Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly

Sisters in Arms: Military Alumnae Find Fulfillment in Uniform

mhaq — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:12:54 -0400

By Rachel Kerestes ’99

With dust storms swirling above, explosives dropping in the evenings, and the Army rolling in, Air Force Major Kimberly Calcutt McQueen ’99 sat atop Saddam Hussein’s former private terminal at the Baghdad airport in the summer of 2007, maintaining the communications network for Air Force personnel deployed there and preparing to set up communications services for a newly arrived Army battalion. In the next four months she would connect the Iraqi police force with U.S. forces and expand General Petraeus’s communications network.

Despite the danger and pressure of the assignment, McQueen relished the opportunity to use her skills. “The military places a high value on knowledge and advanced education,” says McQueen, “but we spend so much time training that sometimes it’s nice to actually get out there and do the job.”

Despite the training, McQueen admits that she never expected to find herself dodging mortars at the Baghdad Airport, or taking shelter from falling bombs in a bunker before continuing her communications networking tasks.

McQueen confesses that it was the scholarship money offered in exchange for participating in the ROTC unit at UMass that initially drew her into the military. Her plan was to gain a few years of practical experience and retire to the private technology sector. Instead, she says, she found a community where her skills are highly valued, her professional development is encouraged, and she’s given the opportunity to lead.

After ten years in the military, McQueen says it’s a thrill to put on her uniform every day. “I feel empowered. I feel a sense of purpose. Most of all I feel like I’m making a difference in the world, and I can’t imagine a life I’d want more.”

A Life Like No Other

According to a recent Rasmussen Poll, nearly 80 percent of Americans now view the US military favorably. Despite the high level of support, if you ask most civilians what life is like in the military, they conjure images only of boot camp and Iraq.

The advent of an all-volunteer service and the elimination of ROTC programs on many private college campuses following the Vietnam War created a gap between military personnel and the average citizen. For Mount Holyoke women in uniform, this gap can feel like a chasm. While their classmates enter civilian careers as lawyers, teachers, and investment bankers, at least three-dozen Mount Holyoke alumnae are currently pursuing professional opportunities in the military.

“If you told me while I was at MHC that I’d end up in the Army, I would have laughed and said you were crazy,” says Army Major Catherine Kimball-Eayrs ’93 (left), who entered Mount Holyoke with dreams of becoming a doctor. After failing to land a spot at one of her top-choice medical schools, she considered her options.

“My dad was a member of the military medical corps, but I never connected the military with a professional career,” she recalls. “After looking into the Uniformed Medical School, I realized that the military could be the path to the career I wanted as a physician.”

Kimball-Eayrs graduated in 1999 with an MD and an Army commission. She expected to complete her required seven years of service in return for her medical degree, leave the military, and work as a civilian physician. Ten years later, she is still in the Army, and is a pediatrician and working mother. Having found increased professional opportunities in the Army, Kimball-Eayrs recently recommitted to another tour.

Beyond the Battlefield

While popular culture associates military life almost solely with combat operations, most military careers happen away from the battlefield. Teams of professionals, from engineers to accountants, provide the infrastructure key to achieving the military’s mission. Others address the challenges of providing everything from health care to groceries for some 1.5 million active-duty personnel and their families.

For example, in her role as director of base medical services at NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen, Germany, Air Force Lt. Colonel Melanie Carino ’92 (above) coordinates the care of more than 4,000 U.S. military and government personnel and their dependents.

“I am effectively running a branch of a managed-care organization,” says Carino, noting that with a budget of over $37 billion in 2009, the military healthcare system is one of the largest in the US.

Increased career opportunities for women in traditionally male dominated fields is another benefit of military life, alumnae say. A computer scientist and communications systems specialist, McQueen explains that, because evaluation methods are uniform and focused specifically on the quality of your work, the requirements for advancement are more objective in the military than in civilian jobs.

Says McQueen, “You’re given a tremendous opportunity to shine when you know that your success is based on your performance. That’s exactly the sort of meritocracy I learned to aspire to at Mount Holyoke.”

On the Front Lines

The military’s current strategic plans focus its mission increasingly on humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. From combating yellow fever in Central America to providing relief to the victims of the 2004 South Asian tsunami to distributing food aid in Africa, according to the State Department, the U.S. military engages in humanitarian projects in over 100 countries in any given year. However, with two wars currently under way, combat operations are still a core element of military life.

Kimball-Eayrs experienced the front lines directly when she deployed to the infamous Iraqi “triangle of death” in September 2006 to provide medical support to an Army combat brigade. The deployment was not only an opportunity for Kimball-Eayrs to sharpen her medical skills. As one of 150 women in a group of more than 5,000 and the most senior female, it also offered a chance to demonstrate her leadership abilities.

“You can’t back down in that sort of situation. People are relying on you for more than just your skills; you also need to set an example,” she says. “I drew on the confidence and strength that I developed at Mount Holyoke not only to succeed as the lone female in the group, but also to serve as a leader.”

Finding Work-Life Balance

Day-to-day life in the military can be difficult. Deployments are coming on shorter notice and lasting longer, budget cuts require personnel to do more with less, and duty stations are typically changed every two to three years, keeping many constantly on the move.

“It’s very hard to commit to staying in the military as a mom,” says Kimball-Eayrs. “You can’t escape the fact that you’re going to be sent away from home for extended periods of time.” In this instance, the equity in performance standards described by McQueen can create an extra burden for soldiers with families. “If you want to get promoted, you need to do the same things as any other officer; that includes deployments,” says Kimball- Eayrs, whose fourteen-month deployment to Iraq in September 2006 came when her children were three years and thirteen months old.

For Major Shawna Doherty ’98 (USAFR), that lack of control over time at home was the primary reason she transferred to the reserves and a civilian job. “I expected to serve a full career in the active-duty military,” says Doherty, who was commissioned as an Air Force officer following her Mount Holyoke and ROTC graduation. Upon returning from a deployment to Afghanistan, Doherty married a civilian and realized that the stability she wanted to build a family wasn’t in the cards if she continued her military career.

Now a consultant, Doherty confesses that the most difficult part of the transition from active-duty to civilian life relates to how she’s viewed as a woman in the workplace. As a military officer, Doherty was guaranteed the respect accorded her rank. As a civilian, she has struggled to achieve that same equality.

Doherty also misses the strong sense of community in the military, and what she describes as a culture focused on developing individuals. “I always felt that I was surrounded by people who wanted me to succeed when I was at Mount Holyoke, and I found the same culture echoed in the military.”

Leaving Mount Holyoke’s Mark

Despite the increasing opportunities for women in the military described by alumnae, there are still chances to break barriers. Women account for just 15 percent of the force, and post- Vietnam-era female officers are only beginning to fill the ranks of generals and admirals.

“Mount Holyoke women have a tremendous opportunity to contribute to shaping military culture, because we’re smart and ambitious,” says Doherty. However, officers must leave personal politics at the door to do their jobs effectively. “Members of the military don’t make policy; that’s up to civilian leaders,” notes McQueen. “Our job is to support those decisions; we implement that policy.” That’s difficult at times for an overachieving Mount Holyoke woman, particularly since the college trains students to advocate for their opinions.

Even though the alumnae interviewed credit their Mount Holyoke education for their military success, on the whole they agree that the MHC community’s support for their career choice is limited. They said professors had refused them recommendations and some classmates and faculty had taunted them for choosing the military. One alumna said a classmate spat on her the day she wore her ROTC uniform to a history class.

Like many private colleges, Mount Holyoke does not maintain an ROTC unit on campus; students wishing to participate join the unit at UMass. Although military representatives do come to campus, some may have been discouraged from recruiting by Mount Holyoke’s policy of asking all organizations recruiting on campus to complete an acknowledgment of nondiscrimination or to discuss with students why they can’t sign the statement. Doherty argues that the lack of support at MHC for military careers limits graduates’ opportunities for jobs and inhibits their understanding of the military. “Members of the military aren’t born in Petri dishes,” she says; “they reflect the values of the communities they come from.”

Answering the Call to Service

Beyond the professional possibilities, alumnae say they serve in the military because they find a sense of honor and purpose in serving their country.

Describing how she was inspired by Mary Lyon’s call to public service, Carino says that she wanted to serve a cause greater than herself. She considered leaving the military several times to pursue a larger paycheck in the private sector, but realized that a higher salary would not equal the personal satisfaction of doing a job she describes as important.

“I realized that the culture and the values of the organization were as important to me as the work,” says Carino. Describing the military as a nonprofit organization, she argues that service members give full effort to their jobs not to improve the bottom line, but because so many people rely on them. “In the Air Force we follow a set of core values: integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do,” says Carino. “Our entire mission is to serve others.”

Rachel Kerestes ’99 is a freelance writer and political consultant. She lives in San Diego with her husband, an officer in the US Navy.

A-ten-SHUN, MHCers! Here's More about MHC Alumnae and Other Women in the Military

• To sample 1993 MHC alumna Catherine Kimball-Eayrs’s life as a military physician, check out her blog posts in the “comments” section of this article.

• To read previous Quarterly stories about, and see photos of, other alumnae in the military, click here.

• For links to information on women in the US military from the Revolutionary War to oral histories of current servicewomen, click here.

• To read profiles of recent Frances Perkins students who are veterans, click here.

More about MHC Women in the Military

• This past April, Sybil Bailey Stockdale ’46 took part in the commissioning ceremony for the missile destroyer Stockdale, a new warship named after her late husband, Vice Admiral James Stockdale. Read the media coverage and see photos here.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-stockdale19-2009apr19,0,7641300.story

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/apr/19/1n19ship223851-navys-newest-destroyer-stockdale-na/

• A piece in the winter 1997 Alumnae Quarterly profiled 1994 MHC classmates Fran Mackey and Laurie Shyloski, who had trained at the same Army flight school and had just both been promoted to first lieutenant rank. Read the story here.

Here’s what they’re up to these days:

Laurie Shyloski Morgado: “My family is currently stationed at Siena College in New York. I left the service just shy of 10 years after I commanded a Blackhawk helicopter company at Fort Hood, Texas. Now my 3 kids—Isabelle 5, Madeleine 4, and Ian, 1—keep me super busy. I look forward to starting another interesting career in a few years.

Fran Mackey Gill: “I ended up spending nine years in the military, where I met my wonderful husband Clair. We have a wonderful two- year-old son, Joshua. I'm just finishing up my intern year as an emergency medicine physician in Richmond, Virginia. It has been a very busy, humbling, incredible journey and I'm trying my best to balance my roles—wife, mother, and physician.”

• Heather Lixey ’06 was a ROTC cadet and self-described “Army brat” when the Quarterly interviewed her in 2003 for an article about student reactions to the then-new Iraq War. Today she’s a paralegal for the American Red Cross in Washington, DC. Read the summer 2003 Quarterly story here.

Links About Women in the Military

Thanks to Rachel Kerestes ’99 for this information.

• Women In Military Service For America Memorial Foundation

The history of women in the armed forces began more than 220 years ago with the women who served during the American Revolution, and continues through the present day. The Women's Memorial honors all the women who have served courageously, selflessly, and with dedication in times of conflict and in times of peace—women whose achievements have for too long been unrecognized or ignored.

http://www.womensmemorial.org/

• History Archive of the Women In Military Service For America Memorial Foundation

This site offers an overview of the history of women who have served in or with the US Armed Forces and resources for further study. It also includes hundreds of oral histories.

http://www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/History/historyar.html

Women’s Memorial History Archive

• The Women’s Research and Education Institute—Women in the Military Project

The Women in the Military project was established in 1990 to provide information and policy analysis on issues important to military women and women veterans and to government policy makers, scholars, the media, the media, and the general public. In conjunction with the project's mission, WREI publishes Women in the Military: Where They Stand, now in its fifth edition.

Information and analysis is made available to Congress, the executive branch, academia, the media, and members of the public with an interest in military women.

http://www.wrei.org/WomeninMilitary.htm

Government Reports

• GAO: Women in the Military—Career Progression Not a Current Problem but Concerns Remain

This report is from 1989 and, while dated, it finds no significant impediments to women being promoted at rates similar to men. Civilian and military leaders have since addressed many of the concerns identified in this report.

http://archive.gao.gov/d26t7/139518.pdf

• GAO: Gender Issues—Trends in the Occupational Distribution of Military Women (September 1999)

From the report: In 1993 and 1994, significant changes in legislation and policy allowed women to fly combat aircraft, serve on combat ships, and serve in more combat-related occupations. As of September 1998, 90 percent of the services’ career fields were open to women, and 80 percent of the services’ 1,425,000 positions were open to women. The major areas closed to women include infantry, armor, special forces/SEAL, and submarine warfare. All are associated with ground combat, except submarine warfare, which remains closed due to the cost of changing habitability conditions.

http://www.gao.gov/archive/1999/ns99212.pdf

In these college communications-produced profiles, you’ll meet three Frances Perkins scholars who are veterans.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/fp/18373.shtml

Read the recent New York Times series on women and the military here. Their "Women at Arms: Valor Under Fire" series "explores how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.

Salamanders Signal a Global Warning

mhaq — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:44:43 -0400

By Jenny Hall

A young alumna’s discovery in Yellowstone National Park is causing a stir far beyond its gates and has sobering implications for the future of the planet.

For nearly five years, Sarah McMenamin ’04 has been conducting research on a subspecies of tiger salamander, called Ambystoma tigrinum, as part of her doctoral thesis at Stanford University. The salamanders are robust little creatures that have flourished for thousands of years in vernal pools and kettle ponds formed by glaciers.

Sarah McMenamin ’04 surveying a pond in Yellowstone National Park for frogs and salamanders. Photo: Yu-Jun Lee

McMenamin was charged with comparing the salamander’s habitat and population to a survey conducted in 1992–93. Guided by wetland sensing data prepared by survey coauthor Christopher Wright, she looked at an area of Yellowstone 10 km in radius that contained forty-nine ponds. What she found was alarming. In 1992–93, twenty-six of the forty-nine ponds contained amphibians. Now only fifteen did, a decline of nearly 50 percent. Moreover, the ponds themselves were disappearing.

“I remember standing there in the field, comparing the map of 1992–93 with the landscape in front of me and realizing the two were very different,” she says. “It was exciting, because I knew the information we were getting was important, but at the same time, it was very disturbing, because of the implications for the environment.”

Because the ponds surveyed were not fed by streams or rivers and were refilled only by snow melt, rainfall, and the local aquifer, the animals’ decline could not be explained by the usual factors—such as wells, irrigation, or dams—that can draw down water tables and change habitat in less isolated areas.

“The fact that we’re seeing this severe a decrease in an isolated area, in one of the best-protected areas in the country, which has minimal to no human development, implies that the effects of global warming are everywhere,” said McMenamin.

Amphibians are well-known indicators of climate change, according to J. Alan Pounds, resident scientist of the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica. “We can expect mass extinction in amphibians and a wide range of other species, if global warming continues on its present course.”

A Young Scientist’s Evolution

McMenamin comes to her passion for science naturally. Father Mark is professor of geology and geography at MHC, and mother Dianna is a planetary geologist. The Cambrian explosion and evolutionary history were frequent topics around the dinner table as Sarah grew up, and she loved tagging along on her dad’s field trips. She spent a lot of time outdoors, frequently bringing home snakes and turtles.

Being homeschooled taught her the value of hard work and enthusiasm, she says. “If something sparked my interest, I pursued it. I learned to answer my own questions, and spent a lot of time in Williston Library, reading.”

When McMenamin entered MHC, she recalls being certain “I did not want to go into science. That was what my parents did, and I wanted to strike out on my own in some creative, artistic field like writing or painting,” she said. But an introductory course in biology soon drew her in.

“The biology department was extremely stimulating for a budding researcher, and … I was able to pursue research at a very early stage in my career. I was a TA for my adviser Jeff Knight and Craig Woodard for two semesters of their Genetics and Molecular Biology class, which was a fantastic experience,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I also spent two semesters doing independent research with [former faculty member] Diane Kelly.” Internships at the Howard Hughes undergraduate research training program at MHC in summer 2000 and at the NASA Ames Center in California in 2003 cemented her enthusiasm for research.

“The camaraderie of working with other people on a common goal is a very powerful thing,” she said. “There’s a sense of teamwork and a feeling of satisfaction you get when you ask intelligent questions and find out the answers. I was hooked.”

After graduating from MHC, she decided to explore developmental biology at Stanford. “Transitional states fascinate me,” she said. “Amphibians live compellingly distinct lives in adulthood and childhood, in water and on land. They inhabit a particular ecological niche, marginal areas that push them to modify and adapt.”

Biologist Elizabeth Hadly, McMenamin’s thesis adviser at Stanford, says McMenamin has all the characteristics of a dynamic scientist. “What makes Sarah so amazing is that she is intensely curious and totally focused on her subject, amphibians,” she said. “It can be a little touch-and-go when you put students in the field for the first time. Some are great researchers in the lab, and ask really good questions. But put them out in the field, where conditions can be iffy, and they fall apart. I think Sarah was terrified at first, but she absolutely fell in love with the work, started finding stuff, and never looked back.”

Since October 2008, when McMenamin’s paper on amphibians in Yellowstone was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she’s become a bit of a celebrity. Newspapers and Web sites picked up the story, and she has been interviewed by USA Today, the BBC, Discovery, Scientific American, and ABC, among others.

“It was exciting at first, but it certainly cut into my productivity,” she said. She may have to get used to it. Just a few months ago, on a routine field survey, she discovered a completely new type of salamander living in two Yellowstone ponds. She’s calling them “crystal salamanders” because they are completely transparent. “Sarah called me at home, she was so excited when she found them,” says Hadly. “Yellowstone has been studied up the wazoo, but here are these salamanders that nobody has ever known about. It makes the case for preserving this habitat even more compelling.”

Currently, McMenamin is collaborating with Pounds and Hadly on a chapter in an upcoming science publication and writing up her discovery of the “crystal” salamanders. And she successfully defended her doctoral thesis in May.

McMenamin says of her work, “Hopefully, as our and other research is publicized, and public awareness increases, we will become more sensitive to the needs of the populations we share our planet with. I think it will be very difficult to draft legislation that will effect real change, let alone find a way to implement it. I do know the solution has to be multifaceted, and come from a stronger sense of stewardship of the land and of the planet.”

• See the transparent “crystal” salamanders Sarah discovered!

• Check out media frenzy Sarah’s research prompted:

ABC-TV spot
Discover magazine blog
Scientific American
Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

• Read abstracts of 2009 MHC seniors’ research in the sciences. (Abstracts are sorted by department.)

You Asked; She Answers�President Creighton Addresses Alums� Questions

mhaq — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:03:26 -0400

President Creighton during the laurel parade
Photo: Paul Schnaittacher

The Quarterly invited alumnae to submit questions for President Joanne V. Creighton to answer. You sent many, and she chose which to answer here. Others will feed into a farewell article planned for the end of Creighton’s presidency next spring.

Q. I was a student on the committee of faculty, staff and students you formed in 1996 to develop the Plan for 2003. We spent a lot of time working on the college mission that year. Knowing what you know now, how would that mission statement be different? Elizabeth O'Donoghue '97

A. I’m proud that we were able to boil down the College’s mission into a single sentence: it warms my heart as an English professor! The key elements in that sentence—academic excellence, diverse residential community of women, liberal arts, and purposeful engagement in the world—are still the touchstones of Mount Holyoke today. I wouldn’t change a word.

Q. What is the biggest challenge facing the College today and what’s being done about it? Melinda A. Mann ’79

A. Without a doubt, the current economic environment is providing the greatest challenge that colleges and universities have seen, probably since the Great Depression. We’re doing all we can to contain costs, but we know we can’t cut our way back to equilibrium without seriously hurting educational quality. So our challenge over the next few years will be to grow revenue to maintain Mount Holyoke’s academic excellence.

Q. What new requirements are necessary for a successful MHC president, and if you were serving on the interview committee, what are the most important traits and skills you would wish to see? Katherine Gleeson Wallin ’59

A. There are many ways to be an effective college president. Fundamentally, though, to lead Mount Holyoke one must appreciate and privilege the College’s raison d’etre, its academic program and its outstanding faculty. At the same time, the president is the CEO of a complex organization and must do all the things that good managers do: hire well, plan, execute those plans, and balance the budget.

Q. How can a women’s college stay viable in the weak economy, which threatens to push students toward “marketable degrees”? (yuck! The term leaves a bad taste in my mouth!)—Dee Drummey Boling ’88

A. The question is really less about being a women’s college, and more about the state of the liberal arts. With families under greater financial pressure, students have every reason to insist that their college education should help them find a job, as well as lead a productive, fulfilling life. The liberal arts have historically been the best route into the professions and to career success. We need to make sure that we keep the curriculum relevant and that we help employers and students recognize its value. This is one of the drivers behind our new Nexus program, which will connect the liberal arts classroom with experiences beyond the gates.

Q. Why do you think we have fallen further in ranking than either Wellesley or Smith? And why have we fallen so far below Wellesley? Anonymous

A. US News rankings reflect institutional wealth more than any other factor, including educational quality. Mount Holyoke will always be disadvantaged compared to wealthier peers. If their methodology looked at real measures of academic strength and educational outcomes, Mount Holyoke’s position would no doubt rise. But such things are not easily quantified, and we must not forget that the real motivation behind these rankings is to sell magazines—I’ve long been a critic of the damage these bogus rankings have done to higher education.

Q. Although I strongly believe in single-sex education, I think it is outdated and archaic, and has significantly altered the quality of applicants and matriculating students at MHC. What does President Creighton think about MHC going co-ed, to maintain its competitive position, and to actually elevate its rankings relative to other small liberal arts colleges? Susan Sokalner Dickstein ’71

A. By any measure, the students at MHC today are every bit as strong as they were a generation ago, and we’ve been receiving more applications over the past few years than at any time in institutional history. Like you, most people in the MHC community are passionate about both academic excellence and women’s education, and I wouldn’t want to compromise on either. We’ve yet to see any data that suggests that co-education would improve Mount Holyoke’s academic quality, or its ranking.

Q. What’s your take on the future of women’s colleges? Did your view change in any way during your tenure at MHC? Carol Sliwa ’80

A. I freely admit that I came to Mount Holyoke with some skepticism about single-sex education, but I will leave a convert. I think there will be a continuing place for women’s colleges in the United States for one simple reason: they work. One of the most inspiring parts of my Mount Holyoke career has been our involvement in Women’s Education Worldwide. While women’s colleges in the United States may be a countertrend, there are young Mary Lyons around the globe starting brand new women’s colleges in our image where they are most needed—places like Kenya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Bahrain, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. And they, too, will change the world for the better.

Q. Of the new buildings, what’s her favorite and why? KC Maurer ’84

A. Mary Lyon said, “Stone and brick and mortar speak a language that vibrates in my very soul,” and I have to agree. I love all our new buildings, but the most satisfying for me has been the new residence hall, which is actually the only entirely new structure we’ve built during my presidency. I love the way it communicates with the both the landscape and the architectural heritage of campus. It’s state of the art, but it feels like it has always been there.

Q. My classmates and I have always liked the fact that we were Joanne’s first firsties, and are really happy that she’ll be with the College long enough to celebrate at our 10-year reunion with us! If I were having lunch with President Creighton, I think I’d like to ask her how her impressions of the students have changed over time, and what she’s learned about the kind of women who become Mount Holyoke alumnae. Katherine O’Brien ’00

A. While the faces have changed over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in student values, ethos, and affect. I have learned a great deal from our students. I am deeply impressed by the incredible journeys so many of them have taken to get to the College—from inhospitable settings such as a refugee camp in Algeria, or a village in Tibet, or a township in Zimbabwe—and the passion for learning and for making a positive difference in the world that so deeply infuses their lives.

Deep (and Wide) Impact: The Weissman Center Marks 10 Years

mhaq — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:51:19 -0400

By Eric Goldscheider

Ten-year celebrations included a talk by journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault (left), student presentations (center), and (right) a meeting between student grant recipients and Center founder Harriet Levine Weissman ’58 (right).

Photos by Paul Schnaittacher (right); Fred LeBlanc

As the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, its impact as a vibrant hive for teaching, learning, and social action at Mount Holyoke continues to grow. Operating out of a few offices in Porter Hall, the center has insinuated itself into many aspects of academic life on campus, has established bonds with the surrounding community, and promises to be a source of new approaches to creative pedagogy in higher education nationally.

“Our idea was to get our tentacles into as many classrooms, as many faculty gatherings, as many student gatherings as possible, and to really encourage and shape campus conversations,” said Christopher Benfey in a recent interview. Benfey, a respected literary critic and author who is also Mellon Professor of English, codirected the Weissman Center from 2000 to 2004.

Many colleges and universities contain institutions charged with performing some of the tasks that the Weissman Center does, such as bringing speakers to campus, helping students with their writing, and promoting community engagement by placing students in internships and service learning opportunities. But the magic of the Weissman Center is that it has also doggedly and energetically grappled with big-picture questions, such as: What role can a liberal arts education play in building leadership skills? How does one go about broadening students’ perspectives and instilling in them a drive for social relevance? How can educators everywhere prepare women to rise to the highest echelons of their chosen fields by being agents of change? By combining the discrete tasks it performs into a coherent whole, the Weissman Center has become a force for integrative thinking at Mount Holyoke.

Lois A. Brown, who steps down this summer as director after four and a half years, described some of the components of the Weissman Center and the strategies it uses to advance its overarching ideals. The Speaking, Arguing, and Writing (SAW) program prepares a cadre of about forty peer mentors who fan out across campus to work with fellow students, often assisting professors in specially designed speaking- and writing-intensive courses. There is also the Community-Based Learning (CBL) program, which sends Mount Holyoke women off campus in ways that are structured to complement and buttress their coursework. At the end of each academic year, the Weissman Center hosts the Senior Symposium, at which members of the graduating class showcase intellectual passions, independent projects, and scholarly research.

And of course there are free, public events with speakers who are always fascinating and usually famous in their fields. The Weissman Center carefully calibrates these lectures and symposia to tie into the curriculum in as many classes as possible. Featured guests meet with students and faculty in small-group settings, often engaging directly with concerns relevant to what students are working on at the time. Semester and yearlong themes such as “Family Matters,” “Migrations,” and “Geographies of Color” give professors in any department the opportunity to design course offerings or syllabi that relate to the work of the writers, activists, broadcasters, political figures, and artists of many stripes who come to South Hadley in fairly rapid succession each term. These have included leading thinkers like veteran newswoman Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the late literary theorist and activist Susan Sontag, crusading author on public education Jonathan Kozol, writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, and architect Daniel Libeskind.

Before assuming the directorship, Brown, an associate professor of English, turned one of her introductory literature, culture, and critical theory courses into a writing-intensive course. “Peer learners and mentors make safe spaces for sometimes very nerve-racking moments,” explains Brown. Mika Weissbuch ’11 describes becoming a peer mentor as a time of enormous growth. “I learned to really step into my voice and become aware of what I was thinking and why I was thinking that way,” said Weissbuch. Beyond that, she said, “the Weissman Center has been an essential part of my education and informs the work I do in the community ... I have learned the importance of really understanding what others believe before I pass judgment or conjure up suggestions.”

Speaking Up for Women

From its inception in 1999, a guiding principle of the center has been that honing basic oral and written communication abilities is crucial to effective leadership. Concomitant with this were the twin ideas that competent speaking and writing, no matter how elegantly deployed, can be vacuous without a strong foundation in knowledge; and that activism without artful presentation risks being soulless and ineffective. The Weissman Center was born of a marriage between two fledgling initiatives. The SAW program was already experimenting with new ways of teaching written and oral communication, such as role playing, in-character recreations of historical events, debates, and the greater use of oral exams. The big idea linking it to what was then called the Center for Leadership and Public Interest Advocacy was that form and content were inextricably related.

Harriet (in yellow) and Paul (in blue shirt) Weissman listen to a presentation during the center's anniversary celebrations. Photo by Fred LeBlanc

“There was a concern, especially as a women’s college, that we had a particular obligation to teach women to be assertive, to be able to arrive at a position on the basis of knowledge and to argue for it with authority,” said Professor of Philosophy Lee Bowie. “That was much of the motivation from the faculty for the creation of these two programs.” Bowie, whose fields include the philosophy of the mind and of logic, was one of the founding co-directors, along with Eva Paus, an economics professor who now leads MHC’s McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives.

When Benfey and his co-director, Professor of German Studies Karen Remmler, took the reins in 2000, they set out to solidify the bonds between the SAW program and the public events mission of the center. “Our vision was to make the programming an opportunity for people from different walks of life, from different disciplines and professions, to come together and have public conversations around an issue,” said Remmler. She and Benfey organized a yearlong theme, ending in the spring of 2005, called “Water Matters: Survival for the 21st Century.” Including exhibits, it had more than a dozen public events linked to courses with nine professors in five departments. Benfey describes as almost missionary zeal his and Remmler’s drive to have a lasting impact on the campus as a whole. “We wanted to be a force in the classroom, we wanted to be a force in the lives of faculty, we wanted to provoke,” he said.

The SAW program is now headed by Laura Greenfield, who teaches a course each semester designed to educate new peer mentors about underlying theories they can draw on to become effective partners in the learning process. “We look for women who really understand the reciprocal nature of their work,” said Greenfield. A measure of the impact the program has on the college as a whole is that about two dozen faculty offer speaking- and writing-intensive courses each semester that employ a SAW peer mentor. And in the last academic year, nearly 40 percent of Mount Holyoke women used the SAW Center, a drop-in resource located in the library, making more than 1,270 appointments. “That is a phenomenally huge number compared to what I’ve seen at other institutions,” said Greenfield. She is bringing some of the ideas developed in the SAW program into a wider arena by encouraging her students to present papers at professional meetings. In November Mount Holyoke will host “the first and only conference specifically devoted to peer mentoring and writing,” said Greenfield. “We’ll have hundreds of people from across the country and perhaps the world coming to talk about our work.”

Rebekka Lee '04, who is pursuing a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, looks back at her mentoring experience as an important part of her education. One of the reasons the SAW program has such a great impact is its scale, according to Lee. "So many classes had a writing mentor [that] any student was probably going to have a mentor in at least one class, especially if she started in 2002 or later," she said.

Reaching a Broader Community

Alan Bloomgarden coordinates the Community-Based Learning program, which predated the Weissman Center but is now under its umbrella. This is another way in which the center's reach extends deeply into the college as a whole. There are between twelve and fifteen CBL courses each year, with a total of about 200 students, in which faculty specifically build some form of community engagement into their curriculum.

Also, the center employs community fellows who are paid to work with area organizations through initiatives such as the Holyoke Corps, which works with students in the public schools of an economically stressed city; and Girls Inc., a national nonprofit organization with local chapters that teach life skills to girls. "The most sophisticated and productive conception of CBL is one that involves engaging students in citizenship development and leadership," said Bloomgarden. "The match between the CBL program and the leadership orientation of the Weissman Center is an excellent one because we want students to become change agents."

Emma Fialka-Feldman '11 describes herself as being "passionate about getting more people into leadership [and] a big fan of the Weissman Center... because it challenges students and faculty to think about leadership in holistic ways." She attends all the public lectures and recently took Educational Psychology, a course with a CBL component through which she tutored children and helped out in enrichment programs at the Donahue Elementary School in Holyoke. The experience "really gave me the opportunity to reflect on what we learned in class about what it means to motivate students and what that looks like," said Fialka-Feldman.

Linzy Brekke-Aloise '98 graduated a year before the Weissman Center was formally launched. Today, a professor of early American history at Stonehill College, Brekke-Aloise often speaks with prospective students about MHC. The Weissman Center, she said, is a big selling point. She participated in the discussions in the mid to late 1990s that led to the formation of the center. "There was a very strong [feeling] that one of the benefits of a women's college was the creation of female leaders who are not afraid to speak up and to speak out, but that there needed to be a formal, structured way of promoting that," said Brekke-Aloise. She got to know Harriet Levine Weissman '58, who with her husband, Paul, made a $4 million founding gift, and still views her as a model of the kind of leader the college aspires to produce. "Harriet is a force in public life and an amazing philanthropist," said Brekke-Aloise. "One of the things I find most fascinating about her is that she is genuinely interested in all things Mount Holyoke, a remarkable quality in an alumna who has been graduated for several decades."

Brekke-Aloise is struck by the relevance of the Weissman Center's founding principles to issues facing higher education more generally. "Women are still struggling to feel comfortable and competent making public arguments," she said. "Even in the classroom they want to quietly build consensus rather than say, ‘This is what I think, this is the argument that I want to make.' Women hang back quite a lot." Now that enrollment trends show that women outnumber men in many coeducational institutions, administrators are wrestling with how best to empower women's voices. "Mount Holyoke and institutions like the Weissman Center have a very strong leadership role to play in guiding other institutions of higher learning about how best to educate women," said Brekke-Aloise. "They know how to do it, and in many ways coeducational institutions do not."

Looking back at an illustrious decade of programming and pioneering pedagogy during tenth anniversary celebrations this spring, Harriet Weissman said, "Paul and I are deeply privileged, proud, and honored to have our names attached to the center."

Learn More About the Weissman Center

There’s much more to learn about the Weissman Center’s multifaceted program. Here are a few suggested links to get you started.

• Main Web site Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/

• The McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/global/

• The Speaking, Arguing, and Writing (SAW) program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11260.shtml

• The Community-Based Learning (CBL) program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11261.shtml

A summer 1999 Quarterly article, “When Thought Leads to Action: Community-Based Learning Translates into Meaningful Projects and Tangible Benefits” by Martha Ackmann, shows what the program was like in its infancy. CBL_Su99QArticle.pdf

• The Senior Symposium program
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/16261.shtml

• Past Weissman Center-Sponsored Programs
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/11282.shtml

A sampling of past semester- and year-long themes:

“Family Matters ”

“Migrations ”

“Geographies of Color ”

“Water Matters: Survival for the 21st Century .”

•Faculty profiles of past and current Weissman Center Directors

A Short History of Philosophical Ideas about Infinity

mhaq — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:45:27 -0400

Illustration: Elwood Smith

Note: This article is part of "What Everyone Should Know About...", a Quarterly series by MHC professors.

By Sam Mitchell

Almost the earliest pieces of writing we possess speculate and argue about the infinite. Greek philosopher Zeno's paradoxes are probably the earliest. One of them (written in the fifth century BC) concerns Achilles, fleetest of foot of all the Greeks, who is to run a race with a tortoise. He gives the tortoise a ten-meter start. He runs ten times as fast as the tortoise, but cannot ever overtake him. Why not?

By the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise began, the tortoise is ahead, by one meter.

By the time Achilles reaches the end of that one meter, the tortoise is still ahead, by ten centimeters.

By the time Achilles reaches the ten centimeters, the tortoise is still ahead, by one centimeter.

By the time Achilles reaches the one centimeter, the tortoise is still ahead ... And so on. The series never reaches an end, and the tortoise is always ahead of Achilles. No matter how many races Achilles runs, the tortoise is still ahead by the time he's reached the end. So Achilles can't overtake the tortoise.

The same logic can make movement itself seem impossible. To walk across a room, you must cross the final half of the room, but before that you must cross a quarter of it, and an eighth before that ... But it is impossible to cross an infinite number of finite spaces. So you can't move.

Nearly 400 years before Christ was born, Aristotle worried about this and other puzzles concerning infinite divisibility. He was also worried about the infinitely big. The universe, he thought, couldn't be infinitely big. If it were, then half of it would also be infinite. What makes the whole infinite bigger than half of it? Apparently nothing; they're both infinite, so they must be the same size. But they can't be the same size, since one is half of the other. Aristotle raises a number of other objections, and concludes that the universe must be finite. Looking at the stars above him, he concludes that space consists of a huge (but finite) sphere with the earth at the center.

As soon as Aristotle suggested this, someone asked what was on the other side of the sphere. Still, the idea kept almost everybody happy for well over a thousand years, which is a pretty good run. In the third century BC, Archimedes calculated the number of grains of sand it would take to fill Aristotle's universe. In the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas endorsed Aristotle, and the view became the orthodoxy of the church.

Things changed when Renaissance scientist Copernicus argued that the earth was not the center of the universe. People thought that maybe other things were wrong with Aristotle too, such as his ideas about a finite universe. In the seventeenth century, Galileo was one of these dangerous thinkers, and he raised an independent puzzle about the infinite. Roll a doughnut along its edge, which is about 30 cm long. At any time, only one point of the edge touches the table, and only one point of the circumference of the hole in the middle is above that point. So there are as many points along the edge as around the inner hole. But say the inner hole is 10 cm around. Then there are as many points in 30 cm as there are in 10 cm. And if we have various freak doughnuts with unusually small holes, there are as many points in 30 cm as there are in 1 cm, 1 mm, or the circumference of an atom.

Analogously, suppose you're a desk clerk at the Hotel Infinity. All your infinitely many rooms are full, but someone new turns up. Must you turn that person away? No. Move the occupant of room 1 to room 2; the occupant of room 2 to room 3, and so on. Room 1 is now vacant for your new person.

If infinitely many new people show up, you can still be accommodating. Room 1 goes to room 2, room 2 to room 4, room 3 to room 6 and so on. Since all the room numbers doubled, and thus became even numbers, you can now put the infinitely many new people in the (now vacant) odd-numbered rooms. There must be as many even numbers as there are numbers, since there are infinite rooms, whether they are even- or odd-numbered. We can put all of the numbers, without residue, into just the "rooms" occupied by the even numbers.

Nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor argued that this showed that there were numbers of numbers, and that this infinite number of numbers was descriptive of many types of numbers. For example, the number of numbers was the same as the number of even numbers (and odd numbers, and primes, and multiples of a billion, etc.). It seems obvious, but it was not obvious to Aristotle, who was the word on this for a long time.

Cantor also proved that the number of fractions was equal to this infinite number, which he called Aleph-null. Most remarkably, he proved (by what is called the diagonal argument, which is worth looking up) that there was more than one infinite number. The number of points around the circumference of a doughnut is, in an important sense, greater than aleph-null, even though aleph-null is infinitely big. He called this new number Aleph-one, and he conjectured, but could not prove, that there were no infinite numbers in between Aleph-null and Aleph-one.

Cantor's work met with considerable resistance, but eventually won the day, and is now almost universally accepted. Almost universally. There remains a tiny minority of mathematicians called intuitionists, or constructivists, who don't believe that we can really understand the idea of an infinite totality. In the twentieth century, these were joined by philosophers, who questioned whether it is possible to understand Cantor's view of infinity.

I agree that we cannot completely understand the idea of the infinite, but explaining why would take me, well not quite an infinitely long time, but longer than this article allows.

Sam Mitchell is associate professor of philosophy at MHC . He loves getting students interested in what he calls "weird stuff."

Photo: Andrea Burns

Go Deeper Into Infinity!

Discuss infinity (briefly, or endlessly) by posting your comments below.

Find out more about Sam Mitchell here.