Fresh Teaching Attracts the Next Generation of Scientists
By Shoshana Walter ’07
Rebecca Jablonski-Diehl ’09 steps into the murky water of Lower Lake. In front of her is the serene reflection of trees stretched out across the water. It is a familiar sight. But the experience of treading cautiously down a slimy slope in thigh-high waders is definitely new. “The bottom was mucky. We were scared we were going to fall down and not make it out,” Jablonski-Diehl recalls, laughing.
She wasn’t venturing into the muddy lake just for kicks. Jablonski-Diehl and her classmates were collecting water samples for a lab project in biology professor Martha Hoopes’s ecology course. The students gathered samples for nearly two months, comparing and contrasting water conditions at sites around campus.
It is challenging work for 100-level students, but the payoff can be big. With this kind of hands-on experience, students often develop a passion for scientific exploration and discovery early in their college careers. Eventually they may become science majors, or something just as important: informed and scientifically literate citizens.
“I’d never actually done experiments myself,” says Jablonski-Diehl. “Going into the lake was probably the most fun thing I’d ever done in any class.” She was hooked, and became an environmental studies major.
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Julie Holley ’87 Says Crew’s Lessons Linger
By Maryann Teale Snell ’86
Julie Holley ’87 looks pretty serious. But behind that near-scowl of concentration are a ready laugh and spirited confidence when she tells how she wound up at Mount Holyoke, and how she joined the crew team despite using a steel hook instead of a right hand.
Rewind to spring 1983, awards night at a high school in Queens, New York. Holley, on the brink of graduation, is getting several. Jean Sudrann ’39, an MHC English professor, is also being honored. She and department colleague Marjorie Kaufman are impressed with Holley and ask where she’s going to college. To SUNY Purchase, she replies, to study music. The professors tell her, “You need to come to Mount Holyoke.” After a year at Purchase, she transferred.
In browsing MHC’s course catalogue, Holley was taken with a photo of rowers on the water. Although a star swimmer and competitor in track-and-field events (she was on the winning U.S. team at the 1984 International Games for the Disabled), she had never rowed before. But she looked at that picture hard. “I said to myself: That’s what I want to do when I get to Mount Holyoke.”
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By Stan P. Rachootin, Professor of Biological Sciences
Note: This is the second in a continuing series of “What everyone should know about …” essays by MHC professors.
The great evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
It is true that any topic in biology, and many scientific questions that impinge on our lives, can be illuminated in revealing and useful ways by considering evolution. How and why does HIV change? Why did domesticated plants and animals happen? What new human diseases are cooking themselves up, and how are they “stirred” by our domesticated animals and “seasoned” with our antibiotics? Can genes from one organism prosper in another? What happens during a mass extinction? What were consciousness, language, and prayer cobbled together from, before there was consciousness or language or religion?
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One Woman Brings Hope to Cambodian Kids
By Elizabeth Eidlitz
While her mother was listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats on the radio, Nancy Woodward was ministering to baby dolls in the pretend hospital she set up in the sunroom of the family’s Hanover, New Hampshire, home.
Almost sixty years later, while some retired classmates from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School were playing golf and booking cruises, Nancy Woodward Hendrie ’54, MD, was repeatedly flying 8,713 miles to build Roteang Orphanage, a cornerstone project of The Sharing Foundation (TSF). It aims to improve conditions for Cambodian children, an estimated 45,000 of whom die each year from preventable starvation and treatable diseases.
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Gary Gillis, assistant professor of biological sciences. Interests: biology of animal locomotion, playing tennis and Ultimate Frisbee, watching horror movies, reading good books (broadly defined)
Pee-Wee the guinea pig. Interests: Unlike my owner, I am completely uninterested in locomotion. Just the thought of running appalls me, and whatever you do, don’t mention the word treadmill around me. I love to eat, especially clover, hay, and dried fruit. (Banana chips are my weakness.)
Summa the chameleon. Interests: Like Pee-Wee, I too love a good meal, but have a penchant for moths and crickets.
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Bettina Bergmann has long focused her academic research on ancient Roman art and archaeology, and is fascinated by many elements in the excavated sites around the Bay of Naples, which were buried in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These days, her area of interest also has become part of an unexpected confluence of the ancient and modern worlds.
“Just as new work on Vesuvius asks us to connect with the plight of the ancient victims, the eruption” has become a paradigm for contemporary disasters like 9/11, the Indonesian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, says Bergmann, Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History.
For example, a prominent Vesuvius volcanologist shared his excavation skills at the 9/11 craters in lower Manhattan, and a call went out afterwards for classical archaeologists interested in working on the continuing recovery of the victims’ remains and personal effects in a sifting facility in Brooklyn.
Long interested in the interiors of Roman houses, Bergmann is at work on an essay about the restored Roman frescoes salvaged from a villa outside Pompeii that are on display at the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (These galleries were funded, in part, by Shelby Baier White ’59 and her late husband, Leon Levy.)
In the spring, Bergmann will teach her course on art and cultural politics. When she first introduced the course nearly a decade ago, she had to search for contemporary problems analogous to ancient ones. Now, the issue of patrimony and provenance of objects— essentially, the ownership of history—has heated up, and with a growing schism between archaeologists and museums, “there’s not enough time” to cover all the issues, she laments. Nevertheless, she aims to set the current debate within its long history, which dates back to the Romans themselves.
One of a few specialists of the Roman world trained as an art historian, Bergmann revels in the recent upswing of interest in her favored time period. “It is always interesting to me to see how we engage with the past … and now seems a particularly powerful moment.”— M.H.B.
Photo by Ben Barnhart
Online Career Curriculum Prods Students Into Action
Getting students into the Career Development Center has always been a challenge. While students say they’re aware of all the good information that awaits them in the building adjacent to the health center, few make the best use of it, at least not before their senior years. Career counselors at Mount Holyoke hope a new electronic initiative will prod students beginning in their first year to think more systematically about life after college.
YourPlan is a four-year career curriculum that outlines in a logical manner the steps students need to take to find a meaningful place in the world after college. Set up as a series of checklists online, it offers students at appropriate stages in their college years the strategies, structure, and professional support they will need to carry their education into a job, graduate school, or volunteer work they are suited for and find personally rewarding.
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The Founding Fathers, whose triumphal achievements and profound failures have been addressed in a dozen recent books, including the lecturer’s, were the subject of a September lecture for first-year students by Professor of History Joseph Ellis.
It was the second in a series of talks established as part of the First-Year Seminar Program that introduces first-years to the liberal arts. “Why Dead White Males Matter” conveyed Ellis’s understanding that while “they may all be dead, and they may all be white, the men who founded America, along with [their] successes and failures, remain relevant.”
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LaundryView, an online monitoring system for MHC laundry rooms, gives a virtual glimpse of students’ clothes to see if they’re done or whether machines are available.
James Harold enjoys the outdoors with his son, Tobias.
It’s early Tuesday morning, and in a lecture hall in Kendall, students enrolled in Philosophy 235, Medical Ethics, are hashing out the moral rights of people in the late stages of dementia. Their assigned readings offer two different approaches to a thorny issue inherent in this life-altering condition. Is it more important to honor a patient’s directive for care in such a situation, made long before the dementia took place, or the current needs of the same individual, which may conflict with the person’s earlier wishes?
It’s tough stuff for many students, whose exposure to abstract ideas like the nature of self, standard fare in the philosopher’s world, has been limited. For James Harold, an assistant professor of philosophy who teaches the class, the goal is not memorization of a slate of correct answers to difficult medical questions but an understanding of how, logically, to get to an answer and the philosophical principles relevant to that answer.
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Among the winners in this year’s contest for photos taken by students abroad was this shot of three barley harvesters in the village of Burr in India’s Spiti Valley. Senior Nicole Edick’s image won in the “people and culture” category of the contest, sponsored by the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. See the other winners at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/global/17635.shtml.
When Holly K. Norwick FP’08 was called to the ministry, she faced an internal struggle that one might expect to accompany a dialogue with a God who considered women unfit to be ministers.
Daughter of a conservative Lutheran pastor whose Biblical interpretation left little room for women as church leaders, Norwick recalls that she “resisted [God’s call] quite fiercely but finally submitted, and from then on the math was clear.” Introduced to MHC through a mentor at a community college in Hawaii, Norwick applied to the Frances Perkins Program. Five minutes after receiving her MHC acceptance letter, Norwick resigned from her job in the Honolulu police force.
“Being accepted at a school that empowers women is really the aspect I needed,” says Norwick, who had served as the officer in charge of community volunteers for the Crime Stoppers program. “What I needed was the confidence that it was okay to be a pastor, and MHC has done that. Seeing so many proficient, happy women who don’t find it odd that I want to do these things” boosted her self-image as a woman of faith.
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Highlighting the fall season was the debut of a new $5.9 million outdoor track-and-field facility, complete with a synthetic turf field, lights, and a state-of-the-art press box. The field hockey team opened the complex in September when it hosted the Seven Sisters Classic.
Led by junior forward Jaimie Macari, the field hockey team advanced to the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) postseason tournament for the tenth straight year. Macari tallied a team-best thirteen goals, as the Lyons finished with a record of 7–9.
Mount Holyoke’s tennis and volleyball squads also made return trips to the NEWMAC Tournament, collecting three and five victories, respectively.
Sophomore forward Lauren Orr posted eight goals to pace the Mount Holyoke soccer team, which found the win column three times. Orr was responsible for the winner in two of the Lyons triumphs.
The cross-country team enjoyed an outstanding season in which it raced to the team title at the Seven Sisters Invitational for the first time since 1999.
Mount Holyoke’s golf team competed in five events, including its home invitational this fall. The Lyons were at their best in their last tournament of 2007, placing fourth at the Wellesley College Invitational.
The riding team opened its slate at the Preseason Tournament of Champions in Laurinburg, North Carolina. After claiming the title at that competition, the Lyons went on to capture High Point Championships at both the Becker College and Williams College intercollegiate horse shows.
Mount Holyoke’s crew team excelled in its two events this fall. Its varsity eight boat nabbed second place at the Head of the Housatonic and tenth place at the Head of the Charles.—Mike Raposo, MHC sports information director
Photo of field hockey forward Jaimie Macari ’09 by Richard Orr Sports Photography
ASTEROIDS
Associate Professor of Astronomy Darby Dyer and Ronald Zissel, the longtime astronomy lab director, now retired, have had asteroids named after them. 7272 Darbydyar and 6949 Zissel orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Read more
STUDY IN COSTA RICA
Sustainable development in a community setting is a goal of a new MHC study-abroad program outside Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, beginning in 2009. Read more
GENOCIDE PREVENTION
Gerald Caplan, a leading Canadian authority on genocide and genocide prevention, was this year’s scholar-in-residence at the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. Read more
Notes from the Alumnae and Students of Color Conference
If there was one thing that Mount Holyoke students took away from November’s Alumnae and Students of Color Conference, it was that our older sisters went through a great deal for us to enjoy the safe space we have today.
The first-of-its-kind conference brought together a diverse group of nearly 150 alumnae and students. Keynote speakers included Ninotchka Rosca, founder of GABRIELA, the women’s-rights organization of the Philippines; and Debra Martin Chase ’77 (above), Emmy nominated motion picture and television producer.
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