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 ’65
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.
The term downshifting has been around at least fifteen years, since Amy Saltzman published Downshifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track. But what was once a marginal movement is becoming mainstream. Kossek, whose doctorate is in organizational behavior, says American companies are realizing that to retain their high-talent individuals they have to start using “underutilized tools”—such as reduced hours or flexible schedules—in managing these individuals. And, she emphasizes, research shows that these arrangements serve employers and employees equally well. “The benefits of employing downshifters need more PR based on the sound research,” Kossek notes.
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By Harper Montgomery ’94
Mount Holyoke alumnae are major players in the art world today. Making art relevant in a world where it’s becoming less and less visible is the difficult challenge that all of these women embrace. None of them could imagine doing anything else. But their passion for art is matched with the vision and tenacity that has made them important leaders in the field. Being influencers in the art world—innovative makers and leaders in shaping conversations about how art is exhibited and studied—requires an intellectual curiosity and seriousness of purpose that was for all of them fostered by early experiences at Mount Holyoke.
The seductive beauty of objects was what first attracted Marcia Gagliardi Brennan (art historian, class of 1988, shown at left) to the study of art. She remembers sitting in Louisa McDonald’s Asian art course first semester of her first year thinking, “These are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen—I want to do this with the rest of my life.” Her professors in the art history department at Mount Holyoke gave her, she says, the vision of what was possible.
Even at its most theoretical, Brennan’s innovative scholarship has remained grounded in her love of objects. After developing her interest in critical theory and intellectual history at Brown University, where she earned a PhD in art history in 1997, Brennan pursued research in two books on how gender relationships have affected the reception of modernist paintings at different moments in the twentieth century. Although her early scholarship was grounded in gender theory, Brennan’s writing challenged gender studies to expand its breadth by looking at how Eros—heterosexual femininity and heterosexual masculinity—has historically framed viewers’ aesthetic experiences of art.
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By Leanna James Blackwell
It was a warm Sunday in August 1953, and Katherine Butler Jones ’57 (above) had one more person to visit before leaving her childhood home in Harlem for college. A family friend, Aunt Ida, was expecting her. Aunt Ida cooked her meals on a hot plate and worked in service, spending her small savings on gifts for others. Five-dollar bills were slipped quietly into Jones’s hand during every visit. But this time, when Jones arrived at the familiar brownstone, Aunt Ida had another surprise. It was a carefully folded hundred-dollar bill, enough for transportation to and spending money at Mount Holyoke.
It was the biggest bill she had ever seen. Jones’s first-year tuition, room, and board were covered by her mother’s cashed-in life insurance policy. These sacrifices represented, she knew, years of hard work and the belief of a community in the power of education to change lives.
That belief is the frame around everything Jones has achieved since, as professor, activist, historian, and writer. After Mount Holyoke, Jones earned a master’s in education from Simmons College and a doctorate in educational administration from Harvard. She settled in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Hubert Eugene “Hubey” Jones. together they raised eight children, an achievement Jones calls “a political act” for its “power to shape the future.”
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By Susan Bushey '96
Kate* woke up from an alcohol-induced blackout her first month on campus with a student adviser handing her a telephone number, telling her to call it and ask for help. “I felt coerced into calling, but I later was happy for it,” she says. Ann* vowed never to become her father—an alcoholic who got sober when she was fifteen, but who never found happiness. But in her junior year on campus, she picked up a bottle that she wouldn’t put down for another eight years. “I was a sick, sick girl,” she says.
These are two of the many Mount Holyoke women who are recovering alcohol and drug addicts. It’s not a fact about which people brag, but being able to provide help is. ADAP—Mount Holyoke’s Alcohol and Drug Awareness Project—has been serving the needs of students and alumnae for thirty years, long before such programs were federally mandated. In the fall, anniversary events included a panel with alumnae who told their stories and students who read the stories of others, as well as speakers such as Susan Cheever, author of Note Found in a Bottle: my life as a Drinker.
The road to recovery, though paved with pain, can and should be one of hope, according to ADAP director Susan McCarthy. “Recovery is possible,” she says. “[Addiction] doesn’t have to go to the extreme.”
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“Instead of less government, in many areas we actually need more government.”
–MHC politics professor Douglas J. Amy
Government Is Good
By Douglas J. Amy
When was the last time you heard someone say something positive about government? Most of what we hear about this institution is relentlessly negative. The news media focus almost exclusively on the problems of government—the scandals, the corruption, the policy fiascos. Government programs that work well are not considered news. news is when the Pentagon spends $400 for a toilet seat, or when a member of Congress is discovered to be a closet homosexual.
On top of this, the idea that “government is bad” has become one of the major themes of the republican Party. ever since ronald reagan quipped, “Government isn’t the solution, it is the problem,” conservatives have used every opportunity to disparage and demonize government. They are constantly telling us how awful it is: the enormous amount of waste, the poor service we get from bureaucrats, and the ever-increasing size of the public sector.
However, these negative images of government are often based more on myth than reality. Many of the common criticisms leveled at government are highly exaggerated, misleading, or simply wrong. For example, studies have found that most government bureaucracies are actually quite efficient, with a level of waste of only 2–3 percent. and surveys show that the public gives high marks to government employees for the services they provide—on a par with the ratings for private-sector services. also, if we look at the size of government as a portion of our gross domestic product—a common way to measure the size of the public sector—we see that government has hardly grown in the last thirty years. In 1976, all government spending made up 32.1 percent of GdP, and in 2006 it amounted to only 31.8 percent. In reality, then, government is not nearly as bad as it is often portrayed.
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By Hannah Wallace ’95
Online learning is one of the latest trends in higher education. Institutions such as Bowdoin, Duke, and Wellesley are offering downloadable lectures on iTunes U, while MIT is posting entire classes—exams and readings included—on its OpenCourseWare Web site. “Coursecasts,” such as the popular lectures of physics professor Walter Lewin, are not for credit, but they’re free.
Mount Holyoke is taking a slightly different approach. Last fall, the college became one of the first in the country to launch online courses in conjunction with the New York Times Knowledge Network. The two classes—Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics Vinnie Ferraro’s “The End of History or the Clash of Civilizations?” and “Inside the Art and Craft of Film,” taught by associate professor of film studies Robin Blaetz—were open to the public, though MHC alumnae got first dibs. Because these classes were more interactive than mere lectures—including live Web chats and e-mail contact with professors as well as readings and other resources (including movies for Blaetz’s class)—they came with a small price tag: $140 for four sessions.
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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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My Struggle With Panic Disorder
By Kara C. Baskin ’00
Photo by Scott Suchman
I’m twenty eight years old, recently married, happily employed and, for two months last fall, I was terrified to leave my house. Things should’ve been peachy, really. I had a book deal in the works. Brian and I had just gotten married. My life was hectic, Type A, and organized just the way I liked it. But suddenly my fancy “happy hours” gave way to TV Land reruns; my posh dinners with media clients were replaced with yogurt and bananas; and my “for better or for worse” marriage vows were being put to the test before my wedding gown even came back from the dry cleaner’s.
I have panic disorder. An acute, debilitating form of anxiety, it affects six million Americans. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from it, and the attacks usually begin in one’s twenties. Sufferers tend to be overachieving, highly creative, and dare I say it?—a little neurotic. Trembling, sweating, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, choking, chest tightness, and intense nausea are a few of the lovely symptoms that come on like an impromptu acid bath.
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Opening the Door to Ethical Capitalism
by Mieke H. Bomann
Sheila Lirio Marcelo ’93 needed help. An entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix Partners, a venture-capital firm, she was busy trying to get her own Internet start-up off the ground. But first on her to-do list was finding a nanny for her two boys, one of whom also needed a tutor, and personal care for her father, who had undergone heart surgery. Her two dogs also demanded some regular exercise. The convergence of those personal needs, combined with a desire to find work she was passionate about, helped her to formulate Care.com, a Web-based service company aimed at people who need outside help for some of life’s most important tasks, but who don’t have the time or the information resources to get it. “I really wanted to focus on [building] a for-profit company that had a social mission,” she explains. “So I started looking at families and children.”
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MHC Fellowships Help Fund Alumnae Dreams
By Susan Bushey '96
How many people can get money back from their alma maters? Mount Holyoke alumnae can.
The Alumnae Association and the college both fund fellowships annually, awarding nearly $50,000--this year the total was $47,425--to chosen alumnae. Some ninety to 130 apply for the thirteen to twenty awards given in a typical year, a low percentage of the 30,000-alumnae body.
Of the seven awards available, one--the Mary E. Woolley--is supported by the Alumnae Association's Founder's Fund and it is the largest, $7,500. The other awards average $1,500 per recipient.
Past fellowship recipients have used the funds to continue their education, teach in other countries, study women's education, and write a book, to name just a few. Alumnae from any class may apply, and the requirements are not stringent about what will be funded or how the money will be used. The only thing that these diverse recipients have in common is their ultimate goal--to pursue a dream.
Following, we highlight how four women have chosen to be lifelong learners with the financial help of the association and the college. If you'd like to join them, see the How to Apply section.
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