Here’s hoping that the process of comprehensive curriculum reform—so ambitiously spelled out in Section I of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2010—is proceeding! This gargantuan undertaking was covered in the winter 2004 Quarterly article “What Does an Educated Woman Need to Know?”
Why is rethinking the curriculum important, when the College is doing well as reflected in record applications, large grants from prestigious foundations, and successful capital campaigns? It would maximize use of college assets—its fine faculty, unique global culture, strong physical plant (the campus), and productive administration—and create another one: a rigorous curriculum focused on preparing women to excel.
It would define what knowledge and capabilities MHC grads would have. Targeted outcomes would be made measurable. The college would be more accountable to all constituents: students, parents, faculty members, administrators, trustees, alumnae, and donors. Participants better able to identify what they support would be more willing to commit resources. It is also an opportunity for Mount Holyoke to lead in reform and distinguish itself from competitors.
More ominously, an era of increased measurement and accountability for public and private colleges is dawning. The bipartisan Commission on the Future of Higher Education, organized by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, is working on requiring regional accreditation agencies to require colleges to adopt measures of academic proficiency, and compare data from similar colleges. Competition to attract top students may evolve into competition among colleges to demonstrate results.
Developing hardheaded proposals for what capacities graduates should have is exciting but terribly difficult. Harvard, with its enormous intellectual resources, has been struggling with undergraduate curriculum reform since 2002. And what happens when agreed-upon goals require different academic configurations from what exist now?
Implementing major curriculum reform would take years and would be painful. However, ten to twenty years from now, saying “trust us, you’ll get a fine education at Mount Holyoke,” may no longer suffice.
Laura Nixdorf Bernstein ’65
Lincoln, Massachusetts
We are writing in response to “When She Graduates as He,” published in The Boston Globe Magazine, and featuring Kevin Murphy, a Mount Holyoke student who has undergone gender reassignment surgery to become a male.
Mr. Murphy insists that people respect his lifestyle choices, and he is entitled to that respect. Similarly, all of the women, past and present, who have chosen to attend women’s colleges deserve the same respect for which Mr. Murphy clamors. It is hypocritical to demand respect for a lifestyle choice one has made while refusing to show respect for others’ choices. Simply put, Mr. Murphy and other men do not belong at Mount Holyoke College.
Part of Mount Holyoke’s mission is a “commitment to educating a diverse residential community of women at the highest level of academic excellence ...” This mission does not seek to promote the aims of men, nor should it. Mount Holyoke’s dedication to educating women is now being derailed by the efforts of those men seeking to take advantage of Mount Holyoke’s liberal and accepting atmosphere.
Students at women’s colleges seek to be educated in an environment that caters exclusively to the educational needs of women. Those students who undergo gender reassignment or self-identify as men must realize that once they decided to become men, they agree to forgo opportunities that they had as women. Becoming a man and remaining at a women’s college is analogous to renouncing your citizenship, yet expecting to maintain the benefits of citizenship.
There is a limit to tolerance and acceptance; there is a point at which Mount Holyoke must demand that its mission be respected. We are saddened by Mount Holyoke’s lack of conviction; but as long as Mount Holyoke continues to passively go coed, we will refrain from providing financial support to our alma mater.
Suzanne Corriell ’00
Iowa City, Iowa
Regis Ahern ’01
Orlando, Florida
Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 Traces Her Journey From Theatrical Underdog to Topdog
By Leanna James Blackwell
Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 knew she had arrived well before she got to Broadway. Go back about 20 years to the late 1980s—before the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog, before the MacArthur “genius grant,” before the Obie for best new play. Leave the Times Square theatres, the lights and the crowds behind.
Look instead for a grimy little neighborhood bar that was formerly a gas station, a place you’d never hear about unless you happen to live around the block. Walk into the bar and that’s where you’ll find Parks, sitting on a stool behind a makeshift curtain. It’s opening night of her first play and there are five people in the audience.
(More)
Faith Meets Science for Katie Alton ’05
By Emily Harrison Weir
Prelude
The road that led Katie Alton ’05 (above, wearing purple) to spend forty days and forty nights in a Midwestern abbey started at a bioethics conference in Washington, D.C. A month after hearing about a case discussed there, the aspiring physician was still troubled. Doctors couldn’t cure a seriously ill infant, but easing the baby’s pain was possible. However, the baby’s parents declined medical intervention, believing that by watching their child suffer, they were showing faith in God. “I saw this kind of case as a potential problem for me and my future patients,” Alton says. A request like that “would make me angry, because that kind of deep faith didn’t resonate with me at all.”
The neuroscience major’s job at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics exposed her to many cases involving conflict between patients with a strong religious faith and healthcare providers with a strong faith in science. So when the opportunity arose to audition for a Learning Channel reality show—The Monastery—that brought five women to Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa, Alton applied. “I wanted to study monastic life from the perspective of a scientist confused about how people could hold onto what I saw as antiquated religious beliefs in the light of amazing scientific discoveries,” she explains.
Alton was the youngest of five participants who spent January and February 2006 with the abbey’s thirty sisters. Practically nothing about the experience was as Alton anticipated, and it changed her life profoundly.
(More)
For Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach for America and this year's commencement speaker, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is a fellow pragmatist. In accepting the Nobel this year for his work in spreading the idea of micro-credit across the developing world, Yunes emphasized not that he was making a dent in an intracable problem, but that poverty is an intractavle problem, but that poverty is an artificial creation and that the world can be poverty free-if we want it to be.
"Wow," responded Kopp to that sentiment in her address to this year's class of 521 graduating seniors, including thirty-nine Frances Perkins Scholars. "The reason this message struck me so powerfully is that it's so consistent with what I've seen firsthand about educational inequity. We can solve it."
Kopp, whose organization is the nation's largest provider of teachers for low-income communities, was initially driven to improve the public school system by idealism and the notion that things should be better than they are. But seventeen years later, what sustains her and her colleagues is the understanding that educational inequity “is within our control to solve.”
The power of inexperience and the importance of time—in other words, the courage of idealists to ask naïve questions, and the rewards of hard-won insights that come from sticking with sizeable challenges—are essential to making change in the world, Kopp noted.
In addition to Kopp, honorary degrees were awarded to Air Force Senior Scientist Emeritus Eleanor Reed Adair ’48, Hollywood producer and lawyer Debra Martin Chase ’77 (See photos, p. 34.), and Lieutenant Commander Charles D. Swift, an attorney who successfully challenged the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Honoring the realities of each day’s efforts as “the very life of life” was the message of an ancient Sanskrit poem, “Look to This Day,” read at baccalaureate by Vidya Sampath ’07. Teachers and idealists of all stripes are encouraged by the poet to look to the future, but not without first honoring the “bliss of growth and the glory of action” that lie within the brief course of a day.
The evening before commencement, President Joanne Creighton pointed to the “energy … good spirits and … hard work” of the class of 2007 and hoped these young women had connected their education to their passions.
In addition to baccalaureate degrees, one master’s degree, one post•baccalaureate certificate, and twenty-six certificates to international students were awarded at commencement.— M.H.B.
What Seniors Say They'll Miss Most About MHC
Midnight talks in the hallways … Sitting in
swimsuits on Skinner Green … Buffalo tofu
… Chef Jeff cookies … All-you-can-eat
salad bars … Having all their best friends
within a one-mile radius … Sunday brunch
and sharing stories about Saturday night’s
debauchery … M&Cs, specifically the
chocolate and raspberry brownies …
The free bin … Never having to deal with
annoying/sketchy men
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
By Mieke H. Bomann
This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 Quarterly.
From her bedroom window in MacGregor Hall, Senia Bachir-Abderahman ’10 has a beautiful view of Upper Lake and the forest that surrounds it. The college’s rural quality was enticing to this North African for whom woods and lakes had been, for the most part, the stuff of dreams.
The desert landscape of southwest Algeria where Senia grew up is not only treeless and arid but nearly devoid of sand. The bare rock and small-stone terrain is inhospitable to all but the most hardened of life forms. Nevertheless, some 200,000 refugees from neighboring Western Sahara have subsisted there since the mid-1970s. Senia’s family was among them. (More)
By Meg Massey ’08
This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 Quarterly.
Jade McCarthy ’02 knew that she was making an impact her first week on the job. While interviewing Philadelphia Eagles fans after the team’s loss to Seattle, a man driving by rolled down his window and yelled, “Finally—a female doing sports in Philadelphia!”
It was about time, indeed. Last year, Jade became the first female sports reporter in the history of Philadelphia’s major television networks when she joined the sports team at NBC-10. The city had had female sports writers and cable sports news anchors but never a woman sports reporter on a local network.
“When I was interviewing, they asked, ‘Do you think you can handle going into the locker room or club house and asking the tough questions? Can you handle the light that will be shone upon you as the first woman in this city to do this?’” Incredulous, she guaranteed her abilities and hasn’t looked back. (More)
By Julie L. Sell ’83
This article originally appeared in the winter 2006 Quarterly.
She may be only five-foot-one and 105 pounds, but Janet V. Lustgarten ’82 holds her own in the male-dominated world of financial traders and computer engineers. As chief executive officer of Kx Systems, a California technology firm that sells database products to corporate and government clients, Lustgarten has closed business deals with some of the world’s top financial brokerages.
“In twelve years, I’ve only interacted with two women [clients] who were the decisionmakers on this sort of technology,” says Lustgarten. She contends that her gender softens the impact of her direct business style, which she attributes to years spent in New York. “Because I’m a woman, people hear it differently,” she says. “It doesn’t become an ego battle.”
Ten years after the US government’s “glass ceiling commission” published a report on the challenges facing women in attaining senior executive positions in the private sector, the numbers reveal that women like Lustgarten are still vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts. Women account for more than 46 percent of the American workforce but hold less than 8 percent of top management positions. Among women managers, average earnings are less than three-quarters those of their male colleagues. (More)
