The Pulteney Street Survey, Winter 2022

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HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES

THE PULTENEY STREET SURVEY

SOLVING FOR X How 9 alums are managing today’s biggest questions

Shipshape

PHOTO BY ADAM FARID ‘20

The William Scandling motors along on the Cayuga-Seneca Canal at the start of its five-day trip to Cleveland, Ohio this summer. The Colleges’ 65-foot floating laboratory was refurbished and outfitted with the latest tech and equipment for coursework and research this fall.

THE PULTENEY STREET SURVEY

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CONTENTS

H OBA RT AN D W IL LIA M SM IT H CO LLE GE S

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Q U A D

F E A T U R E S

02 U pfront: Open Minds 14 $ 1 Million Gift for Conservation Research 20 12 New Teams

C O M M U N I T Y

C L A S S

N O T E S

26 M astering Management through the Liberal Arts

45 9/11: 20 Years Later

52 Dispatches from Alums

48 P rizes, Premieres and Publications

94 Rememberances

30 Solving for X

50 The Wallet in the Attic

96 The Last Word

Volume XLVI, Number 2 / THE PULTENEY STREET SURVEY is published by the Office of Marketing and Communications, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 300 Pulteney Street, Geneva, New York 14456-3397, (315) 781-3700. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Pulteney Street Survey, c/o Advancement Services, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 300 Pulteney St., Geneva, New York 14456-3397.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges are committed to providing a non-discriminatory and harassment-free educational, living, and working environment for all members of the HWS community, including students, faculty, staff, volunteers, and visitors. HWS prohibits discrimination and harassment in their programs and activities on the basis of age, color, disability, domestic violence, victim status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, or any other status protected under the law. Discrimination on the basis of sex includes sexual harassment, sexual violence, sexual assault, other forms of sexual misconduct including stalking and intimate partner violence, and gender-based harassment that does not involve conduct of a sexual nature.

EDITOR, VICE PRESIDENT FOR MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS Catherine Williams / SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Wickenden ’09 / DESIGNER Lilly Pereira / aldeia.design / CONTRIBUTING WRITERS/EDITORS Ken DeBolt, Grace Gallagher ’10, Mackenzie Larsen ’12, Mary LeClair, Bethany Snyder, Natalia St. Lawrence ’16, Mary Warner ’21, Andrew Wickenden ’09 and Catherine Williams / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Drew Angerer, Michael Appleton, Dylan Bennett ’19, Kevin Colton, Adam Farid ’20, Laura Getman, Andrew Markham ’10, Adam Michaels, David Shankbone, Andy Wolk, Bobby Yan / Additional images courtesy of Apple, Google and Hobart and William Smith Colleges Archives / COVER ILLUSTRATOR Eleanor Shakespeare / PORTRAIT ILLUSTRATOR Kathryn Rathke / PRESIDENT Joyce P. Jacobsen / THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES CHAIR Craig R. Stine ’81, P’17 / VICE CHAIR OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES Cassandra Naylor Brooks ’89 / VICE PRESIDENT FOR ADVANCEMENT Robert B. O’Connor P’22, P’23 / William Smith Alumnae Association Officers: Kirra Henick-Kling Guard ’08, MAT ’09, President; Katharine Strouse Canada ’98, Vice President; Julie Bazan ’93, Immediate Past President; Carla DeLucia ’05, Historian / Hobart Alumni Association Officers: The Hon. Ludwig P. Gaines ’88, President; Paul Wasmund ’07, Vice President; Dr. Richard S. Solomon ’75, P’10, Immediate Past President; Andrew Donovan ’12, Historian. / For questions and comments about the magazine or to submit a story idea, please e-mail Andrew Wickenden ’09 at wickenden@hws.edu.

The pages of this publication were printed using 100% recycled paper which enables the environmental savings equivalent to the following: • 244 trees preserved for the future • 18,227 gal. US of water saved • 35,342 lbs. CO2 saved from being emitted • 403 MMBTU of energy not consumed * * These calculations were derived from the RollandEco-calculator.

ON THE COVER: “Solving for X,” picturing (clockwise, from top) John Muhlfeld ’95, Ted Bromley ’95, Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk ’98, Shaun Ryan ’91, Meggie Schmidt Hollinger ’10, Jacob Fox ’16, Teaganne Finn ’16, Nick Pilgrim ’00 and Delvina Smith Morrow ’09. ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE / ELEANORSHAKESPEARE.COM

U P F R O N T

Open Minds

“ Like so many liberal arts skills, being comfortable with discomfort is valuable not only for critical inquiry in college classrooms, it’s also essential for productive participation in wider campus life and the world beyond HWS.”

During Homecoming and Family Weekend in September, I joined student Trustees Gib Shea ’22 and Nuzhat Wahid ’22 for a forum on the Quad, where we reflected on the start of the semester and had a wide-ranging dialogue with parents and alums in the audience. We discussed the pandemic, of course, including the Colleges’ safety protocols and mental health support systems, but also study abroad plans, faculty research and the renovation of the Intercultural Affairs Center. The conversation reminded me how fortunate we are at the Colleges to be surrounded by so many smart, thoughtful people with such a broad set of experiences and outlooks. The forum brought into focus one of the primary functions of our campus as a proving ground where students — and the rest of us — can explore, engage and disagree, analyze, synthesize and understand more fully that each of our perspectives is only one of many.

In this spirit, I am excited to announce two new programs to encourage students to explore the complexities of thorny issues. The Stern Family Forum, generously funded by Honorary Trustee Herbert J. Stern ’58, P’03, LL.D. ’74 and Trustee Samuel A. Stern ’03, supports annual events with notable guests who will bring nuance to difficult, sometimes controversial subjects. The forum will be coordinated by Provost and Dean of Faculty Sarah Kirk, Hobart Dean Scott Brophy ’78, P’12 and Professor of Philosophy Eric Barnes, who heads up the Colleges’ award-winning debate team.

Meanwhile, Vice President for Campus Life B.B. Barile and Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Khuram Hussain are directing a program explicitly designed to develop effective practices for engaging in difficult conversations. With support from an anonymous alum donor, they will challenge first-year students and their community assistants (formerly RAs) to embrace complexity and ambiguity, and navigate conflict without contempt. Like so many liberal arts skills, being comfortable with discomfort is valuable not only for critical inquiry in college classrooms, it’s also essential for productive participation in wider campus life and the world beyond HWS. The other major academic development on campus is the Master of Science in Management program, which launched this fall (see p. 26). Building on a liberal arts foundation, the intensive one-year program prepares graduates to step into leadership roles in a range of fields. This evolution in the curriculum is rooted in a long tradition at HWS, one in which students learn to meet complex and emerging challenges with innovative, interdisciplinary solutions, as countless alums are doing today — from COVID-19 to urban redevelopment to election security (see p. 30).

Elsewhere in this issue, you will read about intriguing student and faculty scholarship; a new endowment for environmental research and another for the Colleges’ Phi Beta Kappa chapter, which turned 150 this year; and the 12 new and returning athletics programs HWS will launch starting next fall.

With the holiday season approaching, I look forward to seeing many of you at our upcoming off-campus gatherings — and on campus, too, as we prepare to celebrate Hobart’s Bicentennial throughout 2022.

Until then, wishing you a happy and healthy end of 2021, J OYCE P. JACOBSEN President

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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHRYN RATHKE

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Q U A D

PHOTO BY KEVIN COLTON

For 50 years, Koshare has dazzled audiences with original compositions, eclectic aesthetics and electric movement.

Now, Hobart and William Smith’s flagship student dance group is embarking on a new phase, with a new name. >>

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Calling All Dancers

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

“

Introducting Kinetic Dance Collective Since the first performances under the name Koshare in the 1970-71 academic year, the group (later organized as a guild, and later still a collective) has put on an annual concert, attracting dancers and choreographers of all majors and experience levels. The concert’s popularity has grown beyond the bounds of the HWS campus, and since 2013, performances have been staged at the Smith Opera House, the historic venue whose 1,300 seats have sold out every year since. Almost.

Due to the pandemic, the 2020 season was the first since Koshare was founded that the annual concert didn’t happen.

In some ways, it was good timing. Over the past 50 years, students’ recreational interest in dance has paralleled the growth of the HWS Dance Department, and the lines between the two have blurred. There came a subtle but steady shift toward academicizing and professionalizing what had been a club.

“As the number of dance majors and minors grew, and dance and step teams were formed, the choreography became more competitive and less inclusive,” says Professor of Dance Donna Davenport. “Professionalism started being associated with past training, which in many cases comes down to privilege.”

In response, the student group has chosen a new name, Kinetic Dance Collective, and is returning to the historical roots of student-led dance at HWS: fun performances featuring all styles and traditions, and dancers with any degree of experience (or none at all).

For the fall 2021 concert, the group restructured the processes for auditions, choreography submission and leadership selection, to ensure the focus is on the dancing and the unique culture it inspires at HWS — “the energy and support that you feel from the audience [and] the energy and dedication of our students,” as Kinetic Dance Collective co-president Bryna Gage ’22 says. “We dance because we love it and want to make it accessible to everyone on campus and give students a sense of belonging through dance.”

Koshare dancers and choreographers look back on the group’s indelible impact.

"In the fall of 1968, Sharon Tomlinson was hired

by Miss Janet Seeley to teach modern dance at Hobart and William Smith. Sharon was young and had spent some time in New York City dancing with Mary Anthony among others. She brought to Geneva the ideas that were shaping modern dance at the time.

Both subconsciously and — yes — a bit consciously, we wanted to break away from Miss Seeley’s ideas about technique and choreography, including her ‘dance club.’ That’s how Koshare was born.

I remember dancing in St. John’s Chapel, outside on the Quad, in the sunken gardens at Houghton House, and even in Pulteney Park at an antiwar rally; Vietnam had a huge impact on the campus in those days and there were many antiwar gatherings where artists ‘spoke’ along with other more traditional antiwar activists. It was this vision of dance as a source of communication, protest and celebration that cemented our dedication to Koshare and our desire to make it a permanent force in our lives and on the campus.

The dance studio was akin to a sacred space for us, a place where we worked and shared and delighted ourselves and each other with ideas and moving images. We loved to move, and we enjoyed watching others move; for me, that has not changed even 50 years later. Also, there was a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people who planned, organized, worked, argued and produced things we were proud of — not unlike a family.

This was a refuge and a place of safety on a busy campus where we didn’t always feel we belonged.

At times, it was a source of entertainment and, always, it was a place of learning."

Nancy Malfitano Bailey ’71, Professor Emerita of Teacher Education at Canisius College

PHOTO BY KEVI N COLTON

ARTS & E NTE RTAI NM E NT

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"Although the Smith Opera House definitely has its perks, I loved performing in Winn-Seeley. It was such an intimate experience to be dancing within feet of your closest friends, professors and family members. You could feel their energy instantaneously and it fueled the power and passion behind the show. It was also magical to know that you were performing in the same place where decades of former dancers performed."

Caroline Dosky Allen ’12, MAT’13, Education Consultant

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▶ Koshare cofounder Nancy Malfitano Bailey ’71 during one of the group’s earliest performances.

"Because of my time at Hobart and William Smith, I have this awareness that living a creative life is for everybody. And it comes with everything we do: whether you dance it or draw it or write it or sing it, it makes the world more tangible, more livable, more real, more accessible, more vital.

It has more potential to bring about change in oneself and in the world, and I think a lot of the folks who came through Koshare were doing that in their own way. And I’m grateful for that."

Rev. J. Bruce Stewart ’73, Director of the Center for Liturgy and the Arts, and Director of Chaplaincy Services for Goodwin House

"My favorite parts of performing and choreographing for Koshare were how inclusive it was and the community it fostered. I was able to meet people in all different majors and of all different backgrounds and connect with them through the collective joy of movement…it taught me how to value building community using the powerful tools of art and movement…[and] provided me with friendships that will last a lifetime."

Dr. Karah Charette ’14, Doctor of Physical Therapy and co-founder of Bodyful Physical Therapy and Wellness

"Recently, my 15-year-old daughter stole my 1994 Koshare shirt. She wears it often — probably for its timeless design, but perhaps she also figured out how special it is to me. I’m grateful for the constant reminder of my time spent dancing at HWS and the friends I made there. Being able to perform inspiring pieces choreographed by my enormously talented classmates was a challenge, an honor and a total blast!"

Robin Cluse ’96, Teacher at East Mecklenburg High School

“The liberal arts are all about exposure to many, many platforms and experiential roads to explore. Koshare shows this — anyone can be a part of the magic. For those of us who were studying in the Dance Department, of course we had our concerts throughout the academic year. But Koshare was about the entire HWS community, and those within that community who shared a love for dance and movement. We were all one during Koshare.”

Joshua Warr ’05, Licensed Real Estate Salesperson, Director, Performance Artist

Shaahida Samuel ’19, Lead Dance Teacher at Achievement First Brooklyn High School

“

"Koshare was an imperative part of HWS culture! Through dance, students and staff — across genders, races, ethnic backgrounds and ages — were able to connect and come out of their comfort zones. It pulled me out of my comfort zone and helped me to establish close connections with my professors, who encouraged and guided me through this path. I loved the process of choreographing — sleepless nights, late rehearsals in Winn-Seeley or the PAC, the tears, and the ability to become the leader I am today!"

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ON THE M E RITS

As a recipient of a 2021 Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship, Alex Dwyer ’23 will spend 10 weeks next summer working with researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The highly competitive national program offers undergraduate training in oceanic and atmospheric science, research, technology, outreach and education. Dwyer, an environmental studies and geoscience double-major, is the fifth HWS student to win the Hollings award since 2014.

NO DEBATING IT

Sreyan Kanungo ’23 is helping lead HWS to new heights in prestigious debate and leadership competitions. This fall, Kanungo and Sarim Karim ’22 finished eighth in the English as a Second Language debates at the World Universities Debating Championships, widely regarded as the premier international collegiate debate tournament.

Earlier this year, Kanungo, Reece Wilson ’24 and Jack Maloney ’24 took home the top prize in the business presentation category at the New York State Leadership Conference. The team represented the HWS chapter of the Future Business Leaders of America – Phi Beta Lambda, which Kanungo and Eden LaRonde ’24 cofounded this spring.

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ON A(N HONOR) ROLL WITH SERVICE AND VOTING HWS RANK NUMBER 3 IN TOP U.S. COLLEGES FOR PUBLIC SERVICE

For the fifth year in a row, HWS are among the top five U.S. liberal arts colleges for public service, according to Washington Monthly’s 2021 College Guide and Rankings.

Ranked third this year for service, the Colleges were also included on the policy magazine’s annual “honor roll” for student voting.

ONCE AGAIN HWS OFFERS BEST VALUE — AND PROFESSORS ARE THE “SECRET SAUCE”

In Princeton Review’s 2021 rankings, the Colleges stand among the institutions with the best return on investment and professors with the biggest impact. For the sixth year in a row, HWS appeared in Best Value Colleges, which recognizes the strongest combination of academics, financial aid and career outcomes. “Of course, the real secret sauce, so to speak, comes from the faculty experience,” as Princeton Review’s Best 387 Colleges notes. In this year’s edition, HWS faculty appeared in the “Great Professors” rankings, a best-of-thebest tribute to colleges that have earned a regular spot on the list for their “truly stellar records of student satisfaction.”

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

Urban and suburban sprawl takes a toll on biodiversity, but three students have an award-winning idea to restore habitats for bees, moths, butterflies and birds. James Anderson ’23, Maeve Reilly ’23 and Katerina Yacoub ’23 teamed up with the Office of Sustainability to create “pollinator patches” across campus. Pollinator patches are packed with plants that flower throughout the year, providing food and shelter for wildlife. Supported by the Carver & DeLaney Environmental Project Endowment, the new plantings complement campus “grow zones,” where grass and wildflowers are allowed to grow tall to protect and sustain insects and other animals. Together, these efforts help mitigate the stress that mown lawns and paved surfaces place on local habitats. This spring, the pollinator patches project was selected for the IMPACT Conference’s Action Program of the Year, which recognizes direct, student-led action that strives to enrich campuses and communities. The IMPACT Conference is the largest annual conference focusing on college students’ civic engagement and social action.

The student-designed pollinator patches project was named Action Program of the Year.

PHOTO BY KEV IN CO LTON

SOMETHING IN THE ATMOSPHERE

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ANNOTAT IO N

SUPPORT ROLE After nearly 200 years of heavy lifting, the columns at the President’s House were due for reinforcements.

In the U.S., the “international fad for neoclassicism” is “expressed best after about 1830 as Greek Revival,” says Associate Professor of Art and Architecture Michael Tinkler. Many houses built in the earlier Federal style were, by the middle of the century, converted to Greek Revivals. While the President’s House was designed as a Greek Revival, “most of the fraternity houses on campus are actually Federal style in their bones,” Tinkler says.

“Somebody came along, probably in the 1830s or ’40s, and added the porticos to the front.”

Built in 1836 and purchased

by Hobart College in 1885, the President’s House is the former residence of New York City auctioneer Adrian Muller.

The fluted Doric columns — identifiable by their simple, rounded capitals and absence of a base — needed a full repair to prevent permanent structural and aesthetic damage.

The President’s House once sported a secondfloor balcony, which was removed at an unknown date. The front steps were added, removed and added again, following the architectural trends of the era.

The wooden columns are hollow and assembled of many pieces, “what you might call staves, almost like a barrel,” Tinkler says. “Each one is a trapezoidal shape and once they’re glued and clamped together, they’re held together by their geometry.”

PHOTO BY KEV IN COLTO N

Geneva’s architectural heritage makes the city “a varied and stimulating environment,” but the President’s House “stands out as the most important building in all of Geneva,” says Ford Weiskittel, who, with the local Historic District Commission, guided the Colleges’ decision to restore the original columns.

After their restoration at Honeoye Falls Millwork Company, the columns were reinstalled this spring

by Diamond and Thiel Construction of Syracuse.

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OVERHEARD I learned that I can persevere through anything, and if I put my mind to something and set a goal for myself, I can meet and most likely exceed that goal and come out of it a better and stronger person.

MARY BAILLOS ’24, an international relations major and coxswain for William Smith Rowing, on what she learned about herself during her first year at HWS

When students have a sense of belonging, they are more resilient and engaged, and more likely to thrive as scholars and leaders.

…we have learned painfully with COVID all over again how quickly the health disparities emerged, how…we’ve invested so much more in our biomedical research infrastructure, which delivered these vaccines, than we have in our public health infrastructure, which is really meant to implement them and provide them.

DR . CHRIS B EYRER ’81, epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on PBS News Hour Weekend, discussing the uneven parallels between the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics

Generosity and gratitude grows.

People who are generous become more generous.

REV. CHARLES CLOUGHEN JR . ’64 , author of One Minute Stewardship: Creative Ways to Talk about Money in Church, on the snowball effect of philanthropy

Let’s play the ‘Jeopardy’ round with these categories…

60 Minutes correspondent and HWS Trustee BILL WHITAKER ’73, L.H.D. ’97, who guest-hosted Jeopardy! in May

It seems like it’s been a fairly short time for us to be crying shortage as… we’re still in the adjustment back to full opening.

President JOYCE P. JACOB SEN, discussing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s June workforce report on American Public Media’s Marketplace

The thing that we preach around here is that ideas come from any place. My dad used to say: Never dump on an idea because a thread of an idea may come to another idea…It becomes a chain reaction.

…I frequently think I’m completely lost, but being lost is better for writing than knowing exactly where one is…. Allow yourself to be lost. To have no idea what the hell you’re doing.

FR ED MATT ’81 , president of the fourth-generation brewery F.X. Matt Brewing Co., in the Syracuse Post-Standard’s weekly series on leadership

Associate Professor of English KATHRYN COWLES’ advice to young writers, in an interview on the blog Neonpajamas

Associate Professor of Education and Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion K H URAM H USSAIN , on the impact of gifts to the DEI Fund

I always knew I wanted to work in television, but it wasn’t until I went on a college field trip to ABC that I experienced the true adrenaline rush of a live television environment. I was thrilled by the pace of the control room, the energy of production teams and the front row seat to some of the most important stories of our time.

SAR AH KUN IN ’0 9, a three-time Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning television producer, in Reel 360’s Women’s History Month series

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COMMENCEMENT

Weird Edition

PHOTOS BY KEVIN COLTON

After a truly unusual academic year-and-a-half, the Classes of 2020 and 2021 received their diplomas this spring, in person, on the Quad.

IN HER VALEDICTORY ADDRESS to the Classes of 2020 — given in June 2021 — President Joyce P. Jacobsen offered a meditation on the weirdnesses of the past year. Graduates had left HWS for “a world that was locked down and socially distanced, gripped by social and political unrest, obsessed with rulefollowing and rule-not-following.” But there were “other weird things” — like the solidarity that emerged during the pandemic — that conjured for Jacobsen “a world in which even more weird, strange, bizarre and fateful things could happen.”

As Jacobsen told the 2020 grads, “If weird can lead to good, then let’s continue to be weird. Be at one with your weirdness, and the weird collectivity of what we have all been through. Let that feed your compassion for others, who experienced their pains and losses, just as you experienced yours…Above all, keep alive your love of learning…Be the geeky person who wants to know more. Be the weirdo who cares about ideals, who doesn’t give up on your own goals and ideals and helps others to reach theirs.”

HWS presented the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry ’75, D.D. ’20 with an honorary doctorate during the 2020 Commencement ceremony. In his remarks, Curry, the Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, reflected on the hardships and sacrifices of the past year, and a vivid memory of his father telling him, “The Lord didn’t put you here just to consume the oxygen.”

Just weeks earlier, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden L.H.D. ’21 delivered the 2021 Commencement address and was presented with an honorary degree and the 42nd Elizabeth Blackwell Award. In her remarks, Hayden reflected on Dr. Blackwell’s model of determination and resilience, and the previously unfathomable achievement of a 19th-century woman earning a medical degree, much less graduating at the top her class. Hayden said, “Elizabeth Blackwell predicted: ‘100 years hence, women will not be what they are now’…‘None of us can know what we are capable of until we are tested.’ This past year has been a test for all of us. It made you stronger and opened your eyes to opportunities and some surprising possibilities.”

▲ The Most Rev. Michael Curry ’75, D.D. ’20 addresses graduates.

HONORIS CAUSA

▲ President Jacobsen and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden L.H.D. ’21 pose with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

HWS awarded six honorary degrees during the 2020 and 2021 Commencement exercises. In addition to Curry and Hayden, the Colleges recognized four other esteemed recipients, who have each made a considerable impact in their respective professions and communities, and on Hobart and William Smith.

Margaret “Peggy” Bokan Greenawalt ’66, L.H.D. ’20 Retired financial executive, philanthropist and advocate for increased female leadership G. Peter Jemison L.H.D. ’20 Artist, activist, Historic Site Manager of Ganondagan State Historic Site and member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation Mary L. Beer R.N., M.P.H., L.H.D. ’21 Director of Public Health for Ontario County Christopher N. Lavin ’81, L.H.D. ’21 Executive Director of the Boys & Girls Club of Geneva and the Geneva Community Center

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The Life of the Mind 150 years of Phi Beta Kappa at HWS B Y

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For undergraduates, there is no higher recognition than admission to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the country. The HWS chapter, Zeta of New York, was founded in 1871 and over the past 150 years has inducted students who demonstrate not only exceptional academic records but intellectual breadth and love of learning. In honor of Zeta Chapter’s sesquicentennial, a $150,000 gift from Dr. Arnold Cohen ’71, P’05 (pictured inset) celebrates the liberal arts heritage shared between HWS and Phi Beta Kappa — and recognizes the academic excellence of students who will one day become members.

Established in 2021, the Dr. Arnold N. Cohen ’71 and Dr. Colleen R. Carey Endowed Phi Beta Kappa Fund will support, in perpetuity, membership for all new HWS inductees and the annual banquet in their honor.

Dr. Cohen, who excelled as a student at HWS and was elected to Zeta Chapter, later attended Harvard Medical School and went on to a distinguished career as a gastroenterologist.

With the new endowment, he says he wanted to recognize the breadth and intensity of study undertaken by Zeta members, and “to eliminate any barriers” to membership, “so it’s a pure recognition of their hard work and their ability, and their application of their education.”

“To perform at that level requires a consistent, dedicated effort every day,” Dr. Cohen says. “It’s not just being academically intelligent — it means being emotionally intelligent, it means being disciplined.”

“Dr. Cohen’s gift is a generous tribute to Zeta Chapter’s history and a supreme vote of confidence in the talented and curious students who thrive in our curriculum,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen.

During its 150-year history, the HWS chapter has promoted the liberal arts by honoring students who take exceptional care in cultivating “the life of the mind,” says Professor of Physics Don Spector, Zeta Chapter president. Dr. Cohen’s gift positions Zeta Chapter as “a clear locus” of the liberal arts at HWS, Spector says, “a place where we are committed to preserving and promoting the liberal arts as an educational model that’s important for people living active lives in the world.”

Dr. Cohen, who now teaches medicine at Washington State University, says that in “a time where the liberal arts are maybe not appreciated in the way they should be, I think any institution that recognizes the value of a liberal arts education is a good thing — and should be reinforced.”

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P B K @ HWS Of nearly

300

Phi Beta Kappa chapters nationwide, Zeta of New York was the

23rd founded.

Each year, the HWS chapter inducts roughly

30

seniors, along with a handful of the most accomplished juniors, into lifetime PBK membership.

To date, more than

1,000

HWS alums are Zeta Chapter members.

FUN FAC T: During the 1929 Commencement, then-Governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt L.H.D. ’29 (left) delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address at HWS. In a wideranging oration that touched on politics and service, education and civic engagement, he concluded: “We stand, I believe, at the threshold of a better day, a happier day, a clearer day for civilization and America. I have faith in the men and women who are taking up the torch.”

At the ceremony, Roosevelt was awarded not only an honorary degree but honorary membership in Zeta Chapter — 10 days before his alma mater’s PBK chapter (Harvard’s Alpha of Massachusetts) inducted him to its own honorary ranks.

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Winter Wonderland

Captured during a snowfall last December, Chief Photographer Kevin Colton's shot of Demarest Hall was awarded Gold this year in the annual District II honors from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The judges described the effect of multiple exposures and light streaming out of the Blackwell Room as “magical.”

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Nothing More Important A $1 million gift from the Midgley Foundation establishes a permanent fund to support summer research projects focused on environmental conservation.

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Student scholars and faculty mentors collaborating on summer research: it’s a hallmark of scientific education at Hobart and William Smith, and now students have a new source of assistance with the Stanley Wheeler Midgley, Jr. and Constance Lax Midgley Environmental Studies Summer Research Fund.

Established in 2021 by the Midgley Foundation, with guidance from Eric Lax ’66, L.H.D. ’93, the $1 million endowment permanently funds summer research focused on environmental science and conservation, helping students understand challenges at the local, national and international levels — and put solutions into practice.

The Midgely Foundation is named for Lax’s cousin Constance and her husband Stan, who both cared deeply about conservation. Lax, who sits on the board of the foundation, apprised the other members of the wide-ranging environmental research and education that occurs at HWS, which led to the endowment in the Midgleys’ memory.

“Conservation and the environment become more important daily,” Lax says, “so it’s critical for students to have funding for their education and research.

Knowing it’s there for generations to come, and that the Colleges can count on it, is a great comfort to me.”

Most student projects will be guided

by HWS Environmental Studies faculty, but given the interdisciplinary nature of conservation research, the Midgley Fund will also support projects across the curriculum that align with environmental protection. And because research frequently requires travel and supplies, up to 20 percent of the annual support may be used for related expenses.

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“For decades, our students have used the living laboratory of the Finger Lakes to explore urgent environmental questions, and now they will have perennial support to pursue innovative research and solutions,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen. “We are grateful for the foresight and generosity of the Midgley Foundation, and for the friendship and stewardship of Eric Lax, whom we are proud to count among our esteemed alums.”

The inspiration behind the gift To boost tourism after World War II, the Southern Pacific Railway sponsored a contest for the best film on the Colorado Rockies. Stan Midgley, who spent most summer vacations in Estes Park, Colo., had embarked on a promising career as a chemist and executive at Abbott Labs in Illinois, but when his film won the contest’s $1,000 prize, he promptly quit his job. An avid hiker and outdoorsman (he climbed every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado), he began traveling the country, producing more than a dozen films documenting Hawaii, Yosemite, autumn in New England and the breadth of the nation’s natural beauty. These hour-long travelogues — or “chucklelogues,” as they were known, for Stan’s witty narration and the sight gags he incorporated — drew large audiences across the country, including screenings for the National Geographic Society. Every March, the films ran on Detroit television.

Constance Lax — who was the youngest nurse matron in Britain during World War II — was hired to oversee the nurses in a 1,500-bed hospital in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit. She first met Stan after booking him to show a film for a hospital

The falls at Watkins Glen State Park at the south end of Seneca Lake.

group. By then, each had more or less given up on the idea of marriage, but that soon changed.

Happiest when they were alone in the wilderness, “Stan and Constance felt there was nothing more important than conservation and keeping the earth alive,” says Eric Lax — so much so that they earmarked part of their estate to support environmental preservation.

“I believe they would have approved wholeheartedly of the endowed fund that will train generation after generation of scientists and teachers committed to conservation.”

In addition to honoring his cousin and her husband, Lax is gratified to give back to the Colleges.

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With guidance from Eric Lax ’66, L.H.D. ’93, the newly established Midgley Fund permanently supports summer research focused on environmental science and conservation.

PHOTO S BY (CENT ER) KEV I N COLTON, (RIGHT) ANDY WO LK

After graduating with a degree in English, Lax joined the Peace Corps and was sent for two years to an island of 185 people on a quartersquare mile in the Chuuk district of Micronesia, which he calls “a small loss of memory in the Pacific.” He was later a Peace Corps fellow in Washington D.C., then Overseas Director of the Peace Corps School Partnership Program, which allowed him to travel to more than 40 countries. He published his first book, On Being Funny, in 1975. His books since have been translated into 18 languages. He also has given decades of his life to literary and human rights non-profits, especially PEN International, the global writers association. Now an International Vice President of PEN, Lax has served as president of PEN Center USA in Los Angeles and as a PEN International board member for many years.

“I owe so much of my life to Hobart and William Smith,” says Lax, the bestselling and award-winning author of 10 books on subjects as diverse as the discovery and development of penicillin, medical breakthroughs on a bone marrow transplant ward, his own faith, and the life and work of Woody Allen and Humphrey Bogart.

“The Colleges taught me how to think, to take pieces of information and turn them into something whole. I’m grateful for that daily.”

The relationships he forged at HWS have been just as meaningful. His first day in Geneva, Lax met Edie Sparago Irons ’66 on the Quad and they’ve been close ever since, co-chairing their 40th

and 50th Reunion committees. Lax bonded with his senior year roommate, the Rt. Rev. George Packard ’66, through a shared faith “whose subsequent divergent evolutions have profoundly affected us both. [Packard] has been a steady touchstone for me, and graciously opened himself for my book Faith Interrupted,” Lax explains. Dr. Robert Peter Gale ’66, L.H.D. ’87 was a subject for another of Lax’s books, coauthor of yet another and has remained, along with Bob Curtis ’65, Sue Fisher Curtis ’65 and David Lewine ’64, among Lax’s closest friends.

“Without the late, great Peter Tauber ’68, my apartment mate of a dozen years, I would never have met my wife Karen,”

Lax adds. “And Mara O’Laughlin ’66, L.H.D. ’13, my wise-cracking tablemate in the student union and date to the 1963 ROTC Ball, is responsible for admitting decades of impressive William Smith students.”

These friendships, and those with recent graduates like Ella Calder ’18 and Alex Kerai ’19, are the core of Lax’s fondness for HWS. He estimates that half of the campus was built since he graduated, and “probably more graduates have come through the Colleges in the past 55 years than in the 150 before, but to see that the people who are attracted and accepted to HWS are of such an impressive caliber is wonderful, even comforting,” Lax says.

“Walking onto campus and talking with these young people, you realize how talented and smart they are, how lucky the Colleges are to have them and how lucky they are to have the Colleges.”

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FACU LTY NEWS

2021 CAROLYN SHAW BELL AWARD

Kirin Makker

MAKING HISTORY

President Joyce P. Jacobsen

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Associate Professor of American Studies Kirin Makker was featured in Good Morning America’s celebration of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who are “making history right now.” An architect, artist and writer, Makker was nominated by author Sejal Shah, who noted that the HWS professor “models collaborative work in her teaching, transcending conventional scripts. As a biracial/ bi-ethnic Asian American artist, her work begins from a point of multiple lenses. Makker is always searching for new ways of seeing, representing and moving through the world.” Pictured in the Saarinen-Knoll Womb Chair, Makker reimagined the icon of midcentury modern design for her project, The Womb Chair Speaks, with Abbey Frederick ’20

and Ainsley Rhodes ’19. Makker’s article about the project appears in the latest issue of Feminist Studies; another, co-authored with Frederick and Rhodes, is forthcoming in Art Journal. This fall, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., featured Makker’s “Blueprint Series,” which uses cyanotype on textiles and eggshells to “evoke the everyday, the below, the other, the queer, the unbelonging.” See what she’s working on, what her students are making and the occasional photo of her cat on Instagram @kirinmakker.

YOUR INTERNET BRAIN

Is the human brain a computer?

This was the chief question posed in the Phi Beta Kappa lecture in 1971, when HWS celebrated Zeta Chapter’s

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PHOTOS BY (LEFT ) KEV IN COLTON, (RIGHT) DYLAN BENNETT '19

President Joyce P. Jacobsen is the recipient of the American Economic Association’s 2021 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. Named for the first chair of the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, the award is given annually “to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession or mentoring others.” Jacobsen “excelled on all of these criteria,” as the AEA announcement noted.

An “important scholar of labor economics and the economics of gender” and the first woman to serve as HWS president, Jacobsen “is an award-winning teacher, generous citizen of the profession, an exceptional advisor and mentor and a respected and skillful academic leader.” The award will be presented virtually during the 2022 AEA meeting.

Christine Goding-Doty

FINDINGS INTRIGUING FACULTY RESEARCH, REPORTED IN BRIEF*

Daniel Graham

PHOTOS BY KEV IN COLTON

Paul Passavant

centennial. Fifty years later, Associate Professor of Psychological Science Daniel Graham has an answer: the best metaphor for the brain is not a computer — it’s the internet. As Graham writes in his new book An Internet in Your Head, neuroscientists are realizing that beyond performing computations, “the brain also must communicate within itself… [and] communication systems rely on different fundamental design principles than those of computing systems.” This new paradigm, he argues, can open new avenues of research for neuroscientists to unravel the brain’s routing mechanisms and unlock its deepest secrets. Learn more on his Psychology Today blog, Your Internet Brain.

COLONIALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In a Los Angeles Review of Books interview this summer, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Christine Goding-Doty described the connections between colonialism and “the pipes, cables [and] data centers” that power our devices and the internet. As part of the LARB series, “Antiracism in the Contemporary University,” Goding-Doty, who studies race in the digital age, discussed her research with Tung-Hui Hu, a poet, digital culture scholar and University of Michigan professor. She told Hu that where race is concerned, “we can focus on the actions and intentions and relations of human beings, but they belong to a larger context of non-human activity.”

POLICING. PROTEST. POST-DEMOCRACY? “Has the policing of protest become more aggressive and violent? If so, how did this happen?

What does this mean?” asks Associate Professor of Political Science Paul Passavant in his new

book, Policing Protest: The PostDemocratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection. Published this summer by Duke University Press, the book analyzes political protests in the U.S. and how policing such events has become increasingly hostile toward demonstrators.

Two planets were confirmed orbiting the Venus zone of a nearby dwarf star. ¶ Cuba’s economic isolation during the past 60 years helped limit the arrival and establishment of invasive plants. ¶ The cultural resurgence of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and conversations over the tribe’s future, are hampered by the lingering effects of the damming of the Elwha River in the early 20th century. ¶ A mathematical model explains why exposure to a low dose of hepatitis B leads to a slow expansion of the cells that fight the virus, and thus infection persists, but exposure to higher doses can lead to virus clearance. ¶ In the age of social media, multi-level marketing schemes exploit existing gender divides with faux-feminist rhetoric about female empowerment. ¶ Within 50 years of abandonment, post-agricultural forests contain a similar amount of biomass as older forests. ¶ Imaging microscopes and precision micromanipulators can be constructed DIY at a fraction of the cost of their commercially produced counterparts. ¶ Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems exert “an anxiety of influence” and “an anxiety of exile” on the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. ¶ Most students in blended courses in Russian language found the combined video/in-person model preferable to the traditional course format. ¶ William Still, the first to document the Underground Railroad, saw his book as a cultural and political project as well as a road to financial autonomy for his employees, who, like Still himself, were once enslaved. *visit hws.edu/findings for details

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Trial by Science What began as a faculty research collaboration more than a decade ago has become integrated in — and integral to — the HWS biology and chemistry departments.

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In courses like organic chemistry or immunology, you won’t find any “canned” labs at HWS. No moot experiments with predetermined outcomes, because “that’s not really an experiment,” says Professor of Biology Sigrid Carle ’84.

Instead, she says, HWS students “get the real experience of being a scientist, the real process,” by working with Carle and her colleagues on cancer-related research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

With Professor of Chemistry Justin Miller, Carle has been studying the anti-cancer properties of certain compounds since the early 2000s.

Over the years, their biochemical research has opened a gateway to lab work for scores of students, forming the basis of innovative courses, summer scholarship, independent studies and Honors projects.

“Is what we’re doing scholarship? Is it teaching? Yes, it’s both,” says Miller.

“Our teaching is our scholarship and our scholarship is our teaching: there’s no way to disentangle them and we wouldn’t want to. That’s the whole point — students are learning by practicing. I think that’s the best way to teach.”

In the search for new anti-cancer drugs, Miller’s lab synthesizes compounds like those approved for FDA use, tweaking molecules to reveal potential therapeutic uses, which students then test in the cell biology courses taught by Carle. Similarly, Professor of Chemistry Erin Pelkey’s synthetic organic chemistry

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Jenna Hyman ’23 and Haley Sax ’23 run tests in Professor Mowery’s microbiology lab.

group develops strategies to identify potential new anticancer agents, which Professor of Biology Patricia Mowery and her students test for cytotoxicity (i.e. cell killing ability).

“Research is a valuable experience, whatever the institution, but at a small liberal arts college we’re able to have a much larger fraction of the student body do research,” says Mowery. “A small school setting allows for a much deeper mentorship.”

Before working in Mowery’s lab, Brianna Hurysz ’20 was planning for a career as a medical practitioner but “quickly realized how much I enjoyed research and solving problems that nobody else has solved yet,” she says. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Diego, Hurysz says her research experience at HWS not only helped her realize she wanted to go to graduate school, “it also gave me the skills necessary to be competitive” among candidates from large research institutions.

The advantage at HWS, Pelkey says, is that students are in the driver’s seat, which is “an excellent model for education and training, as the students learn by doing real organic chemistry

research…They initiate the independent studies, they work together in groups of two and three all year round.”

Matthew Burnett ’20 says the “dynamic environment” of Carle’s lab challenged him to “adapt to situations and address problems as they arise,” which is “extremely beneficial for a future career.”

As are the opportunities for students to publish alongside their professors, adds Burnett, who is pursuing his master’s in microbiology and cell sciences at the University of Florida.

For Kaitlynn Sockett ’20, now a chemistry Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, the research that became the foundation of her Honors project “was intimidating,” she says, “but valuable preparation for grad school.” Her time in Pelkey’s research group underscored the importance of being able to “work independently and defend and explain the results.”

As Miller puts it, research at HWS pushes “students to learn a lot and contribute substantially to the project.

If they have their goal and have the latitude, they’ll make mistakes but learn from them and come out better trained, better scientists, who know how to think scientifically and problem-solve.”

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VOICES FROM BEYOND This summer, HWS student researchers opened a window to Geneva’s past. Anthony Bray ’23, Samari Brown ’24, Sal Fabio ’22 and Christina Roc ’24 compiled biographies of notable Black Genevans, which inspired the dramatic monologues performed in September as part of a theatrical walking tour of downtown. From Beyond: Staging Geneva’s Unheard Voices offered contemporary audiences nuanced portraits of Black lives and experiences in the city more than a century ago. During the summer, Bray, Brown, Fabio and Roc worked with Associate Professor of Theatre Chris Woodworth, as well as archivists and librarians from HWS and Geneva, to unearth genealogical records, primary documents and historical artifacts, exploring how history itself is constructed and performed.

Brown says that as she researched and wrote about the life of Geneva teacher Nancy Lucas Curlin, she returned to the notion of challenging conventional historical narratives — not only “the lingering thought, ‘What can I do to play a role in the telling of a more accurate story,’ but also the mission: how will I rewrite (and right) history?”

Samari Brown ’24 as Nancy T.P. Lucas Curlin, a 19th century educator and one of the Genevans who inspired the HWS theatre department production, From Beyond: Staging Geneva’s Unheard Voices.

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ATHLETICS

Our Screaming Fan Base Is Going to Get a Whole Lot Bigger The Colleges plan to add a dozen sports over the next five years.

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New and returning sports include: men’s and women’s alpine skiing baseball softball women’s bowling men’s swimming and diving men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track and field men’s and women’s volleyball

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“Hobart and William Smith have a nearly 200year history of engaging students at the highest levels as scholars and athletes,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen. “At a time when other colleges and universities are pulling back on sports or even dropping programs, we are doubling down on our commitment to athletics and the experiences our students have as athletes.”

Announced this summer, the Colleges’ 12 new and returning athletics programs join the existing 23 sports to raise the total HWS offerings to 35. New sports include men’s and women’s alpine skiing, baseball and softball, women’s bowling, men’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track and field, and men’s and women’s volleyball. Earlier in the year, HWS also announced the addition of a varsity esports team, which debuted this fall.

“This is an exciting time in Hobart and William Smith athletics history,” says Associate Vice President and Director of Athletics and Recreation Deb Steward. “Our coaches have proven that they are outstanding recruiters of high-achieving studentathletes, and we look forward to welcoming more quality student-athletes to our campus.”

The national search is underway for head coaches to lead the new programs, as HWS prepares to recruit student-athletes for the first season of competition. The expansion begins in the 202223 academic year when Hobart welcomes back alpine skiing, baseball, and swimming and diving, and William Smith adds alpine skiing, bowling and volleyball.

Hobart volleyball begins competition in 2023-24. The following year, Hobart and William Smith will compete in indoor and outdoor track and field. The plan concludes in the 2025-26 season with the addition of softball.

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PHOTO BY KEVI N COLTON

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Commitment | Achievement | Excellence

The Heron Society is now accepting nominations for the

2022 HERON HALL OF HONOR CLASS

For full eligibility details, or to submit a nomination, visit HWS fans cheering in The Cooler.

Once fully implemented, Hobart will offer 17 sports and William Smith will offer 18. In total, the Colleges estimate that the number of student-athletes will expand from approximately 575 to about 750.

“These new and revived sports, and the coaches and students they will attract, will add to the vitality of our already thriving athletics program and to our campus community,” Jacobsen says. “I’m very much looking forward to cheering them all on in the years to come.”

hwsathletics.com/HHoH_nominate

Nominations may also be mailed Heron Hall of Honor William Smith College Winn-Seeley Gymnasium 300 Pulteney St. Geneva, NY 14456

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Huddle Up for a Good Cause

Hobart Football visits the Happiness House preschool program ahead of the annual Tackles and Touchdowns game in October. With donations for each tackle and touchdown made during the game, the event has raised more than $40,000 since 2010 for Ability Partners Foundation and its programs and services.

Unlike previous visits to Happiness House, because of COVID protocols, the players could only interact with the children through glass.

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SCATTON HANGS UP HER WHISTLE

WILBER PASSES 600

William Smith Head Soccer Coach Aliceann Wilber P’12 became the second coach — and the first woman — ever to hit the 600win milestone in NCAA soccer. She recorded her 600th win with a 2-0 victory over Ithaca College in September. Now in her 42nd season, Wilber is the only head coach to lead the Herons team.

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After a long, accomplished career at HWS, retiring athletics director Deb Steward hands the reins to Brian Miller.

Steward Says Farewell, Miller to Lead HWS Athletics After a 33-year career in college sports, Deb Steward, Associate Vice President and Director of Athletics and Recreation, announced her retirement in October. She will be succeeded by Brian Miller, previously the Colleges’ Associate Director for Athletics and Recreation and Director of Athletic Compliance.

Steward, who has served in a leadership role at HWS for the past 16 years, says she’s “grateful for the trust that our coaches, staff and student-athletes have put in me, and enormously proud of what we have accomplished together.”

“It’s remarkable what Deb has built here,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen. “In the past 18 months alone, she led our teams through the uncertainty of the pandemic and set us on an exciting course to expand our athletic opportunities. I remain grateful for Deb’s dedication to the Colleges and her strong guidance. She will be missed.”

Among other honors, Steward has been recognized as the Women Leaders in College Sports Division III Administrator of the Year. During her tenure, Steward hired 20 head coaches; broke the Colleges’ single day fundraising record; oversaw athletics achievements that earned conference, regional and national acclaim; and coordinated important athletic and recreation facility advances at HWS. Miller, who looks forward to working with coaches, staff and students, notes Steward’s support and influence as “a mentor, teammate and great friend whose positive impact on these Colleges is undeniable.”

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PHOTO S BY KEVI N COLTON

During 32 seasons, Hall of Fame field hockey coach Sally Scatton P’02, P’06 racked up 471 wins, including 11 Liberty League Championships and three NCAA Division III National Championships. Scatton, who announced her retirement this summer, “has been a role model and mentor to decades of Heron field hockey players and colleagues,” says Associate Vice President and Director of Athletics and Recreation Deb Steward. “She is a fierce competitor with high standards that have put our program among the best in the country. Sally’s humor, passion for the sport and love for the Herons have made an enormous impact on so many, including me.”

Scatton joined William Smith field hockey as head coach in 1988, leading the program to 30 winning seasons and to national championships in 1992, 1997 and 2000. Under her guidance, Herons earned 57 All-America awards from the National Field Hockey Coaches Association. Scatton, who ranks sixth in Division III history in career wins, was voted National Coach of the Year three times, Regional Coach of the Year six times and took home top coaching honors from the Liberty League 10 times. She was inducted into the Heron Hall of Honor in 2007 and the NFHCA Hall of Fame in 2010.

This fall, Sophie Riskie ’07 took over as Herons field hockey head coach — the first alumna to lead the team. Steward says, “Sophie brings a wealth of knowledge and passion New Head Field Hockey Coach to this leadership role. I’m confident Sophie Riskie '07 and former Head she will build on the successes of Coach Sally Scatton P'02, P'06 on McCooey Field. this storied program.”

HIP HO BA RT , FOR E V E R! Celebrating 200 years of Hobart College [

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Charter Day, April 22 Reunion Weekend, June 3-5 50th Reunion Celebration for Classes of 1970, 1971 and 1972, June 7-10 Bishop John Henry Hobart Commemoration Day, September 12 Bicentennial Gala, October 22

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Professor of Economics Tom Drennen never took an economics course as an undergraduate. He was an aspiring nuclear engineer, exploring the future of energy, but the more he learned about climate change, the more he understood that the best energy solutions would have to transcend engineering and science. Politics, history, international relations, sociology and, yes, economics — understanding how they all connect would determine the most viable path forward.

Drennen — who directs the Colleges’ Master of Science in Management (MSM) program, which launched this fall — says Tom Drennen the new graduate curriculum proceeds from the same idea: “empowering students to dive deep into serious, complex, interrelated issues and find solutions.” In other words, the MSM is an extension of the liberal arts framework that has defined education at HWS for 200 years.

INESS

Mastering management through the liberal arts

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“Whatever the department or program, creative problem-solving is central to the Colleges’ approach to academics,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen. “Over the past 20 years or so, student interest in leadership opportunities has grown and grown, as we’ve seen with the success of the Centennial Center, the Entrepreneurial Studies minor and the Bozzuto Center for Entrepreneurship. The Master’s in Management is a natural next step, both for the Colleges and for our graduate students, to take solutions-oriented critical thinking to the next level of sophistication and efficacy.”

Jack Lesure ’21, MSM ’22 says a running theme of his undergrad years was chasing the subjects that captured his curiosity: “In high school, I was never one of those students who had a favorite subject or had the future all mapped out — my undergrad was the first time in my educational career that my courses became intersectional.

I was excited about the freedom to go in whichever direction I wanted to learn more about.”

With a B.A. in philosophy and two internships at Mastercard under his belt, Lesure is eager to fuse his academic background with management skills in communications, finance and leadership as he explores careers in public policy. “I’ve gone from writing essays and debating ideas on paper, to now learning about the language of business and how to be a transformational leader,” he says. “I’m really excited to bridge the two together as I continue my studies.”

For Anna Murphy ’21, MSM ’22, courses like “Management Strategies” are a valuable supplement to her Media and Society major — and a leg up in the world of marketing and event management.

After an internship with a sports event management firm this summer, Murphy says she knew there was more to learn. She chose the MSM not only “because HWS is a part of who I have become,” but “because of the community HWS offers…Professors really care about students succeeding.”

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Beth Kinne notes that as

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undergraduates, HWS students develop a solid “foundation for asking probing questions about complex issues, and the ability to pursue answers in an expansive but intellectually sound way.” The MSM, which can be completed concurrently with a bachelor’s degree or in a single post-grad year, cultivates “additional pragmatic tools,” Kinne says — tools that are indispensable for leaders in private and public businesses, nonprofit organizations and government.

In Kinne’s graduate-level electives on business law and navigating conflict, students develop foundational knowledge in legal concepts and reasoning, and examine how conflict and mediation unfold in different contexts. The MSM’s other electives — including courses on

social innovation, nonprofit management, organizational development, data analytics and marketing — complement the program’s core courses in leadership, innovation and management. With an internship requirement, site visits with industry leaders and a capstone project, the program is a management laboratory, where students can “map out a situation 360 degrees, to focus on what is central and what is peripheral, understand and interpret it well, and to act effectively,” explains Professor of Sociology Jack Harris P’02, P’06.

Harris, an expert in social entrepreneurship, says holistic critical thinking is indispensable for “creating business entities that are based on

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The inaugural class of the Master of Science in Management program meets in the Bozzuto Center.

community assets and are sustainable in the long run. These approaches require thinking through problems, design, human relations — there is no formula that works in the varied situations within which we find ourselves.”

This is one reason liberal arts degrees carry serious cachet with today’s employers.

“It is precisely because employers place a premium on innovation in response to rapid change that they emphasize these student experiences rather than narrow technical training,” as Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, explained in the Harvard Business Review in 2019.

Attuned to this professional landscape, the MSM offers students a unique and

“ W H EN YOU L EAV E H WS ,

YOU M AY N OT K N OW EV E RY T H I N G , BUT YOU’L L B E PR EPA R ED FOR A N Y T H I N G . ”

And it’s not just the tech industry that’s exciting “knowledge collision between the looking for well-rounded candidates. The HWS liberal arts core and the ‘traditional’ World Economic Forum’s 2020 report managerial skills of business,” says Ed projected that critical thinking, problemBizari, the Entrepreneurial Fellow at solving and “skills in self-management the Centennial Center for Leadership, such as active learning, resilience, stress Entrepreneurship and Innovation. tolerance and flexibility” will be those “Technology-minded management has most in-demand over the next five dominated business in the U.S. over the years, particularly with the rapid rate of past several decades; an HWS master’s technological change. As The Atlantic’s in management, based on a strong liberal Yoni Appelbaum noted in his 2016 arts foundation, will increase the quality article, “Why America’s Business Majors and quantity of graduates who are willing Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts to make conscious, impactful and socially Education,” undergraduates “are minded decisions in the traditional clamoring for degrees that will business setting.” help them secure jobs in a “With the liberal arts, you’re shifting economy, but to succeed able to approach problems in the long term, they’ll require from different angles and find an education that allows them solutions that other people to grow, adapt, and contribute wouldn’t necessarily think of,” Yves Montissol ’21, MSM ‘22 as citizens — and to build says Yves Montissol ’21, MSM successful careers.” ’22. After graduation this spring, At HWS, that education is a Montissol joined the New York given, says Visiting Assistant Jets’ front office sales team, Professor of Environmental with longer-term plans for law Studies Robinson Murphy, also school, but when he heard about a member of the MSM faculty. the MSM, “it was a no-brainer “Time and time again, I watch for me to come back,” he says.

Ed Bizari our students grow into impressive The program “will give me a head critical thinkers and experimental, start on tomorrow’s problems,” fearless doers,” Murphy says. says Montissol, who chose This is the atmosphere that his electives — business law, the early weeks of the new data analytics, marketing graduate program evoked for and communications, and Max Harris ’21, MSM ’22. Sitting organizational development Beth Kinne in class, Harris says he was reminded — to complement his interest in of something he heard during his Silicon Valley. “Tech catches my first days as an undergraduate: eye in a major way — the work “When you leave HWS, you may environment, the job prospects, not know everything, but you’ll the constant evolution and the be prepared for anything.” fact that they need people who Anna Murphy ’21, can solve problems that aren’t MSM ’22 tech specific.”

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How does a cutting-edge biotech company respond to a pandemic? What does election security entail in the digital age? How can Silicon Valley improve equity? Is there a better way to manage our trash?

The challenges and opportunities defining the first decades of the 21st century reflect an increasingly complex and interconnected world. They’re also the issues HWS graduates are primed to tackle. With no direct paths or pat solutions, asking the right questions is as important as knowing when — and how — to seize the moment. Here, nine alums unpack the interdisciplinary problems that keep them up at night and share the innovative thinking that’s shaping the future.

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There are 13,587 licensed yellow taxis operating in New York’s five boroughs.

Licenses are tied to taxi medallions, which at the height of the market in 2014 were valued at more than $1 million apiece. Since the arrival of app-based services like Lyft and Uber, medallions’ worth has dropped to levels not seen in 20 years, putting some owners who bought at the top of the market in dire financial straits.

This was the most pressing problem facing the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission when Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk ’98 was confirmed as commissioner and chair in February of 2020. As head of the TLC, she leads the commission’s board and manages the municipal agency of 600 employees responsible for licensing and regulating yellow taxis, limousines, black cars, commuter vans and vehicles that contract with apps. In total, that’s more than 1,000 active businesses, 100,000 vehicles and 170,000 licensed drivers.

After just a few weeks on the job, the pandemic had accelerated, the city shut down, commuting and tourism fell off, and the typical million-ridesper-day rate for New York for-hire transportation plummeted. As the streets emptied of fares, Heredia Jarmoszuk saw the mounting impact on TLC licensees. During a meeting with the mayor’s office about emergency response efforts, she pointed out the opportunity to “address two problems at once.”

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Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk ’98 untangles the financial knots binding NYC taxi owners while mapping the future of urban transit.

however, are only as viable as the owners’ and drivers’ ability to operate, which is dictated in part by their debt.

“Some have unmanageable debt, some are insolvent,” she explains, and assistance is more urgent than ever with the added burden of the pandemic. “I wake up every day thinking: how am I going to address this problem and help?”

Initially, it was unclear what relief the City could provide, she says, because “generally speaking, you can’t use public money to resolve private debt.” There was also the question of “what we were solving for — how much money do we need? No one knows because these loans are all private transactions, and there’s no central repository for that information.”

Through the TLC driver resource center that opened in 2020, she and her team found indebted medallion owners “who wanted to restructure or refinance but didn’t have the down payment.”

In response, the TLC developed a $65 million grant program that launched in September. Alongside the resource center, which offers “legal and financial assistance and representation,” Heredia Jarmoszuk says the grant program is providing medallion owners “the tools they need to refinance and reach more favorable terms.”

After a month in operation, the program has helped more than 170 applicants, owing a combined $52 million, to restructure and resettle their loans. Debt forgiveness so far amounts to nearly $22 million. Though it will take time — another 850 drivers have applied — she says the program “could yield close to $500 million in debt cancellation and forgiveness.”

One way or another, she says, “I’m going to fix this problem, and we’re never going to find ourselves in this situation again.”

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Fare Questions

“If the City was going to embark on meal deliveries for people who found themselves food vulnerable, I wanted to utilize our licensed drivers to get the meals out, to provide them supplemental income during the pandemic,” she says.

Through the $39 million food delivery program she developed, TLC-licensed drivers transported 65 million meals to more than two million families between March and October of 2020.

With New York steadily reopening, Heredia Jarmoszuk sees ridership rebuilding, and while “the city’s transit systems are back to 40 percent of pre-pandemic days,” she says that “taxis are seeing an increase in market share. Things are getting better slowly.”

She’s continuing long-term planning to address the TLC’s strategic goals, including improved accessibility, the electrification of the city’s fleet of vehicles, a regulatory review and technological innovation. Those goals,

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Vote of Confidence Connecticut’s elections director Ted Bromley ’95 looks back on an extraordinary election season in 2020 — and what the 2024 cycle has in store.

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The general election of 2020 was unlike any in modern history: plagued by disinformation, suffused with concerns about foreign interference — not to mention the global pandemic that made it difficult if not dangerous for voters to go to the polls. For Ted Bromley ’95, Director of Elections for the State of Connecticut, the onetwo punch of a uniquely polarizing presidential race and the COVID-19 crisis magnified the interrelated issues at play in today’s elections — security, information and access.

During the 2020 cycle, social distancing and stay-at-home orders meant Bromley and his staff of 11 ran most of the election remotely, relying on technology that, for all its benefits, can raise questions about security, directly and indirectly. “We’re defending against hackers, of course,” Bromley says, but in a world imperfectly connected by the internet and social media, “it also comes down to how you control malicious misinformation.”

For Bromley, who has spent two decades in state government, civic duty is indexed to the capacity to “promptly solve problems and help people…that’s the main goal, or should be the main goal, of any state or federal agency.”

With state resources, federal support, guidance from social media companies and the University of Connecticut’s online voter center, he and his team monitored cyber threats, pushed back against unfounded concerns about fraud and led a public education campaign about electoral safety measures. Bromley says that despite the 2020 headwinds, his office ultimately administered “a problem-free election, one of the best that I’ve been involved in. I’m really proud of what Connecticut did.”

The election-season furor, however, hasn’t exactly abated. As an April report from the Pew Research Center notes, “partisan conflicts over election rules and procedures…have become increasingly contentious.” That’s likely to intensify as the Congressional redistricting process ramps up and new state and federal voting bills come under scrutiny. Misinformation doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. Looking toward the 2024 elections season, Bromley anticipates that he and his staff will once again be up against a steady stream of online propaganda designed to disrupt and undermine confidence in the process. His office continues to work closely with social media platforms and will soon launch a campaign to remind Connecticut’s 2.3 million eligible voters that the Secretary of State website offers secure, accurate and up-to-date election information. “If the general public doesn’t have faith in the result,” he says, “then it was all for naught.”

If trust in the process improves electoral security, encouraging more eligible voters to cast their ballots is an important line of defense. Bromley says that COVID-19, as disruptive as it was, provided the occasion to illustrate the

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practicality of making voting easier. “We want to make sure that everyone can participate,” he says. But in Connecticut absentee ballots are hard to get in nonpandemic times and early voting is not allowed, as he explains, because of the way the voting process is defined in the State Constitution. The pandemic forced elections managers to implement new technology and expand absentee voting, “things that we might not have otherwise done for years,” Bromley explains. “We pushed the envelope in terms of successfully running elections with more technology and more benefits for the general public, and we did it all in eight months leading up to the election.”

Considering the success of Connecticut’s 2020 elections, the state legislature has taken up bills to expand absentee and early voting; ultimately, the changes will require a state constitutional amendment, slated for next year’s ballot.

“You hear a lot of people say, ‘I hope we can get back to normal,’ meaning the norm two or three years ago,” Bromley says. “I hope ‘normal’ is using what we’ve learned going forward.”

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Moderna Senior Vice President Shaun Ryan ’91 on managing risk and helping the company scale up to take on COVID-19.

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Since early 2020, Shaun Ryan ’91 has been operating at warp speed. The senior vice president and deputy general counsel at Moderna says, “For better or worse, we’ve always been a lean legal team,” and when COVID-19 emerged, he was the lawyer responsible for working with governments and negotiating research and manufacturing contracts. Ryan says he wouldn’t want to relive the stresses of the pandemic or the whirlwind production of the vaccine, but he’s also “probably learned more in the past 20 months than I have in the past 20 years of practicing law.”

Moderna — founded in 2010 as ModeRNA Therapeutics — is a pioneer in messenger RNA biotech, still an emerging field in pharmaceutical research. The first successful mRNA transfection was recorded only 32 years ago, and with the pace of standard testing protocols, most mRNA drugs are in their nascency (most of Moderna’s products are either in Phase 1 trials or preclinical development). When the pandemic hit, Moderna was a clinical stage company, still about two years away from running large-scale Phase 3 studies, let alone distributing significant quantities of mRNA medicines.

For Moderna scientists, creating “the COVID-19 vaccine took a matter of days,” Ryan says, “because of the 10 years prior spent developing the mRNA platform.” But the company now had to account for preclinical research and large-scale clinical trials alike, while navigating an uncertain regulatory landscape, building out supply chain operations and expanding manufacturing capacity (and raising the capital to do so) — on top of coordinating with government agencies and negotiating

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international agreements. Going from a development-stage biotech operation to a global pharmaceutical company practically overnight introduced another order of complexity, Ryan says, “in part because we were doing all of these things simultaneously…all well before we knew whether the vaccine would even work.

There wasn’t a lot of precedent.”

With a vaccine candidate in hand, Moderna researchers raced to start testing. In partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Moderna completed clinical trials and won FDA approval in just shy of a year.

Meanwhile, Ryan and the company’s legal team were coordinating trial protocols, allocating materials, managing logistics and hashing out contract terms with government officials.

In some ways, the frenzy helped gauge the company’s priorities. Among other duties, in-house counsel manage risk, but “there was no way to manage for all the risks we were taking on,” Ryan says.

“The most important part of managing a crisis of this scale is to figure out the two or three things you need to get right… and solve for those.”

With the pandemic raging, there wasn’t time to roleplay negotiations and game out different scenarios.

Typical sticking points — like which party covers delivery costs — became minor concerns compared to issues like manufacturing capacity, the vaccine’s efficacy and liability.

“Administering hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine around the world, essentially simultaneously…the risk of liability is huge,” Ryan says. Convincing governments to accept a share was

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crucial. “In a normal situation, a company should, and would, be 100 percent liable for its products. Here, we all agreed that we needed to move fast, so we had to make sure we were all sharing that liability — that it wasn’t all borne by one small company.”

Ryan, who studied English at HWS, says “the introduction to a broad range of ideas and ideologies proved immensely useful” in thinking through the potential legal, ethical and financial consequences of Moderna’s decisions. “Learning how to read carefully, think critically and make cogent arguments has been invaluable for what I do now,” he says.

These days, Ryan still spends about half his time on COVID issues, including efforts to deliver vaccine to underserved parts of the world. “So far,” he says, “almost 50 million doses of Moderna vaccine have been delivered to [the international vaccine alliance] Gavi/ Covax for distribution to low and lowmiddle income countries, but we have a long way to go.”

And while getting beyond this pandemic remains a priority, Moderna is also readying for the next one.

Until now, Ryan says, there’s been little political appetite for a dedicated pandemic response facility, which requires vast resources to maintain, possibly for decades, without being used. As governments and NGOs revisit the idea, Ryan has a seat at the (still virtual) table, helping his bureaucratic counterparts think through practical challenges “to ensure the world is better prepared for the next pandemic, whenever that may come.”

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A Shot in the Arm

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Trust the Process Meggie Schmidt Hollinger ’10 is guiding Google’s efforts to create more equitable tech.

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Product design and development is iterative by nature. It’s how companies evaluate and respond to user needs. In the tech industry, underrepresented groups have historically been left out of that process, which is where the product inclusion department comes in. Product inclusion is devoted to recognizing and mitigating harms, and reducing stereotyping and misrepresentation in a given device, app or feature. And it starts with empathy.

“With technology, people can feel like it’s impersonal or that it’s cold, but there’s a lot of warmth and a lot of heart and a lot of goodwill in how it’s actually designed,” says Meggie Schmidt Hollinger ’10, a Senior Program Manager for Google Consumer Trust.

From YouTube to Search, Maps to Drive, Google’s products are used by billions of people with their own backgrounds, lived experiences, needs and expectations. To ensure “the solutions we’re coming up with for users’ journeys are meeting their needs,” Schmidt Hollinger says, she and Google’s Product Inclusion & Equity team work directly with users from underrepresented groups throughout the research and design process to prioritize “the issues and opportunities that are important to them.” She and her colleagues are focused on “systemically changing practices” so that the end product reflects this deep engagement with users.

Take the Google Pixel phone camera, or Duo, Google’s video calling platform: they effectively capture different skin tones thanks to Google’s close work with photography and film experts in the Black+ community.

“What we’ve found is that [successful

product inclusion] is about building with communities, not for them,” Schmidt Hollinger says.

Though she’s been at Google for eight years, she didn’t set out to work in Silicon Valley. She remembers the advice she got not long after she graduated during the Great Recession: “Don’t plan your career because you couldn’t possibly anticipate what will come. It will never turn out exactly as you expect.” (Even if she’d wanted a roadmap to her future, it would have been impossible because, at the time, her role at Google didn’t exist.)

The important thing, she says, is “going in pursuit of the things that compel you and that are interesting to you.”

For her, that’s been the opportunities for innovation and creativity in the tech industry. She joined Google’s User Experience design team as a Program Manager in 2013, helping steer projects like the Google logo redesign and the launch of Google Assistant. The UX-focus remains vital to her approach to product inclusion — as is her art history degree: “It still stokes my intellectual curiosity and, if anything, it taught me not to put myself in boxes.”

And while she’s also compelled by the possibilities of the latest tech, Schmidt Hollinger says she’s energized most by the intelligence and the kindness of the people she works with to make Google’s products more inclusive. “What matters less to me is the exact number of launches we hit by the end of year; what matters more is the network of people we’re building who are invested in inclusion and equity issues,” she says. “To see what all of us are doing in 10 years and how that intersects — that’s truly what inspires me.”

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Mayor, hydrologist and entrepreneur John Muhlfeld ’95 on community resilience in Big Sky Country.

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Montana’s rolling prairies and snowcapped peaks may conjure an image of the lone cowboy and the rugged individualism of the mythic American West. But John Muhlfeld ’95, a hydrologist and the mayor of the city of Whitefish, says it takes a collective effort to protect the state’s natural splendor — and its values.

In late 2016, an online terror campaign came to Whitefish. After a seasonal resident and infamous white supremacist went viral for his Nazi salute to celebrate the election of President Donald Trump, locals spoke out. Neo-Nazis retaliated with a flood of online harassment, sending hate messages and death threats to Jewish residents and other community members. Tensions escalated as white nationalist groups announced an armed rally in Whitefish on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But the morning of the planned rally, Whitefish was instead filled with local counterdemonstrators. Muhlfeld, who has served as mayor since 2011, says the small city’s solidarity and its “swift,” “decisive” denunciation defused the situation. Beyond calling in law enforcement, the Whitefish community sought advice from the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Secure Community Network, and organized with the local anti-discrimination group Love Lives Here. Combatting hate “takes stepping forward to clearly articulate that those means of expression are not accepted and our community will stand up for

plan that prioritizes environmental protection and preservation of the city’s idyllic character. Recently, he helped secure a 3,000-acre land conservation easement to protect Haskill Basin watershed; for more than a century, Muhlfeld explains, the basin had been the primary source of Whitefish’s drinking water, based on “little more than a handshake deal with the landowner, the largest private timber company in Montana.” He says through “hard work and partnerships with state, non-profit and federal agencies,” the city has formalized the easement and is now in the process of building The Whitefish Trail, a 50-mile system that will encircle the city and Whitefish Lake.

For Muhlfeld, these efforts to protect the great outdoors encapsulate what makes Montana so special: the will to preserve open spaces and manage monumental problems as a community.

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When the Dam Breaks

what’s right for the dignity of all people,” Muhlfeld says.

In the following months, the city was singled out as “a national model of resistance” by Yahoo! News. The New York Times profiled Whitefish earlier this year in the article, “How a Small Town Silenced a Neo-Nazi Hate Campaign.” As local Rabbi Francine Green Roston told the Times, “If you asked [Whitefish leaders], ‘Do you think they’re going to show up?’ they were like, ‘Nah,’ but they had a full plan in place.”

For Muhlfeld, safeguarding the city from the most toxic human conduct extends to habitats around it. Beyond serving as Whitefish’s mayor, he is principal hydrologist and co-founder of River Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in river, floodplain and aquatic habitat restoration. RDG has executed some of the country’s largest dam removal projects and revitalized aquatic habitats that had been the sites of mining operations for centuries.

The company has restored hundreds of miles of river and acres of wetlands, removed 45 hydropower facilities to allow safe fish passage and mimic natural conditions, but its services are still urgently needed to roll back stresses on the region’s aquatic ecosystems. With projects like the ongoing Klamath Basin restoration, the largest dam removal in U.S. history, Muhlfeld says RDG is “working under the guide that we don’t have time for natural processes to recover habitats for endangered species.

It takes intervention.”

These challenges shape his vision for Whitefish as a place that can sustain the wild beauty that draws people to visit and live in western Montana.

Surrounded by mountains, lakes and rivers, it’s a gateway to Glacier National Park and one of the fastest growing regions in the state.

Under Muhlfeld’s leadership, Whitefish has adopted a sustainable tourism management

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Delvina Smith Morrow ’09, a senior director with the Pittsburgh Penguins, on the power of community partnerships and the hockey team’s investment in the region’s future.

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In the late 1950s, entire blocks of Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District were leveled to make way for the Civic Arena.

The urban renewal project promised jobs, even as it displaced small businesses and thousands of residents from the majority Black neighborhood.

Built for the local opera company, the arena was most notably the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins. After the hockey team moved in 2010, the venue was torn down and the remaining parcel of land became a vector of disappointment.

How does a city move forward without leaving its residents behind?

Pittsburgh is facing the question again with the 28-acre, $1 billion Lower Hill Redevelopment, which broke ground this September. The project is a collaboration between the Penguins, the city and local developers to transform the Civic Arena site, now a parking lot, into a bustling “destination.” Whether it can be done sustainably and equitably depends on the longevity of partnerships, programs and investments like those managed

by Delvina Smith Morrow ’09, the Penguins’ Senior Director for Strategic Community Initiatives and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

“Anyone who knows Pittsburgh knows Mr. Rogers and the importance of being a good neighbor,” Morrow says.

“That’s how we’re approaching this development: how can we be a good neighbor to the community?”

There are new buildings and outdoor spaces planned, places to “live, work, play and celebrate,” but at the heart of the redevelopment is an “economic engine for the benefit

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of local residents,” Morrow says.

Since joining the Penguins in 2019, she has helped craft a community impact plan that will see the redevelopment’s anchor tenant, First National Bank, reinvest $230 million in the Hill District. Meanwhile, she directed a $100,000 “rec to tech” investment, retrofitting a community center as an innovative tech lab for local students. In June, the First Source Center opened in the heart of the neighborhood, offering job training, financial literacy support and wealth building advice, as well as administrative resources for entrepreneurs, from copy machines to conference space. It’s “a one-stop shop for workforce development opportunities,” Morrow says, “whether they’re tied to the Lower Hill project or not.” Through these kinds of initiatives, she says the Lower Hill project will establish a durable economic model for the neighborhood, the city and the region.

Still, the legacy of the Civic Arena looms large for Hill District residents, and reactions so far range from optimistic to wary. “The community wants to hold the Penguins and the development team accountable,” Morrow explains, “and we are 100 percent on board.” When she joined the Penguins, she started attending community events, asking the residents and organizations in the team’s back yard what they need. She says that even with the new redevelopment’s emphasis on equity issues — from homeownership to cultural preservation to supporting minority- and womenowned businesses — it’s the personal

relationships that will ultimately determine “the narrative of what the Penguins are trying to do.”

A native New Yorker, Morrow says Pittsburgh’s “neighborly” air was never more apparent than during the pandemic. As COVID forced the NHL and the redevelopment to pause, she directed the Penguins’ local response, coordinating with elected officials and police precincts, local organizations and neighbors, to deliver food and supplies across the city. She says it’s this kind of direct engagement that shows Pittsburgh residents “that the Penguins are not just talking heads — we’re here, we’re part of the community.”

“ Anyone who knows Pittsburgh knows Mr. Rogers and the importance of being a good neighbor.

That’s how we’re approaching this development: how can we be a good neighbor to the community?”

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Welcome to Pittsburgh

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NBC Political News Reporter Teaganne Finn ’16 on her search for stories that reveal the consequences of D.C. decisions.

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Stories at the crux of policy and people: for Teaganne Finn ’16, that’s where the news comes alive. In the age of so-called “fake news,” when trust in the media has become a partisan issue and some outlets favor clickbait over substance, the NBC political reporter says good journalism demands “taking the big picture and going down to the local level,” now more than ever.

As Gallup noted in October, “Americans’ confidence in the media to report the news fairly, accurately and fully has been persistently low for over a decade and shows no signs of improving, as Republicans’ and Democrats’ trust moves in opposite directions.” That gap is the result of a range of socio-historical factors, and hardly the domain of a sole journalist to resolve, but Finn says that for reporters covering the Capitol and national politics, there is a risk of getting “stuck in a D.C. bubble,” with all its attendant drama. “Covering local news gives you an appreciation for real people and real stories,” she says.

As a senior at HWS, she reported on children of migrant workers in the Finger Lakes region, highlighting the ways local communities are impacted by federal legislation, like the farm bill that lawmakers take up every five years.

After earning her master’s in public affairs and journalism from American University, Finn joined Bloomberg News as a D.C.-based agricultural reporter, which found her in the newsroom during the passage of the 2018 farm bill.

That moment, and the memory of her student reporting, underscored

the scope and significance of the stories that flow through the Capital Beltway.

“I write stories that flip-flop all the time, between a bill being $3 billion versus $3.5 trillion, or whatever it is.

Those are big figures,” Finn says, “but I know that they’re actually affecting people in towns all over, like Geneva.”

One of the most important stories of Finn’s early career put her in school lunchrooms, observing what was at stake in a Congressional rewrite of the child nutrition bill — from the nutritional value of school meals to the practice of “lunch shaming.” (As Finn explained in a 2019 Bloomberg article, “‘Lunch shaming’…is where students unable to pay for a school lunch are denied food, given alternate meals or otherwise stigmatized…to get their parents to pay up.”) Ultimately, she says, “It came back to this idea: parents just want to feed their kids.”

Her reporting this fall has centered on the unfolding Congressional backand-forth over the debt limit and infrastructure spending, but she’s also covered the journeys of Haitian immigrants and the fallout of Texas’ recent law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Whatever the story, she says meeting readers where they are helps build trust and minimize chances of misinterpretation.

By prioritizing clarity and context, and “sticking to the script” — the who, what, when, where and why — she hopes to avoid amplifying political theater and scandal-mongering. As she says, “You can’t sensationalize something that isn’t there.”

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Beyond the Beltway

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Return to Senegal Nick Pilgrim ’00 follows through on a promise made during a semester abroad more than 20 years ago.

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Nick Pilgrim ’00 chose Senegal as an economics major — that is, he wanted to understand firsthand the impacts of globalization and international monetary policies on a developing country.

And he did. During that semester abroad, he was “exposed to staggering levels of poverty.” In the streets of cities like Dakar and St. Louis, Pilgrim recalls seeing children as young as five begging for money and food. Known as talibé, these children are often entrusted by their parents to a marabout, a religious leader charged with guiding the children’s educational and moral upbringing. Away from their parents, however, the children are “all too often” subject to exploitation, Pilgrim says.

He made a promise then that one day he would return, to do what he could to expand academic opportunities for Senegalese children. The idea stayed with him as he graduated from HWS, went to law school at the University of Chicago, and embarked on a successful legal career — including several years as an assistant U.S. attorney and, more recently, as a senior trial attorney with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In October 2020, despite the pandemic, Pilgrim made good on his promise. With help from his Senegalese “brother” Bassirou Diallo, whom he befriended while studying abroad, Pilgrim opened a computer learning center in Dakar where children receive free courses in math, English, coding and general computer literacy.

The center is the first under the banner of Africa Codes, the nonprofit Pilgrim founded to offer children “the tools and resources they need to maximize

their academic potential and to escape from poverty.”

Though he always wanted to be a lawyer, Pilgrim took to heart the words of Charles Hamilton Houston — Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and the architect of the NAACP’s successful legal challenge to segregation — who believed that a good lawyer should be a “social engineer.” For Pilgrim, that means “someone who works to construct a better, more just, more equal society.”

“The liberal arts education I received taught me that if we want to experience long-term economic development and to eliminate income and wealth inequality, we must make a dedicated, long-term investment in human capital development,” Pilgrim says. And investing in education was the most obvious place to start “because a society’s development is ultimately determined by the trajectory of its youth.”

As the world shifts to increasingly tech-driven economies, he hopes to close the “digital divide” for Senegalese children. In April 2021, Africa Codes opened a second computer learning center in the village of Kounkané and partnered with a school in Dakar on a new computer lab. This fall, the nonprofit launched a campaign for its newest project: building dormitories and classrooms to provide talibé children with English, science, math and coding classes.

Pilgrim says he’s grateful that in less than a year, Africa Codes has had such a positive impact, reaching more

LEARN MORE at africacodes.org or contact Pilgrim at nickpilgrim20@hotmail.com.

than 100 children in high-poverty communities. “I am also grateful to HWS for offering a robust study abroad program,” he adds. “But for my formative trip to Senegal, Africa Codes would never have existed. So, in many ways, the children and students who study at our academic centers are beneficiaries of HWS’ decision to expose its students to different countries and cultures by offering study abroad opportunities.”

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Jacob Fox ’16 in one of the composting bays at Closed Loop Systems in Geneva.

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With Closed Loop Systems, Jacob Fox ’16 is turning organic waste into a regenerative solution.

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Topsoil is in trouble. Jacob Fox ’16 estimates that between farming and the built environment, “we have degraded over 60 percent of our global topsoil. And there are not many ways of replenishing that.” Beyond its utility for growing crops, the top 12 inches of earth is the site of organic activity with incalculable ecological benefits — filtering air and water, managing pollution and flooding, sequestering carbon and regulating the climate.

As the World Wildlife Fund reports, sustainable land use can alleviate the impacts of agriculture and livestock, “preventing soil degradation and erosion and the loss of valuable land to desertification.” Fox, cofounder and CEO of Geneva, N.Y.-based Closed Loop Systems (CLS), says the challenge that comes with many sustainable solutions “is that they are only partial solutions.”

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Renew the Soil, Revive the Earth

“Imagine,” he says, “if one day you threw 100 percent of your garbage in one bin, and that bin was taken to a local composting facility and turned into soil.”

That soil, in turn, could be used to retain stormwater or aid in bioremediation at superfund and brown-field sites.

This is the regenerative cycle that Fox envisioned when he realized that food waste is not only “the single largest piece of the municipal waste stream” but “a very valuable resource.”

Fox first started investigating waste solutions as a public policy major and sociology minor at HWS. He connected with John Hicks ’59, who owns Organix Green Industries, a large-scale vermiculture facility in nearby Seneca Castle, N.Y., where vegetable waste from local farms is broken down by worms and microbes into rich, fertile humus. After graduation — and a few months in Europe for professional soccer trials — Fox joined the company and soon realized he could apply the vermicomposting model to any food waste and “tie it all together in a holistic ‘closed loop system.’”

In 2017, Fox pitched the City of Geneva on a facility to help solve food waste challenges and divert waste from landfills. By late 2018, he had founded CLS with Hicks and Jim and Mike Nardozzi, who own Nardozzi Paving and Construction in Geneva.

Together, the group has experience with

vermicomposting as well as construction expertise and logistical capacity.

Fox sees Geneva as an ideal location to “disrupt” the waste management industry. Between the abundance of local farms and the large landfills within a 15-mile radius, CLS can offer soil and liquid amendments to farmers, mitigate the environmental impact of landfills, and work with local researchers to study soil health, carbon sequestration, bioremediation and the Soil Food Web. After securing nearly $500,000 through state and county grants on behalf of the city, CLS opened the Geneva Resource Recovery Park in early 2021. The new facility is a waste management hub, where for a small annual fee, city and town residents can bring food and yard waste for vermicomposting. Soon CLS will expand its services with a recycling and disposal drop-off area. Metal, construction and demolition debris, bottles and cans, cardboard, landfill materials — the company plans to take it all. With a “pay-as-you-throw” system, residents only pay for the garbage they produce, giving Genevans “the opportunity to save money and divert their waste,” Fox says. A few months later, CLS customers can take home the compost that their organic waste has produced.

With an eye toward statewide growth, the company has already secured a grant to build a facility in Cortland, and Fox says they plan to build seven more by 2024. In addition to replicating the

Geneva model in other communities, CLS has designed an agricultural model that would “handle manure and other farm waste, while also providing soil regeneration for the farm,” Fox explains. Similar facilities are planned for industrial clients with large waste streams, such as food processors, breweries and livestock operations. CLS also has designs to handle biodegradable waste from dining facilities and grounds maintenance at institutions like hospitals and colleges.

For Fox, the more attention paid to what’s going on beneath our feet, the better. “Soil carbon sequestration is our best chance to solve climate change,” he says. “All of our policies currently revolve around renewable energy, and that’s a problem. Solar, wind, industrial carbon capture and other technocratic climate solutions won’t solve our soil erosion and water pollution problems. We can have all the energy we want, but we will be doomed if our soil is gone.”

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▶ Retired FDNY firefighter and 9/11 first responder Rob Serra ’01 touches one of the six stone monoliths at the 9/11 Memorial Glade in New York.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

20 Years Later ◀

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In September, the Kappa Alpha Society placed 2,977 flags on the Quad in honor of those killed in the 2001 attacks, including 548 people from countries around the world.

Among the lives lost on 9/11 were three HWS graduates who worked in the World Trade Center at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald: Andrew H. Golkin ’93, Scott W. Rohner ’01 and Michael J. Simon ’83, P’11, P’13. A memorial plaque honoring Golkin, Rohner and Simon is a fixture in the vestibule at the Abbe Center for Jewish Life.

Rob Serra ’01 was crossing the Verrazano Bridge, on his way to try out for the New York City firefighters’ hockey team, when he saw smoke rising from the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Brand new to the FDNY, Serra had completed his training less than 24 hours earlier and expected to have the day off, but he grabbed his gear and headed downtown.

Even though it was his first official day as a firefighter, Serra says “it never crossed my mind not to go.” The day changed his life forever.

“Pretty much as soon as I got down there, I started to bleed from my nose,” he remembers.

Like thousands of first responders, emergency workers and civilians who survived the attacks, Serra was exposed to toxic ash

PHOTOS BY KEVIN COLTON (LEFT), DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES (RIGHT)

IN MEMORIAM

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and debris on Sept. 11 and in the months following, when he worked at the Staten Island recovery site searching for the personal effects of victims. He has had surgery to remove nasal polyps and still faces neurological damage, including neuropathy and fibromyalgia, which cause intense bouts of shaking, nerve pain and trouble walking.

The September 11 Victim Compensation Fund was established to expand health coverage and compensation to first responders and individuals who developed health problems related to the attacks; however, after renewals in 2011 and 2015, the VCF ran out of funds to pay all filed and projected claims in 2019. continue reading >> HO BA RT A ND WI LLI A M SMITH COL L EGE S / 45

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“We knew the Victim Compensation Fund was not adequately funded,” says Serra, who has been an outspoken advocate for the VCF. As early as 2015, he and a coalition of first responders began making monthly visits to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “We never stopped working. And during that time, we dealt with a lot of loss.”

To bring attention to the health crisis affecting first-responders and to amplify the voices of those who need care, Serra has shared his story with major news outlets, from The New York Times to CBS, Fox News to ESPN. “I don’t necessarily feel comfortable talking about my health, but I knew it was something I needed to do,” Serra says. “Fortunately, I was an English major at the Colleges and I was able to tell our story.”

In 2019, as the nation watched the unfolding testimony in support of the VCF play out on television, Serra sat in the first row of the Capitol chamber. There, he says, the “two most pivotal moments came when people heard the testimonies of retired NYPD detective Luis Alvarez and [comedian and commentator] Jon Stewart.” After many years of loss and frustration, the advocacy of people like Alvarez and Stewart and the attention and support of the public propelled the resolution through Congress.

On July 29, 2019, President Trump signed into law H.R. 1327, The Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorization of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

Serra, a father of three and member of the Board of Directors of the Ray Pfeifer Foundation, continues to advocate for Sept. 11 first responders — and ensure their stories are heard. In 2020, he celebrated his 40th birthday at a Pfeifer Foundation fundraiser for a wheelchairaccessible van to transport Sept. 11 survivors to their medical appointments. This year, after his 12-year-old daughter interviewed him about the 20th anniversary of the attacks for her social studies class, Serra wrote on Twitter: “The most important 9/11 interview I’ve done.”

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▲ Spates on the Long Island Ferry during an early iteration of the “Two Cities” course.

T WO C I T E S RE T U RN S In the fall of 2022, Spates, Professor Emeritus Pat McGuire and Professor Emerita JoBeth Mertens will lead a reprisal of “Two Cities.” Stay tuned for details.

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DISTINGUISHED FACULTY AWARD

A 43-Year Masterpiece Honoring Professor Emeritus of Sociology James L. Spates P’00, P’09 B Y

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Nineteenth century social critic, artist and early sociologist John Ruskin once wrote, “When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

Professor Emeritus of Sociology James L. Spates P’00, P’09, a leading Ruskin scholar, has invested decades of love and skill in the education of HWS students, and for his excellence in teaching and influential scholarship, the Hobart Alumni Association and William Smith Alumnae Association honored Spates with the Distinguished Faculty Award in June.

“Ruskin, to me, talked about the most important things in life and I wanted to share with my students these thoughts, so that those important things in life become part of their thought process as well,” Spates said at the virtual award ceremony during Reunion weekend. “One of the wonderful things about teaching at Hobart and William Smith is that you get to teach the things that you think are important — things that you think will help your students the most…My students, bless them, always were aching to learn.”

Spates joined the faculty in 1971, and for 43 years led students through the texts and ideas that shape sociology and urban studies, exploring what informs social values and peering into human nature. With Professor Emeritus and Former Interim President Patrick A. McGuire L.H.D. ’12, Spates redefined the boundaries of the classroom with “Two Cities,” the course that brought students to New York City and Toronto to analyze urban life at “street-level” through a bidisciplinary lens.

McGuire, who joined Spates in conversation in June, said the course was “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” When McGuire thought something was impossible, he said, Spates was always willing “to do things differently, to challenge students in different environments.”

During the DFA presentation, Michael Gantcher ’92 recalled how Spates “challenged

McGuire (left), Spates (right) and the 1995 "Two Cities" class at the Toronto home of urbanist Jane Jacobs (center). ▼

my assumptions in the first minutes of the first class of this new school year! I had no idea at the time that I was meeting a man who would not only teach me what great teachers can do, and how they can change your whole life, but a man who would become one of my best friends, a man who would never stop teaching me and challenging me…a man who has been a consistent, supportive and loving presence in the life of my family for over 30 years.”

Alums who nominated Spates for the DFA all underscored his profound influence as a teacher and mentor who shaped their thinking, their love of learning and their responsibility as citizens.

Lindsey Kent ’14, a two-time teaching fellow for Spates, says he had a “monumental” impact on her life. After taking his introductory sociology course, she says, “I knew then I had a responsibility to do good in the world and help other people. Professor Spates helped me become a leader and forge my own path post-college.”

For Lynne Harris Bernstein ’86, Spates “was an inspiring mentor whose passion and energy opened new worlds and ways of thinking to his students. He was exemplary of the kind of teacher one imagines you will experience at a small liberal arts college — caring, creative and fully engaged in students’ learning.”

Dan Kresge ’90 remembers “arguing with [Spates] in class about a point he had made. He permitted and perhaps even goaded me into an argument, and I came away thinking I’d won.

Being a professor myself, it’s now clear that moment laid the foundation for my intellectual ‘self-esteem.’”

As Spates himself said, “that’s what being a professor is all about: that you tried to teach them how to be independent thinkers, independent learners, and that you made a good and positive difference in their lives.”

AT A GL A NC E Spates earned an early promotion to full professor in 1984 and was the first faculty member named the Classes of 1964 Endowed Chair. He received more than a dozen Faculty Research Grants during his tenure, as well as awards for his contributions to the curriculum and to the HWS community.

In retirement, he continues his Ruskin scholarship, following his 2006 book, The Imperfect Round: Helen Gill Viljoen’s Life of Ruskin, with a new manuscript, “Availing Toward Life: The Radical Social Thought of John Ruskin.”

Spates is also turning his expertise on social and city life to downtown Geneva, N.Y. He led the revitalization of the Dove Block, the historic former home of renowned painter Arthur Dove, Hobart Class of 1903.

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PRIZ ES, PREM IER ES & P UBL ICAT IO N S

Eat Wheaties!

A new award-winning comedy from executive producer Daniel Webb ’13 explores the pratfalls of social media and “going viral.”

The epic biography of Malcolm X — coauthored

by Tamara Payne ’88 and her father, the late Les Payne P’88 — is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X is “a powerful and revelatory account of the civil rights activist, built from dozens of interviews, offering insight into his character, beliefs and the forces that shaped him,” as the Pulitzer judges noted when the award was announced in June.

Les Payne — a Pulitzer-winning journalist, former Newsday editor and co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists — began working on The Dead Are Arising in 1990.

His daughter Tamara joined the book project as a researcher soon after her return from living abroad in China in 1991. When Les died in 2018, Tamara, then principal researcher, completed and published the book, which was intended “to put Malcolm finally in the context of American history, and to give recognition to how important he really is,” as she explained in the spring 2021 issue of the PSS. Read the profile at hws.edu/ alumni/pssSpring21/payne.aspx.

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PHOTO BY BOBBY YA N (TOP LEF T )

Payne’s Pulitzer

▲ The Dead Are Arising also won the 2020 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Biography/ Autobiography.

Eat Wheaties! follows Sid Straw (played by Tony Hale of Arrested Development and Veep), who is asked to plan his University of Pennsylvania reunion, only to see his life unravel as he takes to Facebook to prove that he was in fact college friends with movie star Elizabeth Banks. The film — “dryly funny, sweet and surprisingly touching” (Richard Roper, Chicago Sun Times) — is the first feature from executive producer Daniel Webb ’13.

Webb, who was also the film’s graphics producer, broke into Hollywood as an intern to Mark Neveldine ’95, the writer, director and producer of films such as Crank, Gamer and The Vatican Tapes. Webb later served as an assistant to Neveldine and his producing partner, Skip Williamson, an executive producer of the Underworld series. After writing, producing and directing a number of short films, music videos and commercials, Webb joined the crew of Eat Wheaties!, which premiered at the Calgary International Film Festival in September 2020 and was screened opening night at the Heartland Film Festival, where it won the Humor and Humanity Award. Eat Wheaties! also won Best Comedy at the 2020 San Diego International Film Festival, prior to its April 2021 release.

▶ This photo features (left to right) director Scott Abramovitch, producer David J. Phillips, executive producer Daniel Webb ’13 and star Tony Hale.

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SHH, IT’S A SECRET

PHOTO COURTESY OF A PPLE (BOT TOM), DAV ID SHANKBONE (TOP)

Christopher McDonald ’77, L.H.D. ’13 joins the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an as-of-yet undisclosed character in the Disney+ series Secret Invasion, set to premiere in 2022. He recently wrapped filming on Rosaline, a comedic take on Romeo and Juliet, and is now shooting the upcoming Netflix series The Watcher. In 2021, he appeared in American Crime Story: Impeachment (produced by Brad Falchuk ’93, L.H.D. ’14) and Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The critically praised HBO comedy Hacks — which features McDonald as a schmoozy Las Vegas casino owner — is now streaming in its entirety.

MAKE IT, DON’T FAKE IT Silicon Valley PR veteran Sabrina Horn ’83 gets beyond catchy slogans to offer practical, ethical and sustainable advice on corporate leadership. In her new book, Make It, Don’t Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success, the awardwinning CEO and public relations expert calls for a more grounded approach to tackling risk, managing setbacks and overcoming crises.

In her no-nonsense, straight-shooting style, Horn delivers real, workable strategies with firsthand accounts of painful mistakes, lessons learned and empowering examples of authentic leadership.

POST-APOCALYPTIC VISIONS In the wake of an early 21st century virus, humanity is left without sight.

Hundreds of years in the future, See takes up the story of the tribes of survivors, including the royal tax collector and witchfinder general Tamacti Jun, played by Christian Camargo ’92 (Twilight series, Dexter).

The Apple TV series launched its second season in August.

Good Trouble In a new collective biography, Dorothy H. Wickenden ’76, L.H.D. ’14 offers intimate portraits of three extraordinary women whose “agitating” changed the country forever.

In The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights, Dorothy H. Wickenden ’76, L.H.D. ’14 tells of the intersecting lives of Harriet Tubman, Martha Wright and Frances Seward, who operated out of Auburn, less than 30 miles from Geneva, at a time when upstate New York was a seething center of radical reform. Wickenden, the executive editor of The New Yorker and a former HWS Trustee, details how these women shaped national policy and individual attitudes toward abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women’s rights movement and the Civil War. As the New York Times review noted, “The Agitators is a masterpiece, not least, of structure...Entwining these three asymmetrical lives as deftly as Wickenden does proves illuminating. Tubman’s actions reveal the existential stakes of Wright’s and Seward’s agitations.

Her freedom journeys made their words flesh.”

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The Wallet in the Attic M A R Y

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▲ Gib Shea ’22 and Teddy Rupenstein ’22, returing the wallet that went missing when Gary Getman ’55 was a student.

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During the monotony of lockdown, four roommates in Medbery Hall discovered a wallet lost more than 60 years earlier — and set out to find its owner.

“The whole thing really started from boredom,” says Gib Shea ’22.

In February, amid a new surge of COVID-19 cases, Shea and his three roommates were spending most of their time in Medbery Hall. There was only so much coursework and sleep to accomplish in a day. The attics above were waiting to be explored.

“We found some old ski team memorabilia and we started to move some stuff around. I lifted up an old bottle and found a wallet that wasn’t water- or animaldamaged, and I was just amazed,” Shea says.

Sorting through the ancient leather wallet, they found fraternity dues, ticket stubs and photographs, all “in remarkable condition.” The wallet also included the driver’s license of Gary Getman ’55.

Then and there, the Hobart students decided to do whatever they could to return the wallet. Consulting with the Office of Alumni and Alumnae Relations, they tracked down Getman’s contact information and wrote to him about their find.

“It was kind of a shock,” says Getman.

After so many years, the wallet was almost beyond memory. Getman, who played on the Hobart baseball team, recalls that he last saw it in the locker room downstairs in Williams Hall but “completely forgot about it till I heard from the boys.”

In his reply, Getman invited them to his Long Island home for lunch. It took a few months of planning, but early this summer Shea and Teddy Ruppenstein ’22 made the drive to return the wallet.

The wallet included Getman’s driver’s license, Air Force vaccine certificate, Kappa Sigma fraternity dues sheet, and photos picturing his twin cousins, as well as his girlfriend at the time, the late Ellen Willauer Decker ’55.

“When we got to his house, Gary and his family were all there,” Ruppenstein says, “and we went through the contents of the wallet and each item brought up a story. The first standout was his and his girlfriend’s gym cards, as well as his ROTC vaccination card, which we all found to be very ironic.”

The visit revealed more than a few parallels across the generations at HWS. Ruppenstein by chance had lived in the same room that Getman occupied in Hale Hall decades earlier. As Getman recalled his

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▲ Getman, pictured with the wallet, which was a Christmas gift from his parents.

friendships at Kappa Sigma, he phoned his fraternity brother James Caird ’56, L.H.D. ’12 and together the group caught up on all things HWS. “We had some amazing laughs and realized many of [Getman’s] stories from the ’50s were not too far off from some of our stories 70 years later,” Ruppenstein says.

It was clear from the start, Shea says, that Getman was a Hobart grad. “We knew because he just talked about life in a way that was intricate and inquisitive but also mellow and very easy-going and had a

point of view that was very focused on other people. And that’s what HWS has taught us, too.”

“It was a very pleasant surprise,” Getman says, “and when I got to meet the boys, I was really impressed. Hobart can be proud.”

The wallet is once again with its owner, and Shea and Ruppenstein are approaching their last semester, but they expect they’ll see Getman again sooner rather than later.

“He hasn’t been back to campus in a while,” Shea says, “but we’re hoping to get him back for the Bicentennial.”

“ It was a very pleasant surprise and when I got to meet the boys, I was really impressed. Hobart can be proud.”

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L A S T

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Extremely Online New York Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz ’07 shares her insights on the creator economy, interwebz culture and why keeping tabs on tech is #winning.

What made you want to cover the tech world and internet culture? In a lot of ways, the internet is reality. There’s no online-offline — it’s not like I’m “logging on,” like it’s like the ’90s. The internet is where people form identity, where people form relationships. When I graduated, it was really the beginning of this shift to a more social media driven world.

Tech reporting then was very gadget focused. The internet, and the impact of the internet on modern life, wasn’t a major part of what tech reporters were writing about. I was really inspired by the work of Jenna Wortham, who I actually work with at the New York Times now.

She was writing about tech from the user side, how people use different products, and I wanted to emulate that but for the internet: how do people use the internet, and how does the internet reshape the world around us?

During your Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, you studied how Gen-Z uses Instagram to access and share news. How do you see the implications of that research playing out online today? When I initially applied for that fellowship, Instagram was still seen as a platform where you’d go to post personal photos. My thesis was that it’s actually much more like Facebook or Twitter, where people, especially young people, communicate news and form their beliefs about the world. At The Atlantic, I wrote about online radicalization and the role that Instagram played. We know about Facebook and radicalization, how the platform favors more extreme content, but at the time I think people were still overlooking Instagram, where there’s tons of extreme content, misinformation 96 / T H E P U LT E N EY STRE E T SU RVE Y

and dangerous propaganda. This kind of content has become a hallmark of the current version of social media because these platforms have done such a bad job handling it. That’s not to say that they should crack down or decide what kind of speech is acceptable — it’s more about acknowledging the fact that these platforms are ultimately media companies. They’re distributing media and informing people, so the question is: how can we better design them to deliver accurate information? I don’t have the solutions, I’m not a tech executive, but as a journalist I can say that there’s been an uptick in recent years of, for instance, anti-vax content and other kinds of dangerous health information, and I think it’s important for platforms to acknowledge that and think critically about whether that’s a good thing.

Do you have a favorite social media platform? Twitter is toxic in a lot of ways.

Instagram is fine but kind of boring. I’m more of a TikTok person — I can watch those for hours.

Can you describe the book you’re working on? My book is called Extremely Online, and it’s about the rise of the online creator economy and how it’s shaped Gen-Z. Since I started writing about tech in 2009, my guiding philosophy has always been that online creators should be taken seriously as a business beat, not just a culture beat.

They’re the next generation of small business leaders in America — or really big business leaders, in many cases.

Over 50 million people are influencers or creators, Youtubers are raking in tens of millions of dollars a year, but they

haven’t had a lot of scrutiny. There’s this lack of oversight in the industry, and it’s important to really dig into the business practices and how these creators are scaling and impacting the world.

What problems or challenges in the tech space are you most interested in reporting on? One thing that I’m focused on is equality and representation, and why these platforms are skewed to reward different types of people. For instance, I’ve written about how women and Black online creators earn less and often don’t get the same distribution in social algorithms. It’s important to look at these companies and the platforms they’ve designed, and ask not only about diversity in hiring and leadership, but also how that manifests in the product itself — the different ways that product decisions could affect marginalized groups. We see this play out time and time again around harassment: a lot of these platforms have been really slow to build systems to mitigate harassment because they’re built by the type of people who generally don’t experience the worst of harassment.

My coverage is focused on those issues and talking to the people trying to solve them, and I think a lot of people at these tech companies really do want to solve these problems, but social media is also just a mirror of our society. The problems in society are going to be reflected in our tech products — there’s no way we build a perfectly equal, flawless platform without fixing these broader issues as well. It has to go hand in hand.

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Taylor Lorenz ’07 is a New York Times reporter covering tech culture and online creators. Before joining the Times, she was a technology and culture writer at The Atlantic.

As a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she studied how members of Generation Z create, consume and distribute news information on Instagram. She is also a former affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Lorenz earned her B.A. in political science from HWS and previously studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she serves on the university’s board of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute. She helped produce the 2021 documentary “Who Gets to be an Influencer?” for The New York Times Presents, tracking the rise of one of the first mainstream Black TikTok content houses.

Lorenz’s book, Extremely Online, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in late 2022 or early 2023.

Non profit org.

U.S. Postage P A I D Burlington, VT Permit No. 19

THE PULTENEY STREET SURVEY 300 Pulteney St., Geneva, NY 14456

PA R A L L E L S salty jokes, faculty mentorship and academic excellence across the generations

What’s the best part about summer research? CW: I’ve worked alongside Professor Elana Stennett on water filtration research since my sophomore year. Seeing this project progress from a simple experiment design, into data, and then a published paper has been extremely valuable. KS: The close interaction with your adviser. Professor Romana Lashewycz Rubycz was such an influential mentor in my career.

I wish she was still with us so I could thank her properly.

CHARLIE WIDING ’22 Pre-med, Statesmen soccer captain Druid, Orange Key and Chimera member Academic All-American American Chemical Society’s International Research Experiences for Students program Major: Biochemistry and Education Hometown: Brookline, Mass.

Toughest class? CW: Organic Chemistry with Professor Erin Pelkey. KS: Physical Chemistry with Professor Carl Aten.

Favorite element in the periodic table?

CW: Potassium is essential, and the most prevalent, in neuronal circuits. Thank you, potassium. I also love sodium, for the jokes. (Do you want to hear a chemistry joke? Na…) KS: C is the basis of life; Au is what we all seek I suppose — but how about Na? People often call me a little salty so makes sense!

If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life… CW: Salads.

KS: Neapolitan pizza.

What piece of culture — book, film, etc. — could you not do without?

CW: Kei Miller’s poetry. KS: Music, especially live music.

What did you want to be when you grew up? CW: Doctor. KS: Paleontologist What brought you to HWS? CW: The research opportunities and multicultural community — not to mention, I was recruited by the soccer program.

KS: The size of the classes. HWS gave me the space to discover my personal and academic strengths.

What’s your proudest moment to date? CW: Finishing my summer internship at the New York Blood Center. KS: Successfully defending my Ph.D. thesis.

Biggest scientific challenge facing the world today? CW: The potential end of antibiotics. KS: Misinformation about science.

Where do you hope to be in five years?

CW: In my third year of medical school!

KS: Giving back to my family, my friends and my community.

KEVIN STEIN ’88 President and CEO, TransDigm Group Inc., aerospace manufacturer Druid Phi Beta Kappa inductee Ph.D. from Stanford University Major: Chemistry Hometown: Chagrin Falls, Ohio