Rochester Review

September–October 2010, Volume 73, No. 1

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, and Susan Hagen

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Published six times a year for alumni, students, their parents, and other friends of the University, Rochester Review is produced by University Communications.

Opinions expressed are those of the authors, the editors, or their subjects and do not necessarily represent official positions of the University of Rochester.

Copyright © 2010 University of Rochester

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Alumni photographs, courtesy of the subjects. Unless otherwise credited, all others are Rochester Review photos.

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Two Remarkable Milestones

By Joel Seligman

In December we will formally dedicate the new 61,800-square-foot wing of the Eastman School of Music, completing a vision first articulated by benefactor George Eastman almost 90 years ago when he engaged the University in his “great music project.”

At the Medical Center this spring, we will dedicate the new 200,000-square-foot Clinical and Translational Science Building, the first of its kind in the United States designed to accelerate the applications of the discoveries of medical science.

These two buildings are remarkable milestones in the progress of our University.

With George Eastman’s enthusiastic support and encouragement, the University opened the Eastman School in 1921 as the first great music school established within a university rather than a stand-alone conservatory. Insisting that music was a discipline with equal academic stature to that of other subjects in the liberal arts, then University President Rush Rhees noted, “educated musicians should be much more than expert musical technicians.” This approach has influenced music education for the past 89 years.

In 1921, the founding dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, George Whipple, arrived in Rochester after being recruited to lead a pathbreaking academic medical program. The model, originally developed by Johns Hopkins, was popularized by Abraham Flexner of the Rockefeller General Education Board. Rochester became one of the first medical education programs to combine the scientific, research, and intellectual discovery of a medical faculty with the clinical education and expertise provided by a teaching hospital—all under one roof. The University of Rochester Medical Center (including the School of Medicine and Dentistry, a Nurses’ Training School, and Strong Memorial Hospital) accepted its first patient in 1926.

Over the past nine decades, both Eastman and the School of Medicine and Dentistry have earned reputations as innovative leaders. Few music schools have thought more deeply about how to enrich the life of a musical scholar as a member of a musical community that reaches far beyond a performance hall. The school has recently added the Eastman Initiatives, the Institute for Musical Leadership, the Music for All program, and Internet 2–driven partnerships with orchestras and schools around the world. By all measures, including U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and The Fiske Guide to Colleges, the Eastman School continues to be a premier music program in the United States.

The Medical Center, too, has remained one of the country’s top academic health programs, whose transformative ideas include the biopsychosocial model of education, the “Double Helix” curriculum, the unification model of nursing education, and nurse-practitioner programs. Rochester scientists pioneered the technology behind a vaccine that has virtually eradicated a leading cause of meningitis in preschoolers as well as a vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer, the first vaccine to target a known cause of cancer. Breakthroughs in the understanding of heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases will benefit generations to come.

At the Eastman School, the new wing will house performance and rehearsal spaces, faculty studios, and a state-of-the-art recording and media control room. Our students and faculty will be able to explore new ways to engage audiences and to explore how the role of music and musical performance is changing in an increasingly digital world.

At the Medical Center, the Clinical and Translational Science Building will be home to more than 600 scientists, physicians, nurses, and professional and support staff. The National Institutes of Health recognized Rochester’s remarkable history and potential to succeed in this new endeavor by awarding the Medical Center a $40 million grant, the largest NIH award in the University’s history, as one of the original 12 sites selected in 2007 to establish translational medicine programs.

The new buildings are physical manifestations of Rochester’s commitment to the highest standards of excellence, whether in academia, clinical care, or the performing arts. The Eastman Theatre complex and the new Clinical and Translational Science Building also reflect a partnership involving the University, the state—which provided substantial funding for both projects—and community leaders and benefactors, all dedicated to accelerating the progress of both Rochester and the University of Rochester.

Letters

A Motivation to Write

I hugely enjoyed your well written piece on [psychology professors] Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (“What Motivates You?”, July-August). I was one of their grad students, getting my doctorate in clinical psych in the late 1980s. Their theory and their thinking has been one of the most influential and powerful influences on my life as a private practice family clinician, as a father of two, and as a man wanting to live fully and to my potential. The care and skill these two take in mentoring their students for a life of high professional and personal motivation with little regret is something worth studying in and of itself.

Congrats, Ed and Rich!

Steve Freilich ’93 (PhD)

Medway, Mass.

Getting the Lead Out

Thank you for documenting the praiseworthy and much needed efforts of the people in the University community working to reduce the risk of lead poisoning in Rochester children (“Home Work,” July-August). In addition to the necessity of dealing with the continuing effects of lead poisoning on contaminated individuals as well as its social impacts, the sad truth is that most of it could have been avoided.

Australia banned lead in interior paint in 1897; France, Belgium, and Austria in 1909. The League of Nations Charter adopted by most Western nations in 1922 banned its use. By 1928, even the most backward European nations participated in the elimination of lead in interior paint. The inherent dangers were universally known. In the United States, which rejected the treaty, free market capitalism had 50 years to do the right thing on its own. But thanks to the power of the American lead lobby, lead in interior paint was not completely eliminated until 1978 in the United States, the last industrialized country to do so. How much of Rochester’s now deteriorating, contaminated housing stock was painted with lead paint after the rest of the civilized world had banned its use? Most of it.

Maybe sadder still is that industry and business groups continue to spend millions yearly on lobbying, and think tanks crank out rationales for resisting reasonable and modest regulation of products, ingredients, and practices that are unhealthy, unsafe, and even potentially deadly. And their political enablers are all too happy to oblige. So much for lessons that might have been learned from the lead story.

So in 2010, the University is helping to remediate a problem that could have been avoided if free markets really were capable of self-regulating and the problem had been nipped in the bud 85 years ago. It’s wonderful that the University is making this contribution but a great shame that it has to.

Bill Glasner ’69

Victor, N.Y.

I read with interest the article “Home Work.” On one hand, the progress and commitment of the University and community partners are to be commended. On the other, lead is still an issue 40 years after I was a resident in pediatrics.

I remember finding a lead level of over 100 μg/dL in a child at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon in early 1971. After a frantic and futile search to find a public health person to contact the family that late on a Friday afternoon, I spent a large part of the weekend trying without success to find the family. However, on Monday the mother called me, bearing fruit to my leaving messages in every business in the area they lived in.

Although we were told the apartment had been abated, a community advocacy agency found lead in the stairwell where the child often played. The city housing folks refused to move the child because the property was going to be razed within the next six months. I arranged for a Community Legal Services lawyer to sue the city, resulting in a move to a new home. The mother became one of my loyal patients.

When I left my residency she told me that she had never kept an appointment with any other person in her life. The lesson she taught me about what happens when the priorities of the patient and family are met was a lasting legacy for my practice of medicine for my entire career. Serving the needs of that child and mother should have been easier.

I salute the progress in addressing lead in the Rochester community and the role of the University and its partners.

Barry Lachman ’72M (Res)

Dallas

lettersSPEAKING OF DINING: A revamped food court in Wilson Commons made its debut for the fall semester. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Et Tu, Tofu?

In 1974, we held an Orwellian themed “1984 Week,” filled with activities aimed at predicting what life would be like 10 years in the future. A time capsule was buried with letters to be mailed in 10 years, and one of the great debates was who would put the correct amount of postage on their envelope.

As part of the celebration, we had “foods of the future” in the dining halls with a focus on sustainable and eco-friendly cuisine. One of the items was a white, spongy cubed substance called “tofu,” and no one quite knew what to make of it, or what to do with it.

Fast forward to 2010, and a visit to Rochester with my wife and son to check out prospective colleges. We were treated to lunch in Danforth, and on the salad bar . . . cubed tofu, now in the mainstream. (I need also to mention that the “olive loaf” popular in my college days was not to be found—this is a good thing!) The University is visionary in so many ways, and although this may not be as profound as lasers or super computers, the planners of this event were prescient about culinary trends as well!

Richard Rubin ’77

Slingerlands, N.Y.

For more about news from Dining Services, click here; and for lasers, here—Editor.

Remembering a College Bowler

I noted with sadness the passing of Donald Feinfeld ’65 (In Memoriam, May-June), my teammate on the 1965 University’s GE College Bowl Team that stunned the country with its victory over a University of Tennessee team that had won four matches in a row. The Tennessee team needed just one more victory to clinch a permanent trophy and consisted of four clean-cut, all-American kids, all of whom the audience had gotten to know over the four weeks.

Our squad included three freshmen and was a group of hairy kids from New York City and upstate New York. Our only fans in the studio audience, as I recall, were my parents and my two uncles, who all cheered loudly every time we got a question right. No one expected us to win, but we prevailed nonetheless, perhaps helping to enhance the University’s academic reputation—or at least its students’ skills at trivia. Whatever the impact of the show, I was sorry to hear that Don had passed away.

Barry Bennett ’65

Frenso, Calif.

Department of Amplification

I’ve read for years the agreeable reminiscences of my classmate H. E. (Kit) Crissey Jr. ’66, and have been most remiss in not adding a few of my own. But now there’s another reason for writing: to offer a few “friendly amendments” to his letter in the May-June issue.

Kit says I switched my major to linguistics, but it was actually comparative literature; I went on to a doctorate in classics at the University of Texas in 1972 and a modest career at the University of Illinois at Chicago, retiring in 1999. Strange as it sounds, I’ve published nine scholarly books, seven of them since that date. A little more embarrassingly, Kit puts me in the same category as the late George Schlein ’64 and the recently profiled Paul Frommer ’65 (“Avatar of Language,” March-April), calling us “three gifted pianists.”

Alas, I had (and continue to have) no such gift, as was made abundantly evident in a May 1966 performance of Mozart’s 23rd Piano Concerto (K. 488), which Kit mentions. I did write a first-movement cadenza and some ornamentation in the Adagio, gestures of youthful chutzpah which, though rather rare back then, aren’t quite enough to justify saying that I played my own edition. (As part of my preparation, I purchased a microfilm of Mozart’s original manuscript from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and subsequently sold it at cost (a mere $8, as I recall!) to the legendary Ruth Watanabe ’52E (PhD) of the Sibley Library at Eastman. I’m pleased to report that David Peter Coppen, head of Special Collections at Sibley, has assured me that the microfilm remains available.

I owe virtually all my knowledge of, and dedication to, classical music to the priceless experience of being around serious “amateur” musicians like Kit, George, Paul, and especially my three-year roommate Steve Moshman ’65, who created and sustained the University’s Baroque Ensemble almost entirely through his prodigious command of the repertory and boundless enthusiasm.

So I agree with those who say that you can go to college and get a degree, but some of the most precious learning takes place outside the classroom.

James Dee ’66

Austin, Texas

In a letter [July-August] about the earlier article “101 Things to Do before You Graduate” [May-June], Stacy Stevens ’53 claims that, while manager of the basketball team, he heard coach Louis Alexander encourage the team “at halftime of a losing effort against Calvin Murphy and his Niagara bunch.”

Murphy, a three time all-American at Niagara, graduated in 1970, and was only five years old when Stevens graduated from Rochester.

T. Alan Wyle ’70

Mays Landing, N.J.

We apologize for mixing up the history of Niagara’s basketball team. While Murphy’s success in college and in the NBA are memorable, during the early 1950s, Niagara was paced by Ed Fleming, one of the team’s all-time leading scorers, who went on to a professional basketball career of his own.

We ran out of room to include all of the letters that we received in response to the July-August issue. We’ve posted a few others, including more about motivation and efforts by Rochester faculty to reduce children’s exposure to lead, in the letters section of Review’s Web site at www.rochester.edu/pr/Review—Editor.

Review welcomes letters and will print them as space permits. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity. Unsigned letters cannot be used. Send letters to Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P.O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; rochrev@rochester.edu.

DINING SERVICES

The Commons Touch

wilsonORDER UP: Opening day for the Commons showcased the new and revamped eateries, such as the Common Grill (above), and the renovated seating and dining areas of the food court in Wilson Commons. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

wilson (Photo: Adam Fenster)

With a grand reopening just in time for the start of the fall semester, the food court at Wilson Commons has been transformed.

The Pit is now the Commons, home to two new eateries—Zoca, a Mexican grill, and Panda Express, a Chinese diner—as well as a renovated salad bar, A New Leaf; American food grill, the Common Grill; and Pizza Pi, complete with a new 6,000-pound deck oven similar to that used by many pizzerias. As part of the planning process, students helped choose the names for the new dining venues and weighed in with other suggestions for the revamped food court.

Overall the renovated Commons is more than twice the size of the previous space and features a lighter and brighter seating area.

Located in the heart of the residential quad, Wilson Commons is one of the most heavily used dining locations on the River Campus.

‘EVER BETTER’

Celebrating Meliora Weekend

The 2010 edition of the weekend anchors reunions and celebrations across the University, October 14–17.

By Kathleen McGarvey

melioraKEYNOTE SPEAKER: Neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta says that stories about health and medicine cover concerns “we all share.” (Photo: Jeff Hutchens/Courtesy of Turner Broadcasting System)

“Medical information is plentiful—but medical knowledge is different,” says neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta. “It’s information that is contextualized, credible, and memorable.”

As the chief medical correspondent for health and medicine at CNN, Gupta is responsible for conveying such knowledge. “Medical and health stories are something we all share in common,” he says. But to help other people understand an issue, he has to be sure that he fully grasps its complexities first.

“Whenever there’s something I want to explain to people, it’s imperative to me to understand it myself. Only then can I really teach it.”

Gupta will be sharing some of his understanding of medicine and media this fall as keynote speaker at Meliora Weekend. He’ll also participate in this year’s presidential symposium on the future of health care.

This year marks the first time that all of the University’s schools will celebrate reunions on the same weekend.

“The inspired organizers of the University’s 150th anniversary created a unique event that brought together the entire Rochester family—alumni, parents, students, faculty, and guests. This event became the annual celebration we now know as Meliora Weekend,” says Jim Thompson, senior vice president and chief advancement officer. “This year is particularly special in that it unites all components of the University for the first time—celebrating Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, School of Medicine and Dentistry, School of Nursing, Simon, Warner, and via Eastman Weekend, Eastman. We are truly trying to live our motto and make it ‘ever better.’”

Among other highlights of the events are appearances by jazz legend Ron Carter ’59E and tours of the new Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre as part of Eastman Weekend, and an invitation-only evening with author David Sedaris for members of the George Eastman Circle. Student performances, family activities, the homecoming game, and other activities also fill the weekend.

Gupta, who will speak on Saturday morning, says he honed his ability to talk about medicine in accessible terms when he worked in the White House, writing speeches about health care for President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

As a correspondent, Gupta says he pictures himself in his medical office: “I imagine the audience as a patient or a family.”

For more about the weekend, visit www. rochester.edu/melioraweekend.

HIGHLIGHTS

Signature Events: Fall Celebrations 2010

This fall’s Meliora and Eastman Weekends feature several signature events. A few highlights:

Keynote address on media and medicine by neurosurgeon and CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta

Presidential Symposium on the Future of Health Care

Invitation-only evening with David Sedaris for George Eastman Circle members

Medical Center CEO Bradford Berk ’79M (MD), ’81M (PhD) discussing compassionate care

Performances by comedian, actor, and writer Jim Gaffigan

Appearances by jazz legend Ron Carter ’59E at Eastman Weekend

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Think You Know Your Chaucer?

chaucerNEW CHAUCER: Reflecting on the work of medieval writers such as Chaucer can “enrich our engagement with the unfolding realities of the 21st century,” says Rochester scholar Thomas Hahn. (Photo: Detail from “The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer”: London, 1602/University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Medieval literature specialist Thomas Hahn, a professor of English, welcomed fellow Chaucer scholars to Siena, Italy, this summer for the 17th biennial international congress of the New Chaucer Society, a gathering for which he served as program chair. Conference-goers considered subjects such as the materials of medieval manuscript production, the global middle ages, and authorship in Italy and England.

Chaucer’s own travels to 14th-century Italy enriched English literature, as he brought back the inventive writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. But the conference-goers’ concerns were rooted in our day, says Hahn. “Inevitably, we understand the lives of those who’ve gone before us through the lens of our own experience. It’s not surprising, then, that the more than 400 medievalists in Siena paid close attention to the links between languages and political identities, migration and border-crossing, the fractious and often productive coexistence of subcultures and local loyalties, and the serenity and violence excited by religious belief and practice. And maybe we shouldn’t be surprised either at how the reflection on and analysis of great writing revise and enrich our engagement with the unfolding realities of the 21st century.”

In that spirit, we offer our first—and possibly only—Chaucer quiz. Match a few of the characters from a medieval favorite, The Canterbury Tales, to their descriptions. Extra points if your Middle English is up to scratch. —Kathleen McGarvey

A. Knight
B. Wife of Bath
C. Miller
D. Nun
E. Summoner

1.

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.
Upon an amblere esily she sat,
Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat
As brood as is a bokeler or a targe
She had gap-teeth, set widely, truth to say.

Easily on an ambling horse she sat
Well wimpled up, and on her head a hat
As broad as is a buckler or a shield . . .

2.

His mouth as greet was as a greet forneys,
He was a janglere and a goliardeys,
And that was moost of synne and harlotries.
Wel koude he stelen corn

His mighty mouth was like a furnace door.
A wrangler and buffoon, he had a store
Of tavern stories, filthy in the main.
His was a master-hand at stealing grain . . .

3.

For sawcefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was, and lecherous, as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake, and piled berd,
Of his visage children were aferd.

His eyes were narrow, He was hot and lecherous as a sparrow.
Black scabby brows he had, and a thin beard.
Children were afraid when he appeared.

4.

Of fustian he wered a gypoun,
Al bismotered with his habergeoun;
For he was late ycome from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrimage.

He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark
With smudges where his armour had left mark;
Just home from service, he had joined our ranks
To do his pilgrimage and render thanks.

5.

Hir over-lippe wiped she so clene,
That in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene
Of grece, whan she drunken hadde hir draughte.

And she would wipe her upper lip so clean
That not a trace of grease was to be seen
Upon the cup when she had drunk.

Answers: 1–B, 2–C, 3–E, 4–A, 5–D

STUDENT INITIATIVES

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Students meld sustainability and entrepreneurship with a project that puts food on University tables.

By Melissa Greco Lopes

farmBUSINESS GROWTH: Caitlin Smigelski ’10 (left) and Annalise Kjolhede ’10 are selling their produce to the Meliora restaurant. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

When Annalise Kjolhede ’10 and Caitlin Smigelski ’10 hung up their graduation gowns this May, they picked up their hoes and shovels. The two broke ground on a new garden that will provide food to the University community at the Meliora restaurant on the River Campus. They’ve taken on the horticultural project during a fifth year at Rochester as KEY scholars, and while they’re cultivating beets, tomatoes, and arugula, they’re also tending to the business end of their nonprofit venture. “Farming starts from the neck up, as they say,” Smigelski says. “There’s so much science and planning that goes into it.”

The pair worked with Dining Services, the College, the Gandhi Institute, the Sustainability Council, and other campus groups to establish the garden. They worked with Dan Scheid, the University horticulturist, to scout locations, eventually settling on a plot near Whipple Park, a housing complex for graduate students. They also consulted with Justin Ramsey—an assistant professor and researcher in the biology department, who shared information about Rochester’s ecology and land-use history—and executive chef Tony Pignagrande to discuss the kinds of foods and herbs that would meet his needs.

Student volunteers work at the garden alongside Kjolhede and Smigelski, and the two plan to turn the project over to other students when they leave campus after the next growing season.

“I loved the enthusiasm and the way the students tackle issues and challenges relating to the farm,” says Cam Schauf, director of Campus Dining Services and Auxiliary Operations. “We think of Dining Services as a department that can provide a laboratory for students to work in and be able to help ideas like this come true.”

Melissa Greco Lopes writes about student affairs for University Communications.

TEACHING TELESCOPE

Starry Space

mees (Photo: Adam Fenster)

NIGHTLIFE: Stars seem to stream across the sky above the University’s C. E. K. Mees Observatory in a long-exposure photograph taken this summer. Administered by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the observatory is located about 40 miles south of Rochester in the Bristol Hills. While the department uses the facility to teach undergraduates in introductory astronomy classes and to conduct some studies in visible wavelengths, most current University astrophysical research relies on larger telescopes based on mountain observatories or in space. Named for a longtime director of research at Eastman Kodak Co., the observatory is open for public tours in June, July, and August.

LIBRARIES

Room by Room

Dedication of the third piece of Messinger family’s project completes an effort to restore historic spaces for students.

By Kathleen McGarvey

messingerCOMPLETE PICTURE: One of Rush Rhees Library’s most popular spaces, the Martin E. Messinger ’49 Periodical Reading Room (above) anchors the renovated west side of the second floor, including two new spaces designed for graduate students—Messinger Graduate Study Room North (below, top) and Messinger Graduate Study Room South (below, bottom). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

messinger (Photo: Adam Fenster)

messinger (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The views of Eastman Quad from Rush Rhees Library’s second floor haven’t changed, but the rooms inside certainly have.

The second of two new graduate studies was officially opened in May at a special ceremony honoring trustee Martin Messinger ’49 and his family, who donated the funds for the studies’ creation. The rooms flank the Martin E. Messinger ’49 Periodical Reading Room, which was dramatically renovated in the late 1990s. Together, the three rooms form a renovated and restored west front on the second floor of the library.

“If you look at how the library is running, with students there around the clock, you see that it’s pivotal, and necessary,” Messinger says of his belief in the centrality of libraries. “You have to give students the infrastructure they need to do their work. Other than feeding them, I can’t think of anything more important.”

He recalls working in the Periodical Reading Room when he was a student. “It was a great, open room,” he says, but fluorescent ceiling lights added in the 1960s created “lousy lighting.”

In time for Rochester’s sesquicentennial in 2000, the room was reopened, complete with pendant lights resembling the original 1930s fixtures and an ambience that has made it one of the library’s most popular spaces.

With this spring’s dedication of Messinger Graduate Study Room South and its companion, Messinger Graduate Study Room North, Rochester students have a suite of comfortable and historic spaces in which to study. The two graduate student rooms had been used as storage spaces until a remark from Susan Gibbons, vice provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, about wanting to enhance the library’s facilities for graduate students inspired Messinger.

“The Messinger Graduate Study Rooms ensure that our graduate students have a convenient, comfortable, and contemplative space on campus where they can focus on their own research in the company of fellow graduate students who are on similar academic journeys,” Gibbons says.

Messinger takes satisfaction in the final results. “We live in an era of information without knowledge,” he says, and libraries are a corrective to that.

“That was one of my reasons for supporting these projects.”

Take a Tour

To see more views of the Messinger rooms at Rush Rhees Library, including 360-degree panoramic views of the three rooms along with before and after photos, and to learn more about the Messinger family, visit Review’s Web site at www.rochester.edu/pr/Review.

PSYCHOLOGY

Old Patterns, New Findings

Research shows specific ways family relationships can affect kids in school.

By Susan Hagen

“Happy families,” Leo Tolstoy declared in Anna Karenina, “are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It’s a great line with which to open a novel, but new research by Rochester psychologists suggests it’s not such a good way to understand family relationships.

A study by Melissa Sturge-Apple, an assistant professor of psychology, and Patrick Davies, a professor of psychology, suggests that unhappy families are typically unhappy in one of two distinct ways. The research team identified three family profiles: one happy, termed “cohesive,” and two unhappy types, one called “disengaged” and the other “enmeshed.” Both patterns of unhealthy family relationships lead to a host of specific difficulties for children during their early school years.

“Families can be a support and resource for children as they enter school, or they can be a source of stress, distraction, and maladaptive behavior,” says Sturge-Apple.

The three-year study, published in the journal Child Development and conducted in conjunction with researchers at Notre Dame, “shows that cold and controlling family environments are linked to a growing cascade of difficulties for children in their first three years of school, from aggressive and disruptive behavior to depression and alienation,” Sturge-Apple says. “The study also finds that children from families marked by high levels of conflict and intrusive parenting increasingly struggle with anxiety and social withdrawal as they navigate their early school years.”

Davies and Sturge-Apple examined relationship patterns in 234 families with six-year-old children. They found that harmonious interactions, emotional warmth, and firm but flexible roles for parents and children characterize cohesive families.

Enmeshed families, by contrast, may be emotionally involved and display modest amounts of warmth, but they struggle with high levels of hostility, destructive meddling, and a limited sense of the family as a team. Disengaged families are marked by cold, controlling, and withdrawn relationships. Although the study demonstrates evidence of family-school connections, the authors caution that dysfunctional family relationships aren’t responsible for all or even most behavior difficulties in school. Other factors, such as high-crime neighborhoods, high-poverty schools, troubled peer circles, and genetic traits also play roles, says Davies.

While building on the long-established family systems theory, which consistently has identified the three types of families using clinical observations, the study is the first to confirm empirically their existence across multiple relationships within the family: in marriage, in child-parent interactions, and in interactions between both parents and a child.

“We were really able to look at the big picture of the family,” says Davies, “and what was striking was that these family relationship patterns were not only stable across different relationships but also across time, with very few families switching patterns.”

“Much of what we read in the popular press is focused on how parents may best prepare children for academic success in school,” Sturge-Apple says, “but this research emphasizes that families are critically important for fostering children’s emotional and social adjustment to school.

“Creating a home environment that serves as a secure base for children, where they have access to parents and resources when distressed in school, where communication and relationships are fostered and conflict is dealt with and resolved can help facilitate children’s functioning in school.”

Susan Hagen writes about the social sciences for University Communications.

CHILDREN’S MUSIC

Hitting the Right Notes

How do you encourage a youngster’s interest in music?

A cooing baby isn’t just charming the people around her—she’s also taking the first steps toward singing, says Donna Brink Fox, the Eisenhart Professor of Music Education and a specialist in teaching music to young children.

She’s also the director of the Eastman Community Music School’s Early Childhood Music Program.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this fall, the program has helped introduce a generation of Rochester’s tiniest tots—they can enroll at just four months old—to the wonders of music.

Fox offers a few tips to parents, grandparents, and others who’d like to share their love of music with the children in their lives:

Let kids know how much you enjoy music by responding to what you hear, not just listening passively: sing along, dance, and move to the music. For infants especially, it’s nice to help them sway and twirl in ways they can’t do alone.

Listen to a variety of musical styles, but keep the experience simple. Dense lyrics or orchestration can be hard for children to process. Choose music that’s unfussy and gives listeners the impetus to move.

Encourage musical play with toys and found objects—even a pot and a wooden spoon works, if you’re game for it—and cheer on their efforts or play along, taking turns and responding musically. “It’s what jazz musicians do,” says Fox.

For preschoolers and younger kids, music is best approached as play. Few children are receptive to the structure of formal music lessons before age six or so.

Show kids music is something you value. Spending time on music lets them know it’s important to you.

—Kathleen McGarvey

PIANO COMPETITION

Michigan Maestro

piano (Photo: Gelfand-Piper Photography/Courtesy of the Eastman School)

OVATION: Pianist Allen Yuan acknowledges the audience after winning the Eastman Young Artists International Piano Competition for his final-round performance with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. The 17-year-old from Farmington Hills, Mich., was one of 22 teenage pianists from China, the United States, Canada, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan who took part in this summer’s annual competition. For more, visit http://tinyurl.com/36q5uo8.

CITATIONS

Research Roundup

Why Change Your Genes When You Could Borrow Some?

John Jaenike, a professor of biology, and his colleagues have documented an example of a new mechanism at work in evolution: bacteria infecting an animal, giving the animal a reproductive advantage, and being passed from mother to children. In a study published in the journal Science, Jaenike reports that members of a particular species of fruit fly that have been infected with the bacteria Spiroplasma are less likely to be affected by a parasitic worm that normally renders the flies sterile. The symbiotic relationship allows the infected flies to reproduce and pass the bacteria to their offspring. Aside from shedding light on an important evolutionary mechanism, the findings could aid in studying ways to stave off diseases by using defensive bacteria.

Purple Light Means Go, Ultraviolet Light Means Stop

A new membrane developed at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics blocks gas from flowing through it when one color of light is shined on its surface and permits gas to flow when another color is used. It’s the first time that scientists have developed a membrane that can be controlled in this way by light. The membrane—created by Eric Glowacki, a graduate student at the laboratory, and his advisor, Kenneth Marshall, a research engineer—could be useful in drug delivery, industrial processing, and other applications.

Women Attracted to Men in Red

What could be as alluring as a lady in red? A gentleman in red, finds a multicultural study led by Andrew Elliot, a professor of psychology, and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Simply wearing red or being bordered by the color makes a man more attractive and sexually desirable to women, according to work by scientists at Rochester and other institutions. Red’s charm lies in making men appear more powerful—it signals rank through cultural and biological associations, researchers say. The effect—seen in undergraduates in the United States, England, Germany, and China—was limited to status and romance; it did not make men seem more likeable, kind, or sociable.

Scientists Pinpoint Earliest Steps of Muscular Dystrophy

Nearly two decades after identifying the genetic flaw that causes a common type of muscular dystrophy, scientists believe they have figured out how that flaw helps bring about the disease. Published in Science, the study—by an international team, including Rochester scientists led by Rabi Tawil ’91M (Res), ’93M (Flw), a professor of neurology—indicates that several deleted versions of a gene that makes a protein harmful to muscle cells trigger remaining copies of the gene to be much more active than usual.

Vitamin D Emerges as Key Player

Within the human digestive tract is a teeming mass of hundreds of types of bacteria that help us digest food and keep bad bacteria in check. A team of Rochester scientists—led by Jun Sun, an assistant professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology—has found that vitamin D is a key player amid the gut bacteria, helping to govern their activity, responding to their cues, and sometimes countering their presence. The findings, published in the American Journal of Pathology, offer a new lead to scientists looking at the role of bacteria in inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.

Scientist Finds New Way to Boost Vaccines

Richard Phipps, a Dean’s Professor of Environmental Medicine, reports he has discovered that the same molecules used in drugs to treat diabetes also stimulate B cells in the immune system, pushing them to make antibodies for protection against invading microorganisms. Further research, Phipps says, may show that low doses of insulin-sensitizing drugs may be useful in supporting vaccines, particularly for people with weakened immune systems who cannot produce a proper antibody response.

LITERATURE

Two Ways of Looking at a Mockingbird

A noted literary scholar says the deeper meaning of the 50-year-old American masterpiece is too often overlooked.

By Thomas DiPiero

mockingbirdSHARPLY DRAWN: The novel’s distinct juvenile and adult worldviews are often blurred by its folksiness, says DiPiero. (Photo: Rochester Review)

Few novels have had the sustained impact on American culture of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the most widely read works of American fiction, and perhaps one of the most beloved, it reached the 50th anniversary of its publication this summer. The novel has sold over 30 million copies in at least 40 languages, and between 50 and 70 percent of U.S. school systems continue to require students to read it.

Why does To Kill a Mockingbird continue to enthrall us? Perhaps because it presents complex social, ethical, and moral issues in a beguilingly simple, beautifully narrated form. This tale of Southern white children coming of age amid racism, violence, and various forms of abuse introduces these issues in a manner that all readers, even the very young, recognize as simplistic; in fact Harper Lee’s first-person narrator, simultaneously knowledgeable and naïve, is one of her most compelling achievements. Jem and Scout Finch learn rudimentary lessons about courage and tolerance as they discover the ugliness just beneath the surface of their small Alabama town, and the message that most of us were enjoined to draw from the work when we were teenagers—that we must all learn to see things from another’s point of view—is the very one that Atticus Finch delivers to his children when they encounter situations or behaviors that are difficult to comprehend.

Judging from the many editorials, Web sites, and panel discussions that celebrated this American classic this summer, that message continues to circulate today. But such a message, while perhaps suitable for adolescents, is dangerously incomplete and unworthy of the complexity of Lee’s masterpiece. When embraced by adults it justifies abuses just as injurious as the intolerance and racial bigotry that the novel condemns. That’s because it suggests that good will is all that we require to understand how history and circumstances have created our and others’ identities, and that once we have acknowledged the problem, it’s halfway solved. So while To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about children, it’s also a story about the limits of children’s understanding of complex social issues. It’s noteworthy that when Atticus addresses the question of identifying with others he uses two different metaphors to make his point. On the one hand, he tells his children to try to stand in someone else’s shoes and consider the world from that perspective; and on the other hand he urges them to climb into someone else’s skin and walk around in it.

Those folksy metaphors for understanding human identity and perspective appear equivalent, but the difference between them is the distinction between juvenile and adult understandings of the world. Trying on someone else’s shoes is child’s play. Everyone has done that, and it’s a diversion with no consequences, much like the role-playing games the Finch children and their friend Dill enjoy on the front lawn. But climbing into someone else’s skin is quite another matter—it’s impossible. Atticus’s two metaphors are structured to underscore the difference between sympathizing with someone and appropriating his or her values, dreams, history, and experiences. The simple fact is that we cannot get into someone else’s skin, and it’s presumptuous and condescending to believe that we can. That’s something that Tom Robinson and Boo Radley know implicitly, and that the Finch children never fully comprehend.

Our nostalgia for the heartwarming message we took away from To Kill a Mockingbird in high school protects us from the harsh reality that history and experience can make people irreconcilably different. It also relieves us of the responsibility of examining our own attitudes and beliefs about others, and it allows us the illusion that everyone is just like us—and strikingly, the Finch children are fond of referring to “ordinary folks like us.” That’s an illusion that can easily invalidate others’ distinct identities.

Metaphor is one of literature’s fundamental tools. It shows us not so much how particular things are alike, but how we can make them alike and how we establish the grounds that allow us to perceive similarity in the first place. To Kill a Mockingbird’s title metaphor illustrates the ways we often make others little more than slightly exotic versions of ourselves. Atticus explains, in the work’s most often cited phrase, that mockingbirds “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” and that’s why it’s a sin to kill them. But we recall that mockingbirds imitate the calls of other birds; they don’t sing their own songs. When we presume easy identification with other people, we assume that, like mockingbirds, they will sing our song, conform to our worldview, abandon their own unique voices, and sing in unison along with us—all for us to enjoy.

To Kill a Mockingbird has endured as a complex literary phenomenon for half a century in part because it establishes a tension separating simplistic views of Americans’ relationships with one another and sophisticated understandings of our history and culture. The challenge in reading this great American novel is not to be beguiled by its form. Remember that it’s precisely when you think you’ve understood others’ perspectives that you must recall you are not in their skin. A lifetime of experience is not assumable. We’re arrogant—and we’re drawing on a learned ignorance that adults cannot afford—when we claim otherwise. We must learn the difference between understanding others and imposing our views on them. That’s a lesson worthy of this masterpiece of American literature. And it’s not kids’ stuff.

DiPiero is a professor of French and the senior associate dean of humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences.

STUDENT LIFE

By the Numbers

Students aren't the only ones getting ready for a new academic year. Here are some of the figures that add up to 2010-2011.

5,036 undergraduates estimated to arrive at the College and the Eastman School

800 pounds of eggs ready at Danforth Dining Hall for one week's worth of meals

18,000 feet of glass cleaned at Wilson Commons

270 pianos tuned at the Eastman School

36,642 chicken tenders served annually

6,000 pounds worth of new pizza oven installed at Wilson Commons

500 gallons of paint used in repainting River Campus residence halls

1,600 items placed on reserve at Sibley Library for Eastman courses

150 pounds of chocolate-covered pretzels in the preliminary order for the Common Market

29 shuttle buses served to take students to Wilson Day sites

4,400 bricks in the newly installed Wilson Commons front porch

20 pipe organs checked and tuned at Eastman.

—Kathleen McGarvey

SPORTS PREVIEW

Scouting Report

How do the Yellowjackets look as they prepare for their fall 2010 seasons?

Men’s cross country

Hungry to reclaim the New York State Collegiate Track Conference crown, which Rochester last won in 2008, the squad wants to finish the 2010 campaign with a top-10 national ranking. Brian Lang ’11 will pace the squad after competing in the NCAA championships last year. Jamie Vavra ’12, an all–Atlantic Region pick in 2009, and Jon Pinto ’11, who earned all-conference accolades last year, add to the team’s depth.

Women’s cross country

Rochester has sent three different individual runners to the NCAA championships the last three years. In 2010, coach Barbara Hartwig is hoping to qualify a full squad for nationals. At the forefront will be Lauren Norton ’12, who qualified for NCAAs as a freshman and sophomore. Other key Yellowjackets include Megan O’Connor ’11, Hillary Snyder ’12, and Zarah Quinn ’13. Some of the younger runners will need to step up and earn places in the team’s top 10.

Volleyball

Rochester promises to be much improved from 2009, with all but two graduated seniors returning, including three talented sophomore starters in libero Lauren Bujnicki ’13, rightside hitter Alma Guevara ’13, and outside hitter Kelly Mulrey ’13. In addition, a strong crop of seniors will be back, while a talented freshman class will be led by setter Jackie Fluegel ’14. The Yellowjackets hope to build on their seventh-place finish at UAAs in 2009.

Rowing

Coach Will Greene’s squad enters its second year of varsity competition after a successful 2009–10 effort in which the Yellowjackets found significant success, including a No. 3 team ranking in the NCAA East Region.

previewSteve Welles ’11 (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Men’s soccer

The Yellowjackets advanced to the elite eight of the NCAA tournament and finished at No. 6 in the country last season. The good news for 2010 is that the team returns its entire midfield and two central defenders, including all-region and all–UAA picks Misha Carrel-Thomas ’11 on defense and Steve Welles ’11 in the midfield. Rochester must replace its two leading scorers and goalkeeper Mike Peacock, all of whom graduated in 2010.

previewBridgette Varin ’11 (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Women’s soccer

Challenged by a brutal 2010 schedule and the graduation of eight players from a 2009 team that advanced to the second round of NCAAs and shared the UAA title, the squad features a young but potential-laden defense. Leading scorers—all-American forward Ellen Coleman ’12 and all–UAA forward Bridgette Varin ’11— return as does Meaghan Magee ’11 to anchor the defense.

Football

Rochester struggled at times in 2009, but with the return of first-team all–Liberty League performers—running back Clarence Onyiriuka ’11 and defensive tackle Chris Bickford ’12—the upcoming campaign looks promising. Both Onyiriuka and Bickford have picked up preseason all–America accolades this year. The Yellowjackets finished 4–3 in the Liberty League last year and 4–6 overall.

Men’s tennis

Coming off a spring season in which they earned a No. 17 ranking in the northeast region and placed seventh at the UAA championships, the team returns five starters for what promises to be a solid fall season. Seniors Dan Barbash ’11 and Jeff Zink ’11 bring a wealth of experience as the Yellowjackets kick off 2010 by cohosting the Flower City Invitational Sept. 11 and 12.

Field hockey

Rochester returns a young team that features only one senior, cocaptain and defender Sara Heidinger ’11. Coach Wendy Andreatta says her team is ready to improve on last year’s record of 11–7, with six returning starters leading the way and a talented class of freshmen bolstering the lineup. The strength will be on defense, where four starters return—Darragh Kerr ’12, Alexis Vangello ’12, Sarah Dixon ’13, and Alexa Freedman ’13.

Golf

Coach Dan Wesley is excited about a 2010–11 team that returns all but one player and welcomes six freshmen. Captained by Chris Driscoll ’11, Ryan Williams ’11, Michael Chudacoff ’12, and David Wien ’12, the team begins its season with a small, four-squad event at Hamilton, then gets into full swing with the St. Lawrence Invitational Sept. 11 and 12.

previewFrances Tseng ’13 (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Women’s tennis

After earning a national ranking of 20th last season, the Yellowjackets are looking to make a bigger impression this fall. Lia Weiner ’11, one of the northeast’s best singles players, returns to pursue her third straight regional crown—and another all-America selection. Also returning is Frances Tseng ’13, who made her mark quickly last year by claiming Rookie of the Year honors for both the UAA and the northeast region. In addition, Weiner and Tseng form one of the region’s most formidable doubles pairings. Danielle Shreck ’11 earned second team all–UAA accolades last year. —Ryan Whirty

Ryan Whirty writes about sports for Rochester Review.

FOOTBALL

Field Goals

An early season rivalry game hits the road— for both teams.

When Rochester’s varsity football team faces off against hometown rival St. John Fisher for the sixth annual Courage Bowl on September 18, the two teams will play at a new downtown venue.

The Courage Bowl, which benefits Camp Good Days and Special Times—a local charity dedicated to improving the lives of children coping with cancer—will kick off for the first time this fall at Marina Auto Stadium, the 14,000-seat venue that’s home to the Rochester Rhinos, Rochester’s professional soccer team.

While the game between the Yellowjackets and the Cardinals has traditionally alternated between Fauver Stadium and Fisher’s Growney Stadium, bowl organizers say the annual event needs a larger venue to accommodate its growing fanbase. The rivalry has drawn more than 25,000 fans during its five-year run.

“We’ve seen strong local interest in the game,” says Rochester’s athletic director, George VanderZwaag. “Moving the game downtown will build more community involvement and help further promote the great work of Camp Good Days and Special Times.”

Founded in 2005, the Courage Bowl is a fundraiser for the Rochester-area program, a nonprofit organization that offers summer camping experiences and year-round activities for children and their families facing cancer or other life-threatening illnesses.

As part of the game’s activities, members of both football teams visited Camp Good Days to meet some of the children. And campers serve as honorary coaches and cheerleaders, attending pregame practices and coaching and cheering from the sidelines.

Camp Good Days is also looking to regain the Guinness world record for largest kazoo ensemble, a record the camp broke in 2006. The first 10,000 fans will be given kazoos in the colors of Rochester and Fisher, and during halftime the crowd will be urged to try to break the current record, held by a group of 3,861 from Sydney, Australia.

—Melissa Greco Lopes

Goal Keeper

Terry Gurnett ’77, the winningest women’s soccer coach in NCAA Division III, begins his final season on the sidelines.

By Scott Hauser

gurnettLINEUP: With Gurnett as their coach, the 2010 Yellowjackets opened the season Sept. 1 with a victory over Brockport. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

In its 33-year history, the Rochester women’s soccer program has won two national championships and a dozen UAA championships. The Yellowjackets have appeared in 19 NCAA tournaments, and have had 27 all-America selections.

And they’ve done it all under the guidance of just one head coach, Terry Gurnett ’77. A former Yellowjacket soccer player himself, Gurnett was working in the student loan office when he was asked if he was interested in helping start the women’s team.

“I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what I was doing—and some will say I still don’t,” Gurnett jokes as he gets ready to lead the Yellowjackets this fall for their 34th campaign—and his last as head coach. “I just had the knack of being in the right place at the right time.”

That place has been as the leader of a Yellowjacket program that over three decades has compiled a record of 410 wins, 131 losses, and 62 ties, making Gurnett the winningest coach in NCAA Division III women’s soccer and the third winningest coach in all divisions. The team won the inaugural women’s Division III title in 1986 and repeated as champions in 1987.

Gurnett announced late this summer that he would hand over his coaching duties to longtime assistant coach Thomas (Sike) Dardaganis when the season ends. Gurnett plans to focus on his duties as associate director of athletics for Advancement, where he has helped build the Friends of Rochester Athletics over the past several years, and to spend more time with his family.

He also will continue his work as the national chair of the all-American selection committee for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America and run soccer camps during the summer.

“I am grateful that Terry wants to dedicate all of his time and energies to the continued growth of the Friends,” says George VanderZwaag, director of the Department of Athletics and Recreation. “His enormous contributions to our department through his coaching role with women’s soccer can only be replaced by his continued efforts to make our overall program as strong as it possibly can be.”

Gurnett, who has worked for the University since his graduation in 1977, says he’s marveled at the growth of women’s athletics over the past half century.

“The biggest change has been in the respect given to female athletes and the way that female athletes are thought about,” he says. “You don’t even have to say ‘female athletes.’ They’re athletes, and they represent the very highest ideals.”

As for the timing of his announcement, Gurnett says he had always hoped he’d be able to recognize when it was time to step down.

“It’s just time,” he says. “I never wanted to get to the point where I didn’t love coaching any more. That would be a terrible disservice to the team.”

As for the legacy he leaves behind, Gurnett is quick to point out that, like in the game of soccer, coaching also requires a strong team effort.

“The University has let me borrow this team,” he says. “They’ve let me be the guardian of it for a few years. Sike’s going to take over. He knows and cares about this program as much as anyone. It will be in great hands.

“I feel blessed that I’ve been able to work with such amazing people over such a long time. The legacy, if there is one, is that we’ve tried to do it right. We’ve been fair and honest and done the best we can at all times.”

SCORECARD

Gurnett by the Numbers

19 Number of NCAA tournament appearances

3 Number of times Rochester played for the NCAA Division III title

2 Number of NCAA Division III championships (1986 and 1987)

1–0 Scores of Rochester’s NCAA championship games

33 Consecutive years with 10 or more wins in a season

410 Number of victories heading into the 2010 season

109 Number of wins in UAA play in 23 years

12 Number of UAA championships in women’s soccer

27 Number of players to earn all-America honors

603 Total number of women’s soccer games coached

6 Number of U.S. presidents since Gurnett started coaching (Carter through Obama)

25 Consecutive postseason appearances (NCAA and ECACs)

Leading Lights

As the scientific community celebrates the 50th anniversary of the laser, we highlight some of Rochester’s contributions to one of the most influential technologies of modern science.

By Scott Hauser

Famously described as a “solution looking for a problem” by one of the Nobel Prize-winning pioneers of laser science early in the technology’s history, the laser has more than proved its importance over the past 50 years.

Few scientific fields—not to mention commercial ones—have gone untouched by the discovery that a relatively simple device could transform light of the kind that’s emitted by an ordinary light bulb into a wave that oscillates so perfectly in sync that the resulting beam could easily be bounced off the moon, or formed into a pulse so brief that a nanosecond seems like a lifetime, or focused so precisely that it produces temperatures and pressures similar to those at the center of the sun.

First demonstrated and reported in the scientific literature in the August 6, 1960, issue of Nature, the concepts underlying the laser had been the focus of several scientific groups around the world. (Indeed, the original concept was outlined in 1917 by Albert Einstein, and by 1960, even the name—an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—had already been introduced into the literature.)

Out of that discovery have come powerful technologies to manipulate atoms, explore new sources of energy, and diagnose and treat diseases and medical conditions—not to mention new ways to check out groceries, play music and movies, and print documents.

In an address earlier this year to kick off “Laser Fest,” a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of the laser, Steven Chu ’70, ’98 (Honorary), the U.S. Secretary of Energy who received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work to capture atoms using lasers, pointed out that four Nobels in physics in the past five decades have been awarded for work directly involving the technology of lasers.

But he noted that the work behind another eight Nobels would not have been possible without the discovery. “Lasers really are the rock stars of innovation,” he said, joking about the seemingly ubiquitous appearance of laser light shows at popular music concerts.

As home to the first academic program devoted to the study of optics (The Institute of Optics was founded in 1929), and to the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (1970), Rochester and its faculty, scientists, and alumni have been key players in the development and commercialization of laser technology. Here are a few sample highlights from that history.

1929

The Institute of Optics founded with the financial assistance of Eastman Kodak and Bausch & Lomb as the first academic program in the country devoted to the study of light and its properties. From 1940 through 1946, the University, through the institute and the associated laboratories supported by the National Defense Research Committee, becomes the leading academic optics center supporting the war effort.

1954

Using microwaves, Bell Labs scientist Charles Townes and his colleagues demonstrate that coherent electromagnetic waves can be produced when atoms are energized in precisely the right way. Townes coins the term “maser” for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”

1957

Townes and Arthur Schawlow outline how the concept of the maser could be transferred to the infrared and optical regions of the spectrum. Columbia University graduate student Gordon Gould outlines ideas for a “laser.”

1958

The Institute of Optics Director Robert Hopkins recruits Emil Wolf, a young scientific protégé of Nobelist Max Born, who has been studying the properties of light waves when they are in phase with one another, a concept known as coherence. While Wolf was not working on lasers, Hopkins recognizes coherence as an important new area of research. Wolf, in turn, recruits Leonard Mandel, one of the pioneers of quantum optics. Together, Wolf, now the Wilson Professor of Optical Physics, and Mandel, the late Lee A. DuBridge Chair Emeritus of Physics, will establish the Department of Physics and Astronomy as a nationally recognized center for the study of light. Wolf publishes Principles of Optics, also known as “Born and Wolf,” or the “bible of optics.”

1959

Gould introduces the term “laser” in a paper titled “The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.”

1960

Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in California constructs the first working laser, using a synthetic red ruby. He reports his findings in the Aug. 6, 1960, issue of Nature. Scholars turn to the “Coherence Theory” chapter of “Born and Wolf,” one of the few academic sources that outline how light behaves when it’s in phase.

Rochester hosts first Rochester International Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics.

1961

In a laboratory at Rochester, Mike Hercher ’56, ’64 (PhD) uses a red ruby similar to the one used by Maiman to demonstrate that a laser beam can be so intense that it effectively forms its own lens in the air, self-focusing itself into a tiny spot.

1962

Rochester receives NSF grant to demonstrate laser technology to faculty at other universities.

1965

laser (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Moshe Lubin, then an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace sciences, is invited to a demonstration of the laser by Hercher. Realizing that lasers would be ideal for studying high-energy-density phenomena such as ionized particles, Lubin brings together Rochester scientists to explore laser science initiatives.

1970

The Laboratory for Laser Energetics is founded with Lubin as director. Established as a “national research center for the study of intense radiation with matter,” the lab is housed in Gavett Hall and the Hopeman Building.

Workers at Kodak Research Laboratories develop the first continuous wave dye laser, and Hercher and his students at the University produce a version that can be tuned to any desired color.

1971

While a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Gary Starkweather ’66 (MS) invents the first laser printer.

1972

Working with commercial companies, the LLE team builds Delta, a four-beam laser, one of the first used to investigate the interaction of high-power laser radiation with matter. A goal of the project is to study inertial confinement fusion, a process to create a nuclear fusion reaction by imploding a small fuel target with extremely high bursts of energy.

1974

Hercher, Stroud, and student Felix Schuda ’74 (PhD) demonstrate a stable, single-mode, continuous wave dye laser can be used to couple so strongly to a sodium atom that the atom’s quantum state—or even the atom’s thermal motion—can be controlled. The development will lead to later breakthroughs in atomic cooling and trapping and in work to create a Bose-Einstein condensate in laboratories.

First barcode scanner installed at a supermarket.

1976

laser (Photo: Laboratory for Laser Energetics)

Ground is broken for LLE’s building on the University’s South Campus.

1977

Mandel and his students Mario Dagenais ’79 (PhD) and H. Jeff Kimble ’78 (PhD) demonstrate photon antibunching, a landmark experiment that establishes that atoms emit single photons.

1978

LLE dedicated with a six-beam Zeta laser. More than 40 universities, government agencies, and private corporations use the facility.

1980

laser (Photo: Eugene Kowaluk ’70/Laboratory for Laser Energetics)

24-beam Omega laser becomes operational at LLE. Senior scientists Steve Craxton and Wolf Seka pioneer a technique that effectively boosts the laser’s energy by a factor of 10. Patented by LLE, the technique becomes the standard for fusion lasers.

1982

Graduate student Wayne Knox ’79, ’84 (PhD) and faculty member Gerard Mourou demonstrate a jitter-free optical streak camera, an instrument that measures ultrashort light signals created by lasers. Working on the scale of picoseconds, Mourou and his student Steven Williamson ’82 measure the optical phenomenon of electron diffraction and Mourou and his student Janis Valdmanis ’84 (PhD) sample optoelectrical signals.

First CD player introduced.

1985

Omega converted to ultraviolet and becomes the highest energy laser in the world, producing 3 kilojoules of ultraviolet laser light in pulses lasting 1 billionth of a second. A “tabletop terawatt laser” is demonstrated at LLE by Mourou and his student Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD). The laser uses “chirped-pulse amplification,” which will become the standard process for all lasers with more than a petawatt of power. Rochester becomes the “cradle of the ultrafast.”

1987

Leonard Mandel and his students invent the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, a fundamental tool for the emerging field of quantum computing.

1988

Charles Munnerlyn ’69 (PhD) outlines a new formula to refine how measurements are taken to enable precise calibration of laser surgery. Thanks to Munnerlyn’s work, procedures involving Lasik vision-correction surgery become available to millions of people. At Rochester, using a new technique, LLE scientists demonstrate that they can compress the density of target fuels as much as 100 to 200 times greater than the previous record. The milestone, documented in a Nature article, met a condition set by the National Academy of Sciences to upgrade the Omega laser.

1989

Stroud and his students John Yeazell ’89 (PhD) and Mark Mallalieu ’94 (PhD) demonstrate that a short laser pulse can convert the quantum mechanical cloud around an atomic nucleus into a miniature planetary system as predicted by classical physics.

1995

Omega is converted to a 60-beam laser, capable of producing 30 kilojoules of ultraviolet laser light. Initial experiments produce the highest thermonuclear fusion yield attained in an inertial fusion reaction. (The record of more than 1 trillion neutrons is expected to be broken this year in experiments led by LLE and National Ignition Facility scientists.)

1997

Steven Chu ’70, ’98 (Honorary), now U.S. Secretary of Energy, is named a corecipient of the Nobel Prize for demonstrating in a 1985 experiment at Bell Labs that lasers can be used to cool atoms to just millionths of a degree above absolute zero (–460 Fahrenheit). Effectively trapping the atoms in what Chu nicknames “optical molasses,” the experiment succeeds in slowing the atoms from their room-temperature vibra- tional speed of about 2,500 miles an hour to a virtual (in atomic terms) standstill. The breakthrough has led to the development of the world’s most precise atomic clocks and to more effective measures of the acceleration of gravity.

2001

The Institute of Optics appoints Knox as director. In 1985, as a researcher at Bell Labs, Knox and his colleagues set the record for briefest light burst ever recorded up to that point at 8 femtoseconds (eight quadrilionths of a second). The feat was noted in the Guiness Book of World Records.

2003

Lukas Novotny, a professor of optics, and his students measure carbon nanotubes at the highest resolution ever, earning a spot in the Guiness Book of World Records.

2006

Demonstrating the sometimes counterintuitive properties of light, Robert Boyd, then the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics, documents the mathematical oddity of “negative speed.” Boyd and his students demonstrate that a wave can be split in such a way that parts of the wave can travel backward—and travel faster than the speed of light. The breakthrough may have implications for improving optical communications systems.

2007

Chunlei Guo, an associate professor of optics, demonstrates that ultrabrief pulses from a tabletop laser system can turn any metal pitch black. Guo later demonstrates that the system can change metal into many different colors, a breakthrough that may lead to more precise diagnostic tools for medicine and other fields.

2008

Omega EP dedicated, adding four ultra-high-intensity laser beams to LLE. The highest energy laser in the world at the time, the lab’s lasers can unleash more than a petawatt—a million billion watts—of power onto a target less than 45 microns in diameter (about half the diameter of a human hair). Working in conjunction with LLE’s original 60-beam Omega laser, the Omega EP will open the door to a new concept called “fast ignition.”

2009

The National Ignition Facility becomes operational. Building on work done at Rochester, the facility is home to the world’s highest energy laser and is expected to be able to demonstrate inertial confinement fusion in a laboratory. At LLE, experiments produce fuel densities equal to that of the core of the sun.

2010

As part of the 50th anniversary celebration, the Optical Society of America's 94th annual meeting, to be held in Rochester from Oct. 24 to 28, will focus on optics and laser science. For more, www.frontiersinoptics.com.

Sources: A Jewel in the Crown; Essays in Honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Institute of Optics, edited by Carlos Stroud Jr. (Meliora Press: An Imprint of the University of Rochester Press, 2004); Inertial Confinement Fusion: An Introduction, edited by Lois Gersh (Laboratory for Laser Energetics, 2008); Laserfest, www.laserfest.org

Crisis Responders

Two sought-after experts, Gary Gorton ’83 (PhD) and Kenneth French ’78S (MBA), ’83S (PhD), offer distinct approaches to financial reform.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

What caused the financial crisis of 2008? And how can we prevent another one?

Ever since the much-maligned troubled asset relief program, known by its acronym, TARP, propped up financial institutions at public expense without preventing an eventual credit crisis, policymakers and experts in industry, universities, think tanks, and the media have debated these questions. Two of the more widely sought-after among those experts are Gary Gorton ’83 (PhD), the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and Finance at Yale, and Kenneth French ’78S (MBA), ’83S (PhD), the Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of Finance at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

Both Gorton and French have earned careful attention and praise from arguably the most powerful person in the world of finance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In May 2009, Bernanke told Washington Post reporter David Ignatius that a series of papers Gorton had delivered at Federal Reserve System conferences over the previous year had helped shape his view of the root causes of the financial crisis. And this past June, Bernanke was on hand in New York City to mark the release of The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System (Princeton University Press), the work of 15 financial experts convened by French in the aftermath of the failures of Lehman Brothers and AIG in the fall of 2008.

crisisROOT CAUSE: Financial reform has yet to address the root cause of the financial crisis, says Gorton. (Photo: Matthew Furman)

Gorton, who distilled his conference papers into a concise and readable book, Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 (Oxford, 2010), admits that the lay readership for whom he wrote the book may find the subtitle surprising. People not familiar with Gorton’s papers, or his book, can be forgiven for thinking that 2007 was the year prior to the financial collapse. Gorton, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at Rochester on 19th-century banking panics, argues that the meltdown associated with the collapses of Lehman Brothers and AIG in the fall of 2008 actually began at least a year earlier, and was essentially a banking panic much like the one that struck George Bailey’s building and loan association in the 1946 film classic, It’s A Wonderful Life.

Gorton says people may have long assumed that federal deposit insurance, enacted in 1934 amidst the Great Depression, put an end to banking panics. Indeed, Gorton argues, there were no panics between 1934 and August 2007.

Gorton says that in pre-1934 panics, individual depositors, fearing a bank collapse, rushed to their banks to withdraw their money. But in 2007, “the ‘bank run’ was invisible to almost everyone because it was a run by banks and firms on other banks,” Gorton writes. In August 2007, as problems in the subprime mortgage market emerged, banks and firms rushed to redeem their money. Multibillion dollar federal bailouts staved off collapse but could not induce banks to begin lending again. The result was a widespread credit crisis.

Gorton fears that the invisibility of the 2007 panic has led people to focus on the effects of the run rather than its cause, or simply to confuse the effects—such as the global credit crisis—with the cause. And that, he says, has led policymakers astray. In particular, the financial reform legislation that Congress spent over a year putting together—and that President Obama signed into law on July 21—“has nothing much to do with what happened in the crisis.”

“What they ended up doing combines disconnected ideas each of which on its own might be OK, but none of this actually has anything to do with the vulnerability of the repurchase market to runs.”

crisisMULTI-CAUSAL: French says there are multiple causes of the financial crisis—“and the more problems you can eliminate, the better off you are.” (Photo: Michael J. Maloney)

French agrees—up to a point. A recipient of the Rochester Distinguished Scholar Award in 2005 and a Distinguished Alumnus Award this past May, French put together an elite group of economic thinkers, diverse in experience and viewpoints, in November 2008, and invited them to meet for a weekend at New Hampshire’s Squam Lake to begin crafting recommendations for long-term regulatory reform. Among the members of the group were faculty from the economics departments and business schools of Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, and other universities, each bringing experience in the Federal Reserve, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and other policy arenas in addition to academic expertise.

In the ensuing months, the Sqaum Lake Working Group began releasing a series of papers, condensed into the final published report. French says he agrees that the financial system suffered a classic banking panic in the summer of 2007, calling Gorton’s ideas “absolutely critical” to understanding the crisis. “Gary’s ideas are percolating through, and I think as time goes on, he’s winning more and more converts,” says French.

“I’m not someone who thinks there was just one cause of the financial crisis,” he says. “The analogy I use is an airplane crash. Usually, it’s a combination of seven or 10 different things, where if you pulled any one or two of them out, you’d come back and say that the plane wouldn’t have crashed except that all of these elements happened simultaneously.”

While Gorton has identified one of the central factors in the financial crisis, there are others, says French. “What Gary would say is the root cause was there five years ago, and yet we didn’t have a financial crisis.”

To French, the crisis resulted from a combination of misplaced incentives and the false assumptions that guide the regulatory system. His thematic approach is reflected in the Squam Lake Group’s recommendations, which are organized around two central concerns. The first is that regulations be shaped not just to ensure the soundness of individual firms, but to address the risk that any given firm poses to the entire financial system. The second is that the firms themselves—rather than the U.S. Treasury—be able to cover the costs of failure. Among the recommendations is the establishment of a systemic regulator in each country (the group recommends that it be the central bank) to analyze and report on systemic risk and design and implement regulations to ensure systemic stability. To ensure that financial institutions bear the costs of failure, the group recommends the equivalent of corporate “living wills”—a plan to dissolve the institution, subject to ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Other recommendations include deferred compensation to executives, new capital requirements, and new disclosures and rules to protect retirement savings.

Gorton likes some elements of the The Squam Lake Report, but on the whole, calls it “unfocused.” “It ends up proposing many things—things which are good—but while we do that, let’s solve the problem as well.”

That problem, Gorton maintains, is how to preserve, albeit more securely, what he calls the “shadow banking system,” in which firms and institutional investors deposit large amounts of money in commercial or investment banks as a means to achieve safe and easy access and a measure of interest (like a “checking account for firms,” Gorton calls it). The shadow banking system evolved in the past 30 years to address, among other things, a collateral shortage, Gorton says. But as commercial and institutional investors reuse collateral in the form of securitized loans, this shadow banking system is vulnerable to runs.

Rather than grant the Federal Reserve the function of systemic regulation, as the Squam Lake Group proposes, Gorton would like to see a new kind of bank—highly restricted “narrow funding banks”—to perform the functions of the shadow banking system under regulatory scrutiny. He’s working on a new paper for the Brookings Institution, coauthored with his Yale colleague Andrew Metrick, to detail such a plan.

“We want to recognize the shadow banking system as a real banking system, a system that’s worth preserving,” he says.

Both Gorton and French stress that the passage of financial reform legislation this summer is the beginning, rather than the end, of efforts to reform the financial system. Gorton believes new legislation will still be necessary. And no changes will occur until regulators write thousands of rules to implement what are, in many cases, general outlines and broad principles outlined by Congress in the legislation.

“There’s enormous discretion left to the regulators,” says French. And the person to watch will be whoever President Obama selects to head the newly created consumer protection agency.

That person “is going to be one of the most powerful people in the country,” he says. “They’re going to really set the precedent for what that agency’s about, what they do, how they tackle the issues, how they think about trade-offs, and the Wall Street folks are spending enormous resources trying to weigh in on that.”

American Healer

Working to ‘save one life at a time’ at his Ethiopian clinic, Rick Hodes ’82M (MD) earns international recognition.

By Molly Petrilla

hodesHUMANITARIAN HELP: As medical director of a clinical effort in Ethiopia for the past 20 years, Rick Hodes ’82M (MD) is known as “Dr. Rick” to his patients (above), many of whom are children (opposite). His humanitarian effort has been chronicled in a new book and documentary film. (Photo: Nara Garber/Courtesy of SusanCohnRockefeller.com)

An old man with a walking stick and cloudy, wandering eyes makes his way through the ancient city of Lalibela, Ethiopia. Rick Hodes ’82M (MD) spots him from afar and approaches, ready with bottled water and antibiotic pills.

Hodes opens with some iteration of his usual line: “I’m a doctor, and if you take this medicine, it can help your eyes.” The man swallows the pills and smiles, shaking the doctor’s hand and thanking him. Then the man is on his way again, stick in hand. If all goes well, he’ll be able to see clearly for the first time in years.

Restoring sight is what Hodes does in his free time—“my own little project,” as he describes it. His day job is medical director of Ethiopia for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). For the past two decades, he has lived in Addis Ababa, where he helps some of the world’s poorest people at a JDC clinic affiliated with Mother Teresa’s Society of Missionaries.

Without Hodes, the patients might never see a doctor: a smiley little girl with a heart murmur; a young boy whose bulging, cancerous tumor has nearly doubled the size of his face; a child with severe tuberculosis of the spine.

hodes (Photo: Nara Garber/Courtesy of SusanCohnRockefeller.com)

“My patients are living with amazing deformities,” Hodes says. “It’s very common to see 120-degree angles in their backs, or spines completely shaped like an S. But these people are living with such strength and dignity and courage that it inspires me. If I feel depressed, I just think about my patients. I love my patients, and they love me.”

The story of Hodes’s work in Ethiopia is the focus of a new book and a new documentary film that chronicle his more than 20-year effort to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in Africa. This spring, author Marilyn Berger released This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes, a nearly 300-page account of his career as a doctor and humanitarian. And in April, award-winning filmmaker Susan Cohn Rockefeller debuted her documentary Making the Crooked Straight on HBO.

Both the book and the film follow Hodes as he treats patients, raises money for their treatment, and brings many of his young patients into his home. The adoptive father of five Ethiopian children, including three with serious spine diseases, Hodes has fostered many others. They come from different backgrounds and different religions, but Hodes treats them all as his own—right down to a weekly Sabbath that he conducts as an observant Jew.

Rockefeller describes him as “a doctor who wants to heal anyone who comes in his path.”

“I think many people get overwhelmed by the enormity of problems that face our global community,” she says. “I think Rick’s message is that you just dig in. You start with one person and you put your focus there and you work. By the end of the day, you can see that you’ve already made a difference.”

Growing up in Syosset, Long Island, Hodes read about Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Dooley, imagining himself as someday following in their footsteps. But as Hodes is the first to point out, “What does a teenage kid in Long Island really know about medicine in Africa?”

He found out in 1985 when, having earned his degree from the School of Medicine and Dentistry (which included a school-supported summer in Bangladesh and winter in India) and trained in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University, he went to Ethiopia as a Fulbright professor. He stayed for two and a half years, and returned in 1990 for a six-week mission sponsored by the JDC. He’s been there ever since.

Primarily treating patients with heart disease, cancer, and diseases of the spine, he sends those who need advanced treatment to specialists in other countries. Spinal cases, for example, are often sent to surgeons in Ghana. Such surgeries are expensive—$13,000 per patient—and Hodes must raise the money for each procedure, primarily through individual donations.

“There’s an idea in Jewish tradition that if you save one life, you’re saving an entire world,” he says. “I’m not building medical schools or hospitals or changing the system, but what I am able to do is save one life at a time. When I can put 16 kids on a plane to Ghana for spinal surgery”—which, as it happens, he did one day in June—“it’s the greatest day of the year.”

With the book and documentary, Hodes has found a level of fame he never expected: TV appearances, interviews, film festival speeches.

“I’m a quiet guy,” Hodes says. “I don’t look for publicity, and I don’t talk about myself if it’s not necessary to, so I look at all this with a great deal of amusement.” Still, he’s happy with the result: daily inquiries about volunteer and donation opportunities to aid his work.

“At this point, I just want to keep on doing what I’m doing, and hopefully have more time, assistance, and money,” he says. “My dream would be to build my own hospital for poor people and to make it a teaching hospital, but for now, I’m happy to just keep living hand-to-mouth, in every sense.”

Molly Petrilla is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer. For more about Hodes and his work, visit rickhodes.org. For more about Making the Crooked Straight, visit www.makingthecrookedstraight.org.

KUDOS

Medical School Honors Hodes

Rick Hodes ’82M (MD) will be a special guest during the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s annual reunion weekend, Oct. 14–17, when he will receive the school’s Humanitarian Award.

Sharing Music, Feeding Souls

Violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins ’93E organizes a long-running concert series for New York City’s homeless.

By David McKay Wilson

hall-tompkinsMUSICAL MESSAGE: “Music reaches the core of our being,” says Hall-Tompkins ’93E, who organizes a concert series in New York City’s shelters and soup kitchens. (Photo: Gregory Routt)

As homeless men and women sit down for lunch at Holy Apostle Church in Manhattan, violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins ’93E places her Stradivarius in the crook of her neck, nods to her fellow musicians, and then leads them in a Brahms string sextet.

The church sanctuary in Chelsea may lack the acoustical magnificence of Carnegie Hall, where Hall-Tompkins played a few months earlier. But that’s not a concern in the Music Kitchen–Food for the Soul series that she has brought to New York shelters and soup kitchens since 2005.

As the performance of the String Sextet No. 2 in G Major brings the series’ 45th concert to a conclusion, a group of men gather nearby, erupting in whoops and later posing for photographs with the smiling sextet.

“Music can help bring people out of themselves,” says Hall-Tompkins, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, Joe Tompkins ’92E, a percussionist. “And you get a response here like you don’t get in the concert hall.”

Hall-Tompkins has received many ovations, in concert halls and elsewhere, thanks to a music career that has taken her across the United States and around the world. A member of the New Jersey Symphony and the Florida-based Ritz Chamber Players, she’s also the concertmaster for both the New York Pops Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of New York.

She developed the Music Kitchen concerts in 2004, when she was preparing for a series of solo concerts. In the aftermath of a friend’s death, she hadn’t arranged to play the repertoire for her colleagues, as she typically did before such performances.

Her husband, who was then volunteering at their congregation’s homeless shelter, suggested she play for the men at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. She played one night, and they asked her to return the following day. It was such a success that she put together chamber groups, building on the tradition in chamber circles of bringing together musicians at parties for spontaneous readings of their favorite works.

She found financial support from private donors and put together groups that have included renowned pianist Emmanuel Ax and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler ’95E of the Kronos Quartet. This spring, she celebrated the fifth anniversary of the series with five concerts in five weeks.

Growing up in Greenville, S.C., Hall-Tompkins had her heart set on performing violin after being introduced to the instrument in the fourth grade.

By high school, she was studying with Lenny Schranze ’81E at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, where Schranze taught chamber music in the public-school magnet program. Over one school vacation, he took the class to New York to hear top performers. He encouraged Hall-Tompkins to apply to Eastman.

“She has always been a bright, sparkly player,” says Schranze, an associate professor of music at the University of Memphis. “She’s a natural leader and is someone who takes the initiative.”

That’s an important trait for someone determined to make a living playing classical music, a career that requires entrepreneurial savvy. This summer, Hall-Topkins signed on as a soloist to the roster of Columbia Artists Management, opening up new performing possibilities. Initiative can also be key when it comes to finding the best instruments. For three years, Hall-Tompkins played a prized 17th-century Stradivarius on loan from a private collection. Made available through the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the instrument was rotated to another player whose turn with the violin had arrived. By late June, Hall-Tompkins had found another classic violin with equal nuance and complexity, but was still seeking private supporters to keep the instrument.

“This violin has a great sound,” she says. “And I’d really like to make it my own.”

She hones her own playing sound by keeping in touch with Charles Castleman, a professor of violin at Eastman, who has mentored her since her graduation in 1993. “He has a very developed sense of the mechanics of violin playing, and he can perceive what you are doing, and translate it into words,” she says. “He has an incredible way of enhancing your natural style.”

Her style has made Hall-Tompkins one of the most sought-after violinists in New York and one who’s known for sharing that talent with those who might ordinarily not get to hear such music.

“Music reaches the core of our being,” she says. “It can play a vital role in nourishing love, hope, and strength, particularly when played at an extremely high artistic level, and performed in a friendly, relaxed setting.”

David McKay Wilson is a New York–based freelance writer.

Who Was ‘Too Loose Latreck’?

bloopers (Photo: Rochester Review)

From the best students, professors can learn. From the most hapless ones, they can get a laugh. Anders Henriksson ’71, a professor of history at Shepherd University in West Virginia, reads some pretty funny things on student exams and papers, and so do his colleagues, in virtually every discipline and in universities across the country. Now we can all share in the fun, with College In A Nutskull: A Crash Course in Higher Education (Workman, 2010), Henriksson’s second edited collection of student bloopers. According to Henriksson, each blooper has been lifted directly from exams and term papers written by actual (albeit anonymous) “unwitting student collaborators.” We offer a few highlights:

What you never knew about philosophy:

“A priori knowledge is things that you have already prioritized.”

New discoveries in art history:

“Too Loose Latreck could be found at work in cafes and brassieres throughout Paris.”

The lives of literary greats:

“Keats frequently downloaded his emotions on an unsuspecting public.”

Know much about history?:

“Thomas Paine thought the problem with monarchy was that it tended to rely too much on having a king.”

A stab in the dark:

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave equal rights to civilians.”

Another stab in the dark (and a favorite of Henriksson’s):

“Pontious Pilot was an official in the Roman Air Force.”

A bit of B.S.:

“The Dawes Plan let Germany pay its debts excrementally.”

Free association:

“Hamas is an Isrealy leader who refuses to remove his sediments from the bank.”

And in other malapropisms . . .

“The only career option other than peasant was often beggar or village idiot. Some, however, went to town and became gelded craftsmen.”

And what was not covered on our Chaucer quiz:

“Even today a few people have heard of Chaucer. It is, however, a little known fact that he did not know a word of English. Canterbury Tales is about pilgrims on their way to Thanksgiving. This was Chaucer’s seminole work.”

Excerpted from College in a Nutskull (Workman Publishing Co., 2010). © Anders Henriksson. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

An Unlikely ‘Prince of Pop’

Mitch Miller ’32E, who died in July at the age of 99, helped shape the sound of American popular music.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

millerSING ALONG: Perhaps best known for the TV show Sing Along with Mitch, Miller was an influential music producer and business executive as well as a noted oboist. (Photo: Getty Images)

An acclaimed classical oboist, a pioneering producer of popular music, a shrewd businessman, and the infectiously upbeat host of the early 1960s television show Sing Along with Mitch, Mitch Miller ’32E “had so many facets that his soul must resemble one of his productions,” the music critic Will Friedwald once wrote. “Only by multitracking could he superimpose all these identities on top of each other.”

In a 1999 interview in the studios of Rochester’s National Public Radio affiliate, WXXI, classical music host Julia Figueras asked Miller to comment on the striking breadth of his musical career. “Whatever I’m doing at the time, I love!” he responded, with a touch of incredulity.

At one time he was considered one of the finest oboists in the world, creating a sound the composer and critic Virgil Thomson called “round without being oily, warm and laughing and sensuous, fawnlike and wholly without acidity.” And according to Eastman School dean Douglas Lowry, “his recordings of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and American in Paris are still widely regarded as the best ever.”

But as Miller told Time magazine in 1951, he grew tired of playing to “blank faces,” and longed for a more visceral connection with his audience. A serendipitous move to Mercury Records convinced Miller to switch genres, as well as audiences.

In a few short years, the oboe virtuoso would become an icon in the popular music recording industry. When Eastman classmate Goddard Lieberson ’35E, ’74 (Honorary), then the executive vice president of Columbia Records and head of its classical division, hired Miller as head of arts and repertoire for the label in 1950, Miller “transformed himself into the prince of pop,” according to Friedwald.

As the “A & R man,” Miller selected the songs as well as the artists, often matching the two. But to a degree unheard of at that time, Miller crafted the sound that ultimately emerged from the studio. A pioneer of multitracking and the echo chamber effect, he was among the first to see the potential crossover of country and pop. Artists such as Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett, both of whom Miller signed, were initially skeptical, but later credited Miller with making their careers.

Miller was often maligned as the peddler of gimmickry—a claim he didn’t deny, commenting once, “You’ve got to work out a gimmick that’ll get people’s attention and hold it.” But one person’s gimmick is another’s innovation, and Miller’s introduction of unorthodox instruments—an electrified harpsichord, French horns, and bagpipes, for example—earned him admiration over time.

Ultimately it was the television program Sing Along with Mitch that clinched his celebrity. Miller earned a spot for the show on NBC in 1961, after he had produced several bestselling Sing Along with Mitch albums, with a Columbia house orchestra he conducted and called Mitch Miller and the Gang. The show, which ran for three seasons, featured Miller leading a chorus of middle-aged men in familiar tunes such as The Yellow Rose of Texas and Song for a Summer Night, inviting the audience to sing along to the lyrics as they appeared at the bottom of the television screen.

As the news of Miller’s death in July spread, columnists as well as visitors to online stories in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and elsewhere recounted the ways in which Miller’s show had become an integral part of their family lives, uniting grandparents and grandkids in festive and unself-conscious singing.

That was the case for a broader cross-section of America than its old fogey reputation would suggest. Several observers recalled that Miller’s show was among the first to include a black woman as a regular—solo singer Leslie Uggams. In 1995, the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality honored Miller with a lifetime achievement award for promoting Uggams over the protests of many network executives and Southern stations.

Perhaps Miller was adept at melding artists into the American mainstream in part because he was an outsider himself. The son of Jewish immigrants and the man Time called “a jolly Shylock” specializing in “schmalted milk,” Miller understood the American mainstream through listening, observing, and insight.

A life trustee of the University, Miller was born in 1911 in a crowded immigrant neighborhood near present-day Upper Falls Boulevard. He was the third of what would eventually be the five children of Abraham, an ironworker, and Hinda Rosenblum Miller, a seamstress.

The family would be an integral part of the community and the University for decades. Miller’s brother, Leon, is a professor emeritus of biochemistry and biophysics at the Medical Center. And an Eastman building at 25 Gibbs Street was renamed the Miller Center, in honor of Miller’s parents, in 2004.

As a student in Rochester city schools, Miller benefitted from the first public music education in the country, courtesy of George Eastman, who, before he established the Eastman School, had provided free musical instruments for city schoolchildren. Miller took up the oboe because it was the only instrument still available when he showed up late for the program. His father taught him how to make his own reed, saving the family $2.

Only once in his career did Miller appear to miss the beat. A lover of many forms of music, Miller hated rock, and he either didn’t see, or actively resisted, its increasing hold on public taste. By 1964, he had been eased out of his role at Columbia and NBC had cancelled his show.

In his later years, Miller returned to classical music as a guest conductor. But the irony remained, as Friedwald said on a recent radio tribute to Miller, that “what Mitch had done as a producer was essentially to create the precedent for rock ’n’ roll production. All the techniques that Mitch used were used by Berry Gordy, by Quincy Jones, by Phil Spector,” he said, referring to three “superstar producers” in rock music.

As Tony Bennett said, “He was the one who showed everybody how to be a producer.”

In the News

Stacey Plummer ’94 Wins National Mathematics Teaching Award

Stacey Plummer ’94, a math teacher at Hollis Brookline High School in Hollis, N.H., has received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Only two teachers from each state, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, are selected for the award each year. Winners are determined by a panel of distinguished mathematicians, scientists, and educators. Plummer, who has been at Hollis Brookline for 11 years, teaches calculus, geometry, and consumer math.

Simon School Alumni Honored for Research

Patricia DeChow ’93S (PhD), Richard Sloan ’92S (PhD), and Amy Hutton ’86S (MBA), ’92S (PhD) have received the American Accounting Association’s first Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Literature Award for their influential paper, “Causes and Consequences of Earnings Manipulation: An Analysis of Firms Subject to Enforcement Actions by the S.E.C.,” published in the journal Contemporary Accounting Research. DeChow is the Donald H. and Ruth F. Seiler Professor of Public Accounting and Sloan is the L. H. Penney Professor of Accounting, both at the University of California at Berkeley. Hutton is a professor of accounting at Boston College.

Isaac Collins ’94 Named Widener University’s Head Football Coach

Isaac Collins ’94 is the new head football coach at Widener University in Chester, Pa. Previously the defensive coordinator at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., he’s also served on the coaching staffs at the University of Delaware, Lehigh, Hobart, Columbia, and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. As a running back for the Yellowjackets, Collins was conference offensive player of the year in 1992. After graduation, he completed coaching internships with the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles as part of the National Football League’s Minority Fellowship Program. As Widener’s head coach, he’s one of only five minority head football coaches in the NCAA’s Division III.

TRIBUTE

John Frazer ’39M (MD): Committed to Service

tributeDIVISION CHIEF: Frazer was the chief of otolaryngology at the Medical Center from 1963 to 1981. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

I first met John Frazer in 1966 when I came to Rochester to begin my residency in otolaryngology. A native Rochesterian, John spent most of his life here, helping and comforting thousands of patients over his long career. His career included nearly 20 years as the chief of the Medical Center’s division of otolaryngology, during which he oversaw the transformation of the field from a division of the department of surgery to its own department, with its own residency program.

Throughout his life, until his death last April at age 95, John was engaging and gregarious, an excellent clinician, a wonderful teacher, an inspiring leader, and a cherished friend.

John had an extraordinary commitment to service. During World War II, he volunteered to serve in the Navy, but was rejected because, while in medical school at Rochester, he had contracted tuberculosis. Later he volunteered for Army service and was again turned down. In private conversations, he often expressed regret that he was unable to serve his country through military service.

In Hawaii, where he began his clinical practice in 1948, John would find satisfaction in humanitarian service. Part of his work in Hawaii involved regular trips to the island of Molokai to treat lepers in the colony originally founded by Father Damien. It was there that he developed innovative surgical techniques in laryngeal reconstruction. This work was later published in scholarly journals.

In 1963, John returned to Rochester with his wife, Doris, and two daughters, Tulle and Sherry, and began his tenure as chief of otolaryngology. When he retired from that position at age 67, he continued an active clinical practice for another 10 years, saw some patients until he was about 90, and consulted for the nearby Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic.

John also remained an avid swimmer and gardener and made annual excursions to the Adirondacks to hunt deer. I think these trips were more about love of the outdoors and boon companionship than hunting, however. He allegedly once said that he was willing to shoot any deer that attacked him. His innate compassion for all creatures great and small made it impossible for him to hunt in earnest.

—John Norante ’69M (Res)

Norante has served on the faculty of the School of Medicine and Dentistry since 1972 and is a clinical associate professor in the department of otolaryngology.

Books & Recordings

Books

Eight Questions You Should Ask About Our Health Care System (Even If the Answers Make You Sick)

By Charles E. Phelps

Hoover Institution Press, 2010

Phelps, Rochester provost emeritus and professor emeritus of economics, explores the central paradox of the American health system: that the United States outspends every other nation on health care and achieves poorer results than many. He proposes better patient education as well as a mix of new incentives for health care providers.

Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul

By Amy Mills ’94

University of Georgia Press, 2010

Mills, an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of South Carolina, explores the urban landscape of Kuzguncuk, a formerly diverse neighborhood in Istanbul, arguing that the nostalgia for Turkey’s cosmopolitan past deflects rather than invites a critical examination of contemporary minority issues.

Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007

By Gary Gorton ’83 (PhD)

Oxford, 2010

Gorton, the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and Finance at Yale, argues that what is widely viewed as the financial crisis of 2008 was actually a banking panic that began in the summer of 2007, with key similarities to panics of the past, long thought to have disappeared following the enactment of federal deposit insurance.

Rough Cradle

By Betsy Sholl ’69 (MA)

Alice James Books, 2009

Sholl, who teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College master of fine arts in writing program, presents her seventh collection of poetry.

The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System

By Kenneth R. French ’78S (MBA), ’83S (PhD) et al.

Princeton University Press, 2010

French, the Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of Finance at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and 14 other financial experts who make up the Squam Lake Working Group, analyze the roots of the recent global financial meltdown and offer recommendations for preventing a recurrence.

Chatroom to Bedroom: Chicago

By Alexsandra Sukhoy ’03S (MBA)

Creative Cadence, 2009

Business and career consultant Sukhoy tells the story of a woman who enters a chatroom in mid-1990s Chicago and undergoes unexpected virtual—and real— experiences.

Vassals and Citizens: The Baltic Germans in Constitutional Russia, 1905–1914

By Anders Henriksson ’71

Verlag Herder-Institut, 2009

Henriksson, a professor of history at Shepherd University in West Virginia, examines the development of civil society in late Imperial Russia through the lens of an ethnic minority’s experience. He has also published College in a Nutskull (Workman, 2010), the second compilation of bloopers and malapropisms that he has gathered together from college student exam papers. (The first was Non Campus Mentis, published in 2001.)

Language, Identity and Liberation in Contemporary Irish Literature

By Jennifer Keating-Miller ’02

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Keating-Miller, the assistant director of undergraduate research and national fellowships at Carnegie Mellon University, explores a movement of contemporary Irish writing that considers the significance of the region’s tumultuous cultural, social, and political history in portrayals of contemporary Ireland’s everyday life and speech.

Discovering Speech, Words, and Mind

By Dani Byrd and Toben H. Mintz ’89, ’96 (PhD)

Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Mintz, an associate professor in the departments of psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California, coauthors an introduction to the study of language as a cognitive science with an emphasis on the representation, production, and comprehension of spoken language.

Better Get It in Your Soul: What Liturgists Can Learn from Jazz

By Reid Hamilton and Stephen Rush ’85E (DMA)

Church Publishing, 2009

Rush, a professor of dance and performing arts technology at the University of Michigan, coauthors with Michigan pastor Hamilton a guide to making liturgy meaningful in local contexts. Based in the Book of Common Prayer liturgy, but presented to be useful in a variety of denominations, the book compares the development of liturgy to the creative aspects of modern jazz performance.

Demystifying Dietary Supplements: Making Informed Choices

By Maureen Giuffre ’83N (PhD)

BookSurge, 2010

Giuffre, a health and fitness educator and former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Nurse Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a guide to help consumers of supplements and herbal remedies distinguish between helpful products and those that are harmful or ineffective in the growing and largely unregulated dietary supplement industry.

Father Stories: Experiences Being a Father

By Stewart L. Wolff ’66

Outskirts Press, 2010

Connecticut child psychiatrist Wolff offers a personal memoir of his “struggle to be ‘a good enough’ dad” to his own two sons.

Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease

By Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs ’68

Stanford University Press, 2010

Stanford oncologist Jacobs explores the life and work of the late radiation oncologist Henry Kaplan, whose research on Hodgkin’s disease is credited with transforming the cancer from a fatal disease to a treatable one.

Heart of the Matter: A Practical Guide to Attitude in Teaching

By Rachel B. Kramer Theodorou ’93 with Marcia Greenberg and Arthur Willis

Publishers Solutions, 2009

Theodorou, a public school teacher in Newton, Mass., and a professor at Brandeis University, offers a companion text to her coauthors’ 2007 book, Heart of the Matter: The Role of Attitude in Teaching. The guide offers interactive exercises in which teachers apply the principles of social cognition laid out in the 2007 text.

For Richer, For Danger

By Lisa Bork ’86

Midnight Ink, 2010

Bork offers a sequel to her 2009 novel, For Better, For Murder, an Agatha Award finalist for best first novel. Finger Lakes car saleswoman Jolene Parker returns, discovering an unsolved murder when she seeks the birth mother of her young foster daughter.

Contemporary Behavior Therapy (Fifth Edition)

By Michael D. Spiegler ’64 and David C. Guevremont

Cengage, 2010

Spiegler, a professor of psychology at Providence College, coauthors an updated edition of the textbook that synthesizes clinical, research, theoretical, and ethical aspects of behavior therapy. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book presents case studies suggesting applications to education, social work, nursing, and other fields.

Inner Journey: Finding Happiness Within

By Gil Gockley ’73W (EdD) with Tanya Tihansky Gockley

Infinity, 2010

Gockley, a counselor and cofounder of the Gockley Institute in Webster, N.Y., offers advice on how to find happiness by improving self-awareness, self-expression, close relationships with others, and moral character.

Recordings

Works for Bassoon

By Judith LeClair ’79E

Avie, 2010

LeClair, the principal bassoonist for the New York Philharmonic, performs an anthology of chamber works featuring her instrument, accompanied by pianist Jonathan Feldman and harpist Gretchen Van Hoesen.

Quicksilver: Songs and Dances of the Americas

By Bonita Boyd ’71E and Nicholas Goluses

Albany Records, 2010

Eastman professors Boyd (flute) and Goluses (guitar) are accompanied by soprano Kathryn Lewek on an album of folk selections.

Crowning Glory: Zappa Symphonies

By the New Dutch Academy

Pentatone Classics, 2010

Featuring cellist Caroline Kang ’02E, the orchestra records newly discovered works by the 18th-century composer Francesco Zappa.

Uncertain Living

By the Britton Brothers Band

Record Craft, 2010

Saxophonist Ben Britton ’08E, trumpeter John Britton ’10E, and pianist Jeremy Siskind ’08E present their debut CD as the Britton Brothers Band, a modern jazz quintet that also includes bassist Taylor Waugh and drummer Austin Walker.

Evolution

By Dave Glasser ’84E, ’86E (MM)

Saxophonist Glasser performs a tribute to Thelonius Monk accompanied by pianist John Nyerges ’80E, ’97E (MM) and two Eastman jazz studies professors—drummer Rich Thompson ’84E (MM) and bassist Jeff Campbell ’02E (DMA).

Books & Recordings is a compilation of recent work by University alumni, faculty, and staff. For inclusion in an upcoming issue, send the work’s title, publisher information, author, and author’s class year, along with a brief description, to Books & Recordings, Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P. O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; or by e-mail to rochrev@rochester.edu.

ACQUISITIONS

Shining the Silver

creampot (Photo: Adam Fenster)

TEA TIME: A creampot by silversmith and American Revolution hero Paul Revere is the latest addition to the Memorial Art Gallery’s colonial silver collection. Created in the 1760s, the pot has a “graceful quality,” says chief curator Marjorie Searl. “The little feet, the scalloping of the spout and the rim, and the curve of the handle are reminiscent of furniture forms in fashion in those decades.” The creampot complements other pieces in the gallery’s collection by Revere’s contemporary and fellow Boston silversmith Nathaniel Hurd, and Hurd’s father, Jacob. (Among the first paintings ever purchased by the gallery for its collections was a portrait of Nathaniel Hurd by 18th-century painter John Singleton Copley. It was acquired in 1944.) Colonial Americans who could afford such luxury items would often take damaged silver pieces and coins collected from other countries to a silversmith to be melted down and reborn. “Out of this very rough material would emerge an object of incredible delicacy,” Searl says. Part of a tea service, the pot “helps to tell a story about the lives and livelihood of people in Boston in the decade leading up to the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and ultimately the American Revolution.”

EASTMAN DAY

Community Commitment

eastman (Photo: Brandon Vick)

MUSIC & SERVICE: Elizabeth Ehrlich ’14E, a violin major from Atlanta, helps paint a gym wall at the Monroe Avenue YMCA in Rochester as part of George Eastman Day, the Eastman School’s first schoolwide day of community service on August 27. Nearly 200 members of the Eastman community volunteered at projects across Rochester as a way to recognize the commitment to the community exemplified by school namesake George Eastman. The new day is modeled on Wilson Day—the College’s day of service named for Xerox founder Joseph Wilson ’31 —which celebrated its 22nd edition on August 30.