the Racquette
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SUNY Potsdam Unveils Student Makes Rope to Save New Center for Easter Island Applied Learning Olivia Broersma Staff Writer
(From Left to Right) Jenica Rogers, Paul Marthers, President Kristen Esterberg, Elise Newkrik-Kotfila and Steven Marquesse cut the ribbon to welcome the crowd into the new center. Alesxis Leigh Olopp
Mark Guido
College Life Editor
Faculty, students and community members flocked to Crumb Library on Feb. 3 to celebrate the official ribbon-cutting for the new campus Center for Applied Learning. The center, which combines offices and faculty from Sisson, Crumb and MacVicar Halls, was open throughout last fall semester, but faculty and staff formally inaugurated it in celebration of its being the first facility of its kind in the SUNY system. President Kristin Esterberg led the commemorative speeches provided by faculty members. “It became very quickly clear that we needed to pull together all of the wonderful people working in these areas,” Esterberg said, “to be housed in a centralized location at the heart of campus. What could be more at the heart of the campus than the library?” The other speakers were Paul Marthers, associate vice chancellor and vice provost for strategic management and student success in the SUNY System; Elise NewkirkKotfila, SUNY director of applied learning; Jenica Rogers, director of SUNY Potsdam’s college libraries; and Toby White, director of experiential education. The opening and the speakers drew a large crowd. “I’m so, so pleased that so many people showed up,” Rogers said. “This is obviously very important to me, but I’m glad to see that it resonates with the campus.” The presenters said they did not want the center’s impact to be understated, and that the assimilation of each individual facility under
one roof has far-reaching effects beyond simple convenience. The proximity of research, study abroad, and internship resources, they said, would allow for a richer cross-collaboration between programs, which would ultimately better serve students and “help [them] blaze a new trail” that may have not been possible without the individual facilities working together.
“It became very quickly clear that we needed to pull together all of the wonderful people working in these areas.” Rogers, who is also the Dorf endowed director for Applied Learning, earned her position in conjunction with the $1 million grant from Joy Dorf, Clarkson alumna of ‘58. Dorf, along with her husband, Richard, funded both the facility and Rogers’ position. The grant was spurred by Potsdam’s desire to spearhead the movement toward defining themselves within the SUNY system. “As I see it, we are really SUNY’s creative campus,” Esterberg said. “We help students figure out how to develop that creativity within themselves and apply it in the real world.” The facility has supplanted Crumb’s computer lab, an area that, while useful to the students, was not irreplaceable. Mitchell Hughes, a work-study
assistant at the center, said he remembered that few people used the computer lab a few years ago because of the many computers in the library. “I can definitely see [the center] being more useful and having more of an impact for students,” he said. Because of center’s newness, some involved with it said they were passionate about getting the word out that the space had been drastically overhauled. Their greatest fear, they said, was that students would not know about the changes happening. The benefit of being at the “heart” of campus is the faculty’s ability to provide some free advertising, and the staff is more than willing to take advantage of their locations to go directly to the students themselves. — Continued on page 2 —
The Presidential Scholars programs offered at SUNY Potsdam allow undergraduate students to take an active hand in their academic education. Students who demonstrate a dedicated interest in their education and furthering it personally are invited into this program. The program encourages students to explore their personal areas of interest in their academic fields through largely independent work. One student who is taking advantage of this research opportunity is Maureen Folk, a senior archaeology major and museum studies minor who is doing research on Easter Island. Folk’s research project, “Moving Easter Island’s Megaliths,” studies the environmental impact of the Moai, or Easter Island heads, on Easter Island. Uniquely, Folk has chosen to focus on the practice of rope-making in moving the Moai across the island and how that practice fostered the island’s environmental destruction. Folk said she saw an area that was unexplored by other researchers and chose to investigate. “Easter Island is pretty famous for being nearly treeless, and they’ve attributed that to the moving of the stone statues on the island,” she said. “My project is looking at that ecological collapse through making rope. So, I’m making rope to understand what kind of impact it would have had.” According to National Geographic’s website, the Moai have been a target of exotic attraction
for thousands of years. Individuals from across the globe have visited Easter Island to marvel at its perplexing stone giants. The Moai “average 13 feet tall and 14 tons” and were built by the Rapa Nui people who were native Polynesians to the island. National Geographic notes that the Rapa Nui erected as many as 900 Moai, but their great environmental impact on the small island ultimately led to its downfall. Recent research into Easter Island has created new hypotheses about the creation, movement and importance of the Moai to their creators and the island. The formerly well-held hypothesis of the Moai presented the idea that they were moved from their construction site to the coast of the island by rollers. However, recent research details the hypothesis of how lengthy ropes were used to “rock” the statues back and forth to move them across the landscape instead. “Dr. [Tim] Messner [assistant professor of archeology] actually helped me find a documentary on how they move one of the statues with rope,” Folk said. “He led me to this documentary and said ‘no one is looking at the rope in this equation.’” The documentary Messner mentioned, “Mystery of Easter Island,” originally aired in 2012 and introduced an alternate hypothesis of the Moai for the first time. Like the researchers in the documentary, Folk chose to investigate this new hypothesis of moving the Moai. explore this unfamiliar topic.
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