summer 2015 VOLUME 9 3
|
NUMBER
1
DICKINSON MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2015
VOLUME 93
NUMBER 1
[ contents ] Dickinson Published by the Division of Enrollment, Marketing & Communications Publisher and Vice President Stefanie D. Niles Executive Director of Marketing & Communications Connie McNamara Editor Michelle Simmons Associate Editor Lauren Davidson College Photographer Carl Socolow ’77 Design Landesberg Design Printer Intelligencer Contributing Writers Matt Getty MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson Tony Moore Grace Fisher ’15 Sasha Shapiro ’15 Magazine Advisory Group Gail Birch Huganir ’80 Donna Hughes Jim Gerencser ’93 David Talton ’07 Marsha M. Ray David Richeson Adrienne Su Website www.dickinson.edu/magazine
20 Where We Are: Read Madonna Enwe ’16’s winning entry for Dickinson Magazine’s summer fiction contest. 26 (Not) Lost in Translation: On Día del Libro, Dickinsonians around the world learned why Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote still resonates after 400 years. 30 Journeys: When Sam Rose ’58 established a scholarship fund in 2000 for economically disadvantaged students, he knew he was investing in the future. Meet some of those recipients and see how they’re creating that future, today.
Email Address dsonmag@dickinson.edu Telephone 717-245-1289 Facebook www.facebook.com/DickinsonMagazine
Printed with soy-based inks. Please recycle after reading.
PRINTED USING
© Dickinson College 2015. Dickinson Magazine (USPS Permit No. 19568, ISSN 2719134) is published four times a year, in January, April, July and October, by Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, Cumberland County, PA 17013-1773. Periodicals postage paid at Carlisle, PA, and additional mailing office.
See Web exclusives at www.dickinson.edu/magazine.
30
UP FRONT
26 30
2
your view
4
Dickinson matters
5
college & west high
15
fine print
16
kudos
18
in the game
IN BACK
36
beyond the limestone walls
38
our Dickinson
54 obituaries 56
14
ON THE COVER
Photo by Carl Socolow ’77
closing thoughts
[ your view ] Faculty kudos I commend the magazine contributors on promoting many great Dickinson faculty members in the spring issue. From freshman orientation through graduation, each and every professor of mine was committed not only to the Dickinson mission, culture and community, but also to each of us students and our academic and extracurricular pursuits. Well done … and please continue to share these stories. DARREN SILVIS ’00
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Editor’s Note: The range and tone of letters we’ve received about Dickinsonians Roger Taney, class of 1795, and James Buchanan, class of 1809, over this past year have inspired us at Dickinson Magazine to explore their legacies further. Go to dickinson.edu/magazine to read the entire debatevia-epistle, learn more about Associate Director for Information Literacy and Research Services Christine Bombaro ’93’s list of Dickinsonians involved in the Civil War and hear what some Dickinson experts have to say about two of the college’s most controversial alumni.
History matters I would like to join and reinforce the comments of Robert Kaplan ’58 and Anne Pinkerton ’63 regarding Dickinson alumni Chief Justice Roger Taney, class of 1795, and President James Buchanan, class of 1809. In my retirement I am now teaching U.S. and world history courses at a number of retirement communities in the Seattle area. I believe it is essential to provide an objective analysis of those whose efforts and decisions were instrumental or detrimental to the integrity of both our judicial and political structures. Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case reduced the status of the slave population to the same level as a farm animal. President Buchanan did everything but lead, and he became known as a “doughface” for his lack of decisiveness, the only standout effort being a letter to Taney in a brazen attempt to influence the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Scott case. JOHN P. “PETE” MAZZA ’63
SEATTLE, WASH.
This letter is in rebuttal to Robert Kaplan ’58 and Anne Pinkerton ’63’s dissenting views on Michael Della Vecchia ’68’s praise of Taney and Buchanan. After reviewing their accomplishments I feel that they should be honored as distinguished members of our college family.
Taney graduated with honors and served his state, Maryland, as legislator, senator and attorney general. He supported Andrew Jackson for president and served his administration as attorney general and secretary of the treasury. He was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court, serving from 1836 to 1864. Many modern legal scholars feel that “despite the [Dred Scott v. Sandford ] decision … he was both an outstanding jurist and competent judicial administrator.” The case was decided by a 7-2 vote and reflected the thinking of many people in the mid-19th century. Obviously, times have changed, and our state and federal legislatures and courts have responded accordingly. Buchanan also graduated with honors, settling in Lancaster and establishing a successful law practice. His political career included two terms as a Pennsylvania state assemblyman, five terms as a U.S. congressman, 10 years as a U.S. senator, several years as secretary of state under President James K. Polk and minister to both Russia and Great Britain. He declined an offer to become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. His term as the 15th president of the U.S. was during a period of great turmoil in our country, and as a student of the Constitution he tried to maintain a balance in his appointments. He believed in compromise and diplomacy, which unfortunately was not possible in the political atmosphere of the late 1850s.
Send letters via e-mail to dsonmag@dickinson.edu or mail to: Dickinson Magazine, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013-1773. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
2
He maintained that secession by the Southern states was not constitutional, but he also felt going to war was illegal. His motto was “I acknowledge no master but the law,” and his administration was scandal free. While he is indeed ranked near the bottom of U.S. presidents, those rankings are subjective. John F. Kennedy, when asked about this subject, said, “No one has a right to grade a president — even poor James Buchanan — who has not sat in his chair first.” BILL HECK ’58
BURLESON, TEXAS
I write to enter the Red Devil dust-up that seems to have been generated by Judge Michael Della Vecchia ’68’s letter in the fall 2014 issue and to respond to Robert Kaplan ’58’s and Anne E. Pinkerton ’63’s critiques. I suggest that Mr. Kaplan and Ms. Pinkerton, with understandable visceral disdain for Taney based upon his opinion in the Dred Scott case, and for President Buchanan for his singularly undistinguished career as president, have misunderstood the point of Della Vecchia’s letter. It was not to pass out collegiate laurels; it was to remind Dickinsonians that included among the long line of graduates who have proceeded up the steps at Old West were two Supreme Court justices (one of them chief justice) and a U.S. president. Notwithstanding the moral void of the Dred Scott decision, a more balanced and nuanced view of Taney may be in order. And certainly we can be assured that his presence on the roll of Dickinson alumni does not dull the luster of the diploma its many graduates have received, devalue their excellent educations nor diminish their pride in the institution. ALAN P. BRUCE ’68
MEDFORD, N.J.
Regarding the letters of criticism published in the last two issues, I respectfully submit that both critics have misunderstood the intent and content of my initial letter, in which I pointed out that when you take so small a school as Dickinson and note that among its alumni are two U.S. Supreme Court justices and a U.S. president, that should be a point of pride. I’m reminded of a similar incident many years ago, when the entertainer and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell mentioned in a nationally televised
interview that she had gone to Dickinson and thought it was a wonderful place, but that she had “flunked out.” In a subsequent issue of the magazine, the calendar of events included O’Donnell’s birthday. This drew harsh letters from people who disagreed with O’Donnell’s humor and social philosophy. I would not criticize same, but would simply accept the fact that she was kind enough to say something complimentary about the college in a very public setting. The purpose of a liberal-arts education is to broaden one’s perspective. Buchanan, Grier, Taney, O’Donnell and innumerable other controversial individuals populate the ranks of any long-standing institution. That one or more of our graduates may have left behind a legacy of disappointment casts no pall on this institution or others who have gone here. MICHAEL A. DELLA VECCHIA ’68
PITTSBURGH, PA.
I am responding to Anne Pinkerton ’63’s letter in the spring issue. I disagree with her opinion of Taney and Buchanan. In my view, it is best not to base a conclusion on one sample of a person’s life. I first became aware that Taney and Buchanan were Dickinson graduates when I was one of Professor of Political Science Harold Pohlman’s Dana research interns working on his book Political Thought and the American Judiciary (1993), while I was a student at Dickinson. It is regrettable that Taney wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, and there is an analysis of the case in Pohlman’s book. However, in my opinion, and to give justice to the totality of Taney’s life, he did reach the highest level in the federal judiciary and served 1836-64, a substantial period of time. Moreover, in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), Taney handed down a landmark opinion that anticipated the federal antitrust policies of the early-20th century and, for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court placed public interest above private property rights. In my continued reading after college on the United States’ political history, I came to the conclusion that no president immediately before or after Abraham Lincoln could have been considered successful, because of purely political reasons. Thus, Buchanan and President Andrew Johnson consistently appear at the bottom of various rankings of U.S. presidents over the years.
Buchanan served not only in the highest office of the land, but also as secretary of state, in both houses of Congress and as minister to Great Britain and to Russia. Both Taney and Buchanan lived lives of purpose, consequence and substance, and when looking at the totality of their lives, both are worthy of respect. Going forward, let all Dickinsonians focus on these three words: purpose, consequence and substance. And in the very least, Taney and Buchanan embody all three in the totality of their lives. BOB MORDECZKO ’88
BRYN MAWR, PA.
As one of Dickinson’s librarians, my office is situated next to a larger-than-life portrait of Buchanan that hangs in the stairwell on the Spahr side of the Waidner-Spahr Library. From my vantage point, I frequently hear a decades-old joke about Buchanan to the effect that he was “arguably Dickinson’s worst student ever, who went on to become arguably the worst president of the United States.” The decisions that Buchanan made, along with those of fellow alumnus Taney, certainly exacerbated conditions that led to the American Civil War and contributed to the oppression of thousands of African Americans. But when, I wonder, will that joke about Buchanan be tempered with historical context, and when will it be followed by stories of Civil War-era alumni of whom we can be proud? No one standing beneath that portrait uses the opportunity to tell the stories of the soldiers, the abolitionists and the politicians who fought to preserve the Union and put it back together after its fracture. Have you ever heard the story of Moncure Conway, class of 1849? How about James McKim, class of 1828? Horatio Collins King, class of 1858? Or John McClintock, class of 1858? John A.J. Creswell, also class of 1848? If these names are unfamiliar to you, I encourage you to use Dickinson’s free online resources such as House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, the James Buchanan Resource Center and other Civil War resources created by Dickinson professors, archivists, librarians, students and information-technology professionals. Rather than disavowing a part of our history, let’s talk about how events inspired those we should celebrate. CHRISTINE BOMBARO ’93
CARLISLE, PA.
3
[ Dickinson matters ] Imagining our futures NANCY A. ROSEMAN, PRESIDENT
I
have participated in more than two decades of commencements, and although I always have been moved by the emotions of the day, there simply is nothing that can prepare you for the moment when, as president, you get to hand each student his or her diploma. At that moment, they are flooded with so many mixed emotions: joy, sadness, trepidation and pride. It is an honor and a privilege to share that moment as our students become our alumni. They not only are the future of our world, but they also hold the future of Dickinson in their hands. There is a world of boundless opportunity ahead for our graduates. There is so much they can and will achieve beyond these limestone walls, and the evidence speaks for itself. Many members of the class of 2015 will continue their studies and will work among scholars and peers at premier institutions such as Oxford, Columbia and Duke universities, as well as the London School of Economics and Political Science, to name a few. Five of our graduating seniors were accepted into the Fulbright Program, garnering research grants and teaching assistantships in Germany and Kazakhstan. While many of our graduates will move into the corporate world, I am equally delighted to see how many considered the nonprofit sector, through the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Teach for America and many other organizations with missions ranging from sustainability to international relations. The class of 2015 has much to be proud of — we certainly are proud of them.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
4
Commencement marks the conclusion of one’s undergraduate experience, and it also points to the beginning of a new academic year and incoming first-year class. While the summer is a time for students to finalize their decisions and the college to determine its enrolled class, I can tell you that, from where we sit today, the class of 2019 has the potential to be the largest and the most ethnically, racially and geographically diverse class in Dickinson’s history. Like many of our peer institutions, Dickinson creates opportunities for access to a high-quality, distinctive liberal-arts education by offering financial aid, scholarships and a robust support system. From 2010 through 2014, the college provided financial aid to between 63 and 71 percent of the five incoming classes. While we strive to open the doors of opportunity for our incoming students, we also work to keep the doors open throughout one’s undergraduate career. It is possible — even likely — that a student’s financial need will change over the course of his or her four years at Dickinson. In fact, the amount of financial aid offered to the student body as a whole increased from 62 percent to 68 percent during this same five-year period. These are challenging figures, but they reflect a new normal in the higher-education landscape. We allocate a substantial amount of our annual operating budget to financial aid, and we take great pride that the college’s endowment, alumni, friends and foundations offset almost 20 percent, or $13,000, of the actual cost of educating each of our enrolled students. As these numbers suggest, our ability to support current and future Dickinsonians is not possible without the generosity of our community. Commencement is an annual reminder that our unique journey allowed us to think differently and more broadly about where we were going then and where we are now. A liberalarts education encourages both intentionality and imagination, and we see the presence of both in the choices and journeys of our graduates. I often tell students that their time at Dickinson will shape them in ways they cannot begin to predict — that their undergraduate experience will demand more of them than they ever dreamed possible and will inspire them to step fearlessly into the world. Our goal as a community should be to expand this opportunity to as many deserving students as possible, regardless of one’s background or ability to pay, and I hope you will continue to support these efforts. As a society, we cannot afford to leave talent untapped, and at Dickinson, we know how to nurture potential and turn it into reality.
[ college & west high ] From left, all class of 2015: Joan Smedinghoff, Nikki Price, Makalea Branch, Wendy Gomez, Kayla Muirhead and Jamie Leidwinger.
More than meets the eye
We wanted to see women on campus succeed, prosper and live up to their amazing potential. — K AY L A M U I R H E A D ’ 1 5
I
n addition to celebrating its 90th anniversary this past academic year, Wheel and Chain made some more Dickinson history with its April pop-up exhibit “More than Meets the Eye.” Dickinsonians heading across the academic quad on April 1 were met with black-and-white photos of 511 Dickinson women — representing students, faculty, staff and alumnae — holding a sign that had a word they felt described them. The range was wide: listener, dynamic, adventurous, caring, sassy, determined, silly, complicated, incorrigible. No matter what the descriptor, though, every woman was beaming with a powerful sense of pride.
Throughout the fall and spring semesters, members of the women’s honorary society had been set up in the Holland Union Building, asking every woman who walked by to participate. The project gained traction when women who were not members of Wheel and Chain took notice, felt empowered by the message and began spreading the word across campus. The goal was, as Kayla Muirhead ’15 put it, “to bring to light ideas of body image, race, ethnicity, freedom, individuality, community, religion—everything that’s important in a nutshell. It highlighted individual beauty and the collective power of all women on campus ... If women go home tonight and talk to their friends about it, our mission was successful. Inspiration and connection promote conversation, and conversation opens doors.” The photo exhibit originally was scheduled to be a one-day-only event, but campus response was so welcoming that the exhibit was moved to the Waidner-Spahr Library for several more weeks. The images are now housed in Archives & Special Collections. “We wanted to see women on campus succeed, prosper and live up to their amazing potential,” said Muirhead. “Everyone deserves their moment to shine and feel a part of something bigger than themselves” — Grace Fisher ’15
5
’15 CLASS OF
[ college & west high ]
class of 2015
They came from 31 states and 15 foreign countries, and the 562 members of the class of 2015 counted among them 204 graduating with Latin honors, five Fulbright recipients, five AmeriCorps members and six newly minted 2nd lieutenants in the U.S. Army. Also among them were founders of Facebook phenom Humans of Dickinson, Montgomery Service Leaders and mentors in the inaugural First-Year Interest Group ( FIG) program. Some of them were the sole undergraduate panelist or presenter at an academic conference; others worked on the College Farm, co-led service trips or conducted research at top-notch labs and institutes. Given the array of experiences these brand-new alumni already have under their belts, we asked them to tell us, “What it’s like to …” do all those great things they got to do while at Dickinson, before they descended Old West’s steps and headed off for their next adventure. Read more about Commencement at dson.co/15commencementstory.
What it’s like to … top 15
be a member of the Liberty Cap Society: First impressions
are crucial, and, as a tour guide, you will be one of the few people students remember from the multitude of college tours they take. The most important thing you can do is be yourself — let the students see how much you love the campus and why you chose it. — Mu Mu
present at an academic conference (or two): Presenting at two conferences a week apart was nerve-wracking. At my first conference, though, my nerves and insecurities evaporated the moment I began presenting. And after channeling courage exhibited by several of my favorite female heroines (Hermione Granger from Harry Potter and Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation), I was excited about presenting my research and taking advantage of these amazing opportunities. — Sasha Shapiro launch an online phenom, Humans of Dickinson: We didn’t set out to launch a phenomenon, but rather it was about looking for a way to tell the collective story of Dickinsonians. We were never interested in creating this for the numbers; we were interested in the stories from the get-go. The numbers are simply how effectively we’re telling the story. — Rebecca Shenton and Justin McCarty co-lead the Montgomery Service Leaders (MSL):
Seeing firsthand the results of the time and effort invested in the Carlisle community is incredibly fulfilling. Whether it was volunteering at Project SHARE, having a discussion with the mayor of Carlisle about local issues or just hearing how excited the volunteers were to walk into their nonprofit partner every day, working with MSL has taught me the importance of community engagement. — Mackenzie King live in the Treehouse: While we Treekids are known for our short showers and cold winters, the biggest impact we have on the environment is through challenging each other’s sustainable practices and educating others about our actions, with the hope that we will inspire environmental consciousness in those with whom we cross paths throughout our lives. — Lexie Raczka spend a semester at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Music Theatre Institute: NMTI is a
laboratory: You spend a minimum of 14 hours a day, seven days a week, creating art, being physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted, overworked, under-qualified and certain that you will fail. The instructors push you to your limits to show that artists cannot and should not be confined by limits, and so, ensure the unique and beautiful blossoming of your life as a theatre artist. There’s a reason their motto is “Risk. Fail. Risk Again.” — Holly Kelly
Carl Socolow ’77
break a school athletics record: Pretty surreal given the history of the school and the basketball program. It’s a great honor for everyone that pushed me to be great on the floor over the last four years. Without them, who knows where I’d be? — Gerry Wixted
start a club: It’s exhilarating to know that you’re cultivating a
new space, a new platform for your peers, yet it’s risky to have to articulate a vision, particularly one that’s been heavily thought about, but not voiced. Then it’s heartwarming to see people help nurse what you created, to have them believe in it and want to become a part of it. That’s what it feels like (aside from all of the treacherous technicalities, i.e. writing a constitution from scratch, drafting budgets and grant proposals, creating weekly workshop agendas). — Brittany Barker
star in the campus musical: Playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof was both extremely challenging and incredibly humbling. There were so many people involved: a cast of 25, a backstage crew of 23, an orchestra of 26, the director, designers, stage managers, box office volunteers, etc. All of these people have to work toward a single goal and execute perfectly. Being one of the key pieces in something like that is a daunting responsibility, but it’s also a joy and a comfort to know that all of those people are working to help you shine. — Jeremy Lupowitz intern in a town where cell service and Wi-Fi are illegal: Living and working at the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., without many modern electronic luxuries — cell phones, Wi-Fi, and even a microwave — I was also in the shadow of some of the most advanced technology the field of radio astronomy has to offer. It was an awesome place, a place where people made plans and stuck to them and friendships were formed without the distractions of phones constantly vibrating. It was … well … out of this world! — Olivia Wilkins
study opera in Rome: I found myself performing in one of
the most beautiful cities in the world and in the country where some of the greatest opera singers started their careers. — Ann Fogler
conduct research on beetle guts: It can be slimy and stinky sometimes, but it is surprisingly satisfying. It’s like opening up this microscopic chamber of wonders that is more complex than you could ever imagine. I had a fantastic mentor who pushed me to think outside of the gut (pun intended), and through this challenge we expanded our knowledge of microbial diversity in this widely under-sampled niche. Not only did I add to an important field of research, but I also helped pave the way for future beetle-juicers. — Kayla Muirhead be a student archivist … and a student athlete: I was
able to live in Carlisle for the summer immersing myself in my history major through working in the archives by day—all while devoting myself to football training at night. This experience allowed me to thrive both academically and athletically throughout my senior year. —Robert Marsden
be a LEAD mentor: It’s like a group of high-school parents at prom. Although it’s their job to make sure we kids behave, we all know that they’re dying to join us! —Suleiman “Slay” Sudah captain the ultimate Frisbee team: Being captain is like being the head of a huge family. As we compete against other teams, it’s my job to make sure that we play hard, aim to win and (most importantly) have fun! — Trevor Griesman
7
Time for the obligatory college graduation insta. I can’t believe I made it. Thanks for an unbelievable 4 years
After four years of carefully avoiding the seal, I can step on it without concern! My time at Dickinson has been filled with incredible friendships, challenging classes, wonderful professors, tons of travel, and countless memories that I will cherish forever
Not your typical graduation picture but it is fitting because IÂ cannot believe four years have passed by so quickly and I could not be more thankful for the friendships I have made especially with factory six who pushed me to be the best person I could be every day and never gave up on me.
#dson2015
Shoutout to the most eclectic group of guys I will ever be a part of and made my Dickinson experience unreal
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
8
Alma Mater, tried and true: Noble Dickinsonia
Done. Thanks for the great 4 years Dickinson.
Congratulations @Dickinsoncollege graduating class of 2015 (photo by @markruffalo)
[ college & west high ]
’15 CLASS OF
Accolades
Three of this year’s four honorary-degree recipients were Dickinson alumni. Here’s why.
From citation for the doctor of philanthropy honorary degree to John R. “Jack” Stafford ’59, presented by Kirsten Guss, associate professor of biology, John R. & Inge Paul Stafford Chair in Bioinformatics.
Evidence of [Jack and Inge’s] generosity to Dickinson is dappled like sunlight across the campus. Perhaps you have studied in the Stafford Reading Room on the first floor of the library. Or maybe you have seen the Stafford Teaching Lab in Dana Hall. Perhaps you have attended a class or seminar in the Stafford Auditorium in the Rector Science Complex. Or completed a research project in the beautiful Dr. Inge P. Stafford Greenhouse for Teaching and Research.
Amidst a full life, raising two sons, working as a freelance writer and as a columnist for the Associated Press, active in your community in countless ways, you have continually carved out Dickinson College as a crucial commitment. Today, surrounded by your family, your husband John, your two sons and daughtersin-law, your five grandchildren, your sister and her husband, your friends, the faculty, administrators, alums and students who are so grateful for your presence, I hope you are justly proud of the work that you have done and continue to do for the college and for the world of thinking and creativity.
From citation for doctor of fine arts honorary degree to William Wallace ’74, presented by Melinda Schlitt, professor of art history, William W. Edel Professor of Humanities.
From citation for the doctor of liberal arts honorary degree to Ann Conser Curley ’63, presented by Amy E. Farrell, professor of American studies and women’s & gender studies, John J. Curley ’60 and Ann C. Curley ’63 Faculty Chair in the Liberal Arts.
While undeniably masterful, your work is erudite in the most accessible of ways. It is an example of humanistic scholarship of the most persuasive kind, not only for the conviction and veracity of its interpretations, but also because it is invested with the voice of its author at every turn — a relative rarity in modern, historical scholarship about the Italian Renaissance that lends credibility beyond the evidentiary. You have inspired countless students and scholars through your teaching, generosity and friendship. And in that inspiration you epitomize the ideal bonds of a well-motivated scholarly community.
9
[ college & west high ]
’15 CLASS OF
Reverberations
Carl Socolow ’77
I
nspired by her 1959 meeting with Robert Frost, Jean Louise Stellfox ’60 spent the 39 years after graduation as a high school English teacher in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal country. It’s a good story, but most good stories need a twist to become great. And this one has it: Upon Stellfox’s 2003 death, her will revealed that she had socked away more than $1.5 million. It also revealed that she was leaving most of it to Dickinson, so the college could start a program to bring such literary luminaries as Frost to her alma mater annually. Two years later, Dickinson launched the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program, named for Stellfox’s parents, and Ian McEwan, the Man Bookerwinning writer, became the accompanying award’s first recipient.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
10
“That Dickinson has the Stellfox is fairly extraordinary,” says Siobhan Phillips, assistant professor of English. “It’s pretty amazing for a place of this size that we have people of this stature with such close contact.” The annual Stellfox visit includes several events, both campuswide and intimate. But Philips notes that the program’s influence reverberates around campus, inspiring events such as a production of Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes and performances of musical settings of poems by Muldoon and Heaney. “You’re reminded of how artistic activity is bubbling all the time,” Phillips says, “and with Stellfox, all of the bubbles come to the surface in one place.” One artistic bubble that has been surfacing annually since 2006 can be found in the commemorative broadsides depicting representations of the author’s works. The broadsides are created by Kseniya Thomas ’01 (pictured above), in conjunction with artists she commissions each year, in her Carlisle letterpress studio.
“A broadside is like a beautiful page of a book that you can hang on your wall,” says Thomas. “You have to walk right up to it, to examine all that detail. That’s the point of a broadside: The art catches your eye, and then you walk up close to see what it says.” This year, two seniors, Mary Naydan and Laura Hart, curated an exhibition of the broadsides to mark the Stellfox Award’s 10th anniversary, which was punctuated by McEwan’s return as the 2015 Commencement speaker (see Page 12). “Some of my best memories from Dickinson are my interactions with writers like Lorrie Moore and Paul Muldoon¢—¢something I imagine would be quite rare at larger universities,” Naydan says. “I hope that the exhibition has inspired students to really take advantage of the opportunities the Stellfox program offers in coming years.” — Tony Moore
11
Moore: In some of your books — such as The Children Act — you dig into social-cultural issues, and I’m wondering if you read about an issue and say, “This has really grabbed me, and I want to write a book about it,� or if there’s a character that has come out of your creative process and that character suddenly fits into an issue that you’re interested in. McEwan: It’s different each time and hard to characterize or generalize about it. With The Children Act, a judge who’s a friend of mine told me about a case he’d been involved with — a Jehovah’s Witness boy refusing transfusion and the hospital urging him to do it, wanting permission from the court to override his wishes, and the judge going to the boy’s bedside. And he later heard that the boy as a young man in his 20s had needed another transfusion, refused it and died. That story struck me as being full of pathos but also full of possibility for exploring matters of law and secular [life] as opposed to religious constructions of the world and responsibility. But other books have come completely differently, sometimes out of chance remarks. I suppose between novels, life moves on, my interests shift. I find myself reading in a certain direction, thinking about certain things and suddenly something will happen — a thought, and something I wrote will pull together what is already there on Watch the interview at dson.co/mcewaninterview.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
12
my mind. I find it useful to leave a reasonable amount of time between books for that to happen. Sometimes not writing is a really good idea. But it’s hard to say. It never feels like choosing. You don’t sit around and think, “Now is the time to do the law or now is the time to do climate change� or whatever. They grow out of your preoccupations. Moore: And speaking of climate change, your novel Solar explores that issue. What captured your interest there, and how did you handle getting into the science of it all? Because it’s not easy stuff once you really get digging. McEwan: Well, the science interests me anyway, so I don’t find that too difficult. It’s a matter that I’ve been thinking of since the early 1990s really. In fact, it probably goes back to even the 1970s, when there was a consensus briefly that the planet was cooling because of particulates in the air, not an unreasonable assumption, and in fact, it probably is also happening but the warming effect of greenhouse gas is greater than the cooling. Without all the particulates and pollution in the air, we’re probably heating the planet at a much faster rate. The difficulty with Solar was finding a path for a way to do it that was not too moralistic, not too caught up telling people how to think. I wasn’t writing a campaigning novel. The best books on
Carl Socolow ’77
Ian McEwan, author of such novels as Amsterdam, Enduring Love and Atonement and Dickinson’s inaugural Stellfox Award recipient, recently came to Dickinson to deliver the 2015 Commencement address. He also sat down for a conversation with writer-editor Tony Moore that touched on McEwan’s work, free speech and the role the Internet can play in the evolution of literature. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
[ college & west high ] climate change are in fact nonfiction books. So finding a lazy, greedy, intemperate creature who caught some of humankind’s most difficult aspects in their own nature was the way to do it in the end, so I ended up with a figure who largely lives in the shadow of his own past and who has that quality of great cleverness on the one hand and extraordinary stupidity on the other, and that’s what I kept witnessing in all the various global conferences. Particularly we’ve seen it in Paris, we’ve seen it in Lisbon and Rio. They all stack up behind these grand statements full of earnest wishes, and very little happens. Moore: And with telling people how to think, I know you’ve spoken out on radical Islam and about the Charlie Hebdo attack specifically, and then the PEN American Center goes and honors those cartoonists, and some of the writers boycotted it. I’m wondering what you thought of that whole thing. McEwan: Well, I was very sorry to hear
that. This is the one country in the world where its constitutional assertions about free speech are taken very seriously. There’s hardly a written constitution in the world that doesn’t have something on free speech, and it means absolutely nothing in so many countries. There’s a very powerful culture of free speech here. Given that PEN is an organization that specifically exists to protect the rights of free speech inside that First Amendment, it was a little disappointing to me, especially from those writers roughly my age who’ve lived through the Rushdie affair. They weren’t asked to even like what Hebdo was doing; they were simply asked to honor that courage. So of course it’s a simple matter for me. Moore: I see that the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo satirizes the PEN group on its cover, so they’re striking back. McEwan: They had it coming.
Moore: Now, of course, every English major on campus would probably love to follow in your literary footsteps. What advice would you give — that you might not mention in your Commencement speech tomorrow — to seniors walking out the door with English degrees? McEwan: Well, if they want to write fiction, what I always say to people is, keep it short, start your literary career tasting failure, and you can afford failure with a short story. You can devote three weeks to something that’s truly terrible. What you don’t want to do is waste three years writing a mediocre 800-page novel. You need to write through your influences, shake off the voices or celebrate them — write with a sense of moving towards what is truly yours eventually. But to do that, you’re going to have to screw up a bit, and you can write five truly terrible short stories and you will not have lost more than six months. Moore: The Internet seems to be much less productive than the proverbial million monkeys with typewriters. Do you see the Internet playing a role in the future of literature? McEwan: Oh, absolutely. There are people writing consecutive, collective, manyhand novels between them, strangers collaborating across the Internet. There’s a real push, I think — and this might just be a pointless dream — but computer games are still in their adolescence, and I think they flounder in a world, a pimply teenage-boy world of car chasing and mass slaughter, but it’s not inconceivable one day that someone will write a brilliant video game that involved complex moral choices of a kind of Jane Austen type in which you investigated human nature by a set of ordeals or moral choices. Whether that will happen or not, I don’t know, but it’s at least conceivable. Just because the Internet has speeded up the level of exchange of ideas, it should in theory mean that ideas in fiction exchange themselves quicker too, but to be against all that, you know, it’s
99 percent junk, abuse, trolls, all the nastiness — but there’s so much good in it, and we can’t escape it. We’re bound to it. We’ve made this thing, and we’ve padlocked ourselves to it. There’s no choice. We could, I suppose, collectively decide that it’s wasting too much of our time, but no chance. There’s no way out. We want it, we love it, we hate it. I mean, someone said some years ago, the Internet’s morally neutral. It just has all of human nature, so everything that’s bad and everything’s that good about people is up there to be read. Moore: When you were first starting out as a writer, what do you remember as some early victories as far as getting published, getting a little recognition, just being satisfied with yourself and what you were doing? McEwan: One of the most exciting moments was having a story received by a truly superb American publication. It’s called American Review, and then it became the New American Review — not a very inspiring title. It was run out of Manhattan by a marvelous editor, Ted Solotaroff, now dead. For about 10 years it dominated the literary scene. It came out four times a year as a paperback book, not as a magazine. Its print run was 100,000. It made money, amazingly enough. And he started taking my short stories, and one day the latest copy came through the mail, and on the cover, which was a very bright pink, it said in white caps, “Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Gunter Grass, Ian McEwan,” all in the same size, and I was so thrilled because these were all writers that meant a great deal to me. That kind of excitement diminishes. There comes a point when you become a professional writer and your book comes out and it might succeed, it might not — good reviews, bad reviews — and it’s something of a treadmill that you’re on with moments of pleasure and so on along the way. But at the age of 22, this was a very magical moment. I’ll never forget the thrill of that little brown package opening.
13
First-ever day of giving
hours
EQUALS
Dickinsonians
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
14
D
ickinsonians all over the world can be proud of their participation in the college’s first-ever Day of Giving. The $449,945 raised with 2,017 gifts will provide life-changing opportunities for today’s Dickinson students. Your gifts are helping to grow and strengthen the community of Dickinsonians ready to change the world. “Dickinsonians everywhere have told me how much Dickinson transforms their lives,” said President Nancy Roseman. “It’s opened up doors. It’s made them realize that things were possible for them that they never imagined would be possible. A contribution to Dickinson — no matter how large or small — makes a difference.” To our alumni, parents, faculty, staff and students who made their gifts to the Dickinson Fund during the Day of Giving, we offer our heartfelt thanks. You have made this a day for the record books.
[ college & west high ]
fine print God and Government: Twenty-Five Years of Fighting for Equality, Secularism, and Freedom of Conscience — An Insider’s Account by Barry Lynn ’70 Prometheus Books A central player in every major church-stateseparation battle for decades, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn ’70 understands the complexities of this divisive issue like few others. As a longtime activist, a civil rights lawyer and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he offers a unique perspective and a wealth of experience on church-state controversies. In this lively book, he has compiled his writings from various sources to explore in depth the ways in which many religious extremists have attempted to erode individual liberties. The topics range from publicly promoted prayer to taxpayer-subsidized vouchers for religious schools, end-of-life and reproductive rights and censorship.
The Surgeon and the Cowgirl by Heidi Hormel ’85 Harlequin American Romance A former innkeeper and radio talk show host, Heidi Hormel ’85 has always been a writer. She spent years as a small-town newspaper reporter and in public relations before settling happily into penning romances. In her first novel picked up by Harlequin American Romance (the second, The Convenient Cowboy, will be available in August), she tells the story of retired rodeo rider Jessie Leigh, who has one more trick to pull off: partnering with ex-husband Payson MacCormack to save her ranch. Hope’s Ride offers horse therapy for children, and Payson is a pediatric surgeon at the hospital set to certify the program. Their split wasn’t exactly amicable, but Jessie’s determined to make it work … even if Payson’s presence sends her heart racing. Payson’s career and Jessie’s ranch are depending on each other, but will working together bring the surgeon and the cowgirl closer together, or drive them apart for good? The Sweetheart Deal by Polly Sweeny Dugan ’87 Little, Brown and Company
Ladies of Letterpress: A Gallery of Prints with 86 Removable Posters by Kseniya Thomas ’01 and Jessica White Princeton Architectural Press Who can resist the tactile charm of letterpress? Not many, judging by its ever-rising popularity among artists and designers working with old-school printing methods. Ladies of Letterpress features the best work of the members of Ladies of Letterpress, an international organization that champions the work of women printers. It includes a wide range of pieces, from greeting cards to broadsides and posters, printed in a variety of type and illustration styles. Each piece is accompanied by details of paper, inks and press used in its printing, as well as a profile of its printer. Whether you’re drawn to elegant greeting cards, humorous note cards, or calendars or posters, you’re sure to find inspiration in this volume. And when you do, there are 86 detachable pages just begging to be pinned up. The book was compiled by the founders of Ladies of Letterpress, Kseniya Thomas ’01, owner of Thomas-Printers, a commercial letterpress and design shop in Carlisle, Pa., and Jessica White. Read more about Thomas on Page 10.
Following the success of her first book, So Much a Part of You (2014), a linked story collection, Polly Sweeney Dugan ’87 presents her first novel, The Sweetheart Deal, which tells the poignant story of what happens when a woman who thinks she’s lost everything has the chance to love again. Read more in her class note on Page 47.
15
Kudos
[ college & west high ] Promotions
Professor of Political Science Russell Bova has been appointed to the Walter E. Beach Chair in Political Science. The following were promoted to the rank of professor: Tom Arnold, biology; Sherry Harper-McCombs, theatre & dance; Hans Pfister, physics & astronomy; and Amy Witter, chemistry. The following received tenure and were promoted to the rank of associate professor: Suman Ambwani, psychology; Jeffrey Forrester, mathematics; Margaret Frohlich, Spanish & Portuguese; Elizabeth Lewis, education; Kristine Mitchell, political science and international studies; Siobhan Phillips, English; Sarah Skaggs, theatre & dance; Sarah St. Angelo, chemistry; and Amy Steinbugler, sociology.
Publications Tullio Pagano, associate professor of Italian,
published The Making and Unmaking of Mediterranean Landscape in Italian Literature: The Case of Liguria, which focuses on literary representations of the northern Italian region of Liguria, whose landscape has been portrayed by internationally known Italian poets and novelists, from Eugenio Montale to Italo Calvino. Awards and Grants
Professor of English Wendy Moffat received the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her book project “The Most Terrible Years: Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Thomas Salmon and the Trauma of the Great War.” Learn more at dson.co/moffatfellowship. Ben Edwards, associate professor of earth
In the News David Jackson, associate professor of physics and editor of American Journal of Physics (AJP) was interviewed by Science magazine, Huffington Post and WBUR’s “Here and Now” about an article appearing in AJP that calculates how long it would take to fall through the center of the Earth. Listen at dson.co/herenowjackson.
sciences, was awarded an emergency grant of $5,000 from the National Geographic Society – Committee for Research and Exploration for his project “Origin of floods caused by pyroclast-lava interactions with snow/ice during the 2015 ongoing eruption of Villarica volcano, Chile.” Assistant Professor of International Studies Shamma Adeeb Alam received a $26,000
research grant for alumni of the Hewlett Dissertation Fellowship from the Population Reference Bureau. His project, “Do Community Health Workers lead to Improved Health Awareness and Increased Use of Health Products among Individuals? Evidence Using Experimental Data from Uganda,” will use survey data to examine whether the introduction of community health workers in an area leads to greater health awareness or increased use of health products among the people in the area.
worthy For a second year in a row, Dickinson is among the Top 10 energy-conserving colleges in the country according to the 2015 Campus Conservation Nationals. http://dson.co/15ccnresults
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
16
Multimedia specialist Brenda Landis produced the award-winning documentary film Cumberlocal, which highlights local economic and human connections, for Leadership Cumberland. The film premiered at the Carlisle Theatre and Performing Arts Center in February. Retired Associate Professor of Sociology Marvin Israel’s photograph, “Pipe and Glasses,” received third prize in the photography division in the 2015 Art of the State juried exhibition held at the Pennsylvania State Museum June 28 through September 13. Israel’s photo was among the 128 works chosen from 1,600 entries. Service Robert Renaud, vice president and chief
information officer, was invited to serve as council member for the Hawkins Leadership Roundtable, which will convene at the 2015 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Presentations
Associate Professor of Political Science Douglas Edlin presented “Why Common Law Judges Can’t Be Objective (And Why We Don’t Want Them to Be)” at the New England Political Science Association.
Sarah Niebler, associate professor of political
Luca Lanzilotta, lecturer in Italian, presented
science, presented her papers “Ideology of the Left: Liberal versus Progressive and Americans’ Self-Identification” and “American Flag, Republican Flag: Symbolic Politics and Partisan Effects of Flag Display in Candidates’ Televised Advertising Campaigns” at the Midwest Political Science Association.
his research paper “Far from us, a skillful blend of journalism and literature at the book presentation ‘via da noi’ ” at New York University.
Nicola Tynan, associate professor of economics, presented “Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility: Metropolitan Water Companies Compared” at the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research Symposium. Suman Ambwami, associate professor of
psychology, presented her paper “Negotiating interpersonal dominance and submission: An experience-sampling investigation of social perception, negative affect, and bingeeating behavior” at the Academy of Eating Disorders. Assistant Professor of Archeology Maria Bruno presented her paper “On the origins of raised-field farming in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes” at the Society for American Archeology. Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies and Political Science Robert Musgrave presented his research “Republican Empire: Partnership and US Foreign Policy, 18661989 and the Resource Pure: State Formation, International Security, and the Politics of Resource Endowments” at the Midwest Political Science Association.
Antonio Rivas, visiting assistant professor
of Spanish and Portuguese, presented “Extravios, masificacion y otros males de altura: Bienvenidos a Incaland, de David Roas,” at the Seventh Transatlantic Conference. Retirements Sylvie Davidson, professor of romance
languages and literatures and John J. Curley ’60 and Ann Conser Curley ’63 Faculty Chair in Global Education; Jeffrey W. Niemitz, professor of earth sciences; Thomas L. Reed Jr., professor of English; Andy Skelton, professor of psychology; Candie Wilderman, professor of environmental science and Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies. Durwin “Whitey” Ellerman, associate director of operations; Victoria Kuhn, senior academic
coordinator, sociology and political science; Randall Nenninger, manager of buildings and grounds; Kim Nichols, director of design services; Pat Pohlman, director of design services; Les Poolman, director of athletics and physical education; Ann Rhoades, executive assistant to the vice president for advancement.
Events lectures art gatherings music Calendar of Arts: dickinson.edu/coa The Clarke Forum: clarke.dickinson.edu (includes event podcasts)
ONGOING – SEPT. 26
Ancient Greek Vessels: Pattern and Image
The Trout Gallery AUG. 12
Buzz Jones Big Band
Drayer Porch AUG. 30
Convocation SEPT. 4
Faculty Wind Quintet
Rubendall Recital Hall SEPT. 8-26
Tint and Repeat
Amy Boone-McCreesh Goodyear Gallery SEPT. 9
The Clarke Forum
Glover Memorial Lecture Rush Holt, CEO, American Association for the Advancement of Science SEPT. 9
Charter Day SEPT. 20
Faculty Recital: Jennifer Blyth
Rubendall Recital Hall SEPT. 25
Faculty Jazz Ensemble
Rubendall Recital Hall SEPT. 25-27
Homecoming & Family Weekend SEPT. 28
The Clarke Forum
Bob Weick Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho ONGOING - OCT. 17
Schofield: Impressionist Landscapes
The Trout Gallery
17
[ in the game ]
Men’s track and field Nick Stender ’15 qualified for nationals in the 10,000 meters, winning the conference in the event and adding a silver medal in the 5,000. Gavin Harter ’17 and Brady Foshay ’17 were AllCentennial Conference (CC) in the shot put and 400. Hunter Smith ran to bronze in both the 10,000 and 5,000. Women’s track and field Don Nichter was named the Centennial Conference Coach of the Year as the women’s track and field team captured second at the outdoor championships. Sarah Rutkowski ’15 ran to All-Conference honors in the 10,000 meters, qualifying for nationals. Amanda Jimcosky ’17 again broke her school record in the high jump, winning the CC title while also earning All-CC honors in the triple jump. Kristina Link ’15 added All-CC performances in the triple and high jump, and Olivia Schumann ’15 won a title with a school record in the 400 and the 4x100 relay, joining Imani Beard ’17, Aphnie Germain ’17 and Jamie George ’17. Rikka Olson ’17 and Niomi Phillips ’18 earned All-CC honors in the pole vault and javelin while Gillian Ferko ’15 broke the school mark in the discus. Men’s tennis Men’s tennis had a nice run in CC play, finishing 6-3 to earn a spot in the playoffs for the first time since 2007. Head coach Jim Kohr was named CC Coach of the Year in his first season. Clark Chapman ’17 had a great year, posting a 7-1 singles record. Chapman joined doubles partner Steven Kaplan ’17 on the All-CC team as both players earned second-team honors in both singles and doubles. Joey Frank ’16 earned honorable mention in singles.
Men’s golf The team played well all season but had a tough outing at the CC championships. The Red Devils placed fifth overall, led by Linn Worthington ’15 and Chris Noonan ’15, who both finished in the top 20 in the individual standings. Worthington was named the team’s Most Valuable Player in 2012 and 2015, while Noonan garnered the honors in 2013 and 2014. Women’s golf Women’s golf turned in an outstanding performance at the CC championships, capturing second place and marking the best finish in program history. They set the school record with the lowest overall score as well. Melanie Campbell ’15 earned All-CC honors with a third-place finish, while 2014 CC Rookie of the Year Stephanie Heiring ’17 was just two strokes away from repeating on the All-CC team. Campbell was named the CC’s Scholar Athlete of the Year for women’s golf, holding the top GPA on the All-CC team. Men’s lacrosse Men’s lacrosse made a great run at the end of the year, winning the final four regular-season games to earn the No. 3 seed in the CC playoffs. They rallied to defeat rival Franklin & Marshall, 9-8, in the season finale at Biddle Field. Suleiman “Slay” Sudah ’15 was named an All-American for the second time, earning his third selection to the All-CC team and voted the team’s Most Valuable Defensive Player. He also was named a Scholar All-American by the USILA. Goaltender Nick Baxter ’16 joined Chris Menard ’16 and Rob Kendall ’16 on the second team. Issa “Ace” Sudah ’15 garnered honorable mention in the midfield.
Women’s lacrosse Women’s lacrosse had a great start and finished strong but were just shy of earning a conference playoff bid. They scored five straight goals late in the season finale, putting a scare into No. 2-ranked Franklin & Marshall. Carly O’Brien ’15 broke into the program’s top 10 in career points, goals and assists. She also was named All-Region for the second time and made her third appearance on the All-Conference second team. Moira Mahoney ’16 and Maddy Siebold ’17 both were named All-Region and All-Conference as well.
James Rasp
Women’s tennis This year’s young team finished 4-10 overall and 3-7 in the conference. The talented group of underclassmen will have strong leadership coming back and will look to be competitive for a playoff spot next year.
Baseball The baseball team set the school record for stolen bases while Harley Moore ’15 moved into third on the all-time list, becoming the third Dickinson pitcher to record over 200 strikeouts. Steven Haynes ’15 boasted one of the highest GPAs in the senior class and had a great season and career, with numerous top-10 rankings. Moore made his secondstraight appearance on the All-Conference team, as did outfielder Ryan Dolan ’16. Softball Softball had a strong start but a tough stretch this season, finishing 15-20 overall. Four players hit over .300 for the year, led by Grace Edelson ’16 with a .400 batting average, hitting 12 doubles and three homeruns. She was perfect defensively, earning All-Conference honors. Sophomore Nicole Torlincasi hit five homeruns on the season, finishing at .343 for the year. — Charlie McGuire, sports information director
Need more Red Devil sports? Check out all the stats, scores, schedules and highlights at www.dickinsonathletics.com. Information about live streaming and radio broadcasts is available on a game-by-game basis, so check the website regularly or follow @DsonRedDevils on Twitter for the latest updates.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
18
Carl Socolow ’77
A driving force
Read about Santorine’s fellow team member Reed Salmons ’14’s experience as a donor at dson.co/salmonstransplant.
W
hen you first meet Kyle Santorine ’17, it’s a safe guess that he’s a football player. The offensive lineman started every game his first year and was only slightly hindered by an injury his sophomore year. Spend a few minutes with him and you’ll discover that he’s a gentle giant — easygoing, quick with a smile and a joke. But a glimpse up his sleeve — literally — reveals a painful loss that has driven him to action. When exploring colleges, playing football plus a strong academic program were must-haves, but it was when Santorine learned that Dickinson’s football team spearheaded an annual Be the Match (BTM) bonemarrow registry drive on campus that he was sold. “In 1999, my little sister was diagnosed with juvenile chronic myeloid leukemia,” Santorine recalls. “She needed a bone-marrow transplant, and my father organized a bone-marrow-registry drive for her. My mother ended up being the best match, but in 2000, Elizabeth passed away.” A tattoo of angel wings on Santorine’s right arm is a tribute to Elizabeth, and with the same determination he shows on the field and in the classroom, he is driving forward to make a difference. In Santorine’s first year, Dickinson’s BTM drive raised more than $6,000 and added 350 new members to the registry. This year, Dickinson nearly doubled its fundraising numbers and brought the total number of registered donors to 850, earning the top spot among 50 colleges participating in the BTM’s Get in the Game initiative. The policy-management major and some teammates also worked to get a Be the Match on Campus club recognized by Student Senate, which will help the group host more registry drives and spread awareness around campus, in local schools and throughout the Carlisle community. “Head coach Darwin Breaux, he wants you to succeed — in the classroom, on the field, in life,” Santorine says. “He tries to instill good values. BTM was one of his ideas to get us involved in the community. “My biggest moment so far was my first collegiate game,” he continues. “Being out there, soaking it in, playing against Hobart [and William Smith Colleges] — a nationally ranked team at the time — was eye opening, humbling and gratifying.” It’s also gratifying that several Dickinsonians have been matched with candidates thanks to the BTM registry initiative on campus. Reed Salmons ’14 had a life-changing experience after being a peripheral blood stem-cell donor for a recipient in Washington, and their meeting one year later has made national headlines. Claire Paulson ’17 also was matched and has donated — she is anticipating connecting with her recipient. And while he’s been on the bone-marrow registry for years but hasn’t been a match yet, Santorine is waiting for that call, with hope that he can help. — Lauren Davidson 19
where we are Madonna Enwe ’16
Illustration by Brian Edward Miller
[ fiction ]
t was one of those nights that only came once or twice a year, when the full moon shone so brightly that the surrounding clouds seemed to be drifting away from it. Our grandparents had told us that it was under a full moon that the sorcerers and witches carried out their evil acts. Some of us had exams the next day, and we were studying in our classes and other secluded areas on the school campus, such as the balcony behind the shower rooms. Some of us did not have any exams or homework, and we were sleeping in class, reading one of the few books left in our scanty library, listening to gossip, recounting the Nigerian movies we had watched, braiding each other’s hair, playing card games or dancing to drum sounds we played on our desks. Some of us were outside of class that night keeping vigil at the taps, to be the first to get water that we would have to use the next day to take our bath. There were only six taps for about 300 girls to get water for a bath the next morning. Some of us did not go to class that night because we were sore from the manual labor we had done during the day, because we were suffering from an illness or because we needed to lie down due to the severe pain we felt from our monthly stomach cramps. By two in the morning, most of us were in our beds sleeping. We slept in rooms with 20 other lower-grades girls and rooms with 50 upper-grades girls. Some of us had woken up later in the night to use the toilet with two other friends, and a few of us had gone alone. It was at about three a.m. that the men entered our school campus.
21
They took us out of our dorms, from under our beds and from under the shelves. They took us from the toilets and from the ground. They held us tightly and dragged us to the yard outside our dormitories, where they left us in a bundle.
One of us was returning from using the toilet alone and saw about 20 men dressed in black overalls. They were driving up in five trucks toward our dormitory, holding long guns and cutlasses. She ran up to the school bell near our clothes lines and rang it seven times before one of the men leaped out of a moving truck, ran toward her and struck her to the ground. Some of us woke up because of the screeching sound of the school bell that was supposed to wake us up at five a.m. We thought that it was already time to wake up, but a few of us knew that it wasn’t and we peeped through the window to see who had rung the bell. Some of us, the heavy sleepers, did not budge when the bell was rung and were later pushed from our beds by our friends or felt the water that was poured on our skin by girls who were screaming that we should join the crowd and run. Some of us started running even though we did not know why we were running. When we saw the men jumping off the trucks and coming toward our rooms, we knew something terrible was about to happen. We thought that the men were thieves who were coming to steal our pocket allowances and books, but we did not have much. We did not have phones, and our teachers and principal lived up the hill from our dormitories. We had a night watchman but we rarely saw him awake. Our school was in the middle of a forest; it took about six hours to get there from where most of us lived. We knew we were on our own. Some of us, the older ones, tried to push the younger ones to run in front, but others ran into the woods without looking back and trampled a few girls on their way. It was difficult for 20 or 50 girls to run out of one door in time, and before most of us could get out, one of the men, who had a stitch scar on his biceps, swiftly pushed us back into the room and shut the door behind him. Most of us who found a spot to hide under the bed and the shelves
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
22
where we kept our luggage were also locked into the room. A few of us ran to hide in the toilets but the men followed us, grabbed our hands and dragged us out. Those of us who had been pushed to the ground by other girls were groaning in pain, and then were picked up by the men and tugged back toward the dormitory. Some of us, the fast runners and the younger ones who had been pushed forward to run, ran the whole night. We did not know where we were running to but we ran non-stop, and the full moon, which was our only source of light in the dark forest, guided us on our path to escape. They took us out of our dorms, from under our beds and from under the shelves. They took us from the toilets and from the ground. They held us tightly and dragged us to the yard outside our dormitories, where they left us in a bundle. They did not say anything. Some of the men went into our dormitories and our classrooms, and we thought they were going to steal our things then let us go free. They did not steal anything. We saw them moving with blue containers pouring liquid inside and outside our plywood dormitories and classrooms. We saw one of them strike a match, and, before our eyes, the buildings where we had spent most of our days learning and sleeping burst into flames. Those were the classes where we had first learned how to write and read the books that opened our minds to a world in which we could do what we loved and be independent. We were confused. Why are they doing this? Why did they not take any of our belongings? Where are we going to sleep when they leave? The men who had gone to the dorms and classrooms returned to the place where they had left us. They started talking with each other. They took out their long guns and cutlasses again and one of them screamed at us. “Follow us! If one of you tries to run away, we will cut you.” We all turned our heads and stared at each other. Where were they taking us? What was going on? Some of us started to cry, and they told us to not make a sound. Some of us were too cold to open our lips and make a sound. We stood in our sleeping wear; some of us had sweaters on while others only had a loincloth tied around their body. The men pushed us toward the trucks and told us to climb onto them. Some of us sat on the floor and others had to sit on other girls. There was no room to move our bodies. Some of the men sat behind us so that we could not see the road. We sat alongside friends of more than two years and locked eyes with girls we had just noticed for the
first time, girls we had gossiped about, older girls we had never spoken to, girls who were once our friends, and girls who had bullied us. At that moment in the back of the truck, our past did not matter; we were all on a moving truck whose destination none of us knew. We gazed at one another while the truck swayed over potholed roads leading away from our school.
W
e do not know how long we drove until we came to a stop. Some of us had slept in another girl’s lap or on another girl’s back. Some of us could not sleep. We were thinking about our families, about our mothers whom we missed and in whose arms we wanted to curl up and hear them say that the men would let us go home soon. After seeing the men burn our school and put us on the trucks, we had started having strange thoughts. We thought the men would take us somewhere we had never been to and they would cut us with their cutlasses and shoot us with their guns. Some of us who thought about this before falling asleep had horrendous nightmares. We had nightmares of our friends being shot and thrown into the forest to rot, nightmares of being beaten and nightmares of being raped and abandoned, bleeding to death because we had never known a man in that way before. By the time the truck stopped, the full moon was gone, and the sky was crystal blue, but there was no sight of houses, only bamboo-thatched tents. There were other men and boys with guns and cutlasses. They told us to get down from the trucks and made us to sit down on the cold and muddy black ground. One of us, the one who had rung the bell earlier that morning, asked the men why they had brought us here. The man with the scar on his arm dragged her out from our midst and placed his hands on her mouth. He told us that we were shameless girls who had the audacity to talk to an older man because of the lessons we had been taught in our school that was modeled after schools in Western nations. He said that we would never return to our school and that he and his men would teach us the things we needed to learn and do as a woman. He dragged our friend into one of the tents as she wiggled her legs and tried to scream through the hands that covered her mouth. We never saw her again. In a few days we were becoming the type of women they wanted us to become. We washed their clothes, cooked their food, carried their water, and in the night one of us or a few of us were taken to the men to spend the night with them. Those of us who had been taken in the night always returned with swollen and bruised faces, and some of us, the younger ones, could not close our legs for a few days: “He slapped me when I refused to lie on my back.” Some of us had to explain to the
younger ones what had happened to those girls, but we did not have enough words to tell them because our mothers had not explained any of this to us. All we told them was: “Do whatever they tell you.” A few weeks later they took some of us and sold us, for bags of rice, palm wine, and chicken, as brides to men who were older than our fathers. During the nights that we slept together with the other girls, some of us sobbed. One of us cried for her mother who was sick and thought that she would never see her before she died. Some of us cried because we missed our siblings for whom we were their main caregivers because our parents were dead. Those of us who were in our last year of high school cried because we had missed our chance to leave our small village and go to university in the big town. We thought that we would never become the nurses, doctors, lawyers and teachers that we had dreamed of becoming since these careers had been introduced to us at our school. Some of us cried because we had been bruised while we were carrying water from the stream and did not tell anyone because we wanted to avoid attention from the men. Some of us prayed every night to God. Some of us blamed Him for abandoning us, while some of us thanked Him for letting us see the new day, hoping that something good might happen. Some of us had never prayed to God before and did not plan to, but a few of us admired those who had someone on whom to pour their worries and learned how to pray to this person. We did not want to stay in this place any longer. Some of us, the bold ones, made plans to escape with one or two friends
In a few days we were becoming the type of women they wanted us to become. 23
when we went down to the stream to fetch water. “When we go to fetch water in the night, let us crawl through the plantain trees and see where it takes us.” Some of us spoke too loudly, and once the men heard about our plans, they tied us to a tree and did not give us food for two days. Some of us followed our plans, but when we came to the forest later one night, we stumbled upon men who were in the forest smoking, and they took us to their leader, who made us kneel down on rocks and spanked us on our buttocks. Those of us who had failed in our attempts to escape told the others that there was no way we could ever run away from this place. We got very sick. We had been used to having headaches or fevers, but the type of sickness that some of us had, we had never seen before. Those of us who were sick felt nauseated every morning, our eyes became red, and we felt constant pain in the chest and stomach. We also lost a lot of weight, our stool was bloody and sometimes we bled from our eyes. Those of us who took care of the sick became sick; even a few of the men became sick too. When the men noticed that this disease might
an author’s inspiration
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
24
M
be contagious, they took all the sick people out of the area. We never saw them again. The men keep on increasing in numbers while our numbers are shrinking. None of us had known that we were going to stay here for this long. We wonder why no one cares about us, why no one has come to take us away from these men. Deep in our hearts we know that our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters miss us. We cry every night not only because we are scared of what the men will do to us the next day, but also because we feel the pain that our families must be feeling. Will we ever leave and see our families again? We do not know, but for now we only have each other and we have to be here for each other until the day we leave this place. The men tell us that more girls will be coming soon. Some of us are relieved that these new girls will share some of our workload, but most of us are worried that we will have to watch these other girls go through the same ordeals that we went through. In our minds, we hope that the men’s plans will fail and someone will finally find us where we are.
adonna Enwe ’16, the winner of our inaugural fiction contest, did not write “Where We Are” solely for the personal joy of writing; she did it to give a voice to the hundreds of girls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria. “This story isn’t for me,” she explains. “It’s for those girls.” Enwe felt an undeniable connection with those young women, having grown up in Cameroon and attended Our Lady of Lourdes school; she and her mother moved to the U.S. when she was 16. “When those girls were abducted it really affected me because I felt like they could be me,” Enwe says. “I really identified with them. “ Enwe admits that the idea of writing about these tragic events was daunting. “I knew, though, that somebody had to write about this,” she adds. “It’s been almost a year and still no one knows where they are, and people have stopped talking about it, so I knew that I had to write this story to make sure no one forgets them.” Although very little is known about the actual missing girls in Nigeria, Enwe is adamant about not making them a cliché. “I didn’t want to just write them as victims,” she says. “I wanted to show them as girls who were desperate to go to school and whose dreams had been crushed. I wanted to give them personalities, dreams, families.”
In addition to her deep love of writing, Enwe is a neuroscience major with plans to go into medicine, partly because, growing up, doctors were scarce in her neighborhood. Her hope is to work with an NGO that provides health care and education in impoverished countries. Her research is focused on the effects of childhood concussions; she has presented at multiple conferences, completed an internship at the Columbia University Medical Center and is currently in the University of Vermont’s Summer Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. Enwe’s dream of becoming a doctor dovetails with her passion for writing. She knows that the mark of a good fiction writer is being able to write about something you have never experienced, a skill she thinks will translate into her medical career. “You need to be able to identify with patients and empathize, something I try to do when I write,” she notes. She also hopes that her medical work will allow her to tell her patients’ stories. “I’ve learned that there are so many things happening in the world, so there will always be something to write about,” she says. “No matter what, I just want to be doing something that helps people.” — Grace Fisher ’15
sweet
Short and (not so)
Carl Socolow ’77
While normal people think of hitting the beach, hiking the Appalachian Trail or sending their kids off to camp, what I most look forward to in June is the summer fiction issue of just about any magazine out there. From physician-writer Anton Chekhov to contemporary virtuosos Lydia Davis and Alice Munro and genre masters Elmore Leonard and Stephen King — I’m a shortstory addict and I love them all. And after reading Madonna Enwe ’16’s haunting story in the preceding pages, you too will understand why we decided to launch a fiction contest. We began the search for the perfect story last fall by selecting the perfect panel: Susan Perabo, professor of English and writer-in-residence; Elise Levine, visiting assistant professor of creative writing; Sherry Knowlton ’72, mystery-thriller author of Dead of Autumn; and Brock Clarke ’90, professor of English at Bowdoin College and author of two awardwinning short-story collections, as well as the novels The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Houses in New England and The Happiest People in the World. In a strong field, Enwe’s story was the clear winner. Here’s what Levine had to say about it: “The voice and style, use of characterization and narrative are outstanding.” Knowlton noted that it “captures the confusion and desperation of these young schoolgirls.” Clark’s support was unambiguous: “Best of all the stories I read.” And Perabo: “At first I thought she would not be able to pull it off, the first-person plural point-of-view, not for more than a couple pages. But she actually did it, and the piece ultimately owes much of its power to that device.” The runners-up are no slouches either: “How to Act Like a Struggling English Major” by Haley Weiss ’15, “Trash” by Mollie Kramer ’15 and “Quick Glimpse” by Donna Peterson, administrative assistant in the Registrar’s Office. You can read their stories online at dickinson.edu/magazine. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for our next call for submissions! — Michelle Simmons
How to Act Like a Struggling Senior English Major by Haley Weiss ’15
Seclude yourself far, far away from your friends (they’re bad influences anyway). Now, pick a topic. Something that you’ve discussed in class, but something that has not been discussed enough. What will this something be? You get distracted by the word “something.” It’s too abstract. Tell yourself to focus. That doesn’t work. Tell yourself that if you fail this prospectus, you will live a life of failure and never get a job. That doesn’t work either. Tell yourself that you can eat three M&M’s after coming up with one topic. That works. What about something like Authorial Reliability in Literature? You eat the entire bag of M&M’s. Trash by Mollie Kramer ’15
I should introduce us, so you know who we are. I’m average. I’m so-and-so, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m whatever he says I am. He says my anxiety has become an issue and that my depression is well beyond that of postpartum depression, considering it’s been four years now since I got pregnant. My husband, he says I dress like a wannabe soccer mom in my cardigan sets that he hates, so I remind him he has a weak jaw that makes his face mousy and childish. Quick Glimpse by Donna Peterson
I lucked out one Saturday night with my dad. My older brothers had plans. I was about 10 years old and announced I wanted to go cat fishing. It was just about dark, so it was perfect. “I’ve never been cat fishing. Can you take me?” I asked. Dad looked up from his newspaper. “Oh, Honey, cat fishing can get nasty. It’s not like when you go fishing for sun fish.” “I know. That’s why I want you to come with me. Please?” He sighed. “OK, go get your tackle box and pole. I’ll get the lantern and other supplies.” I jumped up and down with excitement. I couldn’t believe he was taking me fishing, let alone cat fishing.
Read the complete stories at dickinson.edu/magazine.
25
(not)
lost in
By Michelle Simmons Photography by Carl Socolow ’77
27
“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.” — first line of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
28
Twelve hours. Six locations — four local and two abroad. Twelve languages and 251 readers. This is how the Dickinson community celebrated Día del Libro in April: with a nonstop reading of Miguel de Cervantes’ El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (better known as Don Quixote). International attention is high, with the 400th anniversary of the publication of the novel’s second part (the first was published in 1605) and the recent disinterment of Cervantes’ bones by a team of forensic scientists. It wasn’t always so. As Ilan Stavans noted in The New Yorker in March, Cervantes was “the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers,” and Don Quixote “pokes fun at almost every aspect of life in seventeenth-century Castille, from the Inquisition to manly courage, from lower-class parlance to literature itself. His humorous eye made the entire country look wretched.” Yet his tale captivated the Spanish imagination — and well beyond. Considered the first modern novel, Don Quixote traces the misadventures of Alonso Quixano (who renames himself Don Quixote), his squire, Sancho Panza, and their two loyal equine companions, Rocinante and Dapple. “Don Quixote is a very good reminder of why we read, why we watch movies, why we need fiction and imagination,” says Antonio Rivas, visiting professor of Spanish & Portuguese. “It shows the power of literature, imagination — but also language.” “Every book that comes after Don Quixote is but a footnote,” adds Professor of Spanish Alberto Rodriguez. “I have read Don Quixote 25 times, and it’s always a new book.”
And even with modern editions clocking in at 1,000-plus pages, the novel is the second-most translated book in the world; only the Bible has been read in more languages. And as expected, language and literature were at the forefront of Dickinson’s Día del Libro. Organized by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the event actually covered two days (April 22-23) and several academic departments. On the first day, the campus community saw two of Cervantes’ one-act plays, participated in a roundtable discussion among Cervantes scholars (conducted in Spanish) and viewed the Soviet-era film Don Quixote by Grigori Kosintsev, which was sponsored by the Russian and Spanish departments. The second day — the Day of the Book — began with a Spanish-style breakfast in Bosler Hall’s atrium and the first paragraph read by President Nancy A. Roseman. Midmorning, students studying abroad in Malaga and Mendoza were skyped in and Michael Bogdan ’05, who teaches Spanish at nearby Boiling Springs High School, brought his class. As the movable feast traveled to the Stafford Reading Room in the WaidnerSpahr Library, staff made available translated copies for those readers who did not have their own: Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Hebrew. A late reader pulled his copy in Bulgarian from his iPhone. And while mobile technology added more international flavor to the celebration, the historical import of print was on full view, with the library’s acquisition of several rare editions for its special collections. On display
were several illustrated editions in both English and Spanish: 1742 and 1819 (London), 1864 and 1906 (New York) and 1797 (Madrid) and 1969 (Buenos Aires). The evening ended with a dinner reception, capped off with a performance by Dickinson’s newest a cappella group, the Crescendevils. “This is literature that brings the world together,” says Rogelio Cerezo ’15, a political-science major from Panama, whose high school celebrates Dia del Libro every year. “I felt so good to be able to participate here.”
did you know... Don Quixote has inspired innumerable dramas, musicals, novels, operas, short stories, artwork, albums, and films — most notably Pablo Picasso’s 1955 sketch, Peter O’Toole’s turn in Man of La Mancha and even a rap song by the Funky Aztecs. Miguel de Cervantes died one year after publishing the second volume of Don Quixote. He, along with his wife, was buried at the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid. Their remains were lost to history until 2015, when a team of researchers, using 3D scanners, ground-penetrating radar and infrared cameras, found what they believe to be Cervantes’ tomb. A recent production of Don Quixote by the San Francisco Ballet featured traditional Spanish dances including a seguidilla and fandango. Lost in La Mancha is a documentary about filmmaker and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam’s unsuccessful attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a feature film based on the novel Don Quixote and starring Jean Rocheforte and Johnny Depp. In 2002 the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, asked 100 authors from 54 countries what they considered to be the “best and most central works in Western literature.” Don Quixote received 50 percent more votes than any other on the list. Cervantes’ death also coincided with William Shakespeare’s, and their connections and similarities have been parsed for centuries. According to Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, the two “are the central western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.”
29
A Journeys: where are they now?
Alumni recipients of a transformative scholarship celebrate the gift that helped them along their way
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
30
journey is never a solitary endeavor. We need guides and companions, places to stay, a warm cup of tea. And for those capable of great discoveries but without the resources to achieve them, we need benefactors. “One of the major problems in this country is making the playing field level for all people, especially urban youths,” says Sam Rose ’58 (see Page 35). “Everyone needs an education so we can give everyone the same opportunities.” Since his first gift in 2000 to establish the Samuel G. Rose ’58 Scholarship Endowment Fund, 82 Dickinsonians have directly benefited from his vision for a more inclusive society; 15 years later, the scholarship continues to support a diverse and talented group of current and future leaders. They are peace-builders, teachers, globalhealth educators, scientists and social workers. Their explorations have taken them from Japan to Ghana and from the coast of Maine to inner-city Baltimore. In the pages ahead, learn more about their pathways — where they’ve been, where they are now and where they plan to go next.
Philip Hubert ’12
Don Hamerman
Plays five instruments: piano, clarinet, saxophone, French horn and guitar > arrived at Dickinson unsure of major or career path > exposed to research through National Science Foundation-funded experience for undergrads in computer science > participated in mobilesecurity summer program at University of Connecticut > “Dickinson gave me the opportunity to explore a lot of different things” > majored in computer science > got involved with the Student Senate and the Keystones > connected with the music department and became “a huge music nerd” > studied abroad in Australia > served as technology consultant to the Inspirational Medicine Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by fellow Dickinsonian Coleman Bass ’10 > makes a mean spinach dip according to girlfriend Mary Ann Eggers ’13 > working as data analyst for global organization General Reinsurance > “living the life I’ve always dreamed of, in terms of my career and being able to give back.”
31
Julie Younes ’06 High-school basketball player > combination of the Rose Scholarship and strong financial-aid package, basketball program and academics sealed the deal > double major in international studies and French > studied abroad in Toulouse, living with a host family and playing basketball in France > returned to strong senior-year team under coach Dina Henry and reached the NCAA tournament > took Arabic thanks to Professor of History David Commins, who created a half-credit course for a handful of students > graduated debt-free > first job at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C., think-tank > moved to Jerusalem with PeacePlayers International to work with kids in conflict areas on sports and leadership activities > earned master’s in international development from The Fletcher School at Tufts University with a focus on peacebuilding > after stint at UNICEF, returned to PeacePlayers as director of monitoring and evaluation > remains close to former teammates and returns to Dickinson almost every February for basketball alumni day > advice to future Rose Scholars: “Dickinson is about taking advantage of opportunities offered, so make sure you do!”
Lisa Helfert
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
32
“I’ve known since high school I was going to study psychology and work in human resources” > after considering Syracuse, Dartmouth and Drew universities, decided that Dickinson was “just right” > was active with community-service organization Alpha Phi Omega > Joyce Bylander, vice president of student life, and Norm Jones, former dean of diversity and assistant to the president, became his most influential mentors > tapped to honor society Scroll and Key and was its president during his senior year > “I was really fortunate to have been selected as a Rose Scholar, not just for the financial support but also for the network it provided me.” > has done HR consulting for Goldman Sachs and the Metropolitan Museum of Art > co-launched an event-planning company with fellow alumni > working as talent acquisition specialist at NewsCred, a leading provider of end-to-end content-marketing solutions > “I see my role — and recruitment overall — as a constantly changing puzzle, where I match real people with opportunities for professional success. I’m fortunate to have the best of both worlds — a fantastic academic experience at Dickinson and a fulfilling career.”
Pierce Bounds ’71
Selasi Setranah ’10
Karen J. Jung ’11
Fell in love with Dickinson because of the close student-faculty relationships she observed as a high-school student sampling courses through the Philly Futures program > family’s recent financial challenges left her “with no idea” how she could afford Dickinson > Rose Scholarship, combined with other grants, made it possible > majored in psychology > studied abroad in Mexico, an experience that “stays with you forever” > became a research specialist at the University of Pennsylvania after graduation > Worked on research on a potential vaccine for HIV and advanced through the university as a National Institute of Drug Abuse mentor, HIV Prevention Unit counselor and health resource specialist > earned a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy from La Salle University > feelings on the impact of the Rose Scholarship: “I was so grateful that this person I didn’t even know — Mr. Rose — believed in my dream. For him to want to invest in my future and my education is overwhelming, and it’s something I want to do for others as well.”
David Howarth
Amber Nichols ’10
Rachel Adams
Emigrated from South Korea to U.S. in fifth grade > growing up, spent a lot of time online and self-taught HTML, DSS and “website-building stuff” > planned to attend medical school > developed interests that formed a nexus of education, health, science and technology, which led to a major in East Asian studies and a minor in biology > volunteered in a hospice > studied abroad in Japan and earned a certificate in Japanese > proficient in four languages > worked in the Office of Global Education during junior year: “That year was special for me; I was one of the first ones to welcome international students, from meeting them at the airport to showing them their dorms” > went to Ghana in 2011 as a Global Impact Fellow with Unite for Sight > earned a master’s in social work from Temple University > currently a research project manager at Rowan University, coordinating a pilot study on behavioral intervention for individuals with Type-2 diabetes.
Hema Patel ’09 Had no intention of going to Dickinson until a repeat campus visit, an amazing tour guide and a strong financial-aid package, including the Rose Scholarship > planned a career in medicine > biochemistry & molecular biology major > broadened horizons by taking classes in English, anthropology, economics > interned with an oral surgeon in Carlisle facilitated by mentor Charles Zwemer, associate professor of biology > spent semester in England with Ben Edwards, associate professor of earth sciences, who made the experience incredible, and ended up taking Geology 101 senior year > made lifelong friends though Kappa Alpha Theta > was accepted to dental school, deferred, and never went > stints in clinical research and pharmaceutical business development led to a job at Siemens Medical > after two quick promotions, now running an entire product line > science background provided ability to speak about complex things at different levels, from physicist to radiologist to hospital administrator to trade-show attendee > still remembers lessons from Sam Rose on how you can go to school thinking one thing and do something completely different and be successful.
“I was so grateful that this person I didn’t even know believed in my dream.” Carl Socolow ’77
Amber Nichols
33
Dwight Dunston ’10
Pierce Bounds ’71
Graduated from Friends Central School in Wynnewood, Pa. > chose Dickinson because of its small class size, sense of community and opportunity to minor in poetry > studied with Associate Professor of English and Poet-in-residence Adrienne Su > learned how to play the guitar from classmate and close friend Brendan Gallagher > spent a year at Dickinson’s study-abroad program at the University of East Anglia in Norwich > had a great time as a member of Run With It, the college improv group > senior year, made history as a member of the college’s first and only triple-crown-winning track and field team > on his poetry: “It was here at Dickinson that I really found my voice” > returned to Norwich after graduation to earn a master’s in poetry > writes and performs hip-hop as Sterling Duns, including a gig in Tel Aviv, Israel, while visiting former roommate Benson Ansell ’10 > “Through my music, I want to unify people across cultures, classes, religions, all forms of identity.” > currently assistant director of admissions and track and field coach at Friends Central School > On Sam Rose: “He’s someone who’s really about providing opportunities for people to thrive, and that’s something I want to do with my life.”
Alex Toole ’14
Matt Zugale
As environmental youth leader with the Cathance River Education Alliance, taught elementary-school children about conservation > fell in love with politics during the 2008 presidential election > met influential policy makers such as Michael Chertoff, Dennis Blair and P.J. Crowley while working as a student project supervisor for the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues > double-majored in political science and French and spent his junior year in Toulouse study-abroad program > applied to Teach for America after conducting research for a paper on educational inequity in the United States > interned twice for Sen. Susan Collins, once in Maine and again in Washington, D.C. > teaching in Baltimore > “I’m not sure what I plan to do next, but whatever it is, I know my Dickinson education will play a major role.”
Treasure Walker ’04 Decided she wanted to be an OB-GYN when she was 13 and her aunt was pregnant > “fell in love” with Dickinson’s campus on her first visit > Rose scholarship and other financial aid allowed her to attend Dickinson instead of a large state university > majored in biochemistry & molecular biology with her sights set on medical school > studied abroad in Norwich, England, and interned at a local doctor’s office, both of which “probably would have been impossible at a large university” > broadened her horizons by studying and working on social justice issues impacted by women’s health > earned her M.D. from the University of Maryland School of Medicine > served a two-year residency in Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa., in obstetrics and gynecology > applied for and earned a two-year fellowship in family planning at New York University, which sent her to Nepal and Ghana to study and help improve reproductive health abroad > starting a new position as associate fellowship director of family planning and assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and plans to continue her efforts in family planning education, research and clinical work domestically and globally > believes that what she learned at Dickinson “spurred” her interest in global health and is “amazed and thankful that there are people out there like Mr. Rose who recognize that students who lack financial resources still have something to contribute to the world.” Lisa Helfert
A Sam Rose ’58: Setting benchmarks from the get-go
member of Dickinson’s first nationalchampionship lacrosse team, Sam Rose ’58 has a talent for seeing where the ball is going, rather than where it’s been. The highly successful Washington, D.C., attorney and commercial real-estate developer envisioned as early as the 1980s the economic and social value of reshaping and reinvigorating blighted urban areas, including the then-barren land surrounding D.C.’s Union Station. And as the 21st century rolled into focus, Rose knew that two of the new millennium’s biggest challenges would be in education and the environment. He began his philanthropy at Dickinson with the Samuel G. Rose ’58
Scholarship Endowment Fund — first with a $200,000 commitment and over the years to a total of nearly $10 million — which has given economically disadvantaged students more than just a leg up, it’s changed the playing field altogether. In 2012, he established the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism, which supports an annual residency for environmental experts and activists — from the inaugural recipient Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, to this year’s Mark Ruffalo, actor and organizer of Water Defense. “As I look around the world,” Rose says. “I think education is a good place to put your money.”
35
[ beyond the limestone walls ]
Increasing our impact M I C H A E L D O N N E L LY ’ 0 2 , A L U M N I C O U N C I L P R E S I D E N T
Carl Socolow ’77
I
Michael Donnelly ’02 is principal of Willow Dale Elementary School in Warminster, Pa. He graduated from Dickinson with a B.A. in Spanish and a certificate in Latin American studies and earned an M.S. in education at St. Joseph’s University. In addition to serving on the Alumni Council and participating in several other volunteer activities, Donnelly is pursuing a doctorate at Temple University. Read his Volunteer Spotlight at dson.co/mdonnelly02.
t is with humility that I sit down to write my first column for Dickinson Magazine as your newly elected president of the Alumni Council. As I attempt to capture in words the essence of what it means to me to be a Dickinsonian, I can’t help but be reminded of the great friends — no, best friends — that I have because of a small, highly selective liberal-arts institution in Carlisle, Pa. Recently, while attending an event for another organization in Washington, D.C., I was having a conversation with a fellow educator. A former French teacher, she serves as a supervisor of world languages and English as a second language in her district in Maryland. We had not met before that day, and it was in a conversation with the person who introduced us that we discovered she too went to Dickinson. (How many of you have those “small world” moments? Dickinson might be a small school, but its reach is endless.) We shared stories of our experiences abroad; she spent time in France and I in Spain and Mexico. (Don’t forget to register for the upcoming global-education celebration in Washington, D.C., Oct. 16-18. Visit www.dickinson.edu/ globalstudiesreunion and register by Sept. 30.) We also discussed the Alumni Council and the many ways Dickinsonians can give back to the college and to current and future students. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way the college could train alumni volunteers so they feel current with the college?” she asked. My eyes widened as I responded, “That is a fantastic idea, and, actually, there is such a thing: The Volunteer Leadership Summit will take place the same weekend as the Alumni Council meeting and the Career Conference in October. I hope to see you there!” (Learn more about these events at dickinson.edu/alumni).
I consider it my duty to work with all alumni to increase our impact. We each have a story to tell, a moment to share, an experience to ponder.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
36
I share this brief interaction because that, to me, is what is distinctively Dickinson. It matters not the year of one’s graduation. Greek or independent, athlete or Mermaid Player, the common bond of being a Dickinsonian is what transcends all affinity relations. No matter where one is in life, stumbling upon a fellow Dickinsonian provides a sense of comfort and, albeit brief, a moment of pride and camaraderie. As president of the Alumni Council, I consider it my duty to work with all alumni to increase our impact. We each have a story to tell, a moment to share, an experience to ponder. We owe all of those to that distinctive institution surrounded by homegrown limestone walls. I encourage you to pick up the phone and call a roommate with whom you have not chatted in some time. Perhaps you want to write a note to a classmate who went abroad and never looked back, making a far-off town his or her new home. Maybe you are so inclined to send an email to that professor who made such an impact on your college experience that it would bring a smile to his or her face simply hearing a hello. During my tenure as your Alumni Council president, I intend to seek ways to bring Dickinson to you. As an alum, you are our No. 1 spokesperson, and I want you to be informed about the happenings at the college. I encourage you to write to me with your thoughts any time, and I will do my best to respond in a timely fashion. My email address is profe207@gmail.com. As an educational administrator in the public-school setting, I value feedback and constructive criticism. Introspection allows for us to become better and stronger. Your Alumni Council members, some of the most dedicated alumni I know, are here and willing to serve you to bring Dickinson to you. Here’s wishing for you a fantastic summer season. I look forward to seeing (and meeting) many of you at upcoming events!
Impact
opportunities SEPTEMBER 16
Welcome to the Neighborhood Reception (Multiple locations)
SEPTEMBER 25-27
Homecoming & Family Weekend SEPTEMBER 26
American and Global Mosaics 20th Anniversary Reunion OCTOBER 9-11
Career Conference & Volunteer Leadership Summit OCTOBER 16-17
Celebration of Global Education
Learn more at dickinson.edu/alumni.
37
[ closing thoughts ]
Machines to make us happy B Y SH AW N B E N DE R
A
t a liberal-arts college like Dickinson, the happiness of young adults is of primary importance to faculty and administrators, not to mention students. Worldwide, however, more and more people are beginning to worry about the happiness of older populations. With the exception of France and the U.K., all the countries of Western Europe have total fertility rates under the replacement level of 2.0. The United States has been under replacement level for the past two years, and its total fertility rate has been declining since 2008. Combined with the success of the modern welfare state in improving overall health, projections of future populations worldwide skew decidedly old. In Japan, where references to the “low-fertility, high-aging society” (shōshi kōreika shakai) appear regularly in governmental reports and popular media, consciousness of this demographic shift is particularly acute. Since 1989, when its birth rate hit what was then an all-time low of 1.57 births per woman, the Japanese government has taken measures to encourage couples to have more children. And while the birth rate has not increased significantly, the number of elderly continues to rise. Japan currently has the highest proportion of older adults in the world, with nearly a quarter of its population over the age of 65. In response, the country has begun exploring technical solutions to the problems posed by demographic change, particularly the development of robots for use in the service sector and in domestic spaces. One of the first fruits of these efforts is a robot called Paro. Developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Paro looks like a baby harp seal, complete with synthetic white fur. This fur masks a sophisticated robotic skeleton, which is controlled by two 32-bit CPUs that process information received from sensors in its body, whiskers, ears and eyes. Paro can learn to respond to the voice of its “owner” and to use of its own “name” in multiple languages. Eleven actuators enable it to respond physically by blinking and moving its head, front paws and hind limbs back and forth. A tiny speaker provides audio feedback in the form of occasional squeals.
Sounds and movements are produced not directly in response to the actions of a handler but are generated by internal software programming that runs sensor data through artificial intelligence algorithms, thus creating more unpredictable, “lifelike” behavior. All of this technology is directed toward making the end user —usually an elderly person — happy. Over the past few years, I have observed how care workers use Paro not only in Japan but also in Denmark, where the robot has been adopted enthusiastically. In most cases, Paro is used in interactions with elderly residents suffering with dementia. Nearly to a person the care workers attested to Paro’s ability to provide enjoyment and generate positive feelings in these residents. They emphasized the power of interaction with Paro to change negative emotions to positive ones, agitation to tranquility. In some cases, Paro was described in almost miraculous terms as the only device capable of making a particular resident happy or sociable. In others, it was thought of as a machine that could provide a momentary distraction or diversion for a resident who might be in a bad mood. For some care workers, this change in affect was an end in itself. Much more commonly, however, care workers told me that the positive emotions Paro elicited also enabled them to provide better care. They liked to use Paro “so that …”: “so that it is easier for me to communicate with her; so that it is easier for me to change her diaper; so that it is easier for me to help her shower; or so that it is easier for me to get her to eat,” and so on. Paro thus has a positive effect on the work lives of those who care for the elderly as well as on the everyday lives of older adults themselves. The robot Japan produced in response to a looming demographic crisis might then signal a new era of elder care, one in which the emotional needs of older adults are as important to support, for themselves and for their caregivers, as their material needs for food, shelter and medicine.
Shawn Bender is associate professor of East Asian studies. His research and teaching interests include contemporary Japanese society, popular culture, health and aging, demographic change and technology. This essay is adapted from a One College One Community lecture he gave in April.
d i ck i n s o n ma gazi ne Summer 2015
56
From lectures and guided tours to reunions and networking opportunities, wherever you are, you’ll find a Dickinson connection. To learn more about our 30,000-strong community, visit Dickinson.edu/alumni.
Kambria Fischer
Dickinson: 30,000 strong
P. O . B O X 1 7 7 3 C A R L I S L E , P A 1 7 0 1 3 - 2 8 9 6 PERIODICAL
W W W. D I C K I N S O N . E D U / M A G A Z I N E
P O S TA G E P A I D AT C A R L I S L E , P A AND ADDITIONAL MAILING OFFICE
[
well-stated
]
If you’re passionate about something, sometimes you have to work in the trenches, but if you work for organizations and causes you believe in and stay open to the possibilities, you can throw your hat in the ring when the opportunities arise. 2015 Cogan Alumni Fellowship recipient M AG G I E
A N DR E W S ’ 0 3 .
Read more on Page 50.
Each college has different needs and profiles, and we need to be transparent about the differences that exist. A L A N T. PAY N T E R , assistant director of admissions and coordinator of multicultural recruitment, in Room for Debate, The New York Times. Read more at dson.co/dsontimesdebate.
We need writers and thinkers — people who are willing to stand up to those who fail to use logic or reason but merely try to scare others with fire, brimstone and rhetoric. L E E TA N K L E ’ 1 0 , speaking at Dickinson’s annual Scholarship Luncheon. Read more at dson.co/powerfulgift.
It was like seeing an old friend I’d never met before. It was the best feeling of my life.
R E E D S A L MON S ’ 1 4 on meeting leukemia survivor Mark Tose, the recipient of stem cells donated by Salmons in 2013 through Be the Match. Tose and Salmons met for the first time in April. Learn more on Page 19 and at dson.co/salmonstransplant.
Freedom of expression sustains all the other freedoms we enjoy. Without free speech, democracy is a sham. I A N McE WA N ,
Commencement address. Read more on Page 12.
The apex of this work is so sublime that even if you’re a casual listener, you can’t help but have your entire body break out in goosebumps. A M Y W L OD A R S K I , choir director and associate professor of music, on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor. Learn more at dson.co/masteringmasterpiece.