Rochester Review

September–October 2011, Volume 74, No. 1

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Sharon Dickman, Adam Fenster, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Charla Stevens Kucko, Melissa Greco Lopes, Jennifer Roach, and 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 (ISSN 0035-7421) 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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Contents

Why We Give

Letters

A New Blueprint for Children’s Care

An ‘Eastman’ Education—in Business and Entrepreneurship

Reel Time

Discovery

Big Designs at Small Sizes

Eastman School: 90 Years Young

Saying Farewell to a ‘Tick-Tock’ World

Report on Student Death Released

Get Ready for ‘The Sing-Off’

The Sporting News

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Tools of the Trade

Learning by Talking

Admissions on a Mission

Admit One

A Campus on the Move

Remembering September 11, 2001

Cyber Warrior

An Elite Command

In the News

River Campus Redux

The Write Place at the Right Time

An Ovation for Robert Ward ’39E

Robert Doty: ‘Creative in All Aspects’

Books & Recordings

Thinking about Privacy

Making a Scene

Why We Give

By Joel Seligman

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

On October 21, on behalf of the University of Rochester, I will have the privilege of announcing the largest capital campaign in the history of our University, how much we have raised to that date, and the themes of our campaign.

In recent months the momentum of the campaign has accelerated.

Most significantly, on July 14, Rochester entrepreneur Tom Golisano pledged $20 million to help the Medical Center launch a $134 million stand-alone Golisano Children’s Hospital, the largest construction project in absolute dollars in University history. Members of our Board of Trustees have demonstrated their leadership in recent months, including Barry Florescue ’66, who in June contributed $5 million to support the newly created undergraduate business major; Mark Ain ’67S (MBA) and his wife, Carolyn, who made a $3 million gift commitment to support entrepreneurship education and scholarships at the Simon Graduate School of Business; and Gwen Greene ’65, who made a $1 million commitment to improve the programs of the College’s career center.

Our alumni and friends have articulated enormous pride in the faculty and graduates who have made Rochester one of the nation’s leading research universities. Since 1934, eight Rochester faculty or alumni have been awarded the Nobel Prize. This past year, Ching Tang, the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded Israel’s Wolf Prize for inventing the organic light-emitting diode; and Esther Conwell, a professor of chemistry and physics, in 2010 was presented the National Medal of Science. In all, in 2009, the University ranked eighth nationally in federal research when awards were normalized for faculty size. In 2010, our University received over $400 million in total research funding.

There similarly is tremendous pride in how our students are educated. The University has been a thought leader in redesigning the undergraduate curriculum through our cluster system, pioneering the “biopsychosocial model” for medical education and creating the “unification model” for nursing education. Students have responded with a record-breaking nearly 14,000 applications for this year’s 1,150 College slots and 4,500 applications for the 104 entering positions in the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

We provide “Medicine of the Highest Order.” The University of Rochester Medical Center, including Strong Memorial Hospital, Golisano Children’s Hospital, the Wil-mot Cancer Center, Highland Hospital, and the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, is the principal health care provider for our region. U.S. News & World Report recognized Strong as first in the Rochester area in its inaugural Best Regional Hospitals ranking. The Medical Center four times was ranked among U.S. News 2011–12 Best Hospitals in America list, the most recognitions of this sort the Medical Center has ever received.

We are the home of the Eastman School of Music, ranked first among graduate school of music programs in the last two surveys of U.S. News.

We established optics as an academic discipline with the creation of our Institute of Optics in 1929.

We helped redefine the academic study of business with pathbreaking scholarship such as Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 article, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.”

For 40 years, the Laboratory of Laser Energetics has helped lead the effort to achieve nuclear fusion, potentially a game-changing source of future energy that unlike current nuclear power is safe, cannot melt down, is carbon free and potentially inexhaustible.

Our University is leading the transition to a knowledge-based economy. With over 20,000 employees, we are the largest employer in Rochester and the sixth largest in the state of New York. For eight of the last nine years we have ranked among the top 10 universities nationally in patent royalty income.

Support from our alumni and friends is already transforming our campuses with critical new facilities such as Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics; the expansion of the Wilmot Cancer Center; construction of our first 21st-century new patient care tower to revitalize Strong Memorial Hospital; the renovation and expansion of the Eastman Theatre; and the dedication of the Saunders Research Building as the home of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Currently under construction are Raymond LeChase Hall to house our Warner School of Education and the new Golisano Children’s Hospital.

Our alumni and friends share our dream: To be one of the leading research universities of the 21st century, a community leader and builder, home to outstanding faculty, students, and staff. Our new mission statement captures our spirit in 10 words: “Learn, Discover, Heal, Create—and Make the World Ever Better.”

On October 21, our next chapter begins.

Letters

Getting Back to Business

The announcement of the new undergraduate business major (“A New Major in the Marketplace,” July-August) brought back memories. I enrolled at the U of R in 1942 with the Class of 1946 because the University had just announced a new undergraduate business major. As it turned out I didn’t take any business courses until I returned after the war, when the stars were all back in place—Frank Smith in accounting, Eric Vance in finance, and Don Gilbert in statistics and economics. Al Gleason was also on board to help out with statistics. Some of those in the postwar program later joined the business faculty—Gordon Fyfe ’46 and Bill Gavett ’44, if I remember correctly.

With a strong faculty in the Simon School to draw on, the new major should be a success—and perhaps a drawing point for entering undergraduates.

Gordon Shillinglaw ’48 (MS)

Mesa, Ariz.

Arboretum Update

In your tour of the arboretum (“Tree-Lined Campus,” July-August), you mentioned the deciduous conifer, the baldycypress. I believe there’s also a dawn redwood as well. In my yard is the area’s other dawn redwood, a spectacular tree that always brings favorable comments. The tree has a notable history as well, with the most notable example of the species being the specimen in Winterthur, the estate of E.I. duPont in Delaware.

Michael Kallay ’81M (Flw)

Rochester

The writer is an associate professor of medicine at Highland Hospital.

River Campus Memories

What a pleasant surprise it was to see the photograph of four of my classmates of 1934 in the recent Rochester Review (Class Notes, July-August). Harold Rand ’34 was my closest friend. The River Campus opened in 1930, and we were the first class to start there as freshmen. Our class was small and we knew everyone.

I received my BA in 1933 and so was the first to complete my undergraduate years on that new campus. The college atmosphere was warm and the faculty was excellent, including professors such as Victor Chambers, Ralph Helmkamp, Arthur Gale, and Richard Greene.

Morris Shapiro ’33, ’34 (MS)

Rochester

The writer is a professor emeritus of surgery and a professor of emergency medicine at the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Family Portrait?

The July-August issue of Rochester Review has something for everyone. In my case there are two pictures of great interest to my family:

Page 14 shows a new nursing graduate, my granddaughter Libby Geller ’11N, with her mother, Jean Geller (“Commencement 2011,” In Review). Later you showed a number of families with several graduates (“All in the Family,” Class Notes). Libby can claim her uncle Bud Kitchen ’51, Aunt Pat Wadhams Crawford ’44, cousins Sallie Jackson ’41, Bill Jackson ’38, Harold Field, Class of 1910, and Charles H. Wiltsie, Class of 1887. Yes, I am on the list, too.

And for the fun of it, the lovely picture on page 48 (“Tree-Lined Campus”) shows the gladed hill behind the library . . . the exact spot where I asked Libby’s grandmother, Anne Schaaff, to marry me in July, 62 years ago.

Meliora!

Charles Wadhams ’50

Fresno, Calif.

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.

PEDIATRICS

A New Blueprint for Children’s Care

With a $20 million gift, Tom Golisano kicks off plans for a new children's hospital.

By Kathleen McGarvey

(Photo: Medical Center Public Relations)

A $20 million gift from Rochester entrepreneur and philanthropist B. Thomas Golisano has kicked off the Medical Center’s plans to build a new, $134-million Golisano Children’s Hospital.

“A new facility is necessary to keep pace with medical and technological advancements and to meet the modern standards of a children’s hospital,” says Golisano, who founded Paychex Inc., a payroll and human resources service provider, in 1971.

NAMESAKE: Rochester entrepreneur Tom Golisano (above) announced a $20 million gift this summer to build a new Golisano Children’s Hospital (top, in a conceptual rendering) at the Medical Center. (Photo: Medical Center Public Relations)

The University’s most generous individual living donor, Golisano has given a total of $34 million to the children’s hospital that bears his name, and the Golisano Foundation has given an additional $1.6 million to the Strong Center for Developmental Disabilities to establish the Institute for Innovative Transition.

Golisano Children’s Hospital, which was named in 2002, today occupies the fourth floor of Strong Memorial Hospital, while the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is on the third floor. Limited space requires that many patients share a room—not an ideal arrangement for family involvement, infection control, or privacy. The hospital, the only pediatric hospital in the Finger Lakes region, cares for 74,000 children each year.

With Golisano’s latest donation, the Medical Center plans to create a modern, dedicated children’s hospital. Pending state approval, the University will build a six-story, 200,000-square-foot hospital on Crittenden Boulevard, adjacent to the Strong Memorial Hospital lobby and facing the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center. The new building will be financed through a combination of philanthropy, operating equity, and external debt.

“The new Golisano Children’s Hospital is the ideal setting in which to practice patient- and family-centered care for our youngest patients,” says Medical Center CEO Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD). “This amazing facility will ensure that children will not have to leave our community for care and that families can always remain with their hospitalized children.”

(Illustration: Steve Boerner for Rochester Review)

The new hospital will hold a 60-bed neonatal intensive care unit, pediatric imaging, and 56 private pediatric rooms. Those rooms will be a third larger than current private rooms, offering greater comfort for patients, families, and caregivers. The design will also allow patients to be grouped by disease or injury, giving the hospital better opportunities to train nurses and other staff members to become experts in common ailments such as asthma.

In a similar spirit, the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, as well as the Ronald McDonald House-within-the-Hospital, will move to the new facility.

“When I came to Rochester in 2006, we had top-notch faculty and staff with expertise unparalleled in communities our size,” says Nina Schor, Golisano Children’s Hospital pediatrician-in-chief. “What we were missing was the facility to match, and now, thanks to Tom, we’re going to have a hospital built expressly around the needs of our patients and families.”

SIMON SCHOOL

An ‘Eastman’ Education—in Business and Entrepreneurship

Gift commitment from Mark ’67S (MBA) and Carolyn Ain supports entrepreneurship at the Simon School.

By Charla Stevens Kucko

ENTREPRENEURIAL INITIATIVE: A $3 million gift commitment from Mark ’67S (MBA) and Carolyn Ain (above) will help “educate the George Eastmans of the future,” says Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School. (Photo: Simon School)

There’s more than luck involved in getting a good idea off the ground.

Mark Ain ’67S (MBA), a University trustee and cofounder and chairman of Kronos Inc.—a workforce management company based in Chelmsford, Mass.—knows that well. So he and his wife, Carolyn, have made a $3 million gift commitment to support entrepreneurship education and scholarships at the Simon School as well as to support the University’s Technology Development Fund.

“The power of human capital and the ideas that are generated out of that creativity and drive are the future for our economy,” says Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School.

Ain is a longtime supporter of entrepreneurship at the University. Since 2007, the Mark Ain Business Model Workshops and Competition have been open to students at all levels of study, University-wide. Ain’s support of the Center for Entrepreneurship has enabled students to contribute to economic development in the Rochester region through internships designed to bolster small businesses and the community.

“Mark Ain is a perfect example of the success that is born from hard work and the entrepreneurial spirit,” Zupan says. “Thanks to his and Carolyn’s generosity, we’ll be able to educate the George Eastmans and Bill Gateses and Oprah Winfreys of the future—and for that, we are immensely grateful.”

Kucko is director of marketing and communications for the Simon School.

FILM STUDIES

Reel Time

The University celebrates film and filmmaking with two notable festivals this fall.

REEL STORIES: The Winner, a 2011 film directed by Wieslaw Saniewski (above), will be screened at the Polish Film Festival, sponsored by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies. Other films include Joanna, All That I Love, and Erratum (below, top to bottom). (Photo: Courtesy of the filmmakers)

The film image is an important piece of the city of Rochester’s history—celebrated this fall in two film festivals the University will host. On November 10, the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies—along with other sponsors, including the Polish Film Institute and the Polish Filmmakers Association—will raise the curtain on some of the most highly acclaimed recent Polish cinema. More domestic adventures will be screened on October 15, when Rochester takes part in Home Movie Day, an event honoring amateur moviemakers and their films.

Polish Film Festival

The Skalny Center sponsors the annual, five-day festival, a survey of new trends in Polish cinema. This year, the festival will spotlight two recent films by acclaimed director Feliks Falk—Joanna (2010) and Case Unknown (2009). Falk and actor Pawel Szaida, a star of Wieslaw Saniewski’s new film, The Winner—which is also on the festival program—are scheduled to attend the event. For more, visit www.rochester.edu/college/psc/CPCES/.

Home Movie Day

Family favorites and found films are in the spotlight for Home Movie Day, an international celebration of amateur filmmaking. The event—locally, a collaboration between the University and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film—salutes amateur movies as an irreplaceable source of cultural history and offers guidance on ways to care for and preserve home film collections. Visit the website at www.homemovieday.com.

Discovery

The Ups and Downs of Coming Out

ROOM FOR ALL: Rochester research underscores the importance of accepting workplaces and other social settings. (Photo: Steve Boerner for Rochester Review)

Coming out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual increases emotional well-being even more than earlier research has indicated, but the psychological benefits of revealing one’s sexual identity—less anger, less depression, and higher self-esteem—are limited to supportive settings, says a study coauthored by Richard Ryan, professor of psychology, and published in Social Psychology and Personality Science. The study, which included participants from 18 to 65 years old, found that age made no difference in who comes out, nor did gender or sexual orientation. Instead, the key determinant for revealing a minority sexual orientation was the supportiveness of the environment. “The vast majority of gay people are not out in every setting,” says Ryan. “People are reading their environment and determining whether it is safe or not.”

Brush and Floss for a Healthy . . . Heart?

Scientists have discovered the tool—a collagen-binding protein called CNM—that bacteria normally found in our mouths use to invade heart tissue, causing a dangerous and sometimes lethal infection of the heart known as endocarditis. A bacterium best known for causing cavities, Streptococcus mutans lives in dental plaque, churning out acid that erodes the teeth. A dental procedure of even vigorous flossing can allow the bacteria to enter the bloodstream. Although the immune system usually destroys them, occasionally—and within just a few seconds—they can travel to the heart and colonize its tissue, creating a potentially deadly infection. Microbiologist Jacqueline Abranches, a research assistant professor, is corresponding author of the study, published in Infection and Immunity. The research raises the possibility of creating a screening test to gauge a dental patient’s vulnerability to the condition.

Doves and Hawks, Hatched by Stress

Is your child a “dove,” cautious and submissive when confronting new environments? Or perhaps you have a hawk, bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings? Those basic temperamental patterns are linked to opposite hormonal responses to stress—differences that may provide children with advantages for navigating threatening environments, researchers report in Development and Psychopathology. “Divergent reactions—both behaviorally and chemically—may be an evolutional response to stress,” says Patrick Davies, a professor of clinical and social psychology and lead author of the study, noting that each technique may work better in certain family conditions. “When it comes to healthy psychological behavior, one size does not fit all,” says coauthor Melissa Sturge-Apple, an assistant professor of clinical and social psychology.

TAKE A MESSAGE: Model of a ribosome, which uses instructions provided by messenger RNA to build proteins. (Photo: iStockPhoto)

Changing a Genetic ‘Red Light’ to Green

In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists discovered an entirely new way to change the genetic code, overriding an errant form of genetic signaling for the first time. The findings, though early, are significant because they may ultimately help researchers alter the course of devastating genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and many forms of cancer. The genetic code is the set of instructions in a gene that tells a cell how to make a specific protein. Central to the body’s protein production process is messenger RNA, which takes instructions from DNA and directs the steps necessary to build a protein. For the first time, researchers modified messenger RNA and in doing so changed the original instructions for creating the protein. The end result: a different protein than originally called for. Yi-Tao Yu, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics, is lead study author. Robert Bambara, chair of the department, says that the “ability to manipulate the production of a protein from a particular gene is the new miracle of modern medicine.”

A Potent Illusion

Scientists have come up with new insight into the brain processes that cause an optical illusion. Jump off a treadmill and everything seems for a moment to be in motion; similarly, as a dartboard design moves, with the lines seemingly moving toward the center, an interspersed image of Rochester mascot Rocky seems to loom forward. But it’s an illusion, caused by the way our brains have adapted to the inward motion of the background, which becomes a new status quo. Called the Motion Aftereffect, and first documented by Aristotle—minus Rocky—the phenomenon is caused by neural processes that occur whenever we see moving objects, according to brain and cognitive sciences doctoral student Davis Glasser. A study he conducted with advisor Duje Tadin, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and colleagues at the Montreal Neurological Institute, was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Diabetes and Obesity Are a Daunting Duo for Pregnancy

Type 2 diabetes and obesity in pregnancy together raise a major red flag, according to new research published in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine. The study shows that both conditions independently contribute to higher risks, opening the door to a wide range of pregnancy, delivery, and newborn complications. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are skyrocketing in women of childbearing age; the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that between 2007 and 2008, the prevalence of obesity among adult women in the United States was more than 35 percent, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that about 11 percent of women over age 20 had diabetes in 2010. “We’ve never seen the degree of obesity and type 2 diabetes in women that we are seeing right now, because for a very long time diabetes was a disease of an older population,” says senior study author Loralei Thornburg, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Big Designs at Small Sizes

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

SCALING UP: Chris Striemer, a research scientist for the Rochester-based biotechnology company Simpore, adjusts the target on a high-performance system that deposits ultrathin films of metal onto the surfaces of other materials as part of a project in the University’s new Integrated Nanosystems Center. Located in Goergen Hall, the new center provides University faculty, materials scientists, and researchers at area companies with advanced technology to conduct research using materials at the scale of atoms and molecular structures. In the background is Brian McIntyre, the operations manager for the center, which will be formally dedicated at the start of the 2011–12 school year.

UNIVERSITY HISTORY

Eastman School: 90 Years Young

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

WAITING IN THE WINGS: As students arrived for the first day of classes at the Eastman School on Sept. 19, 1921, work was progressing on what would become Eastman Theatre at the corner of Gibbs and Main streets in downtown Rochester. Established by George Eastman as the first professional school of the University, the school is marking its 90th anniversary during the 2011–12 year. Over nine decades, the school has grown from two buildings to include the Annex, Student Living Center, Miller Center (including Sibley Library), Messinger Hall, and the Eastman East Wing, which opened in 2010–11.

PHYSICS

Saying Farewell to a ‘Tick-Tock’ World

What does it mean when you tell someone the time? More than you might think.

By Adam Frank

(Illustration: Steve Boerner for Rochester Review)

What time is it? It seems like such a simple question. But with just a little reflection—historical and cosmological—we can see that there’s really nothing simple about time. Our ideas and our experience of time have changed again and again. And we seem poised to see them change once more in our lifetimes.

Ask a friend what time it is, and he might look at his watch and respond that it’s 1:17 p.m. But what is 1:17 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes? There’s nothing innate, objective, or God-given about this kind of time. Mechanical clocks didn’t appear until the 14th century, and they had no minute hands—an invention that would take approximately another 300 years to appear. Did 1:17 p.m. even exist a thousand years ago for peasants living in medieval Europe, Song Dynasty China, or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as 1:17 p.m. in the long millennia before the vast majority of human beings had access to any form of timekeeping device?

No. The moment 1:17 is a product of our own era, born in the industrial revolution when society found it had a use for minutes. Since then we’ve been building devices that can meter time into ever smaller units and building a society that makes ever-greater demands for every one of those time demarcations.

The last decades of the 20th century brought another revolution in human temporal experience. Everyone over the age of 20 has a foot on either side of the divide as human culture and human time stepped from the analog era into the digital domain. Many of us can still recall a world unmediated by silicon microcircuit chips.

Remember when you had to be home to get a call?

Remember when you had to order a map from AAA to plan a trip?

Remember when your calendar was something that hung on the wall?

Before the advent of cell phones, we were fundamentally more alone with our thoughts and more present in the lives directly before us. There was nowhere else to be. Urgent or nonurgent communication had to wait until we could find a device connected by a wire to the wall. Now we communicate on a whim, filling time simply because we’re bored or responding to a thought that crossed our mind. The simple act of walking down the street and calling a friend to check in is as profound and radical a shift in the experience, use, and conception of time as anything that passed before, from the Neolithic age to the industrial revolution.

Given our proximity to this tectonic surge of cultural re-creation, it’s impossible to know how long the digital age will last. The agricultural revolution reshaped human experience for many thousands of years. The industrial revolution created cultural forms that extended across centuries. Will the digital revolution simply lead us to a dead end, or will it drive sustainable forms of culture that cross generations? While we can’t answer that question now, we’re close enough to the dawning of the electronic era to see firsthand how new forms of technology directly reshape the human experience of time.

More remarkably, reflecting on the last 50,000 years of cultural transformation, we can expect that the changes in human time manifested through digital technology should mirror changes in cosmological time. That expectation has been fulfilled.

The introduction of mechanical clocks shifted the organization of the European day and eventually provided a new metaphor for the heavens—a precise, cosmic clockwork set in motion by God’s hand. Centuries later, the introduction of steam power started the industrial revolution’s new machine age and drove the rhythms of its workers’ punch-clock lives. The science of thermodynamics, emerging from those steam-powered machines, advanced a new understanding of time and transformation in terms of energy, entropy, and evolution. Thermodynamics yielded its own metaphors and conceptual tools that reshaped cosmological thinking. Then, just before the dawn of the 20th century, trains and telegraph wires created new experiences of simultaneity across vast distances. Einstein’s theory of relativity used its own new vision of simultaneity as a pivot point for merging space and time into space-time. Once a fully relativistic account of space-time and its flexible geometry was available, cosmology was given its first complete language. Always and again, transformations in cosmic and human time surged back and forth, each one supporting the other in metaphorical and material realms.

By the last decades of the 20th century, silicon technology dominated our material engagement with the world. Machines made possible by silicon microcircuits—computers, personal digital assistants, cell phones, and GPS devices—were accelerating the immediate and very personal movement through daily life. These silicon “machines” moved at speeds so fast their cadence was far more native to atoms than to humans. By building culture timed to their clock cycles, we’ve compressed our own time and experience in ways both thrilling and exhausting. In our working and personal lives we’re expected to do more because these machines make it possible. And so we’ve entered a new time whose contours are as closely felt and intimately lived as the tick-tock world of our great-grandparents or the sun-parsed days of our distant ancestors.

At the same time, the scientific capacities unleashed in the computer age pushed our cosmic narrative of the Big Bang to its limits. Computer simulations, massive data-gathering projects, and space-based telescope platforms revealed new challenges to any cosmology that would begin with a beginning. In the closing years of the last century, the pace of life, time, and cosmic evolution all were set in a permanent state of acceleration.

Now with astronomers recognizing the reality that the entire universe is accelerating—expanding at ever faster rates as cosmic time moves forward—they are left trying to imagine new possibilities for cosmic origins. Was there really a Big Bang, or has the universe been moving through cycles of birth and death forever? Is there just one universe or does an infinite number of universes—a multiverse—exist, each perhaps with its own laws of physics?

Thus cosmic time and human time are set to change together once again, as they have so many times in the past. The stage is set, and we can only watch in wonder as the drama of human and cosmic time enter their next act.

Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics, is the author of About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang (Simon and Schuster, 2011), from which he adapted this essay. Frank is also a regular contributor to 13.7: Cosmos and Culture (www.npr.org/blogs/13.7), a website of NPR that explores the connections between science and culture.

UPDATE

Report on Student Death Released

Task force: Response was ‘appropriate and consistent with the University plan for dealing with emergencies.’

By Kathleen McGarvey

The death of junior Jeffrey Bordeaux Jr. last winter was not something the University could have foreseen or prevented with information possessed at the time, according to a report commissioned by President Joel Seligman from the University’s Office of Counsel. T

he 36-page report, submitted to Seligman this summer, notes that the systems and policies in place at the time of the tragedy were similar to those at other universities and that the University’s response was “appropriate and consistent with the University plan for dealing with emergencies.”

Bordeaux died in January following a fight with junior Daren Venable on the Fraternity Quad. Venable was found not guilty of second-degree murder charges at a nonjury trial in April, when a Monroe County judge ruled that he had acted in self-defense. In January, Seligman asked Sue Stewart, senior vice president and general counsel for the University, to review the University’s policies related to the incident and submit a report to him. The task force she led included three University attorneys and a University- retained law firm that specializes in higher education issues and that had no prior relationship with the University. The external law firm was asked to review the report and its methodology.

Seligman also charged the counsel’s office to propose additional steps the University could take to provide a safe environment for all students, faculty, and staff. The report includes 23 recommendations, and Seligman has asked Stewart to oversee their implementation.

“I do not believe that any of these recommendations would have prevented this tragedy,” Seligman wrote in a University-wide memo on the report. “All in the future may contribute, often in incremental ways, to further enhancing safety on our campus.”

In acknowledging the thoroughness and persuasiveness of the report and the effort that went into producing it, Seligman recognized the anguish caused by the incident.

“Nothing in this report should detract from how painful and saddening were the death of Jeffrey Bordeaux Jr. and the subsequent criminal trial of Daren Venable,” he wrote. “The pain to the family and friends of both of these young men is real and has been wrenching. My heart goes out to those who were touched so deeply and personally by this tragedy.”

The full report is available online at www.rochester.edu/president/memos/ 2011/bordeaux-report.html.

Get Ready for ‘The Sing-Off’

YellowJackets selected for singing competition starting September 19 on NBC

(Photo: Keith Bullis for University Communications)

SING OUT LOUD: Tune in to NBC’s reality singing competition, The Sing-Off, in September to see—and hear—Rochester’s YellowJackets compete with 16 a cappella groups from across the country in this fall’s edition of the show. The weekly competition culminates in a live season finale to name the grand prize winner.

SCOUTING REPORT

The Sporting News

What’s the outlook for the Yellowjackets this year? Here’s a quick rundown— by season—of what to expect from Rochester’s sports teams.

TEAMWORK: Preseason All-American Kobie Hamm ’13 (above) and returning UAA Player of the Year John DiBartolomeo (top right) will help lead the Yellowjackets this year. (Photo: Athletics &amp; Recreation)

(Photo: Athletics &amp; Recreation)

Fall

Football The Yellowjackets are poised for a big year with 18 returning starters. Brendan Pidgeon ’13 and Kobie Hamm ’13 are both preseason All-Americans. The team plays its first home game on September 24 against Union. Catch the action a week earlier when the Yellowjackets take on St. John Fisher College in the Courage Bowl at Sahlen Stadium in downtown Rochester.

Field hockey A multi- faceted attack is led by Allison Beardsley ’12 and Anna Dobrzynski ’12, who combined for 25 goals last year.

Men’s soccer and women’s soccer Both teams are regulars in the NCAA Division III national championships. Rochester’s women will be led by senior striker Ellen Coleman ’12 who has been an All-American for two straight seasons. Plenty of players will create offense for the men’s team, including Jake Cargill ’12 and Max Eberhardt ’12.

Men’s and women’s cross country Watch for All-American James Vavra ’12 and Hillary Snyder ’12 at the head of the respective packs.

Volleyball The team has seven home dates, including the UAA Round Robin on October 15 and 16. Casey Larsen ’12 was among the UAA leaders in kills and service aces in 2010.

Winter

Men’s and women’s basketball The men reached the NCAA Division III Sweet 16 a year ago and return three starters, including All-American (and UAA Player of the Year) John DiBartolomeo ’13 while the women are seeking their seventh straight NCAA bid driven by an experienced senior class: Jodie Luther ’12, Maddie Korber ’12, Michelle Ketcham ’12, and Kate Agan ’12.

Men’s and women’s swimming and diving The women have won two straight Liberty League titles and the men have taken two of the last four.

Squash With two All-Americans returning to the lineup in Ben Fischer ’13 and Andres Duany ’13, look for squash to retain its top 10 ranking.

Spring

Men’s and women’s track and field Rochester will host the New York State Collegiate Track Conference outdoor championships on May 4 and 5. The men will be led by school record-holder and graduate student Francisco Ramirez. The women have several defending state champions, including Claire Crowther ’13.

Men’s and women’s tennis The women were ranked as high as No. 20 last year, and Danielle Shreck ’12 and Frances Tseng ’13 will lead the way this year. The men have seven veterans returning, including seniors Brian Rice ’12 and Matt Volkov ’12.

Softball Maddie Skellie ’13 was the Liberty League Pitcher of the Year in 2010 while Nina Korn ’14 was the Rookie of the Year. Both will lead softball this year.

Baseball The team has to replace four starters in 2012. Alex Caghan ’12 was named to the Jewish Sports Review All-America Team in 2010 and 2011.

Golf In 2011, Nicholas Palladino ’14 won the Phil Mickelson Award as the Division III Freshman of the Year.

Lacrosse With five March home games, the Yellowjackets are looking for a strong start to the season.

Rowing Fueled by a bronze medal at the Dad Vail Championships in 2011, the team will continue to build. —Dennis O’Donnell

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

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Researchers at Rochester’s Baby Lab investigate how babies think— and what that tells us about being human.

By Kathleen McGarvey Photographs by Adam Fenster

SURPRISING FINDINGS: Fraternal twins Clara and Oliver Bender, the 11-month-old children of Robin and Jason Bender, participate in research at the Baby Lab. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In the 1960s, major medical textbooks in ophthalmology proclaimed that newborns are blind at birth.

“It’s astounding,” says Richard Aslin, the William R. Kenan Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Most parents wouldn’t have claimed that, but how would they know for sure? And similarly, speech and hearing and otolaryngology textbooks would claim that newborns were deaf—only 50 years ago.”

The understanding of infants’ cognitive development has been transformed in recent decades by researchers like Aslin, who have established that babies just months old have mental capacities formerly believed to be the domain of children much older.

“We knew babies could learn—I mean, obviously they can learn. Your grandmother knows that,” Aslin says. “It’s the rapidity, the ease, with which they learn things that I think has just been startling.”

While most of the River Campus is populated by typical college students juggling laptops and coffee mugs, there’s a corner where sippy cups hold sway, where tiny toddlers—and kids too young even to toddle—make themselves at home. It’s the Rochester Baby Lab, on the fourth floor of Meliora Hall, a research facility Aslin established soon after he arrived at the University in 1984.

It’s a fun and cheery place, with brightly painted walls and lots of toys. But it’s also home to serious psychological research, as Aslin and his students investigate how language and perception develop in babies and young children. There are 10 studies currently under way on language comprehension, visual and auditory attention, expectation formation, music cognition, and more. Many times every week, babies come to the lab, nestle into a parent’s lap as they watch a computer screen or wear a comfortable and harmless cap that monitors their eyes or brain, and do their part for science.

In probing infant cognition, Aslin—president of the International Society for Infant Studies—and his students are uncovering details about origins of knowledge and, ultimately, what it means to be human. In practical terms, it comes down to a version of a question more culturally associated with political scandal than with the nursery: What do babies know, and when do they know it?

“I think the fundamental question in the field is this: why are we as human beings different from all other species?” he says.

Over the past 30 years, Aslin “has made innumerable contributions to our understanding of early human development,” says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics, neuroscience, and psychology at Harvard Medical School. “Beginning with his landmark studies of visual development and later, speech perception, and then progressing to his groundbreaking work on statistical learning, Professor Aslin has become one of the foremost developmental psychologists in the world today.”

Study of infant cognitive development grew out of experimental psychology, but the field has also been influenced by researchers in education and pediatrics. The Rockefeller Foundation supported two “child welfare stations” in the 1920s, one at the University of Iowa and one at the University of Minnesota, to hire faculty interested in child-rearing practices.

“Between the time these welfare stations were commissioned and, roughly, 1960, the field of child psychology—and within that, the subfield of studying infants—was pretty tiny,” says Aslin. But research took off in the 1960s, spurred partly by increased research funding generally, and also partly by growing interest. The study of learning, in both adults and animals, was well established. “So it was a natural next step to study learning and cognition in infants and children,” Aslin says.

FRONT-ROW SEAT: Paige Holmes, 10 months old, sits in the lap of her mother, April, while doctoral student Sarah Davis looks on. Paige is taking part in an experiment Davis designed to study the ways that babies relate the sound of rising and falling tones to the movement of objects. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Perhaps no factor was greater, however, than advances in technology. As scientists and engineers developed devices such as small video cameras and electrode arrays in service of space exploration, they were inadvertently creating tools that would give researchers a way to find out what was going on in another largely unexplored frontier: the minds of infants.

It was mysterious terrain, seemingly inaccessible because of babies’ inability to communicate verbally. But there are a few things babies can do from the time they’re newborns, and one of them is look. And that can disclose a lot.

“Where infants look turned out to be quite revealing,” Aslin says. “You can’t ask them to make a choice by reaching or pointing because they can’t control their hands. But you can ask them to make a choice implicitly by, for example, putting up two objects and seeing whether they like to look at one or the other.”

Interpreting the meaning of babies’ gaze patterns—where they choose to look and how long they opt to look there—isn’t a simple pursuit. There are many factors that may influence such measures. Is the baby looking at a scene because something in it is unexpected and therefore interesting, for example, or is she attentive because it’s reassuringly familiar? Researchers have to be scrupulous in recognizing those complexities and not misreading preferences. But even with those limitations, attentiveness to where babies look has proven a powerful tool.

“Looking has opened up a lot,” says Aslin. “The last 50 years have revealed a litany of discoveries of abilities that infants have that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought they had.”

He cites a classic example of how the timeline of infant development has shifted. Take, for example, what’s called “object permanence”—children’s realization that an object or person no longer visible continues to exist, a developmental concept introduced by Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget.

To find out when babies begin to comprehend object permanence, Piaget and many researchers after him tested children by showing them an object and then covering it. The young subjects literally grasped the issue, they suggested, when they responded by pulling the cover off to reveal the object below. “They get that it’s still there,” Aslin explains, an understanding that seems—by this measure—to arrive around 9 or 10 months of age.

But demonstrating that understanding relies on the ability to grab purposefully and remove the cover—“a behavioral task,” says Aslin. Is it possible that babies younger than that understand, too? Eye-tracking research has suggested that’s the case. Researchers have shown that babies as young as two months register surprise—as measured by looking time—when an object that goes behind a wall is treated in a video as if it weren’t there anymore.

“They looked longer at the unexpected event, and they’re doing it much younger than the babies who could reach,” Aslin says.

Most of the studies at the lab involve children 6 to 18 months old, and researchers have begun to branch into work with preschoolers, too. Researchers observe children as they play or watch specially designed computer videos and then analyze their eye-gaze patterns and brain activity. Optical imaging caps give insight into the parts of the brain that a baby uses when engaged in a particular task. Together with Andrew Berger, an associate professor of optics, Aslin is developing technology to give greater insight into how a baby’s brain develops and functions (see sidebar). Nelson, of Harvard, says Aslin’s work with neuroimaging tools positions him “to make new discoveries about the development of human behavior.”

Through optical imaging and eye tracking, Aslin and his team of graduate and postgraduate researchers pursue two main strands of investigation at the Baby Lab: inquiries into language acquisition and studies of visual attention and visual learning.

“We start as these little creatures who know so little about our world. How do we get from there to adulthood?” says Sarah Davis, a doctoral student in brain and cognitive sciences who conducts her research on how small children process probabilistic information.

“There’s more in the world than you could ever absorb, so you need to select things,” says doctoral student Celeste Kidd. “It’s crucial to understand that selection process to understand how we learn.”

BABY STEPS: Aslin accompanies 15-month-old Beauty Brown to an eye-tracking study at the Baby Lab, a cognitive science research laboratory that Aslin founded in the early 1980s. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In collaboration with Aslin and MIT graduate student Steven Piantadosi, she conducted a recent experiment on what they call the “Goldilocks effect.” Using eye-tracking data collected from infants at the lab, Kidd and her colleagues showed that the babies’ attentiveness to visual scenes was influenced by the level of surprise—due to new information—involved in the scenes. Like the nursery tale heroine, babies prefer something that feels “just right”—they give the greatest attention to scenes that are neither too predictable nor too surprising.

The experiments run at the lab are mostly computer based, and are controlled by the infants themselves. When their attention flags, the scene changes—footage of a laughing baby, an infant favorite, recaptures their attentiveness—and where they look influences what they see.

“It’s interactive, and we know they love interactions,” says Mohinish Shukla, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab who has moved this fall to a faculty position at U-Mass Boston. His interest is language acquisition, and a recent study he conducted on infants, showing them multiple objects and giving them the name of the object in a sentence, demonstrated that they could pick out the object and learn its name by six months of age rather than the expected 17 months. While other such studies conducted elsewhere have given babies the words in isolation rather than in the context of sentences, Shukla thinks the complexity of conditions in his experiment may account for the babies’ performance—the more complicated task of picking the word out of the sentence may actually have been easier for them because that’s the way they hear language every day.

Fifteen years ago, Aslin and colleagues Elissa Newport, the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics, and Jenny Saffran ’97 (PhD)—now a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin—brought babies to the lab, where the children encountered a simple nonsense language the researchers had created to ensure they wouldn’t bring any prior knowledge to bear on the experiment.

“We wanted to find out what they could learn in the lab, not what they’d already learned in the environment,” Aslin says. The children listened to the language, “and then we tested them to see whether or not they’d learned the underlying structure of this little language.” They had.

“They learned the language in just a couple of minutes—and just by listening. Nobody was telling them what to listen to. They were only eight months old.”

The resulting article—which has been cited, Aslin estimates, around 1,000 times, an extraordinary record of influence—shook the discipline. What the experiment demonstrated “wasn’t only startling to us; it was startling to the field that babies are so ready to learn, and do it so quickly, with this kind of implicit learning,” he says. “There’s no direct instruction. It’s just passive listening to things in the environment.”

As adults, we “have intuitions about things, but we’re not taught directly information in many situations. We just absorb it from our experience. It’s a sort of implicit knowledge we have, and frequently we can’t even verbalize it. We just know that something is likely to be true,” says Aslin. “And I think that’s sort of what’s going on here with babies—I think that’s what we’re tapping into.”

TEAM EFFORT: Postdoctoral research associate Mohinish Shukla (left) talks with Tracy Ali (right) and her mother, Karen Crompton, after Ali’s five-month-old son, Rafa, completed an experiment by Shukla. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

As research continues to suggest that cognitive abilities develop earlier than formerly thought, scientists are left with the question of just what that means.

“One strong hypothesis is that when you’re measuring looking times, that’s the same thing as what you end up with as a mature person. It’ll become more elaborate with time, and you can verbalize it,” Aslin says.

“Another view—and I may be on this side; I’m still not quite sure; it’s tricky—is that you have this implicit sense and then it gets replaced by an explicit, verbalized knowledge. The reason I think it might be this way is that there are classic cases of people who’ve had brain damage and who have the implicit sense, but not the explicit, or vice versa.”

Language is a perfect example of implicit learning. “As much as parents like to think that they’re teaching their children language, they’re just talking,” he says. “They’re not saying, ‘That’s not grammatical. Don’t say that.’ They’re just talking, and babies are just listening, figuring out what the underlying structure is.”

It could be that learning object permanence and other capacities are, like language, learned through exposure, he says, and that babies’ capacity to draw lessons from that exposure kicks in far earlier than we have traditionally thought.

“We—human beings—appear to acquire certain skills very rapidly, and we do it despite significant differences in our conditions in the world.” In the nature-versus-nurture debate, “extreme versions of both views don’t make much sense,” he says. “There are huge species differences—and it’s not just because rats don’t get talked to.”

While advances such as eye-tracking devices and optical imaging have made easier the pursuit of such questions, the task of working with babies remains a challenging one. Windows of opportunity are small, and while specially designed videos can capture a six-month-old’s attention, his wiggly toes and other distractions can prove diverting as well.

“Adults don’t ‘fuss out,’ ” says Davis, using the researchers’ shorthand term for when a baby’s mood change cuts short an experiment. “You don’t have college students who are crying because they haven’t had lunch yet.” But there are advantages, too.

“Babies don’t know they’re in a psychology study,” says Kidd. “I can trust their responses more.”

To learn more about the Baby Lab or if you’re interested in participating in future research, visit http://babylab.bcs.rochester.edu.

Tools of the Trade

OPTICAL INSIGHT: Six-month-old Camryn Peruzzini, with her mother, Stefanie, wears an optical imaging cap that measures activity in the brain. The technology behind the cap is being refined by Baby Lab researchers. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

How can you know what a baby is thinking—and how she’s thinking it? Technology is a big help.

Computer software allows researchers to follow automatically where a baby is looking. The Rochester Baby Lab uses a device called Tobii, an eye tracker that reflects a dim infrared light onto the eye and senses its reflection pattern to calculate the exact point of the baby’s gaze. Another system, the Yarbus, is a head-mounted eye tracker that allows researchers to follow a baby’s gaze in natural settings.

While eye tracking is an indispensable tool, it’s not the only one. Aslin and his students also rely on more direct ways of studying the brain.

“When you study behavior, of course you’re studying how the brain controls behavior, but it’s rather indirect. You’re not actually looking inside the brain. You’re using the behavior as a shortcut to study what the brain is doing,” says Aslin.

Traditional methods used by neuroscientists aren’t particularly apt for the study of the infant brain. EEGs provide indistinct information; it’s not clear where in the brain the electrodes are getting their signals. MRIs and functional MRIs—which show the brain in action—require the subject to remain perfectly still, no baby’s or young child’s strong suit.

TINY BUBBLES: Beauty Brown (above) and her mother, Rebekkah, each sport eye-tracking devices for an experiment led by doctoral student Celeste Kidd, who collects the data electronically (below). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Aslin’s lab uses a third technique, called optical imaging. Noninvasive and relying only on light, the method uses metabolic feedback to indicate what parts of the brain are involved in a given visual or auditory task.

“Imagine that you held a flashlight up to your cheek—it glows red because you’ve got red corpuscles in your blood, and so the light is getting absorbed by those red blood cells and the light glows red. The same thing happens if you shine a light through the head,” Aslin explains. “It penetrates through the skull—there’s a certain wavelength of light that will go through biological tissue, even bone—and it gets absorbed differentially by the brain depending on how metabolically active the brain is. So it’s a measure, like MRI, of which parts of the brain are active when you’re engaged in a particular kind of task.”

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

The lab uses a commercially produced cap now, but Aslin is working with Andrew Berger, an associate professor of optics, to create a cap specifically suited for use on babies. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Berger is building on advances in infant cap design already made by a group at Washington University in St. Louis.

The cap is sensitive to what’s happening with blood both in the brain and on the scalp, Berger says; what he’s trying to do is to separate those results, so that scientists can “tune in” to what is happening only in the brain itself. He and Aslin will begin testing the improved device in the Baby Lab this fall.

Success would be a boon not just for researchers but for physicians, too. Optical imaging can detect injuries to the brain from the birth process; a more sensitive device would help to catch neurodevelopmental delays in children born prematurely before they demonstrate learning problems.

Currently, those delays are hard to detect in infants, Berger says, “and the later you catch them, the more catch-up” the child has to do.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Learning by Talking

Another dimension of young children’s cognitive development is social, and Lucia French, the Earl B. Taylor Professor at the Warner School and a developmental psychologist, investigates social interaction and its effect on language acquisition.

“Babies have amazing capacities, but many children don’t have an opportunity to fulfill their potential because they’re in environments that don’t offer adequate opportunities or stimulation,” says French, whose research examines the relationship between language and cognitive development during the preschool years.

If children are “in a home environment where they’re not supported in using language to its full potential as a means of social engagement, information exchange, and articulation of thoughts,” their ability to use and understand language outside of the context of simple commands—to ask questions, discuss feelings, and think about the past and future—is compromised, French says.

That’s also the result “if as three-, four-, and five-year-olds, they’re in a classroom environment where, instead of engaging in developmentally appropriate experiences that build on their capacities, they’re forced into developmentally inappropriate activities with a narrow focus on learning the alphabet and sound-letter correspondence.”

In homes where language is typically concerned with behavior management, not the rich exchange of information, children’s opportunities to develop verbal skill are diminished, says French. And in typical preschool classrooms, research has shown that teachers rarely engage in conversations with individual children or small groups, “so they’re not in a rich language environment in the schools either.”

French has developed a science-based preschool curriculum to foster language development, learning, cognition, and school readiness. Formerly known as ScienceStart! and now called LiteraSci (www.literasci.com), the program has received $5.5 million in federal funding, and students who have been through the program have shown significant gains in language skills, particularly in vocabulary acquisition and the ability to give explanations. They’ve also noticeably advanced their knowledge through a scientific approach of raising questions and investigating possible answers.

“As a developmental psychologist, I never think it’s too late for adequate development,” but if children hear language only in the form of commands directing their behavior and aren’t exposed to conversation and questioning, “they’ll only fall further behind” in their language and cognitive development.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Admissions on a Mission

In the College, an energetic outreach effort by the Office of Admissions results in more geographic diversity and an even higher-achieving entering class.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

FRANK ADMISSIONS: “We want to be as absolutely transparent as possible” about the admissions process at Rochester, says Burdick (far right), who meets often with prospective students and parents like Michigan residents Tom Zahrt and his mother, Mary, both on campus and in visits across the country. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

When the Class of 2015 arrived on the River Campus in August, they came with the distinction of being the College’s most selective class ever. With an average high school grade point average of 3.94 and average test scores in the 95th percentile among the college-bound, they also succeeded in an increasingly global competition, with 15 percent of the members of the class having applied from outside the United States.

The class includes members from all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa—and from more than 50 countries.

The 1,162 members of the Class of 2015 were selected from a pool of nearly 14,000 applicants, out of which slightly fewer than 5,000 were admitted. That, in itself, represents a milestone in the history of the College. For the first time, fewer than half the applicants to Rochester’s undergraduate College received either an acceptance or a place on the wait list.

What makes decisions especially difficult, according to Jonathan Burdick, the dean of admissions and financial aid, is that, in purely academic terms, “95 percent are basically qualified for admission.”

“We attract a very elite pool of applications,” says Burdick. “We’re smaller and farther away from the major population centers and we’ve already got an elite academic reputation, so there’s that degree of self-selection in that only people who think they’ve got a good chance to get in go ahead and apply.” But, he adds, “that’s also the group we go out and seek.”

Sixteen years ago, under President Thomas Jackson, the College began tightening standards for admission as part of the Renaissance Plan, a five-year initiative to strengthen and focus the University’s core offerings in arts, sciences, and engineering. For the next several years, that effort meant making fewer offers of admission.

More recently, the College has pursued high standards of admission by building the quality of its applicant pool. For while college and university admissions are more competitive than ever for students, it’s also true that admissions are more competitive than ever for the colleges and universities. Academically rigorous private institutions such as Rochester compete aggressively with one another to attract the interest of the most promising high school—and sometimes middle school—students.

Burdick came to Rochester in 2003 from the University of Southern California, a vast institution with almost 18,000 undergraduates. Its ratio of admitted students to applicants has traditionally been lower than Rochester’s, but Burdick says these ratios can be misleading. At a school such as USC, he says, “you can count on it that the first quarter or even third that they didn’t admit were dismissed out of hand because they didn’t have the academic qualifications.”

A highly qualified applicant pool makes it easy, in practice, to make good on Rochester’s pledge that there are no numerical cutoffs such as minimum GPAs or test scores. But that makes it difficult to whittle down an increasingly large “stack” (applications are now submitted online) of applications.

Burdick says there will be no shortcuts. “We’re responsible for putting out some messages that aren’t very happily received. So I think it’s our responsibility to be extremely careful about why someone is or isn’t getting in,” he says.

Assistant dean of admissions Mark Wells estimates that this past year admissions counselors collectively spent “well over 10,000 hours over a 16-week period dedicated to just trying to narrow down this pool of 14,000 to a manageable number of students who we can actually invite to join our community.”

Rochester’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid employs more than 70 staff members, not including undergraduates who work for the office as campus tour guides. Almost half, including many supervisory-level staff members, play a direct role in admissions or financial aid counseling. The remainder perform tasks from managing outreach programs, to producing marketing materials, to scheduling and coordinating staff travel arrangements, to facilitating the process from admission to enrollment.

Costas Solomou, who has worked in Rochester’s admissions office for 10 years, is an admissions counselor and the director of admissions programs. This means that he is not only an admissions representative responsible for soliciting and reading applications from his assigned regions, but also oversees Rochester’s developing outreach efforts.

“We’ve been aggressively expanding our markets outside of the Northeast,” he says, using business terms now commonly used in higher education recruitment circles as well.

Expanding outside the Northeast not only promotes the University’s goal of diversity, but also recognizes a demographic reality: the region’s population is declining.

“We’ve been proactive, I think more so than some of our peers,” says Solomou, in responding to the region’s population decline.

One factor that helps Rochester achieve recognition in a national marketplace, of course, is a high ranking from widely read sources such as U.S. News & World Report or Rochester’s designation as a “New Ivy” by Newsweek in 2006. “It’s still resonating,” says Solomou. “Parents still mention it.”

Rochester is buying lists of prospective students’ names and marketing early and often. An expansive Admissions and Financial Aid website includes videos, a blog chock full of information and stories offered by admissions staff and current students, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook presence.

But the largest factor in Rochester’s success may well be what Solomou calls “boots on the ground.”

Rochester now employs regional representatives—admissions outreach personnel who work from far-flung places such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas—to put Rochester on students’ radar screens as they begin thinking about college.

“When we first penetrated the California market in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco,” says Solomou, “it was ‘Rochester who? Where’s Rochester? Is that in Minnesota or New York?’” This year, the College welcomed 45 new students from California—43 freshmen and 2 transfer students.

Rochester has also made headway in Texas. In August, Admissions held a barbecue, sponsored by local venues Sticky Lips Pit BBQ and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, to welcome 24 new students from the state. Such events, Solomou says, “help with the transition from a faraway place to Rochester.”

Solomou mentions two other groups that Admissions has actively drawn into its outreach efforts: parents and alumni. A parent-to-parent program puts parents of current students in touch with parents of prospective students. Events such as cocktail parties and get-togethers for parents “are opportunities where we step away from the process and let it happen organically,” he says.

“We have an army of alumni,” he adds, “attending college fairs, conducting interviews across the country for us—more than 1,300 this year.”

Rochester is also reaching out to talented students at younger ages, following a game-changing trend in the business of higher education. Wells, who has been at Rochester for 14 years, says “Ten to 15 years ago, it was really unheard of to reach out to students much before their junior year in high school.” Now, the practice is common, driven by the increased competition among colleges and universities to attract top talent.

It’s also driven by the efforts of middle and high schools to help young students begin to think ambitiously about their futures. “Whenever we get an inquiry from a middle school, asking ‘Can we bring 40 students to campus for a tour to expose them to college,’ we say ‘Absolutely,’” says Wells. “We’ll find people to staff those events, whenever they take place.”

Rochester has established formal partnerships with a host of community organizations, such as the Boys and Girls Club of Rochester and Upward Bound. In 2007, President Joel Seligman initiated the Rochester Promise, a $25,000-a-year scholarship to qualified students graduating from the Rochester City School District.

Admissions has also helped Rochester to expand its array of on-campus precollege programs. A Taste of College, in which rising high school juniors and seniors take credit-bearing courses with Rochester undergraduates, has been around for about 25 years, says Emily Cihon Fehnel, director of campus programs. In the last five years, however, Admissions has expanded the market for the program by offering participants the experience of living in campus residence halls and adding a full slate of evening activities.

Fehnel, who works closely with the regional directors, as well as other counselors, says the residential component has helped the program to attract students from around the country.

“It’s gaining momentum,” says Fehnel. “And that’s my goal. I want to grow these programs, the residential component especially.” Since fall 2010, almost half of the rising juniors and seniors who have gone through the residential program and were eligible to apply, have applied to Rochester.

In some respects, Rochester might have a steep hill to climb. “We have to work a little bit harder than some of our peers,” says Solomou, referring to Rochester’s location away from populous cities such as Boston and New York.

But Burdick stresses that Rochester isn’t presenting itself as simply another school racking up impressive statistics and high institutional rankings. Part of the outreach effort, he says, is “communicating who we are and what’s important here.”

“We don’t want to communicate how we’re exactly like Y University, but how we’re different. And why you might choose us over Y University—or Y University over us,” he says.

He adds that it’s a challenging task. “We’re beneficiaries of the general attention that great universities are getting. But how you manage that surging interest, how you use that to continue to create a distinctive profile for yourself is still a piece of hard work.”

Admit One

Counselor Haniya Selzer ’11W (MS) and Dean of Admissions Jonathan Burdick share an overview of the admissions process.

PERSONAL TOUCH: Counselors such as Selzer know many prospective students by the time their applications arrive. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s the middle of July and the lobby on the first floor of Wallis Hall is buzzing with prospective Yellowjackets. Summer is not a quiet time in Rochester’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid.

Haniya Selzer ’11W (MS), a native of Syracuse and a graduate of McGill University in Montreal, is a senior admissions counselor who has been at Rochester for five years. Starting in September, she’ll travel for weeks at a time, visiting high schools in her assigned regions. Those regions may change for each counselor from year to year, and often they’re far from contiguous. This year, Selzer will draw applications from her native Syracuse, all of Canada, the city of Beijing, and Minnesota.

“In the summer, we’ll start planning which high schools we want to go to,” she says.

Selzer aims for four school visits a day and will often spend a week in a given area. When schools get back in session, she schedules visits—the sooner the better.

“You try to beat another school in picking the date and time,” she says, alluding to the competition among institutions to attract top students.

By the time Selzer opens a completed application on her computer—these days, applications are submitted online—she’ll often know the applicant, especially if she comes from far away.

“The students from farther away, you get to know better. From Syracuse, we’re getting hundreds of applications.” When she opens an application from afar, she says, “as soon as I see the name, and my interview write-up, I say, ‘oh, of course.’ I know exactly who they are.”

When counselors receive applications, they give what’s called “the first read.” It may take them anywhere from 10 minutes to a half an hour. At the end of a first read, a counselor will rate the applicant on four numeric scales—for academic rigor, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, and what Rochester counselors call “the X factor,” as revealed primarily in the student’s essay and interview.

Not all counselors approach the first read in the same way. Selzer looks first at the academic transcript. Dean of Admissions Jonathan Burdick, who also does first reads (his regions this year include Hawaii, New Jersey, the U.S. territories of Guam and the American Somoa, as well as some international regions) says he goes right to the interview and the essay—what he calls “the color”—and looks at objective factors such as grades and test scores last.

It’s subjective, to be sure, which is why each application also gets what’s called a “blind second read.” Second reads are conducted by senior counselors—counselors such as Selzer, who have been in the office for at least four to five years, right up to Burdick. Second readers are randomly assigned applications. They review the applications, with access to the first reader’s notes, but will make a recommendation for or against admission without knowledge of the first reader’s numeric ratings.

In “a huge chunk of cases,” says Burdick (he estimates it ranges from a third to a half) the first and second readers disagree. Every week from January through March, a committee of second readers meets once a week to go through each case.

A large factor, says Burdick, is “the fit.” How much has the student taken advantage of opportunities to get to know the University? And how much do they appear to know about it?

Supplemental materials that applicants send on their own initiative—what Burdick calls “wacky objects”—play scarcely any role. The exception is the student aspiring to study art or music, who sends a recording or portfolio.

The College also strives for diversity in all its aspects: racial, cultural, religious, and more than ever, geographic. Diversity of academic interests and talents is also important.

Burdick is candid about the role finances play in admissions. He estimates that 85 to 90 percent of admitted students “sailed through” without a review of their financial need. For the last 10 to 15 percent, “we were consulting the information about need. Even then, we didn’t reverse even 5 percent of the decisions.”

“I wouldn’t tell any mother who calls me up and says ‘why was my son denied,’ that I’m 100 percent confident that every decision we made was absolutely the right decision,” Burdick says. “I can only tell her that we’ve got a process that we believe in that’s produced good results.”

—Karen McCally

A Campus on the Move

A new residence hall, a revamped dining hall, and several other projects mark a mini building boom for the River Campus.

By Jennifer Roach

HOME PLACE: Construction is set to begin this fall on a new residence hall (below, in an architect’s rendering) located near Anderson and Wilder Towers in Founders Court. (Photo: Campus Planning, Design, and Construction Management)

Some students in the College will soon have a new place to call home.

Work is expected to begin in September on a new residence hall, the first such project on the River Campus in more than 40 years. Located just north of Anderson and Wilder Towers, the 52,000-square-foot building will cater primarily to sophomores, juniors, and seniors when it opens for the 2012–13 academic year.

The additional 148 beds—a combination of singles, doubles, and adjoining doubles—provided by the hall are needed to accommodate the University’s growing enrollment, says Laurel Contomanolis, director of residential life and housing services.

The five-story building also is an opportunity to build a stronger community among the new hall’s residents and the residents of Anderson and Wilder, Contomanolis says.

“We want to get students out of their rooms to interact with their peers, engage as a floor community, and participate in floor and building activities.”

The new hall is also part of a mini building boom taking place on the River Campus. In addition to the new dorm, work continues on Raymond F. LeChase Hall, the new home of the Warner School. The first major building to be constructed on the Wilson Quadrangle on the River Campus in 30 years, the four-story, 65,000-square-foot building is tentatively scheduled to open in January 2013.

Other projects under way include a major renovation of Danforth Dining Hall, including the creation of a new student market. That project opened in time for the start of the fall semester in August. And 2,400 square feet of space in Hutchison Hall has been updated to create a state-of-the-art undergraduate chemistry lab. The first-floor lab is designed to encourage collaboration among students and to foster small group discussion as students plan, carry out, and analyze experiments.

And in order to welcome students, alumni, faculty, friends, and visitors to campus, the University’s signs on the bridges that cross Elmwood Avenue are getting a facelift. Travelers going west will see a sign reading “University of Rochester River Campus” and travelers going east will see a sign reading “University of Rochester Medical Center.”

The groundbreaking for the new residence hall also marks the second time in the past five years that the College has expanded the housing options for students. In 2008, students moved into Riverview, a commercially developed apartment complex on the west side of the Genesee River that houses 400 University students in a leasing partnership with a private developer.

The new dormitory will be built on University property and is designed to meet several campus needs for space.

In addition to study rooms and lounges on each floor, the first floor will include communal spaces that can serve as a gathering spot for residents of the building and other students. Campus groups will be able to reserve a dance rehearsal space, music rehearsal space, or a conference room. Such spaces are in high demand around campus and will be helpful to have in the new building, Contomanolis says.

Outside the building, the plan is to re-landscape Founders Court, creating outdoor community space, says José Fernandez, executive director of campus planning, design, and construction management.

“What’s really cool about this building is that it’s going to give us a chance to redefine and revitalize the area and create a genuine quad.”

Jennifer Roach is editor of Currents, the University’s faculty-staff newspaper.

Remembering September 11, 2001

Profiles by Robin L. Flanigan

They were young professionals, preparing for a routine workday, both in the office and on a business trip. They were retirees, looking forward to seeing family on a routine flight. But that day—September 11, 2001—would not be routine.

Among the nearly 3,000 people who died during the attacks were six alumni—three who had just settled in at their offices in the World Trade Center; two who were flying aboard United Flight 93 when it crashed in rural Pennsylvania; and one who rushed to help survivors escaping the crumbling towers. As the nation marks the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, we talk with classmates of those who died about their friends.

Jeremy and Lyzbeth Glick (Photo: Courtesy of the family)

Jeremy Glick ’93

It all started with leftover pizza. Jeremy Glick knocked on Ron Zaykowski’s dorm room door at the beginning of their freshman year and offered to share the rest of his dinner.

“Within months we became best friends,” recalls Zaykowski ’92. “We were truly like brothers.”

Glick, a sales and marketing executive who was on United Airlines Flight 93 because his original flight had been canceled the day before, is believed to have been one of several passengers to counterattack the hijackers. His bravery earned him two posthumous honors: the Arthur Ashe Courage Award and the Medal for Heroism, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Sons of the American Revolution.

While at Rochester, Glick was president of the Rochester chapter of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, where a plaque hangs in his honor at the entrance. In 1993 he became a U.S. National Collegiate Judo champion.

“I was a 6-foot-tall, 255-pound football player and he could bring me to my knees in three seconds, just grabbing my wrist the right way,” says Zaykowski, who remains in close contact with Glick’s widow, Lyzbeth, and daughter and helped establish the Jeremy L. Glick Memorial Scholarship Fund—awarded to recognize Rochester Greek system students for their leadership.

Brandon Mathews ’92, another fraternity brother, remembers a late-night football game between friends in which he and Glick were on opposing sides. Mathews and two others preemptively tackled Glick at the same time. Glick’s martial arts training kicked in and Mathews was tossed onto his head. Though the play had been unfair, Glick later apologized.

“Our conversation couldn’t have lasted more than four sentences, but I remember it as vividly as though it were today,” Mathews says. “He was an exceptional guy for his honesty to himself and to those around him.”

Glick is remembered as intelligent and deliberate, with a sense of humor that often involved over-the-top practical jokes. But he was serious about standing up for what was right, regardless of the consequences.

“He was ready at any moment to defend himself and others if necessary,” says Zaykowski. “When I was told he was on that flight, I knew immediately that the hijackers had picked the wrong plane. With that guy in that situation, there was only one outcome. There was no other way it could have ended, in my mind.”

Jean Hoadley Peterson (Photo: University Communications)

Jean Hoadley Peterson ’69N

Quiet and unassuming, Jean Hoadley Peterson led a life of service.

As a nursing student at the University, she would return to the hospital after hours just to say hello to patients she’d seen earlier in the day. Many years later, she was an emergency medical technician, led Bible studies, traveled overseas for mission work, lent money to families in need, and offered help to drug and alcohol addicts and to pregnant women in crisis.

Peterson and her husband, Donald, were on United Airlines Flight 93, on their way to an annual family reunion at Yosemite National Park. The night before the flight, Barbara Bates Smullen ’66N, ’69N (MS), ’83W (EdD) spoke with Peterson, who’d just returned from a trip to meet her first grandchild.

Smullen and Peterson talked by phone weekly and wrote voluminous letters after moving to different parts of the country, seeing each other through child rearing and divorces and spending hours on hefty theological debates. Peterson was a conservative Christian; Smullen was a liberal Presbyterian-turned-Catholic. Despite their religious differences, Peterson was godmother to both of Smullen’s sons.

Smullen fondly remembers how much Peterson gave of herself. Though busy with her own challenging work during her senior year, Peterson gathered data as a research assistant for Smullen’s master’s thesis and volunteered to make nursery curtains for Smullen’s first baby (she threw in a matching diaper carrier and lined the inside of the toybox as a surprise). And she was never happy being a pampered houseguest—she cooked special dishes, tidied up rooms, and helped with the ironing.

This is how Smullen envisions Peterson in her last moments, continuing to serve.

“I picture Jean on the floor of the plane with the injured and with her husband, leading the people in the Lord’s Prayer,” she says. “I feel confident that’s what they would’ve been doing.”

Jeffrey Smith (left) and Michael Degenhart (Photo: Courtesy of Michael Degenhart)

Jeffrey Smith ’87, ’88S (MBA)

Away from the buttoned-up financial industry scene, in which he was an equity research analyst at Sandler O’Neill and Partners, Jeffrey Smith liked to go scuba diving, feverishly cheer on the University of Miami Huricanes football team, and hike—oftentimes with one of his two young daughters strapped to his back.

He and his wife, Ellen, frequently traveled around the world to live life to the fullest.

Michael Degenhart ’88S (MBA) recalls being “immediately struck by Jeff’s smile and sense of humor” after meeting him in January 1987 at a student-run investment club on campus. They became fast friends, joining study groups together and heading to the Elmwood Inn on Sunday afternoons for wings and beer.

“He was a fun guy,” says Degenhart. “He was always trying to get a rise out of people.”

Degenhart got together with Smith often after graduation. They’d eat nice dinners, golf, and talk about their careers, including Smith’s desire to land a job at a New York City investment firm. Smith got his wish in early 1996, then that fall proposed to his future wife on Little Cayman Island while the pair sat stargazing in their wet bathing suits. Degenhart read at their wedding the next spring, after which the newly married couple left for a brief residence on a dive boat in the Coral Sea, off the Great Barrier Reef.

Smith was a groomsman at Degenhart’s wedding in June 2001.

“That was the last time I saw him,” says Degenhart, who had plans to catch up with Smith on a business trip to Manhattan in late September 2001. “Jeff and Ellen talked about their trip in March to Italy, and my wife and I were honeymooning in Italy, so we shared a lot of ideas.”

Zhe (Zack) Zeng (Photo: Courtesy of Ada Grant)

Zhe (Zack) Zeng ’95, ’98S (MBA)

To those who knew Zhe (Zack) Zeng, it was no shock to learn that he had headed toward the World Trade Center after the first tower collapsed—not away from the dust and ash like most everyone else—to help the injured. Trained as an emergency medical technician, Zeng grabbed some supplies from his office at the Bank of New York, where he was project manager for American depository receipts, before being filmed by a television news crew, still in his business suit, administering first aid to a woman on a stretcher. Then the second tower fell.

To honor Zeng’s heroism, the New York City Council renamed a street after him in the Chinatown area of Manhattan. The street, known as Zhe “Zack” Zeng Way, borders a park where Zeng used to meet with friends.

Zeng has often been described as selfless, generous, and humble.

“He was like a brother and mentor to me,” says Hai-Yong Gao ’99, who was four years behind Zeng and was introduced to him as a freshman at the University, where Zeng was working on his master’s degree in business administration. It was the first time Gao had ever been away from home, and it was a relief to meet someone with whom he had so much in common. “We both emigrated from China as teenagers. We both went to the same high school. Our parents didn’t know much English, and we had to interpret for them. It was like we knew each other already.”

They remained close after that, and by 2001 were both living and working in New York City, where they caught up during weekly phone calls, met occasionally for weekday lunches, went fishing on Long Island, and played golf and tennis together.

“Honestly, I wish that he was not a hero,” says Gao, who saw the second plane hit from his office, “so he could be here today. But I’m not surprised at the way things turned out.”

Brendan Dolan (Photo: Courtesy of the family)

Brendan Dolan ’86

“He was a best friend to a lot of people,” Lee Taylor ’86 says of Brendan Dolan, who was vice president in charge of the energy group at Carr Futures in the World Trade Center.

Taylor met Dolan on his first day as a freshman. After graduation, they lived about a half hour away from each other in New Jersey and got together on weekends to swim in Dolan’s pool and spend time with each other’s families.

“He was a solid family man who loved his wife, Stacey, and two daughters, Sarah and Samantha,” recalls Taylor, adding that he, like so many others, got into the energy broker business with Dolan’s help. “He looked after a lot of us, and was always there whenever anybody needed him.”

A quarterback on the Yellowjackets football team, a rugby player, and the social chairman for the Phi Upsilon fraternity, Dolan was the second in his family of five kids to go to Rochester, following a year behind his brother Charles Dolan ’85. Dolan “was one of those people who was happy all the time, no matter what he was doing,” says Doug Darrow ’85, one of Dolan’s fraternity brothers. “He always wanted to be the host, or facilitate a pick-up game of basketball, football, or rugby. He just wanted everyone to have fun and wasn’t afraid to work hard at trying to make that happen.”

And despite the good-natured rivalry that exists among fraternities, notes Mark San Fratello ’85, “Brendan rose above that and was friends with everybody. He was at ease in every setting.” San Fratello, who was a tight end on the football team, remembers being impressed during one practice in which the coach singled out Dolan for a mistake he’d made during a skeleton drill: “The coach got after him good, and I thought, ‘This guy is going to blow up and get worse.’ But then he threw the next ball to me, and it was a good, tight spiral. It said something about his guts and fortitude.”

Taylor, who still gets together with his tight-knit group of friends from college, knows that the reunions would take place more regularly if Dolan were still around.

“It’s surprising that it has been 10 years,” he says. “It really feels like yesterday.”

Aram Iskenderian (Photo: University Communications)

Aram Iskenderian ’82

Aram Iskenderian was patient and even-tempered, a loyal family man who made sure he was on the six o’clock train every weeknight to help bathe his children and put them to bed.

A vice president in global risk management at Cantor Fitzgerald, he had survived the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was on the phone with his wife, who’d called to report that their twin sons hadn’t cried when she dropped them off on their first day of preschool, when the first plane hit in 2001.

He had married his high school sweetheart, Sheri, first capturing her attention—and not in a good way—in the 10th grade by pulling her hair. Though she often complained at home that a boy at school was bothering her, she would eventually describe him as her soulmate. The couple stayed together while attending college hundreds of miles apart, and tied the knot in 1983.

Besides being a hands-on dad, Iskenderian, who also had two daughters, was known for his love of household renovations—give him a wall to knock down and he was happy—and helping others. He was a regular blood donor, and was planning to ride in a September 23 bike-a-thon to raise money for a coworker with multiple sclerosis.

Iskenderian’s calm, methodical approach to life extended to his career.

“I think that was why he was so successful,” says Dick Keil ’83, one of Iskenderian’s Sigma Chi fraternity brothers. “He was a very steady guy, even back in college. Never too high and never too low. When you’re working in finance, that’s a pretty important attribute to have.”

September 11 Memorials

A set of three tables and benches on the plaza of Meliora Hall is dedicated to those who died September 11, 2001. A gift of the Class of 2002, the memorial includes the names of the six University alumni who died that day. The fourth-floor patio of Gleason Hall is dedicated to Simon alumni Jeffrey Smith and Zack Zeng.

Cyber Warrior

Rear Admiral Gretchen Specht Herbert ’84 takes command of Navy Cyber Forces.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

ATTENTION: Rochester area high school students and their parents (above) listen to Rear Admiral Gretchen Herbert ’84 (opposite) in Hoyt Hall in July as part of Navy Week, an outreach program that showcases naval operations and opportunities. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Rear Admiral Gretchen Specht Herbert ’84 doesn’t often get the chance to visit her hometown of Irondequoit, just north of Rochester, much less to stroll the River Campus, where, she says, 30 years ago her daily life as a student, athlete on the women’s basketball and soccer teams, and NROTC scholar “really molded who I am.”

But the newly installed commander of Navy Cyber Forces got that rare chance in July. During her day-long visit to the campus, she delivered a talk to high school students about her 25-year career in the Navy, which began with her NROTC scholarship at Rochester, and, along with President Joel Seligman, toured the University’s newly installed electronic classroom—a room in Lattimore Hall outfitted with 12 computers with dual monitors that will help Naval ROTC students develop navigation skills in a full range of environmental conditions.

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

The sea can seem like a distant place, even to those who live near the coasts. But as Herbert told her audience of prospective students and parents, not only is almost three-quarters of the globe covered by water, but 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 100 miles of the coast. About “90 percent of all international commerce, from your sneakers, to your TV sets, to your laptops, to your milk and butter, travels via the sea,” she said. “And to make sure those sea lines of commerce are open, we’re out there patrolling,” she added, referring to the Navy’s involvement in an international coalition to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia as a recent example.

There are other dimensions to the Navy’s mission, of course, and in her talk and in a follow-up interview, she reflected on the implications of her new role, which she began in June, as commander of Navy Cyber Forces.

Herbert began her naval career, just following graduation, engaged in antisubmarine warfare, tracking Soviet submarines off the coast of Bermuda. That was in 1984, when, she says, “there were two great powers, you knew where your enemy was, you knew what your mission was.”

But since then, developments in technology and geopolitics have made national security a much broader and more complex enterprise. For example, the Navy has traditionally had a command for the surface navy, a command for aviation, and a command for submarines. The establishment of a command for cyber forces, she says, is “a recognition by the Navy that cyber and cyberspace has risen to a level of increased importance and is actually very much like any other war fighting area.” And as commander of Navy Cyber Forces, her job “is to ensure that the fleet has the tools and the training and the personnel to be able to operate in and through cyberspace.”

To give a sense of the threats emerging in cyberspace, Herbert says that “across the Department of Defense networks, there are about 6 million probes a day.” Probes, she clarifies, “are something very different from attacks. They’re a ‘testing of the waters’ kind of thing. But some of those probes go farther and are actually aimed at particular information.” That information might include intellectual property, plans for an operation, or information about “the capabilities and limitations of our armed forces.”

Herbert studied geology at Rochester, and as she told the audience of prospective students and parents, “I can tell you I don’t do anything with rocks.” What college teaches, she said, is “the ability to look at things critically, and to make interpretations”—as well as “how to multitask and prioritize.”

She’s received schooling and on-the-job training from the Navy for each of the many positions she’s held. As she’s worked her way up the Navy hierarchy—her current rank, rear admiral, is the highest, permanent, peacetime rank in any of the armed forces—she’s embarked on a new job every two to three years. Often, she says, it’s “something totally different” from her previous roles.

Her favorite mission? “My first C-duty job,” she says, referring to a combat job that first opened to women in 1993. The job was combat systems officer aboard the USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that, with 5,000 servicemen and women on board, could seem like a small, floating city. “If I could go back to sea tomorrow, you could bet I’d be doing it. And if they told me that I’d have to give up a couple of stripes to go back,” she adds, “I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Q&A

An Elite Command

Rear Admiral Sean Pybus ’79 takes command of the Navy SEALS.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

COMMANDING ROLE: Rear Admiral Sean Pybus ’79 (center) is sworn in as the commander of Naval Special Warfare, where he oversees the Navy’s sea, air, and land teams—the SEALS—and combatant-craft crewmen. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The United States Navy’s sea, air, and land teams—known as SEALS—are among the most elite members of the military service, with a training regimen the SEALS themselves sum up with the saying, “The only easy day was yesterday.”

Established by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 as a maritime force trained to handle any type of unconventional warfare, the SEALS have made headlines twice in the past several months. In May, a team of 25 SEALS broke into the compound of Osama Bin Laden and killed the leader of al Qaeda, who had been the United States’ most hunted terrorist since even before the September 11, 2001, attacks. In August, 22 SEALS were among the 38 American and Afghan service members killed when their helicopter was shot down en route to a battle against insurgents. In between those two events,

Rear Admiral Sean Pybus ’79, a career SEAL who studied economics while at the University on an NROTC scholarship, took charge of the Naval Special Warfare Command, where he now oversees the Navy SEALS as well as special warfare combatant-craft crewmen. He corresponded with us by email in July.

When did you decide on a military career?

As a high school senior, I applied to ROTC programs with the Army and Navy in hopes of getting a scholarship to pay for college. The Navy gave me a scholarship, so that was my early motivation for military service. I assumed I would do my obligatory time in the service after college and then join the civilian workforce. But the ever-challenging work, frequent travel, esprit de corps, and quality people within the SEAL community were strong draws. And it remains that way today.

When did you become a SEAL, and what can you tell us about the infamous training regimen?

As soon as I graduated from Rochester, I went to SEAL training, which is the famous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training course, known as BUD/S, with an attrition rate of between 65 to 75 percent. In 1979, almost all of our instructors were Vietnam veterans. The lessons and instruction they imparted to us many years ago still apply and inform how we operate today, and I’m thankful for that. In my years as a SEAL since BUD/S, I have never been more cold, wet, and miserable as when going through BUD/S in 1979. Doing military special operations in, under, or from the sea is our forte, so most of our selection and training is water-oriented. A BUD/S student spends much of his time wet, sandy, and cold. Going to college in Rochester, however, prepared me well to deal with the cold and wet! By Christmas 1979, I graduated BUD/S training and was on my way to my first SEAL assignment in Virginia.

Is SEAL training similar today?

The basic training regime today is remarkably similar to years past. BUD/S has been proven to produce SEALS with remarkable toughness, unconventional thought, and a never-quit attitude. We’re very careful about making adjustments to this program. With regard to advanced training that prepares SEALS for the specific work we do around the world today, it’s exponentially better resourced than in years past. Naval Special Warfare is the maritime component of U.S. Special Operations Command, and we draw a high level of training, equipment, and other resources from it to maintain a high level of capability and preparedness. We also dedicate time working with our sister special operations forces in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps. The real strength of special operations is our ability to work as a team. Most of the successes our nation has had within special operations result from a team effort across the services.

In what ways did your liberal arts education prepare you for a military career?

Personally, as a student and young man, Rochester’s tough academic regimen forced me to become more disciplined and goal-focused, traits that served me well in the military. The breadth of Rochester’s curriculum has also been an advantage, because naval officers well-versed in subjects from English to engineering have an advantage over specialists, in the long run. Most importantly, I think Rochester has always been committed to helping students learn how to think, not necessarily what to think. For planning and executing special operations in the military, knowing how to think is invaluable. As the commander of the Navy’s special warfare community, I want a diverse officer and enlisted corps, including men and women with a liberal arts background. We’re looking for people with high levels of mental, physical, and moral fitness. They’ll come from many different places, and I think that’s exactly what we need.

In the News

Susan Hockfield ’73 (Photo: Bloomberg)

Theofanidis Opera Commemorates 10th Anniversary of 9/11

Christopher Theofanidis ’92E (MM) has composed Heart of a Soldier, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and to be premiered by the opera on Saturday evening, September 10. Heart of a Soldier is based on the book by James Stewart that chronicles the life of Rick Rescorla, a Vietnam veteran and Morgan Stanley’s head of security, who died in the south tower of the World Trade Center after leading more than 2,000 people to safety. Theofanidis, who now teaches at Yale, was teaching at Juilliard, 50 blocks from the towers, at the time of the attacks.

Hockfield ’73 Tapped for Presidential Research Group

Susan Hockfield ’73, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been selected by President Barack Obama to play a leadership role in the Advanced Research Partnership. The partnership, which Obama announced in June, enlists federal agencies, private businesses, and universities in an effort to improve American manufacturing by promoting research and development of emerging technologies. Hockfield will serve as cochair of the steering committee of the partnership, along with Andrew Liveris, the president, chairman, and CEO of the Dow Chemical Co.

Graduate to Head National Dental Institute

Martha Somerman ’78M (Pdc), ’80M (PhD) is the new director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health near Washington, D.C. Somerman, who completed a periodontal residency at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health and a doctorate in pharmacology at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, was formerly the dean of the University of Washington School of Dentistry in Seattle. She’s a recognized leader in research on the development, maintenance, and regeneration of oral-dental-craniofacial tissues.

Rochester Alumna in Hot Coffee

Joanne Doroshow ’76, executive director of the civil justice research and advocacy organization Center for Justice & Democracy, based in New York City, makes several appearances in the HBO documentary Hot Coffee. The documentary, which premiered in June, centers on the 1995 New Mexico district court case Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, in which a jury awarded significant damages to a plaintiff who had suffered third-degree burns when she spilled a cup of McDonald’s coffee in her lap.

Levi ’69 Recognized for Civic Leadership

John Levi ’69, a partner in the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, was awarded the first Abner and Zoe Mikva Corporate Citizenship Award this spring. The award is given by Mikva Challenge, an organization that promotes the development of civic leaders among students in Chicago’s public schools. Levi’s accomplishments include his election in 2010 as board chairman of the Legal Services Corp., which funds civil legal assistance to low-income Americans, and his role in Sidley Austin’s partnership with Chicago’s Gerald Delgado Kanoon Magnet Elementary School, as well as in the firm’s pro bono programs.

River Campus Redux

A film taken by Herbert Tindall ’36 and donated to the University by his son, Bob ’65, offers a ‘priceless’ glimpse of an ‘infant’ River Campus.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

FILM FANS: Films featuring the Marx Brothers were among a collection of 16-millimeter films that Bob and Herbert Tindall donated to the University along with rare footage of the River Campus. (Photo: Dave Londres for Rochester Review)

Last November, Joanne Bernardi, an associate professor of Japanese who also teaches in Rochester’s film and media studies program, found a welcome surprise in her email inbox.

It was a message from Bob Tindall ’65, who had read about her course, Atomic Creatures: Godzilla (“History in Celluloid,” Rochester Review, November-December 2010). The owner of a large private film collection, he asked her if she would be interested in an original, 16-millimeter film print of King Kong. Two days later, after an extended email dialogue, Tindall wrote to Bernardi that he was willing to donate his entire collection to the University.

The commercial films in the collection—classics by W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Abbot and Costello, for example, all in 16 millimeter—were impressive enough. But what made the collection even more valuable to the University was footage of the River Campus shot by Herbert Tindall ’36, Bob’s father, in 16-millimeter film between 1932 and 1940, the graduation year of Herb’s younger brother, Harry.

“The film shot by [Bob’s] father is, literally, priceless,” says Bernardi. “Sixteen millimeter was introduced by Kodak here in Rochester in 1923, which makes him a ‘first generation’ 16-millimeter filmmaker.”

Nancy Ehrich Martin ’65, ’94 (MA), a classmate of Bob’s and now the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist, calls the film, which is now accessible to viewers in DVD format, “remarkable.”

CAMPUS TIMES: A film made by Herbert Tindall ’36 shortly after the River Campus opened captures a wide slice of what it was like to be a Rochester student in the 1930s, including scenes from the new campus, athletic events, classroom activities, and social life. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

“When Herb arrived as a freshman, the campus was practically brand new,” she says. “He was entering an infant physical campus.”

The film, not so much titled as labeled (“University of Rochester, 1932–1940”), is rich in content, including classroom scenes, sports competitions, and the everyday clowning around of a sharply dressed crop of male undergraduates (women remained at the Prince Street Campus until 1955). Most striking, from an early 21st-century standpoint, say Martin, Bernardi, and others who have viewed the DVD, is not only the homogeneity of the virtually all-white faculty and student body, but the attire: ties and vests to class, to lab, and it seems, everywhere except on the basketball court or the football field.

Today, Herb lives in Lancaster County, Pa., where he spent most of his working life as a country doctor. Bob and his wife, Janice Clough Tindall ’66, live about 20 miles from Herb. To offer people a sense of his dad’s passion for film, Bob has a story he likes to tell.

“My mother was pregnant with her first-born child, which was me. When she went to the hospital to have me, he checked her in, and much to my mother’s dismay, he went to the movies. And while he was at the movies, I was born.”

It’s an account Herb disputes.

“No, no,” he says. “I was there for the delivery.”

“Oh, listen to this,” Bob retorts. (The film, he adds, was You’re in the Army Now.)

Herb developed an interest in photography and film as a high school student, outside Philadelphia, in the 1920s. “There was a group of us,” he says. “We had our own photo-finishing operation. We went around to summer camps and got the kids film so we could process it for them.”

In the late 1920s, he purchased a Kodak Model B—a boxy, 16-millimeter motion picture camera introduced by the Eastman Kodak Co. in the late 1920s—and began making home movies.

At the same time, he nurtured his interest in commercial motion pictures by renting and showing them at home to friends. “There was a place downtown, in Philadelphia, where they had a whole collection of old 16-millimeter films, all silent, of course,” he says. “You could rent a picture every week for $50 a year. That’s what we did,” he says. “It sounds like a lot, but it’s only a dollar a picture.”

Herb says it was a coincidence that he went to college in the hometown of Kodak. The son of a salesman for the Remington Typewriter Co., he moved around a lot, and his father had recently been transferred to Remington’s Rochester office. (“Before I started at Rochester,” Herb adds, “he was transferred to Chicago.”)

After college, medical school, and service in the Navy, Herb established a medical practice and lived with his wife, Julie—to whom he was married from 1941 until her death in 1994—and their four kids on a farm in Lancaster County. He continued the tradition of opening his home, and his expanding film collection, to the community.

Bob says the films, shown decades before the availability of VHS videotapes and VCRs, were well-attended and treasured by his father’s many friends. And to illustrate just how much, Bob has another story.

Several months ago, he says, “My stepmother died. And at her funeral, I can’t tell you how many people came up to Dad and said to him, ‘I remember watching the movies at your farm.’ Not that he did this or that. But that he had opened up the farm for people to come and watch these movies.”

“Movies are a sociological phenomenon,” he continues. “They involve other people. You can sit locked in your room watching a movie that’s shown on a projector. But not a lot of people do that. The point of movies is to engage the community.”

The Write Place at the Right Time

Native New Yorker John Sotomayor ’90 remakes his life as an award-winning journalist in ‘the horse capital of the world.’

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

WRITE MAN: A native Spanish speaker, Sotomayor has won statewide journalism awards in two languages since moving to Ocala, Fla., where he covers tourism, leisure, entertainment, and horses. (Photo: Scott Miller/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx and Queens, John Sotomayor ’90 now finds himself in “the horse capital of the world”: Ocala, Florida.

The son of immigrants—his father is from Arequipa, Peru, and his mother is from Bogota, Colombia—Sotomayor moved from New York City to Ocala in 2004, along with his brother, when his parents retired there.

At first, Sotomayor, now founder of Sotomayor Media Creations and associate editor of Ocala Magazine, wasn’t convinced the move came at the right time. In New York, he’d floundered in his attempts at a legal career, an experience he talks about freely. In 2004, he’d just begun to establish himself as a freelance entertainment writer in the largest media market in the world, writing a weekly column on reality television for Elites TV, a web-based entertainment news site.

So what do you do when family commitments draw you to places that seem far from the beaten path? If you’re enterprising—as Sotomayor most certainly is—you turn it into a big opportunity.

“I came to Ocala and said, ‘Let me use half a year to learn the area and look at the local publications and see what’s available.’ And I got to know the equestrian circles, the business circles, pretty fast,” he says.

Ocala, in north-central Florida, is a small city, of roughly 52,000 people. But it’s growing rapidly, as is its Hispanic community. “The Hispanic community is thriving,” says Sotomayor. “A lot of people are moving from the Miami area up North and from the New York area down South.”

Since his arrival in 2004, he’s written on an exhaustive array of topics, with a focus on tourism, leisure, entertainment, and of course, horses. In the past five years, he’s racked up three awards from the Florida Magazine Association, and three more in the Florida Press Club Excellence in Journalism competition.

A native Spanish speaker, Sotomayor has won awards in two languages. But writing in English was something that, as a grade school student, Sotomayor had to work at to master.

“I never really thought of myself much as a writer,” he says. In grade school English classes, his writing was routinely deemed “awkward.” “That was the common feedback I got on papers—excellent concepts, wonderful vision, awkward phrasing,” he recalls.

At Rochester, he studied political science, but says in hindsight that his most memorable class was a course in science fiction film taught by Constance Penley, who taught at the University from 1983 to 1991.

“I’ll never forget. Because she was the toughest teacher I ever had. I thought it was going to be an easy A. It’s a film class. You’re watching movies and you’re writing about it. How hard is that? But she made us work for it. Really, really work for it,” he says.

In 2008, Sotomayor established himself as a limited liability corporation, Sotomayor Media Creations. That allowed him to join the Ocala/Marion County Chamber of Commerce, where he has since become both a member of the board and the chair and founding member of the Hispanic Business Council. In 2010, the City of Ocala awarded him its Mary Sue Rich Diversity Award, recognizing his leadership role in bringing diverse constituencies together.

Jaye Baillie, the president of the Ocala/Marion County Chamber of Commerce, says, “John’s very focused, he thrives on building relationships, and it’s through those relationships that he’s been able to favorably impact our community and our chamber.”

Having become a recognized civic leader in a growing town in seven years, Sotomayor admits he’s very goal-oriented. “I see what’s the one-year goal, what’s the three-year, what’s the five,” he says. “It becomes a little clearer in a town the size of Ocala.”

An Ovation for Robert Ward ’39E

APPLAUSE: Robert Ward ’39E (above) poses with Eastman students rehearsing for a 2005 Eastman Opera Theatre production of his opera Claudia Legare (below). The Pulitzer Prize–winning composer will receive the nation’s highest opera honor this fall. (Photo: Gelfand-Piper Photography)

Robert Ward ’39E, a composer whose honors include the Pulitzer Prize, a New York Music Critics Circle Citation, three Guggenheim Fellowships, and an Eastman School Alumni Achievement Award, earned his greatest recognition of all in July: the 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honor.

The honor that many regard as the highest in opera recognizes a lifetime of major contributions to the art form. Over more than 70 years, until his retirement in 1989, Ward composed, directed, taught, and administered—at Juillard, Columbia, and Duke, and for the U.S. Army band during World War II.

His 1962 opera, The Crucible, based on the play by Arthur Miller, which earned him the Pulitzer, is perhaps his best-known work from a catalog that includes eight operas, seven symphonies, four concertos, and many shorter works.

Ward and three other recipients will receive their awards at a concert and ceremony in Washington, D.C., in October.

—Karen McCally

TRIBUTE

Robert Doty: ‘Creative in All Aspects’

VISION: Doty was a founder of the Centers for Brain Research and Visual Studies. (Photo: Medical Center Public Relations)

I started my graduate education in physiology at Wake Forest University in 1965. When my advisor moved to another field, I was fortunate to move to the Center for Brain Research at Rochester. In January 1968, I had my first meeting with Bob Doty. I was immediately overwhelmed. His course in neurophysiology was massive, and I almost drowned. Over my three-plus years as his graduate student, I worked hard to keep up with Bob’s energy and intellect, and I am much the better for his guidance.

A world-renowned neuroscientist, Bob died last January at the age of 91. His immense curiosity, spirit of adventure, extraordinary energy, extensive reading, and gregarious nature made him a special individual.

Bob’s adventures in science began at the University of Chicago, where he studied under several of the stars of science and earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. In 1961 he moved to Rochester, where he helped make the University an internationally recognized center for neuroscience. He was a founder of the Center for Brain Research and the Center for Visual Science, and he trained more than 50 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He was also a founder of the Society for Neuroscience, which has become the world’s largest organization for neuroscientists.

In 1996, he retired but continued at Rochester as professor emeritus. He kept his laboratory functioning and created an annual lectureship, “Consciousness from Neurons,” in the name of his beloved wife, Betty, who died in 1999. Many people worldwide will miss the yearly “Doty Doings,” accounts of his experiences and musings.

Bob’s writing was unique. He read widely and often used concepts from ancient literature as well as studies from Eastern European labs, those outside of our own American circuit. Bob knew several languages and taught himself Russian. Fortunately, he never noted my miniscule talents with language. His prose was full of unusual words, terms of his own creation, and unique grammatical constructions. His writing was never boring.

He also engaged energetically in talks delivered by others. He was happy to ask the out-of-the-box question, cite data from obscure sources, or cleverly propose alternative interpretations. He was creative in all aspects of his very full life.

—David Lee Robinson ’72M (PhD)

Robinson is the deputy director of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at the National Institutes of Health.

Books & Recordings

Books

The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism

By Jack Knight and James Johnson

Princeton University Press, 2011

Johnson, an associate professor of political science at Rochester, and Knight, a professor of political science and law at Duke, argue in favor of adopting the philosophy of pragmatism to inform decisions about which types of political and social institutions are suitable for what purposes.

Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House

By Daniel Beaumont

Oxford University Press, 2011

Beaumont, an associate professor in Rochester’s Department of Religion and Classics, explores the life of Delta bluesman Eddie James (Son) House, among the earliest blues artists, whose use of repetitive rhythms and Southern gospel and spirituals inspired musicians such as Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

School Food Politics: The Complex Ecology of Hunger and Feeding Around the World

Edited by Sarah A. Robert ’92 and Marcus Weaver-Hightower

Peter Lang, 2011

Robert, an assistant professor of education at SUNY Buffalo, coedits a series of essays that explore the intersection of school food and urban, social, and environmental politics.

Reason in History: Hegel and Social Changes in Africa

By Babacar Camara ’99 (PhD)

Rowman & Littlefield, 2011

Camara, a professor of black world studies, comparative literature, and French at Miami University in Ohio, reexamines Hegel’s thought in the context of colonialism, neocolonialism, and anticolonial struggles in Africa.

The Life Cycle of Leadership: Surviving and Thriving in Today’s Schools

By Stephen Uebbing and Mike Ford

Learning Forward, 2010

Uebbing, an associate professor of educational leadership at the Warner School, and Ford, a school superintendent who teaches at Warner, show leaders how to anticipate the challenges of each stage of the leadership cycle.

In Sickness and in Death

By Lisa Bork ’86

Midnight Ink, 2011

In the third novel of her Broken Vows mystery series, Bork presents the next adventure of Jolene Parker, whose husband brings home a foster child with such talents as picking locks, hotwiring cars, and possibly, Jolene discovers, worse.

Netter’s Pediatrics

By Todd Florin ’00, ’05M (MD) and Stephen Ludwig

Elsevier, 2011

Florin, a fellow in pediatric emergency medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, brings together in a single volume more than 500 images by pioneering medical illustrator Frank Netter and others working in his style.

Handbook of Optical and Laser Scanning (Second Edition)

Edited by Gerald F. Marshall and Glenn E. Stutz ’81

Taylor and Francis Books/CRC Press, 2011

Stutz and coeditor Marshall draw on 27 international subject specialists in a reference guide to the elements of laser beam characterization and optical systems for laser scanners.

The New French Interior

By Penny Drue Baird ’73

Monacelli Press, 2011

Baird, an internationally recognized interior decorator and president of the design firm Dessins, describes and displays the mixture of art deco and contemporary elements now popular among many Parisians that make up a newer, and sparer, French interior than the more opulent styles of the past.

Cleanse Your Body, Clear Your Mind: Eliminate Environmental Toxins to Lose Weight, Increase Energy, and Reverse Illness in 30 Days or Less

By Jeffrey A. Morrison ’92

Hudson Street Press/Penguin Group, 2011

Morrison, a primary care physician focusing on integrative medicine and president of the Morrison Center in New York City, outlines a therapy program aimed at ridding the body of toxins. The book includes dietary guidelines and recipes to help readers detoxify.

Genetic and Acquired Disorders: Current Topics and Interventions for Educators

Edited by Paul C. McCabe ’92 and Steven R. Shaw

Corwin Press/National Association of School Psychologists, 2010

McCabe, an associate editor of the journal School Psychology Forum and a professor at Brooklyn College, joins coeditor Shaw to offer school counselors, psychologists, teachers, and administrators a guide to issues that affect children who have chronic medical disorders. McCabe is also the coeditor of two additional titles in the Corwin Press “current topics” series: Pediatric Disorders (2010) and Psychiatric Disorders (2010).

Jar Jar Binks Must Die . . . and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies

By Daniel M. Kimmel ’77

Fantastic Books, 2011

Film critic Kimmel presents a collection of essays on what he describes as “the ‘forbidden genre’ of science fiction movies, the ones serious critics aren’t supposed to take seriously.” His exploration includes sci-fi classics from Metropolis to E.T. to Avatar.

Let Me Stop You Right There and 28 Other Lines Every CEO, Manager, and Supervisor Should Know

By Pamela D. Straker ’73

Morgan James Publishing, 2011

Straker, a psychologist and consultant to businesses and nonprofits, offers advice for effective communication with “office archetypes: ‘by-any-means-necessary’ overachievers, gossips, office invaders, negativity-mongering complainers, and many more.”

Transfusion Therapy: Clinical Principles and Practice (Third Edition)

Edited by Paul D. Mintz ’70, ’74M (MD)

AABB Press, 2011

Occupying a “niche between the handbook and weightier compendia,” the guide edited by Mintz provides an overview of transfusion therapy. Mintz is a professor of pathology and medicine at the University of Virginia’s medical school.

The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships that Make Government Work (Second Edition)

Edited by Terry Newell ’66, Grant Reeher, and Peter Ronayne

CQ Press, 2011

Writer and consultant Newell and his coauthors explore what’s needed to foster “solid relationships and trust among those within and outside government organizations”—the element they argue is most lacking in efforts to improve government.

Ready to Read: A Multisensory Approach to Language-Based Comprehension Instruction

By Mary Lupiani Farrell ’66, ’72W (Mas) and Francie M. Matthews

Paul H. Brookes, 2010

Farrell, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University specializing in dyslexia and other learning disabilities, and coauthor Matthews present guidelines to help educators develop a multisensory approach to teaching reading comprehension—one that can be tailored to the learning styles of students.

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

By Alan I. Abramowitz ’69

Yale University Press, 2011

Abramowitz, the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, contends that polarization in contemporary American politics stems not from quarreling among out-of-touch elected officials, but from the attempts of those officials to respond to the most engaged portions of the citizenry.

Blood

By Lewis G. Lefer ’65

Sweet Dreams Publishing, 2011

Lefer, a pathologist in Springfield, Mass., presents a medical thriller rich with satiric depictions of hospital politics. The cast includes a gynecologist, a medical ethicist, and the hospital’s “stingy” vice president.

Endangered Phrases: Intriguing Idioms Dangerously Close to Extinction

By Steven D. Price ’62

Skyhorse Publishing, 2011

Price explores the origins of once-common phrases and expressions such as “quiz kid,” “animal, vegetable, or mineral,” and “poor as Job’s turkey.” Price is also the author of The World’s Funniest Lawyer Jokes: A Caseload of Jurisprudential Jests (Skyhorse, 2011).

Sing to Wake the Dead

By Christopher M. Wicks ’95E

Zebra Prints, 2010

Wicks, an organist, composer, and poet in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, presents a collection of formalist poems—sonnets, villanelles, rondels, and a pantoum—on love, both secular and sacred.

Recordings

Song Nouveau

By the TangleTown Trio

LarkFrost Publishing, 2011

The TangleTown Trio, featuring violinist Jo Nardolillo ’08E (DMA), performs premiere recordings of works by composers Mark Olivieri and Sarah Mattox.

Book of Hours/Helian

By Jeremy Gill ’96E

Albany Records, 2011

Composer Gill presents his Book of Hours and Helian, both of which concern time cycles. Book of Hours features pianist Peter Orth, and Helian features baritone Jonathan Hays.

Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Songs of the Earth)

By Timothy Sparks ’91E (MM)

Centaur Records, 2011

Sparks, a tenor and a lecturer in voice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joins mezzo-soprano Ellen Williams and the Duraleigh Chamber Players in a performance of the Arnold Schönberg Chamber Orchestra transcription of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

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.

Thinking about Privacy

Clark University philosophy professor Judith Wagner DeCew ’70 explores the history and current state of privacy protection.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I was a math major at Rochester. But I took symbolic logic with Professor Rolf Eberle during the second semester of my sophomore year and fell in love with logic. From then on, I took all the philosophy courses I could.

In the 1980s, I was on a fellowship at Harvard Law School preparing to teach a philosophy of law course. I was taking constitutional law with a brilliant professor whom I respect as a teacher and scholar. But while we were studying the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, he said something like “This case has nothing to do with privacy.” A student asked him why, and he responded that nurses and doctors would be in the room, and so it would not be private. I was stunned. The presence of others could only describe a fact, and couldn’t possibly address whether or not there was a moral value of privacy associated with choices one might want to make about one’s body without governmental intrusion.

Privacy protection is really a relatively recent development in the American legal system. It’s embedded in the Bill of Rights, in the Fourth Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure. It was first explicitly recognized in 1905, in tort law, as control over information about oneself. It was expanded in 1965 to include protection of one’s ability to make certain kinds of personal decisions.

Everyone needs to be proactive about their own privacy protection. The European Union has explicit and comprehensive privacy regulations that prohibit gathering personal information or using it for purposes other than originally intended without individual consent. The American approach allows entities such as insurance companies and employers ample access to personal information, and we only have a patchwork of privacy guidelines. We do have protective guidelines for much of our medical and economic information, however.

You should never send anything in email or post anything on a social network that you would not be willing to have blasted to the entire world. Once it’s out there, you can’t control it. And the insidious truth is that there are databases with loads of personal information about phone calls we’ve made or received, purchases we’ve made with store discount cards or charge cards, and anyone savvy enough can get the information, and aggregate and publicize only those bits they choose, giving them the ability to paint a very unflattering portrait of any one of us.

I have to admit that my most enduring memory of Rochester is my blind date during the spring of my first year with Alan (Lanny) DeCew ’68, to whom I’ve been married for 42 years. We were set up by my roommate and the captain of the football team. I also remember gathering with friends at Todd Union to check our mailboxes (yes, for snail mail!) and play bridge. And the protests against the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia. We were all politically aware and active in our education and many extracurricular activities. It was a great time in my life.

Judith Wagner DeCew ’70

Worcester, Mass.

Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Clark University

Author, In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology (Cornell, 1997); coeditor of The Right to Privacy (University of Massachusetts, forthcoming 2011).

PHOTO OPPORTUNITY

Making a Scene

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

INTERNATIONAL INSIGHT: Filmmakers from Nagaland, India—Sophy Lasuh (left), Liyo Kikon, and Kele Yhoshu (right)—take photos during a tour of Wilson Commons this summer. The three, along with two of their colleagues, visited Rochester as part of a cultural exchange hosted by Heather Layton, an artist and senior lecturer of art at the University, along with her husband, Brian Bailey, a professor of adolescent education at Nazareth College of Rochester.