Rochester Review

November–December 2013, Volume 76, No. 2

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Caitlin Mack, Mark Michaud, Leonor Sierra, Leslie White, Rebecca Youmell, and Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

22 Wallis Hall

University of Rochester

Box 270044, Rochester, NY 14627-0044

300 East River Road

Box 270032

Rochester, NY 14627-0032

(585) 275-4121

Fax: (585) 275-0359

E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu www.rochester.edu/pr/Review

Design

Steve Boerner Typography & Design, Inc.

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.

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2013 University of Rochester

Credits

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

Visit Us on the Web

Rochester Review: http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review

A Great Dean and a Great Man

By Joel Seligman

presidentIN MEMORIAM: “When Doug was installed as dean on October 27, 2007, I forecast: ‘In Doug Lowry, we have found the maestro to lead us to a new age of musical education. . . . The symphony he will lead, I predict, will resonate for decades to come.’ ” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In mid-September, Doug Lowry met with me and explained that because of his health, he would have to step down as the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music. For six years, he had been a remarkable leader of the Eastman School. On October 2, 2013, Doug died of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that had been diagnosed in 2011.

The Board of Trustees of the University, at a special meeting on Friday, September 20, 2013, voted unanimously to award an honorary doctor of music degree to Doug and named him Joan and Martin Messinger Dean Emeritus. On September 30, the board voted to name Eastman’s Main Hall in Doug’s honor. It is now Lowry Hall.

In Doug’s honor, the board adopted a resolution which said in part:

“Doug became Eastman’s dean in 2007, the sixth since the school’s founding in 1921. Doug’s tenure decisively upheld the school’s well-earned reputation for greatness. Significantly, his artistry as a composer, conductor, and teacher, and his farsightedness in mapping pathways for music education in the 21st century further burnished the school’s reputation as an international leader.

“Doug Lowry’s lifetime professional career has been distinguished. Decanal and professorial appointments at Eastman, the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music establish Doug as one of the premier musical leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Doug has always demonstrated absolute integrity and creativity in advancing the best interests of the musical arts. He has been a colleague of great wisdom, sensitivity, and exceptional collegiality. The University’s Board of Trustees, its faculty, staff, and students convey their deepest respect and gratitude to Douglas Lowry and commend him for his many valuable contributions to the University.”

When Doug was installed as dean on October 27, 2007, I forecast:

“In Doug Lowry, we have found the maestro to lead us to a new age of musical education. Doug does not arrive with all the answers—but with the ability to pose the right questions. A great conductor values each member of his orchestra. As a great dean, Doug has already exhibited a passionate enthusiasm to cherish each faculty member, each student, each staff member, each alumnus, and each special friend who comprises the Eastman community . . . The symphony he will lead, I predict, will resonate for decades to come.”

Rarely has an academic leader more completely achieved his aspirations. Doug left Eastman a far stronger school than when he began.

Doug led the Eastman School in its efforts to renovate and expand Eastman Theatre, the greatest architectural achievement of the Eastman School in over 80 years.

Doug unified the Eastman community. I marveled at his ability to meet with faculty, alumni, and friends of the school, sometimes of the most intense and conflicting views, and always keep his equanimity. In a world marked by great passions, Doug was a peacemaker and a builder.

I loved Doug’s smile. I loved his charm. He was the rarest of academic administrators: a great dean who also was a great man.

Doug hired outstanding faculty. He initiated a strategic plan that will lead Eastman into the 21st century.

Doug also was a man of literary gifts. He read widely, wrote poetry, and delivered some of the most memorable convocation addresses in our University’s history. He was a warm, decent human being who appreciated music as only a gifted musician could, while also dazzling you with talents as variegated as his ability to create designer pizza to his enthusiasm for his favorite composer, Richard Strauss.

Universities are human institutions. What matters most are our faculty, students, alumni, friends, staff, and administrators. Doug was beloved by all.

I want to particularly recognize one of Doug’s greatest achievements. He assembled an outstanding leadership team.

For the past several years, Jamal Rossi was Doug’s closest associate. Jamal served as interim dean in the interval that led to Doug’s appointment and unofficially has served more recently in that role when Doug could not be present.

With board concurrence, I appointed Jamal to be dean of the Eastman School until the conclusion of a national search.

The use of the title “Dean,” rather than “Interim Dean,” is a consequential one. I have informed Dean Rossi that he has all of the powers and responsibilities that Doug had, and I expect Jamal to be a decisive and bold leader. Music education does not stand still. There are challenges that the Eastman School must address this year and Jamal is the right person to lead the efforts that Doug began. Completing the strategic plan that Doug began will ensure Eastman’s further progress and be a fitting way to honor Doug, his leadership, and our appreciation for his time with us.

Letters

lettersBIRTHDAY: This fall marked the 75th anniversary of the invention of electrophotography by Chester Carlson (above), a process that Joseph Wilson ’31 developed into the Xerox Corp. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Xerox and Us

Regarding the story on Rochester’s connection to Xerox (“Electrophotography, Xerography, and Us,” September–October), xerography inventor Chester Carlson almost had another connection with the University.

Through his wife, Dorothy, he developed an interest in Buddhism as well as in the paranormal. John Romano, the first chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, told me that Carlson approached him about endowing a professorship to explore the paranormal. Romano, as is probably true for most physicians, did not think it was a field worthy of serious academic study and declined the million dollars.

Carlson found the University of Virginia receptive, and it established the Carlson Chair which was held by Ian Stevenson until his death in 2007. He published over 300 articles and 14 books as the director of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, researching the paranormal. It is worth noting that this is an area that holds the interests of many physicists, which was Carlson’s academic training. Perhaps the nonlinear world of quantum mechanics allows them to look more broadly at the study of consciousness and extrasensory phenomena. (See the work of William Tiller and David Bohm.)

Carlson also funded the Rochester Zen Center, which is one of the most highly regarded centers in America.

David Tinling ’63M (Res)

Rochester, Vt.

The writer was a member of the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry from 1965 to 1979.

The article on the birth of Xerox Corporation was informative but incomplete.

The ties between the University and Joseph C. Wilson’s Xerox were bilateral and perhaps even symbiotic. I don’t know how much money the University invested in Haloid, or whether the stock was simply given by Wilson, but it’s part of the story.

I remember one day in late 1961 or 1962 when I saw my faculty advisor, Professor George Suhr of the fine arts department, skipping down the steps of the quad. He had a palsy of some sort, and I found it astounding that he was skipping like a school child. I asked him what that was about, and he said that a large chunk of the University’s retirement fund was invested in something called Haloid, which had just “gone public” as Xerox.

I have since learned from the Xerox website that, in fact, Haloid went public in 1936, but perhaps there was a large secondary offering after the Xerox shares were listed on the NYSE in 1961, or in connection with that listing. In any event, the University had a very handsome profit on its investment or gift, and for a while during my years as a student, had one of the four or five largest university endowment funds in the country, thanks to Xerox and also, of course, to Eastman Kodak.

Unfortunately, the lessons of this success were misunderstood by the University, and by 2002, the result was a punishing shrinkage of the endowment fund. I gather that that circumstance has been rectified.

Christian Wyser-Pratte ’65

Ossining, N.Y.

Thanks, GLF!

Karen McCally’s feature story, “Forty Years Out,” which appeared in the July–August 2013 issue, was most welcome. Rochester’s GLBT community has a proud history, one in which the University played a signal and substantial role, and I was delighted to see the story of the Gay Liberation Front and its amazing founders shared with Review’s readership. There were, however, two errors which I feel compelled to point out.

The first error is a minor one. The article says that the Washington Blade newspaper moved to an all-digital format last year. As someone who picks up a paper copy of the Blade every week, I can tell you that although the Blade has an online presence, it has not gone “all digital.”

The second error, which appears in the sidebar article, is more noteworthy. It is not correct that “(s)ince the Gay Liberation Front began on the River Campus in 1970, the University has maintained a student group dedicated to the interests and concerns of gays and lesbians.”

Sometime in the late-1970s the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) either disbanded or lost its official status, I’m not sure which, and so there was a gap in official University support. However, I do know that in September 1982, and possibly earlier, some students began meeting together as a group in an effort to regain official status. They worked hard to overcome several obstacles placed in their paths, but in the end they secured official recognition and funding.

I was happy, as an alumnus, to attend their meetings, to assist in their battle for recognition, and to help them get up and running. The group was called the Gay Academic Union (GAU), and during the fall semester of 1982 the Campus Times printed several notices, articles, and letters to the editor, pro and con, related to this effort. The November 19, 1982, issue of the Campus Times reported that the Students’ Association Appropriations Committee had voted to fund the GAU, and so the new organization was official.

The February 1983 issue of the Empty Closet contained a blurb written by Julia Rabinowitz, one of the GAU organizers, who reported that the “resurrected Gay Academic Union of the University of Rochester, recently renamed Lesbians, Gays & Friends, held its first dance of 1983.” After a few years’ absence, GLF had indeed been resurrected as the GAU.

Over the years the organization’s name has changed from GAU to Lesbians, Gays & Friends to Gay and Lesbian Alliance to GLBFA (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Friends Association) to Pride Network, and here we are. And so we can say that since November 1982, “the University has maintained a student group dedicated to the interests and concerns of gays and lesbians.” Congratulations and thanks to all who have made that possible.

Bob Dardano ’77

Washington, D.C.

As a graduate in the Class of ’73, I remember the Gay Liberation Front very well. But one of their greatest, and most under-appreciated, achievements wasn’t the liberation of gays at all.

I was raised in a traditional gay-bashing, fairy-baiting, homo-hating community, but was secretly scared of what I didn’t understand and could never ask about. Homosexuals made me nervous—until I met the late Marshall Goldman ’74, who was doing makeup for the Committee on the Performing Arts (COPA) production of The Wizard of Oz, in which I had a part. Marshall was so relaxed about who he was, so funny, and so outrageous all at once that my fears melted away, and I was able to relax. He was just plain fun to be around, and never mind that he was gay and I was straight.

I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and realize that’s when I lost my fear of gays, and started thinking of people with different sexual orientations as just people.

To me, it wasn’t just gay liberation, it was human liberation, and I thank the GLF for their courage in undertaking it. I also want to offer special thanks to Marshall for being open, relaxed, and honest with an up-tight straight.

Richard Worzel ’73

Toronto

A ‘Kodak Kid’

I very much appreciated President Joel Seligman’s article, “The New Kodak,” in the September–October issue.

As a city student who attended the U of R in the 1950s, I was aware of the long-term influence of George Eastman, both in the city of Rochester and at the University. In the Rochester public schools, we benefited from the regular dental examinations and cleanings from the Eastman Dental Dispensary and from classical music programs presented by an orchestra composed primarily of professors from the Eastman School.

My father worked in the Kodacolor Division of Eastman Kodak at Building 65 in Kodak Park from 1948 to 1972. As a “Kodak Kid,” I worked summers as a cleaner of darkrooms in Building 12 in Kodak Park. This work was valuable to me in helping to pay my tuition and other expenses during my four years at the U of R.

I trust that the positive legacy of George Eastman and his company will continue to be remembered by way of his statue on the Eastman Quadrangle, Eastman Theatre, and Kodak Hall.

Lloyd Lipscomb ’58

Lynchburg, Va.

Violation of Values?

I am writing to express my deep disappointment that you chose to feature the Tom Otterness sculpture on the cover of Rochester Review (September–October). Mr. Otterness, in the name of art, murdered an innocent animal so he could film it. The act was despicable and unforgivable. The selection of his work to reside on the campus of the Memorial Art Gallery was in my opinion a travesty because of his past actions and demeans the University and its values.

I would add that the sculpture itself lacks the quality of its companion pieces at MAG, but it is the history of the artist that should have precluded its selection. I would hope that in the future, greater thought would be taken in the selection of what is chosen for both Rochester Review and the University properties. Character and values matter and should have been considered before the selections were made.

Robert Janson ’82, ’88S (MBA)

Ontario, N.Y.

Editor Scott Hauser writes: The decision to select Tom Otterness as one of four artists commissioned to create site-specific work for Centennial Sculpture Park was made by gallery and community committees organized about four years ago. Shortly after the announcement of the selection, Grant Holcomb, the director of the gallery, published an open letter in which he outlined the committee’s decision, acknowledging that Otterness’s actions more than three decades earlier had upset some members of the community. “[Tom] has publicly and profusely apologized for that indefensible act and, since then, has proven himself a well-respected and committed artist dedicated to creating family-friendly sculpture specifically for public places from San Jose to New York City, St. Louis to Toronto. We contacted artists, directors, and curators across the country, and I think it fair to say that all, while not condoning Otterness’s actions, feel that the incident should be considered an aberration in a celebrated 35-year career. As one colleague stated several years back, ‘This is an artist who is probably the most responsive to community of any artist in America, so for him to be tarred for one piece that he did as a young artist, one in which he willingly admits that he made a big mistake—to try to hold that against him after a lifetime of work [is unfair].’ ”

The opening of the park this fall marked a momentous occasion in the history of the gallery, and we chose the photo for the September–October cover because we thought it captured the gallery’s larger ambition to share arts and culture with the community and with future generations.

History Lesson

I read with interest the latest issue of Rochester Review and can’t wait to return under some pretext to see for myself all the changes that have taken place in terms of the construction and renovation since I last walked the campus.

I do have one correction to the piece on page 23 (“Historic Houses”). The Douglass Leadership House . . . “formerly the Delta Upsilon house.” No, unless I am mistaken that particular fraternity was the residence of the Phi Eps—Phi Epsilon Pi. As a member of that fraternity I remember that building well. Many memorable times were spent there.

The building labeled the Drama Center was the Delta Upsilon house. All the other houses are correctly noted.

Michael Jacobs ’66, ’74W (EdD)

Aurora, Colo.

Corrections to your captions on the houses shown on the Fraternity Quadrangle: The Drama center was initially the Delta Upsilon fraternity house. The building next to it, the Douglass Leadership House, incorrectly noted as “formerly the Delta Upsilon house” was the Kappa Nu house.

James Hadley ’62

Providence, R.I.

On page 23, the Drama Center (not the Douglass Leadership House) is the former Delta Upsilon house. The Douglass Leadership House is the former Kappa Nu house (where I lived in the mid-50s).

Ray Jacobs ’57

New York City

Editor Scott Hauser writes: We should have done better in describing the home of the Douglass Leadership House as “most recently the Delta Upsilon house” and noted that since the River Campus opened with seven houses on the Fraternity Quad, the affiliations of the chapters housed in some of the buildings have changed. The original Delta Upsilon house, which was one of the original seven buildings, is now the home of the Drama Center and has been since the early 1980s. The Kappa Nu house, completed in 1955 just north of DU was the first new house on the quad since the opening of the River Campus. The fraternity merged with Phi Epsilon Pi in 1961. In the early 1970s, the Phi Ep house became the Medieval House. When the Medieval House was closed, the original Kappa Nu building became the home of Delta Upsilon. In 2012, what had most recently been the home of DU became the home of the Douglass Leadership House.

Photo ID

Regarding the photo of the bookstore circa 1985 (Class Notes, September-October), the cashier is Stephanie Harrison, Class of 1983, so the date of the photo is more likely around then. Anita Kaye Hyman ’83N, who appears to be wearing an employee name tag, is in the background and is partially obscured by the customer at the cash register.

Stephen Greenberg ’83

Chappaqua, N.Y.

Department of Corrections

Our apologies to Helen Tuntland Jackson ’71E (MM), whose name was mistakenly included in the In Memoriam list in the September-October issue. She is alive and well and ended up on the list because of an error in processing alumni records.

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.

WARNER SCHOOL

Teaching Moment

teacher (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Teacher of the Year: Ashli Skura Dreher, a doctoral student at the Warner School of Education, helps Bobby Crewe, Madison Filicetti, and Collin Dunn during a lesson on food, cooking, and health at Lewiston-Porter Senior High School in Lewiston, N.Y., this fall. A teacher at Lewiston for the past 15 years, Dreher was named New York State Teacher of the Year in September, earning recognition for her work in teaching and developing programming for students with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

CAMPUS HISTORY

Missing Madam

muse (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Commerce Department: A nearly 140-year-old statue depicting “Commerce” lies in a Rochester-area warehouse, awaiting her return to the River Campus sometime in 2014. Originally part of a set commissioned by telegraph pioneer Hiram Sibley for his namesake building on the Prince Street campus, the wayward statue spent the last quarter century in Toronto, where she was cared for by former professor James Carley, who offered to take the statue when the University could not find a suitable home for it. Since 1980, thanks to an effort by Arch Miller, professor emeritus of fine arts, and a gift from the Class of 1954, four figures representing other branches of knowledge—”Astronomy,” ”Geography,” “Navigation,” and “Science”—have stood between Rush Rhees Library and Meliora Hall.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Great Gateway

gateways (Photo: Kevin Leysath)

TRIPLE PLAY: Concertmaster Kelly Hall-Tompkins ’93E performs Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with cellist Troy Stuart and pianist Terrence Wilson and the Gateways Music Festival Chamber Orchestra at Rochester’s Hochstein School of Music & Dance. Under the direction of Michael Morgan, the music director of the Oakland, Calif., East Bay Symphony, the concert was part of the biennial festival that celebrates musicians of African descent and their contributions to classical music. Featuring about 100 musicians from across the country, including several Eastman alumni, the festival is a collaboration involving the Eastman School, area churches, and Rochester community organizations.

STUDENT LIFE

Happy Anniversary, Wilson Day!

wilson (Photo: Adam Fenster)

WHERE’S WILSON? Members of the Class of 2017 work together to clear debris from Mount Hope Cemetery during this fall’s annual Wilson Day. Named in honor of the example of community engagement set by Xerox founder Joseph Wilson ’31, and part of orientation activities since 1988, the initiative is designed to help the freshman class get to know the Rochester area by working with service, civic, and social agencies for a day of community service. In keeping up with the times, the 25th anniversary edition included a social media component, in which students were encouraged to share their work using the “Where’s Wilson?” hashtag. To see the website, visit www.rochester.edu/whereswilson.

STRATEGIC PLAN

Destiny with Data

The University’s investment in the burgeoning field of data science grows to $100 million.

By Leonor Sierra

datascienceDATA BASE: A new building (above, in an early conception) will help leverage the work of Rochester researchers in big data, says Henry Kautz, chair of computer science (below). (Photo: Courtesy of Ayers Saint Gross Architects)

The University is planning to be a big player when it comes to big data.

That was the message of an October announcement in which President Joel Seligman outlined a plan to commit $50 million—in addition to more than $50 million spent in recent years—to greatly expand the University’s work in the burgeoning field of data science.

The commitment will include the creation of an Institute for Data Science, construction of a state-of-the-art building to house it, and as many as 20 new faculty members with expertise in the field.

“This is the top University priority for the University’s 2013–18 strategic plans that were adopted by the Board of Trustees on October 11,” Seligman said in announcing the plans during his opening remarks at the Rochester Big Data Forum 2013, at which researchers in data science from around the nation gathered for a day of interdisciplinary talks and discussions.

datascience (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“Data science is a defining discipline of the 21st century,” Seligman said. “By combining sophisticated analytic techniques with rapidly improving computational capabilities, data science can help extract useful information from the quintillions of bytes of data that are created every day. It is the foundation, for example, of data- informed, personalized medicine, is central to national security and defense, and has already changed online commerce.”

Rob Clark, senior vice president for research and dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, says he expects that the new institute will have an impact on the Rochester region through collaborations with local companies and by helping start new companies.

“The investment opens up great opportunities for the translation to the commercial sector of the discoveries and new techniques that are developed, and we will also be producing highly trained specialists in this area,” he says, pointing to the University’s tradition of entrepreneurship. For example, he noted, faculty, staff, and alumni of the Institute of Optics have gone on to lead or found about 160 companies, many of them locally.

datascienceSCIENCE CORNERSTONE: The home of the new Institute for Data Science will frame a quadrangle of buildings housing science and engineering programs. (Illustration: Steve Boerner)

Home to the Health Science Center for Computational Innovation—which houses an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, one of the most powerful computers in the world—the University has ongoing research projects in data science–driven fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and biostatistics. The new initiative is also expected to leverage existing collaborations with companies such as IBM and Xerox.

“Rochester researchers are already exploiting the tools of data science in their work,” says Henry Kautz, chair of the computer science department and director of Rochester’s big data initiative. “For example, data science has been a key part of research done here to model and predict the spread of infectious diseases, to track the popularity of political ideas, to understand consumer preferences, and to predict the existence of planets.”

Kautz says the University’s expertise in data science is dispersed across many departments and relies on individual groups of researchers to connect with each other to share their knowledge. The new institute will bring faculty members together with resources to enhance collaborations in data science in all fields, he says.

The new faculty members will be recruited in several departments: biostatistics, psychiatry, physics, computer science, political science, and others. But data science will be a critical component of their work, either as developers or users.

The additional faculty are also expected to open new areas of research as the institute develops. Three research domains have been identified as initial areas of focus: predictive health analysis, cognitive systems and artificial intelligence, and analyzing large-scale data as part of an effort known as “analytics on demand.”

Does the Political Legacy of Slavery Live On?

discoverCensus of Slavery: A new Rochester study indicates that white Southerners in counties where cotton farming, along with its underpinnings in slavery, was concentrated—shown here in an 1860 census—express more racial resentment today than other white Southerners. (Photo: Steve Boerner)

White Southerners who live today in former slavery strongholds—a region known as the Cotton Belt—are more likely to express negative attitudes toward blacks than their fellow white Southerners who live in areas that had few slaves.

Residents of the regions where slavery was predominate are also more likely to identify as Republican and to express opposition to race-related policies such as affirmative action.

That’s according to a county-by-county analysis of census data and opinion polls of more than 39,000 southern whites.

Conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, all assistant professors of political science, the research is believed to be the first to demonstrate quantitatively the lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the South. The findings hold even when other dynamics often associated with racial animosity are factored in, such as present-day concentrations of African Americans in an area, or whether an area is urban or rural.

The findings were reported at the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium at the University of California at Riverside in September.

How is it possible that an institution so long ago outlawed continues to influence views in the 21st century? The authors point to economic and cultural explanations. Although slavery was banned, the economic incentives to exploit former slaves persisted well into the 20th century. “Before mechanization, cotton was not really economically viable without massive amounts of cheap labor,” says Sen. After the Civil War, southern landowners resorted to racial violence and Jim Crow laws to coerce black field hands, depress wages, and tie tenant farmers to plantations.

The researchers also found evidence of the relationship between racial violence and economics in the historical record of lynchings. Between 1882 and 1930, lynching rates were highest where cotton was king. By the time economic incentives to coerce black labor subsided with the introduction of machinery to harvest cotton in the 1930s, anti-black sentiment was culturally entrenched among local whites, the authors write. Those views have simply been passed down, they argue, citing extensive research showing that children often inherit the political attitudes of parents and peers.

The data, says Sen, point to the importance of institutional and historical legacy when understanding political views. Most quantitative studies of voters rely on contemporary influences, such as education, income, or degree of urbanity. The findings are also in line with research on the lingering economic effects of slavery. Studies have shown that former slave populations in Africa, South and Central America, and the United States continue to experience disparity in income, school enrollment, and vaccinations.

—Susan Hagen﻿

Copper May Be Culprit in Alzheimer’s

Copper appears to be one of the main environmental factors that trigger the onset and enhance the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a Medical Center study. The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that the mineral plays a role in how toxic proteins are processed in the brain.

Found throughout the food chain—in red meats, shellfish, nuts, and many fruits and vegetables, as well as in water carried by copper pipes and nutritional supplements—copper plays an important and beneficial role in nerve conduction, bone growth, the formation of connective tissue, and hormone secretion.

But the new study indicates that copper can also cause the system that controls what enters and exits the brain to break down, resulting in a toxic accumulation of the protein amyloid beta, a by-product of cellular activity.

“It’s clear that, over time, copper’s cumulative effect is to impair the systems by which amyloid beta is removed from the brain,” says lead author Rashid Deane, research professor in the Department of Neurosurgery and a member of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine.

Under healthy circumstances, other proteins in the brain work to remove amyloid beta. But researchers found that once copper made its way to the brain, the mineral stimulated activity in neurons that increased the production of amyloid beta. The copper also interacted with amyloid beta in a manner that caused the proteins to bind together in larger complexes, creating logjams that the brain’s waste disposal system couldn’t clear.

That one-two punch, inhibiting the clearance and stimulating the production of amyloid beta, provides strong evidence that copper is a key player in Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, the researchers observed that copper provoked inflammation of brain tissue, which may further promote the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier and the accumulation of toxins.

Researchers say the findings must be interpreted with caution because copper is essential to many functions of the body.

“The key will be striking the right balance between too little and too much copper consumption. Right now we cannot say what the right level will be, but diet may ultimately play an important role in regulating this process,” says Deane.

—Mark Michaud﻿

discoverGREENLAND GAS: New research indicates a surprising decline in atmospheric carbon monoxide over the past 60 years. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Carbon Monoxide: Going Down?

A first-ever study of air trapped in the deep snowpack of Greenland shows that atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide over Greenland in the 1950s were slightly higher than those of today. The finding is a surprise because computer models had calculated a 40 percent overall increase in concentrations of the airborne pollutant over the past half century.

Vasilli Petrenko, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, reported in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that carbon monoxide levels rose slightly from 1950 until the 1970s, then declined significantly to present-day levels.

Cleaner automobile combustion—particularly the use of catalytic converters—appears to have driven the improvement. Petrenko says such technological improvements may have had an even stronger impact than is apparent from his data because burning firewood—a major source of carbon monoxide—continues to be used widely in south Asia. As that region’s population has grown, corresponding increases in carbon monoxide may have been offset by decreases in other parts of the world.

“In order for computer models to get things right, it’s important to have accurate historical records,” says Petrenko. “Until now, we haven’t had enough reliable data on carbon monoxide concentrations. This work helps to fill that gap.”

—Peter Iglinski﻿

Familiar Devices Bring Autism Help

Your iPod may be a source of favorite music for you, but for families of children with autism, it can serve as an important quality-of-life tool.

A new device developed by Rochester researchers is showing promise in reducing the time and effort required to toilet train children with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Daniel Mruzek, associate professor of pediatrics, and Stephen McAleavey, associate professor of biomedical engineering, used common items to construct their device: sterile pads, a sensor, a Bluetooth-enabled transmitter, and an iPod. Dan Hansen, a freshman computer science major, wrote software for the project.

A drop of urine on the pad sends a signal to the iPod, triggering a sound or piece of music. At the same time, an alarm sounds on an iPod worn by a caregiver, who can then assist the child in using the toilet. Success brings a game, song, or photo reward from the iPod.

Research shows that it can take a family 18 months to toilet train a child with autism or another developmental disability. In the first pilot test of the device, that time was reduced to only a few weeks.

The University is collaborating with Vanderbilt University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital on a new round of clinical testing with the device.

—Peter Iglinski﻿

GOERGEN AWARDS

Top Teachers

Three Faculty members from Arts, Sciences & Engineering received 2013 Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching this fall. Named for and sponsored by Robert Goergen ’60, a University trustee and former board chairman, and his wife, Pamela, the awards recognize faculty for their contributions to undergraduate education. As part of the nomination process, current and former students are invited to submit letters describing their teachers and their influence on their lives. Here’s a sample of what a few had to say.

Bonnie Meguid

goergenBonnie Meguid (Photo: Adam Fenster)

An associate professor of political science, Meguid focuses on comparative politics, ethnic politics, political parties, elections, and voting.

“What is most distinctive about Professor Meguid’s teaching style and classroom experience is her passion. Her love for the issues she teaches makes such a difference; it makes learning so much more enjoyable.” —Alisa Jimenez ’14

“[She] is a wonderful teacher, truly a gem of academia. She is energetic, informative, creative, and quick—all aspects that not only make her a great teacher, but a fun one.” —Benjamin Walsh ’16

“Three days before the final exam, I went into her office, hoping to get a little guidance and reassurance. . . . [She] showed a level of faith in me that I couldn’t find in myself. She helped me to understand that I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing to hone and cultivate my interests.” —Claire Webster ’16

Anne Meredith

goergenAnne Meredith (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A senior lecturer in religion, Meredith teaches courses on religion and classics, women’s studies, and Jewish studies.

“Professor Meredith is very engaging and caring and one of the best professors I have had. . . . She is able to condense vast amounts of complicated information so that it fits within the confines of the course, and she is easily accessible to her students.” —Kassandra Viers ’14

“Professor Meredith prompted me to begin considering my undergraduate writing and research as an authentic academic contribution. Her teaching and mentoring continue to serve as a model in my own practice.” —Jeremy Schott ’99, who is now an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“Professor Meredith . . . taught me how to think and write in an academic manner, to pursue outside interests, to never stop asking questions, and to voice and express my opinions.” —Claudia Shapiro ’12

John Michael

goergenJohn Michael (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A professor of English and visual and cultural studies, Michael has research interests in literature, film, politics, American identity, and history.

“[Professor Michael] gave me the clearest picture of what it would mean to be a humanities scholar, and why such a pursuit was interesting and important. While teaching me about the past of intellectual thought, he made me want to shape its future, and prepared me to do so.”—Laurel Raymond ’13

“I have crystal-clear memory of my building excitement as [a] new horizon of ideas opened before me, and the contrast of my own intense reaction to Professor Michael’s relaxed, off-the-cuff delivery. He was the picture of ease; he was having fun; and he invited us into the serious play of intellection. I felt welcomed, tempted—dared, even—by his implicit question: you want to spend the rest of your life thinking about some insoluble tension in human culture? Try this on for size.” —Carl Adair ’08

“His remarkable ability to challenge and engage his students while sincerely valuing what they have to contribute cultivated a classroom atmosphere unlike any I had experienced. Never have I felt so validated and respected as a student. In fact, it was in Professor Michael’s course that I first began to truly think of myself as a scholar.” —Analise Baird ’13﻿

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Thinking about Higher Education

learn (Photo: Corbis)

What is new in higher education, with the advent of online learning, MOOCs, or massive open online courses, and more? A lot—and hardly anything at all, says Andrew Wall, associate professor at the Warner School of Education. He was recently appointed chair of the school’s Educational Leadership Program, and focuses his research in areas such as learning outcomes, state educational finance, and public trust in education.

What impact do you think technology will have on the affordability of and access to higher education?

I think among a lot of administrators there’s a grand fear that there’s a huge revolution coming, and that all of a sudden brick-and-mortar institutions are going to disappear, or they’re going to be financially threatened. I take a very different viewpoint.

Technology could have a transformative effect on higher education, but it hasn’t so far. One could say it’s long overdue to have a pedagogical revolution—though I don’t think online education is necessarily a pedagogical revolution at all. It’s like a chalkboard, a new technology that can be used. Putting videos online is not a transformative moment.

The emergence of technology will have a different impact on different institutions. I do think there are institution types that are potentially threatened by the emergence of technology—but I actually don’t think that’s Rochester because people who are sending their children here are people who understand the value of a residential education.

Do online technologies make education less expensive?

In studies, online education hasn’t been less expensive to deliver. There is some new evidence that we’re beginning to get some efficiencies from online education. But there’s this notion that suddenly we’re going to be able to deliver courses to everyone, and they’re going to cost a lot less—this has not been the case.

What about MOOCs?

MOOCs are a whole different beast. I love the ideas of MOOCs, and I’ve made the suggestion that the federal government should seriously get behind MOOCs and provide direct funding for MOOCs to give free access to education for broad swaths of society. If you want to talk about a transformative public good, it’s a fabulous idea. But we are not in that policy place. So I’m actually highly skeptical about how MOOCs will become monetized. In the long run, there are going to be parts of MOOCs that we’re going to adopt, both as individual institutions and as institutions of higher education. I think that we will probably see an integration of the MOOC idea into conglomerations of institutions or compacts where they offer MOOC–like classes in some ways.

How will people make choices among so many options?

College choice is not a rational process. This is well documented. When we make these choices, we make them in part upon the feeling about what we also think it’s going to do for our lives. Sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote about this: there are certain things that are sacred in society. Learning for the sake of learning is sacred. I am going to send my kids to a liberal arts institution because I think there is something greater than economic rationality to a college degree. I think you go to college to become an educated person because it makes your life better. I can’t put a price tag on that. But I also don’t think that’s fully achieved by having classes online.

Is that choice available to everyone?

No. And we should be trying to provide as many people as we can with a quality education to attain a good standard of life. That’s why we need a range of options, which could involve MOOCs, could involve hybrids, could involve community college programs that convert to four-year programs—because if we’re going to be competitive globally, we need a large percentage of the population to be well educated.

What does that mean for traditional liberal arts schools and research universities?

About 45 percent of the people in this country enrolled in higher education are at a community college. We know that 65 percent of all students enrolled right now are nontraditional students. And if you factor together comprehensive state schools, community colleges, and the rising for-profit institutions, that’s over 80 percent of all enrollment. The students who enroll in elite higher education are a small percentage. And that subset tends to be white, wealthy, and educated. So there are real questions about how we provide access and equity to the highest quality educational opportunities. That’s where our big challenge is.

—Kathleen McGarvey﻿

Mark Zupan to ‘Pass the Baton’ as Simon Dean

inbriefTRANSITION: After a decade leading the Simon School, Zupan will become a member of the school’s faculty. (Photo: John Smillie)

Mark Zupan has announced that 2013–14 will be his last full year as dean of the Simon Business School.

Zupan, who will complete 10 years as dean next June, plans to take a sabbatical year beginning July 1, 2014. He then plans to return to the Simon faculty as the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Policy and director of Simon’s Bradley Policy Research Center.

President Joel Seligman, who will chair the search committee for Zupan’s successor, thanked Zupan for “a magnificent job” and for leaving an inspiring legacy at Simon.

Zupan is credited with raising Simon’s profile as well as its enrollment among global business students, with nearly 60 countries represented among Simon’s student body. Under his tenure, the number of faculty has also increased, including 10 new professorships that have been added thanks to support for the Meliora Challenge Campaign.

Simon has introduced several curricular initiatives over the past decade, including new programs for master’s degrees, an initiative to establish Simon academic programs in New York City, graduate program partnerships with the Hajim School of Engineering, and new undergraduate programs with the College.﻿

Finalists for New Sculpture Announced

Alumni, parents, and other members of the University community are invited to indicate whether they like any of the six final proposals for a new campus sculpture.

That’s after a committee of faculty, students, and guest jurors narrowed the field of more than 120 international proposals for the new sculpture near the Sage Arts Center to a small set of contenders for the final design.

Images of all six proposals and details about each artist’s vision will be online at www.rochester.edu/news/photos/jackson-court until November 23. Viewers are encouraged to “like” one or more of their top choices. Renderings of the installations also will be on display at the River Campus Art and Music Library Gallery, where viewers will be able to “like” their favorites through a mobile app.

Guest juror Rochelle Steiner ’96 (PhD), professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts, Allen Topolski, associate professor of art who organized the competition, and other faculty, administrators, and students on the selection committee will incorporate the public’s response into their final evaluation. The committee expects to announce a winning proposal early in the new year.﻿

Veterans Journal Recognizes Rochester

Rochester is a top military-friendly school, according to a new survey conducted by Military Advanced Education, a journal that covers higher education for members of the armed services For its 2014 guide to educational opportunities for service members, the journal evaluated submissions from colleges and universities to create a system for service members to compare educational opportunities and programs across institutions.

In 2009, the University created the Rochester Pledge Scholarship as part of an initiative to meet the Yellow Ribbon Program. That federal program, part of a revised GI Bill, provides financial support for post–Sept. 11 veterans.

Combined with GI Bill benefits, the Rochester Pledge Program guarantees full tuition and mandatory fees support for qualified veterans with 36 or more months of service who are enrolled in undergraduate programs at the College or in the Eastman School. Veterans with fewer than 36 months of service are eligible for pro-rated support based on their length of service.

The scholarship is named in recognition of Francis Bellamy, a member of the Class of 1876 who in 1892 wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance.﻿

New Building for Imaging Services Is Proposed

A new 92,000-square-foot Medical Center building has been proposed to provide space for x-ray, mammography, magnetic resonance imaging, and other imaging services for outpatients as well as some services for children with autism.

The University has applied to the New York State Department of Health for a three-story building to relocate outpatient imaging and some outpatient pediatric care, a move that will allow the Medical Center to modernize existing space for inpatient care.

The new building will be located on University-owned property near Interstate 390 south of the Medical Center and just east of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. It is expected to be completed in 2015, pending approval from the state and from the nearby town of Brighton.

The Medical Center performs nearly 350,000 imaging tests each year, and about 42 percent of them are for outpatient care.

Five years ago, the Medical Center proposed the construction of a new building to modernize and expand adult and pediatric inpatient units and improve imaging technology space. While those plans were revised in the wake of an addition to the Wilmot Cancer Center and the construction of a new Golisano Children’s Hospital, the need for upgrades and expansion of imaging services space remains, according to Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD), CEO of the Medical Center.

“This plan addresses our urgent need for appropriate, accessible space for imaging services. Not only do today’s technologies require more room, we’re also focused on the comfort and privacy of our patients and families. “Plus, this new building will be in a less congested area near the Medical Center and close to the expressway,” Berk says.﻿

inbriefARTIST: Jeremiah Johnson of Rochester helped decorate a beam for the new Golisano Children’s Hospital. (Photo: Ken Huth)

Kids Mark Milestone at Hospital Site

For one day in October it was OK for kids to write on the walls—or at least on a steel beam.

During a celebration to mark the positioning of the final structural beams for the new Golisano Children’s Hospital, pediatric patients were invited to the construction site to decorate a beam with their names, hand- and footprints, and other personal touches.

The new $145-million tower, located on Crittenden Boulevard and attached to the Medical Center and Strong Memorial Hospital, will feature eight floors and about 245,000 square feet of space dedicated to children and their families. The new hospital is scheduled to open in 2015.﻿

NPR Series Features Eastman School in the Spring

Young classical musicians from the Rochester area will have a chance to make their national radio debut next spring when an NPR music program visits the Eastman School.

As part of a visit hosted by Rochester public broadcaster WXXI and the Eastman School, the series From the Top is scheduled to be recorded live in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre on March 19, 2014.

The episode will also feature world-renowned flutists Sir James Galway and Lady Jeanne Galway as special guests who will perform with an ensemble of wind performers.

Hosted by American classical pianist Christopher O’Riley, the series celebrates performances by and stories of extraordinary young classical musicians.

For the episode at Kodak Hall, applications are being accepted from area teens who are classical instrumentalists, vocalists, and composers between the ages of 8 and 18. Applications must be submitted by December 2013 in order to be considered for the March show.

Visit WXXI.org/fromthetop for details about the Rochester performance. The weekly NPR radio show is heard Sundays at 5 p.m. in Rochester on WXXI-FM 91.5. Check local listings for broadcast times in other areas of the country.﻿

FALL SEASONS

Meliora Magic

The Yellowjackets roll to their 200th Fauver victory in a homecoming game that almost didn’t happen.

By Dennis O’Donnell

sports_mainQUARTERBACK KEEPER: Dean Kennedy ’13 breaks free for one of his two rushing touchdowns, leading Rochester to a 38–13 homecoming win over Alfred State. (Photo: Keith Walters for University Communications)

Senior quarterback Dean Kennedy ran for two touchdowns and threw for two more to lead Rochester to a 38–13 homecoming victory over Alfred State at Fauver Stadium during Meliora Weekend.

It was Rochester’s 200th win at Fauver since the stadium was dedicated in October 1930, and it almost didn’t take place at all. The Yellowjackets’ original opponent for the game, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, was forced to drop out when this fall’s government shutdown meant that the Mariners wouldn’t be able to travel to Rochester.

Alfred State, a provisional Division III member of the NCAA, agreed to replace the Merchant Marine Academy just a few days before the October 12 game.

Kennedy threw touchdown passes of 80 yards to sophomore Derek Wager and five yards to senior Thomas Hayes in the first quarter. He ran for a 15-yard TD in the second quarter and ran 41 yards to score in the third quarter. The Yellowjackets improved to 3–2 after homecoming and were 4–2 overall with three games remaining in 2013. Their record in the Liberty League was 2–1.

Kennedy is the first Rochester quarterback in eight years to rush for more than 100 yards. Aaron Molisani ’08 ran for 103 yards on Oct. 8, 2005, in a 32–9 victory over the Merchant Marine on Long Island.

The other homecoming touchdowns came on a three-yard run by freshman Myles Allen and a four-yard run by freshman Shane Saucier.

In other highlights from the fall:

Men’s soccer: The team had a 10–2–1 record going into the last week of October. The Yellowjackets were 3–1 in the UAA and ranked No. 18 nationally. Rochester defeated No. 12 Brandeis, 3–2, on the road in mid-October and then beat Washington, 2–1, in overtime in St. Louis when Alex Swanger ’15 scored 52 seconds into sudden death.

Women’s soccer: Riding the goal scoring of Jessica Smith ’14 and steady play in goal from Allison Bernstein ’14 and Aubrey Jaicks ’15, the team was 5–5–3 with a week left in October. Smith scored 10 goals—four game winners—and topped the UAA scoring chart. Bernstein had a 1.66 goals-against average and one shutout in eight appearances. Jaicks had a 1.00 mark in six matches and had three shutouts.

Field hockey: The Yellowjackets rose as high as No. 14 in the Division III poll heading into key Liberty League matches at Skidmore and St. Lawrence. Rochester was 13–2, 4–0 in the league. That included a 3–1 win over William Smith on Meliora Weekend. Six players had 14 or more points in an upscale offense that scored 62 goals through 15 matches. Michelle Relin ’16 led with 14 goals and eight assists for 32 points. Lindsey Randall ’15 had seven goals and nine assists for 23 points. Goaltending was shared between Madison Wagner ’14 (1.39 GAA) and Tara Lamberti ’15 (1.23 GAA).

Men’s and women’s cross country: Both teams were ranked in the Division III polls on a weekly basis. In the last meet before the state championships, the men finished fourth out of 34 schools at the Oberlin College Inter-Regional Rumble. Adam Pacheck ’14 was first for Rochester. The women finished eighth of 31 teams, led by Catherine Knox ’16 who was 20th overall.

Volleyball: Headed into the New York Regional Challenge at RIT in late October with an 8–22 overall mark (0–7 UAA), Rochester had two prime wins during the year: beating 23rd-ranked Salisbury University, 3–2, in mid-September, then shutting down RIT, 3–0, a week later. Savannah Benton ’14 and Jennie Ford ’16 were the top two in kills per game.

Rowing: One of the prime results from the fall was a sixth place finish by the women’s rowing team at the Head of the Charles Regatta, one of the most widely respected fall regattas. The Yellowjackets went into the event as a lottery team, which meant that they didn’t have an automatic starting position, and wound up starting in 24th place.

Golf: The team will have the opportunity to host the Liberty League championships in April after winning the league’s fall meet. The Yellowjackets won the meet by 12 strokes over RPI. Nick Palladino ’14 was the medalist with a 10-under 134. Will Mallia ’14 and Matt van Niekerk ’17 finished in the top eight.

Men’s tennis: The Yellowjackets were 3–0 in the fall, dominated the St. Lawrence Fall Classic, and had two players reach the Round of 16 at the ITA regional championships—Josh Jachuck ’16 and Julian Danko ’15.

Women’s tennis: The team won its only dual meet of the year. Christine Ho ’16 reached the quarterfinals of the ITA doubles championship and the consolation final of singles. Two players reached the singles quarterfinals at the New York state championships.

Dennis O’Donnell is director of athletic communications for the Department of Athletics and Recreation.﻿

ATHLETIC HONORS

Hall of Fame Inducts New Class

sports_hall (Photo: Susan Kost)

HONOREES: New members of the Athletics Hall of Fame are (front row) Gregory Sutton ’89 (football), Kelly Jean Peters Spurlock ’97 (volleyball and swimming), Jennifer DePrez Spiker ’94 (soccer), and Paul Steele ’81 (squash); (back row) John Norris ’68 (baseball and football), Anthony Daniele ’71 (football), John-Eric Andersson ’95 (soccer and swimming), James Case ’62 (baseball and swimming), and Robert Ryan ’75 (track and field).﻿

Remembering an Eastman Leader

Douglas Lowry brought warmth, wit, and transformational leadership to the Eastman School.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

lowryA COMPLETED VISION: The Eastman School’s East Wing (below), which George Eastman had envisioned, was completed under Lowry’s tenure, as was the renovated Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Lowry’s composition Geo commemorated the hall’s opening. (Photo: Kurt Brownell)

In the hours following the official announcement that Douglas Lowry, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean Emeritus of the Eastman School, had died, a crowd gathered.

The site was Eastman’s Main Hall, the wide corridor with the prosaic name that from that day forward would be known as Lowry Hall.

By the time Jamal Rossi took to a podium, the gathering had extended from the easternmost staircase to the western entranceway. Named dean upon Lowry’s resignation just nine days before, Rossi, Eastman’s longtime professor of woodwinds and, as executive associate dean, Lowry’s closest associate at the school, remarked on the gathering and its meaning:

“This—this alone—right here, this view. What a remarkable tribute to a remarkable person.”

Lowry was named dean of the Eastman School in 2007. He came amidst a transition in which the school was making major investments in facilities and seeking greater visibility in a rapidly changing environment in which no music school, no matter how distinguished, could take an illustrious position for granted.

lowry (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In the spring of 2011, University Trustee Martin Messinger ’49E and his wife, Joan, decided to endow the Eastman deanship, underscoring not only their commitment to the school, but their confidence in Lowry’s leadership.

That September—the same month in which he was officially installed as the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean—Lowry was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

lowryPARTNER: “This is hallowed ground, and we’re happy we could have been part of your lives,” Marcia Lowry told the gathering in the newly named Lowry Hall. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

He worked through his illness and treatments. As dean, he endured a heavy travel schedule, as he sought to build relationships around the country and globe. As a composer, he continued to create music.

His six years at Eastman were jam-packed with accomplishments in both of those roles.

The renovation of Eastman Theatre to become Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre was completed under his leadership. His composition, Geo, was commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra to celebrate the opening of Kodak Hall in October 2009.

Jeff Beal ’85E, an Emmy Award–winning composer for film and television, praised Geo, a five-part, motion-filled, cinematic musical journey Lowry said was inspired by George Eastman’s role in developing the motion picture, and by the Eastman Theatre’s early history as a movie house. “Geo has a classicism that’s very literate, but also a joy to it that isn’t trivial,” says Beal. “Celebratory pieces are looked at as banal. But Geo is just a really genuine, joyful, classy tribute.”

Lowry oversaw the construction of Eastman’s East Wing, a part of the school originally envisioned by George Eastman that includes Hatch Recital Hall and other up-to-date performance, rehearsal, and teaching spaces.

Last February, the Rochester Philharmonic premiered another of Lowry’s compositions that celebrated the Rochester region’s distinguished past: The Freedom Zephyr, a tribute to the Underground Railroad that combined music with texts by Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Select Compositions

The Freedom Zephyr (2013). A celebration of the Underground Railroad. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, with narrator Paul Burgett ’68E, ’76E (PhD) and guest conductor Ward Stare.

Wind Religion (2013). To commemorate the 60th birthday of the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

Geo (2009). To commemorate the opening of Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Christopher Seaman, director.

Good to Go (2008). Trio for oboe, horn, and piano. Premiered at the International Horn Society Convention, Denver, Colo.

Between Blues and Hard Places (2007). Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Chamber Players.

Exordium Nobile (2003). Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Järvi, director.

Blue Mazda (2003). Monodrama for soprano, brass, piano, and percussion. Piece a’ Brevis (2003). For four trumpets. Recorded on New Dimensions (Summit Records) by the Freiburg Trumpet Ensemble.

Suburban Measures (1993). For trumpet and organ. Recorded on 20th Century Music for Trumpet and Organ (BIS) by Anthony Plog (trumpet) and Hans-Ola Ericsson (organ).

These were only his most tangible accomplishments. Alone, they constitute “an amazing legacy,” says Rossi. But, he adds, “I’m not sure that’s what his greatest impact was.”

“As musicians, we talk all the time about what separates a great performance, somebody who plays beautifully, with great sound and amazing technique, from a real artist,” says Rossi. “For Doug, the ability to connect with people was his artistry.”

The ability to connect and communicate—no small matter in any leadership role—is especially important in stewarding an evolving institution that has so much history behind it.

“We deal, in a way, with the past. We don’t discard things from the 17th century because we’re now in the 21st,” says Vincent Lenti ’60E, ’62E (MA), professor of piano and historian of the Eastman School who has taught at the school for more than 50 years.

And yet, he notes, as tastes, demographics, and modes of creation and distribution of music evolve, schools must respond. The result has been division over the very mission of music schools. Is the job of faculty at a school like Eastman to train fine musicians? Or should Eastman faculty also focus on helping students create ways to make a living through their art?

“There are people who say it’s not my job as a teacher to get students jobs. My job is just to teach them,” says Lenti. “But we wouldn’t survive very long if we kept turning out a lot of wonderful people who couldn’t get employed.” When necessary, he says, Lowry “had a way of coaxing people” to understand that their roles as mentors had broadened.

Lowry was among the arts leaders who recognized that helping students prepare for jobs meant reimagining ways of connecting with audiences. Among his projects was the Paul R. Judy Center for Applied Research, launched this past summer. The center, responding to the declining audiences for major American orchestras, aims to promote research into and experimentation with alternative models for ensembles.

His quest to spur innovation, however, didn’t preclude active support of traditional models. Christopher Seaman, conductor laureate of the Rochester Philharmonic, says, “From the standpoint of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and myself as its former director, Doug was the perfect dean of the Eastman School. He loved the orchestra, he understood its excellence, and everything he did for us was aimed at the benefit of both organizations and their symbiotic relationship.”

In His Own Words

“In the coming years, Eastman will take a hard look at the breathtaking changes in the way that music is experienced and consumed, and examine the emerging relationship between music and other art forms, particularly new media. We need to lead this exploration, define its path of events, revive live music.”

—Quoted in Eastman Notes, Summer 2007

“The notion of vigorously connecting your music with other art forms is not a new idea. Stravinsky’s association with Diaghilev brought us Petrushka, Firebird, and Le Sacre du Printemps. . . . This spirit of collaboration will be central to the survival and splendor of music’s next great era, as music tumbles about in the combustion chamber of the real world, the robust theater of ideas; not just musical ideas inspired by somebody else’s musical ideas, but the mosh pit of literature, visual art, drama; of the sciences, of social friction, of politics; in short, the mosh pit of the human condition—the human condition with which you must and will engage. Trust me, it needs you.”

—Eastman Commencement Address, May 2008

“Just a few short months ago, we sent that next generation of musical leaders out in the world. Our guest was Clive Gillinson, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall. Clive began his speech rather inauspiciously, at least from my perspective. He declared to this sea of graduates something along these lines: ‘In 20 years, 90 percent of you will be doing something different than what you originally planned.’ Understand that the house was packed to the rafters with the parents and families of graduates. I remember thinking, ‘Clive had better be good on the rebound.’ Which he was, of course. His provocative message really wasn’t that our Eastman graduates would abandon their dreams. His point was that those very core musical dreams may likely take on a different form at some point.”

—Convocation Address, September 2010

“Music has always been a public art, with some part of it, I guess, held in private reserve. But one of my fears is that that private reserve has gotten larger and larger, and the public stake has gotten smaller and smaller. Maybe because we spend so much time indoors, we become very gifted at wrapping up our music into these impressive conceptual packages so that we can put them up on the shelf for adoration by us and our peers. But that’s not what Bach wanted. Shakespeare wrote enormously complicated plays, but he wrote them for the public. Bach and Shakespeare both wanted their music to be heard. When music becomes privatized, it loses its tether to the general public. So how can we be surprised when the public turns elsewhere?”

—Eastman Commencement Address, May 2013

Eastman faculty and alumni from across musical genres noted that Lowry was expert in posing questions—questions that brought clarity to debates about the mission of the school, the role of the arts in society, and the relationship of music to other arts and to other human enterprises. And he got people to join in conversations.

Maria Schneider ’85E (MM), a Grammy Award–winning jazz composer, recalls Lowry approaching her for her thoughts on Eastman’s jazz program. “He was enthusiastic to hear ideas, and I came at him with a thousand of them. Sometimes he would joke, ‘Oh, my God, here comes Maria! Run!’ But he liked it. He knew I would be throwing out a thousand things I could imagine happening at Eastman.”

Mark Volpe ’79E, managing director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, stepped up his involvement with Eastman at Lowry’s request, joining the Eastman National Council, an advisory board Lowry was eager to expand, and accepting an invitation to deliver the school’s commencement address in 2009.

“He was so wonderful in laying out the case for the school and for alumni involvement,” says Volpe. “Relationships”—with alumni, arts leaders, University leaders, with faculty, and with stakeholders in Eastman’s home of downtown Rochester—“will be his ultimate legacy.”

James VanDemark, professor of double bass and cochair of the strings, harp, and guitar department, says Lowry’s openness to people and ideas set a positive tone at the school.

“Something that was very evident about Doug from the day he arrived on Gibbs Street was that he had a very broad view of the world. He had a completely informed, nuanced view of the musical world, and the world in general,” VanDemark says. “He was remarkably devoid of any kind of artistic prejudice.”

Born in Spokane, Wash., in 1951, Lowry grew up in Idaho. He played piano, guitar, and trombone as a youth, and married his high school sweetheart, Marcia. He started out as a pre-med student at Idaho State University, but quickly changed course, transferring to the University of Arizona to study music theory and composition. He pursued graduate study at the University of Southern California’s music school, began his professional career there, and rose to associate dean and chair of the conducting department. Before coming to Eastman in 2007, Lowry was dean of the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music.

Among the close-knit community of music school leaders, Lowry’s death was mourned not only as a personal loss, but a loss to the profession as well.

Joseph Polisi, president of the Juilliard School, noted that arts institutions either rise or fall together. And what happens at one matters elsewhere, especially if that one is a place like Eastman.

“Eastman’s historic role is extremely important,” Polisi says, adding, “it’s not every day that you get a guy like Doug.

He had a really excellent sense of vision about where the arts profession should be going. And he coupled that vision with the ability to implement, which is a rare combination.”

Robert Blocker, dean of Yale’s school of music, reflected on the relationship with Lowry that he enjoyed for nearly 25 years.

Through their wide-ranging conversations, “There’s not much we didn’t touch on,” he says. And while their roles as music school deans demanded they occasionally competed with one another, Blocker says, “We encouraged each other. We were friends working for the same larger goals.”

INTRODUCING RETTNER HALL

A Hub of Creativity

rettnerRETTNER HALL: Named for University Trustee Ronald Rettner (below) and housing programs for digital media and engineering, the new building was formally dedicated with the help of Rabbi Asher Yaras (top) during a Meliora Weekend ceremony (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Visitors to campus for Meliora Weekend had a chance to tour Rochester’s newest building. Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation was formally opened as a hub for the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering on the River Campus. Named in honor of Ronald Rettner, a University trustee, entrepreneur, business executive, developer, and advocate of higher education whose lead gift made the building possible, the hall features recording studios, high-end computers, 3-D printers, and other technology.

“This is the first building in the country that integrates engineering, computer science, art, graphic design, and music,” Rettner said during the dedication ceremonies. “It encourages student collaboration. It’s team-oriented—students working and learning together and from each other.” The new building also houses two of the University’s newest majors, digital media studies and audio and music engineering.

rettner (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Down in the Chapel

In the chapel of a maximum-security prison, a scholar of religion searches for lessons about life, justice, and spirituality—and the forces that shape them.

By Joshua Dubler

prison (Photo: John W. Tomac)

How, in God’s name, has it come to this?

Any answer can only be partial, but here’s a survey: by a bounteous universe (honor it by what ever name you choose), by a sun that makes things outgrow their bounds, by a nature that continues to slowly come undone, and, lastly, at the fragile margins, by the actions and inactions of women and men.

Somewhere along the way, eons after it all began, clans of men, women, and children began to till the earth. Affixing themselves to the land and to the calendar by which their crops were sown and reaped, these men and women gradually developed a set of activities, some immediately germane to material flourishing and some seemingly extraneous to it. Here we might take special interest in the “less useful” activities: our forebears cut symbols into rock, they fashioned semblances out of pigment, they made music, and they danced. They played games. The children watched them do it, the parents showed them how, and the practices survived them all.

Much later, in the same corner of the world, in a trend spanning roughly a millennium and a half—and henceforth the historical record will substantiate our conjecture—a handful of influential visionaries were credited with gaining access to a realm of reality beyond reality, whereby they received, from an invisible being regarded as to some degree sovereign over all that they saw and didn’t see, a set of amendments to the laws by which they lived. Let us call the commemoration of these wondrous encounters and the enactment of their consequent prescriptions religion (though as a category presuming to isolate an elementary component of our species’ nature, religion will only emerge much later). On their merits, too, as well as via conquest, trade, and emigration, these cultural and religious forms spread, mutating with each and every transmission. Eventually, they even traversed the ocean. Toward the very end of our story, in a uniquely idealistic and opportunistic hour, a country was founded.

It is here, in the new American republic, that we stumble upon the curious innovation that will one day furnish our seven days their improbable setting. For it was in Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia that a group of middle-class Quakers and their fellow religious progressives, having grown disgusted and horrified with the going forms through which public depravity was censured, revolutionized punishment. On the strength of their mobilization, the age of the stockade, the whip, and the gallows was declared over. In the modern era, punishment was to be softened, transformed from a system that extracted recompense from the body into one intent on mending the soul. Henceforth, the debauched offender was to be removed from his corrupting environment and placed in a penitentiary, where, by means of a solitary encounter with the divine light dwelling within him, he would be reformed. At Philadelphia’s famed Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened in 1829, the aspiration of holy encounter was literalized architecturally with the placement of skylights—“eyes of God”—through which the sequestered prisoner might come to see himself as the Almighty saw him, slough off his sin, and repent.

prison (Photo: John W. Tomac)

In theory, the penitentiary was to have been the quintessentially modern institution. And by means of surveillance and instruction, its product, the transformed man, henceforth to be known as the prisoner, was to be the archetypal bearer of what theorist Michel Foucault would a century and a half later call the “modern soul.” As iconically illustrated via Jeremy Bentham’s idealized prison, the panopticon, Foucault’s elegantly simple idea was this: if people are unsure whether or not they are being watched, they will assume responsibility for policing themselves.

In this manner, as a properly disciplined modern subject, the prisoner was to have been rougher hewn, for sure, but in the end fashioned not all that differently than the factory worker, the soldier, the student, and the patient—a man endowed in body and mind with the requisite know-how to act (and only to act) in the productive manner befitting his peculiar social position.

Things didn’t turn out as planned. The silence and solitude of Eastern State inspired madness more than rectitude. Before long, as incarceration became the norm, solitude itself was sacrificed to overcrowding. Reformist zeal proved fleeting. By the mid–19th century, the penitentiary’s founding aspiration had been largely abandoned, leaving the institution branded with its name to hobble on without coherent philosophical justification, a machine without a ghost. In the public conceptualization of crime, the pendulum swung—much like it did again in the final decades of the 20th century—from Quaker environmentalism to Calvinist fatalism. Moral turpitude came to be seen not as a collective product of rotten environments but as the intrinsic nature of rotten men, and, gradually, as driven by the shaping power of the ownership class and the spirit of American racism, the modern prison grew into the appropriate instrument for the infliction of just deserts.

In the chapel, this epic history is also local history. For when Eastern State was mothballed in 1971, its prisoners were dispatched to Graterford Prison. Back then Graterford’s population was only half of what it is today. But then came the wars on crime, then on drugs, and, eventually, on terror. Interests lobbied, people organized (and failed to organize), government officials did their things, and the system changed with the times. More and more prison time was handed out to more and more people, such that something like 2.3 million Americans will spend tonight in prison or in jail.

‘Unlikely Historical Contingencies’

American religious history provides one way to account for the array of dispositions on display in the chapel. By linking imprisonment to reform, the religious beginnings of the penitentiary left their institutional traces, as did, more diffusely, the second and third Great Awakenings, when practices empowering individuals to draw their own theological conclusions proliferated, thereby presaging ever more innovation. Recent trends have been more directly determinative: the Great Migration north of African Americans during the early decades of the 20th century and the attendant urban improvisations that made Islam in its varied articulations part of the black religious vernacular; mid-century litigation undertaken by religious outsiders that stretched the narrow conception of what qualified as protected free exercise under the First Amendment; the prisoners’-rights movement of the 1960s, in which religious prisoners, predominantly members of the Nation of Islam, agitated for and won rights to possess religious literature and ritual implements and to assemble for prayer; the explosion by more than 600 percent of the national prison population over the final three decades of the millennium; the pro- religion spirit of our political era that has brought new public and private support for religious programming on behalf of incarcerated men and women even as other educational and therapeutic opportunities have dissipated; and, at Graterford, the 1995 raid and subsequent chapel shake-up. By enabling some moves and circumscribing others, this unlikely sequence of historical contingencies—sometimes recalled, mostly forgotten, and always contested—lives on in the chapel’s practices.

‘Thoughts Come in a Flood’

For an account more attentive to religious experience, individual men may furnish a second starting point. At Graterford, one could make the case, religion truly starts where William James says it does: with “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.”

Having arrived in the prison undone, men must learn to survive confinement, one another, and themselves. Many did not have rich interior lives before, but now the thoughts come in a flood: anxiety in search of assurance, suffering in search of language, anger in search of a foe, chaos in search of order. Of course, these men were once children, too, and do not arrive in the prison as blank slates. They come equipped with religious proclivities born of their families and communities: in the past, there was a grandmother or mother who preached the Word at them, in vain; there was a voice inside their head that knew when they were doing wrong; like the majority of Americans, without thinking about it too much, they’ve always known that God is who He said He was.

Whether in solitary confinement or in the general population, days at Graterford are frightening, boring, and exhausting. One gets by the best he can. At night, the distractions fade away and the thoughts rush in. It is here where the prisoner is forced, in James’s language, to “stand in relation to what ever [he] consider[s] the divine”—which is how many religious men will soon conceptualize the echo of their thoughts. Here anxiety comes for assurance, suffering to make sense, and anger to be honed; here the self begins to erect an order, and here the terrible secrets that a man must keep to survive become the things that only me and God know about.

‘Religion Proves a Trove’

From the prison’s vantage point, however, all this comes only later. First come the steel and concrete, then authority structures, regulations, and only then the prisoners’ religious ideas and practices. And what may we say of these practices? Foremost, as can be said of any social forms that have been around since longer than yesterday: they work. Just as mass incarceration works—not to rehabilitate and reintegrate prisoners (far from it!) but rather to reproduce itself, grow, crowd out alternatives, and become normal—so, too, for these men is religion made to work.

Living in prison is a crazy thing to make men do, but the overwhelming majority of convicts will give it a shot. Strangely and twistedly, men are conditioned by the building, the administration, by the staff, by their peers, and by themselves into making it through another day, another week, another year. The incarcerated men draw on all resources available, and toward this end, religion proves a trove. An illustration might help:

If the convict is alone, shared tribal marks suggest religious faith to be one way of finding his people. More likely, if one already has people from back in the street, then their differentiating symbols and postures are easy to assimilate into one’s style, one’s affect, and one’s language. By aping those who’ve already figured out how to do it, men begin to make their lives in here. In this process, there is certainly room for religious meaning. From their pockets, the acculturators pull out penciled Bible verses or Qur’anic surahs, words that they say help them get by. But these bulbs will take a while to flower. More critical at this stage is finding one’s footing. Because early on danger is especially acute, one must pay close attention, and check his impulses. If one forgets to mind himself, then a prisoner or a guard will serve as an instructor and burn the memory into his body. But this is less common than it used to be. More likely, should one forget, the task of building self- awareness will be subcontracted to time, a bottomless stock of which is stored in the hole.

After 90 days, the prisoner returns to the block one didactic scar richer. Following a brief spell of clairvoyance, anguish dissipates and boredom returns.

Primed for action by his fellow prisoners, by his cousin who once did time, and, principally—like the rest of us—by what he’s seen on television, the convict is pleasantly disappointed to discover that very little, in fact, happens here. Bored one night, with his cellie asleep, the TV out, but the light still on—it could be weeks or years into his sentence—he picks up his Bible. After flipping through its crisp pages, he finds the recommended verses. For the first time in ages, he reads.

Now something is happening. The next night he picks up where he left off. Maybe it’s his need, maybe it’s his vague sense of readiness, maybe it’s the brute power of the printed word, but for what ever reason, he finds that when he reads these verses, he suddenly knows something in a way that he hasn’t known anything before. Or perhaps the novice is illiterate. Religious traditions are transmitted orally most of the time, and here it is no different. Through a third party, he receives word to come down to the chapel on Sunday, that his cousin will be there to meet him. He goes. Jesus, it’s good to see him. They hug and reminisce and get dirty looks from the ushers. When it’s over, they agree to do it again. And another time. Before long, going to the chapel becomes a normal thing to do. It proves much more enjoyable here than when he was a kid. He enjoys listening to the gospel music, or even to the sermon. Even when he’s bored, there’s a feeling of camaraderie in being bored with others. And while two years back he wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told him, when Sunday comes around he’s as excited for chapel as he is for the Eagles. Well, almost.

One tough Wednesday, he gets bullied on the shop floor. He tells himself that if he can just hold it together until Sunday, everything will be okay.

prison (Photo: John W. Tomac)

Meanwhile, some of the dudes he saw in the chapel, he sees around on the block. They share a laugh. They start sitting together in the chow hall. These guys give praise to Jesus a lot, and that’s a bit odd, as is their talk of how they were saved on such and such a day. Other behaviors make more immediate sense. He becomes attentive to what he’s eating: I mean, this food will kill you if you don’t watch out! Once a week his new buddies walk the yard, and he joins them. Other than to work, his weekly trips to the chapel and the yard are the only times he gets off the block.

One Sunday during service, the sun is shining and the choir is singing, he is overcome by a strange sense of euphoria, a feeling that the worst has passed and that, in the end, everything is going to be all right. He tells the other guys about it over chow. That feeling, they tell him, is the Holy Spirit reaching out to save him. A few weeks later, maybe something happens again. As he’s been prepped to expect, he feels somehow like a new man: clean, absolved, and deeply grateful. Or maybe nothing happens at all. Instead, ever so slowly, the Jesus talk that once seemed so weird ceases to be so. The man begins to make the religious language his own and, as such, comes to understand his own experience through it. One of the things he understands intuitively is that he is no longer the same person he was when he first came to prison.

So religion at Graterford works: it works to replicate itself inside its residents’ bodies and minds; once there, it helps to pass the time, to give a man tools to survive this boring, scary, and sad place, both in isolation and together with his fellow men. It works to institute self-control, conditions discipline of conduct, of diet, and, especially, of thought. It gives the prisoner the framework to think through who he is, what he has done, what will happen when he dies, and how he might never go home. Or, just as likely, it provides objects for contemplation so that he doesn’t have to think about such dire things. If perhaps never to the stark degree achieved by the jail’s edifice and regimen, as a lived practice, a prisoner’s religion gives shape to his world.

In its perverse and roundabout way, then, religion at Graterford honors the penitentiary’s founding mission, producing men who regard themselves as transformed, and indeed, in a variety of ways, they are.

The essay is adapted from Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). © Joshua Dubler. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Belief Behind Bars

prison_sideJoshua Dubler (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“Prisons,” says Joshua Dubler, “are the closest thing I have to a calling.”

When the assistant professor of religion was a child, his mother worked at Rikers Island, the primary jail system for New York City, and Dubler says that he has “lived the age of American mass incarceration, where the prison population has exploded by about 500 percent.”

A new book by Dubler, Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, is the product of fieldwork he carried out in Pennsylvania’s Graterford maximum-security prison in 2005 and 2006. It brings together his commitment to exposing the realities of the American prison system and his curiosity about religion.

“I was raised quite observantly by people who are fundamentally kind of agnostic—agnostic Orthodox Jews. By the time I figured that out, I found that very interesting,” Dubler says. He earned his doctorate in religion at Princeton for the project that is now Down in the Chapel.

The scholarly book, which reads much like a novel, follows over the course of a week a group of about a dozen prisoners who work in Graterford’s chapel. Dubler himself figures as a character in the book, as he traces his interactions with the men: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Catholics, an atheist. The chapel is a kind of workplace, where Dubler and the others discuss their beliefs, their world views, and their experiences with the prison system. He calls the ways that the men adjust to a life term in prison “a central drama of the book.”

“When I’m not in the habit of going to the prison, it’s shaking,” Dubler says. “It’s a kind of monument to human waste and human pessimism. But once you’re there every day, it’s like any other environment: you acclimate to it, and it becomes normal.” He began the work convinced that he didn’t want to produce a piece of disinterested scholarship, but initially he tried to operate simply as an observer. He quickly found that impossible. “So I got to a place where I was mixing it up with people. That was fun for them, and fun for me. People, especially with something they care about tremendously—which for most of these men is their religious beliefs and practices—they’re excited to talk about it. I think I made their lives temporarily less boring.”

There are two assumptions people tend to make about prisoners’ relationship to religion, both wrong, Dubler says. The first assumption, based on what he calls “a kind of secularized Protestant theology,” rests on the notion that genuine religion “is about conviction in your heart, and because we tend to define prisoners by their crime, we just assume that when a prisoner is pleading a kind of righteousness,” he is being insincere. The opposing assumption, he says, is that prisoners come to religion because they have nothing else in their lives. “Religion is more complicated than either of those frameworks allow,” he says, an idea that he illustrates through the conversations that fill his book.

“At my most ambitious, I want readers to think about their own role with respect to American mass incarceration,” Dubler says. “As recently as 1970, we had about 300,000 people in prison in this country. Since then, our population has doubled—and now we have 2.2 million people in prison. We have 5 percent of the world’s population, yet 25 percent of its prisoners. We’re in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in locking people up.” And as the prison population has grown, he notes, it has done so in a racially disproportionate way, with Hispanics almost twice as likely, and African Americans almost six times as likely, to be incarcerated as whites.

Dubler says that he hopes that Down in the Chapel will lead people to question the existing system and to begin to contemplate alternatives.

—Kathleen McGarvey

She’s Queen of the Night

It’s “balls to the wall, give it all you got,” says soprano Kathryn Blomshield Lewek ’06E, ’08E (MM) of the operatic role she relishes.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

lewekGRAND OLD OPERA: Lewek, who performed as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute with the Nashville Opera in April, will debut at the Metropolitan Opera in the same role in December. (Photo: Courtesy of the Nashville Opera)

It’s been the subject of conversation on Gossip Girl. It’s accompanied TV ads hawking everything from smartphones to sexual stimulants. And for singers, it’s known as one of the most difficult arias in all of opera: “Der Hölle Rache,” which translates as “The Vengeance of Hell,” in the second act of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

It marks the moment when the Queen of the Night, wrapped in fury, hands her daughter, Pamina, a knife, making her promise she’ll use it to slaughter the Queen’s rival, Sarastro.

Requiring extraordinary range and dazzling vocal runs, it’s a feat of vocal athleticism that Kathryn Blomshield Lewek ’06E, ’08E (MM) is known to perform exceptionally well.

“I don’t think it actually has the highest written notes ever in an aria, but it’s right up there,” she says from her home studio in Fairfield County, Conn.

Lewek, who’s sung in a variety of operatic roles, oratorios, and requiems during her still infant career, has sung Queen of the Night all over the world, including on prestigious stages such as the Deutsche Oper Berlin and at Austria’s Bregenz Festival. In December, she makes her debut at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in that role.

She says the role still gives her butterflies every time she performs it.

“Every night, it makes me nervous. Everybody always says to me, ‘Oh my gosh, Katie, it’s always just right on, and I don’t know how you do that, and it’s great every night.’ But I’m still worrying every night that it’s not going to come out.”

Like most singers, she’ll often try to vary her performances. But not in this role.

“It’s one of those things where you have to just let your body take over and you have to do what you know how to do,” she says. “If I’m doing another role, I try to make it different and exciting every night in a different way, and with Queen, you just have to sing it exactly how you know how to sing it.”

Queen of the Night is a prime example of coloratura soprano—the highest soprano voice, embellished with vocal runs and trills. Lewek sang in a lower soprano range for much of her time as a student at Eastman, and called her high notes her “party trick notes.” “I would only ever sing them when I’d had a glass of wine,” she says.

lewekAIMING HIGH: Lewek’s ability to sing coloratura soprano is considered unusual in younger singers. (Photo: Courtesy of Kathryn Blomshield Lewek ’06E, ’08E (MM))

In 2009, she had something of an epiphany as a fellow at the vocal program at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif. Under the tutelage of Marilyn Horne, she was encouraged to sing higher and higher.

“She just kind of wanted to see how high I could sing,” Lewek recalls.

Eventually, Horne made a suggestion Lewek found surprising. “She said, ‘You know, I think maybe you should work on some coloratura repertoire.’ And I said, in my very respectful way that you would only say to someone who was such a huge star, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”

But she listened to Horne and began studying coloratura soprano with her current vocal coach, soprano Diana Soviaro.

Robert McIver, professor of voice at Eastman and Lewek’s primary instructor during all six years of her residence, says he’s not surprised Lewek is singing coloratura soprano. “She developed a facility fairly early on in her study to be able to run her voice very quickly and well,” he says. That said, he adds, “I think the shock was that at such an early age she would do Queen of the Night.”

Indeed, at 30 years old, Lewek’s vocal chords are barely fully developed. “It’s like the soft spot on a baby’s head,” Lewek says of the vocal chords of most singers under 30. She remembers McIver’s words to her: “He’d say, ‘That sounds great, but remember, you’re still a baby. You’re totally going to change in the next 10 years.’ ”

“All voices mature at different physiological rates, but generally for a soprano, all of their physical equipment doesn’t arrive until they’re about 29 years old,” says McIver, noting that in both men and women, in all ranges, vocal development lags behind general physical development. “That doesn’t mean they don’t sing beautifully before that, but the process is certainly made easier when all of the physical aspects of the instrument are in place,” he says, referring to the muscular development of the vocal chords.

“People say I have vocal chords of steel,” Lewek says. “I don’t know if that’s right.”

“You do get to know your own voice. That’s a really important aspect of being a singer. To know your limits and also to push yourself at times. You have to push yourself to see what you’re capable of.”

Lessons of Lockerbie

This December marks the 25th anniversary of a terrorist act that cost two Rochester students their lives and sent an alumnus on an international legal mission.

By Scott Hauser

lockerbieCEREMONY: Eric Coker ’90 (above, left) and Katharine Hollister ’90 (above, right) are memorialized on a plaque near Morey Hall, where Jaclyn Reinhart ’14 placed a wreath during a Meliora Weekend ceremony attended by Eric’s father, Tom, and stepmother, Dorothy (couple on the path at left), and led by Mark Zaid ’89 (podium). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Mark Zaid ’89 had already turned his attention to his upcoming spring graduation when he heard about the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. The news caught him up short as the details emerged: the transatlantic flight from London’s Heathrow Airport to New York was carrying 243 passengers, including 35 American students returning from a London study abroad program sponsored by Syracuse University.

Two of the passengers—Eric Coker and Katharine Hollister—were Rochester students, both from the Class of 1990.

Zaid, who had been in London during the spring 1988 semester as part of a British Parliament program, remembered making a similar flight just months earlier. He had met Hollister on a few occasions when the paths of Rochester schoolmates crossed. Long interested in history, politics, and the law, he found he couldn’t let go of the notion that someone should be held accountable for what was soon demonstrated to be an act of terrorism.

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

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

“When I started law school in August 1989, I went in specifically to study how we could go after the terrorists,” says Zaid. “I’ve been working on this since day one of law school.”

This December 21 marks the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, an act of terrorism that until Sept. 11, 2001, was the deadliest single attack involving American civilians. A total of 270 people died, including 189 Americans as well as 11 people in Lockerbie. Suspicion for the attack ultimately turned to Libya, setting off an international legal battle that in 2001 resulted in the conviction of one of two suspected Libyan intelligence officers. The Libyan died in 2012 after being released by Scotland on the grounds that he was terminally ill.

During the past 25 years, Zaid has been at the forefront of efforts to represent the interests of families whose loved ones died in the attack. In 1993, he helped set up a two-person law office whose clients included a widower of a Pan Am victim, at the time the sole Pan Am family member interested in pursuing a lawsuit against Libya. Zaid helped draft federal legislation that made it easier for United States nationals to sue countries that had been designated terrorist states.

Zaid, who now heads his own law firm in Washington, D.C., eventually represented about 30 families of Pan Am victims. Frequently asked to talk about the bombing, the lawsuits, and the changes to national and international law that have come about since Lockerbie, he makes a point of speaking to alumni audiences whenever he can, including University presentations to mark both the 10th and 20th anniversaries. He was on campus for a Meliora Weekend ceremony and again in November to mark the 25th anniversary.

“I want Eric and Kate to be remembered,” says Zaid, who started a scholarship to recognize Coker and Hollister and to support a current student who is interested in the study of history and international affairs.

“I wanted to make sure I gave back to the University because that’s where it all started with me, with Eric and Kate.”

Jaclyn Reinhart ’14, a political science major from Williamsville, N.Y., who is the current recipient of the scholarship, says that although the Lockerbie bombing took place well before she was born, she understands the emotional, cultural, and political impact that such incidents can have. She appreciates that Zaid wants to help students with an interest in global history.

Her own experience studying in Australia has convinced her that most Americans should pay more attention to international news and events.

“Other parts of the world are very much concerned with what’s going on elsewhere and how their actions affect other countries,” she says.

Having a global perspective was important to Coker, says John Iovieno ’90 who met Coker during orientation activities in 1986. Outgoing and energetic, known for his love of practical jokes, Coker quickly became the center of a small group of friends.

“He was very much the glue of the group,” says Iovieno. “He was always the leader in keeping us close together and making sure we got together.”

Well versed in history and politics, Coker had traveled to the then Soviet Union on a high school program and paid close attention to international news.

Iovieno imagines that Coker might have channeled his interests into a career as a scholar focused on political or global affairs.

But he knows that Coker would have wanted his tight group of friends to stay close, something Iovieno has taken the initiative to do, and that he would have liked to know that other Rochester students continue to have opportunities similar to the ones he had.

“Perhaps they had an impact in ways that they never knew,” Iovieno says of those who died 25 years ago, particularly those who were just starting out in their lives. “Maybe things happened as a result of our knowing them that eventually turned out to be good.”

Eyewitness to Error

Psychologist Brian Cutler ’82 explores why well-intentioned eyewitnesses are often wrong.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

cutlerMORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: Certain police procedures may inadvertently encourage eyewitness misidentifications, says Cutler, a psychologist who has been a leader in state-level efforts to reform eyewitness identification procedures. (Photo: James Kachan/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Studies that gauge the reliability of eyewitness testimony go back more than a century. So, too, does evidence that eyewitness memory is often unreliable.

Yet eyewitness testimony is used routinely in criminal trials, and experts count eyewitness misidentification as a major contributor to wrongful convictions.

According to psychologist Brian Cutler ’82, inaccurate eyewitness testimony is rarely the result of ill intent. “We can often believe, with very high confidence, in the accuracy of our mistaken identifications,” he says. Yet the consequences of those errors are enormous. “Wrongful conviction is a real social problem, and it has been for decades.”

According to statistics gathered by the Innocence Project, a litigation and public policy organization affiliated with Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, eyewitness misidentification has played a role in the conviction of three-quarters of the more than 300 prisoners in the United States who have been exonerated through DNA evidence.

What Is to Be Done?

The development of DNA testing in the early 1990s led to a wave of post-conviction exonerations, and in turn, focused attention on the factors leading to wrongful convictions.

Cutler says a key turning point came in the mid-1990s, when then Attorney General Janet Reno focused her personal attention on the problem of wrongful convictions and the role of eyewitness misidentification.

“A wave of reform began to happen, and since then, a number of states and many police departments have implemented real change,” says Cutler.

Which of those changes would Cutler like to see universal? He offers six priorities:

Police should present witnesses with photo arrays or live lineups, rather than show-ups. Show-ups present the witness with only one possible suspect.

Witnesses should have no exposure to the suspect, or to a photo of the suspect, prior to seeing the photo array or lineup.

Eyewitnesses should receive cautionary instructions that indicate that the suspect may, or may not be, present in the line up or photo array.

Photo arrays or lineups should include fillers that match the witness’s description of the perpetrator.

The person who conducts the identification procedure should not know which photo or person is the suspect.

Police should assess the confidence of the witness immediately after the identification and prior to providing the witness with any information that confirms or contradicts the witness’s selection.﻿

Cutler, who has consulted for the Innocence Project, has studied eyewitness memory for more than two decades. He estimates that he’s provided expert testimony on the potential pitfalls of eyewitness accounts in more than 150 cases in both state and federal courts. The author, most recently, of Convicting the Innocent: Lessons from Psychological Research (American Psychological Association), Cutler is an associate dean and professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, an institution founded just 10 years go that he joined in 2008 to help establish its forensic psychology program.

Your research suggests that well-intentioned witnesses, often certain of what they saw, still are often mistaken. Why is that?

Humans, in general, have good memories. It’s adaptive for us to have good memories. You don’t have much difficulty, for example, recognizing people you know, such as family, friends, or coworkers.

But there are limits to our memories, and the ways that crimes often occur challenge these limits. When somebody is robbed by a perpetrator, it often happens very quickly. It’s by a stranger. There might be a weapon present. So the witness might be under high stress. The conditions don’t facilitate accurate memory.

There are other factors. We know that people are less accurate at recognizing people of other races than people of their own race. The perpetrator might be disguised, might be wearing a hat, which covers some of the cues to recognition. Witnesses are still often accurate. But they’re often mistaken.

Do bystander witnesses tend to have more accurate memories than victims?

There is some research on this. A victim might experience a lot more stress than somebody who’s watching a crime take place. A victim might be right up close, whereas a bystander witness might be 30, 40, or 60 feet away. In that case, we’d look at the impact of distance on people’s ability to perceive.

What role can the personality of the witness play in mistaken identification?

It’s true that some people are just more confident based on their personalities. For example, do you know people who are always confident, whether they’re right or wrong? Do you know people who are never confident, even though they’re often right? So sometimes witnesses are just confident on their own, and confidence is just another psychological variable.

Can police procedures play a role in mistaken identification?

Yes. Police can facilitate accurate recognition, or they can impair accurate recognition, in the way the police go about testing memories for perpetrators through things like show-ups, photo arrays, and lineups.

In cases in which police impair accurate recognition, the witness is being influenced by the police investigator. In these cases, there’s a chain of events that can make less confident witnesses more confident. For example, if a witness makes a tentative identification, and then a police officer says, “yeah, that’s who we think it is,” the witness becomes more confident. And then if the police find more evidence against the person and bring him to trial, that could make the witness more confident, so by the time they get to the stand, they think that everybody knows the guy’s guilty.

In addition, if a witness mistakenly identifies an innocent person as a suspect, the police might then bring that innocent suspect in for interrogation. And the techniques they use for interrogation, which are very successful at getting guilty people to confess, can also lead innocent people to confess. Then if the witness learns that the suspect confessed, that makes the witness even more confident.

In other words, bad evidence often leads to more bad evidence.

Masters of Rochester

briefsDRS. MASTERS & JOHNSON: William Masters ’43M (MD) and Virginia Johnson received honorary degrees from Rochester in 1987. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

The late William Masters ’43M (MD) is the subject of a new drama series on the cable television channel Showtime. Masters of Sex, which premiered in September, offers a dramatization of the life of one of the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s most famous graduates. Masters was an ambitious gynecologist whose mentor at Rochester, George Washington Corner, studied reproductive difficulties in humans and animals. Corner convinced Masters that the next frontier in understanding human sexuality lay in anatomy and physiology, rather than psychiatry.

The pioneering sex researcher, played by Michael Sheen, and his research partner and later wife, Virginia Johnson, played by Lizzy Caplan, entered the popular lexicon in the 1960s as “Masters and Johnson.” Their first book, Human Sexual Response (1966), became a best-seller and was translated into several languages.

In an interview last July, Masters’s biographer Thomas Maier told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, “Their empirical studies showed that women had a much greater capacity for sex” than men. “This came along right with the advent of the pill and helped spark the feminist view of sexuality of the late ’60s and ’70s.” Maier’s 2009 book, Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love (Basic Books), formed the basis of the Showtime drama.

—Karen McCally﻿

briefsKenneth Megan ’73E (Photo: Petty Officer 2nd Class Patrick Kelley)

EASTMAN’S COAST GUARD IMPRINT

Director Bids Farewell

On September 1, the U.S. Coast Guard Band delivered its final performance under the direction of Kenneth Megan ’73E. The event, held in Leamy Hall at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., was part of a weekend celebration commemorating not only Megan’s tenure as director, but his 38 years with the band.

Nearly three dozen former band members, including retired fellow clarinetist and Megan classmate Dan Lukens ’73E, and Megan’s immediate predecessor, conductor laureate Lewis Buckley ’69E, who led the band from 1975 until 2004, performed with the band during the concert.

In a written tribute, Buckley cited some of Megan’s accomplishments before he became director, including creating a series of concert broadcasts on National Public Radio in the mid-1980s that made the Coast Guard band not only “the undisputed king of band music on NPR,” but gained it additional national, as well as international, exposure and renown.

As assistant director of the band in 1989, Megan organized the first tour of an American military band in the then Soviet Union. In 2008, Megan led the band on a tour of Japan to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Japan Coast Guard and 20th anniversary of the Japan Coast Guard band.

Harpist Recognized for Service

briefsMegan Sesma ’02, ’02E (Photo: Petty Officer 3rd Class Cory J. Mendenhall )

Also this fall, Megan Sesma ’02, ’02E, who in 2003 became the first harpist ever to become part of the U.S. Coast Guard Band, was recognized with the Latina Style Meritorious Service Award. Presented during Latino Heritage Month at the National Latina Symposium in Washington, D.C., the award, sponsored by Latina Style magazine, honors Latinas in the armed forces.

A dual degree student at Rochester who earned a degree in economics in the College in addition to her Eastman degree, Sesma serves as the band’s education chief as well as harpist. She oversees the Coast Guard Academy school concert series and contributes to music education for Spanish-speaking students. She’s also part of the Guatemala Harp Project, in which she’s instructed students and teachers in harp and donated instruments, strings, and other supplies.﻿

A Large-Scale Accomplishment

whitneyPEAK PLACES: Rachel Isenberg ’02 combines physical feats with fundraising for the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation. (Photo: Courtesy of Rachel Isenberg ’02)

It took Rachel Isenberg ’02 and her two friends 16 hours to climb California’s 14,500-foot Mount Whitney last August. She says that’s a leisurely pace. “It can be done in 12. We just kind of took our time and enjoyed it.”

For Rachel, scaling the highest peak in the continental United States was the latest in a series of summertime physical feats. She started the annual ritual for fun, and later, also to raise money for the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation in honor of her mother, who suffers from the illness. She attracts sponsors from her Facebook page as well as from a personal page on the foundation’s website. Since 2009, she’s raised nearly $18,000.

“I've always enjoyed hiking and nature, and being active and traveling,” she says from her office at Temple University, where she’s an English language instructor.

On August 25, Rachel and two friends from graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania started the hike up Mount Whitney at 4 o’clock in the morning. “My friends felt the altitude a bit, which is typical,” Rachel says. “But we got to do sunrise and sunset, which is pretty cool.”

Her greatest challenge came in 2011, when she and Doug Briller ’01 scaled Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, which at more than 19,000 feet, is the highest freestanding peak in the world.

“Kilimanjaro is a five-day climb and you pass through about five different ecosystems,” Rachel says. “But any climb takes a similar mentality. A lot of it becomes mental after a while, just to keep on hiking for hours or for days, to have that kind of determination and fortitude. Or craziness!”﻿

TRIBUTE

Donald Hess: A ‘Silver Fox’ for the Laser Lab

tributeQUIET AND EFFECTIVE: Hess helped win federal support for the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. (Photo: University Libraries/department of Rare Books, Special collections, and Preservation)

I began working closely with Don Hess when I became director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in 1983, and continued working with him until he retired in 1996.

Don, who served as vice president for administration, had been brought to Rochester in the 1970s as vice president for campus affairs by then President Bob Sproull. Don had served with Bob when Bob was the director of the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Don had wide government experience, including having served as director of the Peace Corps under President Nixon.

Bob asked Don to work with the lab’s founding director, Moshe Lubin, to develop a corporate sponsorship. Because of Don’s intimate knowledge of federal agencies and Congress, Don was instrumental in getting the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to urge the Atomic Energy Commission to sponsor research at the lab. Without Don, it is unlikely that federal sponsorship of the lab would have ever occurred.

I always thought of Don as the “silver fox.” He took pride in “flying under the radar,” as he aptly put it. When we went to Washington together, Don trained me to be effective and efficient, but not too prominent. Don could visit more people in Washington in two days than most lobbyists would in a week. Bob Sproull always disdained the use of lobbyists and told me Don was more effective than all the “hired guns.”

Trips to the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Energy, and elsewhere in Washington with Don were very effective in assuring support for the lab. Don always took the high road in advocating research based on achievement.

He also took pride in doing as much as possible at the lowest cost. Don stayed in the cheapest hotels—some with bathrooms down the hall—and used pay phones in the lobbies to avoid the surcharge for in-room phone service. He believed that hard-working parents who paid tuition deserved the best the University had to offer for the least.

When good news came from our advocacy trips, Don eschewed any recognition. His pivotal role in the lab’s history was summarized in a document celebrating its 40th anniversary. Don called me and told me that his picture did not belong on the cover of the document with Bob Sproull, Moshe Lubin, Jay Eastman, and me. I told Don it most certainly did, and that was all there was to it. The success of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics belongs as much to Don as anyone.

Don, who died in September at the age of 82, was fiercely proud of the University and the lab, and strongly committed to higher education during his many years on the board of Associated Universities and as a trustee of his alma mater, Franklin and Marshall College. He truly was a silver fox, and an old-fashioned gentleman in the truest and best sense.

—Robert McCrory

McCrory is director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics as well as vice president, vice provost, chief executive officer, and professor of mechanical engineering and physics and astronomy at Rochester.﻿

Books & Recordings

Books

Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison

By Joshua Dubler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

Dubler, assistant professor of religion at Rochester, explores religious life inside the maximum-security prison in Graterford, Pa. Dubler follows the daily lives of “lifers” who practice a variety of forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other religions, and who work in the prison chapel as janitors or clerks.

Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader

Edited by Martin Manalansan ’97 (PhD) et al

NYU Press, 2013

Manalansan, associate professor of anthropology and Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, coedits the interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the ways in which eating and culinary practices reflect and reinforce class, racial, and gender inequalities among Asian-American immigrants.

The Joyful Life of Charles Granville Rob: Surgeon, Soldier, Scientist

By Allyn May ’56M (MD), ’64M (Res)

Tate Publishing, 2013

May, retired professor of surgery at Rochester, explores the life of the renowned British vascular surgeon who led Rochester’s Department of Surgery from 1960 to 1978.

The Ethics of Nonviolence: Essays by Robert L. Holmes

Edited by Predrag Cicovacki ’91 (PhD)

Bloomsbury, 2013

Cicovacki, professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, gathers and introduces a selection of 16 classic, rare, as well as never-before-published essays by Holmes, a leading philosopher of nonviolence and professor emeritus of philosophy at Rochester. The book also includes an interview with Holmes.

A Sketchbook of Cortona

By Carol Acquilano

Carol Acquilano, 2013

Acquilano, a fine artist and printmaker and a laboratory technician on the curatorial staff of the Memorial Art Gallery, presents a souvenir book of her artwork. The book features more than 50 reproductions of watercolors Acquilano painted in the medieval town of Cortona, Italy, accompanied by text in English and Italian.

Environmental Ethics and Sustainability: A Casebook for Environmental Professionals

By Hal Taback ’53 and Ram Ramanan

CRC Press, 2013

Taback, an environmental consultant in Carlsbad, Calif., offers an ethical framework for decision making to guide individual consultants, businesses, and nonprofits in the environmental field. The book includes more than 50 real-life case studies of ethical dilemmas faced by organizations.

Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi

By Janet Zandy ’73 (MA)

RIT Press, 2013

Zandy, professor emerita of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, explores the parallels in the lives and work of two 20th-century women photographers, both German emigrés, whose art addressed race and class struggle in the United States. The book includes nearly 100 black and white images by Mieth and Palfi, many of which are little known or never published.

In the Midst of Wolves

By Pam Novak ’81

Abbott Press, 2013

Novak tells the coming-of-age story, set in late 19th-century New York City, of a homeless petty thief and a scrappy orphan as they grow into adulthood.

Unfinished Business: A Biologist in the Latter Half of the 20th Century

By Joseph Bagnara ’52

Wheatmark, 2013

Bagnara, the son of immigrants, who enjoyed a 50-year career as a professor of biology at the University of Arizona, recounts the professional and cultural changes he experienced over the course of his long scientific career.

Jewel of the East

By Nicholas Waddy ’01 (PhD)

CreateSpace, 2013

Waddy, associate professor of history at Alfred State College, presents his first historical novel, set in 18th-century India. An e-book version is available from BookBaby.

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life

By Reid Barbour ’88 (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2013

Barbour, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents a comprehensive biography of the 17th-century English writer and physician.

The Death of the Income Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax and the Path to Fiscal Reform

By Daniel Goldberg ’68

Oxford University Press, 2013

Goldberg, professor of law at the University of Maryland, explores drawbacks to the income tax and argues for its replacement by a progressive consumption tax.

Encyclopedia of Radiation Oncology

Edited by Jay Reiff ’82 et al

Springer-Verlag, 2013

Reiff, professor and chief of medical physics in the radiation oncology department at Drexel University, is coeditor of the comprehensive guide for practitioners.

Booby Trap

By Allison Bially ’93

Smashwords, 2013

Bially presents a “positive, can-do memoir” of her experience as a mother undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The book was edited by Erica Cranston Rimlinger ’94.

Violin Music by Women: A Graded Anthology, Vol. 1–4

Edited by Cora Cooper ’82E (MM)

Sleepy Puppy Press, 2013

Cooper, professor of music at Kansas State University, offers a four-volume compilation of music composed by women for violin players from the beginning to advanced levels. The book, featuring works by composers from the 18th century to the present, includes teaching tips. A companion website, www.violinmusicbywomen.com, includes sound files.

The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna

Edited by Jeffrey Jackson ’99 (PhD) et al

Ashgate, 2013

Jackson, the J. J. McComb Professor of History at Rhodes College, coedits a collection of essays exploring the European café as a unique cultural space that has played a historic role in the germination and dissemination of transformational political and cultural ideals.

Acquisition and Analysis of Terrestrial Gravity Data

By Leland Timothy Long ’62

Cambridge University Press, 2013

Long, professor emeritus of geophysics at Georgia Tech, introduces practical procedures for conducting gravity surveys with explanations for analysis techniques. The manual is intended for civil engineers, archaeologists, oil and mineral prospectors, geophysicists, and others.

Gods of Earth

By Craig DeLancey ’87

47North, 2013

In DeLancey’s science fiction adventure, a young man must travel through time and space to battle the last of the human gods.

A Pen Named Man: Our Destiny

By John Newton ’72

Resource Publications, 2013

In the third volume in his A Pen Named Man series, Newton argues that “the route to social fulfillment is through the establishment of universal institutions designed to enable man to serve as God’s representative on Earth.”

Recordings

Bliss of Being

By the Pure Heart Ensemble

RichHeart Music, 2013

The Pure Heart Ensemble, led by pianist Richard Shulman ’73 and including a cellist, flutist, vocalist, and crystal bowl player, perform a compilation of music that “celebrates the feeling of bliss, but also the journey getting there.”

Variazioni

By Webb Wiggins ’68E (MM)

Smithsonian Friends of Music, 2013

Wiggins, associate professor of harpsichord at Oberlin, performs works on two 17th-century Italian harpsichords from the Smithsonian collection.

Perek Shirah

By Max Stern ’69E

Israel Music Institute, 2013

Stern, professor of music at Ariel University, presents his composition for narrator and orchestra—“a cosmic song of praises from Psalms”—by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with Stern conducting.

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

By Mel ’89E and Ellen Heinicke Foster ’89E

Feiner Musicke, 2012

The husband-and-wife duo of tenor Mel Foster and harpist Ellen Heinicke Foster perform their premiere recording. Foster is associate professor of voice at Morehouse College and Heinicke Foster performs with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, various ensembles, and maintains a private harp studio.

River Edge, New Jersey

By Bill Cunliffe ’81E

Azica Records, 2013

Pianist and composer Cunliffe leads a jazz trio in a performance of originals and recreations of Björk’s “All Is Full of Love,” Three Dog Night’s “One Is the Loneliest Number,” and other familiar songs.

Evensong

By Caleb Burhans ’03E

Cantaloupe, 2013

Burhans, a composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and member of the Eastman-founded ensemble Alarm Will Sound, presents seven choral and instrumental works.

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, author or performer, a brief description, and a high-resolution cover image, 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.

Newsman in the News

Executive producer Marc Rosenwasser ’74 shares an inside look at the new PBS NewsHour Weekend, and insights on his long and “tremendously fun career.”

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

There’s an old saying in journalism, which I absolutely subscribe to, which is “content is king.” Producers, including me, like to think of themselves as very clever and important behind-the-scenes players. And then once in a while, you meet someone who reminds you that, “Oh, I watch ABC or NBC or CBS or PBS because I like that guy.” I don’t think anyone should underestimate the importance of who the presenter is. I think the anchor is still really important. That said, I think it goes well beyond the anchor.

Every weekend show, at all of the networks, is kind of a laboratory where you try new things. NewsHour Weekend is a half-hour program, airing nationally on Saturday and Sunday evenings, that we launched in September. It’s much more tape-based than the weekday NewsHour. And by “tape,” I mean there’s much more field reporting as opposed to studio conversation. A metaphor I’ve used is the Sunday newspaper. In the first half of the show, we’re committed to covering that day’s news. It comes with a big, hopefully hefty front section, where you’re getting all the most important news of the day. But there’s typically a little less news on the weekend than there is during the week. So you’re also getting an ideas section, the arts, perhaps religion, science and technology, health.

Marc Rosenwasser ’74

Maplewood, N.J.

Executive Producer, PBS NewsHour Weekend

Formerly executive producer of PBS’s Need to Know and World Focus; senior producer, the CBS Evening News; executive editor, NBC’s Dateline; executive producer, Tom Brokaw Reports; Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press; and editor of Rochester’s Campus Times.

Somebody told me, at one of my first jobs at the AP, “Always focus on the n-e-w in news.” The best thing for me is if people I work with pitch stories I’ve never heard of. For example, one of our first shows featured a piece on something I’d never heard a word about, which is tidal energy. The piece focused on the first federally backed commercial venture in tidal energy, in Maine. The technology being tested can be applied in rivers as well as bays and oceans. And the expectation is that 15 percent of all energy could be water-based by 2030. So it’s something consequential that I think few people know about.

One thing that’s been tremendously fun over the years is that journalism is a very collaborative business. This was the case from my very first job, working on the Campus Times. You’re working very closely with a lot of different people, all of whom are smart and slightly off-center in an interesting way. In the fall of my senior year, we turned the Campus Times into a daily. I remember many nights we’d stay up late into the night, sometimes all night, working to get the next day’s paper out. My attendance in class became increasingly spotty and at one point, my father asked me what exactly he was paying for. And the answer was, I guess, for me to fall in love with journalism.

BACK TO SCHOOL

Convocation Confetti

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Academic canon? Richard Feldman, dean of the College (center) and Peter Lennie, provost and the Robert L. and Mary Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering, walk through a confetti shower at the end of this fall’s convocation ceremonies on the Eastman Quadrangle. The ceremony was one of several marking the start of the academic year. Photograph by Adam Fenster

HONORS

Family & Friends

The University and its academic units honored several alumni and friends this fall for their achievements and service.

honorsAS&E: Connor, Karly, and Ken Armstrong—grandchildren and son of James Armstrong ’54—and the recipients of this year’s Armstrong Award: Vicki Proschel Schwartz and Dick Schwartz; and Jeanine Sullivan Cushman and her husband, John (Photo: University Advancement)

Arts, Sciences & Engineering

James S. Armstrong Alumni Service Award

Dick ’63, ’66 (MS) and Vicki Proschel Schwartz ’62, active alumni for more than 50 years. Dick Schwartz is a retired senior optical engineer and Vicki Schwartz is a former teacher and community volunteer. The Schwartzes have volunteered for several alumni initiatives, including serving on class reunion committees, and both are members of the Lifelong Learning Advisory Council and the Rochester Campaign Committee in support of The Meliora Challenge. A former member of the Trustees’ Alumni Council of the College, Dick Schwartz is a member of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Visiting Committee.

Jeanine Sullivan Cushman ’63, a life trustee of the University. A community volunteer and an active Rochester alumna, Cushman was elected as a trustee in 1989 and served on the Academic Affairs Committee, the Personnel Committee, and the Warner School Trustees Visiting Committee, which she chaired from 1991 to 1993. For nearly 20 years, she has been part of the Warner School Dean’s Advisory Committee and has been a member or cochair of several Class of 1963 reunion committees.

honorsEASTMAN: Ray and Judy Ricker (Photo: University Advancement)

Eastman School of Music

Dean’s Medal

Ramon (Ray) Ricker ’73E (DMA), professor emeritus of saxophone and interim director of the Institute for Music Leadership. As a senior administrator at the Eastman School, Ricker was instrumental in establishing Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership and other initiatives, including the Orchestra Musician Forum, with its website Polyphonic.org, and the Paul R. Judy Center for Applied Research. He and his wife, Judy ’76, ’81E (MM), ’91S (MBA), have established two professorships and a scholarship at the Eastman School.

honorsMEDICINE: Michael Gottlieb, Alexander Levitan, Robert Burne, Dean Mark Taubman, Harvey Alter, Elizabeth Almeyda, and Jules Cohen (not pictured: Steven Birnbaum) (Photo: Ken Huth)

School of Medicine and Dentistry

Dean’s Medal

Alexander Levitan ’63M (MD), a retired internist and oncologist who practiced medicine in Minneapolis, Minn., for 30 years. Having participated in numerous surgeries in which hypnosis was used as the sole agent for pain control, Levitan is known for his expertise in clinical hypnosis. He is also a licensed real estate broker and president of A & L Management, a Minneapolis real estate management company that he owns with his wife, Lucy.

Alumni Service Award

Jules Cohen ’53, ’57M (MD), ’59M (Res), professor of medicine and cardiology at Rochester. With University connections spanning six decades, Cohen continues to consult, mentor, research, and teach. He’s widely known for his research on the factors contributing to heart disease and for his studies of cardiac hypertrophy, cardiomyopathy, and oxygen transport.

Humanitarian Award

Michael Gottlieb ’73M (MD), ’74M (Res), ’77M (Res), an internist and clinical immunologist in private practice in Los Angeles. An associate clinical professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gottlieb was the first physician to identify AIDS as a new disease. He has earned national distinction for his advocacy, research, and philanthropy.

Alumni Achievement Award

Robert Burne ’87M (PhD) associate dean for research at the University of Florida’s College of Dentistry, where he is also a professor and chair of the school’s department of oral biology. He is recognized as an early pioneer in the application of molecular biology and molecular genetic techniques to the study of oral bacteria, especially to the physiology and genetics of pathogenic and health-associated oral streptococci.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

Harvey Alter ’56, ’60M (MD), chief of clinical studies and associate director for research in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md. Widely acknowledged for his work in discovering an antigen that was key to detecting the hepatitis B virus, Alter holds a distinction reserved for preeminent senior researchers: Distinguished NIH Investigator.

John N. Wilder Award

Steven Birnbaum ’78M (MD), a staff radiologist at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Manchester, N.H. A strong advocate for radiation safety, Birnbaum was one of the first practicing radiologists to raise awareness about the overuse of diagnostic imaging procedures that expose patients to high doses of radiation, an initiative that has become a model for radiation protection practices in hospitals nationwide.

Elizabeth Almeyda ’74, ’78M (MD), a noted New York City plastic surgeon. Specializing in aesthetic surgery of the body and face, Almeyda is one of the few women in a predominantly male field, distinguishing herself as a practitioner who offers female patients a perspective reflected in her maxim, “Skilled hands; the eye of a woman.”

honorsNURSING: Richard Mulvey, Elaine Hubbard, Dean Kathy Rideout, Jeffery Rideout, Medical Center CEO Bradford Berk, Maryjoan Ladden, Keri Baker, the late Robert Hurlbut’s son, Robert Hurlbut, and his widow, Barbara Hurlbut, and T. C. Lewis (not pictured: Pamela McQuilkin Lewis) (Photo: Ken Huth)

School of Nursing

Dean’s Medal

Elaine Hubbard, professor emerita of nursing. Hubbard was nursing’s first associate dean for undergraduate studies and later became the director of its community-centered practice. The Elaine C. Hubbard Center for Nursing Research on Aging was named in her honor in 2006.

Distinguished Alumna Award

Maryjoan Ladden ’78N (MS), senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ladden is a nurse practitioner whose work focuses on improving quality and safety through health professional collaboration.

Humanitarian Award

Keri Baker ’11N, cofounder and executive director of Sacred Valley Health, a U.S.–based nongovernmental organization in Ollantaytambo, Peru. Baker coordinates medical campaigns, establishes university partnerships, and oversees the community health worker program known as “Promotoras de Salud.”

Legacy Award

The late Robert Hurlbut ’12 (Honorary), a former trustee of the University and longtime supporter of the school. The founder, former president, and chairman of ROHM Services Corporation, Hurlbut was regarded as a pioneer in nursing home administration and an innovator in shifting the nation’s model of late-life care from traditional nursing homes to senior living facilities.

Richard (Dick) Mulvey, husband of Ann Marshall Gugino Mulvey ’55N, a practicing nurse who was an active alumna of the School of Nursing until her death in 2008. Dick established the Ann Marshall Mulvey ’55 Nursing Endowed Scholarship in her honor to support a promising nursing student who demonstrates need.

John N. Wilder Award

T. C. ’60 and Pamela McQuilkin Lewis ’62, longtime supporters of nursing. T. C. is a former vice president of Canandaigua National Bank & Trust, and Pam is a former nurse and homemaker. They met at Rochester in 1958 when T. C. was helping his sister move into the dorm room she shared with Pam.

honorsSIMON: Kevin Collins, Kathleen Washington, Dean Mark Zupan, Harvey Jacobson, and Daniel Lazarek (Photo: Ria Tafani)

Simon Business School

Alumni Service Award

Harvey Jacobson ’82S (MBA), founder, president, and chief executive officer of California Financial Partners Inc. Jacobson is often called upon to speak nationally on topics such as charitable planning, family limited partnerships, fee-based money management, generation-skipping trusts, and qualified plan distributions. He is the author of The Biggest Mistakes in Financial Planning.

Kathleen Washington ’04S (MBA), cofounder and managing director of Enterprise Solutions International, where she focuses on small and mid-cap business growth. Washington has helped businesses engineer successful turnarounds and has worked with governments in the Caribbean and South America to reduce the cost of energy and build sustainable energy resources.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

Kevin Collins ’82S (MBA), chief financial officer of Catalyst Energy Technologies. A former managing director at Houlihan Lokey, a privately owned investment bank, Collins provided financial advice for a range of transactions, including mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, and sales.

John N. Wilder Award

Daniel Lazarek ’91S (MBA), chief financial officer and co-owner of Access Insurance Holdings Inc., based in Atlanta. Established in 1995, the company has grown from a small start-up to a nationally recognized insurer with $400 million in annual revenue, more than 400 employees, and operations in 14 states.

honorsDENTISTRY: William Calnon (right) and his family—son, Timothy ’15D (Pdc); daughter-in-law, Jennifer Calnon ’09D (Pdc); son, Christopher ’09D (Pdc); and wife, Mary (Photo: Keith Bullis)

Eastman Institute for Oral Health

Director’s Award

William Calnon ’79D (Pdc), immediate past president of the American Dental Association. The president of the Eastman Dental Foundation Board and former acting director of the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, Calnon is a practicing dentist and partner of the dental practice of Calnon & Cilano. He is also a part-time professor in the Department of Dentistry.﻿