With dust storms swirling above, explosives dropping
in the evenings, and the Army rolling in, Air Force Major Kimberly Calcutt
McQueen ’99 sat atop Saddam Hussein’s former private terminal at the Baghdad
airport in the summer of 2007, maintaining the communications network for Air
Force personnel deployed there and preparing to set up communications services
for a newly arrived Army battalion. In the next four months she would connect
the Iraqi police force with U.S. forces and expand General Petraeus’s communications
network.
Despite the danger and pressure of the
assignment, McQueen relished the opportunity to use her skills. “The military
places a high value on knowledge and advanced education,” says McQueen, “but we
spend so much time training that sometimes it’s nice to actually get out there
and do the job.”
Despite the training, McQueen admits
that she never expected to find herself dodging mortars at the Baghdad Airport,
or taking shelter from falling bombs in a bunker before continuing her communications
networking tasks.
A young
alumna’s discovery in Yellowstone National Park is
causing a stir far beyond its gates and has sobering implications for the
future of the planet.
For nearly five years, Sarah McMenamin
’04 has been conducting research on a subspecies of tiger salamander, called Ambystoma
tigrinum, as part of her doctoral thesis at Stanford University. The
salamanders are robust little creatures that have flourished for thousands of
years in vernal pools and kettle ponds formed by glaciers.
Sarah McMenamin ’04 surveying a pond in Yellowstone National Park for frogs and salamanders. Photo: Yu-Jun Lee
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
Ten-year celebrations included a talk by journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault (left), student presentations (center), and (right) a meeting between student grant recipients and Center founder Harriet Levine Weissman ’58 (right).
Photos by Paul Schnaittacher (right); Fred LeBlanc
As the
Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts
celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, its impact as a vibrant hive for teaching,
learning, and social action at Mount Holyoke continues to grow. Operating out
of a few offices in Porter Hall, the center has insinuated itself into many
aspects of academic life on campus, has established bonds with the surrounding
community, and promises to be a source of new approaches to creative pedagogy
in higher education nationally.
“Our idea was to get our tentacles into
as many classrooms, as many faculty gatherings, as many student gatherings as
possible, and to really encourage and shape campus conversations,” said Christopher
Benfey in a recent interview. Benfey, a respected literary critic and author
who is also Mellon Professor of English, codirected the Weissman Center from
2000 to 2004.
Note: This article is part of "What Everyone
Should Know About...", a Quarterly series by MHC professors.
By
Sam Mitchell
Almost the earliest pieces of writing we possess speculate
and argue about the infinite. Greek philosopher Zeno's paradoxes are probably
the earliest. One of them (written in the fifth century BC) concerns Achilles, fleetest
of foot of all the Greeks, who is to run a race with a tortoise. He gives the
tortoise a ten-meter start. He runs ten times as fast as the tortoise, but
cannot ever overtake him. Why not?
By the time Achilles reaches the point
where the tortoise began, the tortoise is ahead, by one meter.
By the time Achilles reaches the end of
that one meter, the tortoise is still ahead, by ten centimeters.
By the time Achilles reaches the ten
centimeters, the tortoise is still ahead, by one centimeter.
Alumnae Break New Ground Preventing Disease and Promoting Health By Hannah Wallace ’95
The public health challenges of the twenty-first century are vast—antibiotic resistance is on the rise, childhood obesity is rampant, and nearly fifty million Americans are still without health care. Add the effects of global warming, cholera outbreaks in Africa, and the continuing HIV/ AIDS pandemic and these combined hurdles seem overwhelming, possibly insurmountable. Fortunately, Mount Holyoke alumnae are making significant strides in public health by founding innovative community-health organizations, launching national wellness initiatives, and collaborating with communities in Zimbabwe to stanch the cholera epidemic, to name just a few.
Deborah Klein Walker ’65, EdD
Title: Vice president and principal associate at Abt Associates, a public health consulting firm; former president of the American Public Health Association
Major at MHC: Psychology
Thirty years ago—when she was working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—Deborah Klein Walker didn’t even know what public health was. Today, she’s a nationally respected
public health expert known for her leadership on maternal- and child-health issues as well as substance abuse programs. She discovered public health while teaching community child-health studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and “never looked back.”
(More)
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.
Girls never went to school when Tashi Zangmo FP’99 was growing up in a remote corner of Bhutan. She’s working to change that. (Photo by Ben Barnhart)
Many an alumna has been described as “following in Mary Lyon’s footsteps,” but the comparison fits Tashi Zangmo FP’99 better than most. Zangmo, a citizen of Bhutan— where many girls still lack even a primaryschool education— says her life’s work is to elevate the standard of female education in her country. And the parallels don’t end there. Both Lyon and Zangmo were raised in small villages, yet became highly educated women when this was rare in their society. Both aimed to create something large and lasting to benefit girls and women; and spirituality is central to the visions of both educational reformers. (More)
I got my first tattoo a month after my twenty-first birthday. I had been imagining it for six months and was ready. Or so I thought.
Having had surgery earlier in the month, I didn’t anticipate the pain being much of a problem. As soon as my tattoo artist-friend’s needle touched down, however, I was writhing in agony. I yelled louder than the TV I was supposed to be distracted by and ended up shaking in a cold sweat.
But the meaning of my tattoo wasn’t lost in those moments of concentrated pain. I focused on my tattoo’s story instead of the needle.
Before I could even talk, I would look at Audubon bird guides for hours. When I started talking, I could name most of the birds. My grandfather and I used to play a game in which he’d name the species of a bird and I’d find it in the book. That’s how I decided I wanted a bird tattoo.
(More)
These days, “green” living is a mark of chic. It’s as common to hear people boast about their new Prius or Energy Star appliance as it is about a new house or a trip to Europe. Reducing one’s “carbon footprint” is an activity on par with yoga and Pilates. Trendy or not, the sentiment behind the effort is positive, and many Mount Holyoke alumnae are bringing the concept of “green living” home.
What everyone should know about ... A Quarterly series
By Shahrukh Rafi Khan
A number of factors created a financial crisis this fall bigger than any seen since the Great Depression. These included easy money (low interest rates), deregulation since the 1970s and lax regulation under the Bush administration, bank and mortgage dealers aggressively pushing housing loans because complex packaging of mortgages into securities let them pass the risk on to others, and management’s focusing only on short-term bonuses and operating with exceedingly high debt. Any one of these is bad enough; combined, they created the perfect storm. With financial markets integrated worldwide, the crisis inevitably went global. The crucial questions now are, will the short-term solutions work and what can we learn for the future? (More)
In late August, the first students moved into the first residence hall to be built on campus in more than forty years. The building opened to generally rave reviews (and some complaints as kinks, especially with the One-Card access system, were being worked out). Here’s a peek inside MHC’s newest student quarters.
(Photography by Ben Barnhart)
“ My friends at other colleges are very jealous.”
—Casey Cokkinias ’10 (More)
Mubarik Ali Khan, a top classical Indian music vocalist, showed little enthusiasm when Zeb Bangash ’04 was introduced to him as a possible student in 1999. However, after her first lesson—a test run taking Bangash through basic scales to gauge her voice and musical sense—his indifference melted. “From now on I have made you my daughter,” Khan said. “If you are willing to work hard, you can become a classical vocalist.”
“What I find most puzzling is how little we, as a nation, seem to care about finding alternative solutions to the fuel mess.”
Thomas Millette, MHC associate professor of geography, explains why corn-based ethanol fuels cars and controversy.
(Photo by Andrea Burns)
As summer hit the beautiful Mount holyoke campus, world energy and food markets were in a state of unprecedented turmoil. Lest you think I exaggerate, here are some sobering numbers. In 2003 the benchmark price of a barrel of crude was $34.79 (in 2007 us dollars). In 2006 the same barrel sold for $67.32. By mid-June the price hit $147 per barrel.* If I didn’t know better, I would think the time is ripe (sorry, I couldn’t resist) for biofuels.
Marilyn J. Bruno ’69 cares for her ninety-two-year-old mother (E. Alda Bruno, above) and aunt Irma Micera,
in their Coral Gables, Florida, home. (Photo: Bill Cooke)
Vickie Martin ’04 and her family always “assumed” Martin’s mother would care for Martin’s grandmother in her own home until she died. But when Martin’s mother unexpectedly died, “the responsibility fell into my lap,” says Martin, who is now the long-distance primary caretaker for her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother. Similarly, Nancy Willbanks ’77, chief financial officer of Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services, found her mother widowed, homeless, and without income after her father unexpectedly died. These women are part of a cultural and demographic shift that will affect the hearts, minds, and daily lives of many alumnae in the near future.
Statistics reveal the magnitude of the shifts in aging and eldercare: 43 percent of caregivers for elders are now fifty and older, finds a study by the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the American Association for Retired People (AARP). Eldercare is not affecting just the “sandwich generation”—those squeezed between raising children and caring for parents—anymore. The “young-old” are now taking care of the “oldest-old.” And there are more of the oldest-old needing care for a longer time. The fastest-growing age group in America, according to the US census, is centenarians, predicting protracted care needs.
Welcome to the “blogazine” (blog+magazine = blogazine) version of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly. You’ll find the same articles as in the printed magazine; however, here we also post extras, and you may also comment on any article. Click the “comments” link to the right of the article title to read comments from others or to post your own. If you can’t find something, use the search tool, browse the categories below, or browse the archives.
With dust storms swirling above, explosives dropping
in the evenings, and the Army rolling in, Air Force Major Kimberly Calcutt
McQueen ’99 sat atop Saddam Hussein’s former private terminal at the Baghdad
airport in the summer of 2007, maintaining the communications network for Air
Force personnel deployed there and preparing to set up communications services
for a newly arrived Army battalion. In the next four months she would connect
the Iraqi police force with U.S. forces and expand General Petraeus’s communications
network.
Deborah Klein Walker ’65, EdD
