Rochester Review

July–August 2011, Volume 73, No. 6

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Alan Blank, Sharon Dickman, Adam Fenster, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Melissa Greco Lopes, Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

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Design

Steve Boerner Typography & Design

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

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

Copyright © 2011 University of Rochester

Credits

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

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1924 and 2011

By Joel Seligman

president (Photo: Adam Fenster)

This May the University’s Board of Trustees unanimously agreed to publicly launch the largest capital campaign in our history at Meliora Weekend later this year. We have done this before.

In 1924 our University was transformed by a capital campaign from what was, in 1920, a College of Arts and Sciences with 577 students and 55 faculty into a national university that by the end of the decade included the new River Campus, the School of Medicine, and Dentistry and Strong Memorial Hospital.

Between November 14 and November 24, the University successfully launched an unprecedented $10 million community capital campaign with the consequential slogan “Ten Millions in Ten Days.” One week later, George Eastman contributed an additional $6 million.

The 1924 campaign provided much of the $8.2 million cost of purchasing the Oak Hill Country Club and transforming it into the River Campus, ultimately envisioned to be large enough to accommodate 10,000 students.

In 1930, the New York Times would call the results of the capital campaign “Rochester’s New Glory.” The campaign led to the construction of Rush Rhees Library, Bausch & Lomb Hall, Dewey Hall, Morey Hall, Lattimore Hall, Gavett Hall, Strong Auditorium, Todd Union, the Alumni Gymnasium, Fauver Stadium, and the Burton and Crosby residence halls. The campaign was pivotal in helping fund construction of the School of Medicine and Dentistry; led to the creation in 1929 of our Institute of Optics; and the renovation of Sibley Library, the world’s finest music library.

How did our predecessors do this? There was first an inspiring vision.

Influential University supporter George W. Todd persuaded University President Rush Rhees to locate the University’s College on what was then the Oak Hill golf course, near where the new Medical Center was planned.

Lead donors were decisive to the campaign. No one was more important than George Eastman. At a critical meeting in July 1923, after Rhees presented options for the River Campus ranging from $5 to $10 million, Eastman declared, “I think we’d better run up the ten million flag and see what we get.” Eastman pledged the initial $2.5 million to the campaign.

What made the Rochester campaign unprecedented was the extent to which it involved our entire community. When the General City Campaign opened on November 14, 1924, 600 volunteers attended a dinner in which targets publicly were announced. A Publicity Committee worked incessantly to articulate the case for the campaign, publishing a near-daily Ten Million Dollar Bulletin during the 10-day public campaign.

Ultimately 15,000 letters were sent to potential donors; successive campaign brochures addressed “Our University at the Cross Roads,” “Our University as Teacher and Neighbor,” and “Build for Rochester.” A history of the 1924 campaign records: “There were subscriptions from newsboys, school children, American Legion posts, labor unions, fraternal and other organizations.”

In all there were 13,733 contributors, including support from 68.5 percent of living graduates. Underlying this success was a volunteer leadership that included 668 individuals, organized into 4 core divisions, 10 districts, and 50 teams.

presidentA GREATER UNIVERSITY: The 1924 campaign, which had as its slogan “Ten Millions in Ten Days,” emphasized the intergenerational impact of giving to the University, as shown in publicity materials from the historic effort. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

The campaign of 1924 was characterized as “the greatest community project ever undertaken in behalf of higher education.” Along with earlier support for the Eastman School of Music, the campaign of 1924 created the modern University of Rochester.

Now it is our generation’s turn. We are a great research university. In October of this year, we will publicly launch a transformational campaign. By its conclusion in 2016, we envision:

A University whose quality has fortified its place among the leading 20 research universities in this country based upon measurable achievements in medicine, engineering, and life sciences as well as outstanding accomplishment in the humanities, social sciences, performing arts, and our professional schools, with critical new facilities such as the recently completed Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics.

Pivotal to our progress is our faculty. They are our core strength, the fundamental reason that students join us here. In February 2011, for example, Ching Tang, the Doris Johns Cherry Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering, was named as the recipient of the Wolf Prize for his invention of the organic light-emitting diode, the technology that gave birth to a multibillion-dollar industry that is used today in televisions, cell phones, and computer screens because of its energy efficiency, superior resolution, and thinness. One in three Wolf Prize recipients in physics, chemistry, and medicine has gone on to win the Nobel Prize.

By 2016, we seek a student body that has grown from 8,450 total students in fall 2004 to 10,000 students, while strengthening quality and diversity. A significant measure of our recent progress involves undergraduate applications to the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. Last year, we received a record 12,804 applications. This year that number grew by over 1,000 to 13,850 applicants for the Class of 2015. Next year’s entering class will be the most selective in our history as well as the most diverse in its ethnic, racial, linguistic, and geographic composition. Notably, 15 percent of our entering first-year students are from abroad.

Our campaign’s ultimate success will be measured by our support for our students, most significantly in the form of scholarships and fellowships. Our students are our future. They are our nation’s future. To date, our alumni and friends have contributed over $127 million for our students, bringing us students such as Handler Scholar Alejandro López-Samamé who arrived at the Eastman School from his hometown of Lima, Peru, and has already achieved success by appearing as first trumpeter with the National Opera of Peru.

We will continue to grow as the region’s leading employer. As of March 31, 2011, our total full-time equivalent employment grew to 20,128 jobs, a year-to-year gain of 465 jobs, making the University the sixth largest private sector employer in New York State. This was the first period in which we crossed the 20,000 full-time equivalent job threshold.

To put this in different terms, the first decade of the 21st century saw a fundamental transformation in the Rochester economy. During that decade the greater Rochester area lost 43,000 manufacturing jobs. The University, in contrast, increased employment by approximately 50 percent, having begun the 2000 decade with 13,140 jobs.

We are already on the move. College Town, if approved by our board by October of this year, will include up to 500,000 square feet with a hotel and conference center, a YMCA that would offer health and fitness programs in collaboration with the Medical Center along with child care, a 25,000-square-foot bookstore, a gourmet grocery store, office space, and other retail establishments. A transit center operated by the Regional Transit Authority would facilitate public transportation to the University and provide an eagerly awaited parking facility.

On April 8, 2011, New York Lieutenant Governor Bob Duffy and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver joined us for the dedication of the nation’s first clinical and translational science building.

Brad Berk, Medical Center chief executive officer, publicly announced that the new 200,000-square-foot building would be known as the Saunders Research Building in honor of Philip Saunders whom Brad earlier that week announced had made a $10 million gift to the Medical Center.

This year our Laboratory for Laser Energetics also celebrates its 40th anniversary. The Laser Lab is participating with Lawrence Livermore and other national labs in one of the 21st century’s most critical energy experiments—the attempt to achieve nuclear fusion ignition in the laboratory, popularly known as NIF. This is the Manhattan Project of our time; as one scientist put it, “a holy cow game changer.” Laser fusion, unlike current nuclear power plants, is safe, cannot melt down, is carbon free, nonradioactive, and potentially will provide an inexhaustible source of energy.

In October we will make the public announcement of the University’s largest capital campaign in our history at our Meliora Weekend. All of you are invited.

Former President Bill Clinton will be our keynote speaker. Meliora Weekend 2011 will feature over 200 events for alumni, parents, and friends from across the University. We anticipate that this year’s Meliora Weekend will be the best attended in our history.

Our time is now. We have the capacity, the will, and the talent. We build on enormous strengths—we have one of the greatest faculties of any research university in this country. We are world-class in programs as variegated as music, optics, financial economics, and neuromedicine. I believe—all of us at the University believe—in our motto, Meliora. We seek to take a great research university and make it stronger. We seek to build an ever stronger Rochester. For we will never forget that we are an urban University, proud to be part of the Rochester community, deeply aware that our progress and Rochester’s success are inextricably linked.

Letters

More on the Global College

Daniel Schesch ’67 (Letters, May-June) and I were not U of R students at the same time, but we both knew, and were deeply influenced by, the African undergraduates whose years on campus spanned both of ours. Macdonald Banda ’65 from Malawi (then northern Rhodesia) and Humphrey Iroku ’66 of Nigeria, whom he mentions, were also friends of mine. Others of this era include Tonye (Tam) Erekosima ’64 of Nigeria and Payne Masuku ’65, ’66 (MA) of Zimbabwe (then southern Rhodesia). Mr. Schesch wonders what “these earlier African alumni” have “accomplished against the impossible odds facing them on their return.” Tam, who possessed one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered, belonged to a minority tribe in his country and was reportedly killed in ethnic violence within a few years of his return home. Payne stayed at the U of R after receiving his baccalaureate degree to earn a master’s degree in history. He returned to southern Rhodesia to become a secondary school teacher, was promoted to headmaster following independence, and has spent his career in his troubled country of Zimbabwe promoting crosscultural understanding and a broad worldview among his school’s teachers and students.

Mr. Schesch is correct that many of these students, “especially those from the colonies, may have been on full U.S. State Department scholarships.” They were, and Review missed an obligation to research the University’s history and discover this fascinating story. If memory serves, these first African students came to the University at the start of the 1961–62 academic year, under what became known as the John F. Kennedy Airlift. This was a Cold War U.S. foreign policy initiative to counter the Soviet Union’s focus on educating promising young Africans from its sphere of influence, such as the Congo, in Moscow to prepare them to return as future leaders. What is especially remarkable is the active role of then University president Cornelis de Kiewiet in ensuring that Rochester would receive and educate Airlift students. De Kiewiet was an expatriate of South Africa of Dutch descent, the powerful Boer group most associated with the perpetuation of apartheid in South Africa.

The political backdrop was unknown in the late spring of 1961 to those of us undergraduates who were interested in forming an International Club to help integrate a larger population of U of R foreign students (many of them graduate students) into student life. George Georgantas ’63, Brian Fleming ’63, Susan Fairman Anastasopoulos ’63, ’66 (MA), myself, and a few others obtained the faculty guidance of the Dean of Students Helen Nowlis, and by the fall, when the Kennedy Airlift students arrived, we had an orientation program up and running. Little did we Americans realize that the “orientation” would run both ways. When I graduated in 1963, the International Club was a strong social institution, its journal/newsletter, the Cosmopolitan, which I had edited, was an important vehicle for sharing the “humanity, intelligence, perspectives, and experiences,” which Mr. Schesch had commented on as being “as much a part of [his] education as coursework.” Mine too, and my coursework was an interdisciplinary major in non-Western civilizations.

So, yes, the University was “A Global College” (January-February) back in the 1960s. How could this history have been lost? This suggests to me a possible role for the new Alumni Lifelong Learning Advisory Council, on which I am now privileged to serve. The recollections of older alumni are too valuable to lose. The “Meliora Moments” campaign [meliora.rochester.edu], which University Advancement has begun as a way to collect online the University’s influence in the lives of alumni, parents, friends, faculty, staff and students, should be linked to or integrated with the documented University archives and made retrievable in order to ensure a fuller, richer, more personal history of the University and its impact.

Dorothea de Zafra Atwell ’63

Silver Spring, Md.

A General Correction

I am writing to point out an observation regarding the article announcing former President Bill Clinton as the guest speaker for this year’s Meliora Weekend (March-April). The names of previous speakers were given along with their formal titles, e.g. “U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu ’70, ’98 (Honorary)” and “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.” However, Colin Powell was blandly described as “a retired general and U.S. statesman.” To be consistent and accurate, he’s a former secretary of state (at the time of Sept. 11) and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the senior military position in our government, a position he held during the first Gulf War), which are a little more than just a retired general and statesman.

I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that this was an oversight or a lack of research and not a politically motivated snub. That would be quite unbecoming of the U of R.

Joe Gelsomino ’76

Alexandria, Va.

Who’s in the Queen’s Court?

The photo on page 50 in the May-June Review has my mother in it. She’s Janet Gilbertine Sprague, Class of 1926. She’s seated on the ground in front of the May Queen just in front of the Queen’s white robe and her feet. She married Chester Wheldon Williams in 1938, and I was born in 1942. It was fun to see a picture of my mother that I had never seen. Thank you for printing it.

Barbara Sprague Williams Olmsted ’64

Napa, Calif.

I am fairly certain that the seated woman on the far right wearing the hat with a feather is my aunt, Julia Zuck Brown. I believe she was in the College for Women, Class of 1926. Julia was my favorite childhood aunt and a role model for me in my formative years. She taught French in the Irondequoit and Brighton (N.Y.) schools.

Rosemary Zuck ’74W (Mas)

Rochester, N.Y.

Setting the ‘Records’ Straight

Thanks for the May-June 2011 issue of Rochester Review—it is excellent. I note in the letters section, there is an interesting communication from Dr. Steve Peters ’79M (MD), entitled “Translating Medical Records” that deals with a picture of me standing in front of a wall of medical records. If you publish response letters, you might want to publish my following humorous letter:

Dear Steve:

Thanks for your kind words about my “remarkably unchanged” appearance since 1979 in the Rochester Review photo. I appreciate the compliment that the records look old and I look young, but I have no control over the latter. Regarding the old paper records in the picture, it could be that: 1) we simply do not like digital records or can’t afford them; 2) we are antigreen; 3) we like to read cursive notes; or 4) we had to use up shelf space. But none of those reasons explain the “massive wall of paper records.” All our research data has been entered online and has been retained in a sophisticated digital management system for the past 30 years or more. During this time, we have carried out a series of randomized clinical trials, and the FDA requires that we maintain the original paper copies of the signed consent and yearly updates of each patient enrolled in our clinical studies—for the duration of the trial, afterwards during the FDA review/approval process, and thereafter in case any questions are subsequently raised about ethical issues related to the patient enrollment process. When the photo was taken for Review, the hospital was just initiating the electronic health records for patient care, but the “eRecords” system does not include the signed research consent forms. You showed your excellent Rochester education by picking up on the irony inherent in the digital photograph. Well done.

Arthur J. Moss, ’62M (Res)

Rochester

Moss is a professor of medicine at the University.

A Family of Portraits

When I saw the portraits of Gideon Webster Burbank and his wife, Mary Goodrich Burbank (March-April), I could not believe it. I thought my younger brother, Conrad, had all that existed. Little did I know that three sets came out of my grandfather Cobb’s attic. There are two more sets of Burbank portraits, which went to two of my sons, George Warren Cobb III and William Tyler Cobb.

My great-grandfather, George Warren Carpenter (1841–1916), and Susan Maria Burbank were married in Rochester on Oct. 15, 1868. They had only one child, my grandmother, Mary Grinnell Carpenter (1876–1952). Consequently, my grandmother inherited the home that my great-grandfather had built at 171 Penfield Road in the town of Brighton in 1916, when her father, George Warren Carpenter, my great-grandfather, died.

On Oct. 1, 1896, my grandmother married Amos Hubble Cobb II (1874–1926). My grandfather Cobb died at the early age of 50. My grandmother lived alone until her death in 1952.

My brother, Conrad, probably found the portraits in our grandmother Cobb’s attic on or after her death. I was stationed at Camp Gieger Marine Base in North Carolina at the time of her death.

G. Warren Cobb ’57

Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif.

Of Memories and Motorcyclists

Nostalgia informs our alumni interests, clearly, a nostalgia that tends to idealize our college years as untroubled and idyllic in comparison with postgraduate reality. The photo that appeared in the last two issues frames that nostalgia almost archetypally, even for those not of that era: a carefree couple on a vintage motorcycle, evocative of James Dean or Kerouac, the mild transgression of riding on the sidewalk, the dress . . . but the tragic end of that easy rider reminds us, and harshly, how contingent and fleeting the idyll is.

Tom Bonfiglio ’72

Richmond, Va.

The writer is the William Judson Gaines Chair in Comparative Literature and Linguistics at the University of Richmond.

Honors Addenda

As we were sending this issue’s special section on national honors to the printer, the Department of Athletics and Recreation learned that tennis player Lia Weiner ’11, a mathematics and economics major from Sarasota, Fla., had been named an All-American and that hammer thrower Yaneve Fonge ’11, a microbiology and immunology major from Cheshire, Conn., had been named an Academic All-American—Editor.

Department of Corrections

In the May-June issue, two photos of Suzanne Davis Arms ’65 should have been credited to photographer Robert McLean.

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.

MISSION STATEMENT

Defining the University’s Mission

Many voices and more than 150 years of history meet in one memorably brief phrase.

By Kathleen McGarvey

missionSUCCINCT STATEMENT: The University printed special T-shirts—worn here by Lizzy Sieverding ’12 (left), a brain and cognitive sciences major from Chappaqua, N.Y., and Olivia Cohn ’12, an English major from Natick, Mass.—to celebrate the introduction of the new mission statement. Similar shirts are available from the University bookstore. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“Meliora” has been the University’s motto for generations of students, alumni, and faculty members. Now it’s complemented by a newly developed mission statement: “Learn, Discover, Heal, Create—And Make the World Ever Better.”

The 10-word statement was introduced to the campus community and trustees just before commencement, to the rousing approval of both groups.

“A mission statement is not a statement about the future, but rather about what is enduring,” says Provost Ralph Kuncl, who with Associate Provost Kathleen Moore oversaw the statement’s development. “It encapsulates and articulates the purposes, characteristics, and values of an institution, the core purposes and the actions that derive from them. It should explain what drives us, and what it is we are trying to create.”

Kuncl notes that the best mission statements are both compelling enough to motivate those within the institution toward a unified purpose and short enough to be memorable.

Remarkably, the 16-month process—beginning with President Joel Seligman’s charge to Kuncl to develop a University-wide statement “that will identify our core values” and involving four focus groups with 46 members from across the University, plus a 14-member “creative panel” of original drafters, and many other constituencies—led to a statement only 10 words long.

“These 10 words allow the reader to project their goals and themselves within the context of an idea that is distinct to the University of Rochester, the action of Meliora,” says Scott Strenger ’12, president of the Students’ Association for the 2010–11 year.

Kuncl expects the statement to be used in academic documents, including funding proposals and accreditation documents, and also as a complement to “Meliora” in other University publications.

“I think it will help us better tell our story for years and perhaps generations to come,” he says. “There is probably no more authentic and succinct a university mission statement out there.”

HUMANITIES SCHOLARSHIP

Building a Platform

Visual and cultural studies scholar Joan Saab is helping to develop a new model for humanities research.

By Kathleen McGarvey

digitalDIGITAL DOMAINS: Focusing on the work of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (above, in a 1965 photo with his “March of Humanity” mural), Joan Saab (below) hopes to enhance how scholars use multimedia in their work. (Photo: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

From computer tablets to smart phones, digitization has transformed much about contemporary life—but scholarly publishing in the humanities has changed little. Books between covers remain a critical currency for tenure and promotion. But through her own new book project, Searching for Siqueiros, Joan Saab, an associate professor of art and art history and of visual and cultural studies, is contributing to what may be a fundamental change in how humanities scholarship is carried out.

We’re “working on ways to connect scholarship and visual culture,” Saab says, with “new platforms for scholarly publishing in the humanities.” For the past several years, she’s been a grant principal investigator for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, a group created with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aims to enhance scholarly understanding of visual practices in digital culture, and to create scholarly context for use of digital media.

The alliance has brought together scholars, technologists, and staff at humanities centers and professional associations to talk about the changing field of visual culture. Their conversations “address the crisis in publishing,” Saab says—the traditional model of scholarly book publishing has become increasingly difficult for presses to sustain economically—“but also aim particularly to help those people working with film to take advantage of the possibility and the affordances of new media in their work.”

digital (Photo: Adam Fenster)

At the time Saab first became involved with the alliance, she was working on a project about a modernist network of visual artists. One of the figures she was studying was Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. As she traveled to Los Angeles taking part in the alliance’s work, her interest in Siqueiros deepened—especially her curiosity about his 1932 mural “América Tropical.”

Painted on an external wall of the Italian Hall on Olvera Street, the 18-by-82 foot mural showed a crucified peasant—and Siqueiros’s method was as revolutionary artistically as his subject was politically.

“Siquieros was friends with Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker, and he was very interested in making a cinemagraphic mural, something that moved, and in taking new technologies—spray paint and air compressors—to make something that would be quick” when compared to the laborious process of traditional mural painting, Saab says.

The controversial image was soon whitewashed over by the beer-garden owner who had commissioned it, only to reemerge in the 1960s as Chicano muralists worked to restore the mural—a nearly impossible task because of Siqueiros’s new-media techniques—and began to reference the image in their own works, a process Saab calls “visual citation.”

Today the Getty Conservation Institute is collaborating with El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a department of the City of Los Angeles, to conserve the mural. They’re using digital technology in the restoration, building a viewing platform and projecting what the mural would look like onto the wall—a restoration that has become the core of Saab’s research.

“What had been a chapter in a book became a sort of stand-alone project for me. But I still conceived of it as a traditional book,” she says.

The project proved thorny. “I was having a difficult time trying to tell the story,” Saab says. “There were too many directions” the book could go, “and I was interested in new media.”

Soon she realized that the writing she was trying to do was a perfect candidate for the digital platform—called Scalar—that technologists and scholars affiliated with the alliance were building at the University of Southern California. The platform works especially well for scholars who want to include media clips and other images with their writing, and whose projects do not lend themselves to the linear quality of a book narrative.

The platform freed Saab to present her scholarship in multiple narrative pathways—and she realized that there were strong parallels between Siqueiros’s experiences with new media and scholars’ own.

“It allows me to tell all these different stories, and to go back and forth in time,” she says of the digital platform. Her book proceeds along three different paths, each with its own subpaths. For readers interested in learning about Siqueiros’s inspirations and influence—one major line of argument—they can follow narrative lines that take them to Italian Renaissance art, or Chicano artists in the 20th century, or the history of Russian film. And for those interested in a “behind the scenes” conversation with Saab about her own experiences in writing the book, there’s a different narrative line that considers broad questions of history and ownership in the digital age.

“It’s fun, and kind of nerve wracking,” says Saab. “It’s a different type of writing, and it’s a different type of thinking.”

Thomas DiPiero, senior associate dean of the humanities and a professor of French and visual and cultural studies, says that traditional books are “time- and narrative-based. What you get in a ‘born-digital’ work that’s multimedia work is that you break that linearity.”

He draws a comparison between watching a movie, in which the story unfolds in the way the film passes through a projector, and looking at a painting. “Your eyes can pass over the painting in whatever order you like, and you can look at any individual part of the painting for as much or as little time as you choose.” A born-digital book, he says, “exists in time in a different way” than a traditional book does, “and once you break that linearity, you open up all kinds of possibilities.”

Critical to the development of multimedia scholarly writing, Saab says, is the foundational input of scholars themselves.

“One of the things we realized was all of this had to come from the scholars,” she says. “It couldn’t come from the foundations or the technologists, because often what happens is people create a widget or a publishing platform, and they say, ‘Here. This is going to transform scholarship,’ and you give it to the scholars, and they have no idea what to do with it.”

Three university presses—Duke, MIT, and University of California—have agreed to publish the projects being produced through Scalar as part of the grant. The first, Alexandra Juhasz’s Learning from YouTube, was released by MIT Press last year.

The projects “will be peer-reviewed and vetted like a regular book,” a crucial dimension of their academic value, Saab says. “The next stage of the grant is we’re working with professional societies to do special issues of journals in this platform. It has to be legitimate in order for scholars to do it.” DiPiero allows that it “has taken some time for people to adjust to this kind of work”—professional societies have already had to grapple with online-only journals—but says that as long as works are peer-reviewed, their academic value is not in doubt. “These are bumps in the road rather than true obstacles,” he says.

Already for Saab the multimedia book has proven a fruitful experiment, allowing her to present her scholarship on an artistic pioneer in ways that simply wouldn’t be possible in a more traditional format.

“It’s a case of form and content coming together.”

CAMPUS DINING

A Fresh Menu

Changes under way this summer to campus dining facilities spotlight the new ways students eat.

By Kathleen McGarvey

diningBEFORE & AFTER: The current dining area in Danforth (above) will be replaced with a sleek space that melds cooking and dining, as shown in an architect’s rendering (below), designed to let students see the preparation of their meals. (Photo: Dining Services)

It’s a rite of passage for college freshmen everywhere: the move from the comforts of the family kitchen to the realities of mass-service in a campus dining hall. But when a renovated Danforth Dining Hall and a new campus marketplace open for service in August, Rochester students may find they have little reason to be homesick.

Evolving eating habits and priorities are creating dramatic changes in the norms of campus dining, at Rochester and elsewhere.

“Early in my career, variety was two choices for dinner,” says Cam Schauf, director of Campus Dining Services and Auxiliary Operations. He’s been at Rochester for seven years, but in the college dining service industry for 35.

For about 10 years, new expectations—and new approaches—have been brewing.

“Throughout colleges and universities, we’re finding student customers are more savvy about choices available to them,” Schauf says. “They have more experience with foods with international flair—they want authentic food, and they’re smart enough to know the difference.

“And they want to know where their food is coming from,” he adds. “We’ve seen the need to take the mystery out.”

dining (Photo: Dining Services)

Mystery is the last thing to be found in the new Danforth design. Walls are coming down, cooking is moving to open stations around the facility, and fresh ingredients are front and center so that students can watch—and direct—the cooking of their meals.

“When students see the food you’re working with, they’re not making any guesses,” Schauf says. “They know you’re using good ingredients, and they know it’s fresh.”

“I see it as dining transparency. Everything is right in front of you, and you see what you’re getting,” says Bradley Halpern ’12, a dual major in political science and computer science from St. Louis. He’s met weekly with Schauf as the cochair of the Projects and Services Committee, a student group that serves as a liaison with campus administrators, and next year he’ll continue his involvement as president of the Students’ Association.

Schauf and his colleagues took the measure of student skepticism about campus cooking three years ago, when the first Mongolian barbecue station opened at Danforth. Preparation of ingredients was moved out of the kitchen and in front of customers—and students marveled at the freshness of their food, even though the ingredients were the same as they’d always been, Schauf says.

“Cooking out in front elevates the process, and you can cook to order. All of that enhances the perception of freshness.”

To keep on top of his customers’ wish list, Schauf meets regularly with student groups, sends out surveys, collects comments, and hosts open forums. Campus dining presents challenges that other food establishments, such as restaurants, don’t face, he says—top among them, the limited ability to vote with your feet.

“We have to find a way to be all things to all people. We’re requiring people to eat here, and we need to accommodate them.” Special dietary needs, whether medical or religious, for example, must be reflected in campus menus.

And keeping things interesting requires careful planning. “Because students are here so many days of the year, if you have the same variety every day, even if you’re offering 70 dishes, it’s a lack of variety if those dishes are always the same,” Schauf says.

“We’re working with equipment to make it flexible, and to offer changing types of food at a given station,” he says. “You need to give the place a different feel as often as possible to keep students interested and enthused.”

But while students may crave variety, their concerns run deeper. “If you look at how much the food cycle affects the environment, it’s substantial,” says Liesel Schwarz ’11, a sustainability planning and development major from Canandaigua, N.Y. And so Schauf, students, and the Dining Services management team have worked together to enhance sustainability, promote healthy options, and feature local food prominently on menus and in campus coffee shops.

Students began pushing for local investment five or six years ago, Schauf says. Produce from the state of New York was an early sustainability goal, and Rochester was the first university to become a member of the state’s Pride of New York program, which encourages local buying.

“When we started six years ago, less than 1 percent of what we were purchasing was local. Now it’s more than 25 percent,” Schauf says. “That’s in excess of $2 million dollars going back to the state.”

And not just farmers but local businesses, such as bakeries and coffee roasters, reap the benefits. “We have different local bakeries supplying different outlets on campus, which provides more variety. And there’s a level of participation you can’t get from national bakeries. Local owners can check on things in person, and develop products specifically for campus customers. And we’ve seen some local bakeries hire more workers from the community to keep up with the increased demand.”

“Cam’s really made an effort to reach out to the community” in sustainability efforts, says Schwarz. She worked for Dining Services from the end of her freshman year as a member of Team Green, a student sustainability group that’s part of Dining Services. In addition to local food, more sustainable service items—students can pick up a reusable “clamshell” container for a "grab and go" meal, for example, returning it for a clean replacement as they need it—and composting programs in many of the dining facilities have also changed the experience of mealtimes at Rochester.

The new campus market—POD, or Provisions on Demand—replaces the Corner Store in Douglass Dining Hall and will occupy the spot formerly occupied by Hillside Café in Susan B. Anthony Hall. It will also feature local foods, especially produce. “Upperclassmen want to cook more at home, with places like Riverview Apartments” offering kitchens, says Halpern. “The market will make it easier to do that.”

“Probably the toughest nut to crack is ‘healthy food’ ” because healthy means different things to different people, Schauf says, —and because students may resist the removal of certain less-than-nutritious foods as a narrowing of their choices.

“It’s a topic of discussion on a lot of campuses,” how to achieve the right balance, he says. “We try to give them choices—and to educate them” about health issues by partnering with University Health Service.

But Halpern says there’s high student interest in healthy food, calling it “one of the top student requests.” He calls the revised dining plans that will be introduced along with the renovations “part of a larger effort to encourage healthy lifestyle choices.”

The changes afoot at Rochester are part of a national trend. “At colleges and universities, we don’t compete with each other over food,” Schauf says. “So we steal shamelessly from each other, and we trade ideas in campus visits, trade magazines, and conferences.”

“What’s been new in the last five years is a lot of colleges and universities are going to restaurants for ideas. When I joined the business, it took about 10 to 15 years for ideas to move from restaurants to dining halls. Now it can be a matter of weeks.”

JAZZ FESTIVAL

From Gibbs Street to ‘Jazz Street’

jazz (Photo: Adam Fenster)

OPENING NIGHT: Guitarist Bob Sneider ’94 and his quartet play the music of Wes Montgomery on the first night of the 10th annual Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival in downtown Rochester. The opening night performance by Sneider—an assistant professor of jazz studies and contemporary media at the Eastman School and a faculty member at the Eastman Community Music School—and his bandmates Phil Flanigan (bass), Mike Melito (drums), and Eastman Community Music School faculty member Paul Hofmann (piano) was one of two dozen shows featuring Eastman faculty, students, and staff during the nine-day festival. Drawing visitors from throughout the country as well as internationally, the festival featured several performances in Eastman venues, particularly along Gibbs Street, which was renamed “Jazz Street” during the festival. Photograph by Adam Fenster.

SINGER FAMILY PRIZES

Award-Winning Teachers

singerThis spring’s Singer Family Prizes were awarded to (from left): Todd Benz, of Pittsford, N.Y., nominated by Kelly Beamish ’11, a cell and developmental biology major; Leya Mathew Joykutty, of Plantation, Fla., nominated by Sofia Melgarejo ’11, a neuroscience major; Susan Berry Peters, of Longmeadow, Mass., nominated by Benjamin Freedman ’11, a biomedical engineering major; Timothy Cullen, of Leonia, N.J., nominated by Chae-Ri Han ’11, an economics major. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

PRIZED PUPILS: Each year, undergraduates are invited to honor teachers who have had a profound impact on their lives as students and as individuals before they arrived at Rochester. Graduating seniors are asked to nominate high school teachers to receive the University’s Singer Family Prize for Excellence in Secondary School Teaching. The awards are presented at a special ceremony during commencement weekend. “The Paul Singer Family Foundation feels strongly that while devoted secondary school teachers play a vital role in the intellectual development of American society, they often receive little recognition or acclaim for their endeavors,” says Gordon Singer, the son of Paul Singer ’66, who initiated the prize.

—Melissa Greco Lopes

TRANSLATION STUDIES

Literary Acclaim

Three Percent honors literature in translation and Open Letter launches a digital series of books.

By Valerie Alhart

translated (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things—translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry—and Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver—translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal—are the winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Award.

Announced in April as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, the award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the United States over the previous year. Three Percent—a website that’s part of the University’s translation program and part of Open Letter Books, the University’s translation press—oversees the awards.

Open Letter also announced in June that it has launched a new ebook series for international literature. The first nine titles will be made available on ebook readers such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.

“We believe the best publishing model for Open Letter is the one that gets great international literature into the hands of readers,” says publisher Chad Post. “That’s why we’re so excited, not only to be offering a large selection of our books in both print and digital formats, but also to be putting these ebooks out there at a price that allows anyone to take a chance on something new.”

Valerie Alhart writes about the humanities for University Communications.

PSYCHOLOGY

The Power of Red

color_red (Photo: Adam Fenster)

RED ALL OVER: What links speed, power, and the color red? Rochester dancer Samantha Johnson ’11, a neuroscience major—and president of Louvre Performance Ensemble—from Half Moon Bay, Calif., demonstrates that it’s not a sports car: it’s your muscles. That’s according to a new Rochester-led study that finds that when humans see red, their reactions become both faster and more forceful, but people are unaware of the color’s intensifying effect. Andrew Elliot, a professor of psychology, and his colleague Henk Aarts, a professor of psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, say the findings, published this spring in the journal Emotion, may have applications for sports and other activities in which a brief burst of strength and speed is needed. “Red enhances our physical reactions because it is seen as a danger cue,” says Elliot, a lead researcher in the field of color psychology.

—Susan Hagen

CITATIONS

Research Roundup

Aggressive Breast Tumors Linked to Vitamin D Deficiency

Low vitamin D levels among women with breast cancer correlate with more aggressive tumors and poorer prognosis, according to new research highlighted this spring at the American Society of Breast Surgeons meeting. The study—led by Luke Peppone, a research assistant professor of radiation oncology at the Wilmot Cancer Center—is the first to examine vitamin D and breast cancer progression. Peppone and senior investigator Kristin Skinner, an associate professor of surgery and director of the Wilmot Comprehensive Breast Care Center, examined prognostic factors for 155 women who underwent surgery for breast cancer between January 2009 and September 2010.

Smoke-Exposed Children with Flu More Likely to Need ICU Care

Children who are exposed to secondhand smoke are more likely to need intensive care and intubation when hospitalized with influenza. That's according to new research based at Golisano Children’s Hospital and presented at the Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May. Researchers, including Karen Wilson, an assistant professor of pediatrics and author of the study abstract, also found that the children exposed to secondhand smoke had longer hospital stays. After controlling for underlying conditions, scientists—who analyzed the medical charts for 91 children hospitalized for flu at Golisano Children’s Hospital between 2002 and 2009—discovered that children exposed to secondhand smoke were almost five times more likely to need intensive care and more than 11 times more likely to need intubation.

Genome Duplication Encourages Rapid Adaptation of Plants

Plants adapt to the local weather and soil conditions in which they grow, and such environmental adaptations are known to evolve over thousands of years as mutations slowly accumulate in plants’ genetic code. But a Rochester biologist has found that at least some plant adaptations can occur almost instantaneously, not by a change in DNA sequence, but simply by duplication of existing genetic material. The research by Justin Ramsey, an assistant professor of biology, and published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that yarrow plants with a greater number of sets of chromosomes had a greater survival advantage over other yarrow plants when moved to a new environment.

Documenting the Literary Resistance to the Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition didn’t silence all its critics—especially novelists and playwrights of the time, argues Ryan Prendergast, an associate professor of Spanish. In his new book, Reading, Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain (Ashgate Press, 2011), Prendergast focuses on Miguel de Cervantes’s enduringly popular novel, Don Quixote, which was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, as well as Moorish novels and theater from the period. Prendergast examines how religious and royal authorities conflated citizenship in Inquisitorial Spain with Catholicism, to the exclusion of Muslims, Jews, and other groups—and considers how literary texts from the period offer a critique of political and religious intolerance despite the threat of the Inquisition’s legendary, though often exaggerated, punishments.

Genetic Defect Holds Clues to Risk for Sudden Cardiac Death

Scientists are unraveling for the first time how genetic defects can help predict the risk of dying suddenly in individuals with one of the leading causes of sudden cardiac death. A new study—led by Coeli Lopes, an assistant professor of medicine in the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute and published in the journal Science Translational Medicine—shows that the function of specific genetic mutations are strong predictors of risk of sudden death and other cardiac events in patients with long QT syndrome, a rare, inherited heart rhythm disorder. The discovery could also provide insight into the assessment and treatment of millions of people who experience cardiac arrhythmias—irregular heart rhythms that cause the heart to beat too fast or too slow and can lead to sudden death if not corrected.

PHILOSOPHY

Agreeing to Disagree

Philosopher Richard Feldman explores the relationship between belief and evidence.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

feldmanPHILOSOPHICAL EVIDENCE: Feldman is credited with bringing a new focus to reasonable disagreement through his work on the theory of evidentialism. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

For Richard Feldman, dean of the College and professor of philosophy, disagreement must be an agreeable thing to scrutinize. With his Rochester collaborator, Earl Conee, also a philosophy professor, he has developed the theory known as “evidentialism,” which considers the relation between belief and evidence. For his contributions to epistemology—the theory of knowledge—Feldman was recognized this February with a conference in his honor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Trent Dougherty ’09 (PhD), who completed his dissertation under Feldman’s direction, helped to plan the event, which he nicknamed “Feldmania.”

“He has made the topic of reasonable disagreement one of the hottest topics in epistemology,” says Randall Curren, chair of the philosophy department. In 2010, Feldman coedited the book Disagreement (Oxford University Press), and a collection of essays and critical discussions based on his collaboration with Conee, titled Evidentialism and its Discontents, is scheduled to be published in July.

What is evidentialism?

Evidentialism is a theory about the nature of justified, or reasonable, belief. It holds that whether a person is justified in believing a proposition depends entirely on the evidence the person has concerning the proposition. This implies that other considerations—such as whether the person has gone about investigating the proposition in a responsible way, whether there’s relevant information available that the person doesn’t know about, or whether believing the proposition is helpful or harmful to the person—aren’t relevant to the justification of belief.

Can opposing conclusions based on the same evidence be equally reasonable? And how does one move forward from there?

These are key questions. Evidentialism, as it’s typically understood, would seem to imply that opposing conclusions based on the same evidence cannot be reasonable. And if you make the assumption that in many of the significant controversies in which we find ourselves, people on the opposing sides have the same evidence, then you have to conclude that the people on one or both sides aren’t reasonable in their beliefs. Thus, even if they’re as sincere, careful, well-intentioned and thoughtful as can be, they’re not both reasonable. This reply depends on what I’ve called the “Uniqueness Thesis.” This is the principle that says that a body of evidence justifies exactly one attitude toward a proposition—either believing it, disbelieving it, or suspending judgment about it. Some philosophers would deny this thesis. They’d say that a body of evidence can justify more than one of these attitudes. In effect, you get to choose. Whether this amounts to a denial of evidentialism is a tangled question.

Do disagreements over ethical or aesthetic questions differ from those over more empirical issues?

If ethical and aesthetic questions have genuine answers—if there is a truth about, for example, what the right thing to do in a given situation is—then they don’t differ from disagreements about other issues. I think that ethical questions do have genuine answers, although in many cases it’s extraordinarily hard to know what those answers are. In many cases, there are underlying empirical issues—such as what the consequences of what a particular course of action will be—that are the source of disagreement. That view about ethics is, of course, controversial.

Fractiousness fills current political discourse, and much of the debate seems to rely on loose standards for evidence. How does that affect opportunities for agreement?

It’s true that people disagree, often strenuously, when they have painfully little basis for their beliefs. Too often, our culture seems to take acknowledging that you have no opinion as some kind of weakness. And changing your mind is, at least in political settings, often taken to indicate incompetence. I think it can actually show the ability to take new evidence into account, which is a sign of rationality. This situation strikes me as highly unfortunate.

What can we do when we find ourselves locked in disagreement with someone?

There are a couple of things to note. The key one is to think about the issues you discuss as genuine issues and the people with whom you interact not as opponents to defeat but rather as potential sources of information that you should consider. When you read or hear an argument that comes to a conclusion you disagree with, I think you should ask yourself, “What’s the reasonable thing for me to think, now that I’ve learned about this argument?” Instead, people often think, “How can I deny this argument?” or “How can I ridicule the person making the argument?” If you think about things the way I suggest, it’s the arguments and the evidence, not the people, who matter. There’s another thing people should keep in mind. It’s OK not to have an opinion. I’ve contemplated writing a paper on the virtues of suspending judgment. It’s often the appropriate attitude. People shouldn’t be afraid of it. And when you find that there are strong opinions on both sides of a question, sometimes—though not always—that’s because there is competing evidence on both sides, and people on each side are focusing on the evidence that supports their own view. I think that in the cases in which one might think that multiple views are all reasonable, suspending judgment is actually the only reasonable one. A related point worth noting concerns the relationship between belief and action. Suppose you have to choose between two courses of action and you have no basis for a belief about which one will be better. In such a case, it is reasonable to do either of the actions, but it is not reasonable to believe that the one you’ve chosen is the better one.

UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP

Four Elected Trustees

Alumni, medical education, and business leaders join University’s board.

trusteesNomi Miron Bergman (left), Paul Griner, Carol Karp, and John Kelly

Prominent executive leaders in cable television, pharmaceuticals, medical education, and business management were elected this spring as University trustees.

Nomi Miron Bergman ’85 is president of Bright House Networks, the nation’s sixth-largest cable television company, which provides digital cable, digital phone, broadband Internet, and metro Ethernet services to residential and business customers in metropolitan markets in Alabama, California, Florida, Indiana, and Michigan. An economics and statistics major at Rochester, Bergman is a member of the University’s National Council for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. She is a charter member of the George Eastman Circle.

Paul Griner ’59M (MD) is a professor emeritus of medicine at the University and senior lecturer on medicine at Harvard Medical School. From 1984 to 1995, Griner served as general director and chief executive officer of Strong Memorial Hospital, where he’s credited as a leader in the development of hospital programs designed to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care. He chairs the University’s National Council for the School of Medicine and Dentistry and was a member of the school’s Alumni Council. He is a charter member of the George Eastman Circle.

Carol Karp ’74 is vice president and head of global regulatory affairs and risk management at Janssen Alzheimer Immunotherapy R&D, an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson. A prominent pharmaceutical industry executive, she has helped lead multiple companies in areas of regulatory affairs, project management, drug safety, and quality assurance for more than 25 years. A biology major at Rochester, she is a charter member of the George Eastman Circle. Her daughter, Sarah Karp ’11, is a Take Five Scholar for the 2011–12 year.

John Kelly is a corporate vice president at Xerox Corporation and executive vice president for ACS, a Xerox company. Kelly is a highly regarded consultant to the financial services, technology, and communications industries in the areas of business process management and document services. A member of the George Eastman Circle and the Executive Advisory Council at the Simon School, he joined Xerox in 2004 as chief operating officer of global services. Before that he held leadership positions in technology consulting and systems integration at NEC Corporation and Capgemini in the United States and Europe.

Named Professorships Making a ‘Lasting Imprint’

History professor Robert Westbrook turns to moral and political philosophy to frame his writings on the American past.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

westbrookHISTORIANS’ ART: “Professors are among the few lucky artisans left in the modern world of work,” says Westbrook, a historian who was installed this spring as the first Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Robert Westbrook once confessed to a room full of graduate students that his doctoral dissertation advisor at Stanford had called the first draft of his dissertation prospectus “constipated.” The comment came in a talk, titled after the Rolling Stones classic, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But If You Try Sometimes, You Get What You Need,” in which, with characteristic candor and wit, Westbrook advised his listeners that “the alertness to contingency and the unintended consequences of human action that we cultivate as historians is one that we might well extend to our own lives.”

Westbrook had gone to Stanford directly from Yale, where, he explained, as part of his financial aid package, he had landed a job as assistant to Howard Lamar, then the chair of Yale’s history department and a noted scholar of the American West. It led him to appreciate, he recalled, that “professors are among the few lucky artisans left in the modern world of work.” That realization, as well as the “rush” he says he experienced with the publication of his first work—an entry in The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West on barbed wire—sealed his decision to become a historian. Westbrook, who

has taught at Rochester since 1986, this spring became the first Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History, a professorship named for Washington, D.C., attorney Joseph Cunningham ’67 (MA).

He has supervised more than 20 doctoral dissertations, a sizeable number in the history department’s small graduate program. And many of those students came to study with Westbrook in part because of the book, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell, 1991), that eventually came of that allegedly burdened first effort.

James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard, says the book was “an instant classic.” Daniel Borus, a professor of history who has been Westbrook’s colleague at Rochester since 1990, calls it “one of those rare books that redefine a field.”

Dewey, a late 19th- and early 20th-century social reformer and one of the founders of the American philosophy of pragmatism, had long been written about as a major contributor to modern American liberalism. To the contrary, Westbrook argued, Dewey was “a minority, not a majority, spokesman within the liberal community, a social philosopher whose democratic vision failed to find a secure place in liberal ideology—in short, a more radical voice than has been generally assumed.”

In 1993, the book earned the 1991–92 Merle Curti Award, an honor given biennially to the best book in social or intellectual history by the Organization of American Historians. The critic Louis Menand found the book significant enough to devote a 7,000-word essay to it—entitled “The Real John Dewey”—in The New York Review of Books in 1992.

Casey Blake ’87 (PhD), a professor of history and founding director of the American studies program at Columbia, says of Westbrook “where I think he really is quite unique is in drawing on debates in moral and political philosophy to frame historical questions.”

Westbrook’s second book, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations During World War II (Smithsonian Books, 2004), was cast as an examination of the claim made by many political theorists that Enlightenment liberal states, such as the United States, founded on the principle of individual liberty, generally fail to foster deep conceptions of civic obligation. Westbrook put that claim to the test, attempting to excavate the political philosophy implicit in the artifacts of everyday life—advertisements, cartoons, posters, Norman Rockwell paintings, and even the pinups of Hollywood starlets—distributed to Americans with federal sanction during the war.

Through a discerning and at times colorful analysis of these artifacts, Westbrook concluded, in accord with the political theorists, that the reasons for which Americans fought were to carry out essentially private obligations—to families, children, parents, and “an ‘American Way of Life’ defined as a rich (and richly commodified) private realm of experience.”

Westbrook was drawn to Rochester 25 years ago by the prospect of teaching and working alongside Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic who taught at Rochester from 1970 until his death in 1994. Over the years, Westbrook has consistently attracted a loyal following of undergraduates as well as graduates to his courses on American intellectual history, American culture during the Great Depression and World War II, and many others in a wide and ever-changing repertoire.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen ’92, the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who took several courses with Westbrook as a history major, calls him “transformative” in her personal and intellectual development.

“I’d grown up in a shopping mall. I said ‘like’ every sixth word. I didn’t come in a package that at all announced that I could be a scholar,” she says. “But he took me deadly seriously, hearing past the ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’ and could see what was possible in me and helped me cultivate that.” These days, Ratner-Rosenhagen is among the scholars to whom Westbrook regularly sends his essays for feedback.

Says Kloppenberg (with whom Ratner-Rosenhagen studied in graduate school): “Robb has left a lasting imprint on the fields of American intellectual history, American political science, and the history of American philosophy. Those are three distinct fields. And not many people make a mark in more than one academic discipline during their careers.”

McCally is an associate editor at Rochester Review and earned her PhD in history, under Westbrook’s supervision, in 2002.

Joseph Cunningham: ‘A Lifelong Interest in History’

cunninghamNAMESAKE: Cunningham studied history at Rochester while waiting to be called to active duty and later established a career as an attorney in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“I was born and raised down the street from the University,” says Joseph Cunningham ’67 (MA), recalling “sledding on the slopes behind the football field” and playing basketball on campus.

Urged by his mother to attend a Catholic college, he earned his bachelor’s degree not at Rochester, but at John Carroll University, he told the audience in Rush Rhees Library’s Hawkins-Carlson Room last May at the installation of the first Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History.

After college, he pursued a law degree at Columbia. In 1962, a newly minted attorney who was also a commissioned officer awaiting a call for active duty, Cunningham had the time and the inclination to sample Rochester’s academic offerings. He eventually pursued a master’s degree in history, for which he was awarded a tuition scholarship.

“I’ve had a lifelong interest in history, and a great regard for the University of Rochester,” says Cunningham. He says he and his wife, Andrea, endowed a professorship out of “gratitude for the spontaneous generosity that the University extended to me when I wanted to pursue graduate studies.”

Cunningham’s master’s thesis, “Religious Aspects of American Government in the Philippine Islands,” was a first-rate work of scholarship, says Stewart Weaver, a professor of history and chair of the department, who checked it out of Rush Rhees Library and read it prior to Cunningham’s visit to campus in May.

“Joe’s thesis anticipated by decades the recent scholarly interest in the cultural dimensions of Western colonialism and might well have been published had his career not taken him in other directions,” says Weaver.

Cunningham has practiced law for more than four decades and is the founder of the Washington, D.C.–area firm Cunningham & Associates, specializing in insurance defense and civil litigation. He has also taught law at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland.

Says Weaver: “The endowment of the Cunningham Professorship is a tribute not only to Joe’s extraordinary generosity but also an important statement of faith in the historical discipline. It will heighten substantially the visibility of our program and make it possible to retain and benefit from the presence of one of our most outstanding scholars.”

—Karen McCally

BY THE NUMBERS

Career Advancement

Introducing the Gwen M. Greene Career and Internship Center

By Kathleen McGarvey

careercenterLIFELONG CONTRIBUTIONS: A trustee since 2000, Greene received the James S. Armstrong Alumni Service Award in 2005 for her contributions to undergraduate life on campus. (Photo: Courtesy of Gwen Greene)

Gwen Greene ’65, a member of the Board of Trustees since 2000, has for more than 20 years helped students hoping to break into the financial world. She’s used her experience as vice president of JP Morgan Securities to help students explore internships or launch careers in global investment banking, securities trading or brokerage, and other paths. This spring, the College’s career center was renamed the Gwen M. Greene Career and Internship Center, in recognition of Greene’s continued support and new $1 million commitment to the campus resource.

“I am passionate about our career center and mentoring current and former students to help them begin their careers,” says Greene. “I have a strong conviction that our students are as qualified as any to get those coveted jobs, and it is alumni and friends of the University who can help them compete successfully.” The Gwen M. Greene Career and Internship Center supports several services for students at Rochester, including career counseling and graduate and preprofessional school advising, as well as networking opportunities. During the academic year, the center’s counselors hold one-on-one sessions with students, helping them create résumés and cover letters and honing their interview skills and job search strategies. Here’s a look at the center and some numbers for the Class of 2011, as of commencement day:

$145,000

Total dollar amount of the center’s Summer 2011 Reach Funding stipends, supporting unpaid internships of 125 students

90%

Percentage of 2011 graduates who will have jobs or who attend graduate school one year after commencement

90%

Percentage of Senior Survey respondents who had at least one internship, research, or career-related experience

80%

Percentage of seniors who visited the office at least once during the academic year

34%

Percentage of survey respondents admitted into graduate or professional school, as well as Take Five and postbaccalaureate Rochester programs

30%

Percentage of respondents who accepted a full-time job or internship offer, or a service-related experience

26

Number of 2011 graduates who will be completing Teach for America, City Year, or other service and teaching programs

13

Years Burt Nadler has served as the center’s director

11

Number of career counselors at the center

For more about the center, visit www.rochester.edu/careercenter.

QUOTABLE COVERAGE

Risk Analysis

Simon School’s New York City conference offers lessons on American economy.

simon (Photo: Corbis)

Representatives from some of the nation’s leading financial, legal, and policy media outlets were on hand this spring as more than 300 leaders from industry, government, and academia discussed the “Emerging Risks to America’s Financial Stability,” a one-day conference sponsored by the Simon School in New York City. Held in the heart of the nation’s financial center, the conference offered an opportunity to hear in-depth from some of the country’s most prominent economic and business analysts. Here’s a sample of what they said:

Fox Business News

“The decade ahead—from a technology standpoint—is going to be transformative, disruptive, and incredibly exciting. . . . For me, the decade will be defined by the following four words: mobile, social, collaborative, and cloud.”—Anita Sands, COO of UBS Wealth Management, talking about trends in information technology with the TV network as part of its live coverage of the conference.

Dow Jones Newswires

“If we create an entitlement, let’s do it right.”—Veteran economist and Yale University professor Robert Shiller, talking about how the United States can better contain spending by tying growth of debt and Social Security to GDP.

Forbes

“Incentives within the medical system are horrible. I get the Rolls-Royce of health coverage for nothing.”—Freakonomics author and University of Chicago professor Steve Levitt talking with the magazine about incentive structures in the health care system, the debt debate, and other topics during the conference.

Law360.com

“The Madoff and Stanford frauds reminded us of the importance of getting evidence early on of wrongdoing. It’s important to have people come forward, and we are amenable to incentives. That means increasing corporate cooperation, encouraging self-reporting and reduced sanctions, deferred prosecution, and nonprosecution agreements.”—Robert Khuzami ’79, the SEC’s chief enforcement officer, talking about convicted financier Bernard Madoff and accused financier Allen Stanford.

NorthJersey.com

“You are our partners, not our banks.”—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, talking about his efforts to work with the business community in New Jersey to spur economic growth.

—Scott Hauser

QUOTES

Rochester in the News

“There is significance to rewarding people. You get them to do what you want them to do, but not what they want to do.” —Edward Deci, a professor of psychology and the Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences, talking with the CBS news site MoneyWatch.com about his study showing that people may enjoy doing tasks less when they are paid for them.

New York Times

“I can see if you’re getting worse over the course of the visit, your ability to eat, to walk, to converse, and to think.”—Ray Dorsey, an assistant professor of neurology, describing a pilot study of group checkups for patients with Parkinson’s disease that he led at the Medical Center.

CNN

“His music is accessible because of the groove . . . (and) Marley the performer was charismatic enough to sell it. A lot of artists don’t have that.”—John Covach, a professor of music in the College and a professor of music theory at the Eastman School, remembering musician Bob Marley on the 30th anniversary of his death.

Fox News

“A third of new drugs that are approved have no comparative data at all. I think we’d all say that is sad.”—Alec O’Connor, an associate professor of medicine, responding to a new study showing that 33 percent of Food and Drug Administration drug approvals included no data on how the medications compare with existing alternatives.

MSNBC

“I wouldn’t necessarily tell my patients after reading an article like this to drink more than five cups of coffee a day to lower your risk of a particular type of breast cancer. It’s just that if you happen to enjoy coffee consumption, you may possibly have an added benefit of protection against one subtype of breast cancer.”—Michelle Shayne, an assistant professor of medicine, reacting to news of a study indicating that women who drink five or more cups of coffee a day are 57 percent less likely to develop estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer than women who drink less than one cup.

U.S. News & World Report

“I believe, yes, attending to emotions is extraordinarily important, not only for the well-being of the individual’s emotional and mental health but also for the physical health and maybe even evolution of myocardial infarction.”—Robert Gramling, an associate professor of family medicine, talking about a study showing that people who are very frightened of dying during and in the days after a heart attack have more inflammation—a sign they may not do as well over time as patients who are less afraid.

NPR

“Nobody really, really knows.”—John Treaner, a professor of medicine and chief of the Infectious Diseases Division at the Medical Center, responding to a question about whether a repeat flu shot is needed this fall, as this year’s shot is a duplicate of last year’s. Treanor and other experts recommend following the Centers for Disease Control’s advice to get the flu shot.

GOLF

Phil, Meet Nick

Nicholas Palladino ’14 earns Phil Mickelson Award, Division III’s top honor.

By Ryan Whirty

sports_golferMEDALIST: Palladino earned medalist honors at four different tournaments and was named League Rookie of the Year. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Although golfer Nicholas Palladino ’14 hasn’t settled on a major yet, he already has a good idea about what interests him, both in the classroom and in life. In essence, he wants to know what makes people tick.

“I like to think about how people view things, how they think about things,” he says.

And for Palladino, that desire to get inside people’s heads includes a thorough self-examination. The goal? Simple self-improvement.

Based on Palladino’s performance during his freshman year on the golf course, it’s hard to imagine how much more he needs to improve. During the regular season, he earned medalist honors at four different tournaments, garnering Liberty League Rookie and Player of the Year honors.

He earned a trip to the NCAA championships in May, where he played two solid rounds before being named the winner of the 2011 Phil Mickelson Award. Given annually to the most outstanding freshman in Division III golf, the award is named for the Masters-winning PGA golfer and presented by the Phil and Amy Mickelson Foundation.

It was the capstone to a spectacular rookie season.

“That takes the cake easily,” says Palladino, of Highland Heights, Ohio. “That was the best achievement of my career.”

Rochester golf coach Dan Wesley says that while he knew Palladino would make an impact on the team, the coach couldn’t have imagined how well the freshman adjusted to college life and college golf. But, Wesley says, Palladino has both the mental discipline and the will to succeed.

“Nick has all the qualities that tournament golf requires: mental toughness, positive attitude, determination, and relentless focus,” Wesley says. “He also made a commitment this past year to become physically stronger, which allowed him to increase his power and his stamina—which makes a huge difference over the course of a tournament and a season.”

But Palladino didn’t always possess the psychology of a winner.

“I’ll admit that I was a little bit of a hothead,” Palladino says. “I had a bit of a temper. If I had a bad round, I’d get off the course and be down in the dumps. I pretty much let golf determine my mood for the next day.”

After taking advice from his father and grandfather and reading a book on golf philosophy, Palladino realized that he couldn’t dwell on mistakes.

“It really did help me control my temper,” he says. “Golf is a game. It shouldn’t affect your life.”

That ability to place the sport in perspective was on full display during Palladino’s freshman season, and Wesley hopes he’ll be able to continue cultivating that frame of mind as he progresses through his Rochester career.

He says Palladino has emerged as a capable team leader for the Yellowjackets, and he adds that the young golfer continues to work hard, developments that should help Palladino build on his first year.

“I don't think he’ll feel pressure to match this year’s accomplishments because he knows each year is a new journey with new challenges,” Wesley says. “His freshman year is long gone now, and he is looking forward to making some noise with his teammates as we chase our team goals.”

Meanwhile, as he decides on a major, Palladino has found an affinity for history—a class on the mythology of King Arthur and Robin Hood was a favorite—because history provides an ideal discipline for examining why people do what they do, Palladino says.

“I like seeing how things happened in the past,” he says. “To avoid bad things happening, we have to learn how to use the past to help the future.”

Ryan Whirty writes about sports for Rochester Review.

HIGHLIGHTS

A Season in Review

Yellowjackets earned honors on and off the field this spring.

By Ryan Whirty

sports_wrapSTANDOUT SENIORS: Finishing in the top 16 at NCAAs, Lia Weiner ’11 (above) earned All-America honors in tennis while Francisco Ramirez ’11 (below) topped his season by qualifying for the 800 meters at the national meet. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Highlights from the spring sports seasons:

Softball: The Yellowjackets were led by freshman infielder Nina Korn ’14, who took the Liberty League by storm, earning league Rookie of the Year and first-team all-league accolades. Korn also picked up first-team all-UAA honors for Rochester, which went 26–15 overall and 6–2 in the league. Also posting a stellar season was outfielder Katie McLean ’12, who joined Korn on the first-team all–Liberty League and all-UAA rosters. Madeline Skellie ’13 was Liberty League Pitcher of the Year.

Baseball: While Rochester struggled to a 14–20 overall record, several players had standout seasons, led by designated hitter Steve Just ’11, who picked up first-team all-region, second-team all-UAA, and first-team all–Liberty League accolades. Outfielder Alex Caghan ’12 earned third-team all-region honors to go with spots on the all-UAA second team and the all–Liberty League first team.

Golf: In addition to the rookie season posted by national Division III Freshman of the Year Nick Palladino ’14, Marc Youngentob ’13 had an excellent spring campaign, joining Palladino on the all–Mid-Atlantic Region team. As a squad, the Yellowjackets placed second at the UAA championships, where Palladino was the medalist. Rochester also won the Fred B. Kravetz and Mid-Atlantic Region invitationals.

sports_wrap (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Rowing: In addition to filling the stroke seat on Rochester’s first Varsity 8 crew, senior Margaret Zupa ’11 picked up Academic All-District accolades. She led her crew to the bronze medal at the Dad Vail Regatta, where the Freshman 4 placed sixth out of 48 teams.

Lacrosse: The Yellowjackets were 2–13 on the field, but few could rival them in the classroom as 10 players garnered Academic All–Liberty League recognition, including Megan Battin ’12, Caressa Chen ’13, Frances Cooley ’13, Kayleigh Hogan ’12, Keegan Kennedy ’12, Liza Maizel ’13, Natalie Mitchell ’13, Morgan Preziosi ’13, Hilary Rosenthal ’12, and Maggie Stevenson ’11.

Men’s track & field: It was the year of the steeplechase for Rochester, led by Brian Lang ’11, who repeated as an All-American by placing fourth at the NCAA championships. He was followed by teammate Daniel Lane ’11, who came in 10th in the event at nationals. At the state championship meet, Lang won the steeplechase, while Jason Zayac ’12 was fifth and Justin Roncaioli ’13 finished 10th to lead the Yellowjackets to a third-place finish as a team. Also having a solid season was Francisco Ramirez ’11, who competed at the NCAA championships in the 800 meters.

Women’s track & field: Seniors Jacqueline Cinella ’11 and Yaneve Fonge ’11 both earned national Academic All-District honors, and they both qualified for the NCAA championships—Fonge in the hammer throw and Cinella in the 400 intermediate hurdles. Fonge won the hammer at ECACs and states, while Cinella earned the state title in the 400 intermediate hurdles. As a team, the Yellowjackets were second at the state championships.

Squash: Rochester placed 11 players on the Liberty League all-academic roster. On the court, Benjamin Fischer ’12 earned first-team All-America honors for the second straight year, and teammates Andres Duany ’13 and Hameed Ahmed ’11 were named to the All-America second team. As a unit, Rochester posted a 12–5 mark and finished the season ranked fourth nationally.

Men’s tennis: The Yellowjackets finished eighth as a team at the UAA championships and posted a mark of 11–11 on the season, including an 8–1 win over Hobart on Senior Day.

Women’s tennis: No. 1 singles player Lia Weiner ’11 advanced to the round of 16 at the NCAA championships and was named Rochester’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year. In addition, Weiner, Frances Tseng ’13, and Danielle Shreck ’12 picked up second-team all-UAA accolades by leading the Yellowjackets to a fifth-place team finish at the association championships.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Anthropologist Robert Foster ‘rediscovers’ cultural treasures of the Pacific Islands.

By Susan Hagen Photographs by Adam Fenster

artifactsPIECE WORK: Kathryn Leacock, curator of collections at the Buffalo Museum of Science, examines a carved frigatebird from the P. G. T. Black Collection, a 6,200-piece trove purchased by the museum in 1938. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Robert Foster travels across the globe to do field research in Papua New Guinea. But one day a few years ago, following up on a footnote in a book, the professor of anthropology and of visual and cultural studies drove less than an hour west of Rochester to Buffalo—and found there one of the largest and oldest collections of Pacific Islands artifacts anywhere in the world.

That 2006 discovery took place in the halls of the Buffalo Museum of Science. Although the museum had a couple dozen objects on display, when staff took Foster to the museum’s storeroom, he discovered thousands of pieces.

“I was stunned,” Foster says. “It was off the map. Buffalo’s not a place you’d expect Pacific Islands objects to be.”

The P. G. T. Black Collection—safely preserved at the museum for the last seven decades—contains some 6,200 objects from remote villages and colonial outposts across Melanesia, everything from stone axes and toys to fishing tools and spears. Although individual items had been displayed, a catalog of the collection had never been published—and the trove of cultural treasures had remained virtually unknown among scholars.

“The collection provides a window into the early encounters between Pacific Islanders and traders, missionaries, and collectors,” says Foster, an expert on the effects of globalization. “These objects reveal islanders’ innovative response to the influx of Europeans and new technologies around the turn of the 20th century.”

“It’s an unusual collection in that it emphasizes everyday objects more than exotic ritual objects,” Foster says. “I’ve speculated that in some ways it’s a ‘shadow’ collection, representing objects that were being replaced at the time by what Europeans were bringing in.”

P. G. T. Black, the collector, was a branch inspector for Burns, Philp & Co., a trading and shipping firm based in Sydney, Australia. He acquired the objects—pieces used by Pacific Islanders at the time—between 1886 and 1916, and in 1938 the Buffalo Museum of Science bought, sight unseen, the 40 crates they filled.

artifactsPROFESSORS & COLLECTORS: Robert Foster (above) visits the Memorial Art Gallery, where items are on loan from the Black collection, named for the Australian inspector for a shipping firm (below) who collected the items between 1886 and 1916. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

There are some structural reasons for the collection’s low profile, Foster says. Anthropology as a discipline was, until the 1920s or ’30s, much more institutionally associated with museums than it is today, and the ties that did remain tended to concern archaeology. The Buffalo Museum of Science is independent of all of the area’s universities.

artifacts (Photo: Buffalo Museum of Science)

Lacking proper documentation, the Black collection remained relatively unknown even among Pacific studies specialists. The problem, Foster explains, is that without accurate records of where and under what circumstances objects were acquired, scholars have lacked crucial context for the objects.

But a lucky break and some timely advocacy by museum staff and Foster have solved the mystery. After tracking down Black’s grandson in California during the mid-1990s, a former museum curator discovered that the family owned three trunks of papers, including material from the period when Black was collecting. In 2010, following inquiries from Foster, Black’s great-grandson donated the original diaries to the museum. From these documents—itineraries, really, says Foster—and other material in the Australian archives, Foster has been able to piece together some of the missing background on the collection.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies have both awarded Foster fellowships to support his project of sharing the riches of the collection with a wider audience. His scholarly sleuthing will culminate in a book, an online catalog, and a museum exhibit, Journeys into Papua, that opens September 17 in celebration of the museum’s 150th anniversary.

artifactsDOCUMENTED COLLECTION: A museum drawer holds examples of earrings and other ornaments from Central Province, Papua New Guinea (above), part of a collection that also includes Black’s meticulously kept diaries (below). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The collaboration is a “match made in heaven,” says Kathryn Leacock, curator of collections at the museum. “He provides the research, we have the collection.”

Foster anticipates that the insights culled from the collection will eventually come full circle. He’s working with senior researchers at the Australian Museum, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Australian National University on ways to incorporate the objects from the Black collection into regional projects. Such initiatives, he says, will help make the artifacts accessible to the communities from which they originated and provide a rich set of resources for constructing local histories.

artifacts (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“It’s amazing when you think of these objects that were created in New Guinea in the 1890s and then went to Australia, and then to Buffalo and then—for those that were part of other exhibitions—New York or San Francisco or Washington, D.C.,” says Foster.

“They’re not inert. They have what I call ‘social lives’—and new meanings continually get attached to them.”

Additional reporting by Kathleen McGarvey

A New Major in the Marketplace

An undergraduate business major —built to ‘Rochester standards’— offers students fresh options and broad knowledge.

By Kathleen McGarvey

business (Photo: Corbis)

Michael Echter ’13 has plans to become a mechanical engineer. But the Penfield, N.Y., native says that’s not all he’s interested in—a lawn care business he’s run in his hometown for the past five years has whetted his appetite for some business knowledge to pair with his engineering degree.

This spring, he made it official, pursuing dual degrees: a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and a bachelor of arts in business, paired with a minor in American Sign Language.

“I believe it’ll make me more marketable, but it’s also something I have a strong interest in,” he says. “There are natural connections between business and engineering.”

Echter is among the first students to sign on for Rochester’s newly minted business major—the Barry Florescue Undergraduate Business Degree Program, named in recognition of the support of Barry Florescue ’66, a University trustee (see sidebar, page 47). A collaboration between the College and the Simon Graduate School of Business, the major takes an atypical approach for an undergraduate program: students will study business within the context of a liberal education, giving themselves a broad base of knowledge in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences rather than narrow training within fields of business.

“Some of our peers don’t have an undergraduate business major at all, or have it in a different school, as a business degree,” says Richard Feldman, dean of the College. “To have it in the same school, as part of a liberal arts program, is unusual. Not unique, but unusual.”

“This is a wonderful example of a crossdisciplinary program,” says Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School. “It’s also an example of an intergenerational commitment, exemplified by Barry’s counsel and support, to create an outstanding program.”

businessACADEMIC CONNECTIONS: One of the first students enrolled in the new major, Michael Echter ’13 is studying business and engineering, which, he says, have natural connections. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The latest development in an effort to expand the College’s undergraduate offerings, the business major was approved by the state this spring. As is the case for students throughout the College, business majors will take three-course clusters in two areas outside of their social sciences home. It’s an approach that reflects the signature Rochester Curriculum, which offers students the freedom to study what they love and the guidance, through the cluster system, to explore a variety of fields. That liberal arts perspective plays to the University’s historic strengths, say Rochester’s academic leaders. For example, when Howard Hanson took direction of music education at the Eastman School in the 1920s, he urged students to partake of all the University had to offer. He saw eye-to-eye with then president Rush Rhees, who had declared that “educated musicians should be much more than expert musical technicians.”

businessEARLY ADOPTERS: Timothy Kuchman ’13 (above) and Yu (Bonnie) Xia ’13 (below) are among the first to enroll in the new business major, which was approved by the state this spring. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“A traditional business degree would feature a much higher fraction of business courses,” says Feldman. “I think a broad education is valuable. Students will have a greater understanding of a variety of disciplines.”

For Timothy Kuchman ’13 of Rochester—who says he was the second person to sign up for the new major—the opportunity to study business is a welcome one.

He began taking business classes as a high school student, and knew he ultimately wanted a business career. He opted to attend Rochester, in spite of the lack of a business major.

When he heard the major had been approved, “it was great news. It was exactly what I wanted.”

Business is one of the most popular areas of study for undergraduate students nationwide—about 12 percent of undergraduates are business majors nationally, says Zupan, and more than 295,000 students entered undergraduate-level programs of study in business in the 2009–10 academic year at member institutions, according to data from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, an international accreditation group for business programs.

Over the past five years, the College had sought to address students’ interest in business with a minor and with two majors in the economics department, economics with a concentration in financial economics and economics with a concentration in economics and business strategies.

“We’d developed the idea of a hybrid major, an economics major but you’d take a certain set of courses in economics and a number of electives that could be in the Simon School,” says Mark Bils, professor and chair of the economics department, of the earlier majors.

business (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The new major, in development for two years and ultimately expected to draw 50 to 60 new students a year, replaces the business strategies hybrid—but the grounding in economics is key, say those involved in creating the program.

“This major fulfills both needs” students have expressed, says Bils: “a broader background in business-related courses and a developed specialty in economics and markets.”

“I’m going to bill this as the hardest business major in America” when talking with prospective students, says Jonathan Burdick, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid. “It’s everything you’d want in a business major, plus some pretty significant pinnings around it from economics and the Simon School that aren’t always part of a business major elsewhere.” The quantitative and analytical research focus of faculty in both the economics department and the Simon School means there won’t be a “soft track” for students who aren’t interested in the challenge, he says.

The structure of the Rochester major also stands in contrast to recent criticism of some academically anemic undergraduate business programs. In an April article produced collaboratively, the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education suggested that undergraduate business education is characterized by student disengagement, with students spending less time preparing for class than their peers in any other general field.

“We’ve been very conscious in designing this major to maintain what I’ll call ‘Rochester standards,’” says Ronald Hansen, senior associate dean for program development at the Simon School and the William H. Meckling Professor of Business Administration. He, along with Zupan, Feldman, and Bils, played a central role in designing the new major.

“Because Simon is very economics-oriented and has a good relationship with the economics department, working on this major together is a natural for us,” Hansen says.

A relatively small set of core courses for the major allows students ample time to explore other areas within the liberal arts; two alternative tracks for several additional courses—Organizations and Markets, and Marketing—provide a narrowed focus of concentration within the major.

Karen Forsythe, the academic advisor for students in the major and part of the Multidisciplinary Studies Center, calls the business major “a true collaboration between the two schools. But it’s an undergraduate College degree.”

businessMAJOR DEVELOPMENTS: Richard Feldman, dean of the College (above), Ronald Hansen, senior associate dean at the Simon School (below, left), and Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School (below, right), helped develop the new business major as a collaboration between their academic units that’s designed to be grounded in a liberal arts setting. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The major builds on principles of statistics and economics and other social sciences to provide students with an understanding of business-related disciplines such as finance, accounting, marketing, operations management, and organizational theory. Its approach is analytical—a hallmark of the Simon School, Zupan says.

“We’re fairly distinguished for management as a science, not an art,” he says. While some business schools teach using case studies, “we’re more deductive. What are the underlying principles?”

The deductive framework taught at Simon is fundamental to the rigor of the new major, Zupan says, and a critical skill in solving the problems one meets in business. “One alum calls it ‘X-ray vision,’ ” he says.

business (Photo: Adam Fenster)

From its earliest days a very academic business school, the Simon School has been rooted in the discipline of economics, Hansen says. Three prominent journals—the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics—are edited there, and “this school has a very economics-oriented faculty.”

“A lot of business schools that are very case-based tend not to emphasize the underlying theories—but Rochester is on the analytical and quantitative side” of approaches, he says.

The fact that Simon has no internal departments fosters integrated thinking, Hansen says.

“Most business problems don’t come neatly labeled, and you can’t just crank out a solution. When a product is losing money, it could be a marketing, or a design, or a cost issue, among other possibilities. The areas overlap.”

“I feel it’s a more global view than the previous economics major—more organization-wide and less theoretical,” says Yu (Bonnie) Xia ’13, from Shanghai, China. She hopes the major will enhance her employability when she returns to China—and she says it complements her interest in human behavior. She would like ultimately to work in human resources.

To all involved, the notion of increasing students’ options is compelling.

“The single most valuable thing” about the development of the major “is we’ve had students who’ve transferred out of Rochester saying the reason they’ve left is the lack of a business major,” says Burdick. Now he anticipates being able to attract transfer students into Rochester with the opportunity to major in business.

“We asked, how do we get the best of both worlds?” says Zupan. “We preserve liberal arts strength and include the Simon School approach to business.” Although “we looked at other schools’ majors closely, we wanted to break the mold, to leave the most space possible for the liberal arts.”

Their connection at the undergraduate level is crucial, Zupan says. “At too many universities, there’s a moat between business and other schools on campus.” That’s not true at Rochester, he adds, and the business major will strengthen ties, raise the Simon School’s visibility among undergraduates, and perhaps draw more of them to the school’s MBA program after graduation.

“I think the students who come out of this major and go straight to the job market will have strong economics training in solving problems, thinking analytically, and framing questions and issues that come up in terms of what they’ve learned,” says Bils. “And for those who go on for an MBA, graduate schools will be looking for a good background in math and economics.”

The question of what comes next is always on students’ minds when they choose a major, and Hansen suggests that a familiarity with the fields of business can enhance competitiveness on the job market.

“If the people hiring you expect you to have some understanding of marketing, some understanding of underlying economics, of how markets work, then you’ll have more value to companies if you have basic skills,” Hansen says. “But this is a broad business major,” he adds. “We’re not trying to get students to specialize.”

Says Feldman: “Some majors are more aligned with career choices than others.

“I expect we’ll find business majors will go on to do many different things—just as students in every major do.”

Preparing Students for a ‘World of Business’

New major is named for Barry Florescue ’66, a trustee and longtime University advisor.

business_sideBUSINESS MAN: A key supporter of the new business major, Florescue himself majored in business as an undergraduate at Rochester. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

When Barry Florescue ’66 was an undergraduate at Rochester, he earned a business degree in a program that was retired in 1972, as the Simon School—then the School of Business Administration—turned its focus to graduate studies.

Now, as Rochester returns to undergraduate instruction in business, Florescue is lending his financial support, and his name, to the newly created major.

He has contributed $5 million to the University to support the business major. In recognition of his generosity, and other contributions he has provided for development of the major, it will be named the Barry Florescue Undergraduate Business Degree Program.

“When I learned that the University was considering reestablishing the business major that I pursued as an undergraduate, I knew this was an important area of the dynamic curriculum that was worth supporting,” Florescue says. “I am pleased to be a part of this new program, knowing that it will prepare our students to become successful players in the world of business.”

Florescue is chairman of the board of BMD Management Company Inc. A charter member of the George Eastman Circle, he is a member of both the University’s Board of Trustees and the Simon School’s Executive Advisory Committee. Through the Florescue Family Foundation Scholarship and the Florescue Fellowship Fund, he has helped both undergraduate and business school students in their quest to study at Rochester.

“Barry’s support ensured that we would be able to launch and sustain the new business major, and we’re very grateful for that,” says Peter Lennie, the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. “Our undergraduates will greatly benefit from his generosity.”

—Melissa Greco Lopes

Tree-Lined Campus

With a horticultural history dating to the turn of the 20th century, Rochester’s arboretum is earning national recognition.

By Scott Hauser

arboretumROOTED IN ROCHESTER: “[When] you realize what we have as a palette,” says Dan Schied, manager of horticulture and grounds, of the University’s arboretum, “why not look for ways to celebrate it?” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

You might see them in late spring or early summer—one or two at a time, sometimes a larger group—stopping on the Wilson Quadrangle. The visitors pause to look at a leafy canopy that seems so well sculpted you might imagine it was dreamed up by a child who was told to draw a tree.

The goldenraintree, a hardy deciduous species originally from Asia that grows near Crosby Hall on the River Campus, is a favorite of students, who like to climb its broad branches. But horticulturists, too, have been known to stop to admire it.

“People in the know who have seen it say it’s an unusually good specimen,” says Dan Schied, the manager of horticulture and grounds at the University.

The goldenraintree may soon have new fans as the University’s arboretum earned national attention this spring when Rochester was selected to join the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Campus USA program. Fewer than 100 schools nationwide have earned the designation, and Rochester became just the sixth member in New York.

“It’s really quite an honor to be recognized—and a testament to the hard work of all the individuals who maintain all the campuses,” says Schied.

His 12-person team, along with support from vendors, is responsible for maintaining the University’s arboretum and grounds, which includes the trees and shrubbery on the River Campus as well as the Eastman, Medical Center, South, and Mt. Hope campuses.

To qualify as an arboretum, a collection of trees and shrubbery must have at least one person committed to its care, it must feature interpretive materials about the plants, and it must be shared at least part time with a wider community.

And sharing the history and educational information about the University’s collection, especially with students, is a favorite part of Schied’s job. “Students seem excited when you tell them their campus is an arboretum.”

As part of his work, he looks for opportunities to create collections of particular plants and plant species as a way of introducing students and visitors to the importance of landscaping and how careful consideration of plant selection and placement helps create inviting environments.

For example, he’s helped establish a collection near Meliora Hall that includes specimens of each of the Rochester-bred lilacs. Such efforts also fit into a larger horticultural legacy.

Located in a metropolitan area known as the “Flower City,” the University shares a neighborhood with Highland Park, an internationally recognized botanical garden that grew out of the Ellwanger and Barry Nursery, likely the largest nursery in the country at the turn of the 20th century. Many of the buildings—and trees—on the Mt. Hope Campus were once part of the nursery.

A presenter at national conferences on the topic of sustainability and landscaping, Schied travels frequently and says such history is rare for a college campus.

“You come back and you realize what we have as a palette,” he says. “Why not look for ways to celebrate it?”

The Dancer Claimed Them

Murray ’64 and Peggy Topf Schwartz ’65 collaborate on a biography that’s a scholarly project and more.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

schwartzesDANCE PARTNERS: Murray and Peggy Topf Schwartz (above), who met as students at Rochester, tell the story of Pearl Primus (below), a pioneering dancer and scholar, in their new book. “A lot of what she’d done had been forgotten” by the time the Schwartzes met Primus in 1981, says Murray Schwartz. (Photo: Stan Sherer)

It’s a premise for some good novels: A lead character or two, settled in their lives, have a life-altering encounter that sets the plot in motion.

It’s also a pretty accurate depiction of what happened to Murray ’64 and Peggy Topf Schwartz ’65 in the spring of 1981.

Murray was an English professor and dean at the State University of New York at Buffalo, when he came home to Peggy, the chair of the dance department at the Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts, with a 30-page resume from Pearl Primus.

Primus was applying to become headmaster of SUNY Buffalo’s Cora P. Maloney College of Afro-American Studies. She also happened to be one of the most magnetic and pathbreaking figures in modern American dance. A dancer and scholar who eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology, Primus choreographed solo works that were deeply informed by her research in the American South as well as Africa and the Caribbean. But she had made her debut almost 40 years earlier and “a lot of what she’d done had been forgotten,” Murray recalls.

schwartzes (Photo: Barbara Morgan/Courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Dance Program)

What Primus had done was to offer, through her solo dances, political commentary on racism and poverty that was radical for its time. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, she made her solo dance debut at New York’s 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association in 1943, with her dances “Strange Fruit” and “Hard Time Blues,” wrenching explorations of lynching and sharecropping.

That June, she performed at the Negro Freedom Rally, held at Madison Square Garden. And the following summer, she toured the American South, posing as a sharecropper and studying the communities whose lives she was intent on portraying through dance. These activities, along with her participation in communist and other left-wing organizations, attracted zealous attention from the FBI throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

Murray hired Primus. It marked the beginning of a deep and enduring friendship between her and the Schwartzes that offers an added dimension to the Schwartzes otherwise scholarly work, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (Yale University Press, 2011).

Both admit that friendship with Primus, however rewarding, was not always easy. “She called Murray her angel and said it would be a lifetime assignment,” says Peggy.

Indeed it was. The friendship was marked by “frequent telephone calls, either early in the morning or at dinner time, surprise visits to Murray’s office or to our house, sometimes just to sit together quietly,” and many conversations about plans for performances, institutes, and academic exchanges, the Schwartzes write.

The idea for the biography came gradually, starting after Primus’s death from diabetes in the fall of 1994.

“Shortly after Pearl died,” Murray says, “Peggy, partly as an act of mourning, started to interview people who knew her—childhood friends, people in the dance world. Peggy spent years doing these interviews. Around 2004 or 2005, we realized we should team up.”

“We went to a little house we have in Vieques, Puerto Rico—500 square feet,” he says. “We sat at a table and we literally emailed chapters back and forth to one another. Peggy wrote drafts and I shaped them. And after a while, we couldn’t tell who had written what.”

Friendship with Primus came naturally to the Schwartzes, both of whom have embraced the arts and political activism their entire adult lives. They met at Rochester, where, Murray recalls, not only were they both studying English but “we were both in the honors program, which meant we had small seminars our junior and senior years.”

They married as students, and after Murray’s graduation, moved to Berkeley, where he pursued a doctorate in English and Peggy began working at a pilot Head Start program, designing a movement and dance program, while completing coursework toward her Rochester degree.

Peggy, who was raised in the Bronx and in Great Neck, N.Y., still remembers the shock she felt when, on a high school camping trip to the Smoky Mountains, she encountered the “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs that were posted at water fountains, restrooms, restaurants, and public places throughout the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Growing up in New York, I had never seen anything like that,” she says. “My desire to be involved started in high school. Everything was just bubbling to the surface.”

schwartzesDANCE SCHOLAR: An anthropologist as well as a dancer, Primus helped bring African dance to Americans. Her life crossed many boundaries, including ethnic, racial, and cultural, according to the Schwartzes’ new book. (Photo: Steve Long)

Murray, who grew up in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, says his father was active in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a magnet for Russian Jewish immigrants who had brought with them to the United States the secular socialist politics they developed in protest against the Russian Empire.

He speculates on what drew Primus to him and Peggy. “She trusted us to see what she was about. We were both so interested in taking an interdisciplinary approach to things.”

Peggy says that although Primus is known today almost exclusively in the dance field, her life crossed many boundaries—disciplinary as well as ethnic, racial, and cultural. And that made the prospect of writing the biography all the more enticing.

“We deliberately set out to make this book have a wide appeal,” she says. “Pearl’s life was so complex and rich. It touched on the civil rights movement, on the cultural history of New York City, and on the complicated relationship between blacks and Jews,” she says of Primus, who had a Jewish grandfather, was married briefly to the son of a Lower East Side Torah school principal, and participated in a number of organizations that joined New York’s black and Jewish political and cultural radicals.

In 1948, a trip to Africa financed by the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, transformed her life, and arguably, the scope of modern American dance.

“After she went to Africa, she was interested less in performing and more in teaching—on bringing authentic African dance to the United States,” says Murray. Peggy notes that after Primus’s return from Africa, she wore only African dress in public.

A dancer and scholar at a time before dance departments had become a mainstay at colleges and universities, Primus had to rely heavily on her allies in administration. In 1983, when the Schwartzes moved to Massachusetts, Primus followed a year later. Peggy was to join the Five College Dance Department, a collaborative program of the four western Massachusetts colleges of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. Murray was to become dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts, where he continued as Primus’s ally, but where she could only secure a string of temporary appointments.

“Dance didn’t really have an institutional base,” says Murray. “By the time she entered the academic world, it was just starting to gain a foothold.”

That’s something the Schwartzes have both found regrettable. Dance, as well as music, says Murray, “underlies all the other arts because they engage the rhythms of the body.”

That might be precisely the problem, Peggy speculates. Unlike art or music, she notes, “dance still has to justify itself as an academic discipline. It’s the Puritan culture that still doesn’t know how to deal with the body.”

Q&A

Business Plan: Women in Leadership

Former U.S. Federal Reserve executive Cathy Jones Minehan ’68 focuses on principled leadership as dean of a business school dedicated to fostering women leaders.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

minehanLEADERSHIP: The new dean of Boston’s Simmons College School of Management, Minehan says the school’s vision is “to educate women to serve in positions of power and principled leadership.” (Photo: Simmons College School of Management)

When Cathy Jones Minehan ’68 approached corporate recruiters on the Rochester campus in the spring of 1968, most told her they didn’t take women into their management training programs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York hadn’t either. But it decided to take a chance on Minehan the following fall. That marked the beginning of her almost 40-year career in the Federal Reserve System during which she rose to become the president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The first woman president in that bank’s history, Minehan served with the presidents of the other 11 Federal Reserve Banks on the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that guides U.S. monetary policy.

In addition to chairing the executive committee of the University’s Board of Trustees, Minehan is chair of the board of the Massachusetts General Hospital, chair of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s Council of Economic Advisors, and a member of MIT’s Investment Company Board. She serves as a director of Becton Dickinson and Co., VISA, MassMutual Financial Group, and MITRE.

In August, she becomes dean of Boston’s Simmons College School of Management.

The Simmons School of Management plays a distinct role in business education. Tell us about it.

The management school, and the MBA program in particular, is small, but it’s iconic. It fills a particular position in the market both locally and nationally—and to some extent internationally—in that it has always focused on business education for women. Its vision is to educate women to serve in positions of power and principled leadership. That term “principled leadership” means ethics, governance, corporate social responsibility, diversity management, and organizational behavior. We believe we have a special competency in this area.

Is this a response to the recent financial crisis?

No. Simmons has long made principled leadership training the capstone of its MBA program, and we’ve been recognized by the Aspen Institute as the No. 1 small MBA program for doing so. But the financial crisis has made the concept of principled leadership resonate even more strongly.

Why do you think there’s a need for a business program focused on women?

Certainly there are many women at most business schools. But when you look around, and you see what happens when women get into middle management, how quickly many “drop out,” and how few make it to top management, I think there’s a role for a school where issues to do with gender and organization, with women and leadership get discussed. And that might happen more easily in a single sex environment. There are also real social advantages in finding ways for women to advance. Just look at it from the perspective of the pipeline of people entering industry. The student body at most graduate schools, including business schools, can range from 30 percent to 60 percent women. If your pipeline is filled with women and you can’t find a way to move them into senior management, there’s something wrong. You’re losing brain power. And that can’t be good—for society, for businesses, for anybody.

It’s sometimes said that balancing family responsibilities is what slows women down. Do you agree?

There’s something about this issue that really raises the hair on the back of my neck. It seems to say that women should be seen as secondary contributors solely because of family responsibilities. In my experience, even if shorter hours are a factor, good women contribute greatly; and they should be expected to do so. My husband and I both worked while we were raising our two kids. We made a lot of adjustments. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. I think it’s something that each couple, each family, each staffer needs to figure out how to do whether it involves child care, elder care, or simply having a life outside work. And businesses should recognize and support those decisions.

How should employers respond to these challenges?

By welcoming diversity. And I think, in general, businesses are much more focused on diversity now because they realize that if they don’t, they could be missing out. They could be missing out, for example, by assuming that because someone is a woman, they’re going to be raising children, and that raising children will make a woman less valuable on the job; or because someone is an African American and didn’t come through the same schooling that a manager is accustomed to, that makes them less valuable. That’s not smart business decision making. There just isn’t enough talent to go around. We have to create an environment in which everyone who can contribute feels comfortable doing so.

Jazz—with Kavanah

Saxophonist and composer Shauli Einav ’08E (MM) captures the attention of critics with his blend of Israeli themes and traditional Western jazz.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

einavTRUTH TELLING: Saxophonist Einav says his musical approach is to “play the truth.” “It’s like when you talk to someone, and you sense they’re telling you something true, with integrity. It’s the same thing in music.” (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

In the past decade or so, jazz critics have remarked widely on a recent spate of exceptional jazz musicians emanating from a place that might seem unlikely: Israel, a nation with no historical connection to the African diaspora, and a population of just 7.7 million people in an area smaller than Massachusetts.

One of those musicians is saxophonist, composer, and arranger Shauli Einav ’08 (MM), a native of Jerusalem who got hooked on jazz as a youth, during his family’s annual treks to the Red Sea Jazz Festival, a four-day event held since 1987 in the southern resort city of Eilat.

His debut release, Opus One (Plus Loin), has attracted the attention of critics writing in jazz media such as DownBeat and Jazz Times and news outlets such as National Public Radio and the Jerusalem Post. He’s been called “emerging” and “noteworthy.” “Découverte assurée” (“Discovery assured”), noted a Belgian critic.

Saxophonist and composer Walt Weiskopf ’80E initially drew Einav to Eastman, where he was teaching in the early 2000s. He calls Einav’s playing “authentic and rooted.”

“Shauli is extremely talented and has tremendous instinctive love for every aspect of jazz,” says Weiskopf. “He’s a singularly motivated and original jazz musician.”

Einav says his approach is to “play the truth.”

“It’s like when you talk to someone, and you sense they’re telling you something true, with integrity,” he says. “It’s the same thing in music. You can sense when a player is playing the truth versus just moving his fingers around, showing off. The music should have essence.”

One might also say kavanah. Kavanah is the title of the second track on Opus One and a Hebrew word describing a state of mind for prayer, and more broadly, the state of concentration and intention that infuses spoken words—or musical performance—with meaning and sincerity.

Einav also says that his work exudes “a feeling of urgency.”

The opening track, Jerusalem Theme, is an exploration of many dimensions of Jerusalem’s past and present, while Hayu Leilot (“Those Were the Nights”) is Einav’s interpretation of a 1940s Israeli standard. The Damelin is a tribute to his friend, David Damelin, who was killed by a Palestinian sniper in March 2002, when the two were both in the Gaza Strip, during the tour of military service that’s mandatory for young Israelis, men and women alike.

As a high school student, Einav was captivated by the late Arnie Lawrence, a jazz saxophonist who founded New York’s New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, then moved to Israel in 1997 on a mission to unite Jews and Arabs through music. It was Lawrence whom Einav credits with inspiring him to “play the truth.” He recalls walking two miles each day from school to Lawrence’s studio, where he took master classes. The walk was long and often hot, but as Einav says, “for a 16-year-old guy, it was great.”

Einav remembers distinctly his first encounter with Weiskopf, whom he says was “one of my favorite saxophonists growing up.”

“When I saw him perform at the Red Sea Jazz Festival, I went up to the stage afterwards, when he was putting away his instrument. I asked him if I could take some lessons with him. I asked him where he taught. He said he taught at the Eastman School.” From there, says Einav, going to Eastman was “my top priority.”

Einav calls the band he assembled on Opus One his “dream band,” crediting pianist Shai Maestro, trombonist Andy Hunter, bassist Joseph Lepore, and drummer Johnathan Blake, with much of the recording’s success.

But Einav is the first to note that starting out takes more than talent in a band and its leader. It also takes connections, since one of the first things people in the industry want to know are the names of your mentors.

“Four reasons the 29-year-old Einav garners attention in a crowded field are his mentors,” writes John Ephland in DownBeat, referring to Lawrence, Weiskopf, Harold Danko, the composer and pianist who chairs Eastman’s jazz and contemporary media department, and the saxophonist Dave Liebman.

Starting out also requires entrepreneurialism.

“Jazz is a very competitive field. You spent a lot of time promoting your band and your solo career. We have to do everything—the bookings, getting people to the gigs, everything. I spend many hours on the computer.”

“It’s a maze,” says Einav of New York’s jazz scene. “But I’m a big believer in opening up as many doors as I can.”

In the News

Stephanie McCurry ’83 (MA) Writes Prize-Winning Book on Confederacy

Stephanie McCurry ’83 (MA), a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, won dual honors for her book A Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010). She won the 2011 Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social or intellectual history and the Avery O. Craven Award for the most original book on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, both given by the Organization for American Historians, the main professional organization for scholars of American history. The book was also named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in history. McCurry argues that the Confederate experiment to build an allegedly democratic government in which political rights extended only to slaveholding white men—a minority of the population as well as a minority of the population of Southern white men—collapsed due to its internal contradictions and the agitation of groups long assumed powerless, namely slaves and poor women.

Stephen Cook ’07M (MPH) Honored by American Heart Association

Stephen Cook ’07M (MPH), an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, has been named Science Advocate of the Year by the American Heart Association. The national award recognizes a medical professional who engages lawmakers on issues related to heart disease and strokes. Cook chairs the childhood obesity committee of the New York state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is a member of the National Advocacy Task Force of the Obesity Society, a national organization founded in 1982 to study obesity. He also helped develop the Monroe County, N.Y., program HEALTHI Kids (“Healthy Eating and Active Living THrough policy and practice Initiatives for Kids”) and participates in the association’s You’re the Cure policy advocacy network.

Arthur Miller ’55 Honored by Queen Elizabeth II

Arthur Miller ’55, University Professor at New York University School of Law, has received one of the United Kingdom’s highest honors, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The honor, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II, is an order of chivalry recognizing distinguished public service to the UK. For 15 years, Miller helped moderate panel discussions on public policy issues, modeled after the Fred Friendly dialogues he moderated for PBS, for the BBC and Grenada Television. In addition, Miller donated more than 1,800 woodblock prints by the 19th-century Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi to the American Friends of the British Museum, which were exhibited in 2010 at the Royal Academy in London and at the Japan Society in New York.

Rochester Alumni Claim Rhodes College Top Honors

The Clarence Day Awards—the top two faculty honors at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.—both went to Rochester alumni at the school’s 2011 convocation. Jeffrey Jackson ’99 (PhD), an associate professor of history, won the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity following the publication of his 2010 book, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave Macmillan). Bernadette McNary-Zak ’88, an associate professor of religion, won Rhodes’s Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching. Students and colleagues cited McNary-Zak’s imaginative pedagogy and ability to inspire students. She has also coedited a book on undergraduate research in religious studies to be released by Oxford University Press later this year.

FAMILY ALBUM

All in the Family

Meet a few of this year’s multigeneration Rochester families.

familiesTHREE GENERATIONS: The College ceremony brought together three generations of the Scala family: John Scala ’80, his son, Andrew Scala ’11, a mechanical engineering major in the Hajim School from Lancaster, Pa.; and Andrew’s grandparents, Robert ’58M (PhD) and Janet Eddy Scala ’55N. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

familiesFAMILY PRACTICE: At the School of Medicine and Dentistry ceremony, Calla Brown ’11M (MD), of Zionsville, Ind., and her fiancé, Bela Denes Jr. ’11M (MD), of Springfield, Ill., were welcomed into the profession by their physician fathers, Darron Brown ’79M (MD), ’82M (Flw), ’82M (Res) (left) and Bela Denes Sr. (right). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

familiesFAMILY PHYSICIANS: Tegan Vay ’11M (MD) of Rochester (left) is a second-generation Rochester graduate, joining her mother, Mary Beth Robinson-Vay ’85M (MD), ’88M (Res), and father Joseph Vay ’86 (MS). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

familiesMUSICAL LINES: Representing the 11th Eastman School degree in her family, Anna Lenti ’11E, of Rochester, celebrated with her father, Eastman School historian and faculty member Vincent ’60E, ’63E (MA), her sister, Elizabeth ’02E, and her mother, Christina ’72E. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Commencement is a time for family and friends to gather to celebrate a new generation of achievement and success. Throughout the commencement season at Rochester, those celebrations include several families who share not only the joy of graduation, but also a legacy of ties to the University. We asked a few of those multigeneration families to pose for photos this spring.

DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

Alumni Honors

The University recognized the achievements of several notable alumni this spring.

alumni_honors (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Esther Conwell ’45 (MA): Honorary Doctor of Science

A research professor of chemistry and physics at Rochester, Conwell was awarded a National Medal of Science last fall by President Barack Obama for promoting women in science and for helping launch the computer revolution by explaining how electrons flow through semiconductors used in transistors. Conwell is the first University faculty member to receive a Medal of Science. She’s also an inducted member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.

alumni_honors (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Jay Last ’51: Honorary Doctor of Science

Considered one of the “fathers” of Silicon Valley, Last was one of a group of eight entrepreneurially minded scientists who founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in 1957. Fairchild helped establish Silicon Valley as a center for technological innovation and entrepreneurialism and is credited with inventing the technology that drives the computer industry today. Last is also a founder and member of the board of directors of the Archaeological Conservancy, a national nonprofit organization established in 1980 to preserve archaeological sites in the United States.

alumni_honors(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Eric Topol ’79M (MD): Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Smith Hutchison Medal

The director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in California, which focuses on individualized medicine, Topol is the chief academic officer of Scripps Health, a senior consultant cardiologist practitioner at Scripps Clinic, and a professor of translational genomics at the Scripps Research Institute. A noted medical scientist, Topol led work in the genomics of heart attack that was recognized by the American Heart Association as a top research advance and by Time magazine as a “Top 10 Medical Breakthrough in 2010.“

FOOTBALL FELLOWS

Yellowjacket Alumni Celebrate ‘Dinner with the Coach’

football_reunion (Photo: Keith Bullis for Rochester Review)

TEAM HUDDLE: Yellowjackets who played football under former coach Pat Stark (front row, center) from 1969 to 1977 gather each spring to renew their ties as classmates, teammates, and friends. The tradition started about six years ago as a way to honor Stark, who coached the Yellowjackets from 1969 to 1984. This year’s get-together took place in East Rochester and drew attendees from Buffalo, Geneva, Syracuse, Elmira, and Schenectady. Pictured are: (front row) Dave McNelis ’74, Mark McAnaney ’75, Jim Juraska ’73, Stark, Roger Watts ’72, Phil Chrys ’75, Mike Garritano ’76, and Dave Smith ’74; (back row) Dave Cidale ’71, Jim Mazur ’78, Ed Heffernan ’76, Dick Rasmussen ’72, ’79W (MS), ’97W (EdD), Anthony Daniele ’71, Bob Kulpinski ’71, ’73 (MS), ’86 (MS), Paul Caputo ’73, Joe Novek ’73, Bill Hammond ’73, and Dennis Hennigan ’75. Not pictured is Mike Roulan ’71.

Books & Recordings

Books

The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values

By Lisa Szefel ’04 (PhD)

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Szefel, an assistant professor of history at Pacific University, explores a group of writers, editors, and critics who promoted social reform in the late 19th- and early 20th-century United States by popularizing poetry and creating an infrastructure to support poets who linked creativity to moral obligation.

The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making

By Peter Stone ’00 (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2011

Stone, a faculty fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University, lays the foundation for a comprehensive political theory of lotteries. While lotteries have long been used in limited instances—such as selecting jury pools or drafting citizens into military service—Stone draws on both theoretical insights and empirical analyses to establish principles for the use of lotteries more broadly in social decision making.

John Romano and George Engel: Their Lives and Work

By Jules Cohen ’53, ’57M (MD) and Stephanie Brown Clark

University of Rochester Press, 2010

Cohen, a professor of medicine and cardiology at Rochester, and Clark, director of the Medical Center’s Division of Medical Humanities, tell the story of two Rochester medical faculty members who helped transform the education of doctors and care of patients both nationally and globally.

Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres

By Deborah and Jon Lawrence ’76 (PhD)

University of Oklahoma Press, 2011

The Lawrences—Deborah, a professor emeritus of English at California State University at Fullerton, and Jon, a retired professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine—interview nine historians who have studied violence in the West.

Taking Charge of Your Health: A Guide to Getting the Best Health Care as You Age

By William J. Hall ’72M (Flw) and John R. Burton

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Hall, the Paul Fine Professor of Medicine, Oncology and Pediatrics at Rochester and the director of the Center for Healthy Aging, coauthors a guide for older adults and their families to selecting and communicating with doctors and navigating Medicare and private insurance.

Elemental

By Denise Thompson-Slaughter

Plain View Press, 2010

Thompson-Slaughter, managing editor of Reviews in American History, in Rochester’s history department, presents a collection of poetry reflecting on “the elements of life: earth, water, fire, air, and spirit.”

Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy

By Randall W. Stone

Cambridge University Press, 2011

Through a combination of theory, statistical analysis, and case studies, Stone, a professor of political science and director of Rochester’s Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, explores how informal governance results in the disproportionate influence of the United States in international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the European Union.

Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays

Edited by Karen Malpede, Michael Messina ’79, and Bob Shuman

Northwestern University Press, 2011

Messina, a former publisher and acquisitions editor at Applause Theatre & Cinema Books/Limelight Editions, coedits an anthology of plays by contemporary American and British dramatists exploring the costs and implications of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

By Stephanie McCurry ’83 (MA)

Harvard University Press, 2010

McCurry, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates the radicalism of the Confederate experiment to build a slaveholding aristocracy, and the roles of slaves and poor white women in ensuring its failure. The book received both the Merle Curti and the Avery O. Craven awards from the Organization for American Historians.

Sleep Manual

By Wilfred R. Pigeon and Michael J. Sateia

Barron’s Educational Series, 2010

Pigeon, an assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Center’s Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Lab, offers a guide to the science of sleep and sleep disorders. The book is accompanied by a CD of relaxation exercises and behavioral strategies to induce and maintain sleep.

Courts in Latin America

Edited by Gretchen Helmke and Julio Rios-Figueroa

Cambridge University Press, 2011

Helmke, an associate professor of political science at Rochester, is contributor and coeditor of the volume of case studies by scholars of judicial politics in Latin America, examining the extent to which courts in the region protect individual rights and limit governments.

Developing and Evaluating Educational Programs for Students with Autism

By Caroline Magyar

Springer, 2010

Magyar, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical Center, offers school psychologists, special education professionals, and those in allied fields an overview of evidence-based guidelines and other resources to help create effective learning environments for students across the autism spectrum and grade span.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland

By Jonathan Stuhlman and Valerie Ann Leeds ’79

Mint Museum of Art, 2011

Leeds, an independent curator, art historian, and authority on the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri, joins Stuhlman, curator of American Art at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, N.C., in exploring Irish themes in Henri’s work.

Sounding Out Pop: Analytic Essays in Popular Music

Edited by John Covach and Mark Spicer

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Covach, a professor of music in the College and a professor of music theory at the Eastman School, coedits a series of nine case studies on popular music acts, including Roy Orbison, Marvin Gaye, Radiohead, and Tori Amos.

Reading, Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain

By Ryan Prendergast

Ashgate, 2011

Prendergast, an associate professor of Spanish at Rochester, demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spanish authors in a variety of literary genres resisted the censorial system of the 16th- and early 17th-century Inquisition.

Abortion Politics in Congress: Strategic Incrementalism and Policy Change

By Scott Ainsworth ’83 and Thad Hall

Cambridge University Press, 2011

Ainsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, examines the influence of congressional procedures on federal abortion policy, demonstrating the ways in which legislators face procedural incentives to favor incremental policy changes.

Ludlow (2nd Edition)

By David Mason ’89 (PhD)

Red Hen Press, 2010

Mason, a professor of English and codirector of the creative writing program at Colorado College, offers a second edition of his 2007 novel-in-verse about the Ludlow coal field massacre of 1914, in which 18 men, women, and children were killed by the Colorado National Guard. Mason was named Colorado poet laureate in 2010.

Including Students in Academic Conversations: Principles and Strategies of Theme-Based Writing Courses Across the Disciplines

By Deborah Rossen-Knill and Tatyana Bakhmetyeva ’06 (PhD)

Hampton Press, 2011

Rossen-Knill and Bakhmetyeva, director and associate director of the College Writing Center at Rochester, offer new writing instructors principles of academic writing that can be applied across disciplines, as well as a view into the processes by which experienced instructors from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences create and implement class activities.

Developing Musicianship through Improvisation

By Christopher Azzara ’92E (PhD) and Richard Grunow

GIA Publications, 2010

Azzara and Grunow, professors of music education at the Eastman School, present an instructional guide to improvisation that likens improvising to conversing, laying out vocabularies of tonal patterns, melodic phrases, and rhythmic patterns and phrases applicable to classical, jazz, and folk music. Two CDs accompany the book.

Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present

Edited by Douglas Crimp and Lynne Cook

MIT Press, 2010

Crimp, the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at Rochester, joins Cooke, the chief curator at the Reina Sofía art museum in Madrid, in coediting a book of images by photographers, filmmakers, and performance artists chronicling the run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets of Manhattan during its deindustrialization in the 1970s. The book accompanies a 2010 exhibit at the Reina Sofía.

The Whistling Blackbird: Essays and Talks on New Music

By Robert Morris

University of Rochester Press, 2010

Eastman composer and music theorist Morris presents a collection of essays on American composers such as John Cage, Milton Babbitt, and Richard Swift. Morris analyzes aspects of contemporary music criticism and theory and discusses his own creative approaches from the perspective of his 40-plus years in music composition.

The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus

By Murray ’64 and Peggy Topf Schwartz ’65

Yale University Press, 2011

Married couple Murray Schwartz, a professor literature at Emerson College, and Peggy Topf Schwartz, a professor of dance at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, explore the life of modern dance pioneer and Trinidad native Pearl Primus.

Yoga for Singers: Freeing Your Voice and Spirit Through Yoga

By Linda Lister ’93E (MM)

Lulu, 2011

Lister, the director of the Opera Theatre at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, demonstrates how yoga promotes the physical, emotional, and hence, vocal, well-being of singers.

Recordings

James Willey: String Quartets Nos. 3, 7 and 8

By the Esterhazy Quartet

Albany Records, 2010

The Esterhazy Quartet performs String Quartets 3, 7, and 8 by composer James Willey ’61E, ’72E (PhD). The recording culminates a nearly three-decade collaboration between Willey, who retired in 2000 as professor of music at the State University of New York at Geneseo, and the quartet, which is a faculty ensemble in residence at the University of Missouri.

West Meets East: Sacred Music of the Torino Codex

By Schola Antiqua of Chicago

Discantus, 2010

The choral ensemble Schola Antiqua of Chicago, including founding member and artistic director Michael Anderson, presents a live concert recording of sacred music originating in early 15th-century Cyprus. Anderson is an assistant professor of musicology at the Eastman School.

Vivaldi: Lute & Mandolin Concertos

By Paul O’Dette /Parley of Instruments

Hyperion, 2010

O’Dette, a professor of lute and of conducting and ensembles at the Eastman School, performs a selection of Vivaldi’s works for lute and mandolin. He’s accompanied by the period instrument ensemble, Parley of Instruments.

Hilos

By the Alias Chamber Ensemble

Naxos American Classics, 2011

The Alias Chamber Ensemble, including violinist and artistic director Zeneba Bowers ’94E, ’96E (MM), performs the music of California-based composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Percussionist Christopher Norton ’83E, ’86E (MA) also performs.

Cantos: Music of Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon

By Eastman BroadBand

Bridge Records, 2010

The contemporary chamber ensemble cofounded and directed by Eastman associate professor of composition Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon is joined by soprano Tony Arnold, tenor Scott Perkins ’11E (PhD), and baritone Alexander Hurd in performing Zohn-Muldoon’s Niño Polilla, Flores del Viento, and Comala, a work for which Zohn-Muldoon was named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Night Strings: Music for Viola and Guitar

By George Taylor and Nicholas Goluses

Albany Records, 2011

Eastman faculty members George Taylor (viola) and Nicholas Goluses (guitar) perform selections that capture “the various phases and moods of night from the first shadow of darkness to the sounds of night.” The recording includes compositions by Eastman professors Bill Dobbins (jazz studies and contemporary media) and Samuel Adler (professor emeritus of composition).

The Curio Shop

By Chesley Kahmann ’52

Orbiting Clef Productions, 2010

Kahmann and her singing group the Interludes perform a collection of 15 songs in the seventh volume of the Kahmann Touch CD series. Kahmann’s previous work, The Music Box, featuring 11 piano improvisations, was also released in 2010.

Shostakovich & Weinberg

By the Kopelman Quartet

Nimbus Records, 2011

The Kopelman Quartet, including Eastman violinist Mikhail Kopelman, performs Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 and Weinberg’s Piano Quintet.

American Weavings

By Carol Rodland and Catherine Rodland ’92E (DMA)

Crystal Records, 2011

Eastman professor of viola Carol Rodland joins her sister, organist and St. Olaf College artist-in-residence Catherine Rodland ’92E (DMA), in a series of duets.

Impressions

By Mark Kellogg ’86E

Mark Kellogg, 2010

Kellogg, an associate professor of trombone, euphonium, and brass chamber music at the Eastman School and principal trombonist of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, performs French-inspired music for trombone.

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

All About the Content

Public relations leader Risë Zywotow Birnbaum ’74 offers her perspective on news, PR, and their relationship in the digital age.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Photo: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

There is such a need for content nowadays. Journalists, online media folks, bloggers—they all need content. There’s around-the-clock news rather than 5- or 30-minute broadcasts, and on the Web, the space is endless.

Journalists—whether they’re in print, television, radio, or online—go online searching for stories. It’s an interesting dynamic that’s going on. Consumers are not the only ones going online for information. It’s also the journalists.

Our job in PR is to help a client communicate messages by incorporating that message into information that’s interesting and valuable to the client’s target demographic. We’ve got to provide the news folks with information that’s going to be beneficial to their audiences, or they’re not going to be interested.

News people and PR people work very well in the sandbox together. They need each other. We’ll talk to the journalists, and they might say, “I’m thinking of a story, but I’d like to present it as a debate and I need a spokesperson.” And we’ll find a couple of credible spokespeople. We try to steer the story in the direction that news folk are looking for, while continuing to deliver our client’s message. Naturally our clients are looking to have their messages framed in the most positive ways. And we’re, of course, looking to do that, but in a way that news folks will be interested in.

Risë Zywotow Birnbaum ’74

Washington, D.C.

Current Job: Founder & CEO, zcomm (www.zpr.com)

Previous Job: ABC News network correspondent

Current Home: The Watergate

Home at Rochester: Hill Court. “It was called ‘Phase.’ And I was part of the first group to move in. It was like having a brand-new apartment. It was just heaven.”

Goal: “I want to get illustrated in the Wall Street Journal. But not because I’m going to jail.”

Social media is a phenomenal way to engage people, and some clients still don’t realize it. Some clients aren’t willing to stick their toe into that yet because they know that once you’re online, you’re also subject to public criticism. But we have a social media practice in which we oversee the Facebook and Twitter sites for our clients. It’s been very successful for the clients that have used it.

When someone posts disparaging comments on a client site, we have to get a handle on their veracity. Sometimes they’re true. Someone might say, “I went to your restaurant, and the service was terrible. It took 40 minutes to get my meal.” In that case we might come back and say, “Wow, that’s so good for us to know,” or “You’re actually right. We know that Tuesday was a tough day and we’re going to be redoubling our efforts.”

I founded zcomm 22 years ago. Over that time, we’ve had clients in every possible industry you can imagine. Some clients are commercial, and others, there’s nothing commercial about them.

Right now I’m working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development on a public service message about fair housing. The goal is to make sure that the message is heard by a particular audience—in this case, members of a particular ethnic community. Sometimes we develop an entire campaign for a client—the internal and external communications, events, videos, social media. On others, we work for an agency on just one portion. On this project, we’re the arms and legs.

WELCOMING COMMITTEE

Getting Oriented

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

TEAM LEADERS: Andrea Sobolewski ’11, ’12 (T5), of Hackettstown, N.J., gets a lift from fellow orientation team leaders Laura Vidler ’12, of East Aurora, N.Y., Eleanor Oi, director of orientation, Kevin Brown ’14, of the Bronx, and Annalise Baird ’13, of Fort Washington, Pa. Appointed this spring, the group is preparing a series of activities to welcome the Class of 2015 to campus in August.

Faculty and Student Honors 2010–2011

National Faculty Awards

Academy for Eating Disorders

2010 Meehan-Hartley Award for Public Service and Advocacy

Mary Tantillo, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

2011 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship

T. Florian Jaeger, Assistant Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences

David W. McCamant, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Fellow

Michael Tanenhaus, Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics

American Academy of Clinical Chemistry

Outstanding Speaker Award, 2010 Annual Meeting

John D. Markman, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery

American Academy of Neurology

Chairman, Pain and Palliative Care Section

John D. Markman, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery

American Academy of Nurse Practitioners

Fellows

Jane Tuttle, Professor of Clinical Nursing and of Pediatrics

Jill Quinn, Assistant Professor of Nursing

American Academy of Pediatrics

2010 Landmark Award

Dale Phelps, Professor of Pediatrics

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Fellow

Robert Clark, Dean, Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

American Association for Dental Research

First Place, Hatton Competition Awards

Jin Xiao, Resident, Eastman Institute for Oral Health; Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Oral Biology

American Board of Dental Public Health

Honorary Board Diplomate

Ronald J. Billings, Director Emeritus, Eastman Dental Center; Professor, Eastman Institute for Oral Health

American Chemical Society

2011 Gordon Hammes Lectureship

Douglas Turner, Professor of Chemistry

2011 Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry

Richard Eisenberg, Tracy H. Harris Professor of Chemistry

American College Personnel Association

2011 Emerging Scholar

Judy Marquez Kiyama, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership

American College of Emergency Physicians

President

Sandra Schneider, Professor of Emergency Medicine

American College of Prosthodontics

2010 ACP President’s Award

Gerald N. Graser, Professor, Eastman Institute for Oral Health

American Council of Learned Societies

Fellowship

Robert Foster, Professor of Anthropology

Eleana Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

American Counseling Association

2011 Association for Creativity in Counseling Research Award

Mary Tantillo, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing

American Federation for Aging Research

2011 Hartford Scholar in Geriatric Medicine

Supriya Mohile, Assistant Professor of Medicine

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

2011 Research Award

Yeates Conwell, Vice Chair and Professor, Department of Psychiatry

American Gastroenterological Association

Third Place, Institut Rosell Probiotics Challenge

Sonia Yoon, Fellow, Department of Medicine

American Heart Association

Science Advocate of the Year

Stephen Cook, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics

American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering

College of Fellows

Tom Foster, Professor of Imaging Sciences and of Physics

Duncan T. Moore, Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor of Optical Engineering; Professor of Optics, of Biomedical Engineering, and of Business Administration; and Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship

Kevin Parker, William F. May Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Professor of Radiology and of Biomedical Engineering; Dean Emeritus, Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

American Library Association

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

For Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women

Stephani Li, Assistant Professor of English

American Medical Directors Association Foundation/Pfizer

2011 Quality Improvement Award

Tobie Olsan, Associate Professor of Nursing (with Suzanne Gillespie, Jurgis Karuza, Paul Katz, Jim Evinger, and Chandni Sud)

American Musicological Society

Philip Brett Award

Roger Freitas, Associate Professor of Musicology

Ruth Solie Award

Ralph Locke, Professor of Musicology

American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society

President-Elect

Judith F. Baumhauer, Professor of Orthopaedics

American Prosthodontic Society

President

Carlo Ercoli, Associate Professor; Chair and Program Director, Prosthodontic Division, Eastman Institute for Oral Health

American Society of Clinical Oncology

2011 B. J. Kennedy Award and Lecture for Scientific Excellence in Geriatric Oncology

John M. Bennett, Professor Emeritus of Oncology

American Society of Reproductive Medicine

2010 Distinguished Service Award

John T. Queenan Jr., Associate Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Association of American Medical Colleges

Board of Directors, Resident Physician Representative

Javeed Sukhera, Fellow, Department of Psychiatry

Association of Departments of Family Medicine

President-Elect

Thomas L. Campbell, William Rocktaschel Professor and Chair, Department of Family Medicine

James McKeen Cattell Fund

2011–12 Fellow

Patrick Davies, Professor of Psychology

College of Critical Care Medicine (Society of Critical Care Medicine)

Fellow

Nicole Stassen, Associate Professor of Surgery and of Pediatrics

Creative Capital—Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Writers Grant

For Before Pictures

Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History; Professor of Visual & Cultural Studies

Lady Davis Fellowship Trust

2010–11 Lady Davis Visiting Professor

John Howell, Associate Professor of Physics

Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research

President

Denham Ward, Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Foundation of New York State Nurses

2010 Distinguished Nurse Researcher

Nancy M. Watson, Associate Professor of Nursing

Glenn Foundation for Medical Research

Glenn Awards for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging

Vera Gorbunova, Associate Professor of Biology and of Oncology

Heinrich Jasper, Associate Professor of Biology

Heart Rhythm Society

Distinguished Scientist Award

Arthur J. Moss, Professor of Medicine

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

Circuit and Systems Society Board of Governors

Paul Ampadu, Assoicate Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering

International Continence Society

Fellow

Mary H. Wilde, Associate Professor of Nursing

Journal of Clinical Imaging Science

Editor-in-Chief

Vikram Dogra, Professor of Imaging Sciences, of Biomedical Engineering, and of Urology

Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

National Medical and Scientific Advisory Board Member

Steven Bernstein, Professor of Medicine, James P. Wilmot Cancer Center

National Academy of Sciences

Fellow

Lynne Maquat, J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics; Director, Center for RNA Biology

National Endowment for the Humanities

Fellowship

Robert Foster, Professor of Anthropology

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Member, National Advisory Council

Tom Gasiewicz, Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Medicine

National Institutes of Health

Merit Award

Louis S. Constine, Professor of Radiation Oncology and of Pediatrics

Member, Council of Councils

Regis J. O’Keefe, Chair and Marjorie Strong Wehle Professor of Orthopaedics; Director, Center for Musculoskeletal Research

B Cells in Health and Disease Award

Ignacio Sanz, Chief of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology; Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology & Immunology

National Medal of Science

Recipient

Esther M. Conwell, Professor of Chemistry

National Science Foundation

Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award

Engin Ipek, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Azadeh Vosoughi, Wilmot Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering

National Women’s Hall of Fame

2011 Inductee

Loretta C. Ford, Professor and Dean Emerita, School of Nursing

Optical Society of America

Board of Directors

Jannick Rolland, Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering

Organization of American Historians

2010 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History

For In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783

Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of History

Princess Srinagarindra Foundation (Thailand)

2010 Princess Srinagarindra Award

Loretta C. Ford, Professor and Dean Emerita, School of Nursing

Pulitzer Prize

Finalist in Music

Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Associate Professor of Composition

The RNA Society

2010 Lifetime Achievement in Service Award

Lynne Maquat, J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics; Director, Center for RNA Biology

Rochester Engineering Society

Engineer of the Year Award

Kevin Parker, William F. May Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Professor of Radiology and of Biomedical Engineering; Dean Emeritus, Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Society for the Study of Evolution

President

H. Allen Orr, Shirley Cox Kearns Professor, Department of Biology

State University of New York

Member, Board of Trustees

Marshall A. Lichtman, Professor and Former Dean, School of Medicine and Dentistry

United States Olympic Committee

Coach of the Year, U.S. Junior National Team: Squash

Martin Heath, Squash Coach

University of Cambridge

2011 Wyse Visiting Professor

Robert Foster, Professor of Anthropology

Wolf Foundation

2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry

Ching Tang, Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering

National Teaching Awards

New York State Academy of Family Physicians

2010 Family Practice Educator of the Year

Steve Schultz, Associate Professor of Family Medicine

Society of Teachers of Family Medicine

2011 Recognition Award

Susan McDaniel, Professor of Psychiatry; Director, Institute for the Family; Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Family Medicine

University Teaching Awards

2010–11 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Jonathan Baldo, Associate Professor of Humanities at the Eastman School

G. Graydon Curtis ’58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Nontenured Member of the Faculty

Eleana Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

William H. Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching

Philippe Fauchet, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Computer Engineering; Professor of Optics, of Biomedical Engineering, of Materials Science, and of Physics

Arts, Sciences, and Engineering

Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Carmala Garzione, Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences

Kenneth Gross, Professor of English

Renato Perucchio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering

Eastman School of Music

2009–10 Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching

Kenneth Grant, Associate Professor of Clarinet

School of Medicine and Dentistry

Department of Surgery

Seymour I. Schwartz Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award

David L. Gillespie, Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery; Professor of Surgery

School of Nursing

2010 Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award

Patrick Hopkins, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing

National Student Awards

All-American

Women’s Basketball

Melissa Alwardt ’11, Greece, N.Y.; Health & Society

Men’s Basketball

John DiBartolomeo ’13, Westport, Conn.; Financial Economics

Men’s Cross Country

James Vavra ’12, Owego, N.Y.; Biology

Golf

Nicholas Palladino ’14, Highland Heights, Ohio; Chemistry

Women’s Indoor Track & Field

Yaneve Fonge ’11, Cheshire, Conn.; Microbiology & Immunology

Women’s Soccer

Ellen Coleman ’12, Wauwatosa, Wis.; Biomedical Engineering

Squash

Hameed Ahmed ’11, Helsinki, Finland; English

Andres Duany ’13, Lima, Peru; Economics

Benjamin Fischer ’12, Lucerne, Switzerland; Economics & Business Strategies

Men’s Outdoor Track & Field

Brian Lang ’11, Baldwinsville, N.Y.; Statistics

American Council of Learned Societies

New Faculty Fellows Program

Jennie Lightweis-Goff ’09 (PhD), Faculty Fellow in English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Gloria Kim, Doctoral Student in Visual & Cultural Studies

American Heart Association

Predoctoral Fellowship

Suzanne O’Brien, Doctoral Student, Health Practice Research, School of Nursing

American Medical Association Foundation

2011 Leadership Award

Jason Ian Reminick, MD/MBA Student, School of Medicine and Dentistry and the Simon School of Business

American Physical Therapy Association/Health Policy and Administration

Research Grant

Suzanne O’Brien, Doctoral Student, Health Practice Research, School of Nursing

American Society for Gene Therapy

Excellence in Research Award

Melissa Badding, Doctoral Student, Toxicology

Banff International Literary Translation Centre

Summer Residency

Andrew Barrett, Graduate Student, Literary Translation Studies

Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

Wyeth Fellowship

Jessica Horton, Doctoral Student, Visual & Cultural Studies

College Sports Information Directors of America

Capital One Academic All-America Team Men’s Basketball

Michael Labanowski ’11, Rochester; Mechanical Engineering Men’s Swimming & Diving Francis Ferraro ’11, Niskayuna, N.Y.; Computer Science and Mathematics

Critical Language Scholarship

Recipient

Aurora Dopp ’13, Kenmore, N.Y.; International Relations

Matthew Lavigueur ’12, Hudson, N.H.; Political Science

Zachary Palomo ’13, Hondo, Texas; International Relations

DownBeat Magazine’s Annual Student Music Awards

Graduate College Jazz Soloist

Matt Stuver ’06E (MM), Doctoral Student, Jazz Saxophone

Foundation for Physical Therapy

Florence P. Kendall Doctoral Scholarship

Ruth Chimenti, Doctoral Student, Health Practice Research, School of Nursing

Fulbright Scholars

David Liebers ’09, Niskayuna, N.Y.; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Nathaniel Lindsey ’11, Skaneateles, N.Y.; Interdepartmental Engineering

Jenna Miller ’11, Richfield Springs, N.Y.; Russian

Rachel Sitts ’11, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Neuroscience

Kelli Summers ’11, Colorado Springs, Colo.; Biomedical Engineering

Daniel (Felix) Ungar, Doctoral Student, Eastman School, Viola

Hannah Watkins ’11, Kenai, Alaska.; Biomedical Engineering

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Gates Cambridge Scholarship

David Liebers ’09, Niskayuna, N.Y.; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

German Academic Exchange Service—Research Internships in Science and Engineering

DAAD-RISE Scholarship

Ashley Haluck-Kangas ’12, Greensburg, Pa.; Biology

David Narrow ’12, Owings Mills, Md.; Biomedical Engineering

Jonathan Raybin ’12, Kent, Ohio; Chemistry and Physics

Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award

Finalist

Brian MacMillin ’10, West Point, N.Y.; Mechanical Engineering

Goldwater Scholar

Scott Barenfeld ’12, Monroe, N.Y.; Physics & Astronomy

John A. Hartford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies

2011–13 Claire M. Fagin Fellow

Susan Lowey ’11N (PhD), Doctoral Student, Nursing

Humanity in Action Foundation

Fellowship

Mara Chinelli ’12, New York, N.Y.; Anthropology

International Double Reed Society 2010 Young Artist Competition for Oboe

First Prize

John Upton ’12E, Lake Orion, Mich.; Oboe

International Trombone Association

2011 Emory Remington Trombone Choir Competition, First Prize

Eastman Trombone Choir, John Marcellus, Conductor

Jacksonville Jazz Piano Competition

2011 Winner

Christopher Ziemba ’08E, ’11E (MM), Graduate Student, Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media

Knowles Science Teaching Foundation

2010 Science Teaching Fellowship

Tyler Lucero, Graduate Student, Teaching & Curriculum, Warner School of Education

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies

Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Gloria Kim, Doctoral Student, Visual & Cultural Studies

National Football Foundation

Hampshire Honor Society

Keegan Edwards ’11, Norwich, N.Y.; Political Science

Zachary Feldmann ’11, Arnold, Md.; Political Science

Ryan Gilhooley ’11, Scranton, Pa.; International Relations

Andrew Kryszak ’11, Lancaster, N.Y.; Electrical & Computer Engineering

Christopher Pesota ’11, Dickson City, Pa.; Financial Economics

Zachary White-Stellato ’11, Albany, N.Y.; Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Benjamin Yezer ’11, Rockville, Md.; Chemical Engineering

National Institute of Nursing Research

Predoctoral Fellowship

Rebecca Tucker, Doctoral Student, Health Practice Research, School of Nursing

National Science Foundation

Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant

Daniel Scantlebury, Doctoral Student, Biology

2011 Graduate Research Fellowship

Laura Ackerman, Graduate Student, Chemistry

Cory Bonn, Graduate Student, Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Alexander Federation ’11, Rochester; Chemistry and Cell & Developmental Biology

Francis Ferraro ’11, Niskayuna, N.Y.; Computer Science and Mathematics

Benjamin Freedman ’11, Longmeadow, Mass.; Biomedical Engineering

C. Rose Kennedy ’11, Oro Valley, Ariz.; Chemistry

David Kleinschmidt, Doctoral Student, Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Adam Kozak ’11, Columbia, Md.; Biomedical Engineering

Victoria Massie ’11, Laurel, Md.; Anthropology and African & African-American Studies

Christina Rossi ’11, West Henrietta, N.Y.; Mechanical Engineering

Randy Sabatini, Graduate Student, Chemistry

Hannah Watkins ’11, Kenai, Alaska; Biomedical Engineering

National Soccer Coaches Association of America

Scholar All-America Team

Steve Welles ’11, Elmira, N.Y.; Financial Economics

Ellen Coleman ’12, Wauwatosa, Wis.; Biomedical Engineering

Pittsburgh Foundation

Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund Award

Amanda Graham, Doctoral Student, Visual & Cultural Studies

Princeton in Asia

Fellowship

Erin Crossett ’11, Pittsburgh, Pa.; International Relations

Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Foundation

Fellowship

Imran Uraizee ’13M (MD), Medical Student

University of Notre Dame

Erskine E. Peters Fellowship

Kira Thurman, Doctoral Student, History

U.S. Department of Defense

2010 Breast Cancer Research Program Predoctoral Fellowship

Mercedes Szpunar, MD/PhD Student in Pathology

National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship

Francis Ferraro ’11, Niskayuna, N.Y.; Computer Science and Mathematics

U.S. Department of State

Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship

Grace Cannon ’13, Akron, N.Y.; French

Sorcha Dundas ’12, Rutland, Vt.; Anthropology

Samantha Echaves ’13, Redding, Calif.; Mechanical Engineering

Jessica Giambra ’11, Phoenix, Ariz.; Religion and International Relations

Lucas Giannechini ’13, Healy, Ark.; Mechanical Engineering

Kathryn Hartmann-Dow ’12, Bethlehem, Pa.; Studio Arts

Elaine Hernandez ’12, Port Saint Lucie, Fla.; Mathematics

Susana Ho ’12, Queens, N.Y.; Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Paul Jiang ’11, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Financial Economics

Alba Lamaj ’11, Rochester; International Relations

David Chie-Yong Lee ’11, Bedford, Texas; International Relations

Kathleen Lewis ’12, Highlands Ranch, Colo.; Music

Andrea Morrell ’12, Marilla, N.Y.; Mechanical Engineering

Oladoyin Oladeru ’13, Bronx, N.Y.; Epidemiology

Cindy Paauw ’11, Amherst, N.Y.; Psychology

William Pellett ’12, Williamson, N.Y.; Political Science

Natalie Peterman ’12, Palos Verdes, Calif.; Spanish

Cecelia Scribner ’12, Waterbury Center, Vt.; Geological Sciences

Emily Smith ’11, Canajoharie, N.Y.; Health & Society

Kenisha Smith ’12, Inglewood, Calif.; Economics and English

Emilia Sola Gracia ’12, Caguas, Puerto Rico; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Kelly Walsh ’12, Buffalo, N.Y.; Film & Media Studies

U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association

Women’s Cross Country Scholar-Athlete Team

Hillary Snyder ’12, Fairport, N.Y.; Film & Media Studies

Whitaker International Fellows and Scholars Program

Fellowship

Hannah Watkins ’11, Kenai, Alaska.; Biomedical Engineering

Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library

Dissertation Fellowship

Erin Leary, Doctoral Student, Visual & Cultural Studies

University Student Awards

Susan B. Anthony Prize

Lauren Yu ’11E, East Amherst, N.Y.; Bassoon and Music Education and Mathematics

2011 Edward Peck Curtis Awards for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student

Consuelo Angiò, Department of History

Shane Fogerty, Department of Physics & Astronomy

John Frost, Department of Chemistry

Valerie Johnson, College Writing Program and Department of English

Gregory Ristow, Department of Conducting & Ensembles, Eastman School

‘OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE’

National Medal of Science

honors_conwell (Photo: Courtesy Of Ryan K. Morris Photography/National Science & Technology Medals Foundation)

Esther Conwell, a professor of chemistry who has a joint appointment in the Department of Physics, received a National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama last fall. Recognized as a pioneering materials scientist, Conwell helped launch the computer revolution with work that explored how electrons travel through semiconductors. She also was recognized for carving a path for women scientists in the second half of the 20th century.

Established by Congress in 1959, the national medal is awarded by the president to recognize “outstanding contributions to knowledge” in the sciences. Conwell is the first Rochester faculty member to receive the medal.

She is also a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, two of the highest honors a scientist or engineer can receive.

‘DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTIONS’

American Association for the Advancement of Science

honors_clark (Photo: University Communications)

Robert Clark, dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science.

Recognized for his “distinguished contributions to research on dynamic systems and controls, acoustics, and, more recently, on nanoscience and nanoengineered materials,” Clark is an expert in the sciences of acoustics and in bionanomanufacturing. He is a fellow of both the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

HONORARY SOCIETY FOUNDED IN 1780

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

honors_tanenhaus (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Michael Tanenhaus, the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics, was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the honorary society has a broad membership that includes scientists, politicians, businesspeople, and artists.

Highly regarded for his groundbreaking findings in how the human brain recognizes and processes words, Tanenhaus and his students pioneered a method of study known as the Visual World Paradigm, which has been widely used in language processing studies since 1995.

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science.

HIGHEST HONORS

National Academy of Sciences

honors_maquat (Photo: Medical Center)

Lynne Maquat, the J. Lowell Orbison Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. One of the highest honors possible for a scientist, the induction recognizes Maquat for her work in the field of RNA biology. Widely cited for her research on a cellular mechanism that derails the production of unwanted proteins in the body, Maquat is the director of the University’s Center for RNA Biology.

She is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation, the National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the promotion of science and its use for the general welfare.

GREAT AMERICAN WOMEN

National Women’s Hall of Fame

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

Loretta Ford, the founding dean of the School of Nursing, will be one of 11 American women inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame at a ceremony this fall in Seneca Falls, N.Y., the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement. An internationally regarded nursing leader, Ford is credited with helping transform the nursing profession and changing the delivery of health care by cofounding the nurse practitioner model at the University of Colorado in 1965. Today there are more than 140,000 nurse practitioners in the United States. Ford was appointed the first dean of the School of Nursing in 1972. She retired in 1985.

Founded in 1969, the National Women’s Hall of Fame is the nation’s oldest membership organization recognizing the achievements of great American women. Inductees are selected every two years based on their lasting contributions to society through the arts, athletics, business, education, government, humanities, philanthropy, and science.

‘DEEP CREATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS’

Wolf Prize

honors_tang (Photo: University Communications)

Ching Tang, the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded the Wolf Prize, one of the international science community’s most highly regarded honors. The inventor of the organic light-emitting diode—which gave birth to a multibillion-dollar industry that’s exploring ways to create and improve displays in cell phones, computers, and televisions—Tang is also widely recognized for his work in photovoltaics, which could lead to major improvements in the ability to produce low-cost solar cells to capture energy from the sun.

One of three scientists who received this year’s prize, Tang was cited for his “deep creative contributions to the chemical sciences in the field of synthesis, properties, and an understanding of organic materials” and “for groundbreaking conceptual and experimental advances that have helped to create the research field of organic materials.”

The Wolf Prize is presented annually by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation.

Tang is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Society for Information Display.

EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE

UK Fulbright Scholars

honors_students (Photo: University Communications)

Nathaniel Lindsey ’11 (T5) and Hannah Watkins ’11 were selected as Fulbright Scholars to study in the United Kingdom, the most competitive of the Fulbright student programs. They are Rochester’s first graduating students selected for the program. Lindsey, an interdepartmental engineering major from Skaneateles, N.Y., will study at the University of Edinburgh, enrolled in a one-year master’s program. Watkins, a biomedical engineering major from Kenai, Alaska, will study at Imperial College in London. They are among only 35 scholars chosen from more than 700 applicants for the UK program.

The two join several other Rochester students selected for Fulbright programs this year. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Fulbright programs offer opportunities for career-launching study, teaching, and research abroad and are designed to promote educational and cultural exchange between the United States and other nations.