of a social agenda, and stand tall once again.