Starting to Talk About the End of Life
by Emily Harrison Weir
Photos: Andy Duback • Illustrations: © Deidre Scherer
Death: it will happen to each of us, but few want to admit it or—worse—talk about it. Camilla Rockwell’s film, Holding Our Own: Embracing the End of Life, aims to smash that cultural taboo and open a dialogue about life’s final passage. The powerful and touching documentary uses art and music to, Rockwell hopes, “attract people and gently seduce them into engaging a topic that they would rather run away from.”
Rockwell understands that reaction, but has seen firsthand the anguish that ignoring impending death can cause patients and their families. Five years ago, Rockwell became a Hospice volunteer; one of her first clients passed away without her family ever acknowledging she had terminal cancer. “It was my first real vision that suffering is caused when people can’t speak about their fears, make plans for the end of life, and say goodbye,” Rockwell recalls. “I wanted to find a way to help people begin to talk about the end of life.”
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“The main obligations of the gardener are to be mindful of the garden’s needs and to be observant each day of what is going on in the garden.” Those words from the late U.S. poet laureate and thoughtful gardener Stanley Kunitz were particularly relevant to the work of three MHC interns this summer who planted and cared for the Mount Holyoke Student Garden.
Hatched as an independent study by two students long since graduated, the project and its supporting hands have been given a small piece of land by the college for a pilot program that is just beginning to define its vegetative and curricular goals. The three interns—Sarah Lince FP’09, Morgan Lindsay ’09, and Ally Neher ’07— were paid by the Center for the Environment to make the garden’s first season a productive one. A founding gift from the class of 2007 helped launch the project.
Acorn squash, pumpkins, potatoes, basil, parsley, dill, and cilantro grace the plot’s half acre at the south end of Prospect Hill, next to the college’s botanic garden nursery. The vegetables and herbs were sold to Dining Services in the fall. Thus, students had a bigger taste of truly local produce, which is rapidly becoming a mantra for consumers of all stripes concerned with transportation costs, freshness, and support of community producers.
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As Darren Hamilton, associate professor of chemistry, enthusiastically relates, the department is in a multidimensional process of enhancing its teaching labs with the more efficient use of nontoxic and recyclable materials; focusing on more efficient technologies like microwaves instead of hotplates to carry out basic experiments; and having students make better use of chromatography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, state-of-the-art instruments that are currently underused.
“Using a glass flask, solvent, and a hotplate for recrystallization tends to leave our students with the idea that everyone does it like this,” says Hamilton, a British-born and educated organic chemist who has led the charge to reevaluate the teaching labs. While it’s still important that students know how tried-and-true procedures work, he says, “we want to look like the outside world.”
Part of the department’s efforts relate to an academia-wide movement to “green” chemistry, which involves using less-toxic solvents and thinking critically about the scale of experiments and how much waste they produce. A clean working environment is not only safer but mimics the functioning of pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline—places MHC chemistry students routinely intern and work. —M.H.B.
How many students applied
3,194
How many were accepted
1,671
How many enrolled
522
How many are African
American, Asian
American, Latina,
and Native American
121
How many states are represented
42
How many countries are represented
24
Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics
As conversation jumps from Academy Award winner Helen Mirren to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses to the sexualized concept of “the Orient,” Five College visiting assistant professor Constantine Pleshakov pushes the far-reaching, all-inclusive dialogue even further. In Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics, everything is up for discussion.
The syllabus for the class reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century novelists and includes not only Rushdie but also Yukio Mishima and Arundhati Roy. Students relate the literature to its historical context, approaching the novels as forums for political change. “Literature is politics, remember that,” Pleshakov repeats. What were the novelists’ causes? What were their solutions to the problems of the twentieth century? How do their stories reflect social realities?
Offering an inter-disciplinary major, the Critical Social Thought (CST) program prompts students to turn intellectual traditions upside down for a new look at social realities through the colorful lenses of history, anthropology, culture, and language.
One cold day last winter, class discussion revolved around Edward Said’s Orientalism as students discussed its place on the class syllabus. It’s not beach reading, but it’s useful in a theoretical way, claimed most readers. The book addresses the question of “Orientalism” as a construct and how this construct fits into our culture—from foreign policy to vacation destinations.
This is critical social thought at its organic roots: taking social theories and using them as a jumping-off point, rather than a destination. The conversation is lively and intelligent, with Pleshakov alternating between a precarious perch on his desk and pacing the crowded room, eyes widening as he emphatically nods the debate along.
“I was skeptical at first, jumping right into a 200-level critical social thought course with no prior experience,” says Natalya Goykhberg ’07. “As it turns out, CST is a combination of every discipline I have studied— philosophy, politics, literature, international relations, and history.” Lauren Senchack ’07 concurs. “I’m not an English major, so I was initially concerned about the level of discussion, but Pleshakov has a wonderful way of validating every person’s opinion.” — Stephanie Miedema ’07
Photo by Andrea Burns
Students, faculty, staff, and alumnae signed their names or left written sentiments on nine pieces of structural steel that became part of the new residence hall this summer. Traditionally, the steelworkers sign the final piece of steel erected in a building, says John Bryant, director of facilities management. But the act of leaving a mark on the world is so popular at MHC that nine beams were ultimately offered and indelibly marked. Other buildings on campus are also repositories of names and messages, including Blanchard, where the plywood under the rotunda is a veritable signature scrapbook. The new hall will open to students in fall 2008.
Latest still image of new residence hall under construction:
Visit the Mount Holyoke College web site for a live video feed.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Standing at the podium in a Kendade classroom, Grace June Kim ’07 was not visibly nervous. But her presentation in the college’s second annual Senior Symposium was the culmination of ten months of research and fieldwork, and naturally, she wanted it to go well.
The symposium illuminates the academic passions that seniors have cultivated in the company of their professors and peers. Ninety seniors from twenty-seven departments were showcased this year, including Kim, whose topic was, “Adolescents’ Pursuit of Career Possible Selves: Examining the Relationship Between Social Capital and Procedural Knowledge.”
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Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist and professor of geology at MhC, spent three weeks this summer studying rocks in the Boston Basin near hingham, Massachusetts. But they weren’t just any rocks. these rocks were fossils of some of the oldest complex life forms on the planet. McMenamin and a group of geology students from across the country, together with a colleague from the university of Pittsburgh, determined not only that these 575 million-year-old fossils of the soft-bodied organisms called the ediacara biota were exactly that (which had been in question) but also that they had lived in beach environments, and not just in deep water, as is the general consensus among paleontologists. An abstract with the group’s findings will be presented to the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in November and “will shake things up quite a bit,” says McMenamin. —M.H.B.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Do you remember life before you had a cell phone? Microwave? Computer? From the moment you added each item to your life, it became hard to imagine living without it, right? Facebook is the same.
I started my Mount Holyoke career as many of you did—I received my roommate’s name from Residential Life, then exchanged introductory letters and a timid phone call. On move-in day, I tried frantically to organize the sea of new faces in my dorm. During my first year, I sat in the back of classrooms and then cursed my shyness whenever I had a homework question and didn’t know the name of anyone in my class to ask. I’d chat with someone at dinner, then never cross paths again.
And then in my sopho-more year, Facebook struck.
For those who have heard the name but wonder what it’s all about, Facebook is a Web-based networking tool. You create a personal profile with as much or as little information as you want. Typically, users include a picture, contact information, interests, education details, and a photo album. Initially, you are connected to those with whom you share a workplace, school, or geographic location. Then you desig•nate others as “friends”; only they can see your profile.
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Led by tour coordinator Debby Hall ’74 and conductor Cathy Melhorn, professor emeritus of music, Glee Club alumnae went on tour to China this summer. Sponsored by the Alumnae Association, fifty-five singers from the classes of 1962 to 2009, and thirty guests visited Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi’an, and Beijing, with some extending their trip for a Three Gorges Yangtze River cruise. Joining with outstanding Chinese women’s and mixed choirs, they performed in distinguished venues for large, enthusiastic audiences, and despite very hot, humid weather, managed a full itinerary of sightseeing, shopping, and eating! (For more pictures of the group’s trip, go to www.alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/go/gleeclub.)
Photo by John Lemly
Late fall is a good time to get ready for the spring job search, and getting an effective research strategy in place is part of that process, says Cori Ashworth, career and professional consultant for the Alumnae Association.
As a first step, it’s essential to make your job search manageable by narrowing your focus in terms of location and industry. “When you’re doing research, start at the macro level and move to the micro level,” Ashworth says.
Select a city where you’d like to live and work your research around that place, she advises. If you’re recently graduated and clueless as to which fields are best suited to your major, Ferguson’s Facts on File Career Guidance Center gives lots of ideas on how to apply a particular major to the real world. It’s available on the college’s Career Development Center (CDC) Web site.
One of the best places to start your job search homework is by doing the self-assessments Ashworth has put up on her career service pages on the Alumnae Association’s Web site. Once you have a handle on your work identity, you can begin to research relevant industries by looking at the database Vault Online Career Library, also at the CDC site. It gives you overviews of industries, Web sites, associations related to particular fields, and salary and hiring information.
Another useful site available through the CDC is CareerSearch, which contains millions of profiles of employers from the business and academic worlds. It enables a job seeker to do a geographical sort of companies by industry.
Armed with all that information, you then can make use of LifeNet, Ashworth points out, which is the Association’s networking tool that enables you to find alumnae working in particular fields and contact them for informational interviews and insights. —M.H.B.
Lila M. Gierasch ’70 is interested in the world. a well-respected scientist, researcher, and university professor with innumerable awards and professional commendations to her name, Gierasch is, according to one colleague, a leader, possessed of excellent judgment, and “at home in any company.”
Those desirable accomplishments, and her experience as department head and director of NIH-sponsored research programs throughout her career, led to her nomination this summer as alumnae trustee of Mount Holyoke by the nomination of Alumnae Trustees/Awards Committee of the Alumnae Association. The fact that she lives in nearby Ashfield and works in Amherst was considered a plus in strengthening local community ties to the board. Election to the five-year term will take place during the association’s annual meeting in May 2008.
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A small but enthusiastic cadre from the Mount Holyoke Club of Greater Washington, D.C., gathered at the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art Friday nights to listen to Washington-area jazz artists. Despite the often smothering summer heat, Club Copresident Alix Boucher ’00 attended nearly every week with friends and says the music was always fabulous, the garden setting next to the reflecting pool pleasant, and the sangria quite nice. She hopes to entice more people to attend this kind of gathering in future years.
To relax better at the end of the day, members of the Mount Holyoke Club of Greater Hartford joined yoga instructor Carlin C. Carr ’00 in two one-hour yoga sessions in Hartford’s West End. “We had a great showing,” said Carr. “I think it was a really interesting and unique event for local alums. It is a gentle, relaxation type of class. Who doesn’t need that?”
F a c u l t y W o r k s
Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use
By Robert B. Shaw (Ohio University Press)
Familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost, blank verse— unrhymed iambic pentameter—has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metric line for centuries. Shaw analyzes the work in this meter by these great poets but also gives emphasis to modern and postmodern poets working in the form, the meter’s technical features, and its many uses.
Robert B. Shaw is professor of English at MHC and frequently writes on modern and contemporary poetry. His own books of poems include Below the Surface and Solving for X.
F i c t i o n
Not Like You
By Deborah Davis ’79 (Clarion Books)
Touted by one reviewer as the best mother-daughter story she’d ever read, Not Like You tells the story of fifteen-year-old Kayla, who must learn to take care of herself—even if that means no longer taking care of her alcoholic mother. The book is an emotionally complex novel for teens, and its moving, realistic storyline builds to a hopeful conclusion.
Deborah Davis’s other novels are My Brother Has AIDS and The Secret of the Seal. She was also the editor of You Look Too Young to Be a Mom: Teen Mothers Speak Out on Love, Learning, and Success. Check out her Web site, www.deborahdavisauthor.com.
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No Guarantees
When I read Corinna Yazbek’s article “Coming Out About Class”(summer), I yelled out to my husband, “Yes! Finally someone knows how I feel!”
Coming from a working-class family to Mount Holyoke, I had to deal with class misperceptions. I had friends who didn’t understand why, when I had only $20 in my bank account, I couldn’t just call up my parents for more money. An adviser expressed confusion when I revealed that I had no idea what an independent study entailed; I had never attended a private school where an independent study was part of the curriculum.
I was willing to endure those little embarrassments because I fully believed that I would be leading a stable, middle-class life after I received my Mount Holyoke degree. However, in the seven years since leaving Mount Holyoke, I have ridden the highs and lows of the job market (and my savings account), from working in a cushy job at a university to a backbreaking job in retail. Like Yazbek, I think, “I didn’t go to Mount Holyoke to do this.”
Thank you, Corinna Yazbek, for telling those of us struggling that “a Mount Holyoke degree is no guarantee that we will never … have to do whatever it takes to earn enough money to survive … and this is all okay; it doesn’t mean we’ve failed.”
Gabriela Valdez Burgman ’00
Woburn, Massachusetts
Questioning Themselves
I truly enjoy every issue of the Alumnae Quarterly,but the articles by Katie Alton ’05 and Corinna Yazbek ’01 have prompted me to finally get off my duff to thank the Quarterlystaff for printing articles from fabulous young alums. It’s a joy to see these women questioning themselves, their surroundings, and their core beliefs. Young women like Katie and Corinna make me even more proud to be an MHC graduate!
Candy Moot ’75
Montpelier, Vermont
Limits to Tolerance
The summer Quarterly letter from Suzanne Corriell ’00 and Regis Ahern ’01 was a stunner.
Not living in the Boston area, I never saw the newspaper article about the undergraduate who has undergone gender reassignment surgery to become a male.
I have very much come to terms with the fact that the world is, by sexual persuasion, a very different place from what it may have been when I attended Mount Holyoke. From what I can figure out, there is a tolerance that is a credit to the institution.
However, I cannot agree more strongly with the writers that the young woman who is now a young man has absolutely no business attending Mount Holyoke. Without a doubt, the surgery was done after the kind of agonizing soul searching that very few of us have had to undergo. But Mount Holyoke’s alumnae and undergraduates have repeatedly made it plain that the college is to remain a woman’s college. I support the writers’ statement: “There is a limit to tolerance and acceptance; there is a point at which Mount Holyoke must demand that its mission be respected.”
Sylvia Smith Campbell ’52
Denville, New Jersey
… Or Not
I vehemently disagree with the viewpoints of Ms. Corriell and Ms. Ahern. Mount Holyoke is not going coed passively; it is providing a much-needed support network and a safe space for transgender students. Above all, a female-to-male transgender individual’s experiences as a woman are not erased just because she becomes a man.
Transgender students at MHC are going through the process of self-discovery while attending college. To force a student to leave during this period of gender exploration would be a terrible blow, forcing the student away from a wonderful and supportive community. In my opinion, it is the option of the student to decide whether or not to remain at a women’s college.
Mount Holyoke provides transgender students with a safe space. Those of you familiar with the story of Brandon Teena (a transgender youth killed in Humboldt, Nebraska, because of his gender identity) will recall that the outside world is not kind to those who transgress gender boundaries. There is not a limit to tolerance and acceptance. Mount Holyoke is a supportive place for transgender students and I am proud to have it as my alma mater.
Molly Hazelton ’02
New York, New York
Safety Issues for Big and Small
Two issues: First, I found the picture of the class of 2007 (summer) disturbing. Even with full views of only the first row and ends of rows, there appear to be a lot of overweight people in this picture! What is the college doing to encourage wellness, exercise, and healthy eating among students?
Second: The article on nanoscience says nothing about the very real safety issues inherent in nanomaterials. Exactly because of the exceptional ways in which nanoscale materials behave, there is an urgent need to ensure that we fully understand their effects on the human body, other organisms, and the environment as a whole before we employ them. Someone must develop extensive testing for the unintended effects before release of new nanomaterials. Such testing may require creative thinking, since common tests used for conventional materials (food, drug, and cosmetic tests) may not be sufficient. We must not let the market alone determine how nanomaterials are used.
Susan Bobbe Van Hemel ’65
Washington, D.C.
Fiftieth Reunion Class Remains at Reunion I
I write with important news about upcoming reunions. The Alumnae Association previously announced a new pilot program for reunion, to commence in 2008. We based the new format on the recommendations of our Reunion Ad Hoc Committee, which spent a year and a half gathering extensive alumnae feedback about reunion.
The committee, with board approval, recommended that we continue to hold Reunion I during commencement weekend. Classes would include the 2nd, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, 70th, and 75th reunion classes. Reunion II would be held the following weekend, and would include the 30th through the 65th reunion classes. Classes were divided in this way in response to numerous surveys where you let us know you wanted reunion programming tailored to the specific preferences of your classes.
While the response to the new format was largely positive, a number of alumnae and students raised concerns. These focused primarily on the historic relationship between the 50th reunion class and the graduating class. This intergenerational legacy includes a 50th reunion class gift to seniors, the presence of the 50th class during the laurel parade, and social events between the two classes. After carefully considering the feedback, the Alumnae Association staff and board and the Ad Hoc Reunion Committee decided to move forward with the anticipated three-year pilot program with one significant change: we will keep the 50th reunion class in Reunion I.
The rest of the pilot program remains the same, and will feature enhanced programming based on your requests. Please keep in mind that the new format is an experiment.
Your feedback and comments will guide us in our future planning. In the meantime, here’s what to expect next year:
For classes fewer than 30 years out, we’ll offer practical programming, such as finance and career workshops, expanded programs for families and children, and opportunities to connect with professors and alumnae from other classes.
For classes more than 30 years out, we’ll create more opportunities for class socializing, and deepen the academic content of the Back-to-Class offerings, which will also include workshops on life and career transitions, health, retirement, and travel.
Each reunion will include class dinners and social hours, an alumnae parade and alumnae meeting, and Teen Scene. Each weekend will also offer a chance to meet with the college president. We are excited about creating special programming to celebrate and honor all generations of alumnae—and we look forward to seeing you next spring.
W. Rochelle Calhoun ’83
Executive Director, MHC Alumnae Association
