President Creighton during the laurel parade
Photo: Paul Schnaittacher
The Quarterly invited alumnae to submit questions for
President Joanne V. Creighton to answer. You sent many, and she chose which to
answer here. Others will feed into a farewell article planned for the end of
Creighton’s presidency next spring.
Q. I was a student on the committee of faculty, staff and students you formed in
1996 to develop the Plan for 2003. We spent a lot of time working on the
college mission that year. Knowing what you know now, how would that mission
statement be different? Elizabeth O'Donoghue '97
A. I’m proud that we were able to boil down the College’s mission into
a single sentence: it warms my heart as an English professor! The key elements in
that sentence—academic excellence, diverse residential community of women,
liberal arts, and purposeful engagement in the world—are still the touchstones
of Mount Holyoke today. I wouldn’t change a word.
Q. What is the biggest challenge facing the College today and what’s
being done about it? Melinda A. Mann ’79
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Commencement 2009
Ireland’s President Tells Grads, “Do Good, Humanly Uplifting Things”
It is no accident that the peace and reconciliation that eluded Ireland during its decades-long “troubles” finally came to pass in a new era “where women’s talents are flooding every aspect of life as never before,” said Ireland President Mary McAleese in her commencement address to the class of 2009, which was broadcast live via the Internet.
“For centuries, the world has tried to fly on one wing, and it has not been a pretty sight as it struggled with the downstream consequences of wasting the talent and potential of that other wing, the women of the world,” she emphasized to the 566 women receiving degrees on May 24.
The challenges for women, of the developing world especially, remain daunting, McAleese went on, and all who were awarded MHC degrees—including thirty-six Frances Perkins scholars, one master’s degree recipient, twenty-four international students earning certificates, and three post-baccalaureate degree students—should “go and do good, humanly uplifting things that will not be done unless you do them.”
Inspiration to work hard and long and with indomitable spirit was provided by Luora Webb FP’09, who received her degree this year at the age of eighty-two and is believed to be the oldest person to graduate from MHC. The first African-American to be hired in the Springfield, Massachusetts, public school system, she received a standing ovation and roar of appreciation from the audience.
Also receiving honorary degrees at MHC’s 172nd commencement were Princess Loulwa al-Faisal al Saud, founder of Effat University, the first private university for women in Saudi Arabia; and Clare Waterman ’89, chief of the Laboratory of Cell and Tissue Morphodynamics at the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
For full text of the commencement speeches and a photo gallery, go to www.mtholyoke.edu/news/channels/27/stories/5681394.
(Left) Commencement speaker McAleese greets graduates. Photo by Ben Barnhart
(Right) Luora Webb FP’09 is, at age eighty-two, believed to be the oldest person ever to graduate from MHC. Photo by Fred LeBlanc
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Since a “perfect storm” swept the US economy off its foundations last fall, the waves have eroded finances everywhere, including at Mount Holyoke. As President Joanne V. Creighton wrote to the campus community in January, “In the past six months we have seen the financial markets move from shaky to steeply lower and the economy as a whole move from weakness to serious recession.”
“The consensus view among financial experts is that the worst may not yet be over and that the recovery will be long and slow. The negative impact on Mount Holyoke and on higher education in general is already being felt, and it will continue well into the future. As a result, like many other institutions, the college needs to make both short term and longer-term changes to remain financially stable.”
MHC’s endowment—the income from this fund accounts for about one-fifth of each year’s operating budget— dropped by $155 million in the last half of 2008. But Mount Holyoke is hardly alone in being hammered by the recession. A national survey released in late January noted that American college and university endowments lost an average of 23 percent during fall 2008. “This is the most challenging environment that any of us in higher education have seen in our professional lifetimes,” Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, told the Washington Post in January.
This is true even though higher education’s endowments generally outperformed the market during the fall slide. For example, the S&P 500 index dropped nearly 29 percent during the second half of 2008, while MHC’s endowment value slid 22 percent during this period.
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President Joanne V. Creighton to Step Down in 2010
President Joanne V. Creighton will step down at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year after nearly fifteen years of service. The seventeenth president of MHC, Creighton informed the college’s faculty of her decision at a special meeting in February.
“An extraordinary and palpable esprit de corps emanates out of the college’s inspiring history and mission; that spirit has been the engine of our collective success during the past dozen plus years,” Creighton wrote in a message to the broader community.
Creighton’s tenure has been marked by significant achievements. Since she assumed the presidency in 1996, applications for admission have risen by 50 percent; ninety new tenuretrack faculty were hired, and 81 percent of alumnae have participated in two fundraising campaigns.
“Joanne has a remarkable ability to bring out people’s best selves in service of the greater good,” said Mary Graham Davis ’65, president of the Alumnae Association. “The constructive agenda she has set for the extended Mount Holyoke community has kept alumnae informed and engaged. We have seen we really can make a positive difference in the life of our alma mater. The strong partnership we enjoy between the association and the college is no doubt one of Joanne’s most important legacies.” (More)
Go Ahead, Say It! Frank Talk About Tough Topics
In a plugged-in, battery-charged, Bluetooth kind of culture where we are all consumed with the desire to communicate, the one thing you’d think we’d be good at is dialogue. Not so much.
Turns out that active listening and respectful sharing, especially when it revolves around the issues of race, class, and sexual difference, is hard work and takes a lot of practice. Three campuswide discussion groups at MHC aim to help us polish this desirable skill set.
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The importance of fresh water is hard to overstate. So are the pollution, drought, and mismanagement that are severely challenging the world’s rivers, lakes, ponds, and wetlands. Sandra Postel, interim director of MHC’s Center for the Environment, is a fresh water expert. We talked to her over the summer about why water matters.—M.H.B.
Q: You have described rivers as the “blue arteries of the earth.” Can you explain their importance?
A: I think of rivers as an important part of the planet’s circulation system—a fundamental part of what makes the planet function. They transport critical nutrients and elements to the ecosystems. Rivers help keep the earth alive. (More)
Their belongings and expectations in tow, firsties came to campus in late August for Orientation—and their first taste of college life. From the looks and sounds of their large gatherings in Chapin and small-group circles on the greens, MHC’s latest student crop will not disappoint in the classroom or out in the world. Here are a few details about the incoming class:
A decade ago, people from other countries flocked to America for high-quality healthcare delivered with limited delays. Today, “medical tourism” consists mainly of Americans, Europeans, and Canadians traveling to developing nations to receive the same care at rock-bottom prices.
Andrea Ponce ’09 (left) thinks this new twist may help ignite her beloved Guatemala’s floundering economy. “I think that medical tourism is a great way to start offering services to developed countries and empower our economy,” she writes in an e-mail from home.
Daughter of a surgeon and a tour operator, Ponce began examining Guatemala’s prospects for the emerging medical tourism industry for a visit Guatemala’s renowned volcanoes, lakes, and Mayan ruins.
The demand for medical tourism is certainly there, Ponce says: many Europeans and Canadians are tired of the long waiting periods for surgeries common in their healthcare systems. And forty-five million uninsured Americans represent a virtually untapped market.
That’s good news for Guatemala. A decade after a peace agreement that ended thirty-six years of guerrilla warfare, 32 percent of the population of this tropical beauty lives on less than $2 a day.
Ponce, who plans to get her MBA after graduation, hopes the burgeoning industry will alleviate some of the pressure for many of her compatriots to emigrate for work. “I want to create opportunities for Guatemalans so that they do not have to migrate to other countries,” she says.—M.H.B.
For the past five years, Gail Hornstein (left) has sat in on support groups organized by people who hear voices.
Across the United States and Europe, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses are coming together to share their stories, to devise coping strategies, and to reframe what it means to be “mentally ill.” Hornstein’s new book takes readers inside this world.
A psychology professor at MHC, Hornstein has always been interested in states of mind beyond the normal. But it was not until she did the research for Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, to be published in March 2009, that she came to understand “what a truly patient-centered approach could achieve.”
“I was forced to reject much of what I learned in graduate school and from other professionals,” says Hornstein. “People who have been diagnosed with mental illness have been working for more than thirty years to develop alternatives to mainstream psychiatric approaches. It’s important to listen to their ideas.”
Rather than accepting the drugs and behavioral treatments favored by professionals, the people Hornstein writes about recover mainly with support from their peers. In the groups they organize, patients encourage one another to describe, often for the first time, what the voices in their heads are saying, and to analyze traumatic experiences that seem linked to the appearance of symptoms.
“Medicalizing these experiences tends to create passivity,” she says. “If the medication doesn’t work, people don’t know what else to try. Peer support groups teach them a range of ways to help themselves.”
In her book, Hornstein introduces readers to some of these people, including historical figures and contemporary activists. The book’s title refers to the jacket made by Agnes Richter, a woman institutionalized against her will in 1890s Germany. Every inch of the garment she fashioned from her institutional uniform is hand-embroidered with an autobiographical text recording her experiences.
For Hornstein, Agnes’s jacket symbolizes “the conundrum we face in understanding madness. People have an intense desire to tell their stories, but we can’t always grasp their meaning.” Hornstein hopes her book will serve both the storytellers and her readers.—M.H.B.
Learn More: To see Hornstein’s 600-title bibliography of first-person narratives of madness, go to www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/ghornste.shtml. For information and links to the psychiatric survivor movement, go to www.freedom-center.org or www.mindfreedom.org.See below for excerpts from Mieke Bomann's interview with Hornstein.
Excerpts from an interview with Gail Hornstein
New Book
My new book is Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. The subtitle captures a key part of what it is about: my search for a different way to understand mental illness. I don’t use that term [mental illness]. The people I’m writing about reject that particular way of framing what they are more likely to call emotional distress.
Madness
The people I’m writing about in this book are people who have themselves experienced emotional distress—some historic figures, some contemporary activists, some of whom live in Northampton or London or elsewhere. Madness is the word that is preferred by the people I’m writing about. In a more profound sense, I use it because it has precisely the kind of symbolic resonance that I’m trying to encourage readers to have. I’m trying to get them to think about states of mind that are seriously disturbed without presupposing that they have a biological cause. I’m trying to decipher the meanings of madness using an archeological metaphor rather than biological.
I am taking the readers in this book on a journey to meet many of these people, to participate in their meetings and gatherings and plunge into different ways of thinking about mental illnesses.
I want people to know that the methods that the survivor movement has come up to help people are as effective as or more effective than the treatments of mainstream psychiatry. It’s helpful for family members [of people who] have been diagnosed with mental illness. This is a really positive message.
Peer Support
I’m a PhD psychologist who is reframing her own understanding on the basis of what these people are telling me. I’m rejecting much of what I learned in grad school and what colleagues think, and presenting the viewpoint that patients themselves have come up with. And a word like madness is part of that.
The people I write about are people who have joined together—mental health professionals are allies but not leaders—and the core method of helping people is a peer-support model that is based on an understanding of emotional distress as trauma, and other abuse. (An overwhelming number tell of trauma.
The Hearing Voices Network in England has hundreds of peer-support groups. I started one here in Holyoke. In these groups people who have the experience of hearing voices (not called schizophrenic experiences) see what can they do to help themselves if they’re frightened by them. Some hear the voices of their dead husband and it’s reassuring.
But for those that are tormented, the Hearing Voices Network has pioneered a self-help model where people come together once a week in groups that are not run by mental health professionals, just voice hearers. I have gone to dozens of these meetings. They talk in ways that they are rarely able to do in the mental health system. They are asked what the voices are saying and when and where. What these groups do is help to identify triggers and coping strategies. It’s such an insightful and optimistic approach and really interested in what’s going on in people’s minds.
Resilience
Psychiatry in the last years has become very narrow—here. It’s not nearly as narrow in Europe … The British National Heath plan now sends practitioners to meetings of the Hearing Voices Network to learn how to deal with potential crises and alternative treatments. Medicalization of these experiences tends to make people more passive—and if the meds don’t work, they don’t have any choices. A lot of my book is about resilience—in terms of mental health. Many of us have come to understand that in physical health we shouldn’t just wait until we catch a disease, that we can do things to make ourselves healthier. Wellness. What I’m saying is that the psychiatric survivor movement has set up ways for emotional resilience so that if bad things happen to you, you can cope with them better.
Bob Herbert is done with French art history.
After nearly a half century of scholarship on the likes of Seurat, Impressionism, and Renoir, the professor emeritus of the humanities turned to the work of an Amherst-based artist, Orra White Hitchcock, whose nineteenth-century lithographs, woodcuts, and watercolors were known, but whose travel writings were virtually undiscovered—until he stumbled on them.
Herbert has now edited and published Hitchcock’s diaries, which he came across in an archival folder while investigating her artwork at the Amherst College library. Familiar with her lithographs of the Connecticut River Valley that had been previously exhibited, Herbert was surprised and delighted to find her witty journals.
Married to Edward Hitchcock, a prominent geologist and onetime president of Amherst College, Orra describes in a “plainspeak” style what she sees during two trips, one to Europe and the other to Richmond, Virginia. “Unlike other travel diaries, she’s writing to herself. She’s not thinking of others, but merely what she’s seeing,” says Herbert.
In addition to publishing her diaries, Herbert is the co-curator of an exhibition of her art scheduled for October 2010 at Amherst’s Mead Art Museum. Some of Orra’s published illustrations of her husband’s work will be shown, along with several dozen watercolors of plants and large classroom charts and drawings (including prehistoric fossils).
If his move from fine art to science illustration seems jarring, consider this, he says: much of his research was devoted to the work of Seurat, an artist whose exploration of the science of color is evident in his technique, which came to be known as pointillism.
“My interest has been all along … in the relation of art and science,” says Herbert, who is now at work editing Hitchcock’s husband’s travel diaries. Bob Herbert has just begun, again.—M.H.B.
Professors TomWartenberg and Rachel Fink introduce Speedy the chameleon to a second-grade philosopher.
Philosophy instruction for young children got a boost recently when Professor of Philosophy Thomas Wartenberg received a three-year, $56,000 Squire Family Foundation grant to continue work in the field. One course he teaches now sends MHC students out to teach philosophy in several Pioneer Valley elementary schools. The grant will help spread philosophy for kids to more schools. Check out his site at www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.com
Reading in common
Racial tension, family disintegration and reunion, and personal identity figure prominently in author Danzy Senna’s debut novel, Caucasia, which has been selected as this year’s “common read.”
Assigned to incoming firstyear students, common-read books are often incorporated by faculty members into their curricula. Alumnae clubs frequently add common-read books to their rosters too. Caucasia “is a compelling narrative that will encourage you to explore your own views of race and class, identity and community,” said college President Joanne V. Creighton. Senna has been invited to campus to discuss her work.
New Dorm Opens Doors
Construction is finished, and 172 lucky residents—first-years to seniors—have moved into the first new dorm built here in forty years. The winter Quarterly will feature a photo essay on the new residence hall and its denizens.
This has gotta hurt …
In preparation for their upcoming seasons, Mount Holyoke’s fall athletic teams begin training at the end of August. Workouts are designed to increase conditioning and agility. Players work hard, both individually and as a team, to improve before regular season contests begin.
Student Leaders Around the Globe Gather at MHC
After two years of planning, Women’s Education Worldwide (WEW) hosted its first Student Leadership Conference at MHC in June. Some seventy students from five continents took part in leadership and skill-building workshops. As they got to know one another and learned new skills, participants developed personal projects to implement in their home countries. Conceived in 2003 by the leaders of Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, WEW was organized to foster exchange among colleges and universities and to advocate for the education of women.
Some Facebook groups we think we’ll join….
• MoHos for Naming the New Dorm After Stephen Colbert
• Mount Holyoke College:Studying Harder Than Your School Since 1837
• Mount Holyoke Biologists ... We Are Naturally Selected
• I’ve Been Menaced by the Mount Holyoke College Skunk
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.
