Teaching Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la Recherche du temps perdu is frequently described as “undeniably daunting” and “notoriously difficult.” A University of Virginia professor even called the task of teaching Proust to undergraduates “almost an impossible one.”
Nevertheless, MHC Professor of French Catherine LeGouis tackled the classic in her spring seminar, and nine intrepid souls signed up for a reading load that makes Anna Karenina look light. Not only did all students cover 1,200 tightly packed pages, en français, but two attempted all seven volumes of the Recherche.
And they liked it!
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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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