Mills Matters

Alums running for Congress

On February 28, Congresswoman Barbara Tutt Lee ’73 put the rumors to rest by announcing her candidacy for the California US Senate seat to be vacated by Senator Dianne Feinstein at the end of her term in early 2025. After releasing a video online, Lee held her first campaign rally at Laney College on February 25, with Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and Assemblymember Mia Bonta in attendance.

Earlier this year, as Lee’s name was floated as a possibility for Feinstein’s Senate seat, she spoke with Jezebel to say that any announcement would be made with due respect to Feinstein, and that she hopes to repeal the Hyde Amendment while still a member of the House of Representatives. She has long credited her time at Mills with nurturing her political aspirations; she encountered Representative Shirley Chisholm on campus during Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign and later worked on Chisolm’s primary campaign.

A week later, Lateefah Simon ’17 announced that she would run to replace Lee in California’s 12th Congressional District. She earned her Mills degree in public policy, received a MacArthur Genius Grant at the age of 26—before she enrolled at Mills— and worked for now-Vice President Kamala Harris when Harris was the San Francisco district attorney.

She currently serves as the director for District 7 on the BART board of directors. Simon, who is legally blind, has long advocated for public transit in her 25-year career in community organizing.

Merger updates

On January 18, Northeastern’s Faculty Senate voted to admit Mills College as the 10th college at Northeastern with a vote of 29-0-1. The vote officially gave Mills College at Northeastern University the authorization to grant degrees, and it creates a pathway for Mills faculty to serve on the Faculty Senate and the University Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. In the meeting, Provost David Madigan said that Mills faculty members will continue to go through Mills promotion and tenure processes.

►The admissions process for the fall 2023 entering class is underway, with Northeastern’s Office of Enrollment Management reporting a goal of 150 fouryear students to join the Mills campus in August. Approximately 1,000 undergraduate applicants to Northeastern overall expressed interest in studying in Oakland (35 submissions came in for graduate-level study), with 1,800 offers going out. Admissions offers are also being sent to students interested in one of the four Northeastern programs available this fall: computer science, business administration, health science, and biology.

►In addition, the Global Scholars program will take place on the Mills campus this fall, with two cohorts of approximately 425 students spending alternating semesters in Oakland and at Northeastern’s London location.

►The Oakland-based Northeastern admissions staff is growing, with two positions for assistant director and a senior recruiter slot open as of press time, in anticipation for recruitment that’s more personalized to the Mills campus and upcoming new programs in fall 2024.

►According to Michael Fleming, the longtime director of planning, analytics, and effectiveness on the Mills campus, the fall 2022 semester saw 168 returning Mills undergraduates and 25 returning graduate students.

Students find support in major gifts

Mills College at Northeastern University gratefully acknowledges the following members of the community for their gifts, grants, and pledges of $50,000 or more, received between July 1 and December 31, 2022.

• The estate of Linda M. Johnson ’66 for its unrestricted bequest, which will help the Mills campus respond to urgent financial demands and meet student needs.

• Mei Kwong ’70 and Laurence Franklin for their support of the Dialogues of Civilization Summer Program, which will enable students to study abroad for specific subjects in locations such as Ireland (for literature and film) and Vietnam and Cambodia (food and culture).

• The PG&E Corporation Foundation for its donations to the Upward Bound Gift Fund and the Educational Talent Search Program, both of which support local students from under-resourced high schools who want to pursue higher education.

Special classes pop up on campus

Subjects such as book art, dance, and media studies are finding new life on the Mills campus this year in the form of pop-up classes. These unique one-credit electives are offered to students at no additional charge, and accommodate 10 to 20 participants who generally meet for a handful of sessions rather than a full semester.

Visiting Associate Professor of Biology Helen Walter volunteered to oversee this special slate in the fall semester in conjunction with her role in coordinating global Northeastern programs for the Oakland campus. She reports that seven pop-ups are happening this spring—from Postcards, Mail Art & Zines to Can Comedy Save Democracy?—with surveys among Mills faculty members happening now to set up classes for the fall.

“We’ll probably offer eight to 10 [next semester], and we’ll likely offer a different selection in the spring when we have different students,” Walter says. “They’re designed for situations in which a student needs to drop a class, but they need another add-in to still be considered full time.”

Pop-up classes are already part of the Northeastern academic experience, and they’re making an appearance on the Mills campus (for continuing students as well as new ones) with the support of the College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD) in Boston. But they’ve largely flown under the radar thus far, and Walter acknowledges that the process of communicating their existence to possible participants has been tough—but will see improvements going forward. “Really, the best way is for us to give information to students at registration,” Walter says. “They don’t have to choose right then, and they may come across something later they may want to take, but we can impress upon them that these classes are a way to add on to their college experience.”

One pop-up class that took place last semester was Creation to Performance, a dance class in which four Northeastern first-years participated and Mills dance alums choreographed.

“Our pop-up was a wonderful opportunity for incoming Northeastern students to quickly get a deeper feeling for the extraordinary history of dance at Mills,” says Sheldon Smith, chair of the Department of Dance and Theater Studies. “And it was so great to get to know these students and realize that there are many more just like them who want to dance, make dances, and share in an artistic community.”

Ambassador alum to speak at Commencement

Michèle Nichols Taylor ’88, who is the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council, will address the Class of 2023 as this year’s Commencement speaker (Commencement is on April 30; see the back cover for more information.). She is a daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who has been a longtime activist for human rights. Taylor has previously served on the board of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, and as a member of the Anti-Defamation League’s Southeast regional board.

“I have danced my whole life in a variety of styles, I love performing, and I wanted to stay active in college. I loved performing at Mills because I was able to take advantage of the wonderful theater and studio, and meet a lot of Mills alumnae/i.

I’m so thankful I was part of the class.” –Sophia Fettig, Northeastern first-year

Precious items still part of the Mills archives

After the College auctioned off its copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio in fall 2019, many wondered what other treasures were held in the Mills archives. David Nordham with Northeastern Global News sat down with Director of the Library and Special Collections Janice Braun in the Heller Rare Book Room to learn more about what those items might be.

A few of them:

• Several remarkable Bibles, including a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1454; an annotated second edition of the King James Bible, also known as the “she” Bible, from 1611; and a Martin Luther translation of the Bible from 1539.

• A 1481 version of Dante’s La divina commedia from Florence that includes notes from the philosopher and artist Cristoforo Landino and hand-drawn engravings.

• Thirty-six titles from the Arts and Crafts-influenced Kelmscott Press, which operated in London between 1891 and 1898, including a full collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works.

• The herbal, or, Generall historie of plantes from 1633 by John Gerard, one of the first chronicles of botany in the English language.

• The archives of Beate Sirota Gordon ’43, who helped write the new Japanese constitution post-World War II; former music professors Pauline Oliveros and Darius Milhaud; and world-famous musician Patti Smith.

Previous Quarterly stories have delved into several of those collections housed at Mills, as well as that of Senate candidate Barbara Tutt Lee ’73 and opera singer Emma Nevada, who graduated from Mills Seminary in 1876. Read those articles at quarterly.mills.edu.

The Mills archives are available for alums and members of the community alike to peruse. Visit library.mills.edu to learn more about how to access them and the other collections that are housed in F. W. Olin Library.

Calendar

Mills College Art Museum

The museum is open 11:00 am–4:00 pm Tuesday through Sunday and until 7:30 pm Wednesday. Admission is free. Visit mcam.mills.edu for more information.

Murmurations: 2023 MFA Exhibition ■ April 22–May 28

Graduating MFA candidates with concentrations in studio and book art showcase their work.

A+P+I Artist Talk

April 4 ■ Heesoo Kwon

Heesoo Kwon, current artist-in-residence in our Art+Process+Ideas artist residency, started making art to shed the burdens of patriarchal society, initiating an autobiographical religion Leymusoom as an ever-evolving framework to explore her family histories and communal feminist liberation. 12:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall at Jane B. Aron Art Center.

Mills Music Now Concert Series

Visit performingarts.mills.edu for more information on times and tickets.

April 16 ■ Music of Barbara Strozzi, Venetian Virtuosa