The Hill, Summer 2016

The McDA N I E L C O L L E G E | Summer 2016

THE GOOD EGG

Randy Day’s plan to raise happier chickens and make Perdue Farms the role model for animal care.

The

McDaniel College Summer 2016 Vol. 31, Number 2 The Hill is published three times yearly by: McDaniel College 2 College Hill Westminster, MD 21157-4390 www.mcdaniel.edu Associate Vice President of Communications and Marketing: Gina Piellusch Editor: Kim Asch Staff Writers: Peggy Fosdick, Cheryl Knauer Design: Lilly Pereira Alumni correspondence to: alumni@mcdaniel.edu or The Office of Alumni Relations McDaniel College 2 College Hill Westminster, MD 21157-4390 All other correspondence to: kasch@mcdaniel.edu 410/857-2290 or The Office of Communications and Marketing McDaniel College 2 College Hill Westminster, MD 21157-4390 McDaniel College, in compliance with federal and state laws and regulations governing affirmative action and nondiscrimination, does not discriminate in the recruitment, admission and employment of students, faculty and staff in the operation of any of its educational programs and activities as defined by law.

The diverse views presented in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the College. ©2016 McDaniel College

On the cover: Chief Operating Officer Randy Day ’77 is taking Perdue’s chickens ahead of the flock in animal care.

Photograph by John Waire

Hats for members of the Class of 2016 proclaimed their new status as McDaniel alumni.

F E AT U R E S

10 A Happier Chicken

Randy Day ’77 pushes Perdue Farms to become a standard-setter for animal welfare in the chicken business.

14 Outbreak Override

As a senior advisor for global health security at the CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Dr. Nicki Pesik ’86 helped keep the nation safe during Africa’s Ebola outbreak. She intends to do the same in the face of our Zika scare.

16 Forces of Nature

An entrepreneurial writing course spans the entire academic year, involves three weeks of “class time” in Peru and inspires students to speak up for the rain forest.

D E PA RT M E N T S 2 Carpe Diem

20 Invested

6 Insights

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Alumni Updates Life since college

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Back Story What they were thinking

News around campus and beyond

Advancing the vision

Celebrating the “aha!” in learning

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3 First Jobs

McDaniel degrees at work

C. KURT HOLTER

Class Noted Guess who was honored with the College’s top professional achievement award for his work developing medicines to combat influenza and other pernicious diseases? See page 42.

NICHOLAS GRINER, HOWARD COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

News around campus and beyond

Class Action Howard County Superintendent Renee Foose (front, left) and President Roger Casey (front, right) with the inaugural class of T4T scholarship recipients.

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A celebratory signing ceremony announced the inaugural class of 11 Howard County high school students who will receive Teachers for Tomorrow (T4T) scholarships. Believed to be the first program of its kind in the nation, T4T is an innovative partnership that provides full scholarships — including tuition, room and board — for a select group of Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) students to attend McDaniel with their commitment to work for the school system for three years immediately following college graduation. T4T was developed to increase the diversity among HCPSS teachers and the overall workforce, while providing college access to academically talented students with limited resources.

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Branching Out

McDaniel is reforesting 3 1/2 acres of its SingletonMatthews Farm, thanks to a $25,000 grant from the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. The College will maintain the land as a forest in perpetuity in exchange for the right to sell credits to developers, who by law must replace trees cleared for projects.

Summer 2016

Mindful Mentoring It was a defining moment when Paul Mazeroff, a 1967 alumnus whose passion for education and psychology were ignited on the Hill, heard his name announced as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Ira G. Zepp Distinguished Teaching Award.

During his 16 years on the faculty, Mazeroff, a senior lecturer of Psychology, Provost Julia Jasken presents has ingeniously advised, mentored and Paul Mazeroff with the College’s top teaching award. conducted research collaborations with his students. Each year, he works with a group of students to explore how Jungian archetypes in clinical psychology apply to modern works such as “Harry Potter,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “The Lion King.” Dressed for their roles, students and mentor present their analyses to the Jungian work group in Baltimore.

Mazeroff’s penchant for choosing unconventional topics that connect psychology to the liberal arts never fails to engage students from majors across the disciplines. He developed, with Music professor Margie Boudreaux, the popular “Music, Mind and Brain” course and, with a student majoring in Neuroscience, wrote the accompanying lab manual. His course “Madness, Genius and Creativity” showcases his ability to link his clinical experiences to the liberal arts. “The Hero’s Journey,” another course he developed, applies psychological principles to ancient epics like “The Mazeroff emphasizes Odyssey” and modern masterpieces the relationship like “Star Wars.”

Through interdisciplinary courses, between theory and internships and career-focused lectures, Mazeroff emphasizes the rela- the clinical practice tionship between theory and the clinical practice of psychology; he of psychology. has sent dozens of students to graduate study or first jobs in the field.

The consummate liberal arts professor, Mazeroff reaches far beyond the Psychology department in Merritt Hall. First to volunteer, he’s played both Freud and Jung at the College’s German-American Day and hosted international students in his home, helping them with their transition to the Hill. Colleagues are no longer surprised when he shows up in their offices bearing books, articles, videos — even props — from his personal collection that he knows will help with a topic they are covering in class.

A true embodiment of McDaniel’s trademark creative and critical thinking, Mazeroff designed the evening concert-lecture “Robert Schumann: Genius and Madness” with Music lecturer David Kreider.

A licensed psychologist and counselor, Mazeroff earned his B.A. in Psychology from then Western Maryland College in 1967, his M.A. in Counseling and A.G.S. in Rehabilitative Counseling from University of Maryland and his Ed.D. in Human Development Counseling from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

C. KURT HOLTER

“We need our best and brightest students to teach and work in our school system, and we must remove financial means as a barrier to their success,” said HCPSS Superintendent Renee Foose. HCPSS targeted academically successful, low-income students who qualify for federal free and reduced-price meals. The selected students receive a full McDaniel scholarship, which includes a donation of $12,000 funded by the T4T program. McDaniel covers the remaining costs after state and federal grants are applied. The Kahlert Foundation has also pledged $230,000 to support T4T over the next four years.

“McDaniel is proud to partner with Howard County on the T4T program, and we are grateful to The Kahlert Foundation as the first private funders to pledge their support of T4T,” said President Roger Casey. “I can’t wait to see what the first Teachers for Tomorrow Scholarship recipients achieve at McDaniel. They exemplify the best of what America is searching for in its future teacher workforce.”

The T4T students are permitted to pursue any course of study they choose, as long as they minor in education and commit to working for HCPSS for three years. Participants are required to maintain a minimum grade point average of 2.75 in the major and graduate within four years. The 11 students who make up the inaugural T4T class include six males and five females from six Howard County high schools. They are members of honor societies, athletes, actors and musicians, and are involved, in a variety of student clubs. The students also work and volunteer in their communities. They have grade point averages ranging from 3.0 to 4.71. Several were born outside of the U.S. More than half of the students are among the first generation in their families to attend college.

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C. KURT HOLTER

Fit to Win

QUANTIFY

McDaniel's Encompass Distinction entrepreneurial program sponsors the Innovation Challenge to inspire student startups.

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Nicole Rutherford ’16 has dreamed of opening a wellness, fitness and nutrition center since high school. The $10,000 top prize she snagged this spring at the College’s inaugural Innovation Challenge will allow her to turn her business proposal for Flourished into a reality for Westminster.

“This prize gives me the confidence to go on,” says the Business Administration and Exercise Science and Physical Education double major who already runs two businesses: Nicole Marie’s Beauty Boutique and Rutherford Strength and Conditioning.

A second-place prize of $5,500 went to Ryan Lutes ’16, an Accounting Economics and Business Administration major, for “Ryan Lutes LLC,” a niche waste and recycling business. Panta Rhei, artisanal brewers of healthful beverages, by English major Tyler Van Dyke ’18 and Biochemistry and Environmental Studies major Jeb Shingler ’17, garnered a third-place award of $2,500.

An audience of students and professors packed Decker Center Forum to listen as the five finalists presented their ideas. Four first-round judges reviewed the more than 20 proposals submitted by McDaniel students. In addition to the three prize-winners, the other finalists were: The Financial Literacy Project, an educational outreach program by Nina Breece ’17, Tyler Krebs ’17 and Allen Calvert ’16; and “Weavr,” a social media app by Josh Peeling ’16.

The McDaniel Innovation Challenge is sponsored by The Encompass Distinction entrepreneurial program and made possible with the generous support of Dennis Sisco ’68 & Alexine Lesko through The Sisco Fund for Enterprise Management.

The judges for the finals were Steve Chapin, Jr., founder of LifeMinders.com, Inc., owner of JARS Residential Properties, and a lecturer at the College; Steve Moore, founder of Run Moore located in downtown Westminster and Grand Prize winner at the 2014 Carroll Biz Challenge; and Deborah Dale Seidel ’84, vice president and manager of investment compliance and business risk at T. Rowe Price.

4.24.16 Day when Brian Norwitz, a junior on the golf team, won the Centennial Conference individual championship, leading McDaniel to a third-place finish at the men’s golf championship.

He was named 2016 Centennial Conference Player of the Year.

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People who attended the annual Taste of Arabia event, featuring Arabic food, music, poetry, Dabka (folk dance) and comedy. The most popular dish was Kofta, a kind of meatball made with ground lamb and beef mixed with onions, parsley and spices.

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Countries in which the Class of 2016 studied abroad during their time at McDaniel, including Argentina, Belgium, Hungary, Japan and Wales.

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[G O FORT H AND DO GOOD]

Maintain your center and values because they are often tested by life’s journeys …

The ills of humanity are best cured by more humanity, not less.

— Attorney and human rights activist James Bell, who addressed the Class of 2016 upon accepting the honorary doctor of laws degree.

Empowering Hispanic Youth A busy summer is under way for rising sophomore Jasmin Chavez, who was selected as one of four summer interns from across the country for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. She represents the Smithsonian Latino Center Young Ambassadors Program, where last summer she was an intern at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., serving as mentor and acting coach to Hispanic high school students interested in the arts, history and the sciences.

Chavez says she’s thrilled for the opportunity to again work with and motivate young people. “I received a lot of guidance from mentors and thanks to them I am here at McDaniel, planning to double major in Political Science and Spanish because someday I hope to defend and represent my people as an immigration and civil rights attorney.”

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Original documentary, narrative and experimental films by graduating Cinema majors that premiered at this year’s VideoPalooza. Students write, direct, produce and edit their own films. “Fly,” by Eli Fisher of New Hope, Pa., documents how a college student loved, dreamed about and eventually learned to fly.

Summer 2016

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Miles to New York City, where five Psychology majors and their professor, Holly Chalk, presented research at the Eastern Psychology Association professional conference, and two were awarded prestigious research awards for their projects. The three students and two 2015 graduates presented faculty-student collaborative research that spanned such topics as body esteem and appearance schematicity, disability identity, atypical sexual behavior and mental health, and gender negotiation styles. Research projects by Lexi Andrea’16 and Laura Mangus’15 were recognized with Psi Chi International Psychology Honor Society awards.

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insights

Celebrating the “aha!” in learning

Making a Poem Nationally acclaimed poet and English professor Kathy Mangan experienced a spark of inspiration when she spotted a red crayon on the sidewalk during her early-spring walk up to campus. She carried the crayon to her Hill Hall office and started jotting down other things she saw along the way, but it took several weeks of “creative labor” to construct the poem.

“Making poetry is a process of compression and distillation. You have to say the most in the least amount of words and with the exact right words,” says Mangan, who holds the Joan Develin Coley Chair in Creative Expression and the Arts. “Writing a poem takes hours of work and revision, but it’s essential to make the labor look seamless.”

Mangan offered an insider’s view of the process of making a poem during her April 6 campus readTIP: ing and talk celebrating the 30th anniRead the poem versary of the Bothe Memorial Lecture. once all the The author of several poetry collecway through before reading tions and printed broadsides, her work a second time has been published in numerous literwith Mangan’s ary journals, including Shenandoah, comments.

Ploughshares and The Gettysburg Review. Her poem, “The Whistle,” was selected in November 2009 by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser as the poem of the week for his syndicated column and was also featured on Baltimore buses and subways as part of the Poetry in Motion project.

“A poem should be like a coiled spring,” she says. “When you press it — when someone reads it — it opens up to its full meaning.”

The uncoiling of the spring, says Mangan, has a way of slowing us down and offering a respite from today’s overwhelming onslaught of information and non-stop stimuli.

Here, she details the building blocks of the poem triggered by that morning walk.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY K AT E B I N G A M A N - B U RT

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The Hill

Instead of Preparing Your Morning Composition Class on MLA Documentation, You Want to Write This Poem After leaving your Subaru at the mechanic’s — it needs fluids — you walk the two miles down Main and up College Hill. It’s April, time for term papers. The syllabus you composed in January requires you to inform your students about research.

You want instead to read them a poem, not talk about works cited. You’d rather cite the toothless man on the boarding house porch, the one who raises his mug of coffee in greeting. The period correctly goes here, you must explain in an hour, already feeling chalk dust dull your fingertips.

But you want to describe the stuffed turquoise bunny perched in the wheelchair at the medical supply store, tell how you hoped it might leap up and mouth I can walk! to you through the plate glass. And the perfect, pointed Crayola you discover wedged in a sidewalk crack? You want it to be Spring Green instead of Vermillion. You want to stroll in class like the hair salon mannequin, the one with a lavender wig and pastel plastic Easter eggs glued to her hand. You want ibid. and op.cit. to come back, because you like saying them together, and you want your students to know of the purple shag toilet seat cover flung into the curb. Let us document the world, you want to say, cataloguing for them the Brinks truck with its imagined clatter of cash, the sparks of forsythia on a scraggly bush, the pointed horns of hostas poking through the dirt like gnarled fingers but which you want to call phalluses.

— Kathy Mangan Summer 2016

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first o s

McDaniel degrees at work

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Michael Hennessey ’16 of Simsbury, Conn., will head to Austria in the fall to attend the Institute of Science and Technology to pursue a doctoral degree in Physics. The Physics major will keep busy this summer with an internship at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility as a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Intern (SULI) where he will work with accelerator scientists on electron beam controls.

Fulbright finalist Melanie Ojwang ’16 (pictured below), an English and Sociology double major from Jessup, Md., will spend nine months in India for an English Teaching Assistantship.

Smithsonian Smarts History and Art History double major Tracee Haupt ’16 will begin a Katzenberger Foundation Art History internship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum researching the historical taxidermy collection with plans to develop the project into a book. In the fall, Haupt will attend the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a master’s degree in History, with a concentration in American History, and a master’s degree in Library Science, with a concentration in Archives and Digital Curation.

Haupt took first prize at the Mid-Atlantic Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Conference for her paper, “The NASA Art Program: Technology, Art, and Contested Visions of Progress, 1962–1973,” which charted NASA’s efforts to use artists to help influence public opinion of the space program.

“In the ’60s people increasingly came to doubt the idea of science and technology as inherently beneficial, and NASA needed to find a way to assuage the public’s doubts and fears about the space program,” says Haupt.

“NASA thought that art could provide a more humanized image of space technology and communicate the emotional impact that had been missing from photographs and videos.”

The invited artists — a few famous, such as Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jamie Wyeth — were given unprecedented access to NASA facilities and launches. Only once during the 1962–1973 period Haupt studied did public opinion in favor of the Apollo space program top 50 percent — and that, she says, was in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface and support peaked at 53 percent.

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Classmate Morgan Stanback ’16 of North Highlands, Calif., also received a Fulbright and will spend the 2016–2017 academic year in Panama.

Sarah Rybak ’16, a Psychology major from Reisterstown, Md., will pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Johns Hopkins School of Education.

French and Political Science double major Leanna JasekRysdahl ’16 of Turlock, Calif., will

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begin working for the Community Technology Empowerment Project (CTEP) AmeriCorps in Minneapolis after graduation. The program bridges the digital divide for new immigrants and lowincome communities.

Fit for Everything

Philosophy and Biology double major Steven Viar ’16 of Oakland, Md., sets off for Cornell University to pursue a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Delaney Firer ’16, an English major from Richmond, Va., will begin working for New Sector Alliance as a Residency in Social Enterprise (RISE) fellow. She will be working at a nonprofit in Boston, as well as participating in workshops in leadership, career development and cross-cohort skill-share opportunities.

John Collins ’16 (pictured below) of Easton Md., is going on active duty and branching into the Field Artillery Corps.

He will attend the Field Artillery Basic Officer Leadership Course in Fort Sill, Okla. During his college career, he was chosen for a Saudi Arabia Exchange Fellowship, where he was one of only 10 students selected from a national pool to travel to Saudi Arabia.

Summer 2016

Art & Capitalism During an AsiaNetwork grant-funded summer research trip to China, Carly Weetman ’16, a Business Administration-Economics dual major, explored along with two professors and five other students the transition from a planned economy to a privatized economy. Research focused on how the new economy has impacted the Chinese Tiehua, or wrought-iron art, industry and culminated in a capstone project for Weetman and her collaborator, Economics major Andrew Roberts ’16.

The pair found that privatization of the market economy in China benefited the Tiehua industry in myriad ways, from the quality and variety of work produced to the artisans’ higher pay and quality of life.

Both will apply their education and real-world insights at jobs in the field: Roberts goes to work for RSM as an accounting staffer/auditor, reviewing financial statements with clients; Weetman begins work with Edward Jones Financial Advising.

While studying abroad in Colombia during the fall semester, Roger Isom, Jr. ’16 volunteered every Saturday in a program that teaches children English as a second language. He also mastered the cienpies and other traditional dances after practicing 10 hours per week. Service, fitness and world travel are at the top of the Exercise Science and Physical Education major’s priority list. Isom was among the first cohort of Global Fellows to graduate in May and received the special distinction on his diploma. For his senior capstone, he completed a comparative study on obesity stigma between McDaniel College students and Colombian students. And he was recently named to The Daily Record’s selective ranking “20 in Their Twenties” for starting Fitness Buddies, a student organization that engages kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Westminster in healthy activities. Isom founded the group during his freshman year and it will continue long after his tenure under the direction of a fivemember executive board composed of student volunteers. Next month, Isom will begin working toward an advanced degree at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

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A Ha!ier Chicken 10

Randy Day puts Perdue ahead of the flock in animal-care practices

BY KIM ASCH

The Hill

RANDY DAY was a middle-schooler in Salisbury, Md., when his dad, a local minister, drove him past Frank Perdue’s home in town.

“This man is doing something interesting,” his dad said. “He’s going to try to brand chicken, something nobody has ever done.”

Day ’77 was, by his own admission, “absolutely indifferent.” But, he added, “It made an impression on me, and when the ads began appearing, I took notice.”

Frank Perdue made his chickens, himself and his company famous by airing remarkably droll television commercials promoting the Perdue brand. He was breaking new ground. Chicken was chicken, and consumers bought what was in the chest refrigerator at the grocery. Frank encouraged them to search for PERDUE® chicken. He paid independent farmers to raise the birds in a prescribed fashion, serving them the company’s own high-quality feed and harvesting them at its own plants. He was on to something. Perdue Farms now has 21,000 employees, is the nation’s fourth-largest poultry producer and sells chickens internationally. It also raises turkeys, hogs, cattle and lambs.

Randy Day, far removed from middle school, is the company’s newly named chief operating officer after assuming increasingly senior-level roles in his 36 yearcareer with the company. Together with CEO and Board Chairman Jim Perdue — Frank’s son — Day is setting a new industry standard for how its chickens are bred, raised and harvested that has won unanimous plaudits from animal-rights organizations.

STOCKSY/SEAN LOCKE

Perdue

Farms was hatched in 1920 when Arthur Perdue, a railway express agent, bought 100 egg-laying chickens for his wife, Pearl, to tend. In the 1940s, Arthur decided to align his business with the emerging broiler industry and switched to raising and selling specially bred meatbird chicks. People liked what he offered and asked for more, and more. The company grew quickly under son Frank Perdue’s leadership. In the 1950s, Frank had the unique foresight to invest in grain receiving and soybean processing, ensuring a quality supply of feed ingredients and setting the stage for what would be Perdue AgriBusiness. A decade later, he transformed the poultry business by successfully branding chicken and Summer 2016

following the continuous marketing innovations, including his own breed and an unwavering commitment to quality. “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” he boasted in his TV commercials.

Chicken consumption was booming, surpassing pork in 1985 and beef in 1992, according to the National Chicken Council. Perdue Farms expanded way beyond its original roost on the Eastern Shore, contracting with 2,500 family farmers across the country to raise birds the Perdue way, annually shipping nearly 700 million chickens to market.

But American tastes zigged to the industry’s zag.

Eventually, consumers became more interested in and concerned about the ways in which animals are raised.

These days, consumers want to know what the chickens are fed, if they have suitable living conditions and if they are treated humanely. They have arrived at a common-sense understanding that, as journalistactivist Michael Pollan has said, “When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chicken, too.”

Day couldn’t agree more. During an interview in May at the corporate headquarters in Salisbury, he listed the company’s initiatives that have already put Perdue ahead of its flock of competitors in satisfying customer concerns — launching what has become the world’s largest organic poultry division and becoming the first company to renounce routine antibiotic use in all its birds. He also shared a preview of the comprehensive animal-care plan the company announced to major media fanfare June 27.

“We’re taking the business back to the fundamentals of how we raise our animals,” Day said. “It’s full circle, absolutely. We’re going right back to the beginning.”

The

animal-care plan states: Perdue will strive to raise happier chickens, “to go beyond just the ‘needs’ of our chickens to also include what our chickens ‘want.’” Guidelines are based on the “five freedoms,” rules for animal welfare developed in Europe in the 1960s that major American poultry producers have long dismissed as antiquated and inefficient. They include freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain and injury, and fear and distress, and put an emphasis on enabling animals to exhibit all their normal behaviors.

Perdue’s 2011 purchase of Coleman Natural Foods, a producer of organic meats, as well as the 2015 acquisition of Niman Ranch, a high-end producer of pork, lamb and beef, have taught the company that it can 11

We’re taking the business right back to FUNDAMENTALS of how we raise our animals.

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follow these animal-care protocols and still be profitable, Day said.

“When I was a kid, all of the chicken barns had open side walls with curtains. But ours is an industry of technological advances and they discovered if we make a solid side wall with tunnel ventilation we can better control the environment. So the industry has gone to what they call cave-dark houses,” Day said. “I think it’s problematic, honestly. The most difficult part is the farmers tend not to want to go in there, because it’s not a pleasant environment. They need flashlights to see anything. So we’re going back to installing windows in chicken houses.”

Perdue is also committing to giving its broilers a more normal “daytime,” by increasing lights-off periods from four to six hours. “Enrichments,” such as straw bales and perches, will be installed to encourage “play.”

The chickens will also have access to the outdoors. The company’s goal is to double the rate of activity of its chickens over the next three years, because lessons learned from Perdue’s organic chicken houses show that increased activity correlates to better health. The modifications will be specifically designed to address broilerchicken growth rates that cause discomfort to birds and could include breeds of birds that grow more slowly and more uniformly. The company will also put its chickens to sleep before harvest.

In December 2015, Mercy for Animals secretly videotaped conditions on one of Perdue’s partner farms in North Carolina. The footage catches an employee at a contract farm stomping chickens to death and also claims to show birds bred to grow so fast some have difficulty supporting their own weight. “It’s hard to watch,” Day said.

In March, Day convened an unprecedented meeting between all of Perdue’s vice presidents and three of the company’s most vocal critics: Mercy for Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, and Compassion for World Farming. “Historically, our position would be that we don’t talk to these groups, we just don’t interact.

It was a gamble, but it felt like the right thing to do,” Day said. “When we sat down with them we found out we’re 90 percent in alignment.”

The three groups have commended Perdue for its four-part commitment to animal care. In addition to a renewed focus on animal wants and needs, the commitment also outlines goals to improve relationships with its contract farmers by establishing better communication and connecting pay incentives for the farmers to improved animal care. In addition, Perdue has made what Forbes described as a “remarkable pledge of transparency,” which includes sharing data in annual progress reports, honestly answering constructive criticism and opening a dialogue with stakeholders including animalwelfare activists, animal experts and academics. The

fourth part of the plan commits to ongoing learning and advancements in the company’s animal-care programs.

Compassion for World Farming called it a “momentous first step in the right direction” and Josh Balk, senior food policy director for the Humane Society, told National Geographic’s The Plate that it is “a precedent-setting policy that will be significant for the broiler industry.”

Members of Perdue’s management team spent much of June traveling the country for face-to-face meetings with poultry farmers about the new animalcare program and assuring them that the company would bear some of the costs associated with the improvements. It was an indication of the kind of personal relationships Perdue hopes to cultivate.

“We’re nothing without our farmers and I don’t think we listen as well as we used to,” Day said.

“We’ve got to re-establish that close relationship with the family farms — like the farm I worked on as a kid growing chickens.”

Day

took his first job tending peaches, apples and strawberry plants at age 12 and continued working at poultry farms through high school and college. “I never thought seriously about a career in anything other than agriculture,” he says.

“I just like growing things.”

On the Hill, he majored in Biology, ran track and played football, pledged the Alpha Gamma Tau fraternity, and fell in love with his future wife, Debbie Scalzone ’79. “Academically, I was an exceptionally mediocre student. I was young and immature and having too much fun. [Dean of Students] Wray Mowbray kept calling me to his office to set me straight.” Still, he says, “I was paying more attention than they thought I was.” He was captivated by the enthusiasm of professors in his department, like Isabel Royer and Jean Kerschner, and appreciated his relationships with coaches Rick Carpenter, Ron Jones, Sam Case and Jim Hindman. He loved how the liberal arts taught him to quickly change gears, from organic chemistry to courses in the humanities, and says that skill has translated to versatility in both his professional and personal lives.

“I got so wrapped up in 19th-century British Literature that in my thirties I went back and read every single work by Charles Dickens, even obscure titles like, ‘The Cricket on the Hearth.’”

After graduation, Day went to Perdue in search of a job. The human resources director rattled his cage, saying that many recent hires had master’s degrees. That irked Day, because he personally knew people working at Perdue without even a bachelor’s degree, but he took up the challenge and enrolled in the graduate program in poultry nutrition at the University of Maryland. This The Hill

JOHN WAIRE

JOIN US on campus for Randy Day’s SmartTALK conversation with President Roger Casey Wed., Oct. 26, at 7 p.m.

Decker Center Forum

time, he approached the coursework like a job and he aced it. Perdue called with an offer soon after he completed the program, but Day turned it down.

Instead, he moved with Debbie to Ft. Lauderdale to run a boatyard owned by the father of his friend Harvey “Bucky” Horsey ’78. “It was fun. Everyone should do something like that once. But my mother kept asking when I was going to use my college degrees.

And Perdue kept calling.”

When two Perdue representatives flew down to Florida to recruit him, Day decided it was time to go home. He learned his first valuable management lesson with his first assignment. “Here I was with a graduate degree in poultry nutrition and I started out in logistics.

That was a beginning of a trend for me that was especially beneficial to my career. As a leader, I try to instill that idea: Don’t tell me what you want to do, do what the company needs of you at the time.”

Since joining Perdue in 1980, Day has taken increasingly senior-level positions in distribution and sales, quality assurance and product development, marketing, business development and strategic planning in both Perdue’s Food and Agribusiness divisions, as well as Perdue BioEnergy and Perdue AgriRecycle.

“Randy has a very strong work ethic. It’s not unusual to be getting texts from him at 3 or 4 in the morning,” said Jim Perdue, who occupies a cubicle like everyone else and sits directly across from Day. VIP-ism is so counter to Perdue’s culture, Day plans to rename corporate headquarters “the business support center” as a way of reminding his senior team that the offices in Summer 2016

Salisbury are not where revenue is generated. “That’s not my own idea, I borrowed it from KFC,” said Day, who also completed an advanced management program at Harvard Business School.

“He’s very intense and a first-class guy,” said Dick Willey, president of Perdue Agribusiness and Day’s best friend. The two came up in the company together and have each served as the other’s boss. They also have enjoyed duck hunting together on Willey’s farm for more than three decades. They get along so well, Willey said, because, “We care about the same things: our families, the company and the community.”

The Days live on the Wicomico River about 12 miles from Perdue’s Salisbury offices and their three grown children all live nearby. One son, Jacob, is a captain in the Army and the mayor of Salisbury. Daughter, Jessica Martin, is a teacher. And son, Justin, is a farmer who raises soybeans, wheat and corn and sells to Perdue.

“There’s an understanding, your corn is coming here,” Day said with a laugh.

Perdue’s roots in the Eastern Shore are personally meaningful to Day, he said, even though the vast majority of the company’s employees live far from Arthur Perdue’s original farm, which has been restored and sits across the street from company headquarters. 2020 will mark Perdue’s 100th year and Day’s 40th with the company. The future looks fertile for both.

“This career suits me,” Day said. “I have to have a strong emotional attachment to what I do. And this is it.”

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DR. NICKI PESIK HELPS LEAD THE CDC’S EFFORT TO KEEP US SAFE FROM EBOLA, ZIKA AND OTHER INFECTIOUS DISEASE EPIDEMICS

BY KIM ASCH

OUTBREAK OVERRIDE It was just two years ago, on August 8, 2014, when the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The virus causes high fever and severe internal bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting, and ultimately shuts down vital organs. The epidemic killed 11,310 people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Worries about a possible global pandemic bordered on hysteria, and public officials in the U.S. debated radical safety measures, from compelling travelers from West Africa to don tracking devices upon entering the United States to prohibiting travel in or out of the affected region.

Dr. Nicki Pesik ’86, head of the Global Migration Task Force at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, strongly advocated against border closures and other extreme responses that stemmed more from fear than science. This was a public health issue, and the agency 14

was well positioned to put effective screening, education and follow-up systems in place to protect our communities while limiting the impact to the traveling public.

For the first time in U.S history, the CDC conducted entry screenings for people returning to the U.S. from Ebola-affected countries. “We had about seven days to initiate screening in the five airports around the country with incoming flights from those areas,” says Pesik, whose team was also tasked with providing technical expertise to help affected countries enhance their exit screening policies and procedures.

Screening was only one part of the solution.

“Our feeling was that just taking a temperature at an airport was not going to mitigate the public health risk of an individual potentially exposed from becoming sick after they arrived in the U.S. We worked to educate every person so that they understood they might be at risk and what to do

and who to call if they got sick,” Pesik says.

“Most importantly, we wanted our state public health authorities to know when they had travelers arriving in their state who had been in affected countries, and we wanted to ensure they had a way to contact those travelers to follow up with them and make sure they weren’t getting sick.” Her task force also oversaw the development of guidelines for specific groups, like U.S. travelers going to affected countries, colleges with students returning from affected countries, nongovernmental organizations, medical volunteers, and the airline industry.

Just four confirmed Ebola cases, resulting in one death, were identified in the United States, and no cases were contracted within our borders. Thanks in large part to the efforts of the CDC — whose Emergency Operations Center was at its highest-ever level of operation with several thousand CDC personnel deployed to West The Hill

BILLY HOWARD

years have presented one looming world crisis after another. In the spring, she spent a month in Puerto Rico as the senior CDC official dealing with Zika virus and three months as deputy incident manager for CDC. The first congenital infection to be identified in 40 years, Zika is a disease spread primarily through mosquito bites. “It’s a challenging response because the mosquito is very difficult to eradicate,” Pesik says. “I’ve heard our director say on numerous occasions that this is the most complex response our agency has had to deal with to date.”

About 80 percent of people infected never show symptoms, and those who do generally suffer mild fever and joint pain. The biggest danger of the Zika virus lies in its ability to cause severe birth defects in developing fetuses, including a condition called microcephaly, in which the brain fails to develop fully.

The virus is also linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a nervous system illness that causes muscle weakness and sometimes Africa — the epidemic was contained and Dr. Kate Heilpern, an executive associate paralysis. Much of Pesik’s work in Puerto ultimately stopped. Now, in conjunction dean at Emory’s medical school, who Rico emphasized risk mitigation, such as with the newly formed Global Health recruited Pesik in 1993. Heilpern says educating communities to clean up areas Security Agenda, a collaboration of more she was impressed with Pesik’s record at with stagnant water where mosquitos like than 50 member nations, the CDC is University of Cincinnati’s highly regarded to breed and preventing sexual transmission focused on helping developing countries emergency medicine residency program and of the disease by using condoms. sustain their public health surveillance, her three years of military service with the “There are still a lot of unknowns with response and treatment systems. virology division of the U.S. Army Research this virus,” Pesik says. “On top of trying to “I spent a couple thousand hours dealing Institute of Infectious Diseases. “She’s now assess what the health outcomes are, we’re with Ebola. It was the most challenging pub- applying those emergency-medicine skills trying to prevent those health outcomes lic health experience I’ve ever head, but it at the CDC to treat not just one patient at a without a vaccine.” was among the most rewarding,” she says. time, but the population as a whole on the Still, the fear factor with Zika is much Pesik’s training in emergency medicine, national and even global levels.” lower than the panic Ebola caused. Pesik, an as well as her decade of experience as an When not in major-response mode, Academic All-American softball player while assistant professor in Emory School of Pesik’s official job title is senior advisor for in college who is now an avid hiker and Medicine’s emergency medicine departglobal health security in the CDC’s Center nature photographer, does not plan to spend ment, have prepared her well to perform for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious the summer inside. “If you use the right proin high-pressure situations and to coach Diseases, where she oversees a $40 million tection, repellents and proper clothing, her team to do the same. budget and the work the center supports there’s no reason to stop being active in the “In emergency medicine, we train for pre- in 17 countries in improving the countries’ outdoors,” she says. “When I hike, I use a paredness, we train for disaster, we train for capacity to respond to infectious disease repellent with Deet and I’m always in longthe unknown. We’re calm in a crisis,” says outbreaks. Of course, the past couple of sleeved shirts and long pants.”

I SPENT A COUPLE THOUSAND HOURS WORKING ON THE EBOLA RESPONSE. IT WAS THE MOST CHALLENGING PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERIENCE I’VE EVER HAD, BUT IT WAS AMONG THE MOST REWARDING.

Summer 2016

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BY PEGGY FOSDICK

HOW A NOVEL COURSE INSPIRES STUDENTS TO SPEAK UP FOR THE RAIN FOREST

FORCES !

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The Hill

IT’S BEEN THE JOURNEY of a lifetime and these students are eager to share their experiences with the world. Having completed the year-long course “The Forest Online: Entrepreneurial Storytelling on Peru’s Amazon Frontier,” their aim is to be part of a force that turns degradation into vitality in rain forests worldwide.

Spanning both the fall and spring semesters — and made fully immersive through a Jan Term study tour deep into the Peruvian rain forest — the course was ambitious in both its structure and its mission: to produce compelling stories that can, and perhaps will, change the world.

NATURE Summer 2016

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“I’m not a scientist but I care,” says Luke Fisher ’16, a Cinema major from Westminster, Md., who has already made several documentaries.

“What was really interesting to me is that in order to save this place, the scientists need writers, documentation, artists. It reaffirmed for me that maybe I don’t know how the plants got there but I can film and show them and inspire people.”

Guided by Environmental Studies professor Jason Scullion and Writing Center director Josh Ambrose, students spent the fall semester studying ways conservationists are trying to protect and restore endangered environments.

The dozen students from diverse majors also were given a how-to seminar by award-winning wildlife photographer Thomas Haney. They camped out at the College’s Singleton Farm near campus. They read about and discussed the history and culture of Peru. They learned how to stay safe in a jungle teeming with animals, plants and bugs. And they sharpened their storytelling skills.

In January, the group of 12 students and two faculty traveled more than 3,500 miles to the remote Las Piedras watershed of Peru’s Madre de Dios (Mother of God) region, one of the planet’s last great wildernesses. Scullion is president of Wildlife Forests and Fauna, or WFF, a U.S.-based nonprofit supporting the grassroots Peruvian organization, the Alliance for Research and Conservation in the Amazon, known as ARCAmazon. With WFF’s support, ARCAmazon obtained the 11,000-acre ecotourism concession comprising oldgrowth rain forest along the lower Las Piedras River. There, with the rustic Las Piedras Amazon Center serving as base camp, McDaniel students settled in to begin their research.

Split into four teams, each with a specific focus — ecotourism, forest management and protection, community and wildlife — students gathered the notes, interviews, photos, video, audio recordings and other materials they would use to tell the stories of this richly biodiverse but threatened ecosystem.

About 1,100 square miles of rain forest is cut each year, 80 percent illegally.

As digital natives, most of these millennials couldn’t imagine a technologyfree world, and none had spent two weeks totally unplugged from phones, 18

web and social media. As they contemplated starry night skies, marveled at a troop of monkeys swinging from tree to tree not 15 feet from where they ate breakfast, and met with people from the region as well as conservationists from around the world, the students’ myriad discoveries ranged from the personal to the universal.

“We were much more alive and in the moment without distractions,” says English major Dani Fatzinger ’16, from North Catasauqua, Pa. “The wildlife of the jungle taught me how to see and stop looking. While wading through swamps of oxbow lakes or sloshing through thick, jungle floor mud, I realized that wildlife has no obligation to perform for my camera,” says Christina “Sunshine” DeJoseph ’18, from Palmyra, N.J., who was on the wildlife team. “However, when I did take the time to genuinely see what was there, Mother Nature blew me away with astounding beauty in moments of spontaneous awe.”

The Hill

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EXPLORE THE FOREST ONLINE at https://theforestonline.com to learn more from students’ multimedia presentations.

p

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Ecotourism through ARCAmazon is one of the ways local people in this spectacularly beautiful but threatened ecosystem can support themselves. “It is all well and good that we want to save the planet but it is also complex. People have to support themselves — they need to have livelihoods,” observes Casey Kelahan ’16, an Environmental Studies and Spanish double major from Ashburn, Va.

No stranger to the outdoors and adventure as a Boy Scout, Jason Swartz ’18, of Dillsburg, Pa., relished his first journey outside the U.S. The Environmental Studies and French major was a member of the forest management and protection team, which examined legal and illegal activities in the forest and what seems to be working or not working in the regions already protected in Peru. Recalling his group’s discovery of illegal agriculture while on a camping Summer 2016

“It’s not just about saving the rain forest. It’s more than that,” says DeJoseph.

“It’s about asking how we can take our experiences and re-invigorate the passions of others to see that everyone plays a unique role in preserving and protecting the rain forest.”

expedition with a park ranger, Swartz says in the video his team produced, “It was definitely a shock to be walking through the jungle and all of the sudden there’s a field of corn.” Worse, was learning that people who are destroying the forest for agriculture are just trying to make a living and survive.

Lucy Benson ’17, a Spanish and History major from Wilmington, Del., says her ecotourism team set out to explore the ethics of ecotourism: “Is it going to change or influence the culture of the region and is it really environmentally friendly or just a selling point for tree-huggers?” Her group concluded that it’s possible to strike a balance between protecting the jungle while serving the community by establishing a profitable ecotourist attraction at the ARCAmazon concession.

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“Coming back from the Amazon, some key take-aways would be just how diverse the biodiversity in the rain forest actually is. In the morning we would hear the sound of howler monkeys...during the day we would see lots of colorful insects and birds,” reports English major Ian Yoshioka ’17, of Hopedale, Mass., in his group’s blog. “For what we couldn’t see with our own eyes, we...set up camera traps. This helped us to see wildlife like jaguars and pumas.”

Professor Scullion, who holds a Ph.D. in Environmental and Forest Sciences and master’s degrees in Public Administration and Forest Resources, was a 2012 Peru Fulbright fellowship recipient. Scullion says, “The most important thing people should know about protecting the world’s rain forests is that there is hope.”

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Advancing the vision

C. KURT HOLTER

invested

Parents on Board Trustees whose children attend McDaniel share a special perspective

By Kim Asch Trustee Robin Salomon personally handed son Ryan his diploma at this year’s Commencement ceremony.

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There are many reasons Robin Salomon was drawn to “All schools advertise that they’re deeply engaged with their serve as a member of McDaniel’s Board of Trustees. At students, but McDaniel makes real its promise.”

Commencement, he had the opportunity to personally hand Salomon is among a relatively small but motivated group a diploma to his biggest reason of all — son Ryan ’16, a tall, of current trustees who learned to love the College not as affable tennis player with a Theatre major and History mi- students, but as parents of students, and have committed nor whose passion for the College proved contagious. to help advance the institution as members of the Board.

Salomon, a developer of affordable housing in New “When someone is good to my kid, that’s going to be reYork City and six states, says he and his wife, Sarah, value paid, and that’s the biggest reason I joined the Board,” says McDaniel’s commitment to providing access and affordabil- trustee Eric Dezenhall, father of Eliza ’15. “I am going to be ity and are particularly impressed that first-generation col- there for the school in any capacity that I can.” lege students comprise more than 30 percent of the student Dezenhall co-founded the company that is now body. They also have high praise for what they call the “best- Dezenhall Resources, one of the nation’s leading crisis manin-the-nation” Student Academic Support Services (SASS) agement firms, based in Washington, D.C. He is also the auprogram, which helped Ryan accommodate his language- thor of nine books, including three non-fiction texts on crisis based learning differences while successfully navigating the communications and corporate witch hunts, and formerly demands of his coursework. served in the White House Office of Communications and “We feel this is a terribly important institution with a Presidential Personnel during the Reagan presidency. The unique character and students-first mission,” Salomon says. Dartmouth College alum is dyslexic and says he “would have The Hill

killed for a program like SASS” when he was an undergraduate.

“I believe a miracle happened at McDaniel — we never imagined our daughter would love college as much as she did,” Dezenhall says. “There was an intimacy about the community; the people who taught there wanted to be there and the students wanted to be there.”

Both Dezenhall and Salomon learned about the responsibilities of college leadership as parent visitors to the Board. Visitors have entrée to almost every facet of Board work; they are assigned (Top) Trustee Eric Dezenhall and to trustee committees and pardaughter Eliza ’15. (Bottom) Parent ticipate in all discussions and Visitor to the Board Bill Rodgers formal board meetings, but just with son Billy ’19. don’t have voting privileges.

Says parent visitor Laura Alberg, a pediatrician in Mount Pleasant, S.C., whose son, Christian, will be a senior English major: “I think parents have a unique perspective to bring to the Board — we are the consumers, after all! We can judge the value of our investment in the College.” From her family’s perspective, Alberg says, “McDaniel is a wonderful nurturing environment for young adults to try their wings.”

Bill Rodgers, an economist and parent visitor whose son, Billy, just finished his freshman year, agrees. “I wanted Billy to be in a caring environment that encourages students to take chances and at times stumble because the best learning happens when we’re uncomfortable,” explains Rodgers, who is a professor of public policy at Rutger’s University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and the chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers. “Education for a specific job is no longer an appropriate long-term strategy for success. A liberal arts education is the best strategy for competing in today’s global economy.”

Of course, McDaniel’s unique brand of customized, personal and affordable liberal arts education faces challenges in today’s marketplace. It’s expensive to provide proactive faculty mentoring and small class sizes, plus substantial financial aid, to the majority of students. But these parents who have witnessed the transformation of their own sons and daughters during their time on the Hill are committed to helping the College do just that.

“We all come from a diversity of backgrounds, but what we all share is a desire to evangelize for this school. I’m not sure Dartmouth needs me very much. I think schools like McDaniel need people who are going to guide them into the next generation,” Dezenhall says. “I don’t delude myself that I will play a big part, but I want to play a part.”

Summer 2016

Gift Highlights Mark Stuart MS’94 and Timothy Rupe have established the Rupe-Stuart Internship Award. This endowed award will support student internships, with preference given to those students taking on unpaid internships with nonprofit organizations. The endowment has been established through a gift of $25,000, plus $15,000 in restricted annual giving, and a $200,000 bequest intention.

The late Dan Yeoman ’56, a Biology major, left a bequest to the College of $164,479.46 in unrestricted support.

Gordon ’68 and Barbara Payne ’70 Shelton made a bequest intention to be divided equally among three endowed funds: The Gordon ’68 and Barbara Payne ’70 Shelton Lectureship Fund to support an annual address about women’s issues by a distinguished individual; The McDaniel Women’s Leadership Circle Endowed Scholarship; and The Gordon ’68 and Barbara Payne ’70 Shelton Student Research Fund to support student researchers in the field of environmental biology with stipends, room and board, laboratory supplies and travel during summer months.

Correction: The late J. Catherine Bishop ’48, a History major, left the College a bequest of $250,000. She was misidentified in the spring issue of The Hill.

Alumnus Welcomed as New Trustee Darrell Guyton ’87, vice president of specialty contracts and commercial facilities maintenance at Morgan-Keller Construction, was elected to the Board of Trustees April 30.

He is a graduate of The Project Manager’s Academy in the Department of Construction Science & Management at Clemson University’s College of Architecture. He sits on the Frederick County Judicial Nominating Commission, is active in Rotary Club of Carroll Creek, serves on the Mission of Mercy Board of Directors, and is Past Chair of the YMCA of Frederick County’s Board of Directors. He has three children and lives in Woodsboro, Md., with his wife, Kris Anne Guyton.

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back story

What they were thinking

March 31, 2016: Political Science & International Studies major Nick Riga ’16 takes a brief break at U.N. headquarters in New York City.

McDaniel’s Model U.N. team of seven students spent a whirlwind week practicing WENDY PLOGER ’90

their diplomatic skills at the National Model United Nations Conference.

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Diplomacy at Rest. I’m someone who doesn’t need a lot of sleep, but this was the last day of the conference and we’d been working pretty hard all week. We got up by 7 a.m. each morning, grabbed breakfast with our advisor, Dr. Grice, walked the 15 blocks or so from our Times Square hotel to the U.N. building, and started formal committee sessions by 9 a.m. We’d get lunch and dinner breaks and then keep working until 11 p.m. some nights. McDaniel’s delegation represented the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan and I was on the Economic and Finance Committee. I surprised myself. My committee had 200 members and I was the only one from McDaniel. It was nerve-wracking in the beginning, but once I got the jitters away I was able to speak well and represent. I got on three working papers and I was a signatory on another six papers. We had some good political discussions and they really liked what I had to say.

Almost 5,000 college students from around the world attended this conference and more than half come from outside the United States. It was a great experience. I made a lot of friends and connections in Japan, Italy, Australia, West Virginia and Texas.

The Hill

An easy, breezy assessment of how closely you read this Summer issue.

(Answers are within these pages.)

Open-Book Quiz 1. Which alumni faculty member is this year’s winner of the Zepp Distinguished Teaching Award. (Bonus point if you include class year.)

4. Which sorority celebrated its 90th anniversary this year?

5. Name the alum who is Perdue’s new Chief Operating Officer.

2. Provide an example of “enjambment” in poetry.

(Hint: check page 7.)

Prize: Answer these questions correctly and be entered into a drawing for a McDaniel College sweatshirt.

Shutterstock/ Rawpixel.com

3. Where will Fulbright finalist Melanie Ojwang spend nine months on an English Teaching Assistantship?

Submit: Open-Book Quiz, The Hill magazine, 2 College Hill, Westminster, MD 21157. Or email kasch@mcdaniel.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2016

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As senior advisor for global health security at the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Dr. Nicki Pesik ’86 has helped quell the spread of Ebola and is now at work on Zika. Read her story on page 14.