Coaches and athletes are giving the college’s new track and field two thumbs up. A synthetic, multipurpose field completed late last fall, it is lit and surrounded by an eight-lane track with a nine-lane straightaway. The new facility allowed the college to host a home track meet in April, its first since 1996.
“Our old track wasn’t worthy,” explained track coach Tina Lee, who has seen her share of tracks and straightaways in the twenty-one years she’s been with the college. It not only had just six lanes, which quickly became outmoded when competitive tracks started featuring eight, but also was showing signs of serious wear and tear.
“We had a lot of injuries because the surface was so hard and worn down,” she said. “This surface will reduce the number of injuries.” She is also excited about the prospect of faster times across the board for competitors thanks to the new track’s improved resilience.
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While the Office of Admission could report no record numbers of applications by mid-February, as it has done in recent years, it nevertheless had received 3,100 applications, its second-highest number, down about 1 percent from last year.
After a decline in early decision applications last year, Jane Brown, vice president for enrollment and college relations, said the college had rebounded with 265. Approximately one-quarter of the class of 2012 will be enrolled from the early-decision pool.
The applicant pool continues to be diverse, Brown noted, with 24 percent students of color, and all fifty states and 111 foreign countries represented.
“The most significant challenge we face in admission this year is the highly publicized change in the financial-aid landscape,” Brown noted. “Many of our more highly endowed peers have pledged to replace student loans with institutional grants. MHC has a proud legacy of serving more low- and middle-income students than most of these institutions and so ... we will continue to include moderate loans in our financial aid awards.”
Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities and professor of politics, has been appointed dean of Mount Holyoke, a three-year position starting in the fall. Gill replaces Lee Bowie, professor of philosophy, who will take a yearlong sabbatical leave before returning to his department.
Lenore Carlisle, assistant professor of psychology and education and chair of the search committee, cited Gill’s broad understanding of Mount Holyoke and its students as a factor in her selection. “She has a good sense of the challenges students face in finding a balance between the curricular and cocurricular,” Carlisle said. “She was very well versed on every perplexing or challenging issue we raised, from diversity to grade inflation. She was very compelling.”
Gill said her “number-one dream” is for Mount Holyoke to become “more self-aware and articulate” about itself. “We have a truly extraordinary opportunity now to consciously create something new, paradoxically something we also already are: a global women’s college,” said Gill.
“I think the dean could help us all to think more deeply about what our students need to learn, and how they can best learn it, so they can take their rightful places at the tables where solutions to the world’s most pressing problems will be found.”
Crossing the state highway in front of MHC is less daunting thanks to revamped pedestrian crosswalks that are now highlighted by pavement markings and street lighting.
Traffic along Massachusetts 116 between Morgan and Park streets—the south and north ends of campus—is calmer due to blinking yellow lights installed this winter in the pavement of new granite-and-brick crosswalks and activated when pedestrians press a button at roadside posts.
“Although some of our Five College neighbors have had serious injuries and fatalities involving pedestrians, so far we have been fortunate that no one has been seriously injured,” said John Bryant, director of facilities planning and management at MHC. Still, in the past two years, one MHC employee and a student were hit by vehicles and sent to the hospital.
A study performed by civil engineers found 3,900 pedestrian crossings each day across Route 116 when the college is in session. Every hour, 800 to 1,200 vehicles pass in front of the college, at an average speed of 40 miles per hour.
Similar to the crosswalks installed a few years ago on 116 in front of Amherst College, the textured stone, blinking lights, pavement reflectors, and streetlights on each side of the five crosswalks are meant to alert drivers that they’re entering a pedestrian zone, said Bryant.
The cost of the project for the college, which took eighteen months to coordinate with the Massachusetts Highway Department and several local agencies, was $650,000.—M.H.B
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Director of Human Resources Lauren Turner announced in February that the college will integrate campus programs for children that “support child care and the needs of our psychology/education faculty and students for research and observation.” The move will consolidate services currently provided by the Gorse Child Study Center and the StonyBrook Children’s Center. The new Gorse Children’s Center will be managed by Bright Horizons. Details about the new model, and the process by which it was chosen are available online. An e-mail listserv to which you can direct questions and concerns is at childrenscenter@mtholyoke.edu.
When Elizabeth Budd ’09 comes across an item begging to be recycled, she picks it up and carries it home. It’s part—albeit a small part—of the personal role she says is important in making the planet just a little less toxic.
“There are things we can do to improve [the environment] now,” the dance and environmental justice major points out. To those who would call saving a yogurt cup from the local landfill less than profound, she responds, “I think we have an opportunity to change, and if you think negatively all the time you can’t get anything done.”
A part-time environmental organizer with Nuestras Raices, a community-development group in neighboring Holyoke, Budd has been actively involved in efforts to counter the city’s proposed waste-transfer station that would, Budd relates, result in up to 225 diesel trucks delivering 750 tons of waste a day.
In an impoverished city with one of the highest asthma rates in Massachusetts, a respiratory ailment that has been linked to diesel pollutants, that’s not the kind of economic development that makes sense, she explains.
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You could say Marjorie Kaufman operates in the no-cliché zone. Ask the MHC professor emeritus of English about her love of literature and you get this response: “If you use terms like ‘love of literature,’ I’ll gag on what you are writing.” Press her for the plainspoken translation, and Kaufman explains, “I take pleasure in reading the good stuff.”
Not only does Kaufman derive great joy from reading and discussing books, but she insists that it’s all she really knows how to do. So it isn’t surprising that at age eighty-five, she is the driving force behind three “literary groups for grownups,” as she refers to her peers.
Every other week she meets for two hours with fellow devotees of the printed word at Loomis Village, a retirement community in South Hadley; at Jones Library in Amherst; and the Council on Aging, also in South Hadley. The last is a poetry writing and appreciation group. She has encountered some inspired work from “genuine poets” in the group who have already produced one book of verse and are working on another. “I want to get their poems out in the world,” she says.
Kaufman, a Milwaukee native who did her doctoral dissertation on Henry James at the University of Minnesota, arrived at Mount Holyoke in 1954 not planning to stay very long. She didn’t believe in private colleges or gender-segregated education. “I’m not sure I even believed in New England,” she said. “But Mount Holyoke surprised me; it wasn’t the spoiled, plate-painting student body that I expected.” Most of her career was devoted to teaching American literature.
Kaufman is slightly dyslexic, something she didn’t realize until late in her career. “I’m a very slow reader,” she says. “Therefore, I need writers to work as hard at writing as I do at reading,” Kaufman says. “Henry James rewards my slowness ... he writes for someone who reads all of the words and broods between the period of one sentence and the capital of the next.”
The groups she leads now give her a “reason to be,” Kaufman says. Initially, some participants thought she would lecture, but that’s not her style, she says. “So what I did was to ask if anybody wants to read. I mean it, I’ll read with anybody, anywhere.” —Eric Goldscheider
Photo by Donna Cote
Exam time finds students stressed out but also creative in their array of coping techniques. A few of them agreed to share their methodology:
Julie Pfahler ’09
I make lots and lots and lots of lists of what I need to do. I also avoid the library completely if at all possible. (Stressed-out MoHos in the library are … constantly breaking down and proclaiming failure, making those they encounter feel doomed as well.) I go to get books and then leave.
Maria Lena Garrettson ’10
I like to dress nice and put makeup on for an exam, just to feel good about myself. I also like to get a lot of sleep and a good breakfast. I know that if I’m tired I won’t function, and if I’m hungry I’ll think about that more than the exam.
Jemilatu Abdulai ’09
Music! I study best with music ... and I also need a semi-active environment to study in. I don’t do well in very quiet rooms.
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Laurie Priest, director of athletics, was named one of the 100 most influential sports educators in America by the Institute for International Sport. The project honors individuals and organizations who have used sport as a means to educate and shape positive values.
Focus the Campus, part of MHC’s continuing response to a nationwide teach-in on global warming solutions in January, hoped to reinvigorate campus efforts around energy conservation and recycling. See the college web site for links to college resources.
'08-'09 Costs Set: The MHC Board of Trustees in its winter meeting set tuition, room, and
board for 2008–2009 at $48,500, a 4.8 percent increase over last year.
Joe Smith likes an element of instability in his art.
Whether he’s stacking bottles high up on glass plates and around the floor—risking shattering them—or fitting wooden blocks into a precarious construction from the top down—defying gravity—the associate professor of art says the attention that kind of daring work commands is essential.
“Standing next to glass makes people nervous—it makes me nervous,” says Smith, whose work with varied materials has been exhibited across the country. “That [emotion] affects me, so I think it’s important. Attentiveness is important to achieve.”
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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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