Occidental Magazine - Summer 2019

SUMMER 2019

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

Nonprofit U.S. Postage Paid Occidental College

The Chemistry of Cartilage: Professor Michael Hill

Oxy’s Child Development Center Turns 25

Address Service Requested

SUMMER 2019

WAKANDA ON WHEELS: CHANDRIKA FRANCIS ’10’S TINY HOME /// A SNAPSHOT OF OXY IN 1962

FOR GOOD The College’s most ambitious campaign in 25 years builds on Oxy’s location, curricular strengths, and the power of a liberal arts education oxy.edu/magazine

OXYFARE 

Snapshots from Volume 41, Number 3 oxy.edu/magazine OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Jonathan Veitch President Wendy F. Sternberg Vice President for Academic Aairs and Dean of the College 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 Communications and Institutional Initiatives Jim Tranquada Director of Communications

Lee Chico ’23, left Christian Chico ’18, below

editorial staff

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

Alumni Reunion Weekend June 21-23 Photos by Marc Campos and Don Milici | MarchFourth photo by Andrew Wyatt

1. Clockwise from upper left, Alumni Seal honorees Kyle Ballard ’04 (service to the College), Christopher Silva (son of the late Jose Silva ’84, service to the College), Andrew Heath ’04 (professional achievement), Adrian Carpenter ’04 (Erica J. Murray ’01 Young Alumni Award), Vance Mueller ’86 (alumnus of the year), Lupe Silva (Jose’s widow), and Eric Warren ’69 (service to the community). 2. Nicolas Sweeney ’14 carries the sign for his class. 3. 2009 grads David Martinez, Sarah Thaler, Sarah Arvey, and Jessica Lobl. 4. Tracy (Flock) Crooks ’89 and Lara Lindersmith ’89 look back at the headlines.

5. Oswald poses with 1964 grads Susan Simpson, SteďŹƒ Miller, Sharon (Smith) Dawson, Judy Henderson, Mike Blaylock, and Carolyn Blaylock. 6. Leila Pazargadi ’04, Maria Stoyadinova ’05, and Nikolay Filchev ’04. 7. Joining President Veitch for the dedication of the Payton Jordan Athletic OďŹƒces are Jack Trotter ’72, Professor Lynn Mehl, Ed SaraďŹƒan ’52, Tod White ’59 and wife Linda, Director of Athletics Shanda Ness, Barbara (Jimenez) Parrott ’63, and Bill Parrott ’62. 8. Rachel and Errol Garnett ’94, Gene Whitehead ’94, and Elizabeth (Villegas) Payne ’94 and husband David party on the Quad.

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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 Victor Chico Department Manager Postal Operations Center

Lee: Occidental Gray Ringer T-shirt, $26.95 Christian: Black Occidental Alumni Stacked T-shirt, $16.95 Sylvia: Gray Occidental Mom V-neck T-shirt, $23.95 Victor: Black Occidental Tigers T-shirt, $17.95 Black Occidental Dad Cap, $21.95

Sylvia Chico Senior Program Coordinator Urban & Environmental Policy

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

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 Cover illustration by Taylor Callery Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Save the Dates: Family & Homecoming Weekend October 18-19

MarchFourth—the internationally acclaimed, genre-breaking marching band featuring John Averill ’89 and Dan Stauer ’91—will bring its colorful explosion of brassy funk, rock, and jazz to Oswald’s Homecoming Carnival and Talegate on October 19 as part of Homecoming and Family Weekend.

Earlier that day, please join your Oxy classmates and friends for the College’s annual Volunteer Leadership Conference.

Interested in learning more about volunteer activities at Oxy? Register online by October 8 at alumni.oxy.edu/hfw19.

Tokyo Salon July 23 A panel discussion on Oxy, Los Angeles, and the role of the Olympics in the growth and development of global cities was held at the Tokyo American Club. Attendees included Aime Fukada ’21, foreground, a sociology major from Singapore; Martha Matsuoka ’83, associate professor of urban and environmental policy; Tetsu Uemura ’83; moderator Seiji Aoyagi ’85; and Aime’s dad, Allen Fukada ’86. Dean Wendy Sternberg (not shown) joined the panel discussion as well.

alumni.oxy.edu

SUMMER 2019

Photographer Joe Friezer—aka “One Shot Joe”—strikes a pose outside his studio on Vermont Avenue, circa 1955. He began taking photos for Oxy soon after.

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Features 8 Good and Ready The Oxy Campaign For Good aims to build on the College’s location, curricular strengths, and the power of a liberal arts education. But its success will be measured by both endowment and engagement.

18 Ready for the World Oxy’s Child Development Center celebrates 25 years of educating the College’s brightest young minds through play-based exploration, interaction, and lots of questions.

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Departments 32

Be Like Mike Professor Michael Hill has guided scores of chemistry students from his lab into impactful careers. But it’s the thing he hasn’t done that touched off an international media frenzy.

OxyTalk

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Stephen Rountree ’71 steps up as chair of the Board of Trustees at a very busy time for Oxy.

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First Word President Veitch on the vision and potential of The Oxy Campaign For Good. Also: Lessons in learning from Professor Marcia Homiak, and a note of appreciation to Frank Hardison ’39.

From the Quad A little rain couldn’t stop the confetti—or Eric Garcetti—as the Class of 2019 roared into the world. Also: Remembering physics professors George Schmiedeshoff and Stuart Elliott.

Page 64 The Class of ’69 brings a new vibe to the ranks of the Fifty Year Club—just as it did to the College experience after setting foot on campus more than half a century ago.

36 Tigerwire Class notes for odd years.

From Wakanda to Water Environmental educator Chandrika Francis ’10 makes the swimming pool a safer place for marginalized groups and remakes a 30-foot bus into her dream home on wheels.

29 Where Were You in ’62?

A series of headshots from 1962 offers a snapshot of Oxy on its 75th anniversary—and leaves us looking for your help.

PHOTO CREDITS: Occidental College Special Collections Where Were You in ’62? | Jim Block From Wakanda to Water | Marc Campos First Word, From the Quad | Kevin Burke OxyTalk | Don Milici Page 64

FIRST WORD » FROM PRESIDENT VEITCH

AVision of Tomorrow, and a Call to Arms Spring is always a joyful time of year at salesman and a secretary, whose scholarhas raised $123 million during what we Oxy as we celebrate the many accomplishship-funded education made it possible for refer to as the quiet phase of the campaign ments of the graduating class. That joy him to become a nationally known arts —funds given primarily by those closest to shone through this May despite the unseaadministrator responsible for the design Oxy in acknowledgment of the many ways sonable rain that fell during Commenceand construction of the Getty Center as in which the College has changed their ment as we watched hundreds of future COO of the Getty Trust and instrumental lives. Their support is a labor of love and a entrepreneurs, diplomats, scientists, public in the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall continuum that dates back more than 100 servants, artists, and educators receive as CEO of the Music Center. As Steve’s years, when alumni decided to create the their diplomas, poised to change the world story demonstrates (page 32), upward College’s first endowed scholarship and for the better. mobility is nothing less than the promise raised the funds needed to landscape the A powerful sense of optimism was of the American Dream, the glue of our then-bare Eagle Rock campus. equally palpable the day before ComThe generosity of a small group of Photo by Marc Campos mencement, when we launched the public our most generous donors has made it phase of The Oxy Campaign For Good— possible to launch the public phase of the College’s first comprehensive fundthe campaign with considerable momenraising effort in more than 20 years. tum. But now we need the help of all Spirits were lifted by the news that more alumni. All of us believe in the power than half of the Class of 2019 contributed and value of a liberal arts education to toward the senior class gift, which supchange lives and in this institution, ports student scholarships. Participation which has been built with alumni reamong graduating seniors has almost sources. The Oxy Campaign For Good doubled over the last four years, which can succeed only if new generations of shows just how much Oxy has meant to alumni take up the challenge. This is a them and confirms our belief that we call to arms on behalf of an institution have an exciting opportunity to build a that has given all of us so much—a call new culture of philanthropy. that has been met throughout Oxy’s 132Fundraising is central to that culture year history. While this is not the first and the success of this initiative. We call comprehensive campaign in College President Veitch speaks at the kickoff of the public phase it The Oxy Campaign For Good out of history, we need to broaden and deepen of The Oxy Campaign For Good on May 18. admiration for the good our alumni are our collective effort to sustain the instidoing in the world and because we want to democracy and the guarantor of our freetution that means so much to all of us. secure the future of Oxy—for good—so that dom. Without it, we are nowhere. Without Which leads me back to the Class of future generations of students can enjoy it, everything we care about falls apart.

2019 and its support for the senior class the same opportunities that benefitted the In addition to scholarships, The Oxy gift. Their firsthand experience over the Class of 2019. Our ambitious goal of $225 Campaign For Good offers many other last four years inspired 253 seniors to help million represents a threefold increase over opportunities to have a genuine impact, make that experience accessible to other the sum raised during Oxy’s last campaign whether that’s strengthening academic extalented students who in turn will join under President John Slaughter—more cellence through endowed professorships them in being a force for good in the world. money that the College has ever sought and support for undergraduate research, It’s a model we hope other classes will before. Access is the campaign’s No. 1 priinvesting in the modernization and renewal follow. I can’t think of a more powerful ority—represented by our goal of raising of our beautiful campus, or providing anendorsement of what we are trying to $100 million for student scholarships. nual support to underwrite the Oxy experiachieve—for Oxy, and for good.

For generations, Oxy has excelled at ence for current students. identifying and educating talent, acting as a To be able to continue this vital work, powerful engine of upward mobility. Steve we are seeking to build a culture of engageRountree ’71, the new chair of the Board of ment and stewardship, one that requires a Trustees, is a classic example: a first-generbroader community involvement and ation college student, the son of a used-car shared ownership of our goals. Oxy already 2

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FIRST WORD

» FROM THE READERS My Generation Thank you for your article “A Generation of Greats” (Spring). It took me on a trip down memory lane. When I started at Oxy in the fall of 1978, I had no idea what I wanted to study. But as a freshman in the Collegium, I soon got excited about a whole variety of subjects. When forced to finally choose a major in my junior year, I opted for biology (with a minor in philosophy). Although that path required a lot of science and math courses, along the way I managed to fit in two or three terrific philosophy courses with Marcia Homiak, a couple of key economics courses with Robby Moore, and, together with our former president, several captivating political science courses with the late Roger Boesche —whom I would include in that same cohort of young, inspiring faculty on campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It is funny how small moments stick with one over the years. In a Homiak course devoted entirely to the study of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, I recall students asking several times to move class out to the lawn on beautiful, warm spring days and Marcia explaining that one cannot do hard moral thinking sprawled out under the trees! That hard moral thinking has served me incredibly well over the years, both in practicing public interest environmental law and in teaching it at Stanford Law School for the last 22 years.

The ability to gain such a broad liberal arts education, from such bright and devoted faculty, is what really makes Oxy

shine. It is the reason my younger son chose to matriculate at Oxy last fall. Heading into his sophomore year, he is thinking of combining chemistry with urban and environmental policy, and he is involved as a jazz saxophone player in the music program. I only regret that he won’t be able to take courses from Professors Homiak, Moore, Newhall, and the others heading into retirement.

Deborah A. Sivas ’82 Palo Alto

I first noticed the young professor bounding up the steps of Thorne Hall in her crimson cap and gown. I would see her talking with students and faculty as she strolled the Quad. I was moved by her articulate and courageous advocacy for faculty benefits during an open community meeting.

Eventually, I enrolled in her class. Like a drop of dye in a pool of clear water, Marcia Homiak indelibly changed the atmosphere at Oxy. She had impact. She mattered. She would conscientiously take notes on every student during the first class, and subsequently engage personally and dynamically with each of us. The clarity of her response to one paper I wrote was more voluminous and insightful by far than my essay. I’ll always remember, with fondness and deep respect, her principled participation in the greater Oxy community, her attentiveness to what was essential, her apparent warmheartedness toward all. During my own graduate studies and career, it was often her voice, the memory of her comportment,

and the impact of her kindness, that gave me courage, sparked my curiosity, and inspired me to continued learning. Brava, Dr. Homiak. I hope you fully enjoy your well-earned retirement.

Leslie chatham ’78 San Rafael

A Swing and a Miss Editor’s note: Because of an editing error in the tribute to Homiak last issue, we should point out that the sixth game of the 1975 World Series was a 12-inning, Series-tying win by Boston over Cincinnati, not a Seriesclinching win by the Reds over the Red Sox. (The Reds took the Series in seven.)

House of Champions Your article “Team Building” (Spring) was excellent and the renovation of the Payton Jordan Athletic Offices is magnificent.

However, the article is remiss in not mentioning Tod White ’59, the visionary who created a matching gift program which made the renovation possible. Many of Tod’s teammates, classmates, friends, and others supported the effort because of Tod and to honor Payton Jordan, Oxy’s track and field coach in the 1940s and 1950s. Tod felt that naming the athletic offices was a proper tribute to the coach of so many fine athletes he developed and mentored during his tenure at Oxy. Hats off also to Armando Gonzales, the architect who contributed to the wonderful Myron Hunt building.

Loren Brodhead ’59 Arcadia

Photo courtesy the family of Frank Hardison ’39

From the Editor: Thanks, Frank I had the pleasure of spending a morning with Frank Hardison ’39 just weeks before his 102nd birthday in April. He welcomed me into his Emerald Bay home, sharing artifacts of his many golf triumphs and stories of his world travels with his late wife, Virginia “Duffer” McGary, whom he wed in 1945. The couple moved to Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach in 1967, where they built a 9,000-square-foot home with a magnificent view of the coastline. On the Fourth of July, he said, you can see the fireworks “all the way from Dana Point to Palos Verdes.” Frank did not live to see the fireworks this year, passing away July 2. The last time I spoke with him in June, he expressed his appreciation for the way the magazine story (“The World According to Frank,” Spring) had turned out, gently chiding me for neglecting to mention that he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oxy. Let the record show that Frank was a gentleman and a scholar. He will be missed by his Oxy family.—DIcK AnDErSOn SUMMER 2019

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FROM THE QUAD

far left: “You are graduating from an institution that—just like the city it calls home—embraces those who navigate borders to come here,” Mayor Garcetti told the Class of 2019. left: As always, a number of graduates used their mortarboards for messages. above: Cue the confetti.

‘Find Comfort in the Uncomfortable’ A little rain couldn’t stop the confetti—or Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti— as the Class of 2019 roared into the world on an unusually blustery day

Rain and wind failed to dampen the spirits of the Class of 2019 as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urged them to cross borders rather than build walls at Occidental’s atypically wet 137th Commencement ceremony in Remsen Bird Hillside Theater on May 19.

In moments of uncertainty, “it is easy for us as human beings to wall ourselves off, to retreat to something easier or more familiar,” Garcetti told the 456 graduates and a crowd of 3,800 parents and friends that packed Hillside, many clad in colorful ponchos. “But my core message to you today as graduates is to encourage you to cross borders, to find comfort in the uncomfortable.”

History shows that walls have inevitably failed—whether it was the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall in England, the Maginot Line in France, or the Berlin Wall, said Garcetti, who was elected to a second term in 2017. Yet walls and other physical barriers 4

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are on the increase—since 2015 Europe has seen more than 620 miles built, he noted.

These barriers are born out of fear—“the fear and anxiety born out of the globalization and technological advancement, fear that our jobs will be lost to automation, fear of a diverse workplace or neighborhood, or that to be part of an integrated economy means the surrender of our national identity,” he said.

“So some say the answer is building more walls. But today I say, the answer is the opposite. We need to cross borders. We need to cross borders today more than ever before,” the second-term mayor said to applause.

The problem extends beyond the erection of physical barriers to those boundaries we impose on our minds and our ways of thinking, cautioned Garcetti, whose first fulltime job was teaching for Oxy’s Diplomacy and World Affairs Department in the 19992000 academic year.

“I fear sometimes that today we are so determined to win at all costs that we see compromise as a betrayal … that we can’t acknowledge the legitimacy of someone else’s argument, that that’s seen as selling out. That zero-sum thinking has led to the decay of our moral and social vocabulary. We can’t find a common space on both sides of an issue, and instead we build barriers between us. If we do not commit to the courage of crossing those borders, we are left with close-mindedness and nothing else.”

Garcetti was one of four honorary degree recipients at the ceremony. Also receiving honorary degrees were longtime trustee John Power ’58, retired partner of the Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny & Myers; Lula Ballton, CEO emeritus of the West Angeles Community Development Corporation; and Lande Ajose ’87, senior policy adviser for higher education for California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

FROM THE QUAD

Photos by Marc Campos and Allen Li ’20

above left: Colorful ponchos blossomed in the audience as a consequence of the wet weather. above right: Amos Himmelstein, vice president and chief operating officer, second from right, with Amy Bell (economics, Memphis, Tenn.), Meike Buhaly (biology, Carnation, Wash.), and Clarasophia Gust (biology, Minneapolis). left: President Veitch with honorary doctorate recipients Lula Ballton, Lande Ajose ’87, John Power ’58, and Garcetti. below: Ovie Kabba (diplomacy and world affairs and Spanish studies, Jamaica, N.Y.) with her family.

right: Matthew LaBrie (economics, Alamo), Galen Maclennan (economics, Taos, N.M.), Mario Lemus (biochemistry, Silver Spring, Md.), Ryan Lee (biology, Portland, Ore.), and Aditya Kankipati (diplomacy and world affairs, Singapore). below: Isabelle McShane (urban and environmental policy, San Leandro), David Kim (biochemistry, Aurora, Colo.), Helen Jiang (psychology, San Francisco), Drake Song (computer science, Irvine), and Austin Lee (cognitive science and diplomacy and world affairs, Cypress).

above: Jeremy Leung (chemistry, Hong Kong) and his family are all smiles. left: Biology Professor Roberta Pollock and Diamond Coleman (biology, Chicago).

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FROM THE QUAD

» APPRECIATION Elliott spent countless hours outside the classroom and lab playing early music and folk dancing.

Schmiedeshoff had more than 20 years of consecutive research funding from the National Science Foundation.

Elliott photo courtesy Occidental College Special Collections | Schmiedeshoff photo by Marc Campos

Two Fixtures in Physics Professors Stuart Elliott and George Schmiedeshoff worked with nearly 60 years of students at Oxy

They may have never shared a lab space, but Stuart Elliott and George Schmiedeshoff worked with six decades of physics students at Occidental. Elliott, who retired in 1992 as professor of physics emeritus, died May 4 at age 91 in Palo Alto. Schmiedeshoff—who joined the Oxy physics faculty following Elliott’s retirement later that year—died July 16, just months after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March. He was 63.

A native of Oakland, Elliott joined the U.S. Navy after graduating from high school in 1944 and trained as a radio technician.

Hospitalized with rheumatic fever, he used the time to teach himself Russian. After his discharge, he enrolled at Stanford where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics and met his future wife, Lyn, at a folk dance.

In 1955, Elliott accepted a teaching position at Kenyon College in Ohio. Five years later, he completed his Ph.D. at Stanford and 6

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joined the Oxy faculty, where his college roommate, Al Hudson, was also teaching.

Elliott’s research focused on the holographic generation of contour fringes as a means of studying surfaces. In 1963, he published a paper titled Effects of Polishing Imperfections on Specular Reflections of X-Rays based on his graduate studies at Stanford. A two-time department chair, he translated numerous Russian scientific articles into English and served as scientific editor of the English edition of the Russian journal Optika i Spektroskopiya.

In addition to his academic career, Elliott enjoyed dancing with the Occidental Folk and Historical Dance Troupe. He played early music on recorder, viola de gamba, sackbut, and racket with a variety of orchestras and consorts in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Elliott is survived by his wife of 65 years, Lyn, brother Carter, son Steve, daughter Claire, four grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

An experimental condensed matter physicist, Schmiedeshoff earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaching at MIT, Tufts, and Bowdoin. He studied liquids and solids under extreme conditions, such as very low temperatures and high magnetic fields, to better understand new forms of magnetism and superconductivity. In connection with his research, Schmiedeshoff developed a miniature dilatometer—an instrument capable of measuring changes smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom in the thickness of materials —that is in use in national laboratories and universities around the world.

Of his more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, 15 had Oxy student co-authors, reflecting his active participation in the Summer Research Program. Schmiedeshoff regularly brought students to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in northern Florida to assist with his experiments. He also collaborated with scientists at Iowa State, Boston College, Caltech, Cambridge Pressure Cells, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Quantum Design, and UC San Diego. At Oxy he served multiple terms as department chair, taking particular pleasure in teaching Introductory Physics to premed students, and was a past chair of the Faculty Admission Committee. He is survived by his longtime partner, Ava Megna, and her family.

FROM THE QUAD

» MIXED MEDIA At the Narrow Waist of the World: A Memoir, by Marlena Maduro Baraf ’67 (She Writes Press). Raised by a lively family of Spanish Jews in Catholic Panama in the 1950s and 1960s, Baraf depends on her many tíos and tías for refuge from the difficulties of life, including the frequent absences of her troubled mother.

As a teenager, she pulls away from the world she knows, leaving for the United States to discover who she will be. Baraf ’s coming-ofage memoir explores the intense and profound relationship between mothers and daughters and highlights the importance of community and the beauty of a large Latin American family. It also explores the vital issues of mental illness and healing, forgiveness, and acceptance. At the Narrow Waist of the World examines the author’s gradual integration into a new culture, even as she understands that her home is still—and always will be— rooted in another place.

George Humphrey, Charles Wilson, and Eisenhower’s War on Spending, by James Worthen ’64 (McFarland). President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953 with only a vague domestic agenda, and he needed help in making both economic and defense policy.

His choice as Treasury Secretary, Ohio tycoon George Humphrey, became one of history’s most influential Cabinet members, leading a budget-slashing campaign that made the Eisenhower administration known for its frugality. Worthen traces Humphrey’s rise from corporate chief to the national stage and examines his strained relations with Defense Secretary and fellow businessman Charles Wilson, who tried in vain to protect the military budget.

Ike’s obsession with spending contributed to a perception that his administration was overly passive in the face of challenges both at home and abroad.

Among the consequences were heavy Repub-

lican losses in the 1958 midterm elections and Richard Nixon’s loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Since retiring from the CIA, Worthen has written three books focusing on the impact of personality on political behavior. He lives in Pismo Beach.

Hometown Hamburg: Artisans and the Political Struggle for Social Order in the Weimar Republic, by Frank Domurad ’67 (Anthem Press). Through the study of Hamburg handicraft in the late Weimar Republic, Hometown Hamburg addresses three intertwined problems in modern German history: the role of institutionalized social, political, and cultural continuity versus contingency in the course of modern German development; the impact of conflicting notions of social order on the survival of liberal democracy; and the role of corporate politics in the rise of National Socialism. It provides a theoretical and analytical framework for reintroducing the notion of historical continuity in the study of modern German history. Hometown Hamburg also supports recent challenges to the notion of Hamburg as a liberal economic and political bastion in a nation of conservative and authoritarian governmental regimes.

It also demonstrates why “liberal” and “socialist” Hamburg remained a hotbed of corporate radicalism and underscores the fact that National Socialism was the only political party that presented a coherent vision of a corporate “good society,” making it attractive to voters across the entire social spectrum.

Domurad is an independent scholar in modern German history. He lives in Portland, Ore.

Major Harold Ferguson: Citizen-Soldier Meets Roaring 20s Los Angeles, by Edmond J. Clinton ’68 (Xlibris). Ferguson was a Stanford-educated lawyer and member of the U.S. National Guard returning from service in World War I to his home in Los Angeles, a city growing into a thriving metropolis. But his entry into the real estate business came at a time when the City of Angels was struggling to accommodate all the new immigrants who saw L.A. as a Mediterranean paradise. Working with the diary and papers of his wife’s great uncle, Clinton reconstructs the challenges of opportunities and obstacles that Ferguson faced in a decade sandwiched between the Great War and the Great Depression. A retired physician, Clinton lives with his wife, Diane (Grossman) ’68, in La Cañada Flintridge.

Briefly noted: Two Occidental faculty won Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards for their work on the 2018 TV documentary That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles. The Emmys are the first for composer Adam Schoenberg, assistant professor of music, and the second for director and executive producer Christopher Hawthorne, professor of practice. The documentary is available for streaming at kcet.org.

Trinkets (streaming on Netflix) is adapted from the 2013 YA novel by screenwriter Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith ’91 (Legally Blonde, Ten Things I Hate About You). Set in Portland, Ore., the series follows the story of a grieving teen (Brianna Hildebrand, center), who finds an unexpected connection with two classmates at her new high school after they all land in the same Shoplifters Anonymous group. Trinkets will return for a second and final season in 2020.

Photo by Allyson Riggs/Netflix

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Good

and Ready

Dozens of Oxy volunteers—including alumni, parents, trustees, and friends of the College— gathered with faculty, staff, and administrators for a daylong leadership summit that kicked off the public phase of the campaign May 18.

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With a goal of $225 million, The Oxy Campaign For Good aims to build on the College’s location, curricular strengths, and the power of a liberal arts education. But its success will be measured by both endowment and engagement

By DIC K A N DE R SO N

ALWAYS TeLL peOpLe THAT going to Oxy was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life,” Rosny Daniel ’09 says. “It’s just a unique place—I’m sure everybody says that—but my rugby coach [Malek Moazzam-Doulat ’92] was also my Intro to Islam professor.

When I asked him to write me a recommendation for medical school, it was not hard for him to have specific things to say about me.

“I love the smallness of Oxy,” adds Daniel, who majored in biochemistry (with a minor in religious studies) and got his introduction to campus through the Multicultural Summer Institute. “I love the feeling of community within the student body. You’d see people in the Quad, or on the weekend, or at the library. You’d play sports with them and do the cancer walk with them. I can’t even begin to stress the importance of MSI and how it was very formative in my thinking about social and cultural issues. I’ve made a lot of my career out of that.”

As a full-time faculty member in the UCSF Department of emergency Medicine, Daniel splits his time between the classroom and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. In addition to recruiting and mentoring medical school students from all backgrounds, “I’m hoping to continue teaching at the national level and to be involved in changing the conversation around social health,” he says. “This work is important and meaningful, and I just have fun doing it. My goal is always to call people in and not call people out. My Oxy experience set me up to do these things.”

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| Photos by M ARC CAMP OS

Daniel’s story is one of many—too many to count, really—that embody the boundless potential for good that begins with a liberal arts education. Consider Janette Sadik-Khan ’82, who as transportation commissioner for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg utilized her ability to “translate dreams into action”—a skillset she developed as a political science major. “That’s what I learned at Occidental and that’s what I was so proud to deliver on the streets of New York City.”

Or Joe Rohde ’77, the veteran Disney Imagineer who considers his chief successes (including Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida and Aulani hotel in Hawai‘i) a byproduct of his liberal arts education. “I came to this job with no other aptitudes,” says Rohde, who majored in art at Oxy. “I am not the best model builder, illustrator, or set designer. I have this other aptitude, which is this critical thinking, the ability to investigate and negotiate. That strength comes from Oxy.” Or Andrew Heath ’04, chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Bombas, which donates to a homeless shelter one pair of socks for every pair it sells—totaling nearly 20 million pairs to date. Whether it was cleaning up the L.A. River, tutoring underprivileged students, or getting out the vote, “It seemed as though almost everyone at Oxy had some philanthropic thing that they were doing,” says Heath, who majored in economics. “There are many other alumni from my class and others who do a lot of good.”

“I have always believed in the power of a liberal arts education to change lives, and summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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Photo by Jim Block

“We’re on the front line for everybody,” Rosny Daniel ’09 says of his work at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

“We advocate for a lot of our patients in terms of giving them the best care possible.”

that’s what Oxy does better than anyone,” says president Jonathan Veitch. The unifying idea of the College’s four cornerstones— excellence, equity, community, and service— is the desire to make the world a better place and equip Oxy graduates for their vital role as citizens of a democracy.

That idea is the foundation of The Oxy Campaign For Good, the most ambitious fundraising initiative in College history and Oxy’s first comprehensive campaign in nearly a quarter-century. With a $225 million goal, the endowment-driven campaign “aims to bring our community together to invest in Occidental’s future and expand our ability to do what we do best—identifying and educating talent wherever we find it,” Veitch says.

Since the quiet phase of the campaign began in July 2016, Occidental has raised 10

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more than $123 million in commitments, including $55 million in planned gifts. Its overall priorities fall into four categories: For Access: $100 million. More than seven out of 10 Oxy students receive some form of financial aid, which totaled a record $49.4 million in the 2018-19 fiscal year. Growing the endowment for financial aid—the campaign’s top priority—will give Occidental the flexibility to continue to provide gifted and diverse students access to an Oxy liberal arts education regardless of their circumstances.

For Distinction: $50 million. New endowed professorships will make it possible for Oxy to attract top talent and reward outstanding faculty. The College also has plans to expand the footprint of its media arts and culture and music majors—building on Los Angeles’ role as a global creative epicenter.

For Campus: $40 million. The Beaux Arts charm of the Occidental campus reflects the vision of Myron Hunt, the pasadena architect who created its original master plan and designed every building erected on campus for 30 years. The average age of Oxy’s 80 buildings is 63 years old—and a long-standing commitment to asset renewal will ensure that the College’s most cherished structures are preserved and reimagined to meet the demands of an evolving curriculum.

For Today: $35 million. Unrestricted giving underwrites every aspect of the Oxy experience for current students and provides budget relief for the College’s daily operations.

Oxy Fund dollars support scholarships, growing technology demands, faculty and student research, and extracurricular experiences— from internships and athletics to community engagement and Dance production.

The campaign’s priorities were formulated after lengthy consultations with alumni, faculty, students, parents, and staff, including the 21 alumni and parents who served on the College’s Student Access and Opportunity Task Force, co-chaired by trustees Rick Rugani ’75 and eileen Brown ’73.

Financial aid made it possible for Rugani and his siblings—older brother Frank ’70 and younger sister Maria ’78—to get an Oxy education. “There’s no way our family would have been able to finance all the kids going to college,” he says. For Brown, 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.

“Without having a strong endowment here at Oxy, we can’t attract professors, we can’t attract students for the long term, we can’t pay for financial aid, and we can’t pay for the campus itself,” adds trustee and task force member Bonnie Mills ’81, who spoke at the kickoff for the public phase of the campaign May 18—the culminating event of a daylong Campaign Leadership Summit on the Oxy campus (page 14). “College is so expensive now that all of us need to support the next generation in whatever way we can.”

Rebecca Kemp ’04 was just beginning her sophomore year when the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. “Because she had grown up in suburban New York, I think it hit closer to home than it would have if she’d grown up in Missouri,” recalls her father, Gil Kemp, an Oxy trustee since 2015. “She ended up coming home and took the semester off, and Oxy was very supportive in that process.” Rebecca returned to Oxy the following semester and graduated with a B.A. in history. Now a full-time mother of four, she lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and does volunteer work for orphans, “of which there are sadly a great many,” Kemp says.

“It’s a tribute to Oxy as an institution that they care deeply about each individual student,” adds Kemp, who is co-chairing the campaign with financial adviser and trustee Anne Wilson Cannon ’74, real estate investor and adviser William M. Kahane ’70, and trustee emeritus Ian McKinnon ’89, founding partner of Sandia Holdings.

A longtime proponent of the liberal arts, Kemp graduated from Swarthmore College in 1972 and founded Home Decorators Collection in 1990, growing it into one of the nation’s leading direct sellers of home furnishings and accessories. He retired as president in 2009, some three years after its acquisition by Home Depot.

Kemp has endowed a number of “modest scholarships” at Occidental since Rebecca’s graduation. “It’s a very fulfilling way to support an institution and have a sense of connection with students,” he explains. “It’s always a pleasure to meet them and see how terrific they are.”

While endowed scholarships such as Kemp’s currently make up almost half of Oxy’s endowment, generating more than $9 million annually, that accounts for less than 19 percent of the overall financial aid budget.

The rest comes directly from the College’s operating budget.

“Occidental is able to attract bright students from all walks of life, including those students who might not be able to pay the freight,” says Kahane, who with wife elizabeth endowed the College’s United Nations program in 2014. “They need some form of subsidy, and that’s what an endowed scholarship program provides.”

As part of the campaign’s $100 million For Access initiative, the College launched the Barack Obama Scholars program last fall,

raising more than $12 million to date in the son, who won both an Oscar and a Grammy interest of empowering the next generation for his Black Panther score and produced of leaders to actively pursue the public good. Childish Gambino’s Grammy-winning “This The College will welcome its third and Is America.” “These are the kinds of opporfourth Obama Scholars with the incoming tunities you get by virtue of being in Los Angeles,” Kasunic says.

Class of 2023.

In recent years the music program has “The Obama Scholars program is an incredible opportunity for people from all kinds seen an uptick in majors, with 32 students of backgrounds to enjoy an Oxy education without having to worry about financial aid or affordability, and to actually have people who are deeply commit$100 Million ted to making change in the For Access world today, to leaving the world Endowment in a better place than they found it,” says Sadik-Khan. “It’s really for scholarships, inspiring to see the passion, eninternships, ergy, and integrity they bring to and research the table and so I’m even more excited to see where they go from here.”

After Associate Professor of Music David Kasunic was named department chair in July 2014, he says, “There was a collective will among the faculty to have the curriculum look more like what students may want to take and connect more to the industry”— to offer coursework in such areas as music production, music business, and songwriting “in the context of a liberal arts education as a critical argument-based enterprise.”

To that end, the Dean of the College’s Office approved the creation of a full-time teaching position in music production.

And musician and philosophy major Ramona Gonzalez ’09, who performs under the name Nite Jewel, will be returning next spring as the Johnston-Fix professor of the practice in Songwriting. (She won raves from students last semester, according to Kasunic: “Ramona is rigorous, smart, creative, stimulating, and completely engaging.”)

Additional funding from the Mellon Foundation has brought to campus top industry professionals such as Ludwig Görans-

$40 Million For Campus Investments in modernization and beautification of campus

$50 Million For Distinction Endowment for professorships and academic programs

$35 Million For Today Annual support to underwrite the ongoing Oxy experience

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Oxy faculty and students discuss their research in biology, chemistry, computer science, and physics with campaign volunteers during the Campaign Leadership Summit.

currently enrolled (including 11 members of the Class of 2020—more than double the number of graduates in 2019). Over the summer, the department’s music library was moved to the Academic Commons to make room for a new music production space designed by architect peter Grueneisen, whose firm has designed soundstages for Sony and DreamWorks Animation as well as for Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer (The Lion King).

On the drawing boards is a new or revamped building that would bring the music and media arts and culture (MAC) programs adjacent to Booth Hall. “We are trying to deliver a 21st-century curriculum in mid-20thcentury facilities,” Kasunic says. “We believe this will be a game changer—not just for the departments but for the entire College.”

“In a city that’s full of trade schools and large university programs that are geared to placing people directly into an industry, I think the liberal arts context steps out and stands out because of the social questions that our students are asking,” says Broderick Fox, professor and chair of the Media Arts & Culture Department.

“Not only are we professionalizing students technically but we’re giving them the critical skepticism, the local/global perspectives, the interdisciplinary opportunities, and a set of driving questions with which they can approach these increasingly complex and daunting—but also exciting—possibilities of this moment we’re in,” Fox adds.

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While Oxy has neither the resources nor the aspirations to develop a film school in the vein of USC or UCLA, “We’re uniquely positioned to cultivate creativity,” says Charlie Cardillo, vice president of institutional advancement (page 17). “A media arts and culture program anchored in the liberal arts can be unlike any other program anywhere else.”

On the opposite side of campus, the most pressing construction need is Norris Hall of Chemistry. Built in 1960 and partially renovated in 1990, it’s a prime candidate for renovation to meet the needs of an ambitious, hands-on teaching and research program.

A member of the Occidental faculty since 1982, Chemistry professor Chris Craney was involved in the last renovation of the building, concurrent with the construction of the Bioscience Building. “While we substantially advanced the conditions for our chemistry instruction by building really wonderful organic chemistry labs, we focused on the highest-need areas and didn’t do much in terms of the general chemistry labs,” he says. “It was clearly intended to be a stop-gap measure.”

Nearly 30 years later, many students arrive at Oxy having studied high school chemistry in facilities far more advanced than the College’s. And while Craney acknowledges that fact, the more vital case for investing in the chemistry building is that roughly one-quarter of all students take a chemistry class during their four years at Oxy. “All those kids are doing labs, and right now they’re all squeezed

into a really small, constrained space, which is frankly inadequate,” he says. “We need more space for our instructional labs, for student research opportunities, and for instrumentation and equipment.”

Issues such as climate change, energy consumption, food production, and human disease pose “really major important questions,” Craney continues, “and chemistry and biochemistry are going to play an important role in preparing students to address those questions—not just address them by recognizing them but actually make positive contributions toward solving some of these challenges. But we can only do that if we have the facilities that allow us to carry out our teaching and research but also prepare the students to understand these problems in more than a superficial level.

“Oxy has traditionally punched way above its weight class in the sciences,” Craney says.

“We have an investment in the faculty members who are here that can only be unlocked if we provide the resources, facilities, and opportunities for them to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with the next generation.”

A multiyear renovation of Norris Chemistry is high on the list of Oxy’s construction priorities, according to Tom polansky, the College’s associate vice president of facilities management. He and his team have begun planning meetings with two architectural firms and chemistry faculty to address laboratory space and other technical concerns.

“The actual timeline for construction will depend on funding,” he adds—which highlights the challenges of keeping up with deferred maintenance with limited resources.

In January 2018, an outside engineering firm did a top-to-bottom inspection of the campus and created a database of over 3,000 individual building elements—every pump, motor, boiler, roof, window, and door lock— to determine the estimated useful life of each component. Oxy’s facilities team spent months going through the list line by line, sorting and prioritizing projects into multiple categories by greatest need.

“What we need is significant funding to make a dent in this list,” polansky says, noting that Occidental addressed $2 million in

Compass Rose, an exhibition by Highland Park artist Debra Scacco (left and below, with Oxy Arts director Meldia Yesayan), utilizes oral histories in tandem with the historic Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas to create a map built from the stories contributed by residents of Northeast Los Angeles.

Photos courtesy Oxy Arts

asset renewal needs last year. “When you think about the small liberal arts college experience, we have to leverage our advantages, and one of our best advantages is our iconic campus.”

Oxy’s chief calling card aesthetically is its collection of 19 Myron Hunt-designed buildings—the most in any one location by the famed Beaux Arts architect. “It’s a distinct competitive advantage to have those buildings, as they impact the learning experience in so many ways. In addition, the outdoor spaces they frame create opportunities for interactions that affect the quality of living and learning on campus,” polansky says.

In harmony with Hunt’s legacy, the College engaged pasadena architect and urban planner Stefanos polyzoides, who curated a 1984 exhibition of Hunt’s work, to design the De Mandel Aquatics Center, which will be dedicated October 18 during Homecoming & Family Weekend. The state-of-the-art pool “embodies the spirit of Myron Hunt—it looks distinctly Occidental,” polansky says. “We’re creating places for experiences that students will remember for a lifetime.”

The De Mandel Aquatics Center and expanded McKinnon Family Tennis Center are among the most visible outcomes of The Oxy Campaign For Good. The new facilities are just a javelin’s throw away from the payton Jordan Athletic Center, which was refurbished and reopened this spring through the vision and generosity of Linda and Tod White ’59, whose matching gift challenge helped pay for the project.

The Whites’ philanthropy didn’t stop there, however. Their support also helped secure a new home for Oxy Arts, the College’s multidisciplinary arts programming initiative—one that deepens the College’s relationship with Northeast Los Angeles.

In January 2018, Meldia Yesayan took the job as director of Oxy Arts “because I wanted to be part of a larger institution that believed in the power of the arts and culture to bring people together and invested in that as a core part of their mission,” she says. At the time Oxy Arts was housed in Booth Hall, in a 5-by8-foot space that had been the harp closet.

Since its creation in 2014, Oxy Arts had functioned as an itinerant initiative. “We programmed wherever we could find space,” Yesayan says, “sometimes in the community but often around campus.” That’s all changed with the May 22 opening of the Oxy Arts building at 4757 York Boulevard, in a building purchased by the College in 2015.

For its opening exhibit, NELA Stories, “We offered a historical and collaborative program that incorporated 32 voices and a local artist with various departments on campus and 31 Oxy students,” Yesayan says. The reception among community members has been overwhelmingly positive: “What we’ve heard is, ‘I see myself and I see my story in this space and I feel welcome here.’”

Another project nearing completion is the Anderson Center for environmental Sciences, whose DNA can be traced back to the arrival of John McCormack, associate professor of biology, as curator of the Moore Lab of Zoology. “The first draft of the design for

the new Moore Lab was me sitting down with powerpoint, maybe a year after I got here, sketching out what I thought would be a better way to plan the space,” says McCormack, whose current research project (funded by a five-year National Science Foundation grant of $787,000) examines how human-caused habitat change has affected birds across North America.

The arrival of the Cosman Shell Collection in 2015, coupled with the existing bird and fish collections, “made it clear that what we were doing with our biological collections and using them to answer interesting questions and involving students in them was bigger than just one professor’s lab,” he adds.

If Oxy is to build environmental sciences into a signature program of the College— “which is the hope,” McCormack says—a new building is just the foundation. “I think the door is open for something that’s like the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs. Not only did they get a beautiful new space but they got an endowment to fund things like research and a speaker series and a chair. Those are the pieces we currently don’t have.”

What will Occidental look like academically after the campaign? Since her arrival as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College in July 2017, Wendy Sternberg has been working with Oxy faculty on updating the academic components of the College’s summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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1. Tuan Ngo ’07 and Maurine Halperin P’16 shared the stage inside Gresham Dining Hall during the public launch of the campaign May 18.

2. Although Oxy was the last school he applied to, “I had no clue that it would become the best decision I had made,” said Jordan Walker ’21. 3. “We have a lot to do moving forward in terms of building the resources that the College needs,” Dave Anderson ’63 said in his closing remarks. 4. Barack Obama Scholars Advisory Council members Hector De La Torre ’89, left, and Bob Johnson ’77 catch up during a campaign reception on Branca Patio. 5. Gloria Duffy ’75 reads alumni stories about their favorite professor or mentor at Oxy.

For the Good of Occidental The comprehensive campaign marks a major step forward to ensure Oxy’s sustainability The Oxy Campaign For Good—which you’ll be hearing a lot about over the next few years—can be interpreted a number of ways. “‘For Good’ can mean what is right, what is appropriate, what should be,” said trustee Dave Anderson ’63, who provided the lead gift for the Anderson Center for Environmental Sciences currently under construction. “But ‘For Good’ also means permanent—for good. This campaign is a major step forward into making Oxy a sustainable institution for the future. And it’s critically important that we all come together and make that happen.”

Anderson’s remarks capped the daylong Campaign Leadership Summit at Occidental on May 18—a day that began with a session on storytelling led by communications expert Andy Goodman in which participants were asked to tell their own Oxy story in a two-minute narrative (page 17). An Oxy education “changes your life—it certainly changed mine,” said Anderson, who enrolled at Occidental two months after his mother died following a long battle with cancer.

“She had been incredibly strong in her belief in wanting to continue to live. And she essentially

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lived until I graduated from high school. And so I arrived on the Oxy campus, very lost and very much not knowing where I was going or what I was going to encounter here. Would this be a positive experience? Would I even last?

“And I remember one of my first courses was an English literature writing course—one of those 101-required courses that Oxy had in those days.

And we had our first writing requirement a month or two into the class.”

When Anderson got his paper back, “it had a C-minus. … What do you do with a C-minus?”

He started talking to his professor, who became one of his mentors at the College, “and I later found out that he gave everyone a C-minus on that exam. That was his introduction to Oxy.” Other speakers at the launch of the public phase of the campaign included trustee Maureen Halperin, mother of Sara Ruth Halperin ’16. She recalled how her daughter, a critical theory and social justice major, landed multiple internships in the music industry—most notably a yearlong internship with Ian Montone ’89 at his management company, Monotone. “Occidental supported my daughter to translate her education into real-world work experience. The Hameetman Career Center is essential to students like Sara Ruth precisely because it helps provide those connections and resources.”

Halperin added that her family makes Occidental a philanthropic priority “so other students can access opportunities similar to those of my daughter and to many of you—opportunities that Oxy graduates can in turn carry forward as they go out into the world and flourish.”

She was joined on stage by Occidental Board of Governors President-elect Tuan Ngo ’07, who was born in Vietnam “to parents who had at most an elementary school education and they had parents who were farmers. Growing up in America,” he told the gathering, “I held tight to

our collective dream that education will lift us from despair and put us on a path to a better life.

“Obtaining a prestigious liberal arts education for those without means is often an illusory dream, because the cost of providing a quality education put it out of reach for many families like mine,” added Ngo, who majored in diplomacy and world affairs. “Oxy believed in me and invested in my future.”

“Though Oxy has many idiosyncrasies, I think our most unique is the culture of care, our tendency to reach out,” said Jordan Walker ’21, an economics major from Jamaica, N.Y. “I know that someone on campus always has my back … from Jenny in the Marketplace telling me to eat, to Georgina in Facilities, who always gives the warmest smile every morning before class.”

To be an Oxy student “is to be capable of amazing things like undergraduate research, studying abroad, and investment management,” added Walker, who is currently president of the Blyth Fund as well as ASOC vice president of finance. “It drives Oxy’s uniqueness amongst other liberal arts schools and pushes me to take advantage of all that Oxy has to offer.”

In his remarks, President Jonathan Veitch called upward mobility “nothing less than the promise of the American Dream. It is the invitation our country holds out to its most talented young people, no matter what their circumstances —an invitation that says to them that you will have the opportunity to go as far as your talents will take you. Upward mobility is the glue of our democracy and the guarantor of our freedom.”

He concluded: “I believe in the power and value of a liberal arts education to change lives. I believe in this community, in this institution, your alma mater. That’s why this campaign is so important. I think it’s worth investing in, don’t you? Thank you for your commitment to helping move Occidental forward—for good.”

left: Wendy Sternberg, vice president for academic planning and dean of the College, rocks the orange and black at Oxy’s upper soccer field during the Campaign Leadership Summit on May 18. below: Architect Myron Hunt, President Remsen Bird, and Sarah Lindsey of the Class of 1923 break ground on the Mary Norton Clapp Library on March 2, 1923.

strategic plan. “We’re not proposing any radical changes to the curriculum, but we want each of our programs to think about how they can best realize the goals that we have stated are our priorities for the academic program: close one-on-one work between students and faculty, incorporation of more research into the curriculum, and connection with the community outside the campus,” she says.

“You can see those things taking shape across the liberal arts discipline.”

From critical theory and social justice to diplomacy and world affairs to urban and environmental policy, “Our faculty have really done an outstanding job over the years in crafting a curriculum that makes sense for who we are as an institution,” Sternberg says.

“Oxy really gives our students an opportunity for focused study in disciplines that are grounded in the liberal arts, but that have a particular focus and flavor to them that you don’t get at other institutions. The campaign will have a direct impact on how these programs thrive.”

The durability of the liberal arts model is matched by the flexibility among traditional disciplines to adapt to the changing needs of not only the workplace but the student body. economics—the College’s most popular major for more than two decades—is wellpositioned to weather generational change

in its professorial ranks, but endowing additional positions will enable the College to recruit and retain the next wave of dynamic faculty and reaffirm the department’s outstanding reputation.

“Ultimately, we’re a liberal arts institution,” Sternberg adds. “We’re not going to become a media school or music production institute. We will always teach the broad range of the academic disciplines—the languages, the humanities, the social and natural sciences. But if we are not evolving our curriculum we’re not providing the kinds of experiences our students are expecting.”

The Oxy Campaign For Good, she says, is “really about advancing those kinds of curricular initiatives that have a special place here at Oxy, as well as some new academic programs that have arisen from these interdisciplinary spaces. One is Black studies, which we are committed to supporting. Our computer science program has just taken off, and our media arts and culture program has exponentially grown. And the new music production path in the music major is both about creative inquiry in the arts and about students creating. That’s part of the one-onone work—the original productions that students do across the disciplines as well as various kinds of research and creative and scholarly endeavors.”

Photo courtesy Occidental College Special Collections

“The liberal arts model has absolutely thrived in the United States—nobody else does this, and Oxy is the embodiment of that ideal,” says trustee Chip Blacker ’72, professor emeritus of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and co-chair (with Sternberg) of the presidential search committee to find Veitch’s successor. “And it means learning critically, up close and personal, with people who are devoted to teaching and mentoring. But I don’t think even people who are generally pretty thoughtful about their college experience understand how precious—and how vulnerable—this model is. summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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Photo by Kevin Burke

“Plenty of higher education institutions are preparing young people to be technically prepared in various fields,” says campaign co-chair Anne Wilson Cannon ’74. “We produce critical thinkers and problem solvers.

It doesn’t matter what the issue is— Oxy grads have the tools to go at it.”

“Higher education in America is expensive,” he continues, “and there are ways that those costs are made manageable by families that otherwise would not have the means to attend a place like Oxy.” Most of these institutions survive through a combination of dedication on the part of faculty and administrators “who understand the preciousness of this educational experiment,” and the willingness of alumni “to turn our attention back toward those institutions … and to do what we can to ensure their futures.”

From undergraduate research and study abroad to the Kahane U.N. program in New York City and Campaign Semester, “The opportunities at Oxy cannot be matched at a larger institution,” says campaign co-chair Anne Wilson Cannon ’74. “A lot of what we do here requires some extra funds. putting on an education like this is very expensive and not everybody can afford the full freight.”

By her reckoning, Cannon has given to Occidental every year since 1976, when she graduated from the Wharton School at the University of pennsylvania. “At first it was a sense that I should give back. My parents explained to me that although they were paying the full room and board for me to attend Oxy, that was not the full cost. That’s because other people who had preceded me had given to the College through the endowment and their annual gifts—and that helped 16

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fill the gap between what parents were being asked to pay and the full cost of my education.”

It was with a feeling of duty, then, that she initially gave to Occidental—“to make up for a gift had been given to me. But as the years progressed, I found myself approaching my annual gifts as, ‘I’m paying it forward. I’m helping current students get the education I’d been blessed with.’

“Oxy has been in my estate plans for many years and I never told the College about it because there was no reason to tell them —it was just my thing,” she explains. Cannon revealed her gift as a show of support for the campaign: “I’m one of Oxy’s biggest fans,” she admits, “and you feel good about giving when it’s going for a good cause.”

“Once the campaign was announced, I felt that it was important to be part of it,” says trustee Gloria Duffy ’75, president and CeO of the San Francisco-based Commonwealth Club, the largest and oldest public affairs forum in the United States. “I’ll try to do as much as I can while I’m alive, but I have made a $5 million legacy gift to Occidental, and I’ll do whatever I can to add to that.”

In addition to laying the foundation for her life’s work, she says, “Oxy invigorated me intellectually and gave me even more of a sense of social mission than I had when I came. It’s extremely important to nurture that.” Working with Brice Harris, professor of history, she developed an independent course of study to look at the potential for transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia).

“That was the type of support I received at Oxy,” Duffy adds. “It’s a place where young people can become aware of the needs in society and gain the knowledge and analytical capability to contribute in a positive way. It’s important for me that my legacy gift go to the endowment because I want Occidental to have the income and resources of an endowment large enough to fund its needs.”

While planned gifts such as Cannon’s and Duffy’s will pay enormous dividends to Occidental in the long run, the annual support of thousands of alumni through the Oxy Fund is essential to sustain the momentum the College has enjoyed under Veitch. In fiscal year 2018-19, Oxy raised $4.7 million in current unrestricted gifts, even as overall alumni participation continues to be an area for muchneeded improvement. perhaps some alumni will follow the example of Jill Normington ’94, who observed her milestone 25th reunion by making her first trip to campus in more than 20 years and by increasing her Oxy Fund gift to $2,500— $100 for each year since graduation.

When she got her initial financial aid offer from Oxy, “It wasn’t great,” Normington recalls. But when Youlanda Copeland Morgan, the College’s director of financial aid, learned of her situation, she spent hours with Normington on the phone, rerunning the numbers and sending her a revised financial aid package “that was tons better,” Normington says —and that made all the difference in being able to afford Oxy. “I can’t say enough good things about how amazing the staff was. every person I worked with in the Business Office could not have been nicer to me over the four years I was at Oxy.” A partner at Normington, petts & Associates—the political consulting firm in Washington, D.C., that she co-founded in 1999 —Normington majored in psychology at Oxy and uses those lessons in her polling “every single day,” she says. “professor elmer Griffin taught us how to use clinical psychology in a very directed applied setting. We published papers. We presented research at conferences. My Oxy experience was foundational in developing me into the person that I am.”

Which brings us all the way back to Rosny Daniel, who worked as a TeleFund caller on campus and still knows the drill a full decade after graduation. “I was very good at getting hung up on 30 times but getting one person to talk to me, so I know the feeling,” he says.

“My favorite thing to do when I’m talking to TeleFund callers is to ask them the standard questions that they are taught how to answer in their training.” Then he tells them that he’s joking and that he’s going to make a gift.

“Oxy gave me so many different opportunities,” Daniel adds. “I always try to give back.” And that’s a good place to end.

Stakeholders & Storytellers Can the College ingrain a culture of philanthropy and stewardship? Oxy’s chief fundraiser believes so At the outset of Oxy’s $65 million Compass for a New Century campaign in 1992, tuition and fees totaled $19,895 and the endowment for the College stood at $141 million. During the 2017-18 academic year, the cost of tuition and fees was $70,182, and the endowment (as of June 30, 2018) was $434.2 million.

In an era when where the cost of attending Oxy is outstripping the growth of the endowment, building the endowment for financial aid is at the forefront of The Oxy Campaign For Good.

That’s a shift in focus from previous campaigns dating back to the 1960s, where renovation or construction was the top priority. But that’s not the only twist to Occidental’s first comprehensive campaign since John Brooks Slaughter was president. The College wants more than your money. We want to engage you.

“There’s a difference between a history of philanthropy at an institution and a culture of philanthropy,” explains Charlie Cardillo, Oxy’s vice president for institutional advancement.

“A culture of philanthropy requires a broader community involvement in a shared ownership of our goals. We consider our broader volunteer community, and others who wish to join us, as stakeholders in the future of the College. It’s a culture of stewardship: ‘This is our place, and we have a shared accountability for its success.’

“Philanthropy is the love of humanity, and it takes many forms,” he continues. “It’s devoting your time and energies to really getting to know the College, sharing that message with your peers, and providing an ear to those who may have some misgivings or misunderstandings about Oxy. You can help clear those up so that people understand the value of its mission.”

Cardillo looks at Oxy as “a house full of individual stories that all connect into a special, shared experience that people have had across the generations because of the unique environment in which this education has been offered.”

And to bring that message home to Oxy’s volunteer leadership, he enlisted the aid of professional communicator Andy Goodman—yes, that’s his real name—who launched his business in 1998 with a singular mission: “to help good causes reach more people with more impact.”

During a morning session titled The Power of Public Narrative, Goodman worked with Oxy’s volunteer leadership and Cardillo’s Institutional Advancement team with the goal of telling their Oxy story in two minutes. The results, Cardillo says, were inspiring: “People uncovered the power of story and in a number of cases uncovered the power of their own stories.”

Charles McClintock ’68, past president of the Alumni Board of Governors, “shared a really powerful story of a young boy whose experience with the concept of racism led to a lifelong commitment to working to understand it and to hopefully defeat it. And he is emblematic of what this community possesses,” Cardillo says. “When Charles got up and told his story in two minutes, it was beautiful. It had imagery and I think people got the idea that a story relates a challenge you faced, a choice you made, and an outcome. It’s not, ‘Oxy was a formative time in my life and now I want to give back.’ ” Over the course of The Oxy Campaign For Good, Cardillo hopes that giving back will take the form of more than just financial support: working with the Hameetman Career Center to identify internship opportunities, for instance, or conducting an informational interview with a prospective student for the Admission Office.

“Any way in which your time, talent, or treasure is informing the student experience, that’s philanthropy,” he says. “That’s leadership. Even if you’re just willing to come back to events and engage with your fellow alums, that conveys the message that there’s something going on here.”

A firm believer in the power of narrative is filmmaker Jesus Treviño ’68. “Every human being is at heart a storyteller,” he says, and Occidental “is an ideal petri dish for nurturing storytelling.

You can be a scientist and tell stories when you make a discovery, you can be an artist and tell a story in a painting, or a composition that you’ve written, or a piece that you’ve performed.

“The fundamental goal of all storytelling is make a better world,” he continues. “We live in a complex world full of strife, misunderstandings, bigotry, and hatred. … If we’re ever to get beyond that, it’s going to be the storytellers that help guide us.”

above left: Andy Goodman, author of Storytelling as Best Practice, trains campaign leaders on the power of public narrative. above right: Tayler Renshaw ’14, vice president of the Alumni Board of Governors, shares her Oxy story. above: Charlie Cardillo, vice president of institutional advancement, considers storytelling “a learned, practiced skill”—and a meaningful tool for better engaging the Oxy community.

A Selected History of Campaigns 1896: The Rev. A.A. Dinsmore of Alhambra is hired as field secretary to raise money toward construction on the Highland Park campus—Oxy’s first capital campaign. In three years, Dinsmore raises $8,620.70 for the new College building.

June 1962: Spurred by a $2.5 million grant from the Ford Foundation that required matching gifts of $7.5 million, trustees announce a three-year, $10 million campaign. The campaign raises $8 million.

1974: Oxy launches a 10-year, $40-million New Capital Program campaign. Major projects include a remodeling of Johnson Hall, conversion of Orr to Weingart, and construction of Culley Athletic Facility.

The campaign raises $60 million.

July 1997: Oxy’s five-year, $65 million Compass for a New Century campaign wraps with a total of $68.8 million.

Renovation was again the top priority.

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Oxy’s Child Development Center celebrates a quarter-century of educating the College’s brightest young minds through play-based exploration, interaction, and lots of questions

By ASHLEY FESTA

Ready for the

World

Photos by the Child Development Center staff except as noted | Above photo by Marc Campos

ix days a week, Mario Hidalgo ’80 teaches a wide variety of stringed instrument lessons to students at his studio in alhambra. wednesday, however, is his favorite day of the week—when he brings his guitar to occidental’s Child development Center for music class. “i get to connect with the kids on their level,” says Hidalgo, aka “Mr. Mario,” who graduated from oxy with a degree in music performance with an emphasis on classical guitar (and knew he wanted to be a musician himself at the age of 5). “sometimes we brainstorm to write a new song. i ask them questions like, ‘why is Mom or dad like a superhero?’ and we formulate songs out of their ideas.”

Hidalgo recalls one little girl named sophie who confided that she had written a song herself but was too embarrassed to share it with the class. instead, she whispered it to him, and he realized she had used the tune of a song she had learned in class but changed the words to be about santa Claus. “and it rhymed!” he says. “i couldn’t believe it.” sophie and her schoolmates wound up performing her song for the CdC’s holiday program. “That’s why i do this,” says Mr. Mario, who has volunteered at the center since 2000. “it gives the kids the freedom to be creative and express themselves.”

at oxy’s annual employee recognition Ceremony in May, some of the loudest cheers in rush gym came from the luncheon’s smallest attendees—the Hungry Caterpillars (ages 2 to 3), Busy Bees (ages 3 to 4), and Terrific Tigers (ages 4 to 5) who populate the CdC, which has cemented itself like elmer’s glue to the College community over the last quarter-century.

Hundreds of children of oxy employees and the surrounding community have benefited from the College’s dedication to educating future generations of leaders— even the ones who are still in diapers. “life skills are built in these first five years,” says laura drew, the CdC’s director since 2017. “They start as such new, tiny little people, and over the course of their years with us they develop in so many magical ways, ultimately becoming mature, competent, and articulate, each coming more fully into who they are and will be as unique individuals.” according to Nalsey Tinberg, professor of mathematics and a member of the oxy faculty since 1980, the idea for the center grew out of discussions among the women’s Collective, a group of female administrators representing different departments on campus. “The issue was always viability and how much of a subsidy it would require,” she says. “it had to basically pay for itself.”

By 1992, the proposed child care center had a potential home—the longtime dean’s House, built in 1951, when glenn dumke ’38 was dean of the faculty—but the

above left: “Mr. Mario” Hidalgo ’80 works on a song with the Busy Bees classroom during music time. top: Linnea Blickley expresses her creativity through easel painting. above: Emmett Windass and Maximus ValenzuelaCornejo build together with manipulatives. opposite page: Paulina Martinez explores a tunnel during outdoor play.

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top: Henry LaCroix traces with stencils and markers. above: Is there a doctor in the house? Sebastian Gilman is on call. below: Canaan Blankenship and Henry LaCroix construct a tower with Magnatiles and lights. bottom: Madeline Leon-Sundberg and Jeremiah Morey explore sand and water play.

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house needed new plumbing, heating ducts, and additional work to comply with state regulations. The estimated startup costs to the College were in the neighborhood of $285,000, with the tuition for a child of an oxy employee projected to be up to $540 per month.

Following the arrival of Phil arcuni in 1990 as associate professor of physics, the proposed center found its most valuable advocate. a young father of two, arcuni chaired the user committee “and worked tirelessly to get the thing going,” recalls John swift, emeritus professor of english, who was then associate dean of the faculty and a father himself in a two-career household. in 1994, arcuni received the Janosik award for his service to the College for his work on the center. “He probably sacrificed much of his academic career to get that,” Tinberg says. arcuni, who moved to santa Clara in 1997 to take a job in the corporate world, died of cardiac arrest in 2014 while bicycling with his niece in woodside at the age of 56. “when he passed away, i sent a note around saying any parent who’s ever had a child in that center owes him a debt of gratitude,” Tinberg says. “He got it over the finish line because he did all the back work.” when the center opened its doors to 18 students in september 1993, it was a boon for professors Jaclyn rodríguez ’77 and eric Newhall ’67, whose daughter, amanda, was a member of the first daycare class. “it was a wonderful experience for all of us—except, perhaps, for my mom, who had cared for amanda for her first couple of years and was hesitant to give her up,” says rodríguez, who has taught in the latino/a and latin american studies department since 1984.

From treks to Taylor Pool for swimming lessons to the Halloween walk throughout campus in costume, the CdC’s students “brought smiles to just about everyone on campus, especially oxy students, many of whom missed younger siblings,” adds rodríguez. she and Newhall chaperoned field trips in those formative years (“we were known as ‘amanda’s parents’—pretty cool”).

Now they are the grandparents of second-generation CdCers Jax, 7, who graduated from the center in 2017, and his sister ava, 2, who will enroll this fall. Their mom, andréa rodríguezscheel Minkoff ’06 M’10, is amanda’s older sister. “amanda and andréa both volunteered or worked at the center,” rodríguez says. “it helped to shape and confirm their mutual intellectual interests in k-12 education—a win all around.”

Summer 2019

“Having the Child development Center on campus was one of my best benefits during the time i taught at oxy,” adds Newhall, who retired from the english department this spring. “Jacki and i had complete peace of mind with regard to daycare for amanda during her pre-kindergarten years. That is a priceless benefit for parents.”

The center’s early days were not without their growing pains. enrollment was lower than expected, and founding director Brigette rodgers left oxy less than six months after the CdC’s opening. Her successor, Tamara woolery, spent the next 23 years as director, fostering “a deep educational and familial spirit” that remains today, rodríguez says. “i wanted the center to be a home away from home for all the kids,” says woolery, a mother of two who retired two years ago and now lives in Pittsburg. “i wanted parents to know their kids were safe and happy. and i wanted learning to be fun rather than a chore.” when she stepped into the role, woolery played a dual role of director and teacher, with only one other teacher to help. They never took lunch breaks; they planned lessons while the kids napped. (The center now has a full-time staff of 10.) in building the program from the ground up, she initiated an annual themed extravaganza that encompassed everything the children had accomplished during the year. For one such program, she and her fellow teachers researched each child’s heritage and hand-sewed costumes for the performance. “we had gone to the library and museums looking for authentic clothes to make for the costumes,” woolery says. “Parents saw their kids wearing clothes like their great-great-great-grandparents had worn. one little girl wore a pink linen dress with tiny pearls, and her mother started crying.” By the time the program was over, she adds, there was not a dry eye in the room.

The CdC was still in its infancy when parents sylvia and Victor Chico started looking for childcare options for their firstborn son, Christian. “it felt like a familyoriented center that wasn’t too big or too small. it was just right for helping kids’ social skills,” says sylvia, who has worked in the Urban and environmental Policy department for more than 25 years.

Victor, manager of oxy’s Postal operations Center, agrees, adding that when Christian and his younger brother, lee, went to elementary school, their teachers were impressed with how well behaved they were. years later, they would return to oxy for college: Christian graduated in 2018 as a media arts and culture major, while lee will matriculate this august with the Class of ’23. while proximity and convenience played a role in why amanda Zellmer, assistant professor of biology, and husband John McCormack, associate professor of biology, chose to enroll their children, it’s the teachers’ commitment that makes all the difference. daughter avery is now 10, and son Beckham is 4, currently in the Terrific

Above photo by Marc Campos | Bottom photo by Don Milici

Tigers class. “i hear things he’s picking up at school,” she says. “He’s building in the block area and using the words ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal.’ He’s picking up those terms in a play-based setting.” with a current enrollment of 45 children (and a waiting list to boot), the center’s commitment to the students and their parents remains constant, even with tweaks to the curriculum. when woolery announced her retirement, Zellmer was a member of the search committee that hired her successor. “we wanted the new director to be willing to incorporate more play-based activities but not make drastic changes,” she explains.

They found the ideal candidate just blocks away from oxy. laura drew has worked in early childhood development for 24 years and has lived in the neighborhood surrounding oxy for the last 18 years. “laura has done a great job of listening to the teachers and their history while also bringing in new ideas,” Zellmer says. while the center always mixed learning with fun, the CdC has taken a more deliberate approach to play-based, child-led education under drew’s leadership. “young children have to interact with something to learn from it and retain it,” says drew, who majored in music education and performance at UCla and is currently working toward a master’s in early childhood education at Cal state Northridge. “They have to be an active participant in the process and construct their own learning through their experiences and interactions.” in moving toward what is called an emergent curriculum, she adds, “The teachers become skilled observers and listen to the questions and comments the students make. and then they tie the reading, writing, and math to those interests.” For instance, when the Busy Bees expressed interest in cooking, the teachers arranged a mini-field trip to oxy’s campus dining facility, where the children watched as their lunch was being prepared.

Casey adams ’03 M’05, whose three children have gone to the CdC, grew up across the street from the center.

Her mother, longtime oxy employee Carolyn adams (who died in august 2018), so loved the center that in lieu of flowers at the funeral, the family requested donations to build a canopy over the patio in the big kids’ yard in her memory. The canopy will provide much-needed shade over the outdoor activity tables. like Zellmer, adams believes that the teachers make the biggest difference at the center. she loves that they allow the students to express themselves, no matter how strange the result may seem to adults. “when the teachers ask questions, sometimes the children’s answers have nothing to do with the question asked,” she says. “But the teachers write it down even if it doesn’t make sense, and the kids see you value what they have to say.”

Marcy Carrillo, who has co-taught the Hungry Caterpillars class for the bulk of her 24 years at the CdC, drives about an hour and a half to work because the staff, students, and parents feel like family to her. The center provides “a sense of security for the kids, knowing that they matter, that they feel at home,” says the mother of two. “The kids leave feeling good about themselves, empowered and ready to take on kindergarten.”

Festa wrote “Nature’s Remedy” in the Fall 2018 issue.

top left: The Terrific Tigers class gets ready for a group activity. top right: Stella Stone explores fractions and math with dividable wooden fruits. inset: Beckham McCormack shows Emmett Windass the worm he found. Cool!

below: The Child Development Center staff was honored at Oxy’s Employee Recognition Lunch in May. From left, CDC director Laura Drew, Laura Cabrera, Wan Lew, Melissa Hernandez, Sonia Lopez, Robin Quiambao, Sophie Kostiuk, Marcy Carrillo, Kathy Bellissimo, and Rochelle Peterson.

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Images courtesy Apple

Be Like

Mike Professor Michael Hill has guided scores of grateful chemistry students from his lab into impactful careers.

But it’s the thing he hasn’t done that touched off an international media frenzy

By PETER GILSTRAP Photos by MAX S. GERBER

LET’S SET ONE THING STRAIGHT: Fletcher Jones Foundation Professor of Chemistry Michael Hill—gifted though he may be—has not bestowed upon the world the ultimate fast-food nose job.

No matter what you may have read from such U.K. news outlets as the Mirror (“Innovative nose job technique takes just FIVE minutes—and no surgery”) or the Sun (“ELECTRIC NOSE JOB”) about a miraculous rhinal transformation utilizing a process called electromechanical reshaping, it isn’t so.

“No, I never had anything happen like the nose job fiasco before,” Hill says with a laugh, sitting in a windowless office deep within Norris Hall of Chemistry, his academic home for the last 25 years.

Back in April, Hill gave a talk on electromechanical reshaping, or EMR, at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando, Fla. “The ACS looks for research that might be interesting to the public just because chemistry has a bad name,” Hill says. “They asked me, ‘Do you mind if we do a little press release?’ I said sure. And then I started getting calls from media outlets.”

BBC News was the first to bite. “I did an interview, but I never mentioned the words ‘nose job,’ ” Hill explains. “And this couldn’t be used for a nose job. A nose has a bone in it. There are a lot of potential applications for this, but a nose job isn’t one of them.”

BBC News’ headline: “Five-minute ‘needle’ nose job?’ ” Scientific accuracy notwithstanding, the Mirror and Sun quickly rehashed the story, and a host of other news outlets followed suit, including the New York Post (“New nose job procedure uses electricity instead of surgery”). Only a few websites took a more buttoned-down approach, such as Medgadget.com (“Surgical Electricity Used to Molecularly Reshape Tissues”).

In the most basic explanation of the procedure, small needles are inserted into the cartilage, electrical current is passed through, and the cartilage is reformed to the desired shape. The process is the brainchild

of Brian Wong, a specialist in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at UC Irvine, who had been working on a less invasive procedure for cartilage-based surgeries, such as those to rectify nasal-tip deformities, deviated septums, and even protruding ears.

“The tissue inherently wants to be in one configuration,” Hill says. “So, you mechanically change it. You insert these electrodes, and you neutralize all of that charge. Now it’s not under strain anymore. You hold it in place, you re-equilibrate the PH, now it’s locked into this new confirmation. That’s the way this thing works.”

Hill, an electrochemist, was brought on board to provide a molecular perspective and discover why things were happening the way they were happening, leading to predictable results with minimal tissue damage. After six years of research, his trial runs have been successful in reforming the ear of a living rabbit, and—having had cataract surgery to correct his own “massive” astigmatism—he is excited about its potential for repairing corneas and improving eyesight. Amazing stuff, but a far cry from human schnozz beautification.

But it’s easy to see why the dangling carrot of such a breakthrough would quicken the pulse of cosmetic surgery enthusiasts. Rhinoplasty is the third most common operation in America, with almost 219,000 procedures annually as of 2017. To this day, Hill says, “I’ll get emails from people asking, ‘Can I schedule a nose job?’ ”

of national scholars to campus, including a novelist, a chemist, a social psychologist, retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Scalia, who was one week away from being confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I was excited to hear his ideas, to see how he analyzed and thought through complicated problems,” Hill recalls. “Instead, he was completely disinterested and dogmatic—facts exist to be manipulated to fit your worldview, not the other way round. I just looked at my friend and I said, ‘Let’s go see what the chemist has to say.’ ” Harry Gray turned out to be “everything Scalia wasn’t—curious, imaginative, open to new ideas,” Hill continues. “He said that science is not for people who can’t be wrong: By definition you continually reevaluate, refine, and evolve your ideas. When you are completely wrong is when it gets really interesting.”

Since 1966, Gray has been the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. A pioneer in his field, he holds an honorary degree from Oxy presented at Convocation in August 2012.

Photo courtesy Michael Hill

Hill’s trek to Occidental began with laying sod in Detroit. Growing up in economically ravaged Hill and his research team in 2004. Standing, l-r: Sam Phang Motor City in the 1970s and ’80s, ’06, Anto Hindoyan ’04, postdoc Reef Hardy, Rutaro Tanimura he expected to eventually become ’06, Hill, Jason Willis ’04, Marci Amii ’03, Noah Stites-Hallet ’04, a tool-and-die maker like his fa- and Greg Ashe ’02. Seated, l-r: Elena Hunanyan ’05, Nareen Hindoyan ’06, Haley Hill ’04, Ricky Amii ’01, visiting professor ther. “I wasn’t the kid that played Katsumi Niki, Alexis Ostrowski ’04, and Vipin Bhagat ’04. with chemistry sets or anything. I (In addressing the Class of 2016, Gray was a groundskeeper for a hospital,” he says called Oxy the “best college on this planet. of his early teenage gig. “We’d lay sod down I’ve interacted with Oxy over many years, and then people would come at night and and your faculty are a tremendous group to steal it. We probably bought the same sod work with.”) the next day and put it back.”

Hill’s relationship with Gray began Fast forward to September 1986. Hill was when Hill attended grad school at the Uniat Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., versity of Minnesota, studying with one of studying history and considering law when Gray’s former students. “After Mike got his fate intervened in the form of Antonin Scalia.

Ph.D., he came to Caltech to do his postdoc The inaugural DeWitt Wallace Conferwith me,” says Gray. “I got to know him ence on the Liberal Arts brought a handful Summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 23

really well because we collaborated. After that he joined Occidental’s chemistry faculty, where he’s had a tremendous influence and been such a leader.”

Attracted by Occidental’s emphasis on research as well as teaching, Hill arrived at the College as an assistant professor in 1994. He has published regularly and guided a multitude of grateful students from his lab into impactful careers. Of 104 Oxy students who have worked directly with Hill, he says, 54 have gone on to Ph.D. programs, 26 to medical school, four to M.D./Ph.D. programs, and six have become teachers.

“He’s known far and wide as a major figure in training undergraduate research students,” Gray observes. “He has a gift as a teacher, he’s like the Pied Piper. I don’t know exactly what his secret is, but he certainly has a way with students that’s special. He’s just a very interesting guy who makes chemistry very interesting.”

One clue to understanding that unique gift might be Hill’s penchant for blowing up Gumby dolls, which he’s been doing since 1994. “He discovered that if you put a little plastic Gumby figurine in liquid nitrogen and freeze it and then let it warm back up, it’ll explode. And when they explode, they make this screaming noise,” explains Bryan Hunter with great glee. He’s a Rowland Fellow at Harvard who graduated from Yale University in 2008 and earned his Ph.D. at Caltech working under Gray.

Hunter, who grew up in North Hollywood, also began working in Hill’s Oxy lab when he was in high school at Oakwood School. “Luckily he took a chance on me,” says Hunter, who taught organic chemistry at Oxy in 2010 and 2011, and inorganic chemistry in 2017. He’s been collaborating with Hill on published works for over a decade. “I learned basically everything that I needed to know for grad school in his lab. It’s pretty remarkable because I went to Yale as an undergrad, but every summer, instead of doing research at Yale, I came back to Oxy.” That pattern continued when Hunter moved on to Caltech. “I don’t trust anybody experimentally as much as I trust Mike,” Hunter says. “A lot of the key experiments for my Ph.D. were actually done in the chemistry building at Oxy and not at Caltech. I 24 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

Summer 2019

can’t underscore enough how good my training with Mike was. When I went into graduate school, people were shocked that I knew how to do certain things. It was just because I’d worked with him at Oxy.” And there’s the Gumby procedure. “A couple times I brought in classes that I was teaching at Oxy and I was like, ‘Oh, Mike, you gotta do the Gumby thing for them!’ And so he would always do the Gumby explosion, which was a huge hit.”

“He loves freezing Gumbys, that’s so true!” says Rebeca Fernández ’16. “He’s also the most gifted lecturer I’ve ever taken a class from. He somehow tells a story in a chemistry course, which is pretty incredible because all you’re doing is throwing molecules together and then studying what happens. But by explaining the most fundamental concepts that are based in a lot of math, he just shows you this entire world that you didn’t know existed.”

Fernández is currently in grad school at University of Wisconsin studying inorganic chemistry. “Most of the research that I’ve seen done here is on par with what Mike ac-

Oxy differs from many schools in that first-year students dive right into doing lab research. “I work with them, they learn basic skills, and there’s a natural progression,” Hill says.

left: Hill and his current research team inside Norris Hall of Chemistry.

Standing, l-r: Laura Chun ’19, Griffin Eden ’22, Jack Leonard ’22, visiting biochemistry professor Natalie Muren, Anna Stokolosa ’18, Hill, Lawrence Seabrook ’20, Sara Woldegebriel ’20, and Sierra Hunter ’21.

Seated, l-r: Ashley Lam ’22, Kate Dinaur ’20, and Sherin Aboobucker ’22. inset left: Stokolosa and Leonard reshape a rabbit cornea.

complishes in an undergrad institution, which is pretty incredible,” she says.

Like many of her peers, Fernández came to regard Hill as a personal mentor as well.

“One of the most important things that he told me before going to graduate school is, ‘You can do it.’ Graduate school is very, very hard, and I go back to that moment so often,” she says.

“The greatest gift that he gave me was the concept of independent thought and the ability to generate unique ideas,” says Azam Ahmed ’99, assistant professor of neurosurgery and radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “I was really fortunate to land upon

Oxy and, more importantly, have him as a research mentor who encouraged that kind of thinking.”

Azam attributes his current position to Hill’s influence. “I think when people choose their profession, either they have this inherent desire to do that thing or are heavily influenced by their parents. But for a lot of people they identify with a certain mentor and say, ‘OK, I want to be like that guy, and I can see my life being like that.’ That’s how it was for me with Mike.”

Hill has held his current appointment as chair of the Chemistry Department since 2014. It’s his second term; he previously

served from 2002 to 2005. In recent years, three tenure-track hires have fleshed out the roster of seven regular faculty: assistant professors Jeff Cannon ’07 and Raul Navarro, hired in 2014 and 2017, respectively, and associate professor Emmanuelle DespagnetAyoub, who started at Oxy last fall.

“Jeff ’s about to get tenure—he’s great,” Hill says. “He’s got an army of undergrads.

Raul is brilliant and very elegant. He’s going to be fantastic. Emmanuelle was a professor in France and a staff scientist at Caltech, and she’s off the charts.”

Hill abides by a principle handed down from Carl F. Braun Professor of Chemistry Emeritus Donald Deardorff, who retired in 2015: “When you’re looking for new colleagues, you know that you’re successful if by the time you retire, you’re the worst one here,” he says. “You always look for people who are better than you. And we’ve always held that line.”

Over the course of two hours spent talking to Hill, his students come in and out of his office—dropping off experimental data, chatting about a cornea repair device that cradles a human eyeball, or searching for a misplaced coffee. It’s a warm and comfortable atmosphere. Everyone calls him Mike.

“The one thing that I want to emphasize is how much fun I have had with my group over the years, and how proud I am of them,” he says. “My students have always been incredibly warm and welcoming to everyone coming into the group. They work extremely hard year-round, and have gone on to do great things.”

Who knows? Maybe one of them will someday perfect the science of the 5-minute nose job. (Just don’t hold your breath.)

Gilstrap wrote “MAC to Reality” last issue.

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Environmental educator Chandrika Francis ’10 makes the swimming pool a safer place for marginalized groups and remakes a 30-foot bus into her dream home on wheels

By ANDY FAUGHT Photos by JIM BLOCK

left: Francis and her partner, Syesha Thomas, seated, have spent more than a year and a half converting a U.S. Forest Service bus into their “tiny house on wheels.” below: The couple “fell in love” with the idea of doing a bus build together after attending TinyFest NorthWest, a tiny house and simple living festival in Oregon.

S STUDENTS APPROACH the pool at Oshun Swim School in Renton, Wash., it’s not unusual for pulses to quicken and for breath to catch. This is no ordinary fear of water for the dozen assembled African American women. “There are layers of historical and cultural trauma around water, in which black families don’t feel safe in the water or near the water,” says Chandrika Francis ’10, who founded the school last year to exorcise dread and make swimming joyful to her nervous charges.

One such student, Kayla Huddleston, has avoided water her entire life. “The most I would ever do is get my feet wet,” says Huddleston, who coordinates a graduate program at Seattle University. “I had never fully immersed myself in a body of water prior to swim class. There’s definitely anxiety, because it’s completely new territory. It’s like learning a new language, but your life depends on it.”

Having now taken two of Francis’ classes to confront her fears headlong, Huddleston can dive to the bottom of the pool, and she considers herself “fully comfortable” in water. “Water is now more sacred than it ever has been,” she says. “I view water, and swimming, as a life-affirming and life-giving ritual and practice.”

“My biggest goal is for our relationship with water to be healed,” Francis says. She named the school Oshun after Orisha, the West African Yoruba deity of rivers and lakes, who represents pleasure, healing, and “all of the things that make life worth living.”

Culturally, swimming pools represent “one of America’s most racist institutions,” as environmental writer Brentin Mock observed in 2014. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination on the basis of race, the stigma of segregated swimming pools is not so easily vanquished. A 2017 study by the USA Swimming Foundation shows that 64 percent of black children have no or low swimming ability, compared with 45 percent of Hispanic children and 40 percent of white children.

“There’s this whole history of violent exclusion, and also a complete lack of access to water spaces,” Francis says. “It goes all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. There have been generations told, ‘Stay away from water, it’s not safe.’ ” For most of Francis’ swimmers, classes are a fish-out-of-water experience, “like going to a different planet,” she says. “It’s their first time being submerged in water. There’s a lot of work around just getting them comfortable putting their face in the water, getting

them comfortable with the buoyancy. It’s so different when there’s no gravity.”

Growing up in Oakland, Francis had no such trepidations: Her father is from the Caribbean, where he regularly swam in the ocean; her mother grew up in Maine, where she swam in the Atlantic and in the state’s bountiful lakes. It’s a passion that effortlessly transferred to their daughter. “Water has been a complete joy for me,” Francis says.

She adds that her time at Oxy—where she majored in urban and environmental policy—helps her relate to her students. The College inspired “all my levels of identity— a person of color, being queer, and being a woman. It’s essential to the work that I’m doing—having that strong sense of identity.”

Francis was set on enrolling at an East Coast college when she grudgingly acceded to her mother’s on-a-lark suggestion that they visit Oxy. “I told her that I’d do it but that I know I’m not interested,” she recalls.

But an overnight stay in Pauley Hall—where Summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 27

below: Thomas and Francis enjoy a Sunday toast inside their home outside Seattle. right: Something’s cooking. bottom: The couple have shared the transformation of “WAKANDA” on Instagram (@reclaiming_our_bus).

diversity and multiculturalism are promoted and nurtured—opened her eyes. “People were so friendly and seemed genuinely interested in me. I could feel the sense of community there.”

Since graduating from Oxy, Francis has been supporting black and indigenous people of color to reconnect with the Earth. As a Fulbright Scholarship recipient in 2010, she taught English to middle and high school students in Spain. She later worked as a tutor and mentor at an underserved public high school in New Orleans in a program called City Year Louisiana, and led backpacking trips as a mountain instructor with the YMCA’s Bold & Gold program in Washington state.

More recently, she studied environmental education through the University of Washington’s graduate program at IslandWood, where she planned and implemented four-day science education immersion experiences for fourth- to sixth-graders from around the Puget Sound.

In spring 2018, after reaching out to more than a dozen pools looking for a space to teach classes a couple of nights a week, she 28 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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started Oshun Swim School (oshunswimschool.com) at an aquatic center in the Seattle suburb of Renton. To date, 50 women have taken part in Oshun’s eight- to 12-week classes. (The school also caters to nonbinary students who may feel self-conscious in a pool because they do not identify as exclusively male or female.)

Francis starts lessons outside the pool, leading a group meditation and reducing stress with games. Throwing a ball, for example, naturally relaxes people and “all of a sudden they’re jumping around and not even thinking about” their fears, she says.

She also hosts “sound and soak workshops,” in which participants listen to meditative music in settings that include a hot tub and sauna. Separate water workshops provide “tips, tricks, and practice needed to be comfortable with submerged movement and play.”

Among Francis’ students is her partner of almost three years, Syesha Thomas, who compares her initial fear of water as akin to being locked in a closed room with no way out. But Francis has created a safe and nurturing environment, she says, and now she can swim half a pool length.

“You feel protected and supported, and your guard can come down,” says Thomas, who completed her J.D. in 2017 from Seattle University School of Law and is now a sales leader at Amazon Web Services. “That allows

you to take more risks, because you trust everybody in the class.”

Francis and Thomas live in a 30-foot converted U.S. Forest Service bus (“The first seven feet are just the hood,” Francis says) that the couple found on Craigslist and bought in November 2017 for $7,000. Their “tiny house on wheels” bears a license plate that reads “WAKANDA.” The interior is resplendent with acacia hardwood floors and walls made of recycled pallets. The bus has a water tank that feeds a sink and shower, and there is a composting toilet. A wood-burning stove wards off the Northwestern chill.

Francis got the idea for such a lifestyle after following tiny house movements on Pinterest, Instagram (on which she posts her own bus-life musings), and on TV shows.

“When we got it, it had all the seats in it, and the demolition took so much more work than we ever could have imagined,” Francis says.

So far, they’ve taken their bus as far away as Joshua Tree (roughly 2,500 miles roundtrip), and have made many friends in the “Skoolie” community, as it’s known. But it’s the coast and its endless oceanic vistas that beckon. “It’s about living the life you’ve always dreamed about,” Francis says. “Being able to drive along, and pull up next to the water—enjoying the beautiful breeze and watching lapping waves from your living room—is a truly liberating experience.”

Faught lives in Fresno—but not on wheels.

WHERE WERE YOU IN

’62?

Photographer Joe Friezer showed off his more playful side with an assist from longtime Oxy head nurse Ruby Rich Burgar ’55 and a student patient in this undated photo.

Photos by Joe Friezer/From the Joe and Henk Friezer Photography Negatives

A series of headshots from 1962 offers a snapshot of Oxy on its 75th anniversary— and leaves us looking for your help to identify a few unfamiliar faces

S

oon after his arrival in the City of Angels from his native Holland in 1955, freelance photographer Joe Friezer became a member of the Oxy community. Working primarily in Northeast Los Angeles, he documented the life of the College for nearly 30 years, photographing events both ordinary (ribbon cuttings, Homecoming courts) and extraordinary (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Occidental in 1967). Friezer was joined by son Henk in his work in 1968, and the two served as the primary news photographers for the Northeast Newspapers chain as well as contributing to other regional and international news publications.

Following Joe’s death in 1998, Henk continued the family business, making the transition to digital photography around 2002. In 2015, he donated the entire photo negative archive of Friezer Photography—more than 100,000 negatives from over 15,000 photo assignments spanning more than half a century—to Occidental’s Special Collections. Eli Chartkoff, the College’s digitization specialist, recently scanned a collection of headshots taken on Oct. 29, 1962, of Oxy faculty, staff, and administrators—the kind of images you might have seen if LinkedIn had been around more than 40 years before its founding. Among the 49 subjects were dozens of familiar faces— from legendary professors and administrators to others whose time at Occidental may have been more fleeting. Collectively their stories offer a snapshot of the College at age 75.

Despite our best efforts, we have come up empty in identifying the seven individuals above—so we’re calling on you, the readers, for your help. Do any of these faces ring a bell? Send us an email with your IDs, your stories, or whatever comes to mind to oxymag@oxy.edu. summer 2019 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 29

WHERE WERE YOU IN ’62?

After joining Occidental in 1942 as a staff nurse, Ruby Rich Burgar ’55 began her studies toward a biology degree. She was soon promoted to head nurse, and eventually switched her major to psychology, completing her coursework after 13 years (the 1955 La Encina is dedicated to her).

Burgar retired in 1974 but remained active in health care circles. She survived a tragic car accident in 1988 that took the life of the driver and one of two fellow passengers.

Looking back, “As Oxy grew, so did I,” she wrote in 1995. “Sometimes I wish I could start all over again.” Burgar died in 1996.

Grant Dunlap ’46’s professional baseball career is well documented, but less well known is the single season of basketball he played as a member of the Montgomery Rebels in the Southern Basketball League.

Dunlap averaged 13.9 points per game with the Rebels en route to the league championship in March 1948. He hung up his sneakers to return to the diamond with the Oklahoma Indians of the Texas League.

He would coach Oxy baseball for 30 years and basketball for 16 years, retiring as professor emeritus of physical education in 1984. He died in 2014.

Franklyn D. Josselyn was hired as both College chaplain and faculty member in 1955 before devoting himself full-time to teaching religion in 1962. “One of the advantages a liberal arts college has over a large university is the closer contact with a larger number of individual students,” he observed. Prior to joining the USC faculty in 1951, Josselyn served congregations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California as a Presbyterian minister. A two-time recipient of the Donald Loftsgordon Memorial Teaching Award, he retired in 1980 and died on Christmas Day, 2010.

John E. Smylie arrived at Oxy in 1962, succeeding Josselyn as chaplain and joining the faculty as associate professor of religion. In a 1964 article for Southern California Presbyterian magazine, he observed, “We need churchmen in higher education not simply to teach religion, but the humanities, and social and natural sciences as well.” At the encouragement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he met during King’s visit to Oxy, Smylie became president of Presbyterian-affiliated Queens College in Charlotte, N.C., serving from 1967 to 1974. He died in 2013.

Roy Dennis ’33 was an all-conference standout as a baseball and football player, but he secured his place in the annals of Oxy sports history by coaching the 1948 football team to victory over Colorado State in the Raisin Bowl. His swimming and water polo squads won 17 SCIAC championships and produced many AllAmericans, including two-time Olympic gold medalist Sammy Lee ’43. In his eulogy for Dennis in 1988, Lee called it a miracle that “his heart had held up for 82 years because he had given a piece of it to every student he taught or coached.”

Ruth Berkey taught in the Pasadena public school system in 1960 prior to becoming a physical education instructor at Oxy. She was later dean of women, coached the women’s basketball and volleyball teams to numerous conference championships, and succeeded Roy Dennis as director of athletics in 1977. Although Berkey left Oxy in 1980 to become director of postseason events for the NCAA, she recruited much of the 1981 women’s volleyball team coached

by Lesley Alward ’75 to a third-place finish in the NCAA Division III championships.

She lives in Grants Pass, Ore.

Jack Stokes Ballard, assistant professor of air science, came to Occidental in 1959 after three years at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. He was also president of Oxy’s Faculty Club during the 1962-63 academic year. Ballard led the College’s AFROTC program until 1964, after which he went to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Later in his career he was an Air Force historian, and retired from the Martin Marietta Corp. in 1992.

In 2017, he published The Luckiest Man Alive: The Life of World War I Aviator Captain John H. Hedley.

Donald Adams, professor of English from 1955 until his death in 1987, specialized in 19th-century British literature. He taught a popular course on detective and mystery fiction and created a bibliography of the College’s 14,000-volume Guymon Mystery and Detective Fiction Collection, donated to Oxy by 1922 graduate E.T. “Ned” Guymon Jr. Adams’ favorite? “[Sherlock] Holmes is the most lively of all detectives, virtually the most vital character in all of English literature,” he told Los Angeles Times writer Patt Morrison ’74 in 1975.

“He is the perfect detective of his sort.”

Evelyn Thompson ’40 M’43—daughter of longtime English Professor Guy Thompson —worked at Anaheim Union High School before joining the Oxy faculty in 1944. She taught English literature from the outset, later adding History of Civilization to her course load. After marrying Pasadena book dealer Jay Kieffer at the family home on Campus Road in 1963, she left teaching.

A second career culminated as director of alumni relations, public affairs, and development for the USC School of Education.

She bequeathed Thompson House to the College with her passing in 2012.

Leland S. Babcock, professor of German from 1952 to 1985, served as a special agent of the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in Germany during WWII. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century German literature, Babcock twice chaired what was then Oxy’s Languages and Linguistics Department and was the founding director of the College’s Upward Bound program in 1965, bringing 100 culturally disadvantaged students to campus for an eight-week summer session. (The program worked with 122 students in the 2018-19 school year.) Babcock died in 2010 at age 87.

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Mabel Barnes, professor of mathematics from 1950 to 1971, turned heads as one of two women accepted into Princeton’s newly opened Institute for Advanced Study in 1933. “The director of the School of Mathematics took me aside and warned me that Princeton was not accustomed to women in the halls of learning and I should make myself as inconspicuous as possible,” she recalled in 1988. “In a day when it was unpopular, she tirelessly promoted careers for women in mathematics,” Professor Benedict Freedman said following Barnes’ death in 1993.

After nearly 40 years of service to Oxy, Dean Ben Culley died Nov. 9, 1982, after collapsing in the middle of his math class.

A notebook found in his inside coat pocket contained a handful of items, among them the 1982 Tigers football schedule, a card bearing Gary Cooper’s autograph, and a “faded, crumbling card” on which Culley had written a few lines attributed to American Quaker missionary Etienne de Grellet (1773-1855): “Any good thing I can do, or any kindness I can show any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it. For I shall not pass this way again.”

Clifton B. Kroeber, the Norman Bridge Professor of Hispanic American History Emeritus, taught at Oxy for 35 years before retiring in 1990. (He died August 8, as this issue was going to press.) He took the surname of his stepfather, pioneering anthropologist and UC Berkeley professor Alfred Kroeber. In 2003, Clif and brother Karl revisited Alfred’s most famous subject, Ishi—the last surviving member of the Yahi nation—as editors of the anthology Ishi in Three Centuries (a companion to Ishi in Two Worlds, written by their mother, Theodora, in 1961).

Herbert Segall may have taught physics at Occidental from 1958 to 1989, but he gave an L.A. Superior Court judge a lesson in English when he was going through the jury selection process for a trial of a white supremacist in 1991. As Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Harvey relates the story, Segall was asked to disclose the occupations of his “adult children.” “I have no adult children,” he replied. “I have two adult daughters.” Pressed for clarification, “Segall, in his best professorial tone, uttered: ‘The expression adult children is an oxymoron.’ ” Segall was not selected.

Bill Hume ’50 M’52 taught music, speech, and history at Occidental before being named director of Thorne Hall in 1958. He spent almost 20 years at Occidental, also serving as director of student activities.

Since his death in 1998, the G. William Hume Fellowship in the Performing Arts has brought a host of visiting artists to campus to not only perform but to lead master classes and workshops. In 1981, his mother was moved to make a 90thbirthday gift to Oxy, writing, “Personally, I have a greater fondness for Oxy than I have for Knox College, which I attended.”

George Cleland ’42, professor of organic chemistry from 1954 to 1984, grew up on the Oxy campus, where his father, 1907 graduate Robert Glass Cleland, was professor of history and administrator for more than four decades. After serving in WWII on the National Defense Research Committee, he joined a research team of scientists and engineers at the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station outside Mojave. As a professor, he encouraged generations of Oxy students to reach for their dreams.

He also was an avid fly fisherman, golfer, pianist, and cat lover. Cleland died in 2010.

As an undergraduate, Cyril Gloyn ’27, professor of philosophy from 1946 to 1971, was head cheerleader—“one of the best in Occidental history,” according to his bio— and one of the masterminds behind RUIN THE BRUIN, painted on the roof of the grandstand of Patterson Field in 1926 prior to the Tigers’ football game vs. UCLA. “Only three things went wrong,” he wrote in 1983: The oil-based paints damaged the gravel-composition roof, the money for the paints had been siphoned from the Dance Committee funds, and the Tigers lost to the Bruins 24-7. Gloyn died in 2000.

Richard Reath, professor of American institutions, was a familiar presence to anyone who took History of Civilization at Oxy between 1947 and 1970. His lectures “were almost perfect examples of organization and lucidity … for a long time I thought he was a born teacher,” colleague Cyril Gloyn observed after Reath’s passing in 1989. But such command had come through years of disciplined self-criticism and appraisal. Before a History of Civ lecture, Gloyn said, Reath would practice in front of a full-length mirror, “checking pauses, changes in voice and gestures.”

Luther Jennings taught psychology and conducted research at Oxy from 1949 to 1986—and knew a photo opportunity when he saw it. Along with colleague Dave Cole M’48, Jennings visited Universal Studios in 1951 to conduct an IQ test of Bonzo, the “world’s smartest chimp” and star of Bedtime for Bonzo. (Bonzo—aka Peggy— rewarded Jennings for his efforts with a kiss on the face, which he good-naturedly wiped away.) In retirement, Jennings (who died in 2006) didn’t monkey around: He helped organize the Senior Curriculum Program at the Pasadena Senior Center.

Clancy Morrison was not quite midway through her 44-year Oxy career in 1962, when the Alabama native was overseeing the preparation of 3,000 meals a day on campus in the dining hall that generations of alumni refer to “Clancy’s” to this day. At her memorial service in 1991, emeritus professor and WWII veteran Omar Paxson ’48 recalled Morrison giving him his first job at Oxy in 1946: “I was hired on the spot at 55 cents an hour and, wow, I thought I’d seen the last of Army sergeants. … She should have been in charge at the time of the Third Army instead of Patton.”

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OXYTALK Photo by Kevin Burke

Rountree brings a host of perspectives to his new role at Oxy: four years as a student, six years as an employee, and 14 years as a trustee.

Building on Momentum Stephen Rountree ’71 steps up as chair of Oxy’s Board of Trustees in the midst of a capital campaign and the search for the College’s 16th president —with his own milestone reunion just around the corner 32 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2019

Photos courtesy Occidental College Special Collections

Stephen Rountree ’71’s path to college exemplifies both the challenges to access that remain today for so many families, and the opportunity provided by an Oxy education.

The oldest child of Clarence “Soapy” Rountree Jr., a used car salesman, and the former Gwen Freberg, who worked multiple secretarial jobs to support their four sons, he was a student at South Hills High School in Covina with no family resources to pay for college.

He was encouraged to apply to Oxy by both his yearbook adviser, LaVerne Ramey ’63, and by assistant principal Ray Cortines, who would become superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District and chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Rountree was awarded a scholarship to attend Oxy, and worked multiple jobs onand off-campus while majoring in English.

Capping a nearly 50-year career that made him a nationally known arts administrator, Rountree was recently elected the new chair of the Occidental Board of Trustees. He succeeds Susan Howell Mallory ’76 M’78, who completed her three-year term June 30.

“You can imagine how amazing it is to me that a first-generation college kid would return to lead the board of an institution that has affected the entire trajectory of my life for the better,” says Rountree, who over the last two decades has been CEO of the Center Theatre Group, the Music Center of Los Angeles County, and the Los Angeles Opera as well as the chief operating officer of the Getty Trust.

Rountree retired in 2018 as managing director/CEO of the nonprofit Center Theatre Group, one of the country’s largest theater companies; it runs the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre, and Kirk Douglas Theatre. Previously he served as president and CEO of the Music Center of Los Angeles County from 2002 to 2014 while simultaneously working as CEO of the Los Angeles Opera from 2008 to 2012. His involvement was critical to the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003 and a major renovation to the Mark Taper Forum in 2008.

After graduating from Occidental, Rountree lived in Sapporo, Japan, for nearly a year before traveling through the Soviet Union and Europe. After returning to Los Angeles, he went into the field of labor relations, joining the College in 1974 as director of personnel.

above left: Rountree as an Oxy sophomore in 1969. left: As Oxy’s assistant vice president for business affairs in 1977. above: Reviewing a model of the Getty Center building project in 1997 with Getty Trust President Harold M. Williams, left, and architect Richard Meier, center.

Rountree completed his MBA from Claremont Graduate University in 1977 and was promoted to assistant vice president for business affairs.

President Richard C. Gilman “provided me with opportunities and responsibilities that I could not have had elsewhere,” he wrote upon Gilman’s retirement in 1988. “I was able to stretch personally and, I think, contribute something to the College.”

Before moving to the Music Center, Rountree served with the J. Paul Getty Trust for 22 years, starting in 1980 as deputy director of the Getty Museum, then as director of the Getty Center Building Program, responsible for managing all aspects of design and construction of the $1.3 billion Getty Center.

In an August 1997 Los Angeles Times story prior to the Getty Center’s opening, retiring Getty Trust President Harold Williams called Rountree “a consensus builder who always has the big picture in mind … Everyone trusts his judgment, motivation, and objectivity.” In 1998, Rountree was named executive vice president and COO of the Getty Trust, and was the recipient of Oxy’s Alumni Seal Award as Alumnus of the Year.

After years of conversations—first with John Slaughter, then with Ted Mitchell— Rountree joined the Board of Trustees in 2005, just as Mitchell was stepping down. He becomes board chair in the midst of a national search for the College’s 16th president and as the public phase of the $225 million Oxy Campaign For Good gets underway. President Jonathan Veitch announced in January

that he would step down in June 2020 after a successful 11-year tenure.

“As Occidental’s national and international profile has increased, the College has had a decade of remarkable growth in the number, quality, and diversity of students seeking admission,” Rountree says. “Meanwhile, the educational program is better than ever and we’ve taken major steps to enhance the campus.

“Coming off of President Veitch’s decade of leadership, Oxy is poised to strengthen its position as one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges and one of the few located in one of the world’s great cities,” he adds. “My goals for the next few years are to recruit a great new president, successfully complete our comprehensive campaign, and support the faculty and administration in sustaining a highly relevant, inclusive, and exciting educational experience for our students.”

In 1977, Rountree married Carol Stassinos, who worked at Oxy for a decade as associate dean of students. They live in Sierra Madre and have two daughters, Katie and Emily, and five grandchildren. In addition to his service to Occidental, Rountree is a trustee of the Ahmanson Foundation, Polytechnic School, and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles Foundation.

Rountree will be two years into his new appointment when the Class of ’71 gathers for its 50th reunion in 2021. “That will be cool,” he says, flashing the same engaging smile he brought to campus five decades ago.

“I’ll definitely be there for that.”

SUMMER 2019

OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 33

OXYTALK

Photos by Marc Campos

left: Sophia Yang ’21 discusses “Diastereoselective Synthesis of Unnatural Amino Acids Using Imine Electrophiles” with Charles Oravec, physics lab supervisor. above: Sam Ritmeester-Loy ’20 talks about his research on “Parasites in Your Shrimp”—prior to lunch, we hope—with Cheryl Okumura, associate professor of biology.

A Season to Reason Oxy’s Summer Research Program marks 20 years of explorations, observations, and presentations

From tracking bumblebee species regeneration in areas ravaged by Southern California fires to analyzing educational integration strategies for immigrants and the Native American environmental ethos, Occidental students have been up to their iPads in research this summer.

On July 31, more than 100 students presented the fruits of their labor at the annual Summer Research Conference, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. Disseminating results is part of the research process, notes Janet Morris, Undergraduate Research Center director, “and this conference is a terrific first opportunity for students to present their work in familiar, friendly circumstances.”

Over the last 20 years, more than 2,000 students have participated in the program, which was created with an Award for the Integration of Research and Education from the National Science Foundation. The award “recognized Oxy’s robust research program in the sciences,” says Professor of Chemistry Chris Craney, founding director of the URC. “Our vision was to extend that opportunity 34 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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to the arts, humanities, and social sciences; to link the academic year and summer programs; and extend these opportunities to offcampus venues like JPL and City of Hope.”

For 10 weeks, students representing 24 majors worked closely with 64 faculty mentors on focused research of their choosing, both on campus and in Los Angeles. “The biggest legacy of the Summer Research Program is it’s not just providing research opportunities for 20 students in the sciences,” Craney says. “It’s doing it for 110 students in all kinds of disciplinary areas and from all kinds of backgrounds. We’re making this opportunity available and allowing them the possibilities of flying.”

Growing up in Arcadia, Kevin Conroy ’20 spent several months as a child living with his maternal grandparents in Anshan, China.

They didn’t speak any English, so Conroy was immersed in Mandarin at an early age.

He arrived at Oxy with a lingering interest in both Chinese language and history, and was inspired by Professor Alexander Day’s History

348 class on the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

“The class struck my interest because this was the time that my grandparents lived through,” says Conroy, a history and East Asian studies major. Taking a second class with Day—The Transformation of Urban and Rural China—he revitalized his language skills during three weeks of study abroad.

Under Day’s guidance, Conroy enrolled in an independent study last semester and began conducting primary source interviews for an oral history, not only with his grandparents but also their peers in Los Angeles’ Chinese-American community. Those interviews became the backbone of a research project exploring how the politics of Maoist industrialization affected the daily lives of both cadres and workers in China during the Cultural Revolution.

With funding from Oxy, Conroy returned to China in May for three weeks of solo research, spending time in both Beijing and Anshan. “My family is from Anshan”—a city about the size of Houston—“so this is like my hometown once removed,” he says. “I really hope that this project gets me to understand more about where my family came from and how being in Anshan under the shadow of Angang [the second-largest steelmaker in Mainland China] has affected our lives.”

Conroy’s work has continued through the URC’s Summer Research Program. Professor Day has been an integral part of the process, he says, offering lots of constructive feedback on how to outline his project and refine his focus when needed. “He’s handsoff where he’s supposed to be, but really hands-on where he needs to be.”

OXYTALK

left: Major spent much of last year immersed in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture courses. below left: Conroy (shown with Day) plans to pursue a master’s in China before returning to the United States for his doctoral studies. below: Daniel is inspired by the connections between public health and kinesiology.

“Kevin is doing a lot of this research on his own,” says Day, who joined the Oxy faculty in 2013. “He is taking the answers from the interviews and working through them to figure out other questions. Then we go through his work and try and develop new questions out of it.”

Conroy’s research has brought him even closer to his grandparents. “I can now hold my own in Mandarin in a political discussion with my family,” he says. “I’ve been fully accepted by them as someone who is actually Chinese and not just American.”

When Elena Daniel ’20 enrolled at Occidental from Annville, Pa., she was interested in premed, so a biology major was a natural first choice. But the human focus of kinesiology won her over. “It seems like a very specific major—the study of human movement —but kinesiology is actually very interdisciplinary,” she says. “My particular interests are developmental motor behaviors, specifically in early childhood, as well as the public health implications of kinesiology.”

As part of her ongoing research on greening schoolyards, Daniel has worked with Associate Professor of Kinesiology Marcella Raney ’01 on the positive effects of replacing playground asphalt with natural elements such as grass and trees. Their findings show that this increases physical activity and creative play among students while reducing physical and verbal conflict.

Through the URC, Daniel spent much of her summer reviewing data from local elementary schools to evaluate the relative impact of schoolyard design features and green infrastructure on physical activity and social behaviors: “We’re hoping that the results of the study support the provision for equitable access to green space for all students.”

Raney is an extremely supportive and dedicated mentor, Daniel adds. “She was there for me every step of the way in constructing my proposal, and was always available if I had questions.”

In addition to her schoolyard research, Daniel was awarded a Public Health Internship funded through the Urban & Environmental Policy department. Working with Every Woman Counts, a program of the California Department of Health Care Services, her dental health research highlighted the lack of Denti-Cal clinics relative to the size of the beneficiary population.

A native of Budapest, Hungary, Máté Major ’22 spent most of his summers in San Diego, where his father taught courses at UCSD. He remembers going to Sea World and the YMCA, and his exposure allowed him to practice his English. By the end of his first year of high school in Hungary, he and his family were deciding what was best for their collective future. It came down to the educational path for Máté and brother Benjamin.

“Either we finished high school in Hungary,” Major says, “which most likely meant college and life there, or we would return to the United States to attend high school so we could apply for college as in-state residents.

At 15, I pretty much decided the latter was going to be the path.”

He and his brother ultimately moved to Los Angeles, where they lived with their older sister, and Major graduated from Harvard-Westlake School. His transition to Oxy was pretty natural following an inspiring meeting as a high school senior with Professor Damian Stocking of the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Department.

Sold on Oxy, Major took Stocking’s Cultural Studies Program course, Literature and Philosophy (“mind-blowing—I fell in love”) as well as Philosophy and the Arts and Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy.

“My first semester was packed with CSLC courses and so was the second,” Major says.

“I got a broad and deep overview of the history of philosophy as well as different ways of reading literature and engaging with art through multiple lenses.”

At the end of Major’s first year, Stocking encouraged him to continue his studies and thinking process through the URC’s Summer Research Program. They worked together to refine and define Major’s project. Titled “Laughing Into the Abyss,” Major describes it as an investigation of two extremes of the comedic genre, the works of classical Greek playwright Aristophanes and 20th-century Irish writer Samuel Beckett—analysis that may lay the groundwork for his senior comps.

The highlight of Major’s first year at Oxy, he says, was reading Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick in Stocking’s class Prometheus: Agonies of the Absolute. “When I finished that book and my related paper, I just felt like a better person. I felt elevated. I was ecstatic. Which is weird, because I know that Moby-Dick gets a bad rap, and people have mixed feelings about it, but if that doesn’t speak to the merits of the CSLC department —that we can make Moby-Dick awesome— then I don’t know what will.”

—laura paisley SUMMER 2019

OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 35

PAGE 64 left: 1969 grads Rabbi Haim Beliak, MaryEllen Garcia, Donna Fontana, and Rob Hartmann. right: Auld Lang Syne Award recipients Jerry Burnett ’53 and Dottie (Reitzell) Burnett ’54. below left: Biology Professor Gretchen North is hugged by Guru Bani Mele Khalsa ’09 after getting the Io Triumphe Award. below right: A hunger strike in the Quad protested military recruiting on campus in 1969.

Photos by Don Milici | 1969 photo by Carol Poliak ’72

Summary of ’69 The Class of ’69 brings a new vibe to the ranks of the Fifty Year Club—just as it did to the College experience after first setting foot on campus

In the 65 years since the founding of the Fifty Year Club at Occidental, thousands of alumni have been admitted to its ranks—and the members of the Class of ’69 proved to be no exception.

But this is a class that has been known to shake things up a bit, as three of its alumni reminded us in the reading of its class history at Thorne Hall on June 23. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length, in their own words.

MaryEllen Garcia: We were early members of the Baby Boom generation, born in the years after World War II. … Even as veterans reclaimed their old jobs, old social norms had shifted. There was pressure on the usual hierarchies of class, gender, and economic status. More families now were middle class, and they and their children now sought an education. Women and people of color had come into the mainstream workforce, and would continue to make strides, although cultural barriers persisted.

Our youthful years were a time of prosperity and opportunity but also uncertainty.

More to the point, the placid, unquestioning ’50s served to lay the groundwork for the 64 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE

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revolutionary ’60s. We could not have chosen a more difficult period for our college years.

Our experience was marked by riots, assassinations, and the war in Vietnam. Any hope of an idyllic campus experience devoted to learning and self discovery was constrained by national and world events that lay far beyond our control.

Rob Hartmann: In 1965 alone, President Johnson dramatically escalated the war by sending 18,000 troops to Vietnam. Malcolm X was assassinated, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X became required reading.

Martin Luther King led the civil rights march on Selma, Ala., and images of police brutality were forever etched in our young minds.

And as if that weren’t enough, our class saw a major transition for the College with the arrival of a new president, Dr. Richard Gilman from Carleton College. In his first address he welcomed us to Carleton College —an unintentional slip that he immediately apologized for.

Our sophomore year saw the creation of the Black Panthers and an ever-growing call

for “Black Power” for black people. Our junior year was punctuated by the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and by Bobby Kennedy in June. It was an alarming night for those who believed in democracy and freedom of speech.

The Selective Service held its first draft lottery in December of our senior year and many of us considered it a lottery for our lives. Some of us considered moving to Canada to avoid serving in what we considered an immoral war. But it was far more difficult to stay in our classes on the path toward our bachelor’s degrees.

Donna Fontana: While real war raged in Vietnam and influenced our campus life, we were more directly affected by student protests and demonstrations that often took over life in the Quad. Student sit-ins in the administration offices protested everything from the war in Vietnam to Dow Chemical recruitment on campus and more.

We were lucky to learn from the very best professors at the top of our fields. Unquestionably, the liberal arts education that we attained at Oxy has served us in good stead on our varied paths through life.

We hope you will find us a valued addition to the club. But be forewarned: You may find us to be a disruptive factor. One of our defining characteristics as a class is that we challenge the status quo, but rest assured that we do it to make things better. To repeat a call to action from the ’60s that in many ways defines our generation: If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Let’s all continue to work toward solutions.

OXYFARE 

Snapshots from Volume 41, Number 3 oxy.edu/magazine OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Jonathan Veitch President Wendy F. Sternberg Vice President for Academic Aairs and Dean of the College 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 Communications and Institutional Initiatives Jim Tranquada Director of Communications

Lee Chico ’23, left Christian Chico ’18, below

editorial staff

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

Alumni Reunion Weekend June 21-23 Photos by Marc Campos and Don Milici | MarchFourth photo by Andrew Wyatt

1. Clockwise from upper left, Alumni Seal honorees Kyle Ballard ’04 (service to the College), Christopher Silva (son of the late Jose Silva ’84, service to the College), Andrew Heath ’04 (professional achievement), Adrian Carpenter ’04 (Erica J. Murray ’01 Young Alumni Award), Vance Mueller ’86 (alumnus of the year), Lupe Silva (Jose’s widow), and Eric Warren ’69 (service to the community). 2. Nicolas Sweeney ’14 carries the sign for his class. 3. 2009 grads David Martinez, Sarah Thaler, Sarah Arvey, and Jessica Lobl. 4. Tracy (Flock) Crooks ’89 and Lara Lindersmith ’89 look back at the headlines.

5. Oswald poses with 1964 grads Susan Simpson, SteďŹƒ Miller, Sharon (Smith) Dawson, Judy Henderson, Mike Blaylock, and Carolyn Blaylock. 6. Leila Pazargadi ’04, Maria Stoyadinova ’05, and Nikolay Filchev ’04. 7. Joining President Veitch for the dedication of the Payton Jordan Athletic OďŹƒces are Jack Trotter ’72, Professor Lynn Mehl, Ed SaraďŹƒan ’52, Tod White ’59 and wife Linda, Director of Athletics Shanda Ness, Barbara (Jimenez) Parrott ’63, and Bill Parrott ’62. 8. Rachel and Errol Garnett ’94, Gene Whitehead ’94, and Elizabeth (Villegas) Payne ’94 and husband David party on the Quad.

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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 Victor Chico Department Manager Postal Operations Center

Lee: Occidental Gray Ringer T-shirt, $26.95 Christian: Black Occidental Alumni Stacked T-shirt, $16.95 Sylvia: Gray Occidental Mom V-neck T-shirt, $23.95 Victor: Black Occidental Tigers T-shirt, $17.95 Black Occidental Dad Cap, $21.95

Sylvia Chico Senior Program Coordinator Urban & Environmental Policy

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

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 Cover illustration by Taylor Callery Oxy Wear photo by Marc Campos

Save the Dates: Family & Homecoming Weekend October 18-19

MarchFourth—the internationally acclaimed, genre-breaking marching band featuring John Averill ’89 and Dan Stauer ’91—will bring its colorful explosion of brassy funk, rock, and jazz to Oswald’s Homecoming Carnival and Tailgate on October 19 as part of Homecoming and Family Weekend.

Earlier that day, please join your Oxy classmates and friends for the College’s annual Volunteer Leadership Conference.

Interested in learning more about volunteer activities at Oxy? Register online by October 8 at alumni.oxy.edu/hfw19.

Tokyo Salon July 23 A panel discussion on Oxy, Los Angeles, and the role of the Olympics in the growth and development of global cities was held at the Tokyo American Club. Attendees included Aime Fukada ’21, foreground, a sociology major from Singapore; Martha Matsuoka ’83, associate professor of urban and environmental policy; Tetsu Uemura ’83; moderator Seiji Aoyagi ’85; and Aime’s dad, Allen Fukada ’86. Dean Wendy Sternberg (not shown) joined the panel discussion as well.

alumni.oxy.edu

SUMMER 2019

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

Nonprofit U.S. Postage Paid Occidental College

The Chemistry of Cartilage: Professor Michael Hill

Oxy’s Child Development Center Turns 25

Address Service Requested

SUMMER 2019

WAKANDA ON WHEELS: CHANDRIKA FRANCIS ’10’S TINY HOME /// A SNAPSHOT OF OXY IN 1962

FOR GOOD The College’s most ambitious campaign in 25 years builds on Oxy’s location, curricular strengths, and the power of a liberal arts education oxy.edu/magazine