Hamilton Magazine - Winter 2020 by Hamilton College

HAMILTON Magazine

Winter 2020

A PROMISE of ACCESS and OPPORTUNITY

THINGS YOU’LL LEARN THINGS YOU’LL LEARN That’s Elizabeth Warren Or is it Kellyanne Conway? College Hill is a springboard to most anything — including a gig trouping with The Capitol Steps. PAGE 6

It’s Ready for Action In this edition of “Extreme Makeover: Hamilton Edition,” check out recent improvements to an old favorite, the Alumni Gym. PAGE 13

Bezoars Made Great Gifts History Professor Mackenzie Cooley and a team of five students spent the summer studying nature, diversity, and loss in the New World under Spanish colonial rule (1500s to 1800s). Their research led to some interesting findings. PAGE 38

‘Good Laws’ Matter

John Donohue ’74, a leading legal scholar, hopes his research on right-to-carry gun laws will help inform the U.S. Supreme Court. PAGE 46

To Some, She’s ‘Mom’ Christine Johnson served many roles as founding director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program. She met recently with her former student and successor Phyllis Breland ’80 to mark HEOP’s 50th anniversary. PAGE 64

On the Cover

This artwork of the Alexander Hamilton statue takes a cue from Lady Justice to mark a decade since the College adopted its need-blind admission policy. For more on our inspiration for the cover illustration, turn the page. PAGE 26

This mosaic was created from campus images, each representing a gift made during last fallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Because Hamilton Day. The event raised more than $3 million for student financial aid. Read more on page 29.

COMMENTS THE TRUSTEES Stephen I. Sadove ’73, P’07,’10,’13, Chair Susan E. Skerritt K’77, P’11, Vice Chair

CHARTER TRUSTEES

HAMILTON MAGAZINE WINTER 2020 VOLUME 85, NO. 1

EDITOR Stacey J. Himmelberger P’15,’22 (shimmelb@hamilton.edu) SENIOR WRITER Maureen A. Nolan (manolan@hamilton.edu)

A Bold Decision and the Vision of a Legend STAC EY J. HI M M EL B ER G ER P’1 5,’22 E D I TO R

NECROLOGY WRITER Jorge L. Hernández ’72 STUDENT CONTRIBUTOR Eric Kopp ’22 ART DIRECTOR Mark M. Mullin DESIGNER Vanessa L. Colangelo PRODUCTION MANAGER Mona M. Dunn PRODUCTION ASSOCIATE Phyllis L. Jackson CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER Nancy L. Ford WEB COORDINATOR Esena J. Jackson STUDENT ILLUSTRATOR Charlotte Guterman ’22 VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING Melissa Farmer Richards ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS Michael J. Debraggio P’07

S WE BEGAN thinking about how to illustrate our cover story marking the 10th anniversary of Hamilton’s need-blind admission policy, we knew we wanted to make a bold statement — just as bold as the decision itself. After all, in the decade since the College adopted need-blind admission, the student profile has changed dramatically (increased applications and selectivity; stronger academic quality; richer ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity; improved retention). Our director of visual communications here at Hamilton had worked years ago with the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who is perhaps best known for the iconic I ❤ NY logo, the psychedelic poster for

Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and for co-founding New York magazine. He emailed Glaser to ask for his thoughts. I’ll admit, I was skeptical that an artist of Glaser’s renown would respond, let alone so quickly. Within days he sent a sketch. It was simple, yet powerful, featuring the iconic Alexander Hamilton statue blindfolded to represent the College’s policy: When prospective students apply for admission to Hamilton, their applications are evaluated solely on their accomplishments and potential without considering their ability to pay. Further, the College commits to meeting the full demonstrated need for each admitted student. We are beyond honored to have executed Glaser’s concept for our cover. As a longtime member of the College community, and especially as a parent of two Hamiltonians, I plan to display this illustration in my office as a reminder that when the brightest, most talented students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together to learn and live, the educational experience becomes richer for all. n

Aron J. Ain ’79, P’09,’11 Richard Bernstein ’80 Harold W. Bogle ’75, P’14 Brian T. Bristol P’11 Julia K. Cowles ’84 Robert V. Delaney, Jr. ’79 Carol T. Friscia K’77 Amy Owens Goodfriend ’82 Philip L. Hawkins ’78 David P. Hess ’77 Gregory T. Hoogkamp ’82 Linda E. Johnson ’80 Lea Haber Kuck ’87 Christopher P. Marshall ’90 Robert S. Morris ’76, P’16,’17 Daniel T.H. Nye ’88 Montgomery G. Pooley ’84, P’16,’19 Ronald R. Pressman ’80 Imad I. Qasim ’79 R. Christopher Regan ’77, P’08 Nancy Roob ’87 Alexander C. Sacerdote ’94 Jack R. Selby ’96 David M. Solomon ’84, P’16 David Wippman Srilata Zaheer

ALUMNI TRUSTEES Johannes P. Burlin ’87 Mark T. Fedorcik ’95 Daniel C. Fielding ’07 Matthew T. Fremont-Smith ’84 Ann E. Goizueta ’90, P’22 James E. Hacker ’81, P’19,’20 John Hadity ’83 Alison M. Hill ’87 Elizabeth A. Marran K’77 Greg M. Schwartz ’94 Kathleen O’Connor Stewart ’84 Sharon S. Walker ’90

LIFE TRUSTEES Henry W. Bedford II ’76 David W. Blood ’81 Christina E. Carroll P’90 Drew S. Days III ’63 Gerald V. Dirvin ’59, P’84, GP’17 Sean K. Fitzpatrick ’63, P’87 Lee C. Garcia ’67 Eugenie A. Havemeyer GP’00 Robert G. Howard ’46 Joel W. Johnson ’65, P’93 Kevin W. Kennedy ’70 † A.G. Lafley ’69 † George F. Little II ’71, P’04 David E. Mason ’61, P’93,’96 Arthur J. Massolo ’64, P’93 Elizabeth J. McCormack Donald R. Osborn P’86 Mary Burke Partridge P’94 John G. Rice ’78 Howard J. Schneider ’60, P’85,’87,’89, GP’18,’21 Thomas J. Schwarz ’66, P’01 A. Barrett Seaman ’67 Nancy Ferguson Seeley, GP’17 Chester A. Siuda ’70 Charles O. Svenson ’61, P’00 Thomas J. Tull ’92, P’13 Susan Valentine K’73 Jack Withiam, Jr. ’71, P’16,’20 Jaime E. Yordán ’71 † Chairmen Emeriti

PRESIDENT OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION Paddy J. McGuire ’81

H A M I LTO N

hamilton.edu/hub a great place to connect

CHECK OUT THE HAMILTON HUB, WHERE YOU CAN ... n

Read what’s new with fellow Hamilton and Kirkland alumni, and post your own news and photos.

Engage instantly by adding a comment or “liking” a post. n Post notices of events and gatherings happening in your area. n

Customize searches to find alumni by class year or to view events by region. n Sign up for a weekly digest of news delivered right to your inbox. Simply click on the box that looks like this: n

Questions? Contact editor@hamilton.edu or your class correspondent, whose contact information can be found on the Hub or in the Hubbub section of this magazine. W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

EDWARD BORRELLI, MAYOR’S OFFICE OF EDUCATION

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

INSPIRE

Max Akuamoah-Boateng ’09 AS A MATH TEACHER in the Houston Independent School District, Max Akuamoah-Boateng ’09 kept a stash of apples and extra food from the cafeteria, and even bought food for students who were hungry. As a high school soccer coach, he’d encounter players who missed school to find work or whose families were at risk of becoming homeless. Barriers to education were standing in the way of their success. Akuamoah-Boateng turned to the community, looking for people to help meet students’ needs. He soon moved into a job developing Houston’s Wraparound Services Department, which connects families with community services and support. For the

past year, he’s been director of operations for community schools in the Philadelphia mayor’s Office of Education. “It’s rethinking the way we do schools, how we connect resources and services, to ensure the wellbeing of all students,” he explains. The best part of his job? Watching students progress from struggling to successful. “They feel safe, they feel healthy, they feel like they are part of a community that cares about them, so they are proud to say, ‘This is my city, this is where I come from, this is a city that took care of me,’” Akuamoah-Boateng says. “Knowing that we, as a city department, are making that possible for young people is so inspirational.” n

TRAILBLAZE Julie Parker ’83

IN 1 SAMUEL, the title character is a little boy in the temple whom God calls on to prophesize to the priest, which the child does. In 2 Kings, an enslaved Israelite girl speaks up to save her owner from leprosy. The Bible is filled with relatively unsung stories of children, says the Rev. Julie Parker ’83. “Once we take these stories and we lift them up, they have a life in our minds and in the world,” she says. She has dedicated her scholarship to “raising up” those stories. Parker, associate professor of biblical studies at the General Theology Seminary of the Episcopal Church, pioneered the field of “childist” biblical scholarship. As she explains it, the field examines biblical children to reassess their roles and importance. Scholars also look at the construction of child characters and ask whose interests are at stake in the portrayals of the text. “Childist interpretation is analogous to second- and third-wave feminism in terms

H A M I LTO N

of how we look at women and children in the Bible. Scholars ask how the understandings of characters have influenced us today and how we can question traditional interpretations,” Parker says. Working as an ordained United Methodist minister during her first years after College, Parker earned a doctorate in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible from Yale University in 2009. “I realized that there was this huge gap in biblical studies. No one was looking at the children in the Bible. I began to develop a biblical field, which has since burgeoned,” she says. In 2008, she founded, within the Society of Biblical Literature, a section for the study of children, and in the last decade publications in the field have proliferated. “Like a healthy child, the field of childist studies is growing strong. Like a happy parent, I am grateful for its development,” Parker says. n

NANCY L. FORD

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

MAKE ART

Jon Bellona ’03 SOUND ARTIST JON BELLONA ’03 created his first installation as a senior fellow at Hamilton. In The Sound Memorial for the Veterans of the Vietnam War, the names of the 58,200-plus Americans killed in action are read simultaneously through eight speakers, names stacked upon names. Bellona included a stereo version of the piece in his first solo show, which took place this fall in a gallery at Utica College. Bellona, who has a doctorate in music composition and computer technology, is

co-director of Harmonic Laboratory, an interdisciplinary arts collective focused on art and technology collaborations. It’s based in Eugene, Ore., where Bellona teaches audio production at the University of Oregon. His work, which he describes as data driven, focuses on environmental sustainability. Bellona may spend weeks researching specific science, new technology, and other streams of knowledge for his art. One of his most recent pieces is Wildfire, consisting of a 48-foot speaker array that plays

back a wave of sounds from real Western fires at the speed of the actual wildfires. For that, Bellona talked to fire experts and scientists, learning about rates of spread and other esoteric fire facts. “One thing I really love about working on pieces like this is that every piece is different, and the challenges are different; they ask different questions, you get to go down the rabbit hole of learning about a new topic,” he explains. n

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

CRACK WISE

Nancy Dolliver K’75

FIGHT POVERTY

Edward “Mac” Abbey ’69 HE ORIGINALLY WANTED TO BE a school principal, but that career plan didn’t last long. After Hamilton, Mac Abbey ’69 joined the Peace Corps and traveled the world. Through this process, he learned about the work of NGOs and how they can help those in need. He had found his purpose. Abbey spent the bulk of his career with Plan International, an organization that advances children’s rights and equality for girls. He served as director in countries ranging from Egypt to Bolivia to Bangladesh. Following a few years in Liberia managing Save the Children International’s response to the Ebola crisis, he landed at War Child Holland, a nonprofit that helps children in war-torn countries obtain crucial educational and psychosocial support. Managing the organization’s operations for Sudan, he oversaw three field directors and the country team, focusing on refugee populations. “In the ’70s and ’80s there was much greater extreme poverty in the world. We thought it was our role to speed up that progress in the communities we were working in,” Abbey says. “What we do is try and support those humanitarian efforts that allow people to help themselves.” Although Abbey retired last spring, he continues to serve War Child Holland as a country advisor. Through his decades of work on microfinance, community health, and literacy programs focused on refugee populations, he’s optimistic that his work has had an impact. “You can’t pin down our role, but extreme poverty has gone down.” n — Eric Kopp ’22

H A M I LTO N

WHEN NANCY DOLLIVER K’75 joined The Capitol Steps more than 20 years ago, she mostly played politicians’ wives because female politicos were scarce. Now that situation is changing, providing the troupe with a growing pool of women power-players. The Capitol Steps, based (where else?) in Washington, D.C., is a song-and-skit political satire ensemble that travels the country amusing both elephants and don-

keys with songs that have recently ranged from “Wake Me Up in Mar-a-Lago” to “The Sound of Sanders.” “We’ve always said that our goal is to be equal-opportunity offenders,” Dolliver says. Migrating to the Steps from a career as a television production manager, Dolliver has now mastered the quick costume change. “I think what’s fun is going out as Kellyanne Conway and then coming back five minutes later and being Elizabeth Warren, and then five minutes after that, you’re Betsy DeVos,” she says. In these times of polarized politics, Dolliver thinks people see political humor as a relief from the nastiness. “Laugh at the other side, but also laugh at yourself,” she advises. n

TELL STORIES Jessica Moulite ’14

AT THE ROOT, an online magazine of black news, opinions, politics, and culture, video journalist Jessica Moulite ’14 tells nuanced stories through short, documentary-style pieces and as host of The Range, a roundtable discussion by thought leaders. Recently she conducted a much-praised, exclusive interview with U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts about Pressley’s alopecia. When Moulite got the assignment, she knew she’d treat the story with special care; she too has alopecia. “All of the congresswoman’s feelings of embarrassment, shame, and pain were so relatable to me because those feelings were mine, and I knew how high the stakes were in telling such a personal story of a government official,” Moulite says. “I wanted to tell Rep. Pressley’s

story because the stigma surrounding women’s hair loss — and alopecia in particular — is one that needs to be broken.” Moulite earned a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. When she pitches stories, she often thinks back to her women’s studies’ senior seminar at Hamilton, and asks herself, “Whose voices are excluded from this narrative? Or if we are going to tell this story about a particular marginalized group within black people, how do we make sure that we are doing this story with the most amount of care?” n

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

SUNY PURCHASE

GET RESULTS Tom Schwarz ’66

ASK THE RECENTLY RETIRED president of Purchase College, State University of New York, what he’ll miss most about his position, and he distills it into two words: “The kids.” Ask him what he’s proudest of during his 17-year career there, and his answer is nearly as succinct and directly reflects the first: “Increasing graduation rates; basically doubling them.” Tom Schwarz ’66, who was one of the longest-running presidents in the SUNY system, is not predisposed to expound on his accomplishments, but that’s OK. Evidence abounds. The institution he helped transform enumerated the successes he oversaw: increasing student retention and the graduation rate; growing the college foundation and investment portfolio; implementing $400 million in capital construction and rehabilitation; and building Purchase’s reputation as a national leader in sustainability. The list goes on. Schwarz, a life trustee of Hamilton, had an unconventional path to a leadership role in higher education, taking his first steps at his alma mater. In 1999, during President Gene Tobin’s sabbatical, Schwarz served as acting Hamilton president, a distinct change of direction. He’d been a successful attorney, a partner, and national practice leader of the litigation department at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In January 2002, Schwarz became Purchase’s interim president, which led to the presidency. “People say to me, ‘How did you go from being a lawyer to being a college president?’ My answer has always been that I had a great liberal arts education,” he says. One of Schwarz’s most innovative accomplishments as president is the Broadview Senior Living Community, a nonprofit organization formed by Purchase to construct a campus senior “living and learning retirement community.” Broadview

is designed to create a revenue stream to support student scholarships and faculty — and to integrate its residents with the college, to the benefit of both sides. Broadview will consist of 174 apartments and 46 villas, some available for moderate-income seniors, and a Learning Commons, a space shared by seniors and students, faculty, and staff. Schwarz remains active in the Broadview project. Not surprisingly, that’s about the students, too. One reason he’s an advocate of the model is that he believes it will benefit Purchase students who lack the career connections that higher-income students enjoy. People who had high-level career success and who also opt to live on a college campus, Schwarz says, are by definition interested in students.

“That translates into social capital for students who don’t otherwise have it. It translates into mentoring. It translates into advising. Turn it around the other way, it potentially turns into individual philanthropy for students,” Schwarz points out. As for what else he’ll do now that he’s no longer a college president, he’s pondering that. He knows it won’t be golf, tennis, or a move to Florida. “It could be something involved with the colleges that are having difficulty. I’ve had some brief conversations with people about that. It could be something dealing with building retirement communities on college and university campuses, which I think is going to happen more frequently because of the demographics,” he says. n

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

PROMOTE EQUITY Diana van Maasdijk ’93

AS CO-FOUNDER AND CEO of Equileap, Diana van Maasdijk ’93 is a global force in the fight for workplace gender equity. Equileap uses investment capital to promote equity, staking out a position as “the leading organization providing data and insights on gender equality in the corporate sector.” We asked her about what she does and why she does it.

How did you reach the decision to co-found Equileap? I was disappointed to keep reading reports on the pay gap, the lack of women in leadership positions, or sexual harassment in the workplace more than 20 years after graduating from Hamilton. I felt we needed a new strategy to tackle gender parity at a global level. Policy and awareness-raising work could only do so much — and the idea of using the power of money to create change at a faster pace was born. At Equileap, we set up a team of researchers who assess thousands of companies in 23 countries, covering all major developed market indices. Today we provide insights that help investors and companies make informed decisions that lead to a more just and equal global economy. We research and score companies on their gender balance throughout the company as well as workplace policies, gender pay gap, parental leave, and more.

“I felt we needed a new strategy to tackle gender parity at a global level.”

Why did you make gender equality your life’s work? I have both a Dutch and Ecuadorian background, and always enjoyed reading about political and feminist theories that explained issues at a macro and micro level. Even in the richest countries, poverty has the face of a woman — and it’s the structural, social, cultural, and economic gender inequalities that keep all women from becoming economically independent and reaching their full potential. At Hamilton, I majored in world politics and minored in women’s studies. My women’s studies classes, and in particular some books written by feminist women of color, sparked my interest for gender equality at an international level. After Hamilton, I got my master’s in international development (with a focus on gender) from American University’s School of International Service. I started my career working for nonprofits, initially in the U.S., then in Senegal, and finally in the Netherlands, where I have lived for 20 years. After my third son was born, I left my job at MamaCash, the oldest international women’s fund, to support philanthropists as a consultant. That took me to my last job for ABN AMRO bank where the idea behind Equileap was born.

What are Equileap’s biggest successes? 1. Building a unique database with over 3,500 companies assessed on transparency and progress toward achieving gender equality 2. Having nearly 20 of the biggest financial service providers globally license our gender equality data 3. Engaging with leading companies worldwide and encouraging them to disclose their gender equality data publicly.

GRACIELA ROSSETTO

We can’t begin to solve a problem until we understand where we’re coming from, so data is the number-one step toward equality. n

H A M I LTO N

BECAUSE HAMILTONIANS [...]

NEGOTIATE

Laura Engelhardt ’95 LAURA ENGELHARDT ’95 SPENT 11 years at Goldman Sachs, where she advanced to become head of strategy and planning for the securities division. Her tenure overlapped with the 2008 financial crisis; in the aftermath, she helped to implement the new provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act. Yet despite her success as a businesswoman, Engelhardt found it increasingly difficult to balance work and family. “I did some soul searching and looked back at what I liked about law school [at Stanford],” Engelhardt says. “One of the things I loved is alternative dispute resolution.” That led her in 2017 to found Neutrality Now, a company based in Summit, N.J., focused on arbitration and mediation. Engelhardt’s clients can avoid a long litigation process and expensive lawyers’ fees by

having a neutral third party either decide their case or facilitate discussion between disputing parties. As an example, she mentions a dispute that she handled between a tenant and property owner in New York Civil Court. “It was nice because the judge was completely overwhelmed, presiding over two courtrooms,” Engelhardt recalls. “Not only were the parties happy, you should’ve seen the court attorney’s eyes when we came back and we said ‘they agreed to a settlement.’” Every negotiation surprises Engelhardt. “I’ve never had the parties reach the agreement that I would have thought they would have reached at the beginning,” she says. “Even when people say it’s only about the money, it’s never just about the money.” n — Eric Kopp ’22

ANALYZE

Brad Smallwood ’90 BRAD SMALLWOOD ’90 JOINED Facebook in 2008, just as it was beginning to run advertisements on its platform and its annual revenues had not yet topped $100 million. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg recruited him away from Yahoo, where he ran the display advertising business. Now Facebook vice president of marketing science, Smallwood oversees a group of more than 500 people, and roughly 20% of them have doctorates, who do analytics on the business side. Their responsibilities include helping advertisers measure digital ad effectiveness, building analytical and measurement tools, and more. Smallwood’s post-Hamilton path included earning a master’s degree in operations

research at Stanford University. “I guess my career aspirations were probably pretty similar to what I’m doing today. It’s just back then the Internet existed, but it was not a thing; it wasn’t used for business at all. So I was doing kind of what I do now for very different types of companies,” Smallwood explains. Doing business on the Internet now is mundane — Facebook’s revenues are in the $50 to $60 billion range, and Smallwood still likes going to work in the morning. “The great thing about working at Facebook is that you can actually see the impact that you make on the world,” he says. “I know it sounds cliché, but the things that we do, we’re not doing them for a hundred people or a thousand people or even 10 million people, we’re doing them for billions of people.” n

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

THE THEBIG BIGPICTURE PICTURE

Wish I May, Wish I Might ON A CLEAR, MILD SEPTEMBER evening, night-sky enthusiasts gathered at Hamilton’s Peters Observatory to catch a glimpse of Jupiter, Saturn, and the waning gibbous moon through a 12" Mead telescope. Victor Lou ’21 captured this long-exposure image of the observatory and the beautiful, star-filled sky that also included a few planes streaking into view.

10 10

H A M I LTO N H A M I LTO N

W W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

Cheers to a Great Toast

NANCY L. FORD

ASK AN EXPERT

by Amy Gaffney, director of Hamilton’s Oral Communication Center

Think back on the toasts you’ve sat through over the years at weddings, retirements, birthdays. How many stand out in a good way? And how do you feel about those you yourself have delivered … or are pondering right now? We turned to an expert for advice on how to offer up a great toast.

1| KNOW YOUR PURPOSE In any speech it’s important to keep in mind why you are there: Why are you giving this particular toast? Why have you been asked to do this? It’s also important to keep in mind that the focus is on whomever or whatever the toast is intended to honor. If you are toasting a couple who just got married, the focus should be on them and their relationship, not on you and your relationship to one of them.

2| KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE Who you are addressing plays a role in determining what is appropriate to talk about. The stories that you tell to your college friends are different than the stories that you tell to your grandparents. And the stories that you would want to have told about you are different if your extended family is there.

3| KNOW YOUR POINT What is it that you’re trying to convey? You typically have been asked to give the toast for a particular reason, to celebrate some milestone. Keeping this in mind will help you be focused so that it is not a long and rambling toast, but has a very specific point that you are trying to make.

Adding Sounds to Silence FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, Hamilton’s F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series has welcomed to campus the Alloy Orchestra, the three-man ensemble called “the best in the world at accompanying silent films” by critic Roger Ebert. The group is renowned for creating original scores using everything from traditional percussion instruments to high-tech electronics to peculiar found objections. Last fall, the musicians made one last stop on campus before going their separate ways. They brought waves of sound to Buster Keaton’s 1926 epic action thriller The General and the 1927 classic Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s film known as the first full-length science fiction drama. Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald has directed F.I.L.M. for more than 25 years.

FLYING THE COOP Through the Community Outreach and Opportunity Project (COOP), 11 members of the Class of ’23 are serving as COOP Service Interns this year. Each receives a two-year paid internship at an area nonprofit. This year’s students are working at:

BARGAIN GROCER • BOCES ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION (language classes for refugees) • COMPASSION COALITION • EMMAUS HOUSE/ST. MARGARET’S HOUSE • KIRKLAND TOWN LIBRARY • NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER (outreach and prevention/Eleanor J. Wertimer Center for Children at the Utica Family Courthouse) • PARKWAY CENTER • ROOT FARM • UNITED WAY

Y’ALL READY FOR THIS? HAMILTON’S ALUMNI GYM opened in 1940 with an update coming in 1978. Fast forward to this January when the latest renovation brought new maple flooring, an enhanced air circulation system, and a fresh coat of paint and finish to the space used primarily for recreational sports and physical education classes. Still to come this summer is HVAC equipment replacement and roof repairs. Thirty workers from across eight trades completed the six-month project at a cost of $2 million. Here are a few photos, old and new, to mark the grand reopening. NANCY L. FORD

The 1975-76 men’s basketball team in one of its last group shots taken in the Alumni Gym before the Scott Field House opened in 1978 (top row from left): Coach Don Alberico, Gerry O’Neill ’78, John Klauberg ’78, Bill Tarbell ’77, Head Coach Tom Murphy, Kevin Smith ’77, Willie Jackson ’78, Captain Martin Guy ’76, and Coach Bob North. (bottom row): Cedric Oliver ’79, Mark Curran ’77, Brian Coombes ’77, Mark Kasdorf ’76, and Mark Rybarczyk ’77

NANCY L. FORD

Hamilton basketball action in 1940, the year the gym opened

RECENT NEWS HIGHLIGHTS from across the Hamilverse 1 KIRNER-JOHNSON BUILDING

A fall screening of Archaeology at the River Narrows: Indigenous Occupation of the Slocan Valley, produced by Petra Elfström ’18, showcased the work of Anthropology Professor Nathan Goodale and student researchers. The film focuses on work conducted at the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village in British Columbia. Since 2009, Goodale has led a field school that trains students in excavation, survey, and mapping, as they explore the archaeology and oral tradition of the interior Pacific Northwest. To view the film, visit hamilton.edu/slocan.

2 KENNEDY CENTER FOR THEATRE

AND THE STUDIO ARTS

A song. A camera. A personal story. These were some of the elements students considered at a theatre workshop led by Michael Breslin ’13 and Patrick Foley. They were on campus to present their play, A Doll’s House, Part 3, and later met with students to explore how an original concept can be improved with the slightest changes in character placement, lighting, dialogue, or sound. Breslin earned his M.F.A. in acting at Yale School of Drama.

3 FILLIUS EVENTS BARN

Performers in traditional dress demonstrated dances, and Oneida rapper Daygot Leeyos shared original beats and lyrics at the second annual Haudenosaunee Social in October. “Our goal was to bring awareness to campus about Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] culture and about the land that we stand on, because it is Oneida land,” said John Dennis ’20, a member of the Shenandoah-Kirkland Initiative which sponsored the event.

4 DAYS-MASSOLO CENTER

Hamilton marked the 35th anniversary of La Vanguardia with a community talk, a Latin cuisine luncheon, and an indoor block party. The organization, whose mission is to give a voice to Latinx students and enrich campus diversity, hosts student performers at its Café con Leche, Empanada Game Night, and discussions and lectures with Latinx activists to highlight social issues within Latin America and for Latinx people living in the U.S.

WANT MORE HAMILTON NEWS? Visit hamilton.edu/news. And if you’re not receiving our monthly Hamilton Headlines in your inbox, send a note to editor@hamilton.edu, and we’ll add you to the list.

H A M I LTO N

5 WELLIN MUSEUM

Tightrope, an exhibit by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, explored the balance between the progress of technology and its impact on the environment. As part of the event, the artist worked with students to create Flowers & Roots, a sculpture inspired by peonies in Hamilton’s gardens. At more than 9' tall and 17' wide, the work is comprised of repurposed computer parts, electrical wire, bronze, and cement.

6 BRISTOL CENTER 7

Food Jam, a two-day event sponsored by the Philosophy Department, brought to campus local food producers and faculty experts from several colleges and universities. Panel discussions addressed structural and practical challenges small farmers face as corporate agriculture dominates the U.S. food system.

7 SCOTT FIELD HOUSE

From breaking into comedy with Second City, to becoming the first woman head writer at Saturday Night Live, to her work on the comedy series 30 Rock, Tina Fey discussed her career — and prompted a few laughs — during her visit to campus as part of the Sacerdote Great Names Series. Selena Coppock ’02, a writer, editor, and stand-up comedian, moderated.

8 STEUBEN FIELD 6

Kicker Sam Thoreen ’22 was named to the D3football.com Team of the Week for his role in Hamilton’s 31-28 win versus Amherst on Oct. 19. It was the second win for the Continentals football squad in 30 meetings with the Mammoths. Thoreen’s 40-yard field goal with four seconds remaining completed Hamilton’s rally from a 28-17 deficit in the final four minutes. Earlier, his 44-yarder was the longest in the NESCAC for the 2019 season.

W I N T E R 2 0 21 90

SHOW AND TELL

18 18

H A M I LTO N

Lo A UL AND e P AG Th OP PR

Ra am bb ba as le-r nn se ou er d b sin Sc s, g y m Fr slo sc iac en an to hoo ca m us k gan , t Sc s. Go the ls, ad oy ia In rb pu and e m s, cca sp ac ir an , he sh f in s ore d wh ing v- or tr t e h e er ve o r wo a incr et d an n eti rd 20 pu e ci i a s ga red s fr sh se pl t re la om fo d i ays rips tt st r r nd . t es y Le W o ef us . M ea nin h t or h a t os r a . P m ria t m e S t i s a hr an l o o a m a d utp kes vie pr pro ses t op es fe en ut, the Un si ss cra ne to c io ve or ft ss the olle n st ,p o e er f G d to in he cti art h so o i ap erm en ci roic n u ng i e s, et n n ar an a rgiz y. act iqu 19 e n of e i 70 30 d e a bu s i . T 0+ Ru wo he ild ts po ssia rkf r in p st n orc g ang os er La e so e t . s ci of ers he ngu The ,h al t h is a e d e m on ge col , t me say at s a lec he s, s, ed nd ti le fro we to Li on ad m re Ha ter of in th c r g m atu Sov ro e lo eat ilt le ng ed on res ietof ’s , in er Br to th Sp cl a p e ezh dis ec ud ro Co ne pl ia es pa m v ay lC p g m pe in ol ins an un ri fa da le , o ist d ct ct o i o o Pa f r ns rt the ies, . y, i n C an ol d d th W ar e ,

SHOW AND TELL

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

VOICES

VIEW FROM COLLEGE HILL

Priorities BY SUZA NNE K EEN Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty

AM ETERNALLY GRATEFUL THAT Brown University was practicing need-blind admission when I applied in 1979. My full scholarship there, and my education in Brown’s open curriculum, made exploration of my vocation and my subsequent career possible. I met amazing people, not only my inspiring professors, at Brown. They came from diverse backgrounds, and they each had passions driving their intellectual, athletic, artistic, and socially conscious endeavors. Without need-blind holding the door open, I would have still gotten an education, but I wouldn’t have done it in the company of such extraordinary people. My parents later gave Brown, as annual fund gifts, the whole amount of my scholarship aid. It took them many years. I was drawn to Hamilton for two reasons linked to my own experience as an undergraduate: the open curriculum and need-blind admission. The open curriculum, which invites students into an educational process stimulated by their own interests, means that classrooms are filled with students who have chosen to be there with one another, drawn together by what they will learn together. Guided by expert faculty and supported by a community on the Hill, Hamilton students are co-creators of their educations, in a curriculum that is always adjusting to meet their aspirations. They are strivers. Hamilton students have in common extraordinary aptitude and willingness to work hard — but in practically every other way they differ from one another. They come from many neighborhoods around the country and the world, and their preparation for college is remarkably diverse. Some are polyglot. Some are fluent in art or math or music. Some vibrate with the compulsion to change and even save the world. Some systematically fill their

H A M I LTO N

packs with the tools, techniques, and experiences they will need to bring prosperity to themselves, their families, and their communities. Some immerse themselves in the oldest works of human creativity, and some work side-by-side with faculty to make new knowledge. Some practice the team play and collaboration that will distinguish them in science labs and on athletics fields. Some get lost in a book and come out on the other side more aware and more attentive people. Needless to say, many Hamilton students would recognize themselves in combinations of those descriptions. The commitment to access and affordability means that all students have been selected not for their financial wherewithal, but for what they can bring to the four-year conversation. Elite colleges, if they do not take care, can fall into patterns of rewarding existing privilege. Alternatively, they can improve the quality of experience for every student by emphasizing opportunities and access for the most meritorious. For Hamilton to have made that principled commitment a decade ago, when the Great Recession was causing other colleges and universities to retrench, to rescind, and regroup, impressed me greatly. A few years ago when I was departing Washington and Lee for Hamilton, a board member quizzed me about my decision. (After all, Hamilton’s endowment is about half a billion dollars less than W&L’s.) I told her about the diversity of the student body, the percentage of Pell-eligible students, and Hamilton’s decade-long commitment to making admission decisions without considering ability to pay. She asked me with genuine bewilderment, “How are they doing it?” I hadn’t even moved to Hamilton yet, but I was already proud to answer, “Priorities.” n

QUOTABLES

Whose planet? Our planet! Brooke Kessler ’22 posed the question and hundreds of members of the Hamilton community shouted in response as they joined counterparts around the world to participate in the Global Climate Strike on Sept. 20. Students and faculty members spoke with urgency and hope as the crowd rallied around the promise of continued action on environmental issues.

Molly Voigt ’15, state legislative manager at Gabrielle Giffords’ Courage to Fight Gun Violence, speaking as part of an alumni panel this fall marking 50 years of Hamilton’s Program in Washington, D.C.

I’ve really seen a straight line in my career starting with the DC program. Illustrations by Charlotte Guterman ’22

The move responds to the recent explosion of [student] interest in data analysis, particularly of very large data sets. Sally Cockburn, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Mathematics, on the College’s new minor in statistics. In addition to growing interest at Hamilton, the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences cited an 88% increase in statistics courses between 2010 and 2015 at fouryear colleges and universities.

Jonas Brodin, a faculty member at The Swedish Program at the Stockholm School of Economics, who is teaching public policy at Hamilton this year, having exchanged roles with Maynard-Knox Professor of Government and Law Frank Anechiarico ’71.

VOICES In my days on the Hill, I performed with Yodapez, sang in The Hamiltones, and wrote funny articles in The Spectator so, not to be overdramatic, but my entire life has led up to this point. Selena Coppock ’02, who moderated a discussion with Emmy Award-winning writer and actor Tina Fey at a Sacerdote Great Names at Hamilton event in October.

It’s a difference of training people directly, and, in the U.S., teaching people to train themselves. W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

THE BIG QUESTION

WE ASKED OUR READERS

Illustrations by Alex Eben Meyer

I I

WAS AN AMERICAN STUDIES

major, and my senior thesis culminated in a paper called “The City and the Suburban Ideal: A History of the Growth of Suburbs in Chicago Between 1870 and 1920.” I now recognize that I was doing something rather unusual — looking at urban history through the window of history and anthropology at a time when we rarely applied the notion of culture to ourselves. I spent hours on the floor of the library, reading popular journals of the early 20th century, “listening” to how Americans were making sense of their changing reality. In retrospect, I was also using concepts that had not yet been named, such as discourse and the social construction of reality. With the support of my advisors, David Locke and Grant Jones, I discovered my passion for the history of ideas, an interest that inspired my journey to become a scholar-practitioner. — MARTHA FREYMANN MISER K’75

H A M I LTO N

N 1989, I DESIGNED AN experiment looking at 6-yearolds’ understanding of sarcasm. Using hand puppets, I acted out a sarcastic skit for first-graders at Clinton Elementary School. Only one 6-year-old understood the sarcasm — the daughter of Professor Doug Weldon, head of the Psychology Department. Oh, the look of fatherly pride when I shared her sarcasm success with Professor Weldon and the Psych Department! I successfully defended my thesis and graduated with honors, something I had never even thought about doing until I was encouraged by my advisor. Hamilton’s small class size and involvement by the professors helped push me and gave me the confidence to try for more. That launched my career journey, where I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Pennsylvania and work today as a clinician at a family practice, offering counseling (and a little humor!) to patients suffering from anxiety and depression when they come to see their primary care physician. A little humor can go a long way!

— KAREN STEVENSON LANDRUM ’89

Y HAMILTON SENIOR

thesis was titled “The Re-creation of Place and Identity in Utica’s Refugee and Immigrant Kitchens.” I interviewed local restaurant chefs, culinary entrepreneurs, and home cooks who migrated to the Utica area about how they've used food to both preserve ties to their home country and reestablish a new sense of place. Focusing on the relationship between food and cultural continuity, I attempted to learn about traditional methods of preserving and transmitting foodways through the exchange of stories, memories, and recipes. The plan for my research project was to create a community cookbook to embody the rich and diverse food culture of Utica’s refugee and immigrant populations. However, only one of my eight informants was able to provide a written recipe. My project changed significantly when I realized it was no longer feasible

to craft a cookbook of written recipes, for they simply did not exist in the way I anticipated. Through this experience, I learned that oral tradition is still the primary mechanism for passing down culinary and cultural knowledge, and for this reason, we have to be open to connecting on a personal level, seeking and listening attentively to human stories. I was also inspired to start having conversations with my own family members, especially the older generations. I would also urge others to discover the keeper of your family’s traditions, the origins and ancestral history of your familial foodways, and how folklore and kitchen practices have changed over time. Record these conversations, learn and transcribe a family recipe, and teach your peers or children how to cook traditionally ... before the stories are lost. — LAUREN HOWE ’13

What was your senior project/ thesis, and what did you learn from the experience?

Y SENIOR PROJECT IN 1972 was an analysis of

RADUATING IN 1974,

one of the major issues at the time was the surge in gasoline prices above $1/gallon (gasp!) and alternating odd/even fill-up days (on one trip back from Providence, R.I., I had to wait on the Thruway until after midnight to buy gas to get back to campus). Reflecting this, my senior thesis was an exploration of the four-day work week, working 10 hours per day. Many benefits (less commuting, saving both time and gas, and a long weekend every week), but it never really got momentum. Then I went to work and found out that I got to work 10 hours per day all five days and a few extra on the weekend! TGIR (Thank God I’m Retired). — BOB SINCHE ’74

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot) and its relevance to reality as one of the forefront plays of the Theater of the Absurd movement. Looking back now, what was I thinking? The original play is in French with the submitted essay also in that language, written under the supervision and sponsorship of the legendary French Professor James Davis. Two life lessons learned from this project for my future career as a writer and editor: 1) Never undertake an assignment of that intellectual magnitude unless your heart is in it 100%. 2) Never think you can BS your way out of anything, not even in your own native language. — JORGE HERNÁNDEZ CABALLERO ’72

S A SENIOR FELLOW,

I spent my senior year researching and writing a historical novel. My curriculum that year was self-designed, with the help of my advisors Bill Rosenfeld and Margie Thickstun. I traveled to the Massachusetts town where my novel took place and spent hours in the historical society looking at maps, letters, and other documents. I talked to a professor at Harvard who’d written a book about the Salem witch trials. I read books about Puritanism, about witchcraft, about life in Colonial America, about medicinal herbs. I watched a video about childbirth so that I could more accurately describe it in a crucial scene. Then, I had to learn how to synthesize all of that research and tell an exciting, compelling story. Being able to focus exclusively on the novel was a gift, but it was also a lesson in perseverance. I lived and breathed that book

all year. I wrote more than I’d ever written before. I tore up entire chapters and rewrote them. I learned how to receive critiques of my work and how to address those critiques as I revised. Sometimes I’d hit a wall, and Bill and Margie would talk me through it. At the end of the year, I had written a book. I’m currently a writer, so I use the skills I learned during my Senior Fellowship every single day. I plan, I research, I write, I rewrite, and I revise. Each one of my published stories came to be, at least in part, because of what I learned my senior year at Hamilton. And even when the writing is overwhelming and I’m drowning in words, I keep going. I finish the story. — JENNIFER KLEIN HUDAK ’93

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

COMMON GROUND

Where Listening Replaces Compromise BY C HR I ST I N E WAL SH ’21

A new student organization, Hamilton Bridge, goes beyond bridging political divides.

e, a group of students committed to “creating a culture of understanding among people of different beliefs, backgrounds, and political viewpoints,” aim to recognize one another’s humanity through ambitious dialogue. Bridge encourages nuanced and inclusive discussion across the political spectrum, where listening replaces the conventional goal of bipartisan compromise. By incorporating our personal experiences into debates surrounding pervasive social norms and national policy, we can understand why people think the way they do — and not automatically jump at the chance to change it. Our biggest success in fostering genuine dialogue across the political spectrum? Giving students a chance to talk about themselves. One example comes from a meeting in September. There, a student began the conversation by expressing his view of human nature as inherently self-interested. As the student

H A M I LTO N

shared both his lived experience and conservative upbringing, other members began to grasp how his background informed his opinion. As the conversation shifted toward the American prison system, however, the student began to question the

policies through real-life consequences. This leads to a holistic understanding of how one’s background continues to shape their ever-evolving interests, beliefs, and values. Our hope is to bring the ideas discussed at club meetings

“By taking a bottom-up approach to fostering dialogue across difference, we are building a movement that challenges the very notion of civil discourse as we know it.” implications of American individualism in a real-life context. This moment of introspection, where the student recognized the complexities of his beliefs, is just one effect of viewing political issues as rooted in the human experience. Such conversations lead to a more authentic, human-centered debate. By placing people’s lived experiences at the center of any political conversation, we can view seemingly intangible

to our classes, campus-wide debates, and communities at large. In order to identify and implement solutions aimed at breaking the cycle of political polarization, we must expand our reach. With the generous support of a Common Ground on the Ground grant, Bridge is partnering with the Chaplaincy, Levitt Center, Days Massolo Center, and the associate dean of diversity to train student facilitators to lead conversations

this spring among students with differing viewpoints. Our discussions will be modeled after the National Issues Forum and progress toward more advanced dialogues in the fall. By taking a bottom-up approach to fostering dialogue across difference, we are building a movement that challenges the very notion of civil discourse as we know it. We are developing the skills required for collaborative, solution-based thinking that directly challenges politics as usual. We are cultivating responsible, socially conscious citizens committed to protecting the common good, undeterred by the increasingly unstable ground we stand upon. n

Christine Walsh ’21, a history major from Milford, Conn., is a member of Yodapez, founder of Bridge, an orientation leader, Alternative Spring Break participant, Levitt Social Innovation fellow, docent at the Wellin Museum, and history research assistant. This spring, she is participating in the SIT: Social Movements & Human Rights study abroad program in Buenos Aires.

KNOW THYSELF

Rachel Weinstein ’93 Rachel Weinstein is a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer with nearly three decades of experience in performing arts management. A double major in theatre and French, she moved to New York City after graduation but decided not to pursue life as a professional actor. Instead, she turned to the business side of the arts. Weinstein began her career in nonprofits, holding leadership roles at companies in some of the most vibrant theatre cities around the globe. Over the last seven years, she shifted her focus to Broadway, producing plays and musicals — and developing education outreach initiatives to bring thousands of students to the theatre each year.

START HERE

’95

’12 THE LIGHTS OF BROADWAY

“Back in New York City, I finally took on my first Broadway project, co-producing The Heiress with Jessica Chastain. One show led to the next, and now I have about a half dozen under my belt, including An American in Paris and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced. In addition to co-producing, I have been hired by several shows, including Dear Evan Hansen and To Kill a Mockingbird, to develop educational resources and oversee school outreach.”

“ I could not look back on

the last 30 years without paying tribute to my

ACT ONE

beloved Hamilton profes-

“After a year-and-ahalf at the bottom of the ladder, interning, and learning the ropes, I landed my first ‘real’ job at the Roundabout Theatre Co., spearheading the major individual donor program and planning special events.”

sor Carole Bellini-Sharp, whom we lost last year. In addition to teaching me the craft of theatre,

VOICES ’19 THE TONYS!

“This was a big dreamcome-true year for me because I won my first Tony for The Ferryman. Now I’m looking forward to my next Broadway production, Jagged Little Pill, a new musical featuring the music of Grammy Award winner Alanis Morissette, which opened in December.”

’04

Carole helped me to find my passion and myself. I feel very grateful to be able to work in a profession that I love so deeply, and I cannot thank her enough for helping me to find my way.”

’98

BACK HOME

“Six-and-a-half years and two children later, I moved back to the States, relocating to Chicago. It did not take long before I found my way into the Chicago theatre scene. I joined the Board of Writers’ Theatre and shortly thereafter served as the company’s interim executive director and then director of institutional advancement.”

A GIG IN ENGLAND

“Shortly after moving to London, I was hired by award-winning director Sam Mendes to be the first director of development of the celebrated Donmar Warehouse. There, I conceived, launched, and grew the theatre’s first comprehensive fundraising program. I also established education initiatives for students and outreach programs for audiences with special needs.”

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

the

for the

H A M I LTO N

Maureen A. Nolan

WHAT IS NEED-BLIND ADMISSION? Hamilton does not consider a student’s financial circumstances in its admission decisions for U.S. citizens and meets full demonstrated financial need. This means the College can invite the most talented and

Hamilton marks a decade of need-blind admission — a bold commitment to access and opportunity

ANNAH STRONG ’17 LOVES this story, and little wonder. It’s dramatic, inspiring, sometimes tear-inducing (ask Strong), and grows more impressive with each successive class of Hamilton students. Ten years ago, in the midst of the Great Recession, the Board of Trustees decided to admit students without first considering their ability to pay for their education. The College was already meeting the full demonstrated need of every student it accepted but sometimes had to consider applicants’ financial circumstances when making admission decisions. The pivotal need-blind admission policy allows Hamilton to evaluate students based solely on their accomplishments and potential. It means that everything

deserving students to join its community and award them the financial resources they need to attend. Hamilton is one of five NESCAC colleges and fewer than four dozen U.S. colleges and universities that provide this extraordinary access.

the College has to offer it makes available to the best students, even if they lack sufficient financial means. Students like Strong. She was a top student at her Elmira, N.Y., high school, yet she was discouraged from applying to Hamilton and other private colleges because of the price tag. “I think they thought it was really out of my reach and out of the reach of students like me at my high school,” says Strong, who reached all the same. At Hamilton, Strong, a sociology major who was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her senior year, worked as a senior intern in Hamilton’s Admission Office, which is how she first heard the story of the need-blind decision. Monica Inzer, vice president for enrollment management, often shares that history with her

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

“... to limit students’

interns. Inzer was a strong voice in the College’s long march to need-blind admission, but when the moment arrived, it was a surprise. “As a college administrator, or as a leadership team, rarely do you get to single out one priority because you’re always moving lots of

opportunity to go to Hamilton based on finance just felt inherently wrong to me, and I felt that we couldn’t allow that to be the case going forward.” — David Blood '81

things forward in incremental ways,” Inzer says. “However, once in a while, you get to say, ‘This thing is most important.’ And I think it

finance just felt inherently wrong to me, and

was the financial crisis that forced us to think

I felt that we couldn’t allow that to be the case

about where we would spend our next dollar.”

going forward,” he says. Also, the need-blind

A BOLD MOVE, A TOP PRIORITY At a December 2009 planning meeting, the

His pledge was quickly matched by a second trustee, and then a third, as a riveted

to present ideas about how to move Hamilton

Inzer thought, “The College is going to do

forward at a time when the national economic

this right now.” Also part of the moment was

crisis had brought many colleges to a stand-

then College President Joan Hinde Stewart,

still. Among multiple topics brought up that

a steadfast champion of college access and

day was Inzer’s presentation on need-blind

opportunity. Without Stewart’s push for need-

admission, which was hardly a new idea for the

blind admission, it wouldn’t have happened,

board. A year or so earlier, the trustees adopted

Inzer says. By the end of the meeting, five trustees

blind admission as a long-term goal, albeit an

had pledged $500,000 each, and within days,

expensive one.

a sixth had committed to the same amount for

Her presentation complete, Inzer thought

a total of $3 million. For Blood, the board’s

the planning meeting was wrapping up when

discussion that day was one of the most satis-

Trustee David Blood ’81 surprised her with a

fying moments of his life. It was also the best

pointed question: How much it would cost to

day of Inzer’s career. “It was a transformative

launch need-blind admission? The answer was

day and momentous decision for Hamilton,”

$500,000 — per class. It was a lot of money,

Inzer says. “The move to need-blind admission

Blood recalls thinking, but doable, and he act-

was aligned with the College’s long-standing

ed, pushing the long-term goal into immediate

commitment to access and made clear that

territory. He pledged $500,000 on the spot.

providing opportunity to a Hamilton education

For reasons both profound and practical, Blood had long advocated for need-blind admission. Hamilton has always been a school

H A M I LTO N

itors, he points out.

Board of Trustees asked senior administrators

a College strategic plan that included need-

policy distinguishes Hamilton from its compet-

was important and would continue to remain a top priority.” The decision drew national media atten-

of opportunity, he observes. “It’s also an ex-

tion. “At a time when some colleges are favor-

traordinary place, and to limit students’

ing applicants who do not require financial

opportunity to go to Hamilton based on

aid, Hamilton College in Upstate New York

has decided to swim against that tide,” began a March 2010 story in The New York Times. A few years later, as David Wippman was considering the prospect of becoming Hamilton’s president to replace the retiring Stewart, he thought about how need-blind was a bold move, guided by principle, and the right one for a College that was so committed to access. “I was attracted to Hamilton in part because it has long been willing to take risks in its efforts to offer students the best liberal arts education possible. Need-blind is the perfect example,”

misinformation that targets his generation. If the numbers show how much Hamilton has changed in the last decade, change has reached the classrooms, too. In some senses, observes Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology, students in the last few years have been the best he’s had in his 38-year tenure at the College. “Honestly, I’d say the proportion of serious students — really hardworking, deeply engaged — has noticeably improved over the past 10 years or so,” Chambliss says. “We’ve always had good

Wippman says.

students generally, and the top has always been

HAMILTON TRANSFORMING

of the most committed students has definitely

very strong, but in recent years the proportion

In the fall of 2010, the first need-blind class

risen quite a bit. I now see most of the students

began its Hamilton career. In the subsequent

in any class are really interested, trying very

decade, the College set records for admission,

hard, want to improve.”

while becoming more selective and more racially and economically diverse. “The funny thing about intelligence is

financial aid. Because Hamilton Day had a $1 million goal to be matched by trustee and campaign co-chair David Solomon ’84, P’16. But when gifts topped the $1 million mark by 5 p.m. EST, another donor stepped forward to match an additional $500,000. By midnight on the West Coast it was official, both challenges had been met. Hamilton had secured, in total, $3,092,733 from 3,658 alumni, parents, students, and friends. Half of the funds generated during Because Hamilton Day are supporting financial aid in 2019-20 through this year’s Hamilton Fund, while the other $1.5 million will be used to create two endowed scholarships.

too has seen a dramatic change in the intellectual engagement of the student body during her years at Hamilton, in particular the last 10. “I can definitely say the students we now

who couldn’t have afforded Hamilton without

teach are extraordinary. If you talk to anybody,

financial aid. “It’s not based on socioeconomic

they’re going to say that,” she says. “The group

background, either. Essentially not allowing

of students is more diverse in most ways, from

students to attend college based on how much

different family and geographical backgrounds,

money their parents earn or how much money

to work histories, to races and ethnicities,

their household earns would be essentially

to gender identities. And more. Students —

limiting the possibilities that Hamilton can

and faculty — have so much to learn from

achieve. Because, as an institution, we have

each other.”

different changes.”

ambitious give-day to support student

Katheryn Doran, associate professor of

from. Intelligence can come from a bunch of

a lot of great minds here working for a lot of

In November, the College held its most

philosophy and department chair, agrees. She

you can’t really determine where it comes different places, right?” asks Jeffery Clarke ’20,

BECAUSE HAMILTON KEEPS PROMISES

One of the top students in the Class of 2017, Kateri Boucher says the need-blind policy was

Clarke entered College thinking he would

part of what compelled her to apply to Hamilton

study computer science, then decided to fashion

because it would help her attend — she couldn’t

his own interdisciplinary major focused on tech-

have afforded it without financial aid — and

nology and digital media. He was motivated in

because of students she would find there. “When

part by what he considers to be a pressing need

I saw that a school was need-blind, it was assur-

— addressing the tide of digital information and

ing that there would be greater class diversity,

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

and that is, I think, what I found at Hamilton. I don’t know what other schools are like exactly, but I think that it measured up to what I had been hoping,” Boucher says. She now works for

“If need-blind admission allows more students of a diverse background to participate in the conversation at Hamilton, it’s going to be helpful to everyone, whether you are on financial aid or not.” — Joe Simmel ’95

a small print magazine in Detroit, where she also manages a community house for people who are homeless. Her twin brother, Jonah Boucher ’17, was co-valedictorian of their class. One of the things he liked about Hamilton was how it wasn’t always apparent who received fi nancial

Bolstered by a $10,000 match from President

aid and who paid full tuition. “But it was

Stewart, the class raised $26,890. The terrace

apparent that there were students from all

was dedicated in June 2016 with

sorts of different backgrounds and a lot of

a plaque that proclaims: “This terrace was

backgrounds that certainly wouldn’t have

made possible by the members of the Class

traditionally led people to an elite, expensive

of 2014, in grateful recognition to the College

liberal arts school, so I think we were all reap-

for its commitment to access and opportunity,

ing the benefit of our peers who could be there

and in honor of graduating as Hamilton’s first

because Hamilton is need-blind,” he says. A

need-blind class.”

math and environmental studies major, he now teaches math at a Boston-area high school. As a vice president at Goldman Sachs and

H A M I LTO N

graduated, Jeremy Brendle ’14 was conversing

as Goldman’s recruiting captain for Hamilton,

with a neighbor, a reporter who writes about

Joe Simmel ’95 sees institutional value in a

higher education, and as their talk turned to

more diverse student body. All graduates will

the admission process at various universities

be working in a diverse world. “If need-blind

and colleges, Brendle spoke up on behalf of his

admission allows more students of a diverse

alma mater. He recounted what Hamilton had

background to participate in the conversation

done to increase access, recession notwith-

at Hamilton, it’s going to be helpful to every-

standing. The upshot was a December 2015

one, whether you are on financial aid or not,”

story in Huffpost with the headline, “How One

he says.

Top College Ended A Policy That Weeded Out

A POINT OF PRIDE

Pride endures in Hamilton’s stake-in-theground for opportunity. A few years after he

Poor Students.” Need-blind admission is an expensive

When the first need-blind class graduated in

proposition, and Will Robertson ’14 sometimes

2014, its members left a message to all who

wonders whether it is too good to be true and

would follow. The class gift was money toward

how long it can continue. Hamilton offered

the construction of a terrace outside Siuda

him his best financial aid package, allowing

House, home of the Admission and Financial

him to pursue everything he loved: music,

Aid Office, to commemorate the milestone. A

cross-country skiing, outdoor adventuring.

record number of seniors pitched in — 98.1%.

He met the woman he would marry. He’s now

10-YEAR TRENDS In the decade since implementing need-blind admission, Hamilton has seen the following:

RECORD APPLICATIONS including for the Class of 2023, selected from a pool of 8,339 applicants, which compares to 4,857 who applied in 2010. 2010

a freelance composer and a recruiter for an outdoor adventure company for teenagers. Hamilton’s move to go need-blind when

2019

it did, what Robertson calls a “values-based decision,” has always stuck with him. “It points to thinking about the good of the College and the values of the College and not necessarily about money and the red and the black and all that. It’s thinking about, ‘We’re

INCREASED SELECTIVITY as measured by the acceptance rate, which has decreased steadily from 29.4% of applicants in 2010 to 16.4% in 2019.

going to make it work because it aligns with

2010

our values and who we want to be as an institution,’” Robertson says.

2019

Ten years on, Hamilton remains committed to providing access, opportunity, and the financial aid it takes to make that happen. Without donor support, need-blind admission would still be an aspiration, and maintaining the promise will require an ongoing investment from alumni, parents, and friends of the Col-

RICHER DIVERSITY OF ALL KINDS In 2009-10, 17.4% of Hamilton’s student body was comprised of U.S. students of color; today that number is 25.4%.

lege. In December 2018, the College launched Because Hamilton, a $400 million capital campaign, its most ambitious ever, and student financial aid is the top priority.

2010

2019

“The decision to go need-blind has proven transformative, and it is, rightly, a point of pride for Hamilton and its alumni,” Wippman says. “It has helped the College become stronger, better, and more enriching for all, whether one receives financial aid or not.” n

In addition, the percentage of first-year students receiving Pell Grants reached a record 21% with the Class of 2023. These grants are provided by the federal government to the neediest families and are one measure of a college’s commitment to socioeconomic diversity. IMPROVED RETENTION for first-year students who return for their sophomore year, and increased graduation rates. An Aug. 11, 2019, article in The Chronicle of Higher Education listed Hamilton fourth among four-year private liberal arts colleges for fouryear graduation rates in 2017.

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

SOLD Sotheby’s at

H A M I LTO N

t’s a job, which means it comes with deadlines, bottom lines, clients, crazy hours, and stress. Such things are rendered incidental, however, when reverential colleagues gather to watch the uncrating of a Monet. Six Hamilton alumni who work at the venerable auction house Sotheby’s New York talk about what they do.

Photographs by Jorg Myer

Hamiltonians at Sotheby’s in New York (from left): Kunter Kula ’11, Max Freedman ’17, Charlotte Van Dercook ’14, Halina Loft ’15, and Chip Bent ’06.

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

CHARLES “CHIP” BENT ’06 Vice President/Business Manager, Impressionist and Modern Art At Sotheby’s since 2009 Master’s in Art Business, Sotheby’s Institute of Art Hamilton Majors: Art History and Economics

am a liaison between our business side and specialist side, which works with clients. I manage the money, so I do our annual financial plan and our forecasting. It’s essentially my job to start the process of trying to figure out the type of financial deal structure that we can offer clients that will give them what they need and be as competitive as possible with our main competition while still being as profitable as possible for us. The last project I worked on when I was with Sotheby’s Hong Kong as a business director for jewelry was the sale of a pink diamond called the CTF Pink Star, an internally flawless diamond that was 59.6 carats. We sold it for $71.2 million. It set a record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction in Asia. I did not get to touch it, but I was able to see it. When it eventually made it to Hong Kong, it showed up with an army of security guards, and then they brought out this box that fit in the palm of your hand. The juxtaposition of the two things was kind of fascinating. People often ask, how did you end up in this job and how did you think to study art history and econ? It was kind of by accident. Starting at Hamilton and thinking, of course, I knew everything, I only wanted to study the things that I wanted to study. During orientation they had assigned me to a temporary advisor — [Professor of French] Martine Guyot-Bender. I went into her office and she said, “Okay, let’s see what you’re interested in taking.” She looked up from the paper and essentially said, “You know, you’re a one-trick pony; you really need to diversify.” I said, “No, with all due respect, this is why I came to Hamilton.” We went back and forth, and she said, “Listen, you need to try a science or an art [class]. You need to branch out.” She pointed me toward Professor [of Art History] John McEnroe, and I took his intro class and then every class he offered. I ended up double majoring in economics and art history.

H A M I LTO N

CHARLOTTE VAN DERCOOK ’14

HALINA LOFT ’15

Associate Vice President/Head of Contemporary Curated At Sotheby’s since 2014 Hamilton Major: Art History

Associate Editor, Editorial Department At Sotheby’s since 2019 Hamilton Major: English Literature; Minor: Art History

robably my favorite thing to do for our sale, in particular Contemporary Curated, is to establish a new record for an artist. There’s an artist who just passed away in 2018 [Jack Whitten], and a collector who owned a painting by the artist that they purchased in 1992 for $5,000. We told them the estimate was $300,000 to $500,000. They were floored. And then we sold the work — the new record for the artist, which is $2.7 million. I work on a variety of events, and now I’m an auctioneer as well. It was pretty difficult to do; it’s around six months of training. But I’ve spoken at a number of events for Sotheby’s with my experience in Contemporary Curated. Last season we had a 600-person cocktail event where I actually was lucky enough to help introduce Oprah Winfrey. The focus on writing at Hamilton was crucially important in proving myself at Sotheby’s. My ability to write about art was important. I took a variety of public speaking courses, and that really helped me as well. Public speaking is hugely important in any career that you have, and particularly here at Sotheby’s, that has helped me distinguish myself.

’m in the editorial department, a division of the marketing department. Our job is to write and produce content to promote different auctions happening through the New York office. The aim is to tell the story behind the artwork, to highlight a work to potential buyers in a way that they may not normally see.

We were selling a really rare first-edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It was fun writing a story about that book, the entire story of what that book is. It meant a day of me talking with specialists in their field, the absolute experts, and it’s such a privilege that I can just walk downstairs and talk with them. The whole experience allowed me to really dive into my nerdiness. We on the editorial team have to cover the live auctions. There are big ones in the spring and fall, which include the contemporary art and the impressionist and modern art auctions. So in the spring, I covered the big impressionist art evening auction. That night we set a new record for Monet, his Meules. I was downstairs watching the live auction and then had to quickly run upstairs to write the article and publish it. It was a great experience to have the opportunity to break such an incredible story. It’s been remarkable how much my majors have benefited me along the way, English more than anything. But now I feel so happy that I’m able to use all the skills and knowledge I picked up in my art history lectures. I’m bringing it up again [in my work], as I have to essentially write art history papers that grab our audiences’ attention. Having those writing skills down pat has really helped. (Thanks Professor [of Art Emerita Deborah] Pokinski!)

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

NINA PIRO ’10

MAX FREEDMAN ’17

Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art At Sotheby’s since 2016 Master’s in Art Business, Sotheby’s Institute of Art Hamilton Majors: Art History and French

Web Producer, Editorial Department At Sotheby’s since 2018 Hamilton Major: Studio Art; Minors: Art History and Economics

specifically work on our day sale, which is a biannual sale. We sell in November and May, and it’s generally around a $40 million value overall, and there are about 300, 350, works of art. I work on sourcing material, pricing material, the day-to-day catalogue production, research, cataloguing. And making sure that we’re on track to actually get everything done that we need to do for the day of the sale — and to get the catalogue out on time. I also run our online sales for the department. I came to Hamilton wanting to study art history and had really enjoyed the department when I visited and wanted to be somewhere where there was a small museum where I could interact with the professors in a smaller environment. I did the year abroad in Paris. A lot of what we do in my department at Sotheby’s is work with third-party authenticators who are mostly all in France, so I joke that my spoken French is really bad, but I can write a lot of French emails really quickly, which helped me get this job and also stay in it. I had interned at Sotheby’s while I was at Hamilton in 2009. It’s funny, you definitely have days where you are numb to the art, and then there are days when you are just so blown away by the power of the artworks themselves. I don’t know if you saw it in the news, but we recently sold the record price for a Monet Haystacks. And the day that it came to Sotheby’s, I didn’t know. It had been so confidential that the department didn’t really even know about it, just a few people who had been working on it. So the head of the department came over and had all of us go downstairs and look at the painting as it came out of the crate. We all got a little bit weepy. It is a museum-quality piece. You definitely have some emotional moments for the artwork and things you really fall in love with, and that was one.

H A M I LTO N

asically I help manage the sothebys.com website — I put up auctions, I organize content like articles and videos, I manage some of the pages and department pages. And then I also do design for Sotheby’s magazine. My job is something I really enjoy because I love art history, but I also love making art and this is the perfect combination of those two things. I get to learn about all of the art and history that come through the building and use my creativity and skill set to figure out the best way to present it to a larger audience. Technically, I’m more of a content manager. I don’t write too many articles, but there have been cases where I’ve found something pretty interesting, and we’re trying to figure out a way to help promote the sale, and there are times when I’ll volunteer to write a piece even though I’m not one of the staff writers. It’s been received really well, and I definitely think my Hamilton education is giving me the confidence and the writing skills to be able to do that. One of the coolest things about my job is the opportunity to see such a wide variety of art in person and almost every day. Especially when the exhibitions go up before the auctions; you might never see the same grouping of art in the same room ever again. Helping to tell the stories behind these works makes it that much more meaningful. It’s a unique experience that I really value and find very exciting. Last sale season there was a Monet Haystacks painting that sold and set an auction record for the artist. That’s my favorite Monet series and getting to see one in the place I worked was really cool.

KUNTER KULA ’11 Assistant Vice President/ Senior Account Manager At Sotheby’s since 2018 Hamilton Major: Economics; Minor: Art History

work in valuations. I’m an account manager, the point person for our clients. Generally our clients will collect in multiple categories: contemporary art, impressionists, American. These are all different specialties that we bring together in creating an appraisal. I organize our teams. We visit sometimes to check out the artwork, condition, and then create reports. Essentially it’s a business development project for us. Maybe six months ago, we were valuing for a very big client about 23 artworks. It wasn’t many by any means, but I think it ended up being almost $1.7 billion in total value. These were of the impressionist/modernist canon of artists.

I’ve spent my entire career in the contemporary art world. I worked at a contemporary art gallery doing sales, and I worked for a contemporary art collector as a collection manager, so my expertise mostly comes from understanding the contemporary art market, which is a very hot and sought-after market these days. It was interesting because I came to Hamilton thinking I was going to study biochemistry. I was always good in biology. This is a true testament of liberal arts education, I suppose. I started taking some art history courses. I was always interested in the arts. I had an affinity for it, but I didn’t know what it would look like for me in a career sense. Actually my second year I was in the Hamilton in New York City program, and I interned at Christie’s. It was an incredible exposure to the art world at a firsthand level. That’s, I think, what solidified my interest. It was like, “Oh, OK, this could be a career for me, and I really enjoy this.” Thereafter, the rest is history, a little bit. I turned to the econ and art history track, and after Hamilton took my first job at Sperone Westwater Gallery. n

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

H A M I LTO N

COLLAGE OF EARLY MODERN SOURCES DESIGNED BY KATIE DEAN

N E W WORLD

nature

P R O J E C T n e w

d o o r s

HAMILTON’S BEINECKE LESSER ANTILLES COLLECTION

o p e n s

by Maureen A. Nolan

HE NEW WORLD NATURE summer history research project was an enterprise of moving parts — an academic and organizational feat. The idea was to develop the research and digital humanities skills of five students on the team, while furthering their personal research and that of the professor in charge. That was Assistant Professor of History Mackenzie Cooley, whose field is the history of science and ideas in the early modern world. Students looked broadly at nature, diversity, and loss in the New World under Spanish colonial rule from the 1500s to 1800s, the early modern period. They conducted research in archives abroad and at Hamilton, created data visualizations, and presented their work on campus and internationally. They contributed to chapters, articles,

ibliography, and footnotes to Cooley’s works b that will be published in the coming years. And, with the help of Hamilton’s Levitt Center and Digital Humanities Initiative, they created new digital tools and databases that will be valuable resources to scholars everywhere. At the center of it all was Cooley, who worked with students to devise and execute individual summer agendas and to help shape their research. Team members had the opportunity, Cooley says, to contribute to the creation of novel ideas that people in the academic world will be excited about. “On top of that I’ve tried to give them opportunities to present original research drawn from documents that people wouldn’t normally have access to, which will make it publishable research,” she says.

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

WIKIPEDIA COMMONS

Holy Roman Empress Maria of Austria (1528-1603), a possessor and gifter of bezoars

The Onion of Knowledge

H A M I LTO N

NANCY L. FORD

N LATE 15TH-CENTURY EUROPE, bezoar stones, coveted as the ultimate cure-all medicine, were trending. The wondrous bezoars were lumps of undigested material taken from the bellies of animals, and by the late 16th century, European colonists in the New World were slaughtering animals apace to harvest stones for the market back home. Professor Cooley has studied the relationship between animals and medical knowledge. “The bezoar,” she writes in a chapter of a book she’s editing, “unites histories of animals, medicine, and Empire.” Maps in the chapter about bezoars show the use and source of the stones over time. One tracks the movement of bezoars given as gifts for royal families. A table lists which type of bezoar cures which ills — for sore eyes, try a dove bezoar. Those data visualizations are the work of Kate Biedermann ’22, who is credited in the book. They are part of her summer work as a member of Cooley’s New World Nature research team. Biedermann, an intended history and French major, received digital training as a class fellow of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Institute, applying her new skills to Cooley’s work and her own research. “I work within the history of race and in the larger scope of things,” Biedermann explains. “For me that fits into the history of science and also the history of ideas, which are very closely interrelated.” She reviewed more than 600 documents across multiple European languages to create the visualizations. Although the initial concept was Cooley’s, Biedermann has built out the research with her own ideas. “The more she learns about this data and how to create data sets and ask questions, the more original her research becomes,” Cooley says.

For evidence, there’s Biedermann’s “onion of knowledge,” also included in the chapter. As she pored over the bezoar stone literature, Biedermann noticed that, over centuries, scholars repeatedly likened the stone to an onion. Struck by the recurrence, the student researcher created a visualization Cooley calls “an intellectual microhistory” in the shape of an onion, with each ring identifying a scholar who used the onion metaphor. “Visualizing it this way was, first of all, fun,” Biedermann says. “But also analytically, you can see how knowledge is created and just recycled over and over and over again through different cultures, through different languages, through different time periods. I mean we’re

A bezoar (shown slightly larger than actual size) from a Bolivian llama

starting in year 1000 with an Arab scholar, then we end with a British physician in 1809.” The next step for Biedermann in her continuing collaboration with Cooley will be co-authoring articles, and she expects to continue to explore digital humanities, which she considers to be a rising new field. “What I like about digital humanities is that it really helps with the accessibility of your research; it makes it a lot more understandable when you can visualize something,” Biedermann says.

Bottom: Map of all available Relaciones locations created by Antton De Arbeloa ’21 A detail from Relación del pueblo de Zayula, 1580. Courtesy of El Archivo General de Indias

Data Driven

ISAPPEARING FOR THE SUMMER into a “Goldilocks zone of history,” Antton De Arbeloa ’21 emerged having helped create what may be the first database of a little-studied collection of 16th-century questionnaires rich in information about life in New Spain. The database, which includes a searchable map, opens up the relatively inaccessible documents to analyses by Hamilton scholars and those around the globe. Professor Cooley, who headed the summer project, is using the database for her research, and so is history major De Arbeloa. In November they demonstrated the database at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Colonial administrators responded to the surveys in the 1570s and 1580s by order of King Phillip II of Spain, who wanted information about the geography and culture of his new holdings in the Americas. His administrators set forth at a critical point, gathering information that could soon disappear — the “Goldilocks zone,” as De Arbeloa put it in a paper about his research. It was a time, he wrote, when “the last of the indigenous elders could shed light on life prior to European colonization, complete with descriptions of local flora, fauna, and history.” Working in partnership with H amilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative, and under Cooley’s guidance, De Arbeloa and student researcher Kayla Self ’21 painstakingly catalogued and analyzed the surveys, known as the Relaciones Geográficas. The student researchers drew on a 10-volume collection of the documents compiled in the 1980s by Mexican scholar René Acuña. Their project took roughly 10 months with De Arbeloa and Self, who both speak Spanish, doing much of the work over the summer.

They have taken the observations r ecorded in the surveys, Cooley says, “and made that into a structured dataset through which it’s possible to ask new questions and make new connections.” When De Arbeloa wasn’t up to his eyebrows in questionnaires, he turned to his personal research. His interest is the loss of diversity — ecological, cultural, intellectual — stemming from the Spanish colonization of the Americas. With the necessary credential from Cooley, he went hunting in important archives in Seville and Madrid. Finding and deciphering the handwritten documents was a slog, but an instructive one, and the work, as with his Relaciones project, was worth the long hours, frustration, and junk food intake. “I saw this summer as really an investment in my scholarship,” he says. He’ll use the Relaciones database for his senior thesis. “What I’m really proud of, and what marked my summer, was completing this database because it’s been a project now a year in the making. Honestly I was so happy, the moment that made it all worth it, was when Professor Cooley showed me the preview of the website,” De Arbeloa says.

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM HAMILTON’S BEINECKE LESSER ANTILLES COLLECTION

Worth a Thousand Words

NEXPECTED MARVELS HELPED her get through the dry spells as Elizabeth Atherton ’22, in the name of digital research, paged through hundreds of books that are part of Hamilton’s Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection. It’s one of the world’s richest troves of documents about the region from the 16th to 19th centuries. One prong of Atherton’s summer project was to find and catalogue every image of flora and fauna contained in roughly 1,000 books, mostly printed before 1850. The effort began last academic year with Alexa Zildjian ’19, and Atherton completed it, identifying more than 900 images in material that ranged from personal papers to calfskin-bound volumes. Turning page after page after page, she sometimes made her way through nearly an entire shelf without encountering anything she could use. “That was a vaguely painful process,” says Atherton, an intended history major. But here is one of the unexpected marvels: a personal sketchbook of paintings, dated from 1828, created by an art and nature lover with the initials N.J. The contents page, written in an elaborate hand, marked the names of some of the birds or where they were spotted: “In the woods bordering the River Demerara, March 1828.” Atherton was amazed to hold in her hands a book produced nearly 200 years ago, just for fun, that somehow ended up in Hamilton’s Special Collections. Now those obscure images can be retrieved with a few keystrokes. Atherton was part of a team effort to digitize the Beinecke images for use in a VIKUS Viewer, a web-based tool that enables users to explore large databases of images. “Having images of flora and fauna from printed books in the collection, searchable with a powerful tool like the VIKUS Viewer, will allow scholars to sort data in ways that should facilitate visual comparison of similar species,”

H A M I LTO N

says Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections. Hamilton’s Burke Library and Digital Humanities Initiative were part of the project. The second prong of Atherton’s research had a bit more glamour — she authored a lengthy appendix that will be published in a book by Professor Cooley. It’s a critical translation — the first translation done of the work — of a history written in the 1500s by Diego Muñoz Camargo about the Tlaxcalans, an indigenous people of Mexico. Atherton edited and polished Cooley’s manuscript. “It was such a big document that my computer crashed sometimes when I tried to open it,” Atherton says. But it was fascinating, and she followed a thread that became her appendix. She wrote about Malintzin, a young, enslaved indigenous woman, who was a translator between Emperor Moctezuma of Mexico and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Getting published is the icing on the research experience for Atherton, who is thinking she may want to pursue a career in aca demia or as an archivist. “I discovered research isn’t as scary as I thought it was,” she says.

Above: Bird with flower from a sketchbook of the West Indies, circa 1820s Right: Espadon (swordfish) from The history of the Caribby-Islands published in 1666

A Smoking Gun

Drawings from Physician Jean-Baptist Ricord’s 1828 Recherches et expériences sue les poisons d’Amérique

of one’s enemy, and can we not fight him more ably, and even disarm him before he delivers a single fatal blow?” As Anderson went deep into Ricord’s work, he decided to use modern science to better evaluate it. Cooley says the “history of science with science model,” which Cooley developed and Anderson ran with, has promising, broader application. Ricord’s science was flawed even by the practices of the time, Anderson found. His memoir, “contains histories of pain, superstition, agnotology, dominance, and racism within its ostensibly scientific pages,” Anderson wrote. Leaning heavily on environmental science and historical documents, Anderson created a digital map of likely locations of manchineel trees in Ricord’s time, a map that could direct researchers to more sources of documents and information. “That map will probably continue to evolve and feature into my work for my thesis and next year when I hopefully move on to my Fulbright grant,” says Anderson, who plans to apply for a prestigious Fulbright research award. Anderson, Cooley says, has produced, “quite an amazing bit of original research.” Amazing enough to produce a chapter, co-written with Cooley, included in an edited volume.

BROWN UNIVERSITY’S JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY

HAT TO WRITE? Thomas Anderson ’20 was in search of a topic for a research paper for his class Race, Science, and the Origins of the Modern World with Professor Cooley. After some joint pondering, Cooley suggested that he turn to Hamilton’s unique Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collections to scout out colonial medical records, in French. Anderson, a history and French major, was agreeable and came back with three promising prospects, one of which was an 1822 manuscript about the manchineel, considered to be the world’s most poisonous tree. The two soon recognized, with amazement, they’d come upon what Cooley called a smoking gun. “What Thomas had found is an unstudied medical trial on a young slave,” she says. It’s rare to see a scientist’s motivations clearly articulated, Cooley explains, “especially when it is a deeply racist motivation that directly incentivizes their scientific project.” The manuscript was the work of colonial physician Jean-Baptist Ricord of Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles. In it, Ricord tracked his experiments testing poisons from the manchineel on dogs, slaves (including a boy he called Jacob), and on himself. Anderson found the manuscript last academic year, and Cooley hired him as a researcher so he could pursue it, continuing his work over the summer as part of her New World Nature team. Ricord was doing his studies, Anderson would later write, “during the last gasp of slavery in Guadeloupe.” Ricord saw the deadly tree as a weapon for slaves to use against their rulers, and therefore a weapon the colonizers needed to master for their own use. “Is it not of the highest importance to understand these plants well enough, and better if possible, than the evil slaves who use them?” Ricord wrote. “Is there not a great advantage in knowing how to use the weapons

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

Finding Academic Gold

INDFUL OF HER PROFESSOR’S advice to stay open to the unexpected, Kayla Self ’21 was in Puerto Rico developing a concept she’d devised — the Spanish use of the Caribbean as testing ground for imperialist policies and practices for use on mainland Americas. Her academic radar and a random encounter in a museum led her to what may be the oldest European-style pharmacy in the New World, which has not been prominently written about in the literature on the history of medicine, says Professor Cooley. “Its drawers illuminate the medical practice at the confluence of the New World and Old,” Cooley would later write. As a member of the New World Nature research team, Self spent the first part of her summer painstakingly helping to build a digital database of surveys about New Spain’s geography and culture. What she learned inspired her own field research for several weeks in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Self, a world politics major with a focus on Latin America, was the only non-history major on the team. At Cooley’s suggestion, Self, who speaks Spanish, visited the Museo de las Casas Reales in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. As she worked her way through its many rooms, trying to decipher the organizational system, she came upon an exhibit that stopped her short. It was a freestanding wooden pharmacy cabinet, with rows of drawers, hand painted with landscapes. The drawers once contained medicinal plants, and the landscapes presumably represented the locations where they were obtained.

H A M I LTO N

Detail from what is possibly the oldest European-style pharmacy cabinet in the New World. Kayla Self ’21 encountered the treasure in Puerto Rico.

On alert for a find, Self knew the cabinet was gold and fired off a photo, the first of many, to Cooley, who is interested in what the cabinet’s imagery may reveal about the New World’s system of creating scientific knowledge. She’s also interested in the potential for DNA identification of materials in the drawers. Finding the cabinet was an aside to Self ’s own research. As she learned more about the Spanish approach to the Caribbean, she focused on the original inhabitants of the islands. “I found myself thinking about how rebellion, protest, and resistance shaped these islands in past and present,” she wrote in a report about her work. “These themes of how people pushed back against colonial power intent on extracting resources from them emerged everywhere I went, whether studying the past or navigating the present.” Self, whose mother is from Puerto Rico, was doing research there in July during widespread protests against the governor, who would soon resign. The home where she stayed gave her easy access to protesting crowds, and being there was a pivotal moment in her life. Self views the governor’s ouster as a blow for democracy in the context of the island’s long history of colonialism. “I’ve always wanted to do social justice advocacy work and Puerto Rico is my main love and passion, so that’s definitely something that is going to drive me in the future,” she says. n

KAYLA SELF â&#x20AC;&#x2122;21

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

In Pursuit ‘Good Laws’ of

by Eric Kopp ’22

n every human society … there is an effort, continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort, and to diffuse their influence universally and equally. — In an address from the Continental Congress, Oct. 26, 1774

This philosophy, says John Donohue ’74, is what drives his work. Donohue is a leading legal scholar who hopes his recent research on right-to-carry gun laws will help inform the U.S. Supreme Court as it considers a Second Amendment case heard in December. Donohue, an economist and the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, is well known for applying evidence-based analysis to inform the impact of law and public policy. His

H A M I LTO N

latest long-range study, released recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that right-to-carry laws indeed make a difference in violent crime: they can increase it by as much as 15%. “The U.S. is alone among affluent nations in its level of homicidal violence,” Donohue says. “Since I got interested in why crime was spiking so sharply during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, it was natural to investigate how

our uniquely lax regulations and massive prevalence of guns were influencing these unfortunate events.” He first became interested in gun research 20 years ago when Ian Ayres, the William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale Law School, asked him to help review John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime. Decades of research have led to Donohue’s 2019 publication “Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assess-

ment Using Panel Data and a State-Level Synthetic Control Analysis” that takes a hard look at violent crime in states that have adopted right-to-carry concealed handgun laws. To determine the impact of these laws, Donohue and his team used a technique called synthetic control analysis. “What we will do is try to look at states that have not adopted right-to-carry [laws] at the time when, let’s say, Texas adopts, in 1996,” Donohue told the Los Angeles Times in a question-and-answer piece back when the study was first released. “We will look at the crime pattern that Texas had the 15 years before they adopted the right-to-carry law and see if there are other states we can think of as a composite of Texas, that mimic that identical pattern of crime that Texas had prior to 1996.” Researchers then take that composite of other states and see what happened there after 1996. The difference between that number and what actually did happen in Texas after 1996 becomes a prediction of what the impact of Texas passing the rightto-carry law has been on violent crime. Donohue and co-authors Abhay Aneja and Kylie Weber found that over a 10-year span, states that implemented right-tocarry laws saw a 15% increase in violent crime rates. “To give a sense of what it costs to address such an increase,” Donohue says, “it would take a doubling of the current U.S. prison population to reduce the crime rate by about 15%.” Donohue hopes his findings will prove helpful to members of the Supreme Court, who heard oral arguments in the case New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. City of New York on Dec. 3. At stake: the constitutional right to carry a gun outside of the home. The NRA hopes that the court will expand the Second Amendment and curtail other gun safety measures. Donohue says that, “An NRA affiliate paid one of the nation’s highest-priced oral advocates to

“I hope that my latest work will inform the U.S. Supreme Court that the costs in increased violent crime of expanding the Second Amendment from a right to have a gun in the home, to a right to have a gun anywhere, would not be small.” — John Donohue ’74

push for an expanded notion of the Second Amendment beyond the individual constitutional right to have a gun in the home for self-defense. The Supreme Court created this for the first time in its 2008 decision in Heller.” A pivotal part of this decision will be the vote of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a former student of Donohue’s, who had previously written a decision that, although rejected by his two fellow Republican judges, would have ruled that the Second Amendment prohibits bans on assault weapons. Nevertheless, Donohue believes his work will speak for itself and help inform some of the justices. “Since my work has documented the lapse of the federal assault weapons ban has ushered in a 10-fold increase in deaths from mass shootings, I think any Supreme Court

decision that stripped the American people of the ability to address the serious problems of gun violence would be both unwise and highly antidemocratic,” he says. At a more local level, Donohue’s research has already swayed courts. The University of Missouri’s 60-year ban of guns on campus was recently upheld, even as Missouri now allows 19-year-olds to carry concealed weapons without a permit. “I was the expert witness [in the case] that found that any form of gun regulation must undergo strict scrutiny before it can be permitted,” Donohue says. “But the court concluded that our evidence in support of the University of Missouri’s ban of guns on campus was sufficient to sustain the gun ban. “I hope that my latest work will inform the U.S. Supreme Court that the costs in increased violent crime of expanding the Second Amendment from a right to have a gun in the home, to a right to have a gun anywhere, would not be small,” Donohue adds. “It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court will be moved by the best empirical evidence on the impact of their forthcoming decision.” No matter the future of gun rights, Donohue will continue to conduct research into policy areas where he can impact change. “I am working on three books — on empirical evaluation of law and policy, on drug policy, and on the battle that led to the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut,” he says. He is also continuing his investigation into the relationship between legalized abortion and crime, and racial bias in the administration of the death penalty in Texas. To Donohue, his work is about trying to advance social welfare. “I am trying to advance our knowledge in a way that will promote better laws and policies. My work has largely been driven by the realization that wise law and policy make an enormous difference in the lives of individuals,” he says. n

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

W A S H I N G T O N

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION: HAMILTON COLLEGE

I N S I D E R S

H A M I LTO N

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

JAY BONHAM ’93 D.C. Program — Fall 1991

INCE 1969, HAMILTON’S Washington, D.C., Program has given students the

opportunity to shape their studies, and their futures, in Congressional offices, federal departments, lobbying and communications firms, and NGOs. When past participants gathered in Washington this fall to celebrate the program’s 50th anniversary, stories tumbled forth — including some from alumni who lived and worked in the nation’s capital when momentous events occurred. Here are just a few personal stories now entwined with history.

WHEN I WAS OFFERED the opportunity to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee on Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination, I knew I couldn’t say no. And although I expected it would be a fascinating experience, no one knew what it would turn into. Granted, I was a 20-year-old intern, so I wasn’t privy to strategy sessions, nor had Senator Joe Biden, who at that time was chairman of the committee, asked me for suggestions. But as the only full-time intern in the office, I certainly had more responsibilities than most. I attended many of the committee hearings and witnessed the tremendous preparation that went into the sessions. The pace was fast and I loved it. There were many nights I would need to run to the Metro so that I could catch the last shuttle to take me from my final stop to our apartment in Alexandria. Now the first time I heard of Anita Hill was at the same time as everyone else. After learning about the NPR report that Sunday in early October, I knew my Monday would be very interesting. I was right! It was a crazy scene when I arrived that morning, with staffers running in and out to meet with others in the Senate offices. For part of the day, I was on phone duty and took calls from people who represented all facets of the political realm. Let’s just say that the callers were very passionate about their views and wanted to make sure I passed along their thoughts to the committee.

Remember this was before the age of social media, so if you wanted to voice your opinion, you needed to pick up the phone. Later, once the Anita Hill hearings began, I found myself again with a front seat to history and would report back to my D.C. classmates on my experience during our class sessions. The beauty of the D.C. program is that it brings together students who have a wide range of internships spanning the political spectrum. When we would get together for class, Professor David Paris would challenge us to challenge each other. While we would disagree and have animated conversations, it was always done in a respectful way and, in turn, allowed us to better understand our own views. To this day, I try to live up to the lessons learned on Hamilton’s D.C. program. Following graduation, Bonham planned to return to D.C., but his alma mater came calling. He worked for Hamilton for more than 25 years, the bulk of his time in the Admission Office. He later worked in Kenyon College’s Admission Office and currently reads applications for Bucknell University. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and two boys.

A few notable events in Washington, D.C., throughout the past 50 years Jan. 20, 1969 Richard Nixon inaugurated

Oct. 15, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium Day

July 1, 1971 26th amendment ratified, lowering the voting age to 18

Jan. 22, 1973 In Roe v Wade, Supreme Court legalizes most abortions

March 1, 1974 Grand jury indicts “Watergate Seven”

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

“The inaugural term of the Washington Program was in 1969. The Vietnam War saturated politics that fall. Washington was the focus of the anti-war movement and of the Moratorium, a massive migration to the capital on Oct. 15 of college students and many others. Michael Klosson [’71] and I had a two-room apartment right-off Dupont Circle, and, after the tear gas blew off Connecticut Avenue, we were ‘hosts’ to about 30 kids that night. It’s hard to recall the setting that made that seem completely natural, but it did. We were in it together.” — Frank Anechiarico ’71, who participated in Hamilton’s D.C. Program as a student and went on to lead it as faculty advisor 14 times after returning to the College as a professor of government in 1976. (Michael Klosson ’71, a former foreign service officer who served as U.S. Consul General for Hong Kong, is now vice president for policy and humanitarian response at the Save the Children Foundation.)

Aug. 8, 1974 Nixon resigns

H A M I LTO N

MATTHEW ENG ’02 D.C. Program — Fall 2000 RICHARD POWELL, who directed the semester in D.C. program in fall 2000, made an exception for me to complete a semester-long internship; students [at that time] typically split the semester into two internships. This would prove fortuitous because I had landed an opportunity with the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and would be a member of the Clinton Administration’s last internship class. Aside from the thrill of interning at the White House, D.C. buzzed with that fall’s presidential campaign; the candidate debates highlighted the race. I have fond memories of gathering with my Hamilton classmates to not only watch, but consume, each debate. We would relentlessly critique the style and substance of both Al Gore and George W. Bush. From Gore’s “lockbox” for social security to Bush’s foibles with the English language, the debates allowed us to witness democracy in action. Little did we know that following Nov. 7, the action would continue for several more weeks and prompt questions we’d

Aug. 9, 1974 Gerald Ford assumes presidency

Nov. 2, 1976 Jimmy Carter elected president

never imagined. Would the nation’s electoral infrastructure prove reliable? Which political party would marshal enough lawyers to successfully argue its case? Would the transition of power be smooth? Though they did not always show it, my colleagues at the Domestic Policy Council were anxious. A Gore victory could mean they would stay in the West Wing to continue their work in welfare reform and public health. A Bush victory would mean new chapters in their careers. In an era before tweets and blog posts, the television sets in their offices had cable news on throughout the day. While they tried their best to conduct business as usual, I knew they were preoccupied with the election. In the classroom, we were bewildered — how could a dangling paper chad on a ballot in Florida determine the nation’s fate? Did Ralph Nader take precious votes away from Gore? Answers to these questions didn’t appear in any textbook. Nevertheless, we were witnessing history, and despite a process in seeming disarray, my classmates and I always believed the country would overcome this challenge. Eng, shown here during his time on the D.C. program, is a strategic advisor for the city of Seattle, where he advises elected officials and others on policy issues affecting for-hire transportation, including the regulation of taxicab companies and companies like Uber and Lyft. He lives in the city with his wife and two children.

Sept. 17, 1978 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign Camp David Accord

Nov. 4, 1980 Ronald Reagan elected president

U.S. NAVY PHOTO

BRIAN BURNS ’03 D.C. Program — Fall 2001 THE MORNING OF SEPT. 11 began as just a normal day during my first week of interning in the advance team office for Labor Secretary Elaine Chao at the U.S. Department of Labor. Within minutes after I walked through the door, a report came in about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, but terrorism never crossed anyone’s mind at first. There was no panic, nothing out of the ordinary in D.C., just what appeared to be big news about a tragic accident. Then about 20 minutes later, during the news feed, the second plane hit, and the mood around the office turned to an uneasy concern over what could be happening. Less than an hour later, an officemate who had gone up to the top floor cafeteria for coffee came running into the room saying that there was smoke coming from across the river in Virginia, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. Early reports on the news identified it as a fire in the Pentagon. At this time everyone’s thoughts were spoken aloud — we are under attack. Our building, along with most federal offices, was given the request to evacuate. Everyone headed home to turn on the news for the bigger picture of what was really happening. Smartphones didn’t exist; TV was the information lifeline. Upon arrival back at the apartments on Connecticut Avenue, my fellow students were rushing back in from their internships. “We are under attack” was the first phrase uttered by everyone as they came through

March 30, 1981 Reagan shot

the door. A group of students from Notre Dame that we had befriended those first weeks in D.C. were in the apartment across the hall, and we opened up our doors to pass back and forth between the rooms. One girl who had been in Crystal City when the plane hit the Pentagon had heard it coming in low to the ground and heard the crash as it hit. Another girl was crying so hard she was shaking, saying, “I want to go home. I don’t want to be here anymore.” As the afternoon wore on, the streets emptied, no one walking, no one driving, it appeared as though D.C. was a ghost town. But most were still in the city, watching their TVs, wondering how this day would change America forever. After working at the Pentagon for more than seven years, Burns transitioned to defense and intelligence contracting and now works as a program manager with Xcelerate Solutions. He lives in Haymarket, Va., with his wife and their twin daughters.

Sept. 21, 1981 Sandra Day O’Connor confirmed as first woman Supreme Court justice

Aug. 20, 1985 Iran-Contra scandal breaks

If you would like to share a reflection about your time in Hamilton’s D.C. program, send it to editor@hamilton.edu. We’ll publish more submissions online in a future edition of Hamilton Headlines.

Nov. 8, 1988 George H.W. Bush elected president

Oct. 11, 1991 Anita Hill testifies in Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

UPI / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

CAROLINE CANNING ’10 D.C. Program — Fall 2008 ONE OF THE BIG DRAWS of Hamilton for me was our D.C. program, so I was especially excited to participate during an election cycle! While in D.C., I had two simultaneous internships — one day per week, I worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the majority side, which at the time was chaired by Joe Biden. The remaining time I spent working at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. These two internships offered me a unique perspective into the inner workings of our government, particularly how presidential campaigns can impact our foreign policy. There was an incredible buzz in the city in the weeks leading up to the election. I remember people talking excitedly about the prospect of not only a party change but, more importantly, the historical significance of electing our country’s first African American president. Our department hosted an election night party for everyone in our program, and as we watched the results come in, everyone waited with bated breath to see the outcome. When the election was ultimately called for Obama, I remember hearing fireworks going off nearby and seeing on the news that revelers were heading down to the White House to celebrate. People were excited, and the energy was contagious! The election also meant changes at both of my internships — Biden would soon be heading to the White House as vice president, and the scholar I was helping to

Nov. 3, 1992 Bill Clinton elected president

H A M I LTO N

Dec. 19, 1998 House of Representatives votes to impeach Clinton

Nov. 7, 2000 Presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore inconclusive; the result, in Bush’s favor, eventually resolved by Supreme Court

support, Bruce Riedel, was soon appointed by Obama as the chair of a review committee to overhaul U.S. policy on Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was an invaluable experience to witness firsthand and something that I will never forget. Canning is a third-party risk manager at Cruise, an autonomous driving start-up. Previously she worked in emerging technology risk at KPMG. Since 2015, she has lived in San Francisco and recently married her wife in Palm Springs.

Sept. 11, 2001 Terrorist attack at Pentagon

Nov. 4, 2008 Barack Obama becomes first African American elected president

ELENI NEYLAND ’18 D.C. Program — Fall 2016 PEOPLE OFTEN REMEMBER where they were the exact moment a major event or tragedy occurred. I remember laying on the couch of my Hamilton D.C. apartment, dark except for the dancing glow of my laptop screen, as Nov. 8 slowly melted into Nov. 9. My roommates had long since gone to bed, accepting the foregone conclusion of Hillary Clinton’s defeat after Pennsylvania had slipped to the Republicans. In the early hours of the morning, Donald Trump was declared the 45th president of the United States. When I think back on the 2016 election, however, I remember the afternoon of Nov. 9, laying on the floor, hugging a dog, convinced I was about to be fired from the biggest break of my life. During the fall of 2016, I interned in the Obama White House. By day I worked in the East Wing assisting with events and tours, and by night I ran into class apologetically late. On Nov. 9, the White House felt raw with disbelief and defeat. Staffers and interns walked around looking somehow lost. For many, years of their work and progress was about to be reversed. For others, the political was more personal: Our friends, families, and selves were being threatened by deportation, failed schools, medical bills, a broken judicial system, and so much more. No war had started or mass casualty event struck, but this election would impact real lives. And even in the seat of power in the nation’s capital, this group of dreamy, liberal idealists couldn’t find a silver lining. Inside our office we watched President Obama deliver stoic remarks from the Rose Garden just a few yards away. We watched Secretary Clinton’s concession speech as

June 26, 2015 Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage

we worked. So when Sunny, one of the two Obama family dogs who frequented our office, settled at my feet, I gave into the urge to lay on the floor and hug her. At that exact moment, my boss’, boss’, boss (still several bosses below the commander-in-chief) came into view, his upside-down head breaking the plane of the ceiling I was staring up at. As my heart sank the last inch it had to fall that day, he chuckled and said, “I think we all wish we could be doing that today.” And so I didn’t get fired; eventually Nov. 9 melted into Nov. 10, and the semester wound to a close. Some of the shock and sadness I witnessed after President Trump’s election turned into Democratic mobilization and electoral gains. But deep divides persist, and the path forward remains unclear. n

“After waiting in the three-hour line for a 30-minute glimpse into the Senate impeachment proceedings of Donald Trump, I was struck by how the impassioned sound bites and video clips on the news didn’t well represent the energy of the room. Many senators were fighting to stay awake, some getting up frequently to stretch their legs. However, where fiery rhetoric fell short, the sense of political tension that consumed the chamber was more pervasive than my classes or readings led me to expect. Being able to witness even a brief portion of the trial helped me fully appreciate our country’s widening partisan divide.” — Libby Militello ’22, a government and Chinese major, who is currently in Hamilton’s D.C. Program. She is a communications intern at Precision Strategies, a firm that works with businesses, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and political campaigns, through a networking connection with Matt Creeden ’16.

Neyland (left with fellow interns and Bo and Sunny Obama) is a political associate for Sara Gideon, speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives. She previously worked on the campaign staff for U.S. Rep. Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.) and spent a year in Malaysia on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship.

Nov. 8, 2016 Donald Trump elected president

Sept. 27, 2018 Christine Blasey Ford testifies in Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing

Dec. 18, 2019 House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

VISIT AND POST AT

There’s More Where This Came From! Browse through just a few of the highlights pulled from recent posts to the Hamilton Hub. For more updates and photos from your classmates — and to share news of your own — visit HAMILTON.EDU/HUB.

healthy bunch collectively speaking. Must have been that fraternity cooking. Same old stories to tell and some new ones to add. Now to plan for a get-together around the 60th reunion. 60th! Hard to believe … like being 80.” From left are Sev Marsted ’61, Bob Levitt ’61, Chuck Woodworth ’61, Bob Disney ’61, John Schoemer ’61, Charlie Anderson ’61, Tom Crane ’61, and Bill Renert ’61.

Bill Yeomans ’55 and his wife, Kay (left), with Joanne Minichetti, mayor of Upper Saddle River, N.J. Bill delivered the keynote address last summer at a town celebration.

TOM CRANE ’61 writes: “Eight of the brothers of the Theta Delta Chi pledge class of 1957 traveled to Siesta Key, Fla., to celebrate their 80th birthdays. Several had not seen each other in over 60 years. Not a bad looking group all things considered – no beards, no tats, and (mostly) hair – very 1950s. Pretty

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Correspondent BARRY SEAMAN ’67 shares this news from Jonathan Tittler ’67: “THREE TEKES ON A TRAIL: This photo captures the moment when Steve Ogden ’70 and I were met by Dick Harned ’67 at the western endpoint of the Erie Canal Trail in North Tonawanda, N.Y. Steve and I had been biking from the Hudson River to the Niagara River over the previous three summers. Our wives just shook their heads.”

HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

CLASS CORRESPONDENTS David Simonson ’47 simonsona6@aol.com Sheldon Horowitch ’48 morrismgt@aol.com Bob Bloomer ’50 rsbloomer@aol.com Jack Banks ’52 jbanks711@hotmail.com Roger D’Aprix ’55 rdaprix@roico.com

Chris Durham ’57 and Correspondent John Allen ’60 sporting their buff and blue as they catch up on all things Hamilton at the Oyster Bar in New York City.

STU HOROWITZ ’68 posts: “I’ve added to my

repertoire of retirement activities. I’m now doing a weekly stint with the archivist at Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s home turf. It’s an assignment only a librarian (and one who likes cataloging, at that) would endure, let alone enjoy. I’m entering metadata into the revised catalog of the books in Roosevelt’s house, supplementing a catalog that was prepared a good many years ago. While the task may seem mind-numbing, the breadth of TR’s holdings, the inscriptions, personal notations, and other marginalia present a fascinating portrait of the man.”

BRAD EMERY ’68 remembers meeting up with John Oates ’68, now his DKE ski instructor, at Mt. Snow, Vt., in February 2019. How many from 1968 are still skiing or ever tried in the first place? Note to Lou Teitel ’68 and John Mellencamp ’68 — look what you started with that roll to Sugarbush 50+ years ago! Now John is a level 2 ski instructor in Vermont specializing in adaptive geriatric skiing for the Class of ’68 ... while Brad provides his unique dentistry on skis service! Correspondent BILL MULLER ’69 writes: “A big congratulations goes to Bob Ross ’69! Bob, in his role as CEO at St. Joseph’s Addiction Treat-

ment and Recovery Centers [based in Saranac Lake, N.Y.], received the Charlie Devlin Award for advocacy in the field of addiction treatment in recognition of his 50 years of serving individuals and families in need of addiction treatment.” Correspondent BILL ROYER ’70 posts an update from Ting-Yi Oei ’70: “Can’t remember the last time I submitted something, but thought that this award for Asian American Community Leader of the Year for Virginia that I received might be of interest. Just shows I’m keeping busy in retirement! Also, we’re moving from Reston, Va., after 45 years in northern Virginia to Petersburg, Va., where we’ve been rehabbing an old house for the last five years.” Royer also shares: “This September the Psi U Class of ’70 assembled once again in Virginia Beach for their biannual reunion. Attending were John Bowe ’70, Joseph Knapp ’70, Frank Karlinski ’70, Don Schaeffer ’70, Chet Suida ’70, Rich Tushingham ’70, and Rich Glover ’70. Also attending were their spouses, including Tamia Patterson Karlinski K’73. In between rounds of spirited golf and bridge there was plenty of wine, great meals, and greater reminiscing of days on the Hill so long ago.

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Greg Bathon ’56 egab33@gmail.com Bill Poole ’59 eloop3@aol.com John Allen ’60 johnallen347@gmail.com 1961 TBD * Sam Crowl ’62 crowl@ohio.edu Doug Wheeler ’63 dpwheeler@hhlaw.com Jon Vick ’64 jonvick2@aol.com Forrest Jones ’65 forrestljones@earthlink.net Curt Brand ’66 r_curtis_brand@sbcglobal.net Barry Seaman ’67 seamanbarrett@gmail.com Mike Berkowitz ’68 m.berkowitz@sbcglobal.net

*WE HAVE A VACANCY! If you’re interested in learning more about serving as correspondent for this class, contact editor@hamilton.edu.

CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Bill Muller ’69 william.muller@usdoj.gov Bill Royer ’70 waroyer@aol.com Rory Radding ’71 roryradding@gmail.com Glenn “Doc” Reisman ’72 glenn.reisman@ge.com Rick Eckman ’73 eckmanr@pepperlaw.com Ed Watkins ’74 az1730@nycap.rr.com Bob Hylas ’75 bobhylas@gmail.com

STEVE DENNIS ’71 writes: “I recently retired after a 25-year career in local economic development. My last position was director of planning and development for the city of Corning [N.Y.]. I am enjoying country life and being a part-time farmer. There is a rumored black bear in the area and lots of deer. No more meetings, and I am resisting any urge to become a consultant.” Correspondent ED WATKINS ’74 reports: “Charlie Garry ’78 and his wife, Anina, joined Rob Gianfranceschi ’74 and wife Jean for hiking tours in Switzerland and Norway. Nice to be retired. … Speaking of retirement, I am joining the ranks of the somewhat idle on Dec. 12. Governor Cuomo has assured me the State of New York will do just fine with me off the payroll.”

Arla Altman ’76 TwinkieBGood@yahoo.com

Finan says he’s looking forward to his retirement “on the beach in South Carolina, enjoying the sun, and fishing.”

Carol Travis Friscia ’77 carolfriscia@me.com Marc Komisarow ’78 marc.komisarow@ hamiltonbridgeadvisors.com Brad Auerbach ’79 brad@bradauerbach.com Peggy Daniel ’80 peggydaniel@earthlink.net Elly Cyr ’81 ellycyr@comcast.net Scott Allocco ’82 scott@sjahealthcare.com Joseph Flynn ’83 jtflynnmd@earthlink.net Liz Finegan Menges ’84 efmenges131@gmail.com Debbie Grassi Baker ’85 debgbaker@aol.com Melissa Joyce-Rosen ’86 MelissaJR@frontier.com

Class of 1977 alumnae Lisa Mesinger Pontius, Stephanie Landau, and Merry Melvin — not only Kirkland classmates but at Horace Greeley High School as well — got together in New York City with eight other high school friends to take in Imagining Madoff (an off-Broadway production starring another high school friend). Merry lives in D.C., Lisa in Florida and Cape Cod, and Stephanie in Connecticut.

JOHN HUTCHINS ’75 shared this photo of (from left) him, Lou Neri ’76, Walter Stugis ’76, and Bob Carpenter ’75 on the links at the Lake Placid (N.Y.) Club. This marked the third year of their annual “Dunham Open” — although regular Jed Conboy ’76 was unable to attend this time around. After 42 years in the healthcare field, TIMOTHY FINAN ’75 will retire as president and CEO of Bradford Regional Medical Center and Upper Allegheny Health System in July. He served as president and CEO of Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center from 1991 to 1996 and as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the regional HMO Univera Healthcare from 1996 to 2005. In 2006, he took over as president and CEO of Olean General Hospital in New York. In an article about his coming plans,

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Correspondent CAROL TRAVIS FRISCIA ’77 shares: “Just heard from Jonathan Yarmis ’77 who writes: “After 64 years of living in and around New York City (if you include Clinton as “around”), I’ve relocated to Austin, Texas, to take the job at Amazon Web Services as director, analyst relations, AI, and machine learning. It’s an exciting opportunity with an obviously amazing company in a fascinating area of technology so I couldn’t say no to the chance to do something exciting. Downside: It’s still in the mid-90s here in Austin in early October. Upside: For a one-bedroom apartment with loft office in Stamford, Conn., I was paying $2,815/month. Here, for a three-bedroom house in a gated community, I’m paying $2,795 (and no state income tax). I can deal with that. Still learning the best barbecue places (of which there are many).”

JAN BERGER ’77 posts: “Following more than a year of coast-to-coast commuting as The Golub Corporation’s (Price Chopper/Market32)

4 THINGS NOT TO MISS IN

ASPEN F

By Liza Rueckert Henry ’08

ounded by silver miners in 1880, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the first ski runs were developed in Aspen. Now the year-round population of roughly 6,660 jumps to 27,000 during the high seasons. Although known for its four ski mountains and high-end shopping and restaurants, of which there are plenty, the town has much more to offer.

APRÈS SKI AT AJAX TAVERN Known for its Ajax Burger and truffle fries, it’s the place to go for après ski. During warm spring afternoons, you’ll find everyone sitting on the patio sipping rosé while watching skiers on their last runs down Aspen Mountain.

LIZA RUECKERT HENRY ’08 moved to

PARAGLIDING One of the most amazing ways to see Aspen, paragliding is not just a summer sport. With flights operating off Aspen and Snowmass mountains in the winter, it’s an awesome way to get an adrenalin rush and a bird’s-eye view.

2 HIKE HIGHLANDS BOWL; LUNCH AT CLOUD NINE If you’re ambitious, hike the Highlands Bowl. Take the lift to the peak of Highlands Mountain, pop off your skis, and hike the 782' rise to some of the best ungroomed terrain in the area. After you work up an appetite, head to Cloud Nine for a late lunch of raclette and fondue.

Aspen right after Hamilton to work as a nanny, drawn in large part by the outdoor lifestyle, skiing included. (She notes that “Aspen has a saying that people come for the winter and stay for the summers. I was only supposed to be here for three months — 11 years later and here I still am!”) She lives with her husband Patrick; daughters Hailey, 2, and Adelaide, 4 months; dogs Ziggy and Kylee; and cats Chloe and Bo. Now a stay-at-home mom, she previously worked as operations manager for Kemo Sabe, a western retail shop in Aspen.

TREK TO THE PINE CREEK COOKHOUSE Located past the old Ashcroft silver mining ghost town, this restaurant is accessible in winter only by cross-country skis or horsedrawn sled. The three-mile trek is slightly uphill. Once you’ve wined and dined, cruise down to the parking lot guided by the light of your headlamp — or, if you’re lucky, a full moon.

PHOTO CREDITS 1. Jamie Fletcher 2. Clear Productions 3. Courtesy of www.colorodoskiauthority.com 4. JOHNNY WILCOX

CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Monique Lui Holloway ’87 moniqueholloway@comcast.net Maria DiGiulian ’88 mdigiulian@verizon.net 1989 TBD * Tamara Helmich Conway ’90 tamaraconway@gmail.com Ray Lauenstein ’91 rlauenstein@gmail.com Richard Skinner ’92 richardms70@aol.com Brendan McCormick ’93 brendanmccormick@verizon.net 1994 TBD * William Ferguson ’95 hamilton.college@outlook.com Tina McSorley Sommer ’96 mcsommy@gmail.com 1997 TBD * Sam Packer Finkelstein ’98 packer.samantha@gmail.com Sarah House Murphy ’99 sarahehouse@hotmail.com Carol Bennett Lang ’00 carol.b.lang@gmail.com Justin Stein ’01 steinjustin@gmail.com Dan Fillius ’02 danfillius@yahoo.com Amanda Gengler Horrigan ’03 amandagengler@yahoo.com

*WE HAVE A VACANCY! If you’re interested in learning more about serving as correspondent for this class, contact editor@hamilton.edu.

interim treasurer via a consulting engagement, I just joined Jacuzzi Group Worldwide in southern California as director, global risk management.” Correspondent JOSEPH FLYNN ’83 writes: “Got this great note from Rick Thompson ’83: ‘Kate Hoare-Thompson ’82 and I have retired! Kathleen was employed by AT&T for the last 34 years, and in late 2018 they made her an offer we couldn’t refuse. The final decision was made around Christmas and we started planning for our next adventure. We decided we wouldn’t stay in Dallas and would move to Lake Placid, N.Y. (my hometown). My brother Tommy [Thompson] ’73, and his wife happened to be in Placid around that time so he helped us find a new home. We Skyped during several house tours and settled on a place in the middle of town, down a dirt road. We showed up to settle in March, the first time we had actually seen it in person, and arrange for some work. We both left our companies in May and then moved the household in June. ... It was a great decision, and we haven’t looked back!’” ASB Real Estate Investments has named DEAN CINKALA ’84 its new chief operating officer. In addition to overseeing accounting, investor reporting, and human resources, he will serve as co-head of the firm’s capital investments group, responsible for transactions and asset management.

Correspondent MELISSA JOYCE ROSEN ’86 posts: “Tom Keane ’86 emailed a photo with his son Christoffer ’20 from last spring’s parents baseball weekend at Hamilton. He writes, ‘Chris is a senior pitcher for the team. We were just recently at Hamilton for Family Weekend in September. I ran into Julio Dolorico ’88 as we were walking in Root Glen. It was great to catch up with him.’ Tom had an exciting spring as his younger son, Se-

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

bastian, was drafted by the Red Sox in the 11th round of the 2019 draft. Tom continued, ‘I have just recently started my 33rd year of teaching history. I also have been coaching baseball and teaching pitching lessons since we graduated.’ I wonder how Dad’s pitching lessons play into his sons’ baseball careers?!”

John Cressey ’90 finished a through hike of the 2,192-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine in five-and-a-half months. He recently retired and is living in Scottsdale, Ariz. NY Governor Andrew Cuomo has appointed KYLE KOTARY ’92 deputy communications director for the New York State Office of Health and Mental Hygiene. Kotary most recently served as CFO for Hospice & Palliative Care, Inc. and previously as director of external affairs, outreach, and marketing at New York State of Health. He holds his master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University.

WANT MORE HAMILTON ALUMNI NEWS? Hop onto the Hamilton Hub—

hamilton.edu/hub

CLASS CORRESPONDENTS Céline Geiger ’04 celinegeiger@gmail.com Sara Peach Messier ’05 sara.messier11@gmail.com Colby Bishop ’06 colby.bishop@gmail.com

SAM BROWN ’01 writes: “It was great to work alongside fellow Hamilton and B uffer alum Jared Belskey ’19 this season at Meadowstone Farm in Bethlehem, N.H.” AKIHIRO NAKANO ’92 shares: “Although not

officially registered, we held an Alexander Hamilton Party 2020 in Tokyo in January. Attendees were Misaki “Maya” Funada ’23, Pablo Reina-Gonzalez ’23, Max Hernandez- Zapata ’19 (not pictured here; sorry Max!), Ren Stern ’13, Gentaro Asai ’95, Mari Izumura ’94, and me. I believe all of us had a good time! Thanks to those who came.”

MARGARET WENDLING BACHELER ’93 is the new

senior director of statewide continuing education and workforce development for the Pennsylvania State University’s 20 Commonwealth campuses. According to the university, she will support Penn State outreach professionals’ work across the state to advance their continuing education mission; identify opportunities for the university to address statewide workforce development needs; and promote blended, accelerated, and other technology-enhanced programs that will attract and retain adult students. She also will identify community and economic development opportunities and support regional initiatives to address them.

The Madison (N.Y.) Central School District Board of Education has named JASON MITCHELL ’98 its new superintendent. He recently served as deputy superintendent in the Canastota (N.Y.) Central School District, following five years there as the assistant superintendent for instruction.

LINDSAY GRIFFITHS ’02 has been named ex-

ecutive director of the International Lawyers Network. This follows her 15 years with the organization, first as director of network development and most recently as director of global relationship management.

Bolstering its growing presence in Atlanta, Fox Rothschild LLP welcomed ALEX KAUFMAN ’06 to its litigation department. With a J.D. from Emory University, he is a trial attorney who represents clients in commercial, employment, and securities litigation and advises on corporate and franchise matters as well as government relations.

Sara Carhart ’07 carhart.sara@gmail.com Melissa Joy Kong ’08 melissajoykong@gmail.com Fiona MacQuarrie Helmuth ’09 fionahelmuth@gmail.com Kory Diserens ’10 kdiserens@gmail.com Nick Stagliano ’11 stagliano.nick@gmail.com Allison Eck ’12 allison.c.eck@gmail.com Alex Orlov ’13 alexandra.m.orlov@gmail.com Tara Huggins ‘14 tarahuggins4@gmail.com Ben Fields ’15 hamilton2015notes@gmail.com Kaitlin McCabe ’16 kamccabe1@gmail.com 2017 TBD * 2018 TBD * 2019 TBD *

*WE HAVE A VACANCY! CASEY GIBSON ’09 writes: “I taught [actors]

Topher Grace and Joseph Gordon-Levitt how to write jingles on this week’s Minor Adventures with Topher Grace podcast. It got dark. Listen anywhere podcasts are available!”

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

If you’re interested in learning more about serving as correspondent for this class, contact editor@hamilton.edu.

Bookshelf Maurice Isserman, professor of history The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)

Thanks to the failure of the press, and to the stupidity of Hollywood, the Home Front has no real conception of war, and only by [soldiers’] letters home can the truth be made known. — S gt. Denis Nunan, C Company, 87th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, letter to his mother from Castel d’Aiano, Italy, March 23, 1945

he unlikely combination of Ivy League ski team members, park rangers, European refugees, and even a few Olympians formed the first specialized alpine fighting force in American history — the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Deployed into combat in Italy at the start of 1945, this elite crew of soldiers ultimately broke the last line of German defenses in the Northern Apennine Mountains, spearheading the Allied advance to the Alps and the final victory of World War II. Maurice Isserman, the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, chronicles the men of this mountaineering unit from its inception to its decisive role on the Italian front. Drawing from hundreds of diary entries and letters written by 10th Mountain soldiers to family and friends back home, the author provides frontline views not only of such famous battles as Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere, but also about the bonds of brotherhood formed under the most harrowing of circumstances.

Among the letters is one by Marty L. Daneman from Chicago, who enlisted right out of high school in the spring of 1943. After extensive training in skiing, snowshoeing, and rock climbing, he arrived in Naples on a troopship in January 1945, still shy of his 20th birthday. Isserman writes: His outfit moved up to the front-lines later that month, but saw little action at first. ‘Crazy as it may sound,’ he wrote in late January to his 18-year-old fiancé Lois Miller, waiting for him back home in Chicago, ‘I’m almost anxious to get into a hot spot, out of simple curiosity how I’ll react. I’d like to prove to myself whether or not I can take it.’ Three weeks later, on February 20-21, he had the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity, when the 10th attacked Mount Belvedere, a crucial high point overlooking the highway that ran between Allied-occupied Florence to the south, and north through the Apennines

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

toward the Nazi-occupied Po Valley. The letters he wrote to Lois after Belvedere suggested that he had done a lot of growing up in the short time since he last wrote: “When it was over I shook for 3 days, jumped at every noise, & couldn’t hold a meal. And came out with a hate for war I’ll never lose. I don’t think anyone except a front line soldier, who has endured the mental agony of shelling, seen the gaping, ragged shrapnel wounds in flesh; seen his buddies die before him & smelled the sickly odor of dead men can develop the hate of [war] I now have.” Also included among the letters are several by Saranac Lake, N.Y., native Donald Potter, who would later serve as a professor of geology at Hamilton from 1954 to 1988. In early 1943, Potter was in his third semester at Williams College where he was a member of the ski team. Like several of his teammates, he decided to drop out and enlist with the mountain troops. Within a few weeks of his arrival for training at Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies, Private Potter was taken out of basic training to join the ski instructors. Isserman writes: After his first day on the slopes, [Potter] wrote to his sister back in the Adirondacks, where he had learned to ski as a child, that being a ski instructor ‘is swell for one’s own skiing’ and that he had already learned a ‘powerful lot.’ He went on:

SUSAN ALICE BICKFORD K’72. Dread of Winter (New York: Kensington Publishing, 2019).

NAMITA GOSWAMI ’94. Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2019). THUY DA LAM ’94. Fire Summer (Pasadena, Calif.:

Don Potter

Don Potter and Jane Chapple on their wedding day following his return from the war.

“G.I. skiing is regular snow plow, stem & stem christies — it’s no different from any other controlled method (under such names as Arlberg, etc.). I have an advanced class, and it looks like I’ll have a chance to really make something out of them.” But life as a soldier in training wasn’t a typical day on the slopes. The men were required to complete training maneuvers at altitudes of up to 13,500', lugging 90-pound rucksacks and camping for extended periods in blizzard conditions with temperatures dropping to 30 degrees below zero. The simulated combat environment also prevented them from lighting fires or burning anything for warmth.

In 1944, Potter, by now a second lieutenant, wrote to his mother from an unidentified location (since his letters were subject to official censorship) describing a Christmas Eve service he had attended the evening before:

“Christmas carols were sung with quite a bit more meaning that most of us have ever put into them and then to end it up we sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ until every beam and rafter in the chapel was standing on end. I’ve never heard anything like it before.” On the evening of Jan. 3, 1945, Potter boarded the USS West Point and set sail for Italy. Twice during the course of the next few months he would be hospitalized for injuries suffered in the line of duty. He would later receive the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in combat. Although the 10th Mountain Division served in combat for only four months, it had one of the war’s highest casualty rates. Nearly 1,000 of the 13,000 soldiers in the division died, and thousands more were injured. Isserman concludes the book like this: “The views from Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere today are of a beautiful and peaceable landscape in an imperfect but better world. The men of the 10th helped to make it so. Sempre Avanti.” n

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Red Hen Press, 2019).

KEVIN GRANT, the Edgar B. Graves Professor of History. Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890-1948 (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2019). RACHEL A. HOROWITZ ’09 and Grant S. McCall (editors). Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies (Louisville, Colo.: University of Colorado Press, 2019).

STUART KESTENBAUM ’73. How to Start Over (Cumberland, Maine: Deerbrook Editions, 2019). SCOTT MACDONALD, professor of art history. The

Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

MARC RANDOLPH ’80. That Will Never Work, The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2019).

MARK RICHARD ’73. Meanings as Species (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

DAVID S. RICHESON ’93. Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019). THOMAS B. ROBERTS ’61. Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2019). WILLIAM WELLS ’67. Face of the Devil (New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2019).

For descriptions of the books listed above, and links to where you might purchase them, visit hamilton.edu/alumni/books.

SHARE & SHARE-A-LIKE

Recent Hamilton social media posts

Share with us by tagging your posts #getscrolled so that they appear on our social media aggregator.

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

The dedicated Seattle area crew of Izzy Bradford ’16, Brent Handy, Emily Pitman ’15, Amanda Thorman ’13, Chris Shi ’12, Phoebe Greenwald ’16, and Emily Grund ’15 volunteer with Teen Feed.

[DISCOVERS ] PROBLEM:

Pharmaceutical companies need data to bring a new drug to market.

SOLUTION:

KEVIN ROBACK ’17 As a scientist with ICON, a contract research organization, Roback analyzes samples from clinical trials and sends that data back to clients. Data are then used to generate a pharmacokinetic profile of the drug — or how fast the drug breaks down in the body — allowing doctors to determine a safe and effective dose for the medication.

gave me hands-on skills with laboratory “ Hamilton methods [plus an] advantage because of the focus on communication skills. A brilliant idea is useless if you are unable to communicate it to others. The ability to articulate complex scientific ideas to people I work with has served me well.”

The world is full of problems. Hamiltonians offer solutions.

SUPPORT THE BECAUSE HAMILTON CAMPAIGN hamilton.edu/becausehamilton

THEN AND NOW

Dare to Make a Difference

HEN THE WOMEN at the heart of Hamilton’s Arthur O. Eve Higher Education Opportunity Program, better known as HEOP, met last spring to commemorate the program’s 50th anniversary, their conversation was inspirational and frank.

Christine Johnson is founding director of HEOP at Hamilton and Kirkland. Her successor, Phyllis Breland ’80, the longtime director of Hamilton’s Opportunity Programs, will retire this spring. When Breland was a HEOP student, Johnson was her mentor, and the two have remained close ever since. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

ON MEETING FOR THE FIRST TIME PB: I came into your office and I can remember I had a turban on and some other things because I was a little kind of militant-like. And so you said to me, “Don’t go in there and tell them what they can do for you. Tell them what you can do for them.” And that has always been the position that I’ve taken through the work and continuing with the guidelines, and I call them Guidelines for Excellence, that you set so long ago. CJ: By the way, let me interrupt you. You were going to be an actress. PB: Yes, yes I was. But that changed. I remember [Professor of Speech] Warren Wright, because when we had public speaking, which was a requirement back then, I was going to be a star. That was my idea. But somehow in figuring out how to articulate my ideas and to defend my argument, my direction changed. And I realized that it was closer to my heart to continue to share the lessons that I was given. But I will tell you, I still was good at it, and I remember, if you remember, I wouldn’t participate in any mainstage production because they were all roles for maids, and I felt I was better than that. CJ: And I agreed with you. PB: … Right. That gave me such dignity because I could stand the ground, because I had the confidence, and I’ve got to thank you for

H A M I LTO N

that, because I don’t think I’ve shut up since. But when I decided that I was going to go this other path, I had the greatest model in you. CJ: Well thank you for that, but I think you repaid me. You repaid me, and you don’t realize — this is the first time that I’m telling you this — you repaid me when you were the speaker at your graduation. Hamilton, being a male institution, found it very hard to yield to female influence. At the time that I came on board we had only one female faculty person.

that happened Mother’s Day of last year. It was about 9 in the morning, and the phone rang. And the voice said, “Ms. J. can I spend Mother’s Day with you? My family, they’re still at my other job location, and I’m now here in Texas at the University of Texas at Austin.” I said, “You are? Of course you can come and have lunch with me.” And he came, and we had brunch together. And with this community in which I live, there’s well over 200 people, and there was Chris Johnson, a woman of color, with this blonde gentleman that was passing himself off as my son. And he was asked, “You call her mother?” He said, “Yes, she’s my mother. She mothered me for four years.” He said, “It’s amazing, I went through more with her than I did with my own mother.”

ON TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

CJ: I believe she was in the English Department. Sure, we changed, and for the better. We had females over at Kirkland, and Hamilton, when Kirkland closed, accepted all of the female faculty that they could, at that time, muster. But I felt that a woman being accepted by the male student body as a speaker at their graduation was a real accomplishment.

PB: … I don’t know that people who are outside of the Opportunity Program family fully understand all that it takes to get a student to not only walk across that stage but walk across that stage with a sense of accomplishment. And you know all of us in so many ways, I think, probably the only person next to my mom who would know those ins and outs and the challenges that I had for you, is you. My children refer to you as Aunt Chris. And there’s nobody who can discipline my children except you. They’ll listen when you say, ‘do this, do that.’

PB: Thank you for that.

CJ: But you’ve got to say why.

PB: Wow.

ON BEING “MOM” PB: What are some of your best successes, students that you’ve seen, the relationships? I mean, the respect is so deep. CJ: You know, there are many of my students that are there, that were there, and they’re still with me, as you are here with me today. Let me talk about something

PB: Right. That was the other side that you talked [about] — you don’t punish or reprimand without a person knowing why. And so when I today talk to students and they have their challenges, I say, “Well, let’s own up to what happened first of all. Why? Now what are we going to do? Because you don’t have any time to feel sorry for yourself.” CJ: That’s right.

Sprocket Media Hub

Phyllis Breland ’80 (left) and Christine Johnson share memories and reflections of 50 years of making a difference through Hamilton’s opportunity programs.

PB: And you are not anyone’s victim, so let’s move forward, let’s develop a plan, that’s behind us. I think that the constant from what you started is very much alive today, and it’s in everything that we do now. There isn’t one piece of that program that we can’t justify or tell you why we’re doing it and what it means. And I think those are the treasures — not I think, I know — that those are the treasures that I carry forward. When you are working with us, you work with us in totality, right? CJ: … yes, in totality, but at the same time what I wanted to do was to prepare each of you for the real world. And the real world, in order to accept you, you must be able to have something to offer.

ON REACHING YOUR POTENTIAL PB: I think that is one of the most difficult challenges that we have had in educating the community and the world. This is not the “people of color” program. CJ: Nope. PB: This is for anyone who meets the economic and academic guidelines. These are people who have the potential to excel if given the opportunity to do so. Our programs, neither yours nor mine, were easy. As

PB: You have put some words in my head. Years ago, I don’t know if you remember them, but they stay with me forever. ... You said, “Phyllis, as long as you are willing to do the work, you can be or have anything you desire.”

CJ: Yes. But you have to make a commitment.

PB: … I thank you, you know, for that.

CJ: And I thank all of you who heard what I said, because around the world today my students are making a commitment.

a matter of fact, I’m now demanding nine classes. And I’ve kept the fine dining, the trip to New York for etiquette, the Broadway play, the communication, the volunteer work that we do with other communities — CJ: Yes. PB: — because those are lifelong things. ... Cell phones, the first summer that cell phones were really popular with the students I [had students turn] them off. A knee-jerk focus. But then I started hearing back from the parents, so you can have [your phone] on the weekend. Because it gave me an opportunity to further instill skill sets to them. Know how to manage your time. Know what you’re doing. Because you haven’t had this phone, you learn now that you can get along without it. You can do things. You can use your mind, your skill, and I think of those little small things that play out in the greatness in the accomplishments of our students. n

PB: Well, it started with you. CJ: Make a difference. Dare to make a difference.

See a video and transcript of their conversation at hamilton.edu/HEOP50.

W I N T E R 2 0 2 0

Necrology For full memorial biographies of the following alumni, as well as a searchable database for those published dating back to 2008, see hamilton.edu/necrology.

Thomas A. Evans ’43, an insurance executive and volunteer teacher of Clinton, N.Y., Oct. 23, 2019.

Merritt C. Farren ’51, a U.S. Navy engineer and fighter pilot and later an electrical engineer of Fort Worth-Dallas, April 6, 2019.

Norman E. Kappler ’56, an advertising

Roswell G. Daniels ’46, a physician of East Peoria, Ill., Nov. 10, 2019.

Donald O. Pollock ’51, a physician of Cooperstown, N.Y., Sept. 29, 2019.

John A. Longeretta ’56, an attorney of New Hartford, N.Y., April 15, 2019.

Graydon S. Staring ’46, an attorney of

Louis D. Boyajy ’52, a pharmacologist

Richard A. Mead ’57, a family-described

Richard J. Carmer ’48, a vice president of the Harden Furniture Co., in McConnellsville, N.Y., Aug. 5, 2019.

Edmund M. Davis ’52, an attorney of

Robert C. Gross, Sr. ’48, an attorney and oil business executive of Portsmouth, R.I., Aug. 1, 2019.

Hugo “Tug” M. Pfaltz, Jr. ’53, a tax, trust, and estate attorney of Summit, N.J., Aug. 31, 2019.

Donald H. Gent ’49, a psychiatrist and

Frank P. Iuorno ’54, an orthodontist of New Hartford, N.Y., Nov. 15, 2019.

Bethel, Conn., July 20, 2019.

Douglas M. Parrott ’49, a Presbyterian

minister and professor emeritus of religious studies of Riverside, Calif., Aug. 17, 2019.

David B. Dickens ’55, a professor of German emeritus at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., Jan. 9, 2019.

Richard H. Storm ’59, who pursued

David R. Bannatyne ’50, an insurance

Philip M. Hahn ’55, a financial analyst of

Crossan H. Curry ’50, an artist and art professor of Oxford, Ohio, June 26, 2019.

James S. Magee ’55, a political science professor of Minneapolis, Dec. 17, 2019.

Robert M. Gow ’50, a businessman turned ski lodge operator of Warren, Vt., Nov. 1, 2019.

Roger G. Townsend ’55, a sales businessman of Port Crane, N.Y., May 10, 2019.

W. Arthur Blanchard, Jr. ’51, an attorney

Jerome W. Cramp ’56, a social studies

Oakland, Calif., July 25, 2019.

surgeon of Hanover, Pa., Oct., 7, 2019.

agent of Stratford, Conn., Aug. 4, 2019.

and artist of Dallas, Aug. 16, 2019.

and research scientist of Morris Plains, N.J., Aug. 11, 2019.

Ellisburg, N.Y., Dec. 25, 2019.

Stamford, Conn., May 23, 2019.

teacher and principal of Salisbury, Conn., Nov. 26, 2019.

Arthur L. Content ’51, a tax and real estate

writer, thinker, wanderer, arts enthusiast, and fundraiser, lately of Burlingame, Calif., Dec. 28, 2018.

G. Alan Shaler ’57, an English literature teacher of Easthampton, Mass., April 4, 2019. James D. MacLennan ’58, a wholesale

furniture sales agent of Chicago, Feb. 7, 2018.

C. Everts Mangan, Jr. ’59, a banker of

careers ranging from teacher to public relations specialist to music critic, of Sarasota, Fla., Oct. 19, 2019.

John R. Landers ’60, a certified public accountant of Liverpool, N.Y., June 1, 2019. Lyman “Butch” S. Logan, Jr. ’60, an entrepreneur of the San Francisco area, June 20, 2019.

Joseph “Jay” D. Allen ’61, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia of Athens, Ga., Dec. 2, 2019. Richard C. Polgreen ’62, a military

careerist of Junction City, Kan., June 15, 2019.

attorney of Annapolis, Md., July 9, 2019.

executive most recently of Vero Beach, Fla., Sept. 27, 2018.

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Kenneth K. Hazen ’63, an insurance and financial services agent of Farmington, Conn., and later Longmont, Colo., Nov. 24, 2018.

Eleanor “Nell” M. Burlingham K’76, a child and adolescent psychiatrist of New York City, Sept. 26, 2019.

Jonathan Z. Hildreth ’64, whose careers

Frances Tower Thacher K’76, a midwife,

ranged from journalist to businessman to restaurateur of Atlanta, Dec. 22, 2019.

hospital administrator, and women’s health activist of Bedford Hills, N.Y., March 25, 2019.

Peter S. Knobel ’64, a rabbi of Evanston,

Joseph D. Wachspress ’76, a cardiologist

Ill., Aug. 20, 2019.

Gary R. Sutton ’64, a French and Latin teacher of Buffalo, N.Y., Sept. 23, 2019.

N. Stephen Bauer ’65, an English teacher

Melinda S. Walsh K’77, a clinical social

Ohio, Dec. 15, 2019.

Richard A. Lyndaker ’09, a professional poker player of San Diego, July 30, 2019. Aaron C. Lenz ’13, of Minneapolis, April 14, 2019.

Alex J. Witonsky ’17, a writer of Smithtown, N.Y., Feb. 19, 2019.

worker and counselor of Weekapaug, R.I., Aug. 13, 2019.

FACULTY

and educational consultant of Larchmont, N.Y., April 9, 2019.

engineer of Clinton, N.Y., Sept. 8, 2019.

Michael G. Sheahan ’65, a physician and

Theodore J. Ferrara ’87, an artist, musician,

and writer of Minneapolis, Oct. 16, 2019.

theatre for more than four decades first at Kirkland College and then at Hamilton, Aug. 28, 2019.

David J. Yockel ’87, a research analyst of

J. Martin Carovano, a Hamilton economics

medical director of South Euclid, Ohio, May 6, 2019.

G. Kimball Sargent III ’66, a business

manager turned financial advisor of Chicago, June 6, 2019.

Andrew K. Van Benschoten ’66, whose

David P. Castellano ’79, a computer

Bethesda, Md., Aug. 29, 2019.

Geoffrey D. Pinkerton ’89, a state budget director of Frankfort, Ky., Nov. 19, 2019.

jobs ranged from town supervisor to student mentor, of New Kingston, N.Y., Aug. 7, 2019.

C. Brendan Moore ’99, a family tire business employee of Newtonville, N.Y., March 19, 2019.

John T. Freedman ’68, a dentist who

Michael L. Everhart ’02, a fundraiser

practiced for three decades in Skaneateles, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2019.

W. Anthony “Tony” Ganey ’68, a banker and former Peace Corps and U.S. State Department worker of Tempe, Ariz., April 12, 2019.

of Voorhees, N.J., July 17, 2019.

Benjamin C. Breisch ’07, of Chagrin Falls,

Carole A. Bellini-Sharp, professor of

professor and later the College’s 16th president from 1974 to 1988, Aug. 12, 2019.

Edwin B. Lee, Jr., professor of history at Hamilton from 1958 to 1987, June 14, 2019. Gregory R. Pierce, professor of psychology at Hamilton from 1991 to 2016, Oct. 9, 2019.

of Alexandria, Va., and Harrisburg, Pa., July 30, 2019.

Jeremiah F. Williams ’05, most recently a high school English teacher of Verona, N.Y., Nov. 6, 2019.

Visit and post on the hub at HAMILTON.EDU/HUB

Peak of Perfection THE BRIGHT YELLOWS AND GREENS OF BEINECKE Student Activities Village, even when covered in a light blanket of snow, have a way of warming the spirit on the coldest winter days. PHOTO BY JADE THOMAS â&#x20AC;&#x2122;20

HAMILTON

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAID

198 College Hill Road Clinton, NY 13323

Hamilton College

THE BIG QUESTION If you could turn back time, what one piece of advice would you give your Hamilton student self ?

FOR NEXT ISSUE, CONSIDER:

Study more, party less? That’s probably true for many of us at least at some point in our college careers. But if you could offer your young adult self one pearl of wisdom that you didn’t know as a student on the Hill, what would it be? Let us know by March 15 at editor@hamilton.edu. Kindly limit submissions to 150 words or fewer, and include your name and class year. Responses will be published in the next issue or on the Hamilton Hub (hamilton.edu/hub).

THE BIG ANSWERS Readers’ reflections on their senior theses experiences can be found on pp. 22-23.