Mills Matters

Adapting to the new status quo

After a relatively uneventful fall semester, upcoming J-term and spring classes at Mills will continue with a pandemicera hybrid approach that incorporates both online and in-person learning. While the mix will still heavily lean toward the virtual, several more courses will meet on campus in 2021, including lab sciences and art studios.

There were plenty of pitfalls to the first four months of a most unusual school year—for students and faculty members alike. Email and Zoom fatigue have plagued many in the Mills community, and at a faculty-staff town hall on October 27, 2020, Dean of Student Life Chicora Martin reported that students have diminished resources on both financial and emotional levels. Technology needs are up, while many of those learning off-campus don’t have the kind of privacy they need for online classes.

The 180 or so students living on campus do have the opportunity to socialize, even as they occupy single rooms. “Students are able to establish social bubbles, and we encourage them to do that,” Martin said. “They have those two or three friends, and they eat together, so they’re interacting in small groups.” A new COVID-19 dashboard is available at mills.edu/covid-19/covid-dashboard.php, showing (as of press time) that there have been no positive cases on the Mills campus since September 2020.

Additional signs of normal life are showing themselves as everyone learns how to adapt to the pandemic. Later in the fall, outdoor yoga sessions on Holmgren Meadow gave those on campus socially distanced time outside, and the area surrounding Mary Morse was reconfigured to allow student and faculty children the opportunity to roller skate. Martin said the Division of Student Life had found better virtual engagement among some populations, such as student parents, and that post-pandemic programming would be adjusted to accommodate those groups.

Mills community makes most of Convocation

As one of the earliest campus-wide events of the year, Convocation followed its tradition of setting the tone for the new school year—though this one was already unlike any other. With classes online and many students spread out beyond the campus, Provost Chinyere Oparah and her staff made the decision to hold the event over Zoom. And rather than bring in an outside speaker—as per usual custom—students took charge and shared rousing speeches and poetry.

Coronavirus, climate change, and Black futurism were the prompts for these creative contributions, and Mills students responded in spades. Convocation kicked off with an indigenous blessing from Hiwa Grieg ’22, Zooming in from Maui, Hawaii, with her mother, Napua (pictured above). Student leaders Dylyn Turner-Keener ’21 (president of the Associated Students of Mills College) and Sophie Stauffer, MA ’22, followed with advice for the pandemic and intensely personal reflections on their experiences at Mills. Three other students—Jessica Hairston ’22, MFA ’23; Reilly Hirst, MPP ’21; and Sara Lahey ’22—shared poems they had written for the occasion. Hairston’s contribution is at right; visit quarterly.mills.edu/convocation-poetry to read the others and for links to videos of their readings.

Work continued apace at the Mills Community Farm over the summer into

the fall, with students and Farm Manager Julia Dashe packaging harvested food for on-campus residents and the Mercy Brown Bag Program for the Elder Care Alliance. “The outdoor space, the resilience of the natural worlds, and the smells and sounds of the surrounding ecology have been truly healing for students, staff, and faculty who have been working, volunteering, and enjoying the farm’s bounty,” Dashe said.

FOR THOSE THAT RAPE AND COLONIZE By Jessica Hairston ’22, MFA ’23

For Those That Rape and Colonize, Earth and I are one in the same, to take hold of Earth, is to take hold of Me I, the Black Woman, the oldest adage, has watched Herself, Earth, raped out of sanctity and auctioned as a commodity, to devolve from a house of worship to a house full of the things that haunt

For the sake of greed, at the mercy of those that lust and want My body is the landscape of earth’s geography small scaled, in my truest essence, I exude an aura-ancient and avant The top layers of my skin shelter thousands of fissures, wherein lies the word ‘opulence’, elucidated under the gaze of astronomical dawn

My melanin is so worldly, it’s the oldest decorum for an ancient ecosystem, the ‘Black Bod’ Wherever, I lay my body, plants blossom, the sun reveals herself, lost moons are found, ‘cause the Black Woman is Earth’s first reflection, her first confidant

My body is often everybody’s home, this wallpaper I live under, is as deep as indigo By now, you should know, there is no reconciling Earth’s changing climate, when you still rape away the light of the blackest abodes As my topical layers fade from opal to opaque, there’s a virus of those that rape and colonize that dims the light in me that glows

Earth came and cried to me the other day, actually she broke down in pain; she said, that she is dying quickly, that the time were living in is borrowed So I cried right back, broken and in pain; I said, that I miss the days where brown skin was a gift, a legacy, inheritance, because now when I look at Earth, my reflection reveals to me my inherited death sentence, to be black is to have sorrow

Instead of innovate locally, you searched, pillaged, and conquered-globally Now my lungs are like the atmosphere you created: breathless, dense, cloudy My kidneys are as overburdened as our overpoliced inner cities My energy is as depleted as our neglected rural communities Honoring Earth, is honoring our collective health, ancient love, communal wealth, giving grace and saying please

My skin is so dark and full of shade, it’s outer-worldly My skin is so black and pretty, it’s as extraterrestrial as our immeasurable galaxy Home can’t have zipcodes, or borders, or stop where the sun can no longer be seen Or where the sun sets and rises

Relinquish your entitlement, make sovereign the bodies you’ve commodified Make sovereign the bodies you’ve raped and colonized Live morally, live minimally, and watch alternatives manifest the extras in life, the things you’ve earned, the delicacies you still desire Sincerely, A Survivor

Campus kudos

A selection of recent achievements by faculty, staff, and students

Mills College was ranked #1 as Best Value College in the West by US News & World Report in September, as well as #1 in the category for Best Undergraduate Teaching. This guide, released annually, measures the academic quality of institutions based on “success indicators” like retention and graduation rates, selectivity, and data from top officials from similar institutions.

Professor Emerita of Dance Molissa Fenley’s solo choreographed work, State of Darkness, was performed (sans audience) at the Joyce Theatre from October 24 to November 1, 2020, by seven dancers, with whom Fenley worked by “adapting her creative process to our emergent world of social distance.”

Professor of Education and Teacher Education Department Chair Tomás Galguera was featured in a July District Administration piece, “9 Reasons

Mills Teachers Scholars lead by learning

The School of Education’s Teacher Scholars Program—which provides professional development training to teachers already in the classroom, with an emphasis on equity, inquiry, and centering the student experience—is taking steps toward a nationwide audience by rebranding as Lead by Learning. The change in name, which was announced on November 20, 2020, is the culmination of many months of discussion to find a better representation of what the program provides—and make it more accessible to those outside the area. Synchronous Classes Engage English Language Learners,” in which he explained how teachers can use music and programs like TikTok to connect with students during online instruction.

Student Rosina Ghebreyesus ’22 wrote an article, “The future is speaking—listen up,” for San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in August, in which she profiled native San Franciscans working to ensure that communities of color are counted in the US Census.

Associate Adjunct Professor of Art History Sarah Miller won a second grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Art for her book project, Documentary in Dispute: The Original Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausand, in which the original manuscript for Changing New York is recreated in a sequence of photos and text.

Professor Emeritus of Music Roscoe Mitchell performed in a virtual concert in August 2020 alongside singer Bobby McFerrin, which celebrated their reception of the 2020 Jazz Masters Fellowship, announced in 2019 by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Provost and Dean of Faculty Chinyere Oparah was featured in an August 2020 Glamour piece titled “Black Doulas Are Banding Together to Beat High Infant Mortality Rates.” In the article, she spoke about the benefits of working with a doula and reflected on her own birthing experience, which led her to co-found the organization Black Women Birthing Justice. She was also interviewed by KTVU Channel 2 for a piece on absenteeism across the Bay Area in virtual schooling on October 19, 2020.

Payne reissued two collections of music

Professor Emerita of Music Maggi

Mills College Art Museum

Shifting Perspectives ■ Through March 7 Students Simone Gage, Sage Gaspar, Sydney Pearce, Melika Sebihi, and Taya Wyatt curated this digital presentation of works from MCAM’s permanent collection that critique views of race, culture, and gender. Pieces include everything from documentary photography of Mexican immigrants in the United States to a plate that celebrates every Black man who lives to the age of 21. Visit mcam.mills.edu to view the exhibition.

through Aguirre Records: Arctic Winds from 2010 and Ahh-Ahh from the 1980s. An August 2020 review was featured in The Quietus, which detailed Payne’s experimental uses of sound and rhythm throughout her career.

Darius Milhaud Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Tomeka Reid was called “the most acclaimed jazz cellist of her generation” by the San Francisco Chronicle in a September 2020 article. She gave an online concert on September 19, 2020, alongside video artist Selina Trepp and percussionist Adam Vida, as part of the Mills Music Now monthly series.

Students Alondra Rios ’21 and Jada Ross ’22 were featured in an October 2020 KQED piece called “It’s OK to Not Be OK: College Students Tackle Mental Health Challenges During the Pandemic” by Laura Klivans, which covered the pandemic’s toll on students’ mental health and how campuses are responding, and provided resources and suggestions for struggling students.

Student Natalia Roman ’24 was quoted in an October Los Altos Town Crier article about her role as director of marketing and community outreach at Science Nation, an online platform that provides free resources to students in STEM.

Associate Professor of Biology Jenn Smith and alumna Lauren Kong ’13 are two of the co-authors on a new scientific article about resistance to rattlesnake venom in squirrels, published in the journal Toxins in September 2020. Smith was also quoted in a November 2020 piece in The Guardian about leadership in animal species and in Popular Science that same month about a newly identified mammal from the Late Cretaceous epoch that resembles species she currently studies.

Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of Computer Science Ellen Spertus was featured as an inclusion and diversity speaker at the eighth annual All Things Open conference, which occurred virtually on October 17-19, 2020.

The fourth book by Professor of English Tom Strychacz, Kitchen Economics, which features close readings of 19th-century regionalist women writers and their work in political economic theory, was published in August 2020 by the University of Alabama Press and received the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature.

Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership Susan Stryker was featured in a September article in the Mercury News written by Martha Ross, MFA ’98. The article, titled “Fighting the New Culture Wars: Mills College Hires Pioneering Transgender Historian and Activist,” covered Stryker’s new position at Mills and her thoughts on transgender rights today.

On Election Day 2020, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Mark Henderson traveled to the town of La Honda in San Mateo County to volunteer at the polls. When he arrived, he learned that he had been assigned to the same site as Hilary Hart ’73, who lives in La Honda, bringing a definite Mills flavor to a historic day.