How America Can Thrive as Others Powers Rise
By Mona Sutphen ’89
The rise of other global powers is most often posed as a sorry tale, full of threats to American primacy, prosperity, and way of life. The potential loss of our #1 status implies a blow to our safety, economy, and prestige.
But this is a rare moment in history—none of the world’s big powers is our adversary. The “pivotal powers”—China, Europe, India, Japan, and Russia—seek greater influence, but each also has an enormous stake in global stability and the world economy. As a result, they share our desire to combat the “rotten fruit” of globalization—terrorism, pandemic disease, the climate crisis, and nuclear proliferators like Iran and North Korea—which pose the greatest threats to America’s way of life.
India is a key ally in tracking Pakistani extremist groups like the LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), which now targets the United States. A strong Chinese public health infrastructure is what stands between us and the next pandemic triggered on a rural farm in China. Russia is coleading an effort to keep nuclear technology out of terrorist hands. Some Americans owe their lives to Scotland Yard’s tracking of terror plots in the London suburbs. Japan is our model for reducing America’s carbon footprint. None is a direct military challenger. And while not all are liberal democracies as we might wish, neither are Russia or China aggressively promoting an alternate ideology, as during the Cold War.
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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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By Hannah Wallace ’95
Online learning is one of the latest trends in higher education. Institutions such as Bowdoin, Duke, and Wellesley are offering downloadable lectures on iTunes U, while MIT is posting entire classes—exams and readings included—on its OpenCourseWare Web site. “Coursecasts,” such as the popular lectures of physics professor Walter Lewin, are not for credit, but they’re free.
Mount Holyoke is taking a slightly different approach. Last fall, the college became one of the first in the country to launch online courses in conjunction with the New York Times Knowledge Network. The two classes—Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics Vinnie Ferraro’s “The End of History or the Clash of Civilizations?” and “Inside the Art and Craft of Film,” taught by associate professor of film studies Robin Blaetz—were open to the public, though MHC alumnae got first dibs. Because these classes were more interactive than mere lectures—including live Web chats and e-mail contact with professors as well as readings and other resources (including movies for Blaetz’s class)—they came with a small price tag: $140 for four sessions.
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Coaches and athletes are giving the college’s new track and field two thumbs up. A synthetic, multipurpose field completed late last fall, it is lit and surrounded by an eight-lane track with a nine-lane straightaway. The new facility allowed the college to host a home track meet in April, its first since 1996.
“Our old track wasn’t worthy,” explained track coach Tina Lee, who has seen her share of tracks and straightaways in the twenty-one years she’s been with the college. It not only had just six lanes, which quickly became outmoded when competitive tracks started featuring eight, but also was showing signs of serious wear and tear.
“We had a lot of injuries because the surface was so hard and worn down,” she said. “This surface will reduce the number of injuries.” She is also excited about the prospect of faster times across the board for competitors thanks to the new track’s improved resilience.
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While the Office of Admission could report no record numbers of applications by mid-February, as it has done in recent years, it nevertheless had received 3,100 applications, its second-highest number, down about 1 percent from last year.
After a decline in early decision applications last year, Jane Brown, vice president for enrollment and college relations, said the college had rebounded with 265. Approximately one-quarter of the class of 2012 will be enrolled from the early-decision pool.
The applicant pool continues to be diverse, Brown noted, with 24 percent students of color, and all fifty states and 111 foreign countries represented.
“The most significant challenge we face in admission this year is the highly publicized change in the financial-aid landscape,” Brown noted. “Many of our more highly endowed peers have pledged to replace student loans with institutional grants. MHC has a proud legacy of serving more low- and middle-income students than most of these institutions and so ... we will continue to include moderate loans in our financial aid awards.”
Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities and professor of politics, has been appointed dean of Mount Holyoke, a three-year position starting in the fall. Gill replaces Lee Bowie, professor of philosophy, who will take a yearlong sabbatical leave before returning to his department.
Lenore Carlisle, assistant professor of psychology and education and chair of the search committee, cited Gill’s broad understanding of Mount Holyoke and its students as a factor in her selection. “She has a good sense of the challenges students face in finding a balance between the curricular and cocurricular,” Carlisle said. “She was very well versed on every perplexing or challenging issue we raised, from diversity to grade inflation. She was very compelling.”
Gill said her “number-one dream” is for Mount Holyoke to become “more self-aware and articulate” about itself. “We have a truly extraordinary opportunity now to consciously create something new, paradoxically something we also already are: a global women’s college,” said Gill.
“I think the dean could help us all to think more deeply about what our students need to learn, and how they can best learn it, so they can take their rightful places at the tables where solutions to the world’s most pressing problems will be found.”
Crossing the state highway in front of MHC is less daunting thanks to revamped pedestrian crosswalks that are now highlighted by pavement markings and street lighting.
Traffic along Massachusetts 116 between Morgan and Park streets—the south and north ends of campus—is calmer due to blinking yellow lights installed this winter in the pavement of new granite-and-brick crosswalks and activated when pedestrians press a button at roadside posts.
“Although some of our Five College neighbors have had serious injuries and fatalities involving pedestrians, so far we have been fortunate that no one has been seriously injured,” said John Bryant, director of facilities planning and management at MHC. Still, in the past two years, one MHC employee and a student were hit by vehicles and sent to the hospital.
A study performed by civil engineers found 3,900 pedestrian crossings each day across Route 116 when the college is in session. Every hour, 800 to 1,200 vehicles pass in front of the college, at an average speed of 40 miles per hour.
Similar to the crosswalks installed a few years ago on 116 in front of Amherst College, the textured stone, blinking lights, pavement reflectors, and streetlights on each side of the five crosswalks are meant to alert drivers that they’re entering a pedestrian zone, said Bryant.
The cost of the project for the college, which took eighteen months to coordinate with the Massachusetts Highway Department and several local agencies, was $650,000.—M.H.B
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
Director of Human Resources Lauren Turner announced in February that the college will integrate campus programs for children that “support child care and the needs of our psychology/education faculty and students for research and observation.” The move will consolidate services currently provided by the Gorse Child Study Center and the StonyBrook Children’s Center. The new Gorse Children’s Center will be managed by Bright Horizons. Details about the new model, and the process by which it was chosen are available online. An e-mail listserv to which you can direct questions and concerns is at childrenscenter@mtholyoke.edu.
When Elizabeth Budd ’09 comes across an item begging to be recycled, she picks it up and carries it home. It’s part—albeit a small part—of the personal role she says is important in making the planet just a little less toxic.
“There are things we can do to improve [the environment] now,” the dance and environmental justice major points out. To those who would call saving a yogurt cup from the local landfill less than profound, she responds, “I think we have an opportunity to change, and if you think negatively all the time you can’t get anything done.”
A part-time environmental organizer with Nuestras Raices, a community-development group in neighboring Holyoke, Budd has been actively involved in efforts to counter the city’s proposed waste-transfer station that would, Budd relates, result in up to 225 diesel trucks delivering 750 tons of waste a day.
In an impoverished city with one of the highest asthma rates in Massachusetts, a respiratory ailment that has been linked to diesel pollutants, that’s not the kind of economic development that makes sense, she explains.
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You could say Marjorie Kaufman operates in the no-cliché zone. Ask the MHC professor emeritus of English about her love of literature and you get this response: “If you use terms like ‘love of literature,’ I’ll gag on what you are writing.” Press her for the plainspoken translation, and Kaufman explains, “I take pleasure in reading the good stuff.”
Not only does Kaufman derive great joy from reading and discussing books, but she insists that it’s all she really knows how to do. So it isn’t surprising that at age eighty-five, she is the driving force behind three “literary groups for grownups,” as she refers to her peers.
Every other week she meets for two hours with fellow devotees of the printed word at Loomis Village, a retirement community in South Hadley; at Jones Library in Amherst; and the Council on Aging, also in South Hadley. The last is a poetry writing and appreciation group. She has encountered some inspired work from “genuine poets” in the group who have already produced one book of verse and are working on another. “I want to get their poems out in the world,” she says.
Kaufman, a Milwaukee native who did her doctoral dissertation on Henry James at the University of Minnesota, arrived at Mount Holyoke in 1954 not planning to stay very long. She didn’t believe in private colleges or gender-segregated education. “I’m not sure I even believed in New England,” she said. “But Mount Holyoke surprised me; it wasn’t the spoiled, plate-painting student body that I expected.” Most of her career was devoted to teaching American literature.
Kaufman is slightly dyslexic, something she didn’t realize until late in her career. “I’m a very slow reader,” she says. “Therefore, I need writers to work as hard at writing as I do at reading,” Kaufman says. “Henry James rewards my slowness ... he writes for someone who reads all of the words and broods between the period of one sentence and the capital of the next.”
The groups she leads now give her a “reason to be,” Kaufman says. Initially, some participants thought she would lecture, but that’s not her style, she says. “So what I did was to ask if anybody wants to read. I mean it, I’ll read with anybody, anywhere.” —Eric Goldscheider
Photo by Donna Cote
Exam time finds students stressed out but also creative in their array of coping techniques. A few of them agreed to share their methodology:
Julie Pfahler ’09
I make lots and lots and lots of lists of what I need to do. I also avoid the library completely if at all possible. (Stressed-out MoHos in the library are … constantly breaking down and proclaiming failure, making those they encounter feel doomed as well.) I go to get books and then leave.
Maria Lena Garrettson ’10
I like to dress nice and put makeup on for an exam, just to feel good about myself. I also like to get a lot of sleep and a good breakfast. I know that if I’m tired I won’t function, and if I’m hungry I’ll think about that more than the exam.
Jemilatu Abdulai ’09
Music! I study best with music ... and I also need a semi-active environment to study in. I don’t do well in very quiet rooms.
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Laurie Priest, director of athletics, was named one of the 100 most influential sports educators in America by the Institute for International Sport. The project honors individuals and organizations who have used sport as a means to educate and shape positive values.
Focus the Campus, part of MHC’s continuing response to a nationwide teach-in on global warming solutions in January, hoped to reinvigorate campus efforts around energy conservation and recycling. See the college web site for links to college resources.
'08-'09 Costs Set: The MHC Board of Trustees in its winter meeting set tuition, room, and
board for 2008–2009 at $48,500, a 4.8 percent increase over last year.
