Occidental Magazine - Fall 2018

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FALL 2018

Nonprofit U.S. Postage Paid Occidental College

Exhuming Edward Gorey: Author Mark Dery ’82

Linda and Tod White ’59 Go the Distance

Address Service Requested

FALL 2018

Photo by Kevin Burke

After her first year at Oxy, Kayla Williams ’20 spent the summer as an intern at Esperanza Community Housing Corp., a social-justice nonprofit in South Central Los Angeles that fosters community development in five core program areas: affordable housing, health, arts, environmental justice, and economic development.

The 10-week internship “gave me the opportunity to put theory to practice,” says Kayla, an urban and environmental policy major from the Bronx, N.Y. “Not only was I reading about injustices, but I was then going to work and making meaningful steps toward addressing those same issues. While interning at Esperanza, my

understanding of concepts such as public health and environmental justice completely changed. I now see these topics as intertwined.”

Kayla’s positive attitude and desire to help made a lasting impression on the Esperanza staff. “She took the initiative to organize a clothes drive with students from Oxy to give the clothes to families in need in our community,” wrote her supervisor. “Her sense and empathy for vulnerable community makes her stand up and look for different alternatives of services.”

“The most important lesson I learned from this internship is the importance of community,” says Kayla, who also works in Occidental’s Center for Community Based Learning, which aims to enrich students’ learning and commitment to social responsibility through civic engagement. “Once a person becomes a part of the Esperanza community, either because they live in South L.A. or because they work with the organization, their personal development becomes a priority.”

Kayla took things away from the program that she never could have imagined—like learning to drive (as a native New Yorker, she was used to getting around using public transit), thanks to a supervisor who gave her lessons on Sundays. Another staff member, seeing Kayla’s determination to learn Spanish to help her assist Esperanza’s overwhelmingly Latino clientele, practiced the language with her daily over tea and cookies. “This was not a part of her job description, yet she saw that I needed help and took it upon herself to help me,” she says.

The experience also gave her “a more dynamic view of the majors offered at Occidental and what careers I can pursue after college,” Kayla says. “Throughout this internship, I have gained a sense of agency deeper than I had ever felt before—it has been one of the most transformative experiences in my life.”

It takes a community to enable students such as Kayla to thrive.

Your annual gift to the Oxy Fund supports a broad spectrum of internships. It’s a meaningful step—one that is sure to pay dividends for future generations committed to the public good.

oxy.edu/giving

It Takes

’22 oxy.edu/magazine

Invest in the kind of education that can only happen at Occidental.

Please make your gift to the Oxy Fund.

PLANTED IN PERU: ADRIENNE (SPIVAK) ’08 AND GARRETT HOSTETLER ’08 /// THE SPIRIT OF CAROLYN ADAMS

Your Oxy Fund Gift Builds Community

Anjolie Charlot and Mira Tarabeine embrace the possibilities that await the College’s most selective class in 70 years

OXYFARE 

Snapshots from Volume 40, Number 4 oxy.edu/magazine OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Jonathan Veitch President Wendy F. Sternberg Vice President for Academic Aairs and Dean of the College Rhonda L. Brown Vice President for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity OďŹƒcer Charlie Cardillo Vice President for Institutional Advancement Vince Cuseo Vice President of Enrollment and Dean of Admission Rob Flot Vice President for Student Aairs and Dean of Students Amos Himmelstein Vice President & Chief Operating OďŹƒcer Marty Sharkey Vice President for Marketing and Communications Jim Tranquada Director of Communications

Homecoming & Family Weekend October 19-21 Photos by Marc Campos

1. The Occidental College Women’s Club staged its annual boutique October 20, with proceeds beneďŹ tting the club’s endowed scholarship.

Seated, l-r: Elvira Bellizzi P’16, Clara Gresham ’53, and Jane Pinkerton P’85, ’88. Standing, l-r: Martha Hidalgo ’81 P’12, Carolyn Nelson (daughter of Lois Thompson ’57), Lois Russo P’85, ’90, and Enid Busser ’58. 2. With wide receiver Andrew Jack de Avila ’22 leading the charge, Oxy’s football team takes to the ďŹ eld for its Homecoming contest against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps.

3. Jazmin Calderon-Arreola ’21, Jessica Rodriguez ’22, and Aracely Ruvalcaba ’20 light up the First Gen Club booth. 4. Members of the Oxy softball team pose at their Tiger Tee Toss—winners of the spirit booth competition during Oswald’s Carnival and Tailgate. 5. From left, Emma Gobler ’19, Oswald, Alayna Schwartz ’19, and Reilly Torres ’19. 6. Decked out in their Oxy T-shirts, members of the Eagle Rock High School marching band perform before Saturday’s game.

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7. Johnson Hall 303 was rechristened the Boesche Classroom on October 21 in memory of Roger Boesche, the Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas, who taught for 40 years at Oxy. (He died in 2017.) On hand for the dedication are Wendy Sternberg, vice president for academic aairs and dean of the College; President Jonathan Veitch; and Mandy Boesche, Roger’s wife of nearly 46 years.

To mark the event, more than 313 alumni and friends made gifts totaling $315,400 to the Barack Obama Scholars Program.

editorial staff

Dick Anderson Editor Marc Campos Contributing Photographer Gail (Schulman) Ginell ’79 Class Notes Editor SanSoucie Design Design DLS Group Printing

Alison Haehnel Assistant Director of Athletics Head Softball Coach

6 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

Published quarterly by Occidental College Main number: 323-259-2500 To contact Occidental magazine By phone: 323-259-2679 By email: oxymag@oxy.edu By mail: Occidental College OďŹƒce of Communications F-36 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles CA 90041-3314 Letters may be edited for length, content, and style.

Occidental College online Homepage: oxy.edu Facebook: facebook.com/occidental Twitter: @occidental Instagram: instagram.com/occidentalcollege Long-sleeve Occidental College shirt features Dry-Excel moisture-wicking technology Sizes S-XXL, $29.95

Occidental College Bookstore oxybookstore.com To order by phone: 323-259-2951 All major credit cards accepted

Cover photo by Max S. Gerber Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Econ Day Celebrates Brickman and ‘Brilliance’ What does it take to become a leader—and to ascend to the helm of two major international companies? To hear Sally Beauty Holdings president and CEO Chris Brickman ’86 tell it, “Leadership is a journey. You’re going to learn along the way, and you’re going to make lots of mistakes.â€? But, he added, “Your will to carry on —your will to persevere—is what will deďŹ ne you the most.â€? Speaking to about 70 students, alumni, faculty, and sta in Choi Auditorium as part of Econ Day on September 25, Brickman—who majored in economics at Oxy and has served as president and CEO of Denton, Texas-based Sally Beauty Holdings since February 2015 —encouraged his audience to “focus on growing as much as winningâ€? in their own leadership journeys. “Beware of the successes—celebrate them and move on,â€? said Brickman, who detailed his own triumphs and pitfalls in the 2014 book The Brilliance in Failure. “Learn from the disasters, because they are your best teachers.â€?

LEFT: “Both triumph and disaster are impostors,� Brickman said, alluding to the poem “If� by Rudyard Kipling.

ABOVE: From left, Brad Fauvre ’87, Elbridge Amos Stuart Professor of Economics Robby Moore, Raymond Yen ’82, and Brickman catch up during the Econ Day luncheon.

Save the dates for Alumni Reunion Weekend: June 21-23, 2019.

alumni.oxy.edu

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Edward Gorey and friend in 1961.

Features 8 Legends of Tomorrow The Class of ’22 has arrived at Oxy— and if first impressions are any indication, we’ll be talking about these Tigers for years to come.

16 A Perfect Match From academics to athletics to the arts, Linda and Tod White ’59 follow their passions as they enhance the Oxy experience.

Linda and Tod White ’59 at their home on Balboa Island.

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Departments

20 The Gorey Details Decades after a chance encounter in a bookstore with Edward Gorey, author Mark Dery ’82 digs deep into the life of the writer, illustrator, and incomparable eccentric.

30 OxyTalk A new generation of academics reflects on Oxy, their research, and the value of mentoring.

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First Word President Veitch on how to get the most out of college. Also: responses to our trivia quiz, tales of Professor De Rycke, and how education at Oxy— and the United States— has changed over the last 70 years.

From the Quad Oxy’s women’s soccer team goes to the NCAA Division III nationals— and the men come close to joining them. Also: What does the future of Oxy’s curriculum look like—and what about the price of admission?

Appreciation To Oxy professor Dan Fineman and countless others, Carolyn Adams was “the hub of our institutional wheel, the still point of our turning world, reliable and steady, central and dependable.”

32 Tigerwire Doug Ramsey ’56 was one of the most exceptional “good guys” in Vietnam.

Nature’s Remedy High on a Peruvian mountain more than 4,000 miles from Oxy, Adrienne (Spivak) ’08 and husband Garrett Hostetler ’08 bring modern ideas to the practice of plant-based medicine.

CREDITS: Kevin Burke The Whites | Eleanor Garvey/courtesy Elizabeth Morton Gorey | Marc Campos Convocation, Adams | Juan Ocampo Goalkeeper Sydney Tomlinson ’19 | Bruce Kinsey Ramsey

FIRST WORD » FROM PRESIDENT VEITCH

How to Get the Most Out of Occidental Parents dropping off their children for their first day of college is one of the most poignant rituals in American life. This August, as we formally launched Orientation for the Class of 2022 in Hillside Theater, I told our newest students that almost everything good in their lives, outside of their families, will begin right here on the Oxy campus: the discovery of their passions, their vocation, lifelong friends. I also urged them to read a remarkable column by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni titled “How to Get the Most Out of College.”

Bruni, who frequently writes about higher education issues, notes that while we overwhelm high school students with advice about how to get into college, once they get in they rarely get any guidance about how to make the most of their college years. He makes clear that he isn’t interested in which majors yield the surest employment and most lucrative salaries.

Rather, he focuses on “how a student goes to school”—the best ways to pick up skills integral to any career and how students can participate in exciting out-of-the-classroom opportunities, both before and after graduation, that can make a big difference in their lives.

Bruni includes lots of practical advice familiar to any college parent: Get enough sleep, be sure to exercise, and don’t isolate yourself by spending all your time studying.

But he reaches far beyond such truisms, emphasizing the kind of wisdom that in many fundamental ways describes an Oxy liberal arts education. Bruni points out, for example, that many students get needlessly worked up about picking their major and emphasizes the value of exposure to a variety of different disciplines. “College’s greatest gifts can be an introduction to a passion you didn’t previously have and a pivot into an occupation you never before envisioned,” he writes. Exposure to variety also applies to the demographics of the college you choose, he adds. “Diversity opens you up to a wealth of ideas, and being com2

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Oxy students browse the offerings at the Involvement Fair in the Academic Quad on September 6.

Photo by Marc Campos | Gutowski photo courtesy Occidental College Special Collections

fortable with it is an asset in just about any workplace or career.” Thriving college graduates report that a willingness to move out of their comfort zones, risk failure, and learn their own capacity for resilience can all pay big dividends.

One of the most striking pieces of advice Bruni offers—drawn from his own interviews as well as data from the national Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey—is that the most important college relationships for students to invest in are with members of the faculty. It’s what he calls a “gamechanger” that makes a difference for all students across all types and sizes of institutions. Students who refuse to regard college as a mere credentialing exercise but take advantage of faculty conversation and counsel and find a mentor look back on that choice as one of the smartest things they did in college, Bruni writes.

It’s a piece of wisdom that was reflected in the profiles of four Oxy students and their faculty mentors that was featured in the Summer issue of the magazine. (You can see video excerpts from those interviews on Oxy’s YouTube channel.) “Making friends with a professor like Professor [Sophal] Ear has changed my narrative of what my experience at Oxy has been,” Naomi Navarro ’18 says of her diplomacy and world affairs adviser. “It allowed me to develop in a way that I hadn’t realized was

possible.” Close relationships like Naomi’s and Sophal’s often grow out of a research project, the kind of sustained academic project that Bruni identifies as another game changer. As a sophomore, Mark Gad ’18 took a class from associate professor of biology Joseph Schulz. Mark really enjoyed the class, was eager to learn more, and joined Joe’s lab. “Because of how much time we spend together talking about the research work, it kind of comes naturally that he is my adviser in so many things,” Mark says. “I’ve made sure to talk to him about every single plan that I had and every single opportunity that comes up.”

The wisdom that Bruni offers and that Naomi and Mark and countless other Oxy students have discovered on their own is not new. His advice on “how to go to school” reflects the engaged, empowering and transformative experience that is an Oxy education. Standing in Hillside Theater on that sunny afternoon, speaking to students and their families, I could feel a collective tremor of anxiety and anticipation. It is with an equal sense of anticipation that we look forward to showing the Class of 2022 how to get the most out of college.

FIRST WORD

» FROM THE READERS

No Huddle? No Problem

A Gentleman’s C

So You Think You Know Oxy?

Trivia quiz was superb! However, I was somewhat surprised that a question referencing football coach Chuck Coker’s introduction of the “No Huddle Offense” was missing. It was quite a big deal at the time.

Carol (Crothers) Finch ’45’s class note (Summer) brings back memories of my days at Erdman in the Marine Corps. Bob Finch ’47, Gene Evans ’47, Harold Dunn ’46, and I were all Kappa Sigmas and had lady friends.

Finch and I eventually married them—he to Carol and I to Shirley Dokken ’46.

In regard to economics professor Larry De Rycke: On one of his exams, he asked us to discuss a book he had assigned. I had not read the book, but instead of giving me an F—which I deserved—he let me take a makeup exam and gave me a C. That may have kept me at Oxy vs. Iwo Jima. I have been most grateful to him and his memory.

I scored an embarrassing five right, three lucky guesses, and 41 wrongs on your quiz (“Trivial Pursuits,” Summer). I did get all of the answers on question 37, though, because I was able to see three of the acts listed (Roto, Ravi, and Linda). Without a doubt, though, the best band I ever saw at the Quad was Danny Elfman’s Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Even then you could sense Danny was headed for a much-heralded career.

Mike Padian ’76 Rancho Santa Margarita

Man of steel: Bob Gutowski ’58

Don Sumner ’64 Pasadena

Sister Schools Having majored in economics and having spent my entire career at the Federal Reserve Board, I was pleased to learn that every year for the last 19 years, economics has been the most popular major at Occidental (“Economies of Scale”). So now there’s the London School of Economics and the Eagle Rock School of Economics!

Kay Oliver ’72 Washington, D.C.

The Paper Chase

Dazzling Days As a pole vaulter myself, I couldn’t help appreciating that nice photograph of Bob Gutowski ’58 in your excellent Summer issue. In the ’50s and ’60s we produced not only NAIA- and NCAA- but Olympiccaliber track and field athletes. Five of my teammates held world records! I just wrote a poem about those idyllic days: Oh, for track and field’s incomparable ’50s and ’60s, With its convergence of world-class athletes In a golden land of orange groves and avocados, Empty freeways, blue skies and sea, Bodies with gifted potential, Unknown even to ourselves.

Ah, to rub shoulders with other comrades Energized our impressionable spirits.

But now we are all scattered.

The sun is setting on our glories.

Most of us don’t run, jump, or throw anymore, Except perhaps carefully, with grandkids.

Those of us still standing, cherish those victories, The ecstatic roar and swelling of emotions, As those fiery waves Roll on the sand of memory.

Ed Crouch ’60 Seattle

The picture of Laurence De Rycke on the contents page (Summer) brought back a flood of memories. I majored in economics and mathematics at Oxy, and I had De Rycke for International Trade in the fall of 1968.

He was unlike any other professor I had the pleasure of knowing.

De Rycke locked the classroom door when class began. No late admissions. Class exams were unannounced, closed book— our first exam was Oct. 31, 1968: Halloween! He required a research paper; we students were required to go to the econ department secretary and give her a number. The research papers were to be turned into the department with only this number as indication of who wrote it. De Rycke did allow us to turn the paper in a number of times before the official due date. I wrote a paper, turned it in a week or so early, and was crushed by the sea of red ink on the paper, with the attendant message, “If this is your best effort you better see me.”

I went to De Rycke’s office; the gist of our conversation was that my writing was unclear, rambling, and didn’t really address the topic at hand. He told me, “Look, No. 17, you have to provide economic foundation for your assertions.” I took his advice and worked on a mathematical characterization and organized the paper around that idea. I eventually earned an A on the paper.

James D. Brownlow ’70 Palmdale

John D. Jorgenson ’47 Portola Valley

Constitutional Crisis I’m a World War II vet who experienced a united America absolutely dedicated to win against our three distant world enemies.

Rosie the Riveters, schools with ROTC programs, and companies all working hard with bond drives and production to bring about our eventual victory—with many brave women and men dying. Since then I’ve watched our country slowly but surely struggle to retain our heritage, which our forefathers fought diligently to preserve.

Years ago, when I read that Herrick Memorial Chapel had been converted to an all-faith gathering place in order to attract more non-Christian students to Occidental, I became incensed that a historically Presbyterian college would do such a thing.

More recently, I read about the Obama Scholars Program and the plan to bestow up to 20 Oxy students with scholarships each year. I’d be willing to bet there will soon be at least one or more non-Christians given Obama Scholarships.

What does this all boil down to? It’s the tremendous and continued threat to our Christian-based U.S. Constitution in our schools—from high schools and especially colleges that teach our young’uns all the anti-American philosophies we’ve been experiencing for many years. If this sad result is what academia is indeed accomplishing, then Obama was right in 2007, when he declared that America is “no longer a Christian nation.”

A. Richard Apple ’51 Lompoc FALL 2018

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FROM THE QUAD

Fall In For Oxy Oxy’s stellar soccer squads claw their way into postseason play, topping off an upbeat autumn for the Tigers

It took 110 minutes and a penalty shootout, but the women’s soccer team secured its first trip to the NCAA Division III Playoffs with a road win over Pomona-Pitzer on November 3. In notching its first SCIAC Tournament championship in program history, Oxy improved its record to 10-2-5 overall (8-2-4 in conference play). The third-seeded Tigers advanced to the championship game with a 21 victory over Cal Lutheran on October 31.

Nicole Castro ’19, Kialani Mackey ’21, Katherine Kim ’19, Grace Hildner ’22, Karla Alas-Lopez ’20, and Elleni Bekele ’20 all scored for the Tigers as Oxy went 6 for 6 in the shootout. The Sagehens missed their final shot high, sending the Tigers storming onto the field in victory. “It was an unbelievable team effort with grit, character, and a team spirit that is the heart and soul of champions,” said Oxy head coach Colm McFeely.

The Tigers played their way into the SCIAC tournament with a 1-0 win at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps on October 27, finishing the regular season tied for second place. Senior captain Castro, a kinesiology major from Mill Creek, Wash., headed in the game’s only goal to lead McFeely’s squad to its first tournament appearance in eight years.

The Tigers surrendered only four goals in 14 regular-season conference matches, recording 11 shutouts along the way. “Our defending record has rightly gotten plenty of 4

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Liam Walsh ’19 and CMS defender Adam Singer battle for the ball— and first place—in the final game of the regular season October 27.

left: Co-captain and goalkeeper Sydney Tomlinson ’19 of Bellevue, Wash., was named SCIAC Tournament MVP. above: The Tigers exult in the aftermath of Oxy’s first SCIAC championship in the program’s 34-year history. right: Linebacker Jackson Caudle ’20, a biology major from Tehachapi, was named SCIAC Defensive Player of the Week following a 10-tackle game (including eight solo tackles) against ClaremontMudd-Scripps on October 20.

FROM THE QUAD

attention,” McFeely says. “But it’s not just our defenders—it starts from our front players having a defending mentality and attitude immediately after the ball is lost.”

The Tigers traveled to Abilene, Texas, to face 13th-ranked Trinity University in the first round of the NCAA Division III Playoffs on November 10, losing 1-0 to end “a tremendous season and a great experience for all involved,” McFeely says. “This team produced week after week and there’s more to come.”

Playing just hours after the women clinched their spot in the playoffs, Oxy’s men’s soccer team came up a little short in their bid to follow suit, falling 1-0 to Chapman in the SCIAC Tournament championship game at Jack Kemp Stadium. The Tigers (14-6 overall, 10-4 conference) had taken down the Redlands Bulldogs with a 1-0 road victory in the SCIAC semifinals to advance to their first SCIAC Tournament final.

Riding high on an MVP-caliber season by senior forward Liam Walsh, Oxy found its way back to the tournament for the first time since 2015 with a 2-1 home win over Chapman on October 17. With 5:36 left in double overtime, the economics major from Washington, D.C., nailed a brilliant free kick from 20 yards out, sending eighth-year head coach Rod Lafaurie’s Tigers to victory.

Walsh, who led the SCIAC with an incredible 15 goals and shattered Oxy records for single-season (17) and career (31) goals, sent Oxy into its final game against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps with a chance to snag a

share of its first regular-season SCIAC title in the program’s 51-year history. But a foul in the box and a William Birchard penalty kick in the 94th minute gave the Stags a 1-0 road victory on October 27.

Nearly one year after its season was cut short due to a depleted roster, Occidental’s football team scrapped its way to a 20-0 season-opening win over CETYS University in Mexicali, Mexico, on September 1.

The Tigers’ 2018 debut—the first time an American team had traveled to Mexico to play the CETYS Zorros on their home turf— was the product not just of a long bus ride but a months-long effort to overcome adversity and get back on the field.

The Tigers opened up a 13-0 lead with a pair of scores early in the first quarter. Junior quarterback Joshua Greaves, an economics major from Granada Hills, threw for a pair of touchdowns in the game, and the Tigers’ defense mustered its first shutout since a 30-0 victory over La Verne in 2010.

In conference play, though, wins proved elusive. Especially tough was a 28-13 loss to Whittier in the “Battle of the Shoes,” as the Poets snapped a Division III-leading 33game skid dating back to October 2014. But Rob Cushman’s team showed improvement as the season wore on, yielding fewer than 30 points in three of its seven conference games and persevering through the schedule with the youngest Tigers squad (26 firstyears and 10 sophomores out of a 46-player roster) in school history.

» HIGHLIGHT REEL

First Team honorees Robertson, left, and Valle.

Men’s cross country had an impressive showing at the SCIAC Championship, finishing second overall at Prado Park on October 27. Thomas Robertson ’20 (third place in the 8K, with a time of 26:29.1), and Brody Barkan ’19 (eighth, 26:43.1) earned First Team All-SCIAC honors, while Charles Sheh ’22 (18th, 26:56.4) landed on the Second Team. “The men stepped up in a big way,” says head coach Rob Bartlett.

“They trained hard, they prepared well for this meet, and they performed when they had to. Finishing second is a very nice accomplishment.”

Roxanne Valle ’19 finished 10th overall (24:21.4) in the 6K for First Team AllSCIAC laurels to lead the women’s cross country team to a third-place finish at the SCIAC Championship at Prado Park on October 27. Aria Blumm ’19 finished 13th (24:32.1) for Second Team honors. Earlier in the season, Valle (a physics major from Azusa) was named SCIAC Women’s Cross Country Athlete of the Week after leading Oxy to a seventh-place finish out of a field of 30 teams that included UCLA and USC at the Master’s Invitational 5K in Santa Clarita on September 29.

Women’s volleyball closed out the 2018 season October 27 with a 3-0 sweep of Caltech on senior day. Oxy celebrated the careers of seniors Sabrina Degnan, Allie Sundara, Hannah Wagner, and Michelle St. Louis with a brief pregame ceremony.

Head coach Heather Collins’ Tigers finished the season at 8-16 overall (3-13 in SCIAC play).

Photos by Ed Ruvalcaba (men’s soccer), Juan Ocampo (women’s soccer), Marc Campos (football), and Sam’s Photo Services (cross country) fall 2018 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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FROM THE QUAD

Photo by Marc Campos

Associate professor of economics Andrew Jaili addresses the crowd at Convocation on August 28.

Thinking Ahead What does the future of Occidental’s curriculum look like? Inclusive, interdisciplinary, urban, and global, according to a task force of Oxy faculty Interdisciplinary. Rooted in research. Committed to both disciplinary mastery and inclusion. Imbued with urban and global perspectives. And taught primarily by fulltime tenure-track faculty.

That’s the future of Occidental’s curriculum, according to a new report from the College’s academic planning task force that draws on a year’s worth of biweekly meetings, faculty surveys, and campus consultations. “The curricular review is not about making decisions about what will be taught in each department, or necessarily about the creation of new programs,” says Wendy Sternberg, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College, who served on the 13-member faculty committee. “Rather, it is providing important questions for our faculty to consider and framing a coherent process to help us reach our goals.”

Presentation of the task force report at the annual faculty retreat in August left faculty “committed to all of the major goals and excited about all the possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration,” says Gretchen North, Faculty Council president and task force member. It also marks the beginning of a new conversation among faculty and administrators as they wrestle with the challenges of how to support interdisciplinary 6

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programs in an academic structure based on departments; how to choose among multiple options that will influence new faculty hires; how to find space for new faculty and new or expanded programs; and, finally, how to pay for it all.

The task force first convened in October 2017 in response to the convergence of a number of developments on campus. “This is Oxy’s Strategic Plan 2.0, partly arising from our evaluation of what we accomplished with the 2012 strategic plan, what remains to be accomplished, and what new initiatives we should explore,” says North, Oxy’s John W. McMenamin Endowed Chair in Biology.

For example, North cites the 2012 strategic plan’s goal to emphasize Oxy’s commitment to global perspectives. “There is widespread agreement that we have done a good job and achieved much of what we set out to achieve,” she adds, pointing to the College’s Kahane United Nations program, the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs, the Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy, and the expansion of study and research opportunities abroad.

At the same time, as much as a third of Oxy’s faculty is expected to retire over the next decade, setting the stage for a wave of

new hires, each of which has potential implications for the curriculum. “A plan is essential to frame the impending turnover of a sizable fraction of the faculty,” the report says.

Sternberg brought her own perspective to campus as Oxy’s new academic dean in July 2017, one with a self-identified propensity to enhance the role of research in the curriculum. “Training students to think like scholars helps achieve the critical thinking skills of a liberal arts education,” she says.

Expanding research opportunities across the curriculum is one reason the task force calls for a 10-year plan to significantly increase the number of tenure-track faculty.

(Currently, 71 percent of full-time faculty are tenured or tenure-track.) Oxy professors have an obligation to engage in outside-theclassroom interactions with students, the task force noted. Non-tenure track faculty “cannot be expected to mentor comprehensive projects, summer research, provide career and graduate school mentoring in that area of specialization, and may not be at Oxy throughout the course of a student’s undergraduate career,” the report states.

While interdisciplinary programs have been part of the curriculum dating back to the launch of biochemistry in 1974, the task force suggested there might be additional opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. This could take the form of new interdisciplinary programs (such as food studies, crime and punishment, and Native American/ indigenous studies), new connections among existing programs, or policy changes to encourage collaboration among faculty from different fields. Academic disciplines themselves are likely to change focus in response to shifts in faculty—one possible example would be physics becoming a department of physics and astronomy. (Oxy’s Core Studies Program is the subject of a separate review, with recommendations due next spring.)

When all is said and done, the fundamental question is this: “What do we want an Oxy grad to have under their belt when they graduate?” North says. “We want them to value the liberal arts, have command of a discipline and a deep understanding of what other disciplines do and how they work together. We want all of our graduates to have research experience, and to be involved in community-engaged learning. And we definitely want them to be committed to equity and a just society.”

FROM THE QUAD

The Price of Admission

» WORTH NOTING

A 21-member task force examines the intricacies and urgencies of Oxy’s financial aid program

Financial aid made it possible for Rick Rugani ’75 and his siblings—older brother Frank ’70 and younger sister Maria ’78—to get an Occidental education. “There’s no way our family would have been able to finance all the kids going to college,” he says. For Eileen Brown ’73, a first-generation college student whose father died unexpectedly at the start of her sophomore year, financial aid made all the difference. “I still remember that tuition was $2,400 a year, because I had to pay for it,” she says.

Their personal experience made the two trustees obvious choices to co-chair Oxy’s Student Access and Opportunity task force.

Meeting three times over the course of six months, the group of 21 alumni and parents was asked to examine “the intricacies and urgencies” of the College’s financial aid program as Oxy prepares for its first comprehensive campaign in more than 20 years.

In an era of rising college costs, the task force’s agreement on the importance of financial aid was hardly a surprise. More significant was the recommendation to the Board of Trustees that the College focus on building the endowment not only to provide access to an Oxy education through student scholarships, but also for travel, research, and internships—the kinds of transformational opportunities that are an integral part of an Oxy education.

While more than 370 endowed scholarships make up almost half of Oxy’s endowment, generating nearly $10 million annually, that accounts for just 22 percent of the overall financial aid budget (which totaled $45.9 million in fiscal year 2017-18). The rest comes directly from the College’s operating budget ($113.2 million in 2017-18).

“The task force gave me a better understanding of the challenges College managers face in providing needed scholarships to talented Oxy students,” says Rugani, a political science major and retired independent financial adviser who spent more than two

decades in the investment banking industry.

“It’s clear that building the endowment is going to be central to Oxy’s ability to continue to fulfill its mission.”

While earning her degree in psychology, Brown, an attorney and real estate developer, was working 20 hours a week in the library in addition to a series of summer jobs.

“When a student comes in with a large financial need, they don’t have the means to do the kind of things that other people take for granted, like having an internship,” she says. ”The idea of looking beyond the classroom and tuition, room, and board when thinking about scholarships hadn’t really occurred to me before. That’s made me much more excited to be raising money for scholarships.”

The committee also looked beyond the numbers to understand how Oxy students experience the financial aid process. “What really stood out was the care and effort our financial aid officers invest in trying to put together resources for incoming students,” Rugani says. “That work is underappreciated.”

Committee member Bonnie Mills ’81, who majored in history and transferred to Oxy after two years at Connecticut College, was similarly impressed with the personal attention provided by staff: “That’s not something you see at big universities.”

“I was really fortunate to get a Luce Scholarship, which was the direct result of Dean [William] Gerberding grabbing me as I walked out the door of a meeting for graduating seniors and saying, ‘You should apply for this scholarship,’” Rugani adds. “It comes down to those personal experiences for all of us, the small college experience.”

To ensure that other students have the same opportunity they had, Rugani, Brown, and Mills have all set up annual or endowed scholarships. “To me, we’re doing something that’s really special,” Brown says. “I’m proud that Oxy has taken on this as its primary mission, giving students access to a liberal arts education.”

History professor Lisa Sousa’s groundbreaking social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous people of New Spain has been recognized with a pair of top honors. The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press) has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History and the American Society for Ethnohistory’s Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for the year’s best book of ethnohistory.

History professor Sharla Fett’s 2017 book Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press)—exploring the little-known story of Africans who found themselves in the United States after being seized from illegal slave ships—is a finalist for the 20th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, the $25,000 prize recognizes the best book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition published during the preceding year.

Biology professor Dan Pondella ’87 M’92 has received a $347,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to digitize the Vantuna Research Group’s fish and marine invertebrates collection, giving researchers worldwide access to it. The three-year grant will integrate roughly 686,000 specimens collected by the VRG over the last five decades with the Moore Laboratory of Zoology’s bird and mammal and Cosman shell collections.

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LEGENDS OF TOMORROW here’s what the numbers tell you about the 566 members of oxy’s Class of 2022: 12 percent are the first in their family to go to college. n 8 percent of them have alumni ties. n 32 percent speak a language other than english at home. n 57 percent are women, 43 percent are men, and 35 percent of them are Californians. n 23 first-years come from China, and another 18 of them hail from 15 countries on five continents. n they belong to oxy’s most selective class in 70 years, with an admit rate of 37 percent out of a record 7,281 applications to the College. n but looking beyond the numbers, here’s what the people who know the Class of ’22 best—oxy’s tireless team of admission officers—tell you about the first-years you will meet in the profiles that follow: “a force for good in her community.” “Insane recommendation letters.” “never boring, never bland.” “unHaving abashedly passionate about making the world a immersed himself better place.” “his heart led him to oxy.” let’s in all things African for Academic Decathlon, get to know them on a first-name basis.

Matt

Matt hopes to spend a semester on the continent through Oxy’s Study Abroad program.

“I grew up right here in highland Park, so I would always drive past Occidental, but I never actually stepped onto the campus until I was admitted,” says Matt Almazan.

“It feels like a different world. There are almost no palm trees. It doesn’t even feel like I’m close to home.”

As a student at Franklin High School, Matt spent the last two years competing on the Academic Decathlon team—a contest covering 10 fields of study (such as art, math, and science) with a common theme. “My junior year it was World War II,” he explains. “Senior year it was Africa.” The team finished third and fourth statewide, respectively, in 2017 and 2018—and the experience made Matt a stronger student, sparking an interest in economics that he plans to pursue as his major at Oxy. To fulfill his Cultural Studies Program requirement —a staple of the first-year curriculum—Matt is taking Philosophy in the Twilight Zone, taught by professor Saul Traiger, which examines the philosophical concepts behind Rod Serling’s classic series (and more contemporary “Zone”-inspired progeny such as Netflix’s “Black Mirror”). “Sometimes watching an episode makes me 8

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“I have a deep belief that empathy can change the world,” Stephi says. “It gave me the insight that’s where I can use my skills to help people in that way.”

very anxious before the tension is finally released,” he says of the show’s signature twist endings.

Outside of his studies, Matt is planning to join Archery Club “because I’ve never done that” and Dance Production “because I really love dancing.” As a high school freshman, “One of my friends asked me to be in her quinceanera, in her court, and initially I wasn’t feeling it,” he admits. “I thought I really sucked at it, but after I learned the movements of Latin dancing, I loved it.” Subsequently, Matt was invited to an additional four quinceaneras. (His three favorite dances?

“Bachata, cumbia, and banda. They’re all different tempos of musics and different steps, but I really love them all.”) Despite the countless hours he devoted to Academic Decathlon, Matt insists that he hasn’t lost his moves: “My mom says dancing is valuable. It can always get the party started.”

the Class of ’22 HAS ARRIVED AT OXY—AND IF FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE ANY INDICATION, WE’LL BE TALKING ABOUT THESE TIGERS FOR YEARS TO COME

BY DICK ANDERSON / PHOTOS BY MAX S. GERBER

Stephi stephi howard’s college counselor at the Lovett School in Atlanta —who also happened to be her homeroom teacher—“made fun of me for being Goldilocks, because I didn’t want to be in the South, but I also didn’t like the cold, and I wanted a very small school,” Stephi recalls with a laugh. In November 2016, she visited Oxy for the first time, “and within five minutes of the tour my mom whispered to my dad, this is where I was going.” Stephi bought an Oxy sweatshirt at the bookstore that day, “and every time I would take the ACT or anything regarding my future, I would always put it on to remind me of my goal,” she says.

That November was auspicious for another reason. Following the results of the 2016 election, Stephi developed a passion for social activism, respectful debate, and various causes. When politics and other hot-button topics would come up for discussion in the classroom, “My classmates were very surprised at the beliefs I held and not necessarily in a positive way,” she explains. “I had to make the choice: Do I want to stop speaking my mind and basically make high school more bearable, or was it more important to me to speak up for what I believed in— no matter the consequences?”

In the end, Stephi held strong to her beliefs: “I lost some friends, but I found other friends who were more similarly aligned to me,” she says. “Some days I regretted it, but you learn the most from the things that are hardest. I’m very grateful for the experience in that I found my fire—I want to help people.”

Coming to Oxy posed a different challenge than high school. “I was hesitant to go to a place expecting that people would have a lot of similar beliefs to me,” Stephi admits. “I had grown so much being around people having very different opinions. Yet I have found that even when they share a similar ideology, people come at a subject with such different perspectives. They are showing me ways to think about things which I have never thought, which is really exciting.”

Stephi originally intended to pursue a political science major at Oxy, she says, “but when I read the description for critical theory and social justice, my brain exploded. Currently I’m taking the intro course [CTSJ 101], which is very dense: Karl Marx’s Manifesto and a lot of very intense reading. I said to my parents, ‘If I take CTSJ as a major, what career do I go forward with?’ And my parents said, ‘Right now you need to pursue what you truly love.’”

That exploration is part of the beauty of a liberal arts education.

“Oxy is very comfortable but not in a way where I feel complacent. I love it here,” Stephi says. “I feel I need to be a tour guide already.”

Anjolie

“My parents grounded me in honesty, integrity, and a loving environment,” Anjolie says. Her mom and dad met at a mutual friend’s wedding: “They’re, like, the cutest.”

“before I knew how to swim I used to always jump into pools,” says Anjolie Charlot of Maplewood, N.J. “My dad would be like, ‘Go! Go!’ That’s the way that I still approach things—by jumping in head first and figuring it out as I go along.” Anjolie—who studied in France for 10 months and committed to Oxy soon after visiting campus for Admission’s MVP Weekend last spring—is eyeing a major in Black studies with a minor in politics or sociology. “The idea of having a Black studies major, especially coming out of the occupation, was really important to me,” she says. The November 2015 occupation of the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Center by hundreds of students precipitated the addition of the major to the curriculum this fall. “One of my missions on campus is to make sure that legacy is carried on and make sure black students have space for that discourse—to ask the hard questions and make sure our answers are heard,” she adds. “Every time you get over a hump there are three more humps to get over.” Anjolie’s extracurricular pursuits reflect a broad range of interests, from Black Student Alliance and Student-Labor Alliance to Surf Club and Pulse Dance Club—“making sure I have some more serious things but also some fun,” she says. Oh, and one more thing: “I like to rep the lefties hard because we don’t get our own desks. I’m just saying.”

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“Part of my responsibility as a citizen of the world is to be conversant in more than one language.”

Ethan It’s been a running joke his entire life that ethan hodges was going to oxy. His parents (Cathryn Campbell ’89 and Craig Hodges ’88) met as students here, as did his paternal grandparents (Diane and Jack Hodges, both 1961 graduates). All his life, his grandfather has been giving him Oxy wear. “There’s a picture of me as a baby wearing an Oxy singlet,” Ethan says. Despite the constant sartorial cues, “I never felt directly pressured to come here,” he insists.

What turned the trick? “I think a lot of students will say the same sort of things,” says the Media, Pa., resident. “I want to be a name, not a number. I want that small classroom setting where I can ask questions. I developed a lot of rewarding relationships with my teachers in high school, and I want to continue making those kind of relationships.”

Another factor was meeting track and field head coach Rob Bartlett, although a knee injury over the summer sidelined Ethan for much of this fall. “I ran my first half marathon in seventh grade and a full marathon in ninth,” he says. For his application to Oxy, “I wrote my idiosyncrasy essay on how much I think about what I wear on my feet all the time.” Pointing to his white Vans, he adds, “These are intentional. They’re very thin.

I go for foot-healthy shoes. The shoes that we wear often“After we got to my room, times have really big heels and a lot of cushioning on my parents ran off to them. That’s not the way a foot is supposed to function, see their old dorms,” so the shoes that I wear when I run are really, really thin. Ethan notes with a laugh. were talking about They’re hardly even shoes. The goal is making my body “They Stewie Beach and still call the Marketplace function the way it’s supposed to be so that I can get rid ‘Clancy’s.’” of stuff like my knee pain and my hip issues. You’ll never see me walking around with shoes with big heels.”

In addition to thinking about footwear, “I’m really passionate about teaching myself little tricks here and there,” Ethan says. “I taught myself how to do a handstand and how to juggle. I was a terrible whistler, so I committed myself to practice whistling.” He credits an app on his cellphone called Streaks: “It reminds you every day to do activities.” These days he’s working on his language skills as well. “When I go for runs around the neighborhood, I see signs that are Spanish. I’m also hearing Spanish every day now, and I find that stuff really great. If my GPA didn’t matter, in an ideal world, I’d be a group language and philosophy double major,” he adds with a laugh, “because my skill versus my passion is a little offsetting.”

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Grace how small is Grace meschery-mcCormack’s hometown of sierraville? smaller than the Class of ’22—by more than 200 people. “I’m always telling people it’s near tahoe or reno,” Grace says. “I haven’t met anyone at occidental who has been there yet.” how many people were in your high school? About 150 total in grades 7 through 12. There were 22 of us in my graduating class. My mom was my high school teacher. Because it was such a small school, she taught drivers ed, film, English, Spanish, and French. My dad is a contractor—he does a lot of solar power and remodeling work. He and my mom recently bought a motel in Sierraville. there can’t be many of those around. No, no. There’s just this one, but it’s doing really well. Birders come there a lot. We have a lot of guests who like to watch birds or watch stars. you spent 10 months in france as a rotary exchange student. how did that happen? My family has hosted Rotary exchange students since I was really small and it’s always been a huge part of my life. Last year I went to Normandy because I really love languages, and speaking French was one of them. I was enrolled in public school, and that was huge. Honestly, if I had not gone to that school and participated in the way I did, I would not have the level of fluency I have now. Because now I’m taking a lot of philosophy classes at Oxy, and before I had left for France I wanted to be an art history Grace’s major. But after going there and experiencing eight hours grandfather is a week of classic philosophy classes and really bonding Thomas Meschery, who played for 10 years with the teacher, that’s what I’m doing now. It’s not what in the NBA and whose I expected. And you meet people from all over the place.

No. 14 jersey was retired by the Golden There were 35 other exchange students and we’d get toState Warriors. gether once a month. One of the students from my program is from Brazil and lives in my dorm at Oxy. I would not have expected that she’d be right down the hall from me and we would become best friends. We speak Portuguese together. when did you decide that you wanted to attend oxy? I had come down here for Admitted Students Day. I took a mock class called something like Race, Gender, and the Female Body. It was super incredible and really well done. We spent a day on campus and I got to explore the L.A. area with my family. Then I went home and We hadn’t even left France yet—it was a nightmare. So, in order to I couldn’t choose between Oxy and Bard College [a small liberal arts preserve my memories, I was forced to paint a little bit. college in upstate New York]. A little later I remember getting an Instead of taking pictures, you wound up painting? Yeah, beemail from a former Bard student saying he had to use a UV light cause I had no way of taking photos. I had these little notebooks, during the winter for Vitamin D. Oxy just seemed really cool, and the and this paintbrush that had water inside it already. And so I would small class sizes for me was just so important. Plus, there’s sunlight. just run around really quick like sketching and painting things. what activities interest you at oxy? I am joining the Internahave you drawn anything since you’ve been here? A little bit. I tional Students Club. Even through it’s technically not for me, I’m went up to the garden behind the President’s House with some going to wiggle my way in somehow. I also signed up to be a group friends, and we just painted and colored. It was really fun. dialogue facilitator at a high school through the Neighborhood Partwhat’s your favorite thing about oxy so far? Professor nership Program. One totally wild thing I did that I didn’t think I’d [Damian] Stocking, and his class called Style and “Substance”: Phido was I applied for The Fang, the comedy magazine. I haven’t heard losophy and the Arts. It’s like everything I’ve ever thought about, he back yet, but even filling out the application was super funny. put into words in an hour and a half. It was just incredible. I mean, Do you write? Do you create? I got into travel drawing the last all my classes are really amazing and we talk about stuff I’ve never few months. One of my more formative experiences was when I thought about, but this one is different. It’s just like, whoa. And went on a bus trip around Europe with 60 other exchange students. everyone in that class is aesthetically very beautiful. It’s been a blast Fifteen minutes into the trip, I dropped my phone into the toilet. so far. I’m so happy I made this choice.

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Sylvia “since primary school, I have read a lot of books, from theoretical physics to history stories of ancient China,” says Hanyun “Sylvia” Lou. Her favorite author is Isaac Asimov (“I love The End of Eternity! The Gods Themselves is also really good”), and during a monthlong stretch in high school she devoured most of the novels of Hermann Hesse (“My favorites are Steppenwolf, Narziss und Goldmund, and Das Glasperlenspiel”). “The city library is near my high school, so I could go almost every day if I wanted,” Sylvia says. She was attracted

by Oxy’s commitment to social justice, and her Cultural Studies Program course, Expulsions, examines migration, refugees, and statelessness. Her range of interests knows no boundaries: Inspired by the Japanese manga series character Detective Conan (“She’s a master at biochemistry—when I was young I really admired her”), Sylvia built a chemistry lab in her study, growing a crystallized gold slide from materials ordered online. “I like to try new things,” the Hangzhou native adds, and she looks forward to being active in Oxy’s Ski and Snowboard Club: “I really want to learn to ski.” Her verdict on tacos? “They’re too spicy. I do not eat spicy foods.”

“I used to want to major in econ,” Sylvia says, “but after I arrived here, cognitive science got me asking: What is consciousness?

It’s good to think about why I am.”

Myles when myles hultgren was looking at colleges, “I really wanted to move away from minneapolis, just because,” the native minnesotan admits with a laugh. “so the location was definitely part of that.” myles—who created an app for the android device as a high school senior—plans on majoring in computer science, “but I’ve always enjoyed learning things like philosophy, so I wanted to go somewhere where I could do that.”

Myles jumped on the what are your early impressions of oxy? It’s beautiful. The classes Bitcoin craze in high are all amazing. The Cultural Studies Program I’m taking is Los Angeles school and cashed out before cryptocurrency From Local to Global—and that relates to what I’m doing. Maybe I’m became a household word: putting too much weight into my classes, but they feel transformative.

“I didn’t make that much because I didn’t have what has surprised you the most so far about the College? I think the capital.” just how easy it was to adjust. When people would tell me it was going to be hard, I’d kind of brush it off, but it is a big adjustment. I’ve done good, though. It’s only been three weeks but I feel like I’ve been here longer. outside of class, what activities are you looking at? Frisbee was a really big thing in my high school that a lot of my friends did, so I want to do that here and get better. And my mom was always really good at dancing, so I want to do that, too. Another one I heard about on the tour that I want to join is the Mixed Race Club. My mom is black and my dad is Swedish. what’s your app? It was a choose-your-adventure game called Mages and Monarchs. I didn’t publish it thinking it would be big or that I would be a millionaire, I just wanted to do it to see if I could. So I just told people to try it and then I tested it myself. It felt good just looking it up and being able to see it, you know.

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“I really like talking about gentrification and injustice, but not in a weird way.”

Lis “I never thought of myself as a leader,” Lis Jimenez says, but the first-generation college student’s accomplishments suggest otherwise. As a junior and senior at Oakwoods School in North Hollywood, Lis led the LGBTQ+ Alliance and Latino Affinity Group, and cofounded the People of Color Feminists Club. “There were other clubs on campus that talked about gender equality in the ‘third world,’ but not about gender relationships within the school,” says Lis. “I thought, why don’t we have an official club where we can get funding, with actual meetings in an actual space? I wanted to “I think Oxy connect the young kids with the older kids, especially duris really eccentric ing the college process.” A lot of students have since joined and I love it,” Lis says.

“People will walk up to the organization, Lis adds: “Now it’s more of a joint club me and say, ‘I love your with other cultural clubs. We all mix in together.” earrings. ‘What’s your name?’ It’s really Growing up in a single-parent household—Mom imcool.” migrated to Los Angeles from Mexico when she was 12 and is a housekeeper for a family in Studio City—“I honestly get a lot of strength from my mom,” says Lis, who lives in a guest house belonging to a family friend and her three sons “who became my second family.” A budding filmmaker, “I make documentaries and narratives and experimental art films mostly about cultural identity,” Lis explains. “I made a film about my mom and my second mom’s stories.” Another film, La Persona, “was more experimental. It shows me basically putting a bunch of stuff on my face: ground-up coffee beans to represent my indigenous Mexican cultural background; lotion over the coffee beans to represent the whitewashing of myself; and confetti over the lotion to represent my LGBTQ+ identity.”

Lis took a look at Oxy on the advice of Oakwood counselor Steffany K. Perez ’94: “She knew that I loved being able to engage with students about social justice, not just teachers,” recalls Lis, who is the recipient of a Point Foundation Scholarship (a highly selective merit-based scholarship for LGBTQ+ students). “My mom was on the tour with me, and she got a feeling I would be safe here.

“Being indigenous was a big part of our culture,” says Lis, who is looking at a double major in critical theory and social justice coupled with media arts and culture. In their application to Oxy, Lis wrote an essay about traveling to Chiapas, Mexico, in connection with the Oakwood School Chiapas Project, which sells artisan products such as sweaters and bracelets made by more than 200 Mayan women.

“We sell at a high price so they can send their kids to school and build their homes and have a better life,” Lis says. “So, I talked about that and having my relationship between being a person of color in America and also my mom being indigenous and being faced with the reality of what it would have been for my mom to stay in Mexico and lead her life there as opposed to coming here. I talked about the complexities of the Mexican culture and American culture and how I don’t fit in with either.” Take it from us: Lis is a natural fit anywhere.

Mira mira tarabeine was born in los angeles and grew up in Damascus, Syria. Her father took over the family printing business, and although she saw a lot of poverty around her, “I knew we were blessed,” she says. When war broke out during the Arab Spring in 2011, “It wasn’t very close to us but we still would hear about it on the news.”

That quickly changed in 2012, when a bombing occurred less than a half-mile from their home. “We had the windows taped in our apartment so they wouldn’t shatter, and we moved our beds so they faced away from the window,” she recalls. “It felt like an earthquake and that was very uncommon. A week later, we left the country. My parents didn’t tell me until the day before and I had to go to school and take all my things. I didn’t really get to say goodbye to people.”

After finishing out the school year in Phoenix, with five people living in a two-bedroom apartment, the family relocated to Beverly Hills, where “my uncle had an apartment and let us stay there. We had eight people living in a one-bedroom apartment—my grandma, my aunt, me and my mom, my three siblings, and my dad. Basically my dad lost his entire business and everything he had ever worked for.” But she and her siblings were able to enroll in a good school system—“Going to college in the U.S. was always my mom’s goal for me and my sister”—and it was at Beverly Hills High School, after Mira joined the volleyball team, “that I feel like I found my voice.”

“Medicine is something I want to pursue,” says Mira, who is considering a kinesiology or sociology major.

“Having a degree in that field gives you the opportunity to serve others.”

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Over the course of her senior year, Mira made the effort to educate her school district on the refugee crisis with an assembly she called “Kids Are Not Invisible.” Each assembly began with the same two questions: “How many of us in here are first-generation immigrants? How many are second-generation immigrants?”

“When I asked first-generation, about 10 percent of the room stood up,” she says. “When I asked second-generation, it was always over 60 percent—during all six assemblies. Throughout each assembly I talked about what’s going on with the refugees, who they are, and then I would ask the question, ‘What makes immigrants different than refugees?’ Because none of them fled their countries because they wanted to leave their families—something drove them out.

They needed a better life.” Following her first talk, she received a $500 donation for the Karam Foundation—a nonprofit organization whose mission includes taking kids out of low-paying child labor jobs and putting them in school. “I told everyone it’s a big problem but we can start by educating one child.”

For middle- and elementary school audiences, she created a “very childlike book” that illustrated the refugee crisis without using the word “war” through the perspective of best friends Mia and Tia. “I’m trying to get it printed,” says Mira, who hopes to travel to Lebanon next summer to teach English to children living on Turkish campgrounds so they can be integrated into the Lebanese school system.

Meanwhile, she’s embracing all that college has to offer. “I am so in love with Oxy’s commitment to community,” Mira says. At September’s Involvement Fair in the Quad, “There were all of these little community engagement programs,” she adds. “I think I signed up for all of them.”

“Everyone at Oxy is so friendly. Maybe it’s because the weather’s always nice out here.”

Lesh as a junior defensive end for the Fayetteville (Ark.) High School Bulldogs, Lesh Chadick broke his right hand during football practice in the middle of AP test season. That didn’t stop him from taking his tests—“I got accommodations so I could type in extra time for something”—or from getting back on the field. “I had a cast over my hand and extra padding,” he says. “I wrapped it up and went out and played.”

That fall, Fayetteville won its second consecutive state championship in football and its fifth in a decade. And Lesh grinded through enough AP courses during high school—13!—that he bypassed his freshman year altogether entering Occidental this fall: “It was definitely taxing, but I’ve gotten into the college of my dreams, I’m getting to play football here, and I’m coming in as a sophomore.”

Lesh was recruited to Oxy by assistant football coach and codefensive coordinator Ricky Lang, but it was his homeroom teacher and college adviser, Ellen (Bogart) Reynolds ’08, who helped seal his decision. “She loved her experience at Oxy and helped me learn more about the College,” he says. “I was looking for a place where I could explore everything that I wanted to. A liberal arts college is a great place for that—it’s all about finding out what you love.”

There are 16 Lesh’s parents, both graduates of the University of Jacobs enrolled at Arkansas School of Law, have encouraged him to get out Oxy—including three on the football team alone. of Fayetteville and see the world. While in high school, A few of them go by Jake, Lesh visited Berlin for an extended stay and became “im- but there’s only one Lesh mersed in everything,” including speaking German, he says. (named for his maternal grandmother).

“A lot of the kids there liked the same stuff we like here, just in a different language.”

His dad, Vincent, is of counsel at Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull and is an adjunct lecturer at the law school. His mom, Terri, is associate director of career services at the law school. His brother, Eli, a high school junior, “is interested in Oxy because I talk it up so much.”

As for his early impressions of the College, “It’s very different “It kind of tore down borders, even though we didn’t speak the same from home,” Lesh admits. “Fayetteville is a pretty liberal place, but language. It was just a really cool experience. You’re not going to it’s Arkansas liberal. So it’s been a straight-up culture shock when meet a lot of people that can say they’ve played a college football you’re on one of the most liberal college campuses in America.” game in Mexico, but we did.”

Despite the head start on his education that his AP credits have What’s the mood like on the team? “Everyone’s re-energized given him, Lesh (who is eyeing a major in physics) has no plans to about everything,” Lesh says. “We’re all so excited and going into it rush through his Oxy education. “I could use that four years and I and attacking it head on. There are a lot of freshmen on the team have time to play around,” he says. “If I decide to switch my major, and the three seniors and upperclassmen have shown us what to do: it can help me through some of that stuff and not leave me behind.” how we practice, how we get better. They’re all in on this football Besides, he adds, “I’m all in for this football team.” After a 2017 team even if they might not see the returns this year.” season cut short by an injury-plagued roster, the Tigers returned to Lesh’s enthusiasm for sports spills over into podcasts, and he play September 1 with a road trip to Mexicali, Mexico, and a 20-0 hopes to find an outlet for his own opinions. “I’m thinking about getwin over CETYS University. After the game, “The teams got together ting involved with KOXY at some point,” he says. “I want to get some for a picture and everybody was happy and celebrating,” Lesh says. kind of radio show going even if no one’s listening.”

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A Perfect Match

By JIM TRANQUADA

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Photos by KEVIN BURKE

From academics to athletics to the arts, Linda and Tod White ’59 follow their passions as they enhance the Oxy experience

As A skInny, BesPeCTACLeD sOPHOMOre, TOD WHITe ’59 was part of one of the greatest performances in the history of Oxy athletics. At the 1957 L.A. Memorial Coliseum relays, White ran the first leg of the 2-mile relay that ended in a dramatic come-from-behind, world record-setting victory over UsC, UCLA, Arizona state, and Georgetown. not surprisingly, White—who all these years later still fits into his letterman’s jacket—has a keen appreciation for the role of athletics in a liberal arts education. “College is much more than what happens in the classroom,” says White, a hall of famer both at Oxy and at newport Harbor High school in Orange County, where he was California state champion in the mile. self-discipline, goal setting, perseverance, character- and confidence-building, and even time management were all important products of his Oxy experience.

But when the trustee emeritus and his wife, Linda, made their first major gift to the College in 2007, it was not directed to the track and field program or the athletics program in general. Instead, the Whites chose to endow the College’s Center for Teaching excellence, which partners with faculty to hone teaching skills with the goal of improving the student experience. As a psychology major who founded a pioneering firm in the field now known as career management, “I

was in the education business, conducting seminars for corporate clients,” Tod says. “effective teaching has always been an interest of mine.”

Last year, the Whites made a major gift to support the community-oriented arts project that will be based in the College’s new Oxy Arts building on york Boulevard. (renovations on the property, located one block south of campus, are well underway, with the opening scheduled for next spring.)

The Whites have a long-standing interest in the arts: Linda is a painter who earned her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania and whose works have been shown at galleries and museums on both coasts, and the couple have been executive producers of many plays at south Coast repertory Theater in Costa Mesa and Anaheim’s Chance Theater. “All of our decisions on philanthropy are joint decisions,” Tod says. “I like how the Oxy Arts program will act as a bridge to the community.” nor have the Whites neglected athletics, endowing the track and field and cross country programs and helping provide funding for the ongoing renovation of the Payton Jordan Athletic Offices (honoring the famed track coach who recruited Tod to run for the Tigers) and construction of the De Mandel Aquatic Center and expanded Mckinnon Family Tennis Center. It’s a history of giving that dates back more than 50 years, when the Whites wrote a check for $5 to the College

left: Tod and Linda enjoy sunset on the dock outside their Balboa Island home. below: All in for Oxy: distance relay teammates Tod White ’59, left, Larry Wray ’57, Dave Reisbord ’58, and Ty Hadley ’58.

Photo courtesy Occidental College Special Collections

as newlyweds. “Oxy was so supportive of me,” Tod explains. “It gave me a scholarship, an outstanding education, and lifelong friends.”

“The breadth and vision of Tod and Linda’s philanthropy is remarkable,” says President Jonathan Veitch. “They recognize that a liberal arts education is a multifaceted experience, one that takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Toward that end, they have supported not only athletics but the arts and teaching as well. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, their generosity has touched almost everyone on campus.”

Tod modestly concedes that his athletic accomplishments outshone his academic performance at Oxy. “I was never on stage receiving accolades for my academic prowess,” he says. “But academics were very, very important.” He credits several of his professors for having a major impact on his life. David Cole M’48 (who taught psychology at Oxy for 37 years) “was just terrific, and very encouraging.” Approached by Tod on how best to become an industrial psychologist, psychology professor Gilbert Brighouse gave a simple answer: First, become a good psychologist.

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“That conversation of less than a minute was very influential, bending the twig to send a tree in the right direction, so to speak,” Tod says. A D-minus he received on a first-year english paper from associate professor Basil Busacca left a mark as well: “My final grade in the class was a B, and that convinced me I could be a better writer.”

While Tod was pursuing a master’s in psychology at Cal state Long Beach, he was introduced to Linda Goodart, a social sciences major, by Oxy track teammate Ty Hadley ’58. It didn’t take long for the two to become a couple, according to Tod. “Linda says she liked my smile and laugh. I thought she was cute and friendly—and she still is.”

Degrees in hand, Tod and Linda moved to Minneapolis, where Tod earned his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Minnesota, and then to Princeton, n.J., where he worked in research and development for kepnerTregoe, an industrial psychology firm. Five years later, Tod joined forces with partner Buck Blessing, a union negotiator and industrial engineer with General Motors, to found Organization research Group in 1971.

“We developed a very good process for helping employees at any level better manage 18

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their own careers, helping them think about why they are going to work in first place; identifying their skills, strengths, and weaknesses; and how to put together a personal development plan,” Tod says. That required writing training materials to train teachers at their Fortune 500 clients who could then put on their seminars. With little competition, the company grew to become BlessingWhite, and was sold in 1989 to new york-based General Atlantic. White stayed with the company as CeO until retiring in 1992. BlessingWhite continues to thrive as a division of Columbia, Md.-based GP strategies Corp.

Tod’s experience in developing training materials and training teachers at BlessingWhite sparked his interest in what was happening at the College’s Center for Teaching excellence (CTe). Launched in 2003 at the suggestion of then-Dean kenyon Chan, the CTe had a modest beginning. “Initially we focused on new faculty,” recalls founding director robby Moore, the elbridge Amos stuart Professor of economics. “The idea was not so much to teach them how to be great teachers, but we knew although most of them had a lot of teaching success, they had not had formal training.” so the CTe

offered practical advice: why student learning goals should be part of a class syllabus, how to elicit feedback on how a class is going, how to encourage students to fill out end-of-semester evaluations. “It was an eyeopener for them,” he says.

Learning about the CTe and its work was also an eye-opener for Tod, who had joined the Board of Trustees in 2002. “Teaching is an important part of Oxy’s competitive advantage, and we saw a real opportunity to help the College ensure that faculty are even more effective in the classroom,” he says.

After he and Linda gave $1 million to permanently endow the CTe, it was a logical step to use part of those funds to create the Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize, presented at Convocation each year. “For Oxy to celebrate teaching excellence in front of the new class sets a terrific example for students,” Tod says. “With the various gifts we’ve given, that ranks really high. recognizing outstanding teaching—that’s very exciting.”

The Whites’ gift “was really a watershed moment,” says Moore, who stepped down as CTe director in 2012. “It allowed us to do so much more—expand our programs and increase faculty participation. We got faculty

Renderings courtesy Newsom Gonzalez (Oxy Arts) and Gonzalez Goodale Architects (Athletics) | Photo by Marc Campos

left: Located at the corner of York Boulevard and Armadale Avenue, the Oxy Arts Center will facilitate collaborations with creative partners in the community. below: Artist’s rendering of the newly christened Payton Jordan Athletic Offices. Renovations began this summer.

left: Since its inception in 2007, the Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize has honored two dozen professors who embody excellence in the classroom. Fourteen recipients gathered with the Whites for a reunion photo following this year’s Opening Convocation. Front row, l-r: Krystale Littlejohn ’07, sociology; Brandon Lehr, economics; Linda and Tod White; Gretchen North, biology; Damian Stocking, English; and Eric Frank, art history. Back row: Lisa Wade, sociology; Clair Morrissey, philosophy; Kerry Thompson, biology; Shana Goffredi, biology; Eric Newhall ’67, English; Regina Freer, politics; Stuart Rugg, kinesiology; Felisa Guillén, Spanish; and Jaclyn Rodriguez ’77, psychology. below right: The Whites in 2015 with Kristi Upson-Saia, religious studies; Gretchen North, biology; and Guillén.

to work on their teaching together and that makes Oxy a better place. It’s an automatic way of building community. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching science or humanities, the issues are amazingly similar.” Tod has remained an active supporter of the CTe, Moore adds. “What I really like about Tod is that he’s smart, he has good ideas and makes occasional suggestions, but he doesn’t want to dictate what we do at all. He doesn’t try to micromanage in any way.” rob Bartlett, head coach for the track and field and cross country teams since 2007, has a similar take on the Whites’ support of athletics. The endowment they created helps pay for travel and makes it possible for him to put together more competitive meet schedules. It also supplements the equipment budget to help pay for things like new high jump and pole vault pits. “Tod cares deeply about our student-athletes’ experience,” Bartlett says. “It matters to him that we have large teams and are offering a quality experience to lots of students. He is supportive in ways that are more than just financial: He watches us compete, comes to our awards banquets each year, and often replies to my weekly email updates.”

His interests extend to the entire athletic program. “The renovation of the athletic offices is really his doing as well,” Bartlett adds. “There are very few facilities that will touch every sport, and that’s one of them.

The renovation will give a better first impression to prospective students, and will make current athletes feel more special.”

Bartlett also points to the fact that the Whites established their endowment as a matching gift program as evidence of the couple’s broad interest in the College. “That shows he really cares about encouraging others to be philanthropic and supportive of Oxy,” he says. “He wants the College to thrive, and knows for that to happen it will take a lot of people supporting it financially, emotionally, and with their time. He’s a good guy— unpretentious, grounded, and humble.”

More recently, the Whites have further diversified their philanthropic efforts by supporting the nascent Oxy Arts Center. Linda, whose most recent work has been in acrylics (“People say I’m abstract but I think I’m getting more representational—I’m just a painter”), has been an important supporter of the arts at Cal state Long Beach, and the community partnerships at the heart of Oxy Arts appealed to both her and Tod. “Los Angeles has become a very strong influence in contemporary art,” says Linda. “I would like to see the center invite local artists to come in, show their work, give talks, and encour-

age the arts in the community as well as at Oxy. Getting my MFA was a big thing in my life, and I want to extend the opportunity to get involved in the arts to others.”

As they have done with other gifts, the Whites’ support for the Oxy Arts Center includes a matching gift component. “We particularly like to support projects that are focused on achieving clearly stated goals.

We’ve found adding a matching challenge to our gifts is especially gratifying when other alumni step up to meet the challenge,” Tod explains.

That common-sense philosophy informs the Whites’ approach to giving. “Oxy isn’t financially as well off as its peers,” Tod adds.

“If you can get others to help, together we can achieve results beyond what you might otherwise expect, and the College can do even better.”

That makes the Whites hall of famers by any measure.

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DECADES AFTER A CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH EDWARD GOREY, AUTHOR MARK DERY ’82 DIGS DEEP INTO THE LIFE OF THE WRITER, ILLUSTRATOR, AND INCOMPARABLE ECCENTRIC

BY PETER GILSTRAP / PHOTOS BY C. TAYLOR CROTHERS

E lIVE IN A WOrlD where the opposite extremes of critique have been reduced to “awesome” and “sad,” whether the topic at hand is a burrito or a natural disaster.

This, however, is not the world that Mark Dery ’82 inhabits.

When Dery speaks or puts words on the page—plying his trade as lecturer, author, and cultural critic—it’s an immersive journey into his fecund mind, a trip that plumbs the depths of Merriam-Webster. The same applies to a simple phone conversation. The man is his work, and his work is quite a show.

“That’s who Mark is, he’s just an original,” says one of Dery’s oldest friends, fiction editor and writer Alexandra McNear ’84.

“He’s incredibly articulate and intelligent and rigorous and thoughtful. I never met anyone who could talk the way he can. I don’t really know anyone else quite like that.”

Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” (a cultural aesthetic revitalized by the success of Black Panther) in a 1993 essay titled “Black to the Future.” He introduced the phrase “culture jamming” (a guerrilla rebellion that appropriates advertising, imagery, and other talismans in a critique of commercial culture) to New York Times readers in a 1990 essay titled “The Merry Pranksters and the Art of the Hoax,” which he expanded into a 1993 monograph titled Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the

His latest effort is Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. With a first printing of 30,000 and strong advance buzz in literary circles, it’s the first comprehensive biography of the late writer-illustrator, a grand and engrossing love letter to a unique talent. For Dery, it’s the culmination of seven years’ work, nearly 80 interviews, and a deep dive into all things Gorey—a distillation of Dery’s own formidable skills at this stage in his career.

Gorey’s persona was “a pose that incorporated elements of the aesthete, the idler, the dandy, the wit, the connoisseur of gossip, and the puckish ironist, wryly amused by life’s absurdities,” Dery writes in Born to be Posthumous (Little, Brown).

Empire of Signs, published by Open Magazine in 1993.

The titles of Dery’s works are tantalizing invitations to his specialized dissections and dark revelations: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999), and I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread (2012).

“By third grade I was convinced I was going to be the savior of American letters,” says Dery, who lives in Nyack, N.Y. His grandmother, a staunch Methodist, had been trained as a librarian “at the Moody Bible Institute, of all improbable places. And my mother had gone to Boston Art School, so it was almost foreordained that I would be an English major. I always excelled at the subject and loved it.”

Born in Braintree, Mass., Dery moved to Southern California at age 3 with his mother and stepfather, who was a machinist in the then-burgeoning aeronautics industry. They first landed in the town of Escondido and soon after moved to Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb just a few miles from the Mexican border.

“It was a very liminal spot like any border town,” says Dery, who spent his summers on nearby Imperial Beach “right by the border fence when it was in a state of dilapidation and no one took it seriously. It wasn’t the FALL 2018 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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heavily fortified cordone sanitaire that it is now, but I used to lie there sunning myself and reading surrealist poetry, and you could run your fingers through the sands and find spent shell casings, presumably from the Border Patrol shooting at narcos or something.”

Though the New England native was something of a fish out of water on these shores, he was an observant fish who soaked up the terra firma world he found himself in.

It was all formative stuff.

“It’s very odd being a Yankee and then moving to Southern California,” he says.

“You almost can’t imagine a greater bipolarity. History lies much more heavily in New England. It’s haunted by the shades of

In choosing a college, “a visionary teacher in high school pointed me toward Oxy, which was wonderfully generous and marvelously welcoming,” says Dery, who attended Occidental on scholarship. “The professors who bulked large in my mind were Dan Fineman, Eric Newhall, David James, and Martha ronk.

They were all extraordinary and exposed me to this notion that a text could have subtext.

Who knew? Jungian symbolism and Freudian readings and Marxist readings and the whole arsenal of analytical tools that can be deployed by the literary critic. And that really kindled my interest in peeling the onion of literary interpretation.”

“Both Mark and I were aspiring poets, and so as a student he came to me for

Dery dedicates Born to be Posthumous to his wife, Margot Mifflin ’82, “whose wild surmise—‘What about a Gorey biography?’—begat this book.”

Hawthorne and Emerson and Thoreau, and to my mind always had a very gothic quality.

Everything is kind of this model railroader’s version of nature. The trees are small and everything’s scaled down and at the Cape the waves kind of nibble at your ankles.

“And then to have walked along the shores of Torrey Pines beach near la Jolla as a kid and see these gargantuan towering cliffs with sedimentary layer upon layer. I loved the notion that Jurassic oceans had rolled over what was now the desert. And to a card-carrying, practicing surrealist there’s nothing more surreal than the desert.”

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teacherly advice,” recalls James, now a professor of cinema and media studies at USC. “I was immediately struck by the galvanic nimbus around him that energized any situation he found himself in, making it more serious and more ambitious. Mark was then—and still is—a person who lives in language and for whom language is a sensual, indeed somatic, exercise.”

But Dery, a guy who consumed the arts like a starving man at a casino buffet, didn’t confine his creative efforts to words on the page. He owned a Fender Telecaster guitar and knew how to play it.

“Toward the end of his time at Oxy he gave a performance of poetry and music somewhat like Patti Smith’s,” says James.

“My only contribution was to advise him not to drink before it. Sensibly, he ignored me.”

Dery was a fan of the embryonic, snarling punk rock attitude as it emerged in the late ’70s, but “my sense of myself was forged by glam rock,” he says, “and very specifically David Bowie.” The late, multidiscipline icon has been the subject of more than a few Dery essays (most recently for the Brooklyn Rail).

Professor James’ poetry class introduced Dery to more than a just a few of the poets whom he counts among his favorites: Wallace Stevens, Charles Bukowski, and Emily Dickinson. It was there that he met Barack Obama ’83. Though the pair had a spontaneous debate on free-market capitalism while relaxing on the Quad one sunny day, “I was absolutely not an intimate of Obama’s,” emphasizes Dery. But he does have a story.

“A few of us had taken to straggling in, two, three, and then five, 10 minutes late.

And James finally put his foot down. He said, ‘Henceforth, I’m laying down the law. If you’re not here by the time the bell rings, I’m locking the door and you’re not admitted.’”

Apparently the future president missed that class, and arrived to find the door, indeed, locked. “The next thing we know he’s wading through the hedges outside the window so he could get up to the glass and tap on it with this really forlorn look on his face,” Dery says. “And then he came around again to the door and I finally lost all patience.

“Budding punk rock anarchist that I was, I decided to make my great statement against tyrannical authority and I reached over and opened the door and let him in.

James flashed me a vaguely disapproving look and Obama slunk in and tried to dissolve into his seat and disappear as quietly as possible.”

Occidental gave Dery more than just an education. He met his future wife on campus, author and lecturer Margot Mifflin ’82, who majored in English and was awarded a Watson Fellowship while at Oxy. Mifflin (who shared her own memories of Obama’s 1981 speech at a campus anti-apartheid rally in a 2012 article for The New Yorker) delivered the 2013 Charles Jensvold Memorial lecture at Oxy titled “Art, Sex and Symbol: The Politics of Tattooed Women.” More recently,

Illustrations courtesy the Edward Gorey Estate | Gorey photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

daughter Thea followed in her parents’ considerable footsteps, graduating from the College in 2017 as a Spanish studies major.

It all began with a freshman mixer in which Dery had absolutely zero interest.

“In those days, the get-acquainted dance was a square dance,” he says. “The mortifying corniness of it made my flesh creep, so I was too cool to attend that, but a little while later they had a more civilized dance and I met Margot. She was spellbindingly beautiful, but we got talking and I realized that she was also blindingly brilliant and very interested in the arts. And so that’s really how we clicked.”

After graduating, Dery embarked upon his artistic journey, beginning with a move to the Bay Area. “In my infinite wisdom I had decided that performance poetry was a growth industry,” he says. “I spent a year working the circuit in San Francisco while working at a bookstore.”

In the decades to follow, Dery would go on to write acclaimed books and essays, teach media criticism at New York University from 2001 to 2010, become a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and see his writing grace the pages of dozens of

distinguished publications, from The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post to Rolling Stone and Wired. But when Dery arrived in New York City in 1983, “I kicked about from job to job as most Grub Street hacks do,” he says. “I did everything from waiting tables to various other jobs that will go unmentioned.”

One that bears mention was his gig at Midtown Manhattan’s venerable Gotham Book Mart, a landmark shop frequented by a who’s who of literary bigwigs, among them Edward Gorey.

“My first exposure to Gorey, the man, was while working at the Gotham Book Mart. I heard this voice in fruity, flutey high tones declaiming around the store in this stentorian, impossibly campy style,” Dery says. “I looked up and saw this towering apparition in a floor-sweepingly long fur coat dyed Easter Peep yellow, this man with jangling bracelets, amulets and talismans and earrings, and this Victorian litterateur-like enormous white beard, and I thought, ‘Who is this preposterous creature?’”

Despite this definitive impression, Dery admits when it came to Gorey’s work, “I was never really bitten by the bug in those days.”

That would change.

top left: Gorey’s poster for the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula. top center: The Lavender Leotard (1973) was first published as a tribute to the 25th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. right: Gorey was nominated for a pair of Tonys for Dracula, winning for costume design. above left: An ill-mannered animal “something between a penguin and a lizard,” in Gorey’s words, joins a family for breakfast “and presently ate/All the syrup and toast, and a part of the plate” in The Doubtful Guest (Doubleday, 1957). above center: The Unstrung Harp (Duell, Sloan, and Pierce, 1953) “holds up a magnifying glass to the agonies of the scribbling trade,” Dery writes.

Those not steeped in Gorey would likely know his work from the long-running PBS TV series “Mystery!”—his animated drawings serve as the show’s intro—or his Tonynominated stage and costume designs for the hit 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, starring Frank langella.

But Gorey, who died in 2000 at age 75, did much more than that. From 1953’s The Unstrung Harp to his final work in 1999, The Headless Bust, he published more than 100 books. His delicate pen-and-ink illustrations evoke a dark, Victorian-cum-Edwardian aesthetic, and perfectly complement his delightfully macabre writing where strange and gruesome things happen, often to children FALL 2018 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 23

(though there are plenty of Gorey titles in the children’s section).

Dery—who grew to appreciate Gorey’s works post-Book Mart encounter—began reading lemony Snicket’s writing to his young daughter, and was taken with the clear influence of Gorey. “I realized that it was more than just a camp Charles Addams, that some of the works really were profound, and I started delving much more deeply into them,” he says.

After seven years of living with Gorey, Dery is “toying with a few ideas” for his next subject, he says, “but I don’t want to give the game away for fear that another ink-stained wretch will steal it right out from under my feet.”

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In 2000, novelist Alexander Theroux published The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, a slim volume about his longtime friend, “and I found it absolutely spellbinding,” Dery continues. “I started reading interviews with him, and everything I could get my hands on.”

In 2011, Dery was desperately searching for his next book topic, unable to settle on anything, when his wife suggested a biography of Gorey. Dery pitched it, and received a one-word reply from his agent: Sold.

“When he told me he was writing a book about Gorey, I didn’t bat an eye,” says Alexandra McNear. “I thought, of course.

Gorey would be perfect for him to write about. The drawings are just totally Mark’s sense of the macabre.”

But creating a definitive bio on Gorey was no easy feat. He was every bit as mysterious and intriguing as his work, a flamboyant yet reclusive character who lived alone with cats, walls of books, and a mummified human head. Though his manner often was hot and cold running camp, he professed to being asexual. He was a person of contradictions.

“Gorey is grist for the biographer’s mill after all,” Dery writes in Born to Be Posthumous, “not only because he was an artist of uncommon gifts but because he was a worldclass eccentric to boot.”

“I wanted to reveal the man in full, seen from every possible angle simultaneously like the subject in a Cubist painting,” says Dery. “So just as I didn’t want to savor the unsavory, neither did I want to turn a blind eye on the facts of his inner life, to the extent that I could excavate them.”

In parsing the long-debated question of Gorey’s sexuality, he adds, “To have that eclipse the entire biography would really be myopic and vulgar. He was vastly more complex than that question, and such a rich and strange artist that I didn’t want to iris down the aperture to just peer through the keyhole of his bedroom. At the same time, I didn’t want to be coy and Victorian, putting pantalets on piano legs … but what I discovered early on is that one of the things that’s most delicious about Gorey is his mysteriousness.”

Dery’s passion for prose is no mystery, but what does it mean to him to be a writer, to engage in this ongoing, adventurous practice? “It’s partly just logophilia, the love of words, though saying ‘just’ dismisses the politics of style,” he replies. “Privileging language is a way of rejecting the tough-guy masculinity of Hemingway’s ‘muscular’ prose; of asserting the values of play and the irrational against the utilitarianism of Strunk and White.

“At the same time, writing isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am,” he continues. “I believe the self is a reflection in the mirror of language; without words—the inner monologue that narrates our thoughts—there is no ‘I.’” Spoken like a born wordsmith.

Peter Gilstrap wrote “Economies of Scale” in the Summer issue.

High on a Peruvian mountain more than 4,000 miles from Oxy, Adrienne (Spivak) ’08 and husband Garrett Hostetler ’08 bring modern ideas to the practice of plant-based medicine

BY ASH LE Y FESTA | PHOTO S BY K ATHL EEN LAVIN E & FLO REN CE BAR SOT TI

ach morning, adrienne (Spivak) hostetler ’08 and garrett hostetler ’08 eat breakfast with their community of 20 people, high on a mountain in rural Peru, and then everyone begins their service hours. Whether it’s cooking the meals, doing research in the laboratory, or going through plants and making medicine, each person has an assigned task for the day.

Everyone has lunch together before resuming their work. in the evenings, they have reuniones, or meetings, which frequently run until midnight or later, sharing lessons from challenges faced that day.

“Work life, home life, and social life—it should be all integrated,” garrett says. “They say fragmentation leads to illness. in the ancient world, when someone got sick, the healer treated the whole family, not just the person. it was an extension of health to the whole community.”

The community’s shared devotion to the interconnectedness of life prompted adrienne and garrett to establish the asociación rueda Sagrada, or Sacred Wheel association. it’s a nonprofit organization based near cusco, Peru, that promotes a natural way of life, emphasizing community, reciprocity, and collaboration. in addition to studying plant-based medicine founded in ancient traditions to treat the whole body, the hostetlers’ work focuses on providing educational programs to teach the practices and culture of the andean people to both local people as well as visitors from around the world. “We take their philosophical vision of life and apply it in a practical way,” says adrienne, who grew up in Denver and majored in art history and visual arts at oxy. “healthy living, natural medicine, agriculture, food, science, and arts are all aspects of a complete sense of life. We live in harmony with nature.”

Adrienne and Garrett spent nearly a month this past summer in Colorado and New Mexico giving programs on natural medicine.

left: The entrance gate to the Hostetlers’ community looks toward Mount Pitusiray in the Sacred Valley. below: The liquid of an andean plant can be used for treating ear infections. middle: Adrienne, second from right, with fellow community members Cipriana Quispe Oscalla and Yuli Libertad Catacora Condori, both from Peru, Florence Barsotti from France, and Dolores Gambino, far right, from Argentina. The setting is Mama Simona—the only female Apu, or mountain spirit, of the 12 sacred mountains system of the Cuzco Valley. bottom: A traditional offering to Pachamama includes grains, flowers, medicinal plants, and fruits.

Every great love story begins somewhere, and adrienne and garrett met by chance through a mutual friend about a month before graduation. adrienne was weaving a navajo wedding basket for an art class when she was introduced to garrett, a biochemistry major from gardnerville, nev. Both played sports for all four years at oxy—adrienne as a soccer forward and garrett as a football offensive lineman—“so we had many of the same friends, and somehow we did not meet until that day,” garrett recalls. he kept adrienne company as she went about her weaving, and the two talked well into the night. after they graduated, garrett took a job as a biochemistry investigator and lab associate at a pharmaceutical company. adrienne, meanwhile, worked a few unsatisfying jobs before she decided to hit the reset button. Feeling a calling to a more connected life, she sold all her possessions, bought a backpack and a one-way plane ticket, and left for South america in november 2009. after her departure, adrienne and garrett weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again, but they wrote FALL 2018 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 27

each other frequently, and garrett got on a plane to visit her about six months later. “i had never been out of the country, so we decided to meet in Peru to see machu Picchu and see where we were in our relationship,” he recalls. Less than a year later, garrett—who had just been accepted into a Ph.D. program in the northwest—threw away his plans and moved to Peru, where the couple was married in 2013.

top: Garrett works in Rueda Sagrada’s research laboratory up on the mountain. above: Making a balm from beeswax and medicinal plants with fellow community member Simon Roser, who hails from France.

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Integrated medicine is the focus of the research laboratory at rueda Sagrada. garrett says much of the work is cataloging and documenting the medicinal plants of the region as well as researching the locals’ understanding of the traditional healing power of plants and the dynamics of plants and the human body. They work to create different combinations of plants to treat various areas of the body in a holistic way.

“We integrate the ancestral vision while working with natural medicine makers, native healers, Ph.D. pharmacists, doctors, lots of modern science. it’s a collaborative laboratory, the first of its kind in the andes,” garrett says. “We work with the plant in wholeness, keeping the integrity of the plant. We can’t just take out a physical element. We integrate empirical data in discussions with pharmacists and medical doctors.”

To keep themselves tuned into their natural surroundings, the hostetlers participate in traditional ceremonies. one of the most basic beliefs of the people of the andes is their service and devotion to mother Earth, named Pachamama. considering that all humanity is one big family, adrienne says, everyone must live in community to care for Pachamama together.

The traditional andean community, known as ayllu in the Quechua language, is a self-sustaining unit typically made up of extended family groups. in the hostetlers’ community, no one needs an outside job, and the organization doesn’t require donations to survive. They generate all the funding they need through their classes and workshops held in Taray and cusco and by selling natural medicine and alimentation.

The ayllu is built upon the understanding that everyone is interconnected, a concept known as ayni, and that living in community requires working together and helping one another. “When someone needs to build a house, they all work together,” adrienne says. “We don’t separate what’s good for me and what’s good for you. it’s a completely different economic system. not capitalism or communism—it’s communal living. We exchange FALL 2018

goods and services. if you put a monetary value on jobs, it creates a huge imbalance of life.”

“Whoever is making the medicine and working with patients, they aren’t superior to the person who is growing the plants,” garrett adds. “Every position adds value to the community.”

To maintain a self-sustaining society, the community must live simply. While “simple living”—adobe homes, spotty internet, dry toilets—was not too difficult of an adjustment for adrienne, it was the “living in community” that was the hardest change for her when she moved to the small town of Taray in the Peruvian andes. “it was completely foreign to the way i grew up,” she admits. “i had to relearn everything. how do you live and work and be with the same people day in and day out? how do you deal with conflicts that come up? That was one of the biggest adjustments.”

In addition to their daily chores, the hostetlers also have educational programs for people who come from all over the world to learn how to establish similar community projects in their own country. The couple does outreach, too—they were in north america and Europe over the summer sharing their traditional vision of life.

left: Bags of plants hold dried medicinal plant material waiting to be processed. below: Glass jars contain the medicinal plants in powder form, ready to use for Rueda Sagrada’s remedies.

left: Drying racks for the plants in Rueda Sagrada’s laboratory. below left: Rueda Sagrada grows and harvests many of the native plants used in its remedies, including passion flower (the greenish flower with purple lines, far left).

Adrienne and Garrett (pictured in Colorado) hope to make healthy food products from the bountiful superfoods of the Andes and Amazon.

The next big project on the horizon is to open a holistic diagnostic and therapeutic clinic in the Sacred Valley. The goal for the clinic, garrett says, is to provide personalized care to treat physical, emotional, and psychological health as well as diagnostics based on diet and traditional medicine. They’re already laying the groundwork and hope to have a pilot started by 2020, but bureaucracy in Peru moves slowly. as they pursue that avenue, they continue to focus on sharing their way of life with the world—and connecting with the next generation of the Quechuan people. garrett says community leaders are concerned about their children’s aspiration to the Western lifestyle and their lack of desire to pass down ancestral knowledge. as for the hostetlers, they delight in learning Quechuan traditions, and they try to model the appreciation and application of those customs.

“Kids see it as going back in time,” says garrett, who stresses that his work with traditional medicine integrates and complements modern science, rather than dismissing it. “it’s not going back to the past; it’s how this ancestral vision can apply to the modern day.”

Ashley Festa wrote “No Small Feat” in the Winter issue.

She lives in Greer, S.C. FALL 2018 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 29

OXYTALK Photo by Marc Campos

From left, Phillip M. Ayoub, Patricia Cabral, Juve J. Cortes, Emmanuelle Despagnet-Ayoub, Kevin M. Williams, Jim L. Brown, and Aleem Hossain.

Seven Wonders Oxy’s next generation of academics reflects on the College, their research, and the value of mentoring

“Being a first-generation college student, the mentorship I received from my professors was pivotal to my academic and personal development,” recalls Patricia Cabral, assistant professor of psychology and one of seven new tenure-track faculty who joined the College this fall. “When I first visited Oxy, one of the first things that made me feel connected to the values of the campus was the importance that was placed on mentorship.”

To get to know Oxy’s next generation of mentors, we asked each new hire to talk about themselves, their research, and their interests outside the classroom; their answers here are edited for space. To read their bios and the full Q&A, visit oxy.edu/magazine.

When did you first take an interest in your field of study?

Phillip M. Ayoub, associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs: I took an interest in politics during my first year of college at 30 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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the University of Washington. I was working toward a premed major when I decided to enroll in a course on Europe in World Politics.

The class felt so relevant to everything that was happening around me in the post-9/11 world. The themes in that course also meant something to me personally, as the son of immigrants with strong connections to Europe and the Middle East.

Jim L. Brown, professor of mathematics: I was originally interested in physics and astrophysics. I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time around eighth or ninth grade and that hooked me. I stayed with astrophysics until my first semester of college when I realized I didn’t like sitting out all night taking measurements. I switched to physics, until I realized I didn’t like taking measurements in a lab any better. I finally became a math major at the end of my first year of college.

Cabral: Like many other students, I took an introductory psychology course in high school. The teacher made every class fascinating. Taking that class made me realize that I wanted to major in psychology once I was in college. But it wasn’t until I took research methods in college that I started to really understand how I could fit into psychology and how fun it can be.

Juve J. Cortes, assistant professor of diplomacy and world affairs: Politics has always been part of my life, in one way or another. I grew up in Mexico in a village of about 600 people but despite its tiny size, it experienced many issues found in larger polities: land politics, water concerns, political divisions, and even religious divisions. In 1994, my family of nine moved to the metropolis that is Los Angeles—a process that began when former President Reagan granted amnesty to Dad. Migrating was a massive culture shock, but that is where I first began thinking about societies and the rules that constitute them.

Emmanuelle Despagnet-Ayoub, associate professor of chemistry: I started to be interested in chemistry in my senior year in high school. My teacher was amazing and really inspired me. Moreover, I’ve already been interested in cuisine, and chemistry is a type of cooking!

OXYTALK

Aleem Hossain, assistant professor in media arts and culture: It happened in stages.

As a kid, my parents took me to see E.T. and they tell me that I walked out of the theater and said I wanted to be a film director. …

When I was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, the film club acquired a big, clunky video camera and I checked it out and started using it without any real guidance. I made my first film—and could feel viscerally how not good it was—but I was hooked.

Kevin M. Williams, assistant professor of economics: I arrived at CMC undeclared but knew about a month into my first semester that I was going to be an economics major.

What attracted you to Occidental?

Ayoub: Its long-standing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I see my work as a scholar as being part of a project to break down barriers to inclusion, and I think Oxy is a place that will cherish and support that.

Brown: I enjoy doing research as well as working with students, so a strong liberal arts college such as Occidental that prizes both always seemed like a good fit.

Cortes: We’ve all had that teacher that encouraged us and had a strong impact on our futures—that is the position I hope to have for a couple of reasons. First, I know that having the right teacher or adviser can make a positive change, and second, many kids growing up in our union need encouragement and role models. I certainly did.

Jim, your forthcoming paper examines “Congruence primes for automorphic forms on symplectic groups.” Can you explain that in lay terms?

Brown: Sadly, no, I cannot. The best I can do is to point out that in 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute picked seven mathematics problems they considered the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. The resolution of any of these problems comes with a $1-million award; only one problem has been solved in the intervening 18 years.

One of the unsolved problems is the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. This problem deals with points on elliptic curves; such points have applications in elliptic curve cryptography. The paper cited above provides evidence for a generalization of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

Patricia, your most recent research examines “generational status, familismo, and socio-emotional competence in the

link between neighborhood quality and risk behaviors for Latina adolescents.”

Can you summarize your findings?

Cabral: We examined associations of early parental and peer influences on subsequent sex initiation among Latina/o youth and how these associations differed across migration generational status. We found that more acculturated Latina girls (i.e., thirdgeneration) were more than twice as likely to initiate sex by 10th grade in comparison to Latinas of first and second generation.

Parental monitoring and friendship quality predicted sex initiation among Latinas while parental involvement and social interactions were significant among Latino boys. Also, both boys and girls were more likely to initiate sex by 10th grade when they perceived their friends to have initiated sex; this is especially true among more acculturated Latina girls.

Phillip, how does LGBT activism in European politics compare to the United States?

Ayoub: The United States adopted samesex marriage 14 years after the Netherlands, and 26 years after Denmark passed same-sex civil unions in 1989. By contrast, the innovative ideas of the American Gay Liberation movement spread to multiple countries in the 1970s, adapting related and interconnected repertoires of gay liberation emancipation.

These are not isolated occurrences—there are international and transnational dynamics at play that need studying. That said, I believe strongly that we have to study how domestic institutions and norms moderate the effect of international and transnational dynamics. Looking at politics in 2017 shows that it’s futile to neatly separate the analysis of the international level from the domestic—we have to understand one to understand the other, and this is why my work also speaks centrally to the subfield of comparative politics.

Juve, of the classes you will be teaching this fall, do you have a favorite?

Cortes: Both Latin American Politics and Democracy & Comparative Democratization are favorites of mine. The topics are my expertise and students really love learning about the tremendous history of Latin America, which exemplifies variation in key political, economic, and cultural variables. Among my students, however, my most popular class might be Physics for Future Presidents. This class teaches the science, technology, and

physics that every world leader needs to know to make informed decisions on technical issues—and we know how important this is.

Kevin, how does it feel to join Oxy’s largest academic department? What are you teaching this fall?

Williams: My previous department [at the University of Utah] had over 30 faculty, so this feels cohesive and welcoming. I’m teaching Game Theory this fall and will be teaching Applied Econometrics in the spring.

Aleem, how has digital storytelling broken down barriers to potential filmmakers/storytellers?

Hossain: The technological advances of the last 20 years have made it way more possible for a young artist, regardless of their identity or circumstance, to make a project.

There are two big remaining challenges and I’m trying to address them in the classroom.

First, we need to break down the barriers in the mainstream established industries—the only places where people can both make media and make a living. It’s great that a 19year-old first-generation college student can make a film that might have been impossible to make decades ago … but you can only go so long without a paycheck to cover your rent and food. Second, we need to break down the barriers of distribution. YouTube and the big streaming services theoretically allow almost anyone to reach an audience of billions, but the reality is that most of the work on those platforms goes unnoticed. In Media Arts and Culture, we’re working to create a generation of creators and thinkers who will help solve these challenges.

What do you like most about teaching?

Despagnet-Ayoub: I’m really enjoying sharing my knowledge to the students, what a reward when you see a smile on their face after understanding a concept! Learning how to scientifically communicate with different backgrounds is really rewarding.

Hossain: I’ve been teaching for 13 years and I still wake up excited to see the latest progress my students have made with their scripts or films or VR projects. I feel ridiculously lucky that I get to work with emerging creators who are finding their voice, thinking critically about the state of the art, taking risks, and expanding the horizons of timebased media.

Williams: If I say “the students,” they’ll think I’m a pushover. So I’ll say “coming up with insanely difficult test questions.”

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PAGE 64 Photos by Marc Campos and Kevin Burke

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‘She Shed Light Everywhere’ Kind, focused, concerned, and effective, Carolyn Adams (1950-2018) embodied the spirit of the Oxy community

Everyone who worked with Carolyn Adams has a story about her. As the editor of this magazine, I listened when Carolyn brought me a story idea. She encouraged us to profile Tetsuo Otsuki, the Bertha Harton Orr Professor of Chemistry—her good friend Dr. O —who was battling cancer with the support of his former student, an oncologist and bone marrow transplant specialist at Kaiser Permanente. She also pitched the partnership and love story of world travelers Mandy Boesche and husband Roger, the Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas. The common theme between the stories—of overcoming obstacles and living life fearlessly— could very well apply to Carolyn, who retired in March after three decades of dedicated service to Oxy, including 20 years as executive assistant to the dean of the College.

Like Otsuki and Boesche—who died in 2012 and 2017, respectively, each at only 69 —Carolyn has left us far too soon. Word of her passing August 24 at age 68 after a 15-month fight against cancer was met with a swift outpouring of messages from the Oxy academic community she loved dearly.

“Carolyn’s personality and professionalism were so remarkable as to make her incomprehensibly rare and so inestimably valuable,” professor of English Dan Fineman wrote. “In the decades I have worked with her, I came to her a hundred times with my petty needs and confusions. In every single instance, she met me with a genuine and 64 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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humane kindness, focus, and concern, and a rapid effectiveness that was nearly unparalleled. In an age when the non-response response is almost standard, she always quickly answered my queries with accurate information and a kind thought. She did this despite the enormous burdens already on her plate and within an institutional ethos that did not always share her capacity to act and feel.

Incredibly, she performed these same daily miracles with everyone without exception.

She shed light everywhere.”

Fineman continued: “In darker moments, I would sometimes reflect upon her example, and recognize that hers was a better way: more productive, more in touch, and more socially constructive. I found in her an ethical and political paragon. She was the hub of our institutional wheel, the still point of our turning world, reliable and steady, central and dependable. While her nominal position—her job title—never reflected her immense structural influence, neither its scope nor its excellence, everyone knew by experience what no org chart could present.”

At Opening Convocation on August 28, Oxy professors wore cloth sunflowers on their regalia to honor Carolyn’s memory. She worked with six deans over 20 years after a decade as an administrative assistant in the philosophy, mathematics, physics, and languages and literature departments. Associate professor of biology Kerry Thompson, who was interim dean of the College in 2016-17,

4 1. Carolyn with Jorge Gonzalez in 2014.

2. With son Chace, husband Pat, and President Jonathan Veitch at Oxy’s Employee Recognition Ceremony in 2012.

3. Morning calisthenics with Dr. O in 2011.

4. With her student worker, Dana Lin ’18, last November.

called Carolyn “one of the most amazing spirits I have ever met. I will cherish the memory of her smile, her deep understanding of people and the world at large, and her purposeful and positive impact on our community.”

Current and former colleagues and friends honored Carolyn at her retirement reception last spring, paying heartfelt tribute to her role as a builder and sustainer of the Oxy community. After Otsuki was diagnosed with cancer in February 2011, for instance, she assembled a support group that grew from a handful of faculty, staff, students, and friends to more than 50. In presenting the first-ever Dr. O Humanitarian Award to Carolyn in 2014, Jorge Gonzalez, then vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College, remarked, “You truly are the embodiment of what this award is all about.”

In addition, Carolyn was honored with the Sarah A. Gilman Memorial Award in 1997, the Administrative Achievement Award in 2012, and the Presidential Medal for Distinguished Service to the College last May. Survivors include her husband of 46 years, Pat; children Chace, Cary, and Casey ’03; and seven grandchildren.

“We are lucky to have had Carolyn and her gifts as long as we did,” wrote Susan Molik, senior academic services assistant and Institutional Review Board coordinator. “I hope we can maintain and share that light on campus (and off) with those around us.”

—dick anderson

OXYFARE 

Snapshots from Volume 40, Number 4 oxy.edu/magazine OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Jonathan Veitch President Wendy F. Sternberg Vice President for Academic Aairs and Dean of the College Rhonda L. Brown Vice President for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity OďŹƒcer Charlie Cardillo Vice President for Institutional Advancement Vince Cuseo Vice President of Enrollment and Dean of Admission Rob Flot Vice President for Student Aairs and Dean of Students Amos Himmelstein Vice President & Chief Operating OďŹƒcer Marty Sharkey Vice President for Marketing and Communications Jim Tranquada Director of Communications

Homecoming & Family Weekend October 19-21 Photos by Marc Campos

1. The Occidental College Women’s Club staged its annual boutique October 20, with proceeds beneďŹ tting the club’s endowed scholarship.

Seated, l-r: Elvira Bellizzi P’16, Clara Gresham ’53, and Jane Pinkerton P’85, ’88. Standing, l-r: Martha Hidalgo ’81 P’12, Carolyn Nelson (daughter of Lois Thompson ’57), Lois Russo P’85, ’90, and Enid Busser ’58. 2. With wide receiver Andrew Jack de Avila ’22 leading the charge, Oxy’s football team takes to the ďŹ eld for its Homecoming contest against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps.

3. Jazmin Calderon-Arreola ’21, Jessica Rodriguez ’22, and Aracely Ruvalcaba ’20 light up the First Gen Club booth. 4. Members of the Oxy softball team pose at their Tiger Tee Toss—winners of the spirit booth competition during Oswald’s Carnival and Tailgate. 5. From left, Emma Gobler ’19, Oswald, Alayna Schwartz ’19, and Reilly Torres ’19. 6. Decked out in their Oxy T-shirts, members of the Eagle Rock High School marching band perform before Saturday’s game.

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7. Johnson Hall 303 was rechristened the Boesche Classroom on October 21 in memory of Roger Boesche, the Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas, who taught for 40 years at Oxy. (He died in 2017.) On hand for the dedication are Wendy Sternberg, vice president for academic aairs and dean of the College; President Jonathan Veitch; and Mandy Boesche, Roger’s wife of nearly 46 years.

To mark the event, more than 313 alumni and friends made gifts totaling $315,400 to the Barack Obama Scholars Program.

editorial staff

Dick Anderson Editor Marc Campos Contributing Photographer Gail (Schulman) Ginell ’79 Class Notes Editor SanSoucie Design Design DLS Group Printing

Alison Haehnel Assistant Director of Athletics Head Softball Coach

6 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

Published quarterly by Occidental College Main number: 323-259-2500 To contact Occidental magazine By phone: 323-259-2679 By email: oxymag@oxy.edu By mail: Occidental College OďŹƒce of Communications F-36 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles CA 90041-3314 Letters may be edited for length, content, and style.

Occidental College online Homepage: oxy.edu Facebook: facebook.com/occidental Twitter: @occidental Instagram: instagram.com/occidentalcollege Long-sleeve Occidental College shirt features Dry-Excel moisture-wicking technology Sizes S-XXL, $29.95

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Cover photo by Max S. Gerber Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Econ Day Celebrates Brickman and ‘Brilliance’ What does it take to become a leader—and to ascend to the helm of two major international companies? To hear Sally Beauty Holdings president and CEO Chris Brickman ’86 tell it, “Leadership is a journey. You’re going to learn along the way, and you’re going to make lots of mistakes.â€? But, he added, “Your will to carry on —your will to persevere—is what will deďŹ ne you the most.â€? Speaking to about 70 students, alumni, faculty, and sta in Choi Auditorium as part of Econ Day on September 25, Brickman—who majored in economics at Oxy and has served as president and CEO of Denton, Texas-based Sally Beauty Holdings since February 2015 —encouraged his audience to “focus on growing as much as winningâ€? in their own leadership journeys. “Beware of the successes—celebrate them and move on,â€? said Brickman, who detailed his own triumphs and pitfalls in the 2014 book The Brilliance in Failure. “Learn from the disasters, because they are your best teachers.â€?

LEFT: “Both triumph and disaster are impostors,� Brickman said, alluding to the poem “If� by Rudyard Kipling.

ABOVE: From left, Brad Fauvre ’87, Elbridge Amos Stuart Professor of Economics Robby Moore, Raymond Yen ’82, and Brickman catch up during the Econ Day luncheon.

Save the dates for Alumni Reunion Weekend: June 21-23, 2019.

alumni.oxy.edu

Office of Communications F-36 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles CA 90041-3314

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Exhuming Edward Gorey: Author Mark Dery ’82

Linda and Tod White ’59 Go the Distance

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Photo by Kevin Burke

After her first year at Oxy, Kayla Williams ’20 spent the summer as an intern at Esperanza Community Housing Corp., a social-justice nonprofit in South Central Los Angeles that fosters community development in five core program areas: affordable housing, health, arts, environmental justice, and economic development.

The 10-week internship “gave me the opportunity to put theory to practice,” says Kayla, an urban and environmental policy major from the Bronx, N.Y. “Not only was I reading about injustices, but I was then going to work and making meaningful steps toward addressing those same issues. While interning at Esperanza, my

understanding of concepts such as public health and environmental justice completely changed. I now see these topics as intertwined.”

Kayla’s positive attitude and desire to help made a lasting impression on the Esperanza staff. “She took the initiative to organize a clothes drive with students from Oxy to give the clothes to families in need in our community,” wrote her supervisor. “Her sense and empathy for vulnerable community makes her stand up and look for different alternatives of services.”

“The most important lesson I learned from this internship is the importance of community,” says Kayla, who also works in Occidental’s Center for Community Based Learning, which aims to enrich students’ learning and commitment to social responsibility through civic engagement. “Once a person becomes a part of the Esperanza community, either because they live in South L.A. or because they work with the organization, their personal development becomes a priority.”

Kayla took things away from the program that she never could have imagined—like learning to drive (as a native New Yorker, she was used to getting around using public transit), thanks to a supervisor who gave her lessons on Sundays. Another staff member, seeing Kayla’s determination to learn Spanish to help her assist Esperanza’s overwhelmingly Latino clientele, practiced the language with her daily over tea and cookies. “This was not a part of her job description, yet she saw that I needed help and took it upon herself to help me,” she says.

The experience also gave her “a more dynamic view of the majors offered at Occidental and what careers I can pursue after college,” Kayla says. “Throughout this internship, I have gained a sense of agency deeper than I had ever felt before—it has been one of the most transformative experiences in my life.”

It takes a community to enable students such as Kayla to thrive.

Your annual gift to the Oxy Fund supports a broad spectrum of internships. It’s a meaningful step—one that is sure to pay dividends for future generations committed to the public good.

oxy.edu/giving

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Invest in the kind of education that can only happen at Occidental.

Please make your gift to the Oxy Fund.

PLANTED IN PERU: ADRIENNE (SPIVAK) ’08 AND GARRETT HOSTETLER ’08 /// THE SPIRIT OF CAROLYN ADAMS

Your Oxy Fund Gift Builds Community

Anjolie Charlot and Mira Tarabeine embrace the possibilities that await the College’s most selective class in 70 years