Alumnae in public office find politics frustrating, exhausting ... and satisfying.
By Avice Meehan ’77
Call it an epiphany years in the making. In chapter one, Sharon Har ’90 picks up a ringing telephone after putting in a long day as a staff adviser to Hawaii’s lieutenant governor. It’s 3 a.m. and a caller pours out the story of her desperate attempts to get someone in authority to clean out a garbage-filled stream behind her house. Within days, Har has mobilized state officials to clean up the stream and fence it in. Chapter two unfolds five years later: Har is working for a law firm handling complex commercial litigation.
“I was killing myself working around the clock. I was winning cases and making money for my clients, but it wasn’t like they needed the money. There wasn’t that personal satisfaction of helping people,” says Har, recalling her 3 a.m. encounter as a “deciding moment.”
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Downshifting Brings Upsurge in Quality of Life
By Emily Dietrich ’85
While most drivers leave gear choice to their automatic transmission, some prefer the control offered by shifting their own gears. Similarly, choosing a gear for career development—determining speed, effort, energy output—is a key to happiness, says Ellen Ernst Kossek ’79, author of CEO of Me: Creating a Life That Works in the Flexible Job Age.
In fact, a national poll by the Center for a New American Dream shows that 48 percent of Americans have opted to make less money to get more time and a more balanced lifestyle. Mount Holyoke alumnae are certainly among them, making adjustments within their careers, downshifting briefly to rev up again later, or starting over in a new business or field.
Downshifting the Mount Holyoke way rarely involves less effort—just a change in how and where the effort is used. Cori Ashworth, the Alumnae Association’s alumnae career and professional consultant, says that in her experience counseling Mount Holyoke women, downshifting has negative connotations, and she’d rather call it refocusing or re-energizing. Both Kossek and Ashworth assert that such a shift can be made in almost any field with careful planning and negotiation.
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Rita Banerji ’90 Fights Female Genocide
Photography by Rita Banerji ’90
According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was “missing” about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today.
Rita Banerji ’90, whose photographs bravely document some of India’s least treasured citizens, explains, “Perhaps ‘missing’ is too innocuous a term for what is actually happening—the systematic and targeted annihilation of a group [through] female feticide, female infanticide, dowry-related murders, an abnormally high mortality rate for girls under five due to starvation and intentional medical neglect, and the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.
Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:
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Some one million female fetuses are aborted each year.
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Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
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Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
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A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
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WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.
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What EVERYONE should know about ... A Quarterly series
By Eva Paus
When the twenty-ninth Olympiad opens in August, the eyes of the world will be on China. The country’s phenomenal economic growth will impress some observers; others will see the dramatic increase in inequality and environmental degradation that have accompanied it; and others still will be deeply disturbed by the government’s poor human-rights record, most recently the crackdown in Tibet and China’s support of the Sudanese government. But whichever element of the Chinese story we might find most salient, all of us must recognize that China, for better or worse, will alter profoundly the global geography of well-being and power in the twenty-first century.
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Speaking candidly about gender, and transcending the persistent animosities between men and women, are the next steps in the psychological transformation of society that began when Mary Lyon opened the doors of higher education to women, said Carol Gilligan in her commencement address to the class of 2008.
“The issues and conflicts have been exposed,” noted Gilligan, a psychologist, author of the seminal work on gender differences, In a Different Voice, and professor at New York University. But there is still work to do to refashion the remaining structures of patriarchy that yet exact tolls for both sexes, and “take on the creative challenge of redesigning the house and building a new framework.”
For many of the 578 women who received MHC degrees on a perfect spring day, including three master’s of arts degrees, eighteen certificates for international students, and forty-five Frances Perkins scholars, Gilligan’s message rang true. Said Anindita Dasgupta ’08 [above, holding camera], who will attend Boston University’s School of Public Health in the fall, “She made a great point that we’ve already heard one great speech about race [from Barack Obama] but that we still haven’t heard one like that on gender.”
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After completion of a self-study last summer, and a visit from an evaluation team in fall, the college was reaccredited in February by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Said President Joanne V. Creighton, “The reaccreditation process was a real validation of all the college has accomplished over the past decade. The visiting evaluators from our peer institutions not only recognized the great strength across the college, but they also were truly impressed by how distinctively mission-driven a place Mount Holyoke is.
“In a competitive landscape where every college says it’s unique, they saw the substance of what makes Mount Holyoke literally like no other—an outstanding liberal arts college for women, of course, but also, in their words, “a veritable world college.” For details, go to http://www.mtholyoke.edu/go/selfstudy.
Teaching and scholarship were honored in spring at the annual Celebration of Faculty Accomplishments.
Robin Blaetz, associate professor and chair of film studies, and Fred McGinness, professor of history and chair of complex organizations, each received the MHC Faculty Award for Teaching. Wei Chen, associate professor of chemistry, and Daniel Czitrom, professor of history, received the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship.
Blaetz was noted for her ability in getting students to see more clearly “what it is they are looking at.” Blaetz spoke about the growing importance for students to “gain mastery of the visual world that surrounds them.”
McGinness’s pivotal role in the complex organizations program for more than twenty years was recognized. In accepting the award, he spoke of the responsibility of historians to “not only remember the past but to do so without distorting it.”
Chen, a polymer scientist who has garnered worldwide recognition, was honored for her groundbreaking work “designing and building new molecular architectures.” She also was commended for her willingness to mentor students and actively involve them in her research.
Czitrom, a leading authority on the history of New York City, was praised for the many forms his scholarship takes, from textbooks to plays to commentaries to critical works. His citation also acknowledged his role as a resource for junior faculty members.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the dynamics of the global community have shifted sharply. Mount Holyoke students have responded to this transformation by enrolling in record numbers in Arabic-language courses and in junior-year-abroad programs in Arabic-speaking countries.
“Students usually have a variety of reasons for studying Arabic, whether it’s just curiosity and a willingness to learn about the culture, the people of the Middle East, and Islam, or just because they love languages,” observed Anne-Laure Malauzat ’09, Mount Holyoke’s Arabic language fellow.
Mohammed Jiyad, who has taught Arabic at Mount Holyoke since 1988, noted that it is “in the interests of this nation to understand the language and culture [of the Middle East].”
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Teaching Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la Recherche du temps perdu is frequently described as “undeniably daunting” and “notoriously difficult.” A University of Virginia professor even called the task of teaching Proust to undergraduates “almost an impossible one.”
Nevertheless, MHC Professor of French Catherine LeGouis tackled the classic in her spring seminar, and nine intrepid souls signed up for a reading load that makes Anna Karenina look light. Not only did all students cover 1,200 tightly packed pages, en français, but two attempted all seven volumes of the Recherche.
And they liked it!
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When White House press secretary Dana Perino admitted last year that she didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was—let’s review, shall we: the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown—Dan Czitrom was shocked. But the professor of history also found her lack of historical thinking typical of a thirty-something.
“Most young people are focused on the present,” Czitrom admits, “so trying to get them to think about the past is a tough sell.” A proponent of the teacher-scholar model of education, Czitrom hopes his own research and publishing projects will help engage his students in the cultural and political history, including American media history and the history of New York City, that is his specialty.
His most recent book may do just that. Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of the-Century New York (The New Press) offers a close look at the nation’s first “muckraker,” whose photographs documenting the squalid tenements on New York’s Lower East Side are well known. Less well understood is Riis’s deeply conservative worldview, which held that the goodwill of evangelical Christians, and not the government, would solve the problems of recent urban immigrants.
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Swimmer Grace Bauer ’08 (right) was honored by the Alumnae Association with this year’s Scholar-Athlete Award. A chemistry major and swim team captain, Bauer was recognized as a superior athlete within the NEWMAC Women’s Swimming Academic All-Conference Team, and set twenty-five swimming records in her fours years at MHC.
Bauer also received the Louisa Stone Stephenson Prize in 2007 for outstanding work in chemistry, as well as an undergraduate award for achievement in organic chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2006.
Said Swim Coach David Allen, “Grace has been a leader within the team as a captain, within the department as a Student-Athletic Advisory Committee representative, and within the chemistry department, serving on faculty-selection committees and as a peer mentor. She is a well-spoken representative for the college and our athletic department, and is deserving of the Scholar-Athlete Award.”
Some students go through college uncertain about their direction and sketchy about what really turns them on, academically or professionally. Not April Empleo Frazier ’08 (above).
Since her first year at MHC, Frazier has worked with low-income youth in nearby Holyoke, and is planning a career in teaching and community development. “I’ve known what I’m passionate about for pretty much the whole time,” says Frazier, who majored in international relations, with a minor in education. “Youth and development found me. I enjoy the honesty the kids present in my life, and I just want to be part of that.”
Thanks to a first-year MHC Community-Based Learning seminar, Frazier allied herself with what is now River Valley Academy in Holyoke, working with students who have behavior problems and learning differences. “I fell in love with it,” she says of that experience, as well as the work she later did with the Holyoke Youth Task Force and the after-school program, Youth Rap.
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Photos of hundreds of MHC students taken from the Facebook Web site were featured in the well-attended Blanchard Gallery art exhibit
The Panopticon: A Facebook Installation. Artist Martha Martinez FP’09 hoped her work would create a critical discourse on how the Internet “tricks users into making compromises with their values,” including privacy in their own life and the lives of others.
Science for All
As the science department chair at a charter school in the South Bronx, I was thrilled to read about the developments in science teaching at MHC in “Ripple Effect: Fresh Teaching Attracts the Next Generation of Scientists” (winter). I graduated from MHC as a chemistry and English double major and went on to teach chemistry for several years. I currently help to lead curriculum initiatives and professionally develop teachers.
I am a huge proponent of the pedagogical work undertaken in the science departments at MHC to promote science literacy for all, to connect relevance and importance, to integrate other disciplines, to stimulate and address interest, and to give students a safe space to demonstrate what they know and don’t know. While viewed as effective teaching techniques, I find them to be motivation essentials, and my colleagues and I strive to incorporate this work into our classrooms every day.
I teach in a community where many students perform below their anticipated grade level due in part to a previous school experience that did not serve them well. Influencing our students to become scientifically literate citizens is a daunting task when school in the past was more debilitating than foundation building. My colleagues and I are working around the clock to fully prepare our students with the knowledge and skills to not only enter college, but to successfully graduate as well.
I am extremely proud to see that MHC is a place where pedagogy is taken into careful consideration and where my students can thrive. With the diversity of students on college campuses today, it is only sound and responsible teaching to offer entry points for all students so that they can, according to Mary Lyon, “go forward, attempt great things, accomplish great things.”
Christine Algozo ’97
Brooklyn, New York
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The faces change every year. The mood remains the same—celebratory. To see many more photos from the two reunion weekends, see our
photo galleries.
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