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
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By Lisa Wlodarski Romano ’89
The Quarterly arrives. I open to the class notes, and sigh. Another mother of three gets a promotion at her multinational corporation. Or publishes a book. Or lands a tenure-track professorship.
Should I write in? Nah. I do Suzuki piano with my three kids. I’ve organized the Great Books discussion circles at my sons’ elementary school. I’ve joined my church choir and sometimes sing solos. But success? Travel? Prestige? That’s what other alums want to read about, I imagine. So I lurk on the fringes of alumnaehood.
I’m a stay-at-home mom. But although I never heard motherhood discussed when I was on campus, in every aspect of my life I’m drawing on some part of my college experience. And I’m not the only one.
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Calligrapher Sally Mangum has a way with words—she makes them beautiful, and surrounds the letter forms with richly colored designs. And she does this for some of the most prestigious customers in the world, including the British Lord Chamberlain’s office.
As holder of a “royal warrant” for calligraphy, Sally displays the royal coat of arms on her business cards and letterhead. But she doesn’t advertise, as referrals bring her business.
“My work consists of a wide range of commissions including invitations, letterhead, diplomas, menus, and monograms for stationers and corporate and private clients,” she says. “I also take on illustration and heraldic commissions.” Those range from drawing pen-and-ink family crests to an illuminated scroll listing all the chaplains at the Tower of London since the fourteenth century.
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By Thomas Millette
“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.
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By Emily Dietrich ’85
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.
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By Caitlin Healey ’09
When you think of video games, you probably picture a geeky teenage boy camped out in a living room, chomping on potato chips while piling up points racing from one virtual level to the next. (You don’t imagine girls at a slumber party playing Super Mario Brothers, right?) The $42 billion-a-year worldwide video-game industry still reflects this stereotype, but career women in the field—such as Patricia Su Yin Kallusch ’93—may help change all that.
If you think video games are just kid stuff, think again. They’re the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry, and computer- and video-game sales are expected to surpass movie box-office revenues by the end of 2008. Grand Theft Auto IV, released in May, set a record for day-one sales in any entertainment sector.
Kallusch, who played video games casually while growing up, wondered how she would use her MHC studio art degree. Internships with a New York City sculptor and in the design department of DC Comics made her realize the broad possibilities of commercial art.
The video-game industry began to boom while Kallusch was in her mid-twenties. “Three-dimensional animation was really taking off,” she recalls, and 3-D artists originally interested in film careers took notice of the skyrocketing video-game sector. Armed with an MFA in computer animation, Kallusch built a career as an animator and video-game environment artist, then moved up the managerial ranks as though mastering levels in one of the games.
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Patterns are important to Marcia Katz Birken ’71. As a mathematics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for nearly three decades, Birken taught about the elegant patterns numbers make. But a nature tour of Yellowstone National Park in 2005 sent her love of patterns in a new direction. “I was looking at the same things everyone else was, but I saw different things. They’d see flowers; I’d see rotational patterns in the petals. They’d see a landscape; I’d see patterns repeated in the meanders of the river. They’d see birds; I’d see how the feathers grew.”
(Birken Photo: Leichtner Studios)
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By Eric Goldscheider
Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez with his "daughters" Krysia Villón ’96 (left) and Milagros “Millie” Cruz ’87 (Photo by Ben Barnhart)
Professor of Spanish Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez remembers his fortieth birthday party in 1994 as a death-taunting celebration. No one present thought the guest of honor, even if he was lucky, would survive until the millennium. He was gaunt to the point of wasting, and suffering advanced AIDS symptoms, including the loss of an eye. “It was a farewell to Alberto. But then, Alberto never died,” recalled Sandoval-Sánchez during a recent interview in his College Street apartment about a mile south of campus. He still refers to the 1990s as “the time I was dead.” (More)
Words Worth a Second Look
N o n f i c t i o n
Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Save Them
By Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen ’94
(Vintage Books)
Eco-tourists need look no further than Disappearing Destinations for a guide to Earth’s breathtaking but beleaguered splendors. From Puerto Rico’s phosphorescent bays to the boreal forests of Finland, the authors show environmentally responsible travelers how to enjoy (and preserve) fascinating but fragile wonders on all seven continents.
Heather Baukney Hansen is a freelance journalist, environmentalist, and world traveler based in Colorado.
Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema
By Angela Dalle Vacche MA’80
(University of Texas Press)
The “diva film” became popular around the turn of the twentieth century, as artists questioned what it meant to be human in an increasingly mechanistic world. Diva is the first authoritative study of this genre, whose films denounced social evils and explored new models of behavior between the sexes.
Angela Dalle Vacche, an internationally recognized expert in European cinema, is an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
By Christopher Benfey
(The Penguin Press)
A meditation on a moment in history, Benfey’s book seeks to show how some of the most famous writers of the nineteenth century responded to the Civil War and the era’s dynamic aesthetic, in part, with allusions in their work to the effervescent hummingbird.
Christopher Benfey, professor of English at MHC and an Emily Dickinson scholar, is also a critic and essayist.
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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.
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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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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