Rochester Review

March–April 2012, Volume 74, No. 4

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Emily Boynton, Sharon Dickman, Adam Fenster, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Charla Stevens Kucko, Melissa Greco Lopes, Dennis O’Donnell, Leslie Orr, Tom Rickey, Scott Sabocheck, Helene Snihur, and Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

22 Wallis Hall

University of Rochester

Box 270044, Rochester, NY 14627-0044

(585) 275-4121

Fax: (585) 275-0359

E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu

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

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

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2012 University of Rochester

Credits

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

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Contents

The Interfaith Chapel

Letters

Birthday Bow

Learning Laboratory

Movable Feats

A Different Kind of Break

New Residence Hall, Courtyard Honor Presidents O’Brien and Jackson

Kodak’s New Moment

Discovery

In Brief

The Plight of Public Pension Programs

Matching Hole for Hole

Winter Sports: A Brief Roundup

Senior Recognized with Squash’s ‘Heisman’

The Professor’s Tale

The Roles of Russell Peck

Epitomizing ‘Everything That’s Good in Higher Education’

The Mind’s Eye

Literary Lights

Rochester Poet’s Work Named Among Nation’s Best

Plutzik Memories

Cross-Cultural Classical

In the News

Confronting Our Differences—Collaboratively

Dill on The Help

Baffled Again

That’s Sweet!

John Maloy: ‘A Prince Among Men’

Robert Ader: Medical Pioneer

Books & Recordings

Pain Reliever

Taco Time!

The Interfaith Chapel

By Joel Seligman

The University of Rochester began as a Baptist institution that until 1927 included compulsory chapel as part of its curriculum. Its first three presidents were clergymen. Their leadership, like the leadership of other initially Baptist institutions, including the University of Chicago, deserves our praise. They built an outstanding University here whose focus was on extraordinary education.

But in 1970, thanks in significant part to the generosity of then Trustee Gilbert J. C. McCurdy and his wife, Virginia, the University opened the Interfaith Chapel, with the inspiring words above the Chapel door, “Mine house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” The Chapel was intended to be home to a multifaith community, a place of worship for all, regardless of denomination, tradition, or culture.

The Interfaith Chapel has become more than that to our University.

During the last few years many of the University’s most solemn occasions have occurred at the Chapel. It was here on September 11, 2011, that I joined others in the University community for two memorial services to honor the nation’s and our University’s loss 10 years earlier. There are some moments in every life that are indelibly etched in memory. For me one such moment was the conclusion of the morning ceremony when approximately 600 firefighters, security officers, emergency medical personnel, and military joined those of us in the University community to vow never to forget the horrific events of a decade earlier. After the ceremony, we formed a giant semicircle outside the Chapel. Of all the locations in Rochester for such a ceremony, it was striking that the firefighters who organized this event chose the Interfaith Chapel. This is not only a house of worship for all denominations but a gathering place for all people. The architecture of the Chapel itself brought solace. On that sad day, the beauty of the building, its gracious lines, and its dignified decor contributed to this occasion where we memorialized the loss of innocent lives.

The Chapel also is where many of our happiest occasions occur. On average, 45 weddings take place annually in the Interfaith Chapel; this past year the Simon School of Business held its convocation here. Other joyous events include commencement diploma ceremonies, baby and bridal showers, and the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s Dr. Robert L. and Lillian H. Brent White Coat Ceremony.

Our University chaplains, who represent various Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Protestant faith traditions, have focused on making the Chapel a sanctuary. I have met Muslim students here; helped celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; and participated in Quaker, Catholic, and Protestant memorial services. The current interim director is a Latter-day Saint (Mormon). A number of other faiths and faith groups meet at the Chapel. In the calming beauty of the Chapel and its meeting rooms, all are safe, all are welcome.

Nor is the Interfaith Chapel only for persons of faith. When the late Sudanese basketball player and activist Manute Bol urged us to join efforts to build schools in Sudan, he chose the Chapel for the event. University meetings are frequently held here, including University leadership classes, safety training, musical programs, Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs, NROTC award ceremonies, the Urban Fellows Program, Gandhi Institute meetings, Native American Heritage month, and various events for Meliora Weekend. Even the newly formed University chapter of the Secular Student Alliance has found a home at the Chapel.

Just as the University itself has evolved from a sectarian institution into a secular one that welcomes persons of all or no religious faith, the covenant statement that articulates the mission of the Interfaith Chapel itself today is being reviewed. Does it fairly reflect our commitment to be fully inclusive while at the same time recognizing that the Chapel will continue to provide a place for services of all denominations and a sanctuary for all in our University community?

These are fair questions, given our increasingly diverse students, faculty, and staff. But what will never change is the quiet architectural statement that the Interfaith Chapel makes as one of the most iconic buildings on our campus. It is fitting that the Chapel helps frame our Eastman Quadrangle, facing Rush Rhees Library. We are above all else an academic institution, but one where all faiths, all people, are welcome.

Letters

Romancing Rochester

I enjoyed reading “Rochester Romance” (January-February 2012) and every other article in the latest Rochester Review, and I wonder if any other couple began their relationship with a bet. When I was finishing my MS in physiology at the medical school, I shared a lab with Thad Szymanski who was doing a research project for [physiology professor] John Murlin and taking courses in the evening on the River Campus. One day we were discussing a problem he had encountered and disagreed about a chemical test. He bet me a dinner. I was right, and our first date was at the best Italian restaurant in Rochester.

We were married two years later in Denver.

Betty Beall Szymanski ’47M (MS)

Bradenton, Fla.

The January-February issue’s In Memoriam section included the name of my late husband, Charles H. Hoke ’45. The interment ceremonies in Arlington Cemetery were inspiring as well as emotional events that appropriately honored his life of service.

Three other subjects in the issue twanged my memory strings.

First, “Dating NROTC” (Letters) corrected by Nelson Simonson ’47, may have still other corrections. Charles Hoke was sent to Columbia University where he and many others ran up and down John Jay Hall (12 stories and no elevators) in 1944, and he received a certificate which certifies that Apprentice Seaman Charles H. Hoke, U.S.N.R., was a member of the November class of the U.S. Navy College Training Program of the College of Arts and Sciences. Dated Oct. 24, 1944, it is signed by President Alan Valentine and Lt. CDR and Commanding Officer William Neill, U.S.N.R.

The last two twanged strings are combined in my “Meliora Moment.” Outside the side entrance of Cutler Union in sight of the Anderson Statue was the moment in December 1944 that I was given my apprentice seaman’s Psi U pin and received a proposal I had no intention of turning down. It was absolutely the wisest decision I ever made, and gave me a life overflowing with rich blessings. We were married May 19, 1945, on his 23rd birthday, and he never forgot an anniversary in 66 years!

Among five children, thirteen grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren are two further “proofs” of the efficacy of “Meliora Moments”—a son, Charles H. Hoke Jr. ’72M (MD), and a grandson, Jerome Hoke ’13.

Elizabeth Conklin Hoke ’45

Bethesda, Md.

Spreading the Dandelion Fame

Thank you for bringing the U of R’s latest events as well as the accomplishments of both alumni and current students into my living room in Korea. Although I was unable to attend my 50th class reunion in 2010, my college experience there has never been far from my thoughts, thanks to old friends and to Rochester Review, faithfully mailed to me here in Asia.

As always I enjoy reading it, and this time was no exception. I found several items that brought back memories which I’d like to mention.

1. Pictures and articles about the famous YellowJackets, the group organized by [music professor] Ward Woodbury ’54E (PhD) in 1956, the very year I entered the U of R. Those were the musical men with whom I shared making music in the Chapel Choir and the Women’s Glee Club.

2. Photo and report of a current student who is an Edmund A. Hajim Scholar and is studying in Robert B. Goergen Hall. These two men’s names are very familiar to me—in those olden days they were just two college guys with whom I studied and played!

3. Reference to Arthur May, exceptional and unforgettable historian, well-known in many circles—my teacher in my freshman year whose profound knowledge of history inspired us, his youngest U of R students. Just listening to Dr. May and his compelling way of talking, we all learned that history is important. How special that the University brings its beginning students into such close contact with distinguished scholars whom we never can forget. Dr. May, Dr. Vera Micheles Dean in the then new non-Western civilizations area, Dr. J. Edward Hoffmeister in geology, and others of their caliber made our Rochester education a lifelong gift. (And here I am in one of those “non-Western civilizations,” Korea, for the past 45 years.)

Kudos to us all for being a part of the University of Rochester! Long may she live, through our lives and manifold contributions to the world.

Greetings to all my sister and brother Rochesterians of yellow dandelion fame!

Sunny Reid Strawn ’60

Seoul, Korea

Got Any Advice?

With commencement season upon us we’re looking for advice from Rochester alumni for the Class of 2012.

We hope to gather samples of accumulated alumni wisdom for a story in the May–June issue of Rochester Review.

So here’s your chance to play commencement speaker: What’s your secret to a successful, happy life? What do you know now that you wish you knew as you were graduating? We’re looking for a wide range of advice—from careers to family life to community to achieving your goals.

Rochester Review,
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.

EASTMAN SCHOOL

Birthday Bow

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

FAREWELL FINALE: On the eve of his 90th birthday, noted violinist and strings teacher Zvi Zeitlin presented his final recital as a full-time member of the Eastman faculty. Billing the performance as his “Farewell Faculty Recital,” Zeitlin—with Eastman pianist Barry Snyder and a student quartet—presented a February program of Schubert in Kilbourn Hall. A musical prodigy who was an 11-year-old scholarship student at the Juilliard School, Zeitlin joined Eastman’s faculty in 1967, earning accolades as a performer and teacher. During his eight decades as a concert violinist, he performed with most of the great orchestras of the world under such conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Christoph von Dohnanyi, James Levine, and Pierre Boulez. For more photos, visit www.rochester.edu/news/photos/zeitlin. Photograph by Kate Melton for Rochester Review

STUDENT SPACES

Learning Laboratory

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

CHEMICAL SPACE: A new teaching laboratory in Hutchison Hall is providing chemistry students with a state-of-the-art space designed to foster collaboration among small groups so they can better discuss, plan, carry out, and analyze experiments. Opened last fall, the 2,400-square-foot lab in Hutchison Hall features energy-efficient fume hoods that allow each student to work within an individual hood. The new lab also features multimedia technology as well as a workspace that can be configured easily depending on the course. For more photos and a 360-degree view of the new lab, visit www.rochester.edu/news/photos/chemistry-lab. Photograph by Adam Fenster

UNIVERSITY COLLECTIONS

Movable Feats

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

PAPER CACHET: A pop-up illustration of the Pinta and the Santa Maria from Voitech Kubasta’s 1961 How Columbus Discovered America, or Christoph Columbus Genuensis is one of more than 50 examples of pop-up books, interactive mechanisms, and other feats of paper engineering on display at Rush Rhees Library through Aug. 17. Drawn from the collections of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, the works in the exhibition Springing to Life: Movable Books and Mechanical Devices span nearly 500 years of movable book technology. For more photos and a video, visit www.rochester.edu/news/photos/popup-books. Photograph by Adam Fenster

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

A Different Kind of Break

Student groups organize trips to build homes and fight poverty as part of alternative spring break.

By Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5)

TAKING A BREAK: Leah Gregorio ’12 (left) and Jessica Nielsen ’14 are helping organize alternative spring break trips, during which students work on community and service projects at sites around the country. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Since she was 14 years old, Jessica Nielsen ’14 has been taking vacation time to build houses. Every summer she would travel from her hometown of Durham, Conn., to Booneville, Ky., located in one of the poorest counties in the country, to volunteer two weeks of her time and labor to help families in need of a new home.

“It’s something that becomes part of you as you do it. I can’t really imagine life without doing it,” says the English and anthropology double major.

When she arrived at Rochester, Nielsen was happy to find a similar opportunity for community service with the student chapter of Habitat for Humanity and the group’s alternative spring break trip. During the trip, students work together with a family who agrees to contribute 400 “sweat equity” hours toward building a new home. The project includes a small, interest-free mortgage the family will have 20 years to repay.

This year, Nielsen is leading the Habitat trip to Greensboro, N.C., and is looking forward to connecting with a new community and the homeowners she will help.

“You’re physically building a house for someone, and you are putting your time, effort, sweat into it. It’s definitely rewarding, much more rewarding than just writing a check,” she says, “You get total satisfaction out of knowing, ‘Oh, their bedroom? I built that bedroom.’”

As Rochester undergraduates take a week off classes in mid-March for the academic calendar’s annual spring break, several students like Nielsen will be heading to less conventional destinations. Designed as an opportunity for travel and service, alternative spring break trips have been organized by University student groups for nearly two decades. In addition to traveling to sites across the country, several students plan to undertake service programs in Rochester, in conjunction with the University’s M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence and the Rochester Center for Community Leadership. For many, the service trips are a welcome change from the stereotypical vacation- oriented spring break experience.

“The service trips in which our students participate are beneficial in at least two fundamental ways: they broaden the perspectives of our students, and they strengthen communities by building social capital,” says Glenn Cerosaletti, director of the Rochester Center for Community Leadership, which helps groups conceive and implement their service projects.

Since the trips are planned and carried out by students they provide “a transformative leadership experience,” he says. “This is about a reciprocal partnership in which students and community members get to know each other and learn from one another.” This spring, in addition to the Habitat trip to North Carolina, student groups will travel to Baltimore and Boston.

For the past 12 years, the Catholic Newman Community has traveled to Baltimore to tutor and mentor children at Holy Angels Catholic School and serve meals at the Corpus Christi food shelter. The project is the longest-running such effort on campus.

“Our goal is just to expose our students to urban poverty,” says Leah Gregorio ’12, one of the leaders of this year’s trip who has participated since her sophomore year. “Each night we have a reflection time and those always blossom into discussions of social justice and urban poverty.”

Though the students live simply and stay at a parish church, they have plenty of time to see Baltimore, and the last day is reserved for a cultural trip to Washington, D.C. Gregorio, a political science major from Wethersfield, Conn., and her fellow leaders aim to continue similar service projects in Rochester when they return, “just so our volunteers can see that these problems aren’t unique to the city of Baltimore, that they exist in our communities here at school and communities back at home.”

Newman, Habitat, Roteract, Circle K, and other service-oriented organizations can receive logistical and financial support for their projects from the Community Service Network, a student-run umbrella organization for service groups. The network partnered with Alpha Phi Omega, a coed community service fraternity, for a trip to Boston.

“Our goal is to introduce students who are participating in the trip to different types of community service,” says Mallory Laboulaye ’12 (T5), president of the network and Alpha Phi Omega.

“This is an opportunity for [students] to dedicate a whole week of service to people they don’t know and just to see that they’re not isolated individuals in society,” says Laboulaye, a neuroscience major from Horseheads, N.Y.

Whether groups venture to a different country or volunteer in Rochester, those who go on alternative spring break say the experiences prove to be fun and rewarding.

“These are students who are giving up their time, a whole week where they could be going on vacation, going home, relaxing, and they’re giving up their time to help the environment, or people, and I think it just says a lot about the Rochester students,” says Gregorio. “It’s a lot of kids who spend their spring break—when many other people are going to Cancun or doing things like that—just really being selfless.”

Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5) is a freelance writer and Take Five Scholar majoring in philosophy and religion.

UNIVERSITY HISTORY

New Residence Hall, Courtyard Honor Presidents O’Brien and Jackson

(Illustration: Steve Boerner)

The names of two recent Rochester presidents will become part of the River Campus landscape later this year.

A new 150-student building, scheduled to open this fall, will be named in honor of Dennis O’Brien, who served as Rochester’s eighth president from 1984 to 1994. A newly redesigned courtyard will be named in recognition of Thomas Jackson, who served as Rochester’s ninth president from 1994 to 2005. Jackson Court is adjacent to the new O’Brien Hall.

“It is fitting that our newest residence hall and its beautiful outdoor gathering space will honor Dennis O’Brien and Thomas Jackson,” says President Joel Seligman. “Their commitment to and investment in undergraduate education continues to make Rochester a leader in recognizing that student living and learning are integral to a successful college experience.”

O’Brien Hall is situated at the intersection of Wilson Boulevard and Intercampus Drive and overlooks the Genesee River. Designed to complement the existing Anderson, Sage, and Wilder halls—all named for important figures in the University’s history—the new building is part of an effort to establish a quad-like courtyard, the new Jackson Court, to help unify the area and draw students toward a natural gathering place.

The construction of O’Brien Hall is targeted to meet LEED gold certification standards—a first for the River Campus—to reduce negative environmental impacts and improve energy performance, among many goals. As the first residence hall built on the River Campus in 42 years, the interior design of O’Brien Hall will differ dramatically from other River Campus living spaces. Upper floors will offer more study rooms and lounges while common areas on the first floor will be flexible for meetings, event planning, and music and dance rehearsals, among other activities. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors will live in O’Brien Hall with a combination of singles, doubles, and adjoining doubles. The established buildings surrounding Jackson Court have been named for Martin Anderson, the University’s first president (1853–88); John Wilder, the first chairman of the Board of Trustees (1850–58); and William Sage, the first secretary and treasurer of the Board of Trustees (1850–90).

A naming ceremony for the new building and courtyard will be held in May.

—Sharon Dickman

BRIEFING BOOK

Kodak’s New Moment

What does the future hold for Kodak? We ask campus experts.

Interviews by Husna Haq

OPTIMISTIC VIEW: “I am optimistic that Kodak will be able to restructure and redefine itself,” says Simon School Dean Mark Zupan. “But it will take considerable hard work and ingenuity.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The January announcement that Eastman Kodak Co. had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection caught few economic, financial, and community observers by surprise. The Rochester-based film and imaging pioneer had struggled to find its footing in the shifting digital sands of the Internet age.

But the news marked a rare moment in commercial history where everyone from the most fumbling amateur shutterbug to the most sophisticated Wall Street whiz kid stopped to reflect on the influence of the 120-plus-year-old company.

We asked a few University experts to share their thoughts.

‘A Valuable Opportunity’

The recession hastened Kodak’s decision to declare Chapter 11, but it wasn’t the dominant cause. The dominant reason was growing competition from copycats like Fuji as well as changes in film technology. As the saying goes, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Any successful and innovative company ultimately invites competition from imitators. For Kodak, these competitors were the likes of Fuji, which is a successful company today because it was able to move away from film—which now accounts for only 10 percent of its revenue stream—and make money in new fields like plasma screens. Later challenges came from changes in film technology, of which Kodak was itself an inventor. For example, a Kodak scientist invented the digital camera in 1976. Kodak was too slow, however, to make the shift to the new technology and clung too much to the past instead of being willing to cannibalize itself along the way. As a result, other companies did the cannibalization for it.

Declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection gives Kodak a valuable opportunity to reset the demands on its cash flow and to prioritize which creditors should be repaid and to what extent. According to a recent study out of Stanford, 76 percent of companies successfully emerge from Chapter 11, typically by becoming smaller and more focused. Witness how much success GM has had coming out of its bankruptcy over the last three years.

I am optimistic that Kodak will be able to restructure and redefine itself. There are a lot of talented folks there who have the capacity to turn its assets into a real winner, but it will take considerable hard work and ingenuity.

Kodak will leave a lasting imprint on Rochester. The influence it has had on the economy of Rochester and the educational system it has nurtured in this region will be a lasting testament to its success. I would argue that the impact of alumni from all of the universities George Eastman and Kodak supported over the years will be Kodak’s greatest legacy.

—Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School of Business

‘Like the Loss of a Friend’

What happened at Kodak is the consequence of a disruptive technological innovation. In film, you had a product that was profitable by any business standard, but by the late 1970s when digital emerged, Kodak was looking at a substitute in electronic cameras that represented less than 10 percent of the profit that you could get from film. At that point, Kodak’s posture was to determine how it could position itself to enter that market but not stimulate or accelerate the profit-damaging transformation from film to digital. It wasn’t that they weren’t aware of the change, it wasn’t that they didn’t have the technology—in fact, they had the lion’s share of intellectual property at that time—and it wasn’t a question of missing the market or not having R&D capabilities. It was more a question of market timing and what would produce the best results for the shareholders. Of course, what happened was that a very profitable product stream in traditional photography was made obsolete by digital.

Kodak recognized the technological transformation and began to look at ways to diversify its business. It entered the copier business, the health sciences market, and pharmaceuticals. Kodak saw the transition coming, invested considerable sums of money in diversifying and developing new businesses, then as its strategy evolved, Kodak disposed of those businesses.

That turmoil is unsettling for a company. It is financially unsettling and leads to a lot of organizational turmoil. Looking backward, I think in some cases Kodak might have moved faster in restructuring. But that’s looking in the rearview mirror. It’s hard to say they made a mistake. I don’t know of another company that has undergone a transition as traumatic. It’s a company based on organic chemistry, that has a terrific brand, and here comes electronic imaging—low profitability, doesn’t use organic chemistry or Kodak’s manufacturing capability, and it’s presented with a direct substitute for its primary product. It was a difficult time for Kodak. I’m not willing to say had they jumped into digital that they’d be in much better shape than they are today.

Kodak’s strategy today appears to be honing in on the printing business, an extremely competitive market. Another opportunity for it is in commercial print-on-demand, an emerging disruptive innovation in printing based on the just-in-time concept.

Kodak is and has been an extraordinarily good company. It has been able to acquire through its reputation a population of fine people. The sense I get is a broad feeling of sadness about this. It strikes me that many Kodak alumni and active employees are going through stages of mourning. It was like the loss of a friend more than of a cold, distant corporation.

—Larry Matteson, executive professor of business administration at the Simon School and a former Kodak executive

‘Regional Economy Has Been Able to Grow’

Kodak had a run on film that lasted 90 years. When you have a product that’s so successful for so long, you have a classic example of creative destruction. How do you destroy something that’s been your lifeblood and pick up something (like digital technology) that destroys your business? The gross margin of film is enormously high compared to digital. If I were a manager at Kodak in the 1980s and we had a gross margin that high, why would I even think about doing digital? You’ve got to have a certain amount of vision to be able to look out on the horizon and realize what’s coming.

We were in denial in this community for a good 10 years about Kodak. Community leaders didn’t get on board until 20 years later, they didn’t say we have to restructure our economy or consider doing business in a different way. People just thought, “Don’t worry, Kodak’s going to come back.” If you’re in a slide for 20 years, with decreasing employment every year, somebody should have looked at this and thought about how we’re going to restructure our economy.

Kodak’s decision to file Chapter 11 had a relatively minor effect on the regional economy because most of the jobs were already gone. The impact was psychological rather than real.

Kodak has given Rochester tremendous potential in attracting a workforce with good education and skills and providing that workforce with good benefits. Its retirement program was quite generous, enough that people could start new businesses if they chose. And its workforce was well educated. Rochester didn’t have the same problem that, say, Buffalo or Akron or another rust belt city had, where many people who were laid off had only a high school education.

Fortunately, our regional economy has been able to grow during Kodak’s downsizing. Rochester created 12,000 jobs last year. We have some big successes like Paychex as well as in telecom, optics, and photonics. And we are incredibly diverse in terms of small businesses—we have many companies under 100 people. We’re never going to see a Kodak-size company here again. We’re more into hitting singles and doubles. We’re not trying to hit home runs. That’s good because no matter what industry is up or down, it’s not going to ruin the entire economy.

It takes about 20 years to transition an economy; it takes a generation of people to go through the system. You have to have a clear vision of where you’re going, foster entrepreneurship and diversity, and build a community that celebrates the arts. We’re five to seven years into that 20-year transition.

—Duncan Moore, vice provost for entrepreneurship and the Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor of Optical Engineering

Husna Haq is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

Discovery

(Photo: Michael Osadciw)

Scientists Discover ‘Saturn on Steroids’

An unusual eclipse in a constellation roughly 420 light years away is offering the first glimpse of a planetary ring system outside the solar system. Led by Eric Mamajek, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, an international team discovered the extrasolar planetary system while tracking patterns of light in the Centaurus constellation, part of a massive star formation between 380 to 470 light years from the sun. Using data from SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS), the researchers noticed that the light pattern from one star in the cluster showed dramatic changes over a 54-day period in early 2007. Rochester graduate student Mark Pecaut and Mamajek identified the pattern as consistent with a protoplanetary disk—similar to that of Saturn—passing in front of the star, dimming its light accordingly. “After we ruled out the eclipse being due to a spherical star or a circumstellar disk passing in front of the star, I realized that the only plausible explanation was some sort of dust ring system orbiting a smaller companion—basically a ‘Saturn on steroids,’ ” says Mamajek.

—Peter Iglinski

Cupid’s Arrow Turns Digital

Online dating has not only shed its stigma, it has surpassed all forms of matchmaking in the United States other than meeting through friends, according to a new analysis of research on the burgeoning relationship industry. While the digital revolution in romance is a boon to lonely-hearters, Rochester and other psychological scientists who prepared the report say that the industry’s claims of offering a “science-based” approach with sophisticated algorithm-based matching have not been substantiated by independent research. Such claims “should be given little credence,” they conclude in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. “Online dating is definitely a new and much needed twist on relationships,” says Harry Reis, one of the five authors of the study and professor of psychology. But he cautions that comparing dozens and sometimes hundreds of possible dates may encourage a “shopping” mentality in which people become judgmental and picky, focusing exclusively on narrow sets of criteria like attractiveness or interests.

—Susan Hagen

Of Blood, Bone, and Leukemia

Rochester researchers have discovered new links between cells that result in leukemia and cells that help form bones, offering a fresh perspective on how the blood cancer progresses and raising the possibility that therapies for bone disorders could help in the treatment of leukemia. Led by graduate student Benjamin Frisch in the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center laboratory of author Laura Calvi, associate professor of medicine, the study found that leukemia disrupts normal blood production in counterintuitive ways. The work, published in the journal Blood, suggests that leukemia cells, which are known to disrupt normal blood production, also disrupt the function of bone cells.

—Leslie Orr

Starve a Virus, Feed a Cure?

A new finding indicates that a protective protein in some of our immune cells may be an important key to fighting HIV and may provide important clues to understanding how other viruses elude our body’s defenses. Publishing online in Nature Immunology, the international team including Medical Center scientists report that the protein seems to block the ability of HIV to replicate by starving the virus of the molecular building blocks that it needs to replicate. Baek Kim, professor of microbiology and immunology and one of three corresponding authors of the paper, says the findings may explain why certain anti–HIV drugs used today are more effective under some circumstances than others. Researchers hope the work will help lead to a way to make anti–HIV drugs more effective, as well as further research into herpes viruses and other pathogens.

—Tom Rickey

A Pill for Heat Stroke?

In a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, Medical Center scientists outline what they believe is one of the first drugs to combat heat stroke. An experimental therapy called AICAR—once dubbed the “couch potato pill” for its ability to mimic the effects of exercise in sedentary mice—protected animals that were genetically predisposed to heat stroke from the potentially life-threatening condition. Robert Dirksen, the study’s author and professor of pharmacology and physiology, says the finding is an important first step toward developing a drug therapy that may be part of the standard treatment for heat stroke in the future. According to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the number of heat-related injuries in the United States more than doubled from 1997 to 2006. In that 10-year period, an estimated 55,000 people were treated for the condition in emergency rooms across the country.

—Emily Boynton

In Brief

LIBRARY LEADER: Toronto’s Mary Ann Mavrinac is the new Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries. (Photo: University of Toronto)

University Joins International Network

Rochester is joining a select group of universities around the world as part of a consortium designed to “stretch international ambitions.” The Worldwide Universities Network, established in 2000 with a mission to accelerate the creation of knowledge and develop leaders who will be prepared to address the significant challenges and opportunities in a rapidly changing world, now has 18 members, including Rochester. “Joining WUN signifies our conviction that we must be strongly coupled to the best researchers everywhere in the world,” says Peter Lennie, senior vice president and the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. Other U.S. institutions in the network are the University of Washington, Penn State University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. International universities include the University of Alberta; the University of Auckland; the University of Bergen; the University of Bristol; the University of Cape Town; Chinese University of Hong Kong; the University of Leeds; Nanjing University; the University of Sheffield; the University of Southampton; the University of Sydney; the University of Western Australia; the University of York; and Zhejiang University.

—Sharon Dickman

Mary Ann Mavrinac Named Dean of River Campus Libraries

The River Campus Libraries have a new dean. University of Toronto library leader Mary Ann Mavrinac has been named vice provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries and will begin her new role June 1. At Toronto, Mavrinac spearheaded the planning and oversaw the 2006 completion of a state-of-the-art facility that was recognized with an innovation achievement award from the Canadian Association of College and University Libraries. She also supervises support for the digital humanities, open access, and scholarly communications at Toronto. Her team provides academic support for the campus Blackboard learning management system, and is the go-to institution for video, podcasting, and emerging technologies. At Rochester, Mavrinac will assume leadership of a library system with a reputation for innovation and user-centered approaches, earning national and international recognition for an anthropological approach to the creation of services and physical spaces and for developing new online tools for academics. Mavrinac succeeds Susan Gibbons, who was named to lead the Yale University Library.

—Susan Hagen

New Center Focuses on Respiratory Pathogens

A new national center established by the National Institutes of Health to protect people against bacteria and viruses that take aim at the respiratory system has been established at the Medical Center. Part of a potential $35 million to $50 million effort funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, the new center puts University scientists “on call” in the realm of respiratory infections. In times of national need, center personnel are available at the request of federal officials to take on urgent projects to inform public health needs. Established with an initial award of $4.7 million, the Respiratory Pathogens Research Center will be directed by David Topham, an influenza researcher who also directs the University’s new Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation, an emerging partnership between the University and IBM to establish an array of IBM supercomputers on campus with the capacity to analyze huge amounts of information quickly.

—Tom Rickey

Simon School Ranked Among Top 25 in Business

The Simon School of Business ranks 22nd among the top 25 business schools in the United States, according to an annual ranking of the world’s best business schools by the Financial Times of London. In the Jan. 30 issue, Simon also places 49th among the top 100 business schools in the world. In the newspaper’s specialty rankings, Simon was third in the world for finance and fourth in the world for economics. Simon is also ranked seventh in the world for accounting. Simon has been ranked among the top 25 schools in the United States for 11 of the 14 times that the newspaper has conducted the survey.

—Charla Stevens Kucko

MLK ADDRESS: Scholar Michael Eric Dyson told a campus audience that King saw promise in America. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

King’s Legacy Is Alive and Vital: Michael Eric Dyson

The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is alive and vital today, noted political analyst and author Michael Eric Dyson told a Strong Auditorium audience during a January visit to deliver the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address. In a talk that drew from King’s life, the history of the civil rights movement, the election of President Barack Obama, as well as from hip-hop artists such as Kanye West, Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, said that while King created opportunities for African Americans, he would not have been satisfied with the nation’s continuing difficulty in dealing with race relations, poverty, inequity, and international conflict. He urged young people, in particular, to remember that King saw promise in America. “Martin Luther King didn’t just change black people, he changed America. He made white people more human, he made white civilization more tolerable. And he brought the humanity of black people to bear. But he refused to give up on white brothers and sisters and said there is something dignified and beautiful in the consciences of America when we can appeal to those consciences to transform America.”

—Melissa Greco Lopes

Eastman Circle: 2,000 and Counting

The University’s annual giving leadership society started 2012 with more than 2,000 members, the second time in five years that the George Eastman Circle has surpassed its goals. Ending 2011 with 2,021 members, the society was established in 2006 with an initial goal of 250 charter members. After 1,087 people signed up during the charter phase, the membership goal was increased to 2,000 by December 31, 2011. Jim Thompson, senior vice president for Advancement, notes that the giving society has been the catalyst for greater involvement and engagement with University supporters. The group’s accomplishments include record-breaking growth of the University’s Annual Fund. “The rapid growth of the George Eastman Circle has put us on par with some of our most successful peer institutions with well-established and more mature programs,” says Nathan Moser ’75, University trustee and chair of the Eastman Circle. “Our membership now extends to 42 states and 11 countries.” Members in the society pledge to make unrestricted annual contributions ranging from $1,500 to more than $50,000 for five years. All gifts made through the Eastman Circle count toward the The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester. For more about the campaign, visit http://campaign.rochester.edu.

Q & A

The Plight of Public Pension Programs

Do state and local governments have a handle on their future obligations? A Simon School expert is not at all confident.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

PENSION PLANNING: An accurate account of public pensions is important, Novy-Marx says: “Not so that public workers can be compensated less, but so that we can appropriately value what the cost of a worker is, what the costs of these plans are, and plan for them going forward.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Robert Novy-Marx has become something of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to understanding the potential for a budgetary explosion caused by state and local public employee pension programs. Novy-Marx, assistant professor of finance at the Simon School, and his colleague, Joshua Rauh of Northwestern, have been widely called upon to help policymakers understand the magnitude of pension obligations faced by states from New Jersey to California. In January, they were awarded the American Finance Association’s Smith-Breeden Prize for their 2010 study, “Public Pension Promises: How Big Are They and What Are They Worth?”

How deep in the hole are state and local pension funds?

Joshua and I have analyzed data from about 190 individual plans—116 state plans and another 70 local plans. And they’re not standardized in any way, but we’ve done a lot of work to try to back out what the liabilities really are year by year, and calculate what the economic magnitude of the liabilities are. Plan managers claim the plans are maybe $1 trillion underfunded. My view is they’re more like $3 trillion underfunded. The states themselves are maybe $2 trillion underfunded, and sub-state government entities are another half a trillion more underfunded than their own claims.

Is that because state and local governments are not funding their pension plans appropriately?

We’re primarily interested in valuing the liabilities. Whether these things should be fully funded is a separate issue. Some other pension plans in other countries are operated as pay-as-you-go plans, which means that they’re not funded, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What I think is a bad thing is having an extra $2 trillion in off-balance sheet unrecognized debt, which the states have.

What does that represent to the average taxpayer?

We estimate that without policy changes, to achieve full funding for public employee pension systems over the next 30 years, each U.S. household would see a tax increase of about $1,398 each year, above and beyond what they would pay because of expected economic growth. In many states, the increases would be higher.

How has it gotten to this point?

The problem with state and local government pension plans is that they’re using an accounting methodology that violates basic tenets of common sense. In particular, one absolutely necessary aspect of an accounting methodology is that if you have two plans that have the exact same liabilities, and Plan A has some assets and Plan B has those assets and some more assets, you should view Plan B as better funded. And it’s better funded by the amount of extra assets it holds. Under the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) methodology, it could easily be that Plan B, which has the exact same assets plus more assets and the exact same liability, could have a worse funding status under the government plan.

How does this square with other budgeting and accounting practices in government?

One thing that state governments do is they use these plans very much to circumvent their own balanced budget requirements. Almost every state—I think all the states with the exception of Vermont—have their own balanced budget requirements; they’re not allowed, like the federal government, to run a deficit. They have to pay for what they spend every year. If you’re going to be compensating your workers, you should be paying them for it. And for deferred compensation, you should be putting that money away. By using GASB, which undervalues these liabilities, they’re able to put away significantly less money than they would if they recognized the full extent, the full magnitude of these liabilities they have. So there’s been a way in which they’ve circumvented their own rules by borrowing and not recognizing that borrowing.

But isn’t a liability always a liability?

State and local governments have their obligations, and they’re told how to fund these obligations—by putting money away—but the GASB methodology makes the obligations look very cheap. And not only does it make them look cheap, but it encourages state and local governments to take on lots of investment risk, because the more investment risk they take on with the assets they hold, the smaller their liabilities get under GASB. They don’t really get smaller—they are what they are—but the recognized magnitude of liabilities under GASB gets smaller the more risk they take on.

What happens when the obligations— “the recognized magnitude of liabilities”—come due?

Government is a pass-through entity: if the governments come up short and have to meet their liabilities to their current workers and retired workers, it just means higher taxes or fewer services. Those are the only two possible ways, apart from defaulting on their municipal bonds—provided they don’t default on their obligations to their workers. Another way to look at this is, there are a few trillion dollars of unrecognized liabilities on the table. And it’s a distribution issue at that point. The $3 trillion deficit people don’t want to deal with has to get eaten by someone—and it’s about apportioning it between different groups. So the possible groups are to the taxpayers, either through higher taxes or less services, the beneficiaries through lower benefits, and holders of other public debt through default.

What do you hope happens with your research?

What I want to do, my primary goal, is to get everyone to recognize what the real costs of these plans are, not so that public workers can be compensated less, but so that we can appropriately value what the cost of a worker is, what the costs of these plans are, so we can plan for them going forward. Otherwise, they’re distortionary. I’m most interested in transparency.

GOLF

Matching Hole for Hole

With a new match play format in the Liberty League championship, the Yellowjackets set their sights on an NCAA berth.

By Scott Sabocheck

MATCH PLAY: “It brings in another factor to the match,” golfer Nick Palladino says of the match play format that will be used by the Liberty League championship in May. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Rochester golfer Nick Palladino ’14 is used to competing on a hole-by-hole basis on the golf course, having participated in local match play tournaments near his native Cleveland home for many years.

The 2011 NCAA tournament qualifier’s experience will come in handy this spring as the Yellowjackets face off with golfers from three other schools for the Liberty League championship. For the first time, the league tournament will use a match play format, in which golfers earn points against their opponents based on their score for each hole rather than how few strokes they take during a full round of 18 holes.

“It’s important that my teammates learn to take it one hole at a time,” says Palladino, a chemistry major. “You can make an eight and your opponent can make a three and you will still only be one down.”

The first round matchups for the league championship feature host Skidmore College against Clarkson University and Rochester against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Saratoga State Park Golf Course in Saratoga Springs on April 28 and 29. The winners of day one will meet on day two for an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament in Howey, Fla., marking the first time that the league champion has been guaranteed to move on to the national team tourney.

“We know it’s in our hands,” says coach Dan Wesley. “We control our own destiny.”

Although match play is typically a foreign situation to many golfers—among major international tournaments, only the biennial Ryder Cup follows a match play format—the Yellowjackets are getting in plenty of practice leading up to the championships. Wesley instituted a Rochester-only match play bracket last season for his seniors to have some fun, and it has carried over to this year’s squad as a way to prepare the team for this spring. Wesley also allows his team to play one-on-one at other times during practice so they can get a feel for the different types of emotion that come with match play.

Under match play, golfers compete one-on-one against a player on another team, and whoever achieves the lower score on a particular hole wins that hole, regardless of the difference in the total stroke count. Golfers earn one point for each hole they win. Ties are considered halved, and the margin remains the same after that hole. The winner is decided when one player is up by any margin after the full 18 holes, or by a sudden death playoff if the score is tied after 18. Also, matches can end short of a full round if one golfer is up by a wide enough margin that the opposing player cannot catch up.

Wesley says that match play comes with momentum swings after winning or losing holes, and golfers have to be mentally ready to move on to the next hole.

“You need to do everything you can to take away your opponents’ momentum and then keep it for yourself when you’ve got it,” he says.

Palladino, Rochester’s only participant in the NCAA championships last year, agrees that the format requires a different approach to the game.

“In stroke play, you just worry about yourself and nobody around you,” he says. “In match play, you absolutely have to consider what your opponent is doing. It brings in another factor to the match.”

Scott Sabocheck is assistant director of Athletics Communications.

HIGHLIGHTS

Winter Sports: A Brief Roundup

BASKETBALL: The women’s team finished 19–6 overall and the men were 17–8. Both were 8–6 in the UAA. Both teams broke the single-season record for free throw accuracy. The men shot 78 percent (380 of 487), barely nipping the record of 77.9 percent (478-614) set by the 1991–92 team.

The women shot 75.5 percent from the line (283-375), smashing the record of 71.8 percent (369-514) set last year.

Jodie Luther ’12 led the women in scoring (10.6 ppg), finishing her career with 1,077 points and eighth all-time. The men’s top two scorers were John DiBartolomeo ’13 at 19.1 and Nate Novosel ’12 at 12.4. Novosel finished his career with 1,197 points, 11th all-time. In the season finale, a 92–73 win over Emory, DiBartolomeo scored a career high 40 points, the highest single-game total for a Rochester men’s player since Chris Fite ’92 scored 40 against St. John Fisher in 1992.

SWIMMING: Sara Spielman ’13 and Rachel deLahunta ’12 both provisionally qualified for the NCAA Division III diving championships on the three-meter board as February came to a close. Final selections were waiting a committee’s decision in early March. The women finished sixth at UAAs, the men seventh. Rochester was ranked in the top 25 in both swimming polls. The Yellowjackets swept the Liberty League championships in December at RPI.

INDOOR TRACK & FIELD: Rochester’s women were third and the men fourth overall at the New York State championships at Hamilton College in late February. James Vavra ’12 was voted the men’s track athlete of the meet after winning the 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter races. For the women, Becky Galasso ’14 won the 500-meter race, breaking a 13-year-old building record in the process and qualifying for the ECAC championships. Galasso anchored the winning 4-by-400-meter relay which also qualified for ECACs.

—Dennis O’Donnell

ATHLETICS

Senior Recognized with Squash’s ‘Heisman’

MODEL PLAYER: Squash player Benjamin Fischer “has been a model of consistency, fairness, and commitment,” both on and off the court, says coach Martin Heath. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Squash player Benjamin Fischer ’13 went up against the nation’s top players all season in the No. 1 and No. 2 positions on a Rochester squad that finished fifth in the nation. As the season came to an end in February, the economics and business strategies major from Lucerne, Switzerland, was recognized for more than his talent on the court as he was named the College Squash Association’s 2012 Skillman Award winner, an honor given annually to a top men’s collegiate squash senior player.

Considered college squash’s version of NCAA Division I football’s Heisman Trophy, the award recognizes not only top players, but also players who demonstrate outstanding sportsmanship, leadership, and contributions to collegiate squash.

“Beni has been a model of consistency, fairness, and commitment in his work ethic, behavior on court, and demeanor off court,” says Rochester coach Martin Heath. “He has accepted his wins and his losses with equal grace and has assumed his leadership responsibilities within the team with quiet assuredness and good humor.”

Fischer finished his four years as a Yellowjacket with a 38–23 record, an impressive mark considering he has never played below No. 3 for the team. A three-time All-American, Fischer earned first team honors in 2010 and 2011 and second team in 2009.

Fischer finished the 2012 team squash season by defeating Kenneth Chan of Yale University at No. 1, helping Rochester earn fifth place in the Potter Cup Tournament, the equivalent of squash’s national championship.

The award is named for John Skillman, who led Yale University to 16 national titles during his 41 years as the Bulldogs head coach. Skillman won the United States professionals tournament three times in the 1930s.

—Scott Sabocheck

The Professor’s Tale

On a journey he began more than 60 years ago, Russell Peck inspires students and colleagues as a scholar of Middle English literature and as an academic ‘force of nature.’

By Myra Gelband ’71

(Photo: Michael Osadciw)

Consider this journey. First, ride a milk truck 150 miles from your home, in the shadow of the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to Rawlins, where you board an overnight train to Chicago. There, another train, this one bound for New York City that lets you off at Princeton Junction, where you take the Dinky to Princeton University. For this you leave behind your boyhood world and a full scholarship to the University of Wyoming, where you’d likely be known by many and considered a standout, having been captain of your high school football team, valedictorian, and winner of the school prize in English. Instead, you travel 2,000 miles to an Ivy League bastion, surrounded by young men of privileged and prep school lineage.

In 1952, Russell Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Literature, ventured east on his own to Princeton, sight unseen, to take up the beginnings of a scholastic career as a medievalist of remarkable achievement and longevity.

Shall we compare this to a pilgrimage, akin to a story from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Perhaps consult an expert. That would be Russell Peck himself, for there is hardly a more respected source on Middle English literature than Peck, an internationally regarded authority on John Gower, a contemporary and friend of Chaucer’s.

The journey brought Peck to Rochester in 1961. Now well into his 51st year on the River Campus, Peck is the longest-serving active faculty member at the University, still teaching a complement of undergraduate and graduate courses and leading the rich intellectual life of a research scholar.

“Russell is always going at high speed, in everything he does. I can’t think of another person who combines his range and his passion in the academic realm,” says John Michael, chair of the English department. “He’s phenomenal, in the sense that he is great. But he’s a phenomenon, a force of nature, intensely committed to everything he does.”

“Literary study is an exercise in vitality,” Peck wrote in a 2001 essay called “Teaching What Can’t Be Taught,” and there is no better proof than to see him as he leads students through rigorous course material, whether in the classroom for his storied lectures on the works of Chaucer, the jam-packed itinerary of his intensive Theatre in England course, or in devising forward-looking ways to share the vibrant literary history of the Middle Ages.

FACULTY OUTLOOK: In many ways, “he remains a young upstart,” say colleagues, noting Peck’s wide-ranging academic interests and commitment to students in the English department. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“His scholarship is distinctive because Russell is an exquisite teacher and a great scholar,” says Peter Lennie, senior vice president and the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. “But beyond that, he’s a source of inspiration to everyone. He has had such a fully vigorous career. He doesn’t let up, and he shows no sign of slowing down.”

Alan Lupack, curator of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library of medieval studies and the Camelot Project, puts it another way. “I suspect Russell lives in a world where days are longer than 24 hours. Also, I don’t know if he sleeps.”

Rochester was another step in Peck’s journey, and he arrived, once again, without a preview of the city or the campus, having accepted the job over the phone. “I was looking for somewhere with snow,” he says, no hint of irony in his voice. “That was part of the attraction. I turned down other offers. Rochester was at the top of my list.”

The snow may have added to Rochester’s appeal, but the vibrant music scene also figured strongly as Russell had met and married an accomplished pianist, Ruth Demaree, while in graduate school at Indiana University. Russell earned his PhD in Middle English language and literature, with a dissertation on “Number Symbolism and the Idea of Order in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,” while Ruth was a graduate student in music.

“I heard her perform Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2,” he says. “That was it for me.”

After finishing her master’s degree, Ruth went to Paris on a Fulbright fellowship to study piano at the Conservatoire National. Russell followed with a marriage proposal. They wed in June 1958 in Paris and spent their summer camping as they traveled through France.

Perhaps you detect a fairy tale quality. Need an expert? Once again that would be Peck, who has also devised and taught courses in Fairy Tale and Popular Culture and Myth and Fairy Tale.

“Russell is the world expert on Cinderella,” says Thomas Hahn, a longtime colleague in the English department. “The mark of a successful teacher is to be able to hear what’s going on in the culture in general. His fairy tales course is the best example of that. It deals with mythic patterns and large issues involving healing the soul. But there’s more going on. Really, he’s reconciling the world in those stories.”

Reflecting on the young man who alighted the train from Wyoming into the world of Ivy sophistication, Peck candidly says, “I wasn’t equipped to understand Princeton. I loved my classes, but I didn’t fully appreciate my total surroundings until I was ready to graduate.”

Isn’t that true for most of us? What outwardly may have seemed a young cowboy’s lack of sophistication and worldliness likely sprang from the same insecurity felt by nearly every college newbie. That experience has informed Peck’s approach from the outset of his academic career, allowing him to reach across disciplines and generations.

Once settled at Rochester, Peck made fast friends with new colleagues, including the acclaimed poet Hyam Plutzik, who succumbed to cancer five months later at the age of 50. First, the young medievalist took over Plutzik’s honors seminar in poetry, and, shortly after, became the first director of the Plutzik Poetry Series, started in the poet’s memory and which reached its milestone 50th year in 2012 (see page 38). Even though he handed off those duties after a few years, Peck remains devoted to the Plutzik Series and the many friendships he has cultivated through that connection.

Such relationships may explain why Peck, who always has time for students, for new ideas, and for colleagues, is cherished in the Rochester community.

“There are two really important things a university like Rochester can do for undergraduates,” Lennie says. “One is to provide a rich, residential experience where students are brought together with a diverse set of peers. The second is to find ways to offer opportunities to engage with faculty who change the way they think about the world. This is what defines Russell above all.”

Michael credits Peck with convincing him to join the Rochester faculty in 1988, and marvels at his generosity and openness, then and now. “I came in with a group of younger faculty, and we were naturally viewed with some skepticism by our older colleagues because of our interests in other areas, such as women’s studies and literary theory.

“Russell went out of his way to make us welcome, to feel engaged. He’s so open to new ideas and the work of others. I wish that were more common, but in truth we tend to get focused on whatever our specialization is at any given moment.”

Not long ago, Peck gave a talk to a faculty group on medieval literature and cognitive science. “There is an emerging approach, about which I have some reservations, involving cognitive linguistics,” Michael says. “I was astounded by Russell’s work on this, and it made me rethink my resistance. In that way, he remains a young upstart.”

An upstart who does everything with a nod to his Western roots. Since the early ’70s Russell and Ruth have owned a farm near Dacre, Ontario, in the upper Ottawa Valley, because he wanted to give his children the opportunity to enjoy a farm life, as he had. The family spent a year there, with the children enrolled in the local school while Russell finished a book on John Gower. They raised animals, installed the plumbing and electrical systems, and put a new roof on the old house and seven barns, built by a trapper/settler in the 1840s.

Peck even devised a way to teach at the farm, bringing students there over several years for a course in Middle English romance.

STUDY ABROAD: Over several years, Russell and Ruth Peck hosted Rochester classes at their farm in Ontario, Canada, where students met Butternut and other animals while studying medieval literature. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“That was wonderful for me, and I learned a lot about teaching,” he says, wistfully.

“The farm is about 300 miles from Rochester, hours of driving into the country,” says Jarold Ramsey, a professor emeritus of English who knows something of Western living from his own youth in central Oregon, where he lives in his retirement. “Russell thought nothing of that trip, though it really was a long haul.”

Over the years Peck has been the faculty director of the Medieval House (now the Medieval Society), the Drama House, and its theater program. He was responsible for acquiring, in 1987, the collection of medieval texts that became the Robbins Library in Rush Rhees Library, a unique, working scholar’s collection of non-circulating (and thus, always available) material.

His Chaucer class still attracts robust enrollments, and he has introduced courses on subjects as varied as History of the English Language and Black Exploitation Films. The latter grew out of Peck’s response when the inner city of Rochester was rocked by race riots in the 1960s.

Peck labels the 1964 riots as the single most momentous event in his formative years at Rochester.

“That had an enormous impact on my thinking. I knew a lot about medieval literature, but little about contemporary race issues,” he admits. “The Rochester riots occurred before those in Newark and Watts. It was the beginning of a tumultuous time. The [Vietnam] war and shootings at Kent State forced me to re-educate myself about the society around me.”

In that turbulent era, when students were often portrayed as disaffected and rebellious, Peck’s effort to connect in and out of the classroom had a lasting impact. “The violence at Kent State in 1970 was a catastrophic jolt to the psyche of the campus,” remembers Debbie Watkins Moncrieff ’71, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Communication Science and Disorders. “There was a powerful feeling of empathy and camaraderie that sprang forth from those events, and Professor Peck was an active voice in those conversations. He cared deeply about the welfare of all students.”

Moncrieff vividly recalls Peck’s Chaucer and Middle English lectures. “It was hard not to be drawn in. He was such a performer in front of the class. There was a sparkle in his eye, his impish grin, that enormous intelligence and enthusiasm. He sang to us. He would pull out his tuning harp, and lead the class in rounds.”

Sara Cohen ’12, an English major from Silver Spring, Md., sat in on a Peck lecture when she was deciding if she wanted to attend Rochester. Once she enrolled, his was the first class she signed up for. “The course description for Classical and Scriptural Backgrounds included something like, ‘the course is this professor’s soul.’ I decided if a professor wrote that in the summary, I was going to enjoy that class, and I did.”

Since then, Cohen has gone with other English majors to Stratford, Ontario, each fall, to attend plays at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and this year was one of 23 students who took Theatre in England, a four-credit course in London that Peck has taught for 21 years. Also along were a few additional pilgrims, Don Chew ’79S (MBA), ’83 (PhD), who has worked with Peck to manage the finances for an innovative publishing project, and Janice Willett ’78S (MBA), a trustee who met the Pecks in 2002 when she attended a Plutzik reading in New York City.

Both Chew and Willett marvel at the organizational skills required for the London undertaking, which involves Russell and Ruth together shepherding students to at least two plays a day over two weeks during winter break, becoming, in effect, surrogate parents.

Peck says he starts looking for tickets in March, and spends hours searching for the right plays—this year ran the gamut from Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Richard II, to War Horse and Cinderella, to works by Jean Paul Sartre and Neil LaBute—and the best seats. The syllabus is demanding and pleasantly exhausting. The group stays at the Harlingford Hotel, where each day starts with a 75-minute class held in the hotel lounge.

“In London, Russell will lecture in the morning, go to two plays, join us for a drink in the pub, then excuse himself to reread a play and prepare for the next day,” Chew says. “I don’t know how he does it. He doesn’t let anyone else grade his students’ papers, either.”

“After watching Russell in action, I have a better sense of what makes a good teacher,” says Willett, who has joined the Pecks in London for the past seven years. “He frames the discussion in a way that draws responses from the students, and he finds value in every response, which encourages more responses and leads to genuine insight. He gives the impression that he is learning as much as the students. And it’s hard to resist his own love of the subject. Those morning sessions have never failed to dazzle me.”

Imagine how the students feel. “The course was absolutely overwhelming, but in the best way possible,” says Cohen.

One evening Cohen found her energy waning. “Professor Peck must have noticed, and asked how I was doing. I admitted I was a little tired. I asked him how he was doing, and he responded, ‘Oh, you know me, I always have energy!’ This is constantly true.”

GENERATIONS OF ADVICE: Peck meets with English major Lillian Dickerson ’12 to discuss her honors thesis in his Morey Hall office. Peck also advised Lillian’s sister, Kathryn ’05, as a Take Five Scholar. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Since the late 1980s Peck has been the creator, chief editor, and driving force for the Middle English Text Series (METS), through the Consortium for Teaching Middle Ages (known as TEAMS). Dismayed that much of the material he wanted to teach was out of print, Peck embarked on the arduous task of producing accurate, authoritative texts that can be read easily in the original Middle English. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and input from other medieval scholars, what began as a project to publish 25 texts has grown to more than 80 volumes, with more to come.

Peck calls the series the most significant work he’s done since he arrived at the University. And Hahn categorically agrees, “There is no other series comparable in any discipline. This is the single biggest influence on how medieval studies is taught around the world, the most important innovation of the 20th, now the 21st, century.”

The volumes will be perpetually in print, published through Western Michigan University, and sold at cost. But they’re also available online, in a searchable database, maintained out of the Robbins collection, and available to scholars around the world to use for free.

“Russell is here every day,” says Lupack. “He oversees every text, every line, every word.”

And nearly every graduate, as is evident in the English department’s annual diploma ceremony. Always orchestrated by Peck, the event is held in Hubbell Auditorium to accommodate an audience from across the University.

“The English department ceremony is unique,” says Lennie. “Diploma ceremonies are rare among colleges and universities to begin with, and special because they highlight the rich commerce that faculty and students have had together. But I know of no other place with a diploma ceremony such as what Russell creates. It’s legendary, the highlight of the academic year. It is, like the man himself, singular and distinctive.”

The ceremony began simply enough some 40 years ago as an intimate occasion at which faculty read from their specialty of study, performed a short play or two, and were led in song by Peck before graduates lined up to receive their diplomas, while holding long-stemmed peonies cut from Ruth and Russell’s perennial garden.

Here is what that has begot, circa 2011, still produced and stage-managed by Peck:

A multimedia production with hundreds of photos of the 70-plus graduating seniors taken during departmental outings throughout the year: theater-going in Stratford, Ontario; travels in England; Niagara Falls adventures; Mount Hope Cemetery in autumn; tobogganing in Highland Park; the lower falls of the Genesee; the Seneca Park Zoo; Eastview Mall in nearby Victor, N.Y.; and the senior picnic on Lake Ontario. The department still sings, and there are prose and poetry readings. And, of course, music, with recorded selections ranging from the Brahms Requiem to the Beach Boys to a song called “What Do You Do with a BA in English?” from the Broadway musical Avenue Q. There’s a harmonica rendition of “The Dandelion Yellow” played by Peck, who brings the proceedings to a fitting and emotional climax with a reading from Chaucer.

It’s “very moving—funny, sentimental, and spectacular,” in the words of its creator, who gets help from his colleagues but is still the ringmaster.

Did Peck plan to stay at Rochester for so long? “I never really thought in those directions. I always just liked what I was doing, and they were very good to me. I’ve been lucky in many ways,” says Peck, “and I’ve enjoyed good fortune here.

“I was the ‘mustard’ professor at the University of Hull [in England] in 1967–68,” Peck says, with a playful smile. “That was the old R. T. French/Reckitt-Coleman fellowship, and when I returned to Rochester, I was given tenure.” The rest is history.

Along the way, and to no one’s surprise, teaching has become the family profession. Ruth Peck had a long association with SUNY Geneseo, teaching music and piano, and still performs and plays as a soloist and collaborator in Rochester. The Pecks’ three children have achieved their own considerable success in the classroom: daughter Demaree is an award-winning high school English teacher in Virginia; Nathan is a high school science teacher with many awards in Missouri; and Gunther is a history professor at Duke University. It pleases Peck to no end that his children still spend time on the farm, as he and Ruth still do, for maple syrup making and timber harvesting.

And last, this: A graduate might discover among saved bits a blue examination book, the final in an upper-level course in Middle English literature. No copy of the questions, only the rush of answers, and not all of them correct, because Peck’s exams have always been famously difficult.

“It’s very hard,” he would whisper, as though someone else had devised the test and he only sneaked a peek. Peck’s written comments hop across the hurried essays, but there, at the end, is the approval every student seeks: “. . . with one of the highest quality.” Praise, in its simplest form.

If we’re lucky we encounter teachers, colleagues, and friends who help us decipher our way forward. And when we’re truly blessed, there is that one, that singular one, whose own journey, by word and deed, stands as a beacon.

Russell Peck. One. Of the highest quality.

Myra Gelband ’71 is a retired senior editor for Sports Illustrated.

The Roles of Russell Peck

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

When asked to summarize Russell Peck in one word, colleagues and friends describe him as “energetic,” “enthusiastic,” “intellectually curious,” “persuasive,” “persistent,” “generous,” “exuberant,” “radiant,” “indefatigable,” and “a rapidly walking library.” It is, in short, a long list. Here are a few of his many facets:

Scholar

Widely respected as a scholar of Middle English literature, Peck is an internationally recognized authority on Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th-century author of The Canterbury Tales; the poet John Gower, a contemporary and friend of Chaucer’s; William Langland, the presumed author of the 14th-century narrative poem Piers Plowman; and Thomas Malory, the 15th-century writer who’s credited with first bringing together Le Morte d'Arthur, a canonical text of the Arthur legend.

His work has been recognized by the John Gower Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and other national humanities and academic associations. He was named the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Literature in 1985.

His wide-ranging command of his field has long been a marvel to many.

“I never had a class with Russell, but I remember being in an absolutely packed house at Hubbell Auditorium, when he delivered a lecture on grammar that was illustrated entirely with slides of dragons,” recalls Don Chew ’79S (MBA), ’83 (PhD). “He went through every part of speech and form of grammar with dragon images. It was hilarious, silly, and amazing. Only Russell could have pulled that off.”

Years later, when Peck asked Chew to help manage the finances of the TEAMS project, all Chew asked for in return was a copy of that dragon lecture. “Russell said he’d tossed it out. I was crushed. I can’t imagine how many such things he’s done over the years.”

He’s also been known to take his scholarship quite seriously, showing up in a cast for graduation in 1971 after injuring his arm jousting.

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Farmer

Since the 1970s, the Pecks have owned a farm in Canada’s upper Ottawa Valley, where Russell, Ruth, and their three children, Demaree, Nathan, and Gunther, continue to maintain a working farm.

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Teacher

Recognized for his teaching by generations of Rochester students, Peck has been widely honored by national organizations, including the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Danforth Foundation, as well as by the University, where he’s received the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; the Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Students’ Association Professor of the Year award (1998); and the 2009 President’s Medal for Distinguished Service.

Always looking for ways to exemplify the notion that teaching can occur far beyond the classroom, he’s conducted courses at his family’s farm in Ontario, taken students to Stratford, Ontario, for a Shakespeare festival, and established a regular theater course in England during winter break. Former students remember cookouts at the Pecks’ home in Rochester, where Peck, accompanied by his wife, Ruth, on piano, was known to sing such songs such as “Goodbye, Forever, Saloon” from a prohibition hymnal.

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Gardener

At their home in Rochester, Russell and Ruth Peck are avid gardeners, tending peonies and other perennials that supply the flowers for the English department’s annual diploma ceremony.

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Digital Entrepreneur

In what he calls his most important work since arriving at Rochester, Peck is the founder and chief editor of a series that makes authoritative copies of medieval literature available to students and scholars. Concerned that works were in danger of being lost as they fell out of print or of languishing in libraries accessible only to scholars who could travel to work with them, Peck has been the driving force for the Middle English Text Series (METS), part of the Consortium for Teaching Middle Ages (TEAMS). The series, available online and perpetually in print copy, produces accurate, authoritative texts that can be read easily in the original Middle English. The series has grown to more than 80 volumes.

(Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Ringmaster

Peck has long taken an interest in making sure he and his students know each other and the community in which they live. Organizing the first installment 30 years ago as the “I’d rather be in Rochester project,” Peck leads trips around the area, taking students to such sites as the Public Market, the Seneca Park Zoo, Lake Ontario, concerts, movie screenings, and others. Says Jarold Ramsey, professor emeritus of English: “[W]henever there was any celebrating in the name of literary study, Russell was your man.”

But he’s best known for organizing the English department’s annual diploma ceremony, a multimedia extravaganza that recognizes each of the 70-plus graduating seniors.

Says John Michael, professor and chair of English: “I always fear for Russell the week before graduation because he runs around at such a breakneck pace. The prospect of his giving up the diploma ceremony fills me with despair. No question, he is irreplaceable.”

Epitomizing ‘Everything That’s Good in Higher Education’

SCHOLAR SUPPORT: A gift from Janice and Joseph Willett honors Peck’s 50-plus-year career. (Photo: University Advancement)

Trustee Janice Willett ’78S (MBA) first met Russell and Ruth Peck in 2002 in New York City during a special event of the Department of English’s Plutzik Reading Series.

Having lived in England for many years, Willett enjoyed talking to the couple about London and the theater and found that they had seen many of the same productions.

Before long, the idea arose that Willett should join the Pecks in England for their regular, two-week winter break course on the theater.

“There aren’t many people who are happy seeing two plays a day, but to Russell, it’s almost a calling, and I was hooked,” says Willett. “One of my favorite things as a theater-goer is that fluttery feeling of excitement in the moment when the house lights go down and just before the curtain goes up, thinking about all the preparation that has gone into the production we are about to see. And one of the things I like best about Russell is knowing that he feels the same way, even if he’s just seen the curtain go up at another play five hours ago.”

Since then, Willett has joined the Pecks in London for seven such trips.

When she and husband Joseph ’75S (MBA) announced this spring that they were pledging $3.5 million to The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester, Willett made sure that an important part of the gift would be in honor of the Pecks, providing support for Russell’s work in the English department and recognizing Ruth’s role in Russell’s endeavors, particularly the London theater program. “The Russell and Ruth Peck Professorship will honor a half-century of dedication to this University,” she says. “My great hope is that all of their former students will contribute to making it possible.”

The commitment also provides support for student scholarships in the Simon School of Business as well as for the University’s International Theatre Program.

Willett says getting to know the Pecks has given her a new appreciation for the commitment it takes to make a difference in the lives of young scholars—and for the synergies of marriage.

“Our gift to the University in support of Ruth and Russell is because to me they epitomize everything that is good in higher education in the United States, along with everything about how a life should be lived.”

—Scott Hauser

For more about The Meliora Challenge, or to support the Peck Professorship, visit campaign.rochester.edu.

The Mind’s Eye

How do we transform an ever-changing jumble of visual stimuli into the rich and coherent three-dimensional perception we know as sight? Rochester vision scientists are helping reshape our understanding of how the brain ‘sees.’

By Susan Hagen

WIDE ANGLE: Using a 7-foot-tall semicircular screen that encompasses a viewer’s entire field of vision, David Knill and other Rochester scientists explore how the brain makes sense of information involving peripheral vision and other cognitive processes of perception. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

By the time James Risen arrived at the Napa Valley hotel his wife had booked in celebration of his 60th birthday, he knew something was terribly wrong. Without warning or pain, the right side of his field of vision had gone blank, like someone had pulled a curtain over the area.

“I could only see about half of my normal vision,” he recalls. “It was like not getting the whole picture.”

As he would soon learn from emergency room doctors, “The problem was not with my eyes. There was a problem with my brain.”

Risen had experienced a stroke that damaged his visual cortex, causing blindness on the right side in both eyes. It’s a common complication, estimated to affect up to 50 percent of people who suffer a stroke, and extremely disorienting.

“Every time I opened my eyes I was reminded that I had a severe visual problem,” Risen says. When walking in crowded areas, people would just pop into sight, as if from nowhere, because he had no ability to detect objects or movement peripherally on the right side. Taking a hike in the woods was out of the question. “I might run into a tree or step in a pothole,” he says.

Even more unsettling was the message he received from his first visit to a neuro-ophthalmologist. The brain cells that process that portion of his vision were dead and doctors could do nothing to restore his sight. He was advised to adjust: stop driving, sell his house, and move downtown where he could catch a bus to his job as an administrator for a law firm in Columbus, Ohio.

For Risen, the loss of independence was “frightening.” “I was very depressed.”

Not long afterward, Risen became a participant in a University research program on human vision and began the long road to recovery. In the process, he also became part of the growing number of discoveries at Rochester that are helping to reshape our understanding of how the brain “sees.” Using investigative tools that range from a room-sized virtual reality environment to microscopic electronic probes, scientists are exploring how our brains are able to transform the jumble of competing and rapidly changing sensory inputs from our eyes into the rich and coherent three-dimensional perception we know as sight. Their insights are helping to build a better appreciation for the brain’s plasticity and leading to the development of life-altering vision therapies.

It’s not surprising that Risen would land in Rochester for the latest in vision discoveries. The city’s moniker is the World’s Image Center and Rochester is home to Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox, companies focused on optical engineering and optical systems, many of which are developed for use with the eye. Today, even as these corporations downsize, the city boasts the headquarters of more than 80 businesses focused on optics and imaging.

For almost a half century, the University’s Center for Visual Science has coupled this local expertise with the skills of researchers across disparate disciplines. Center founder Robert Boynton was a professor of both psychology and optics, two very different fields merged under the rubric of vision. The center brings together 32 faculty members from engineering, optics, neurology, ophthalmology, brain and cognitive sciences, and neurobiology and anatomy. Through funding from the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research, the center provides access to shared experimental facilities and to technical experts like Keith Parkins, one of its senior programmers who creates computer code for everything from 3-D and head-mounted displays to see-through augmented reality systems.

“It’s a kind of beautiful synergy between basic science, engineering, and medicine—all three,” says David Williams, center director for the past 21 years and the dean for research for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. “There is actually a pretty big cultural gulf between these enterprises,” he says. In most universities, engineers would have little experience with patients, and physicians, little exposure to equipment design and basic science. But through the center, clinicians, researchers, and designers meet regularly to share experimental results, ideas, and sometimes even study participants.

PARALLAX PARADOX: Greg DeAngelis is working to pinpoint the areas of the brain responsible for motion parallax—our ability to discern our three-dimensional relationship to objects around us based on our own motion and distance from the objects. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The center is a recognized leader in vision research with its members publishing in journals like Nature, Current Biology, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of Neuroscience. If the findings that flow out of this collaboration confirm one thing, it’s that the abilities we take for granted—like sight, depth perception, and hand-eye coordination—are some of the most biologically complex tasks that we undertake as humans.

“More than 50 percent of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information,” points out Williams, the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics. “Understanding how vision works may be a key to understanding how the brain as a whole works.”

“When scientists back in the 1950s met to talk about artificial intelligence, they thought that teaching a computer to play chess would be very difficult, but teaching a computer to see would be easy,” says center member David Knill, professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

“Why? Because chess is hard for humans. Only the rare human with lots of practice becomes a master. But seeing appears easy for us. Even a baby can see. For that matter, insects, birds, and fish can see—albeit differently than humans. Some see better, in fact.”

What researchers now know is that human vision is incredibly complicated. While we’ve developed software that can beat the pants off the best chess master and best our brightest at Jeopardy!, computer models have barely scratched the surface of human vision.

“We mistakenly think of human vision like a camera,” says Knill. “We have this metaphor of an image being cast on the retina and we tend to think of vision as capturing images and sending them to the brain, like a video camera recording to a digital tape.”

But human vision is more akin to speech than photography. From infancy, our brain learns how to construct a three-dimensional environment by interpreting visual sensory signals like shape, size, and occlusion, how objects that are close obstruct the view of objects farther away. Even nonvisual cues, such as sounds and self-motion help us understand how we move in space and how to move our bodies accordingly.

“We learn to see,” says Knill. “It’s something we have spent our lives learning to do, so we can’t imagine not understanding what we are seeing.”

That sight is constantly adapting underpins some of the most exciting discoveries in vision science at Rochester. For example, scientists have long assumed that an individual’s basic visual sensitivity, such as the ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray, was fixed. Not so, found Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences. In a series of ongoing studies on the effects of playing video games on visual perception, Bavelier has shown that very practiced action gamers become 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast. Such visual discrimination, she says, is the primary limiting factor in how well a person can see.

“Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery—somehow changing the optics of the eye,” says Bavelier. “But we’ve found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last up to years after game play stopped.”

More recently, Bavelier and Rochester cognitive scientist Alexandre Pouget found that playing action video games can also train the mind to make the right decisions faster. Video game players in their study developed a heightened sensitivity to what was going on around them, a benefit that could spill over into such everyday activities as driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.

LONG VIEW: As Krystel Huxlin (standing) and neuroscience graduate student Anasuya Das look on, Maurice DeMay of Rochester demonstrates the peripheral vision exercises he does to strengthen his visual abilities after a stroke damaged his visual cortex. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“It’s not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier says. “Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”

Building on Bavelier’s discovery that video gaming can teach the visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives, Bavelier and Knill have begun research on how to retrain stereopsis, the brain’s ability to perceive depth by combining the slightly disparate views it receives from each eye, in patients who are stereo-blind. Like the effects in 3-D movies, stereopsis is what makes a solid object seem to “pop out” and underlies our ability to judge distances very precisely, such as when we thread a needle or hit a ball, says Knill.

An expert on depth perception, Knill studies how the brain uses such visual cues to control our behavior in the world. How, for example, does the brain incorporate information from shape, size, shadow, orientation, and position of objects to guide hand movements? What signals allow us to know exactly how far away a cup is on the table, and to grasp for it with such amazing accuracy?

For the stereopsis study, Indu Vedamurthy, a postdoctoral fellow in the center, has designed a 3-D computer game using computer animations, two-way mirrors, and eye-tracking devices, in collaboration with Bavelier and Knill. Up to six days a week for an hour each time, study participants who have poor stereovision do their best to squash a virtual frog. The catch is that the game removes all the other reminders that we typically rely on for depth, like perspective and relative speed and motion, and requires the player to rely solely on stereoscopic cues to judge the frog’s location. The team is hopeful that by forcing participants to focus on these cues, they will strengthen their ability to perceive depth.

Greg DeAngelis also explores depth perception but at the basic biological level of single neurons. The professor and chair of brain and cognitive sciences is an expert on motion parallax, a depth cue that rises out of the viewer’s own movements.

(Illustration: Steve Boerner)

With motion parallax, the direction and speed an object moves on the retina is directly related to its distance from the viewer. As we move, near objects seem to move in the opposite direction of our head, while further away objects move with us. “Motion parallax cues are driven by the geometry of the viewing, so it is potentially a very precise measure of distance and a powerful cue to depth,” DeAngelis says.

“The challenge for us was to understand where in the brain there are neurons that can actually extract information about depth from motion parallax, and until a few years ago, nobody knew.” To solve the puzzle, his team created a virtual reality system with an animation that simulated the movement of objects but in a pattern that was ambiguous unless the viewer moved from side to side. They then measured the firing of neurons in the middle temporal area of the brain, a small area known for processing visual motion.

When individual neurons in this region received only the visual cues from the animation, they fired indiscriminately. But when signals from the movement of the eyes were added, the neurons fired in a way consistent with the three-dimensional layout of the scene.

The experiment demonstrates, says DeAngelis, how single neurons in the brain combine visual images with information about the movement of the eyes to compute depth. Our perception of three dimensions does not rely solely on visual features like shape or occlusion or even on binocular vision.

“The brain uses lots of other signals to make sense of the visual input and one of those is the movement of the eyes,” he says.

“We’ve learned a lot about the function of different areas of the brain over the years by observing humans with brain damage from lesions and strokes,” he says. But such nerve cell loss is typically not confined to a specific region. His lab is able to temporarily inactivate tiny areas of the cerebral cortex only 1 millimeter in diameter, then observe and map the functions of discrete areas with precision.

Such advances, DeAngelis anticipates, will help to decode how the brain understands even more complicated aspects of depth, like the perception of undulating surfaces and their orientation to the viewer.

Insights into visual perception are important to understanding who we are as a species, researchers say.

“Humans are very visually dominated creatures,” says DeAngelis. “If you compare humans to mice, mice have pretty lousy vision. They rely on whisking, and tremendously on olfaction. Not that our other senses are not important, but a lot of our behavior, like the ability to manipulate things with our hands and work with tools, relies heavily on vision.”

After losing half of that ability, Risen couldn’t agree more. He came to Rochester to work with Krystel Huxlin, an associate professor of ophthalmology and of brain and cognitive sciences who has pioneered the use of vision exercises to help restore sight lost from brain damage caused by a stroke. “The brain is like a big muscle, in its own way, and it requires exercise, and if you want to recover functions, you have to exercise it,” says Huxlin.

The use of brain therapy was a radical idea in medical and scientific circles not too long ago, one that was met with considerable skepticism. Once nerve cells die, they don’t come back, no matter how much they are stimulated.

But Huxlin’s work has not only shown improvement in vision, it’s also helping scientists better understand the brain’s powerful ability to relearn a skill using alternative neural pathways if given the right coaching.

To rebuild peripheral visual perception, study participants stare at a tiny target in the center of a computer screen while a quarter-sized pattern of moving dots flash for half a second in their blind field. Without glancing at the moving pattern, participants try to distinguish in which direction the dots are drifting. A second exercise uses a circle of bars. The goal is to identify whether the bars are oriented vertically or horizontally.

Compared to running laps and lifting weights, leaning on a chin rest and staring at dots doesn’t sound exactly taxing. Wrong, say Risen and others participants.

“It is very tedious, and it’s focus, focus,” says Risen, who has done the exercises five days a week at home for the past 18 months. “It’s very easy to cheat even if you don’t want to” by inadvertently looking at the moving dots, he says. The sessions include 300 trials, two times a day, a process that takes about an hour. Progress requires months of consistent practice. “If I worked out as much as I do this, I’d be an Adonis,” he says.

“The reason this works is because we are hammering at the exact same spot in the visual field, and at the same neural circuits, over and over again,” says Huxlin. Although the stroke has destroyed the cells that typically transmit visual signals, other, weaker pathways also carry visual stimuli. “What we think is happening is that the training is basically reawakening or driving these alternative pathways harder to the point that the information then reaches consciousness.”

Once the brain recovers the ability to detect motion stimuli from the exercises, most other aspects of vision recover automatically, she says.

But does the improvement that Huxlin is able to measure precisely on the computer screen translate to a real-world ability to understand the three-dimensional world? That’s one of the questions Knill is working with Huxlin to explore.

To study individuals with vision damage similar to Risen’s, Laurel Issen, a graduate student working with Knill and Huxlin, employs a virtual reality system. Participants sit in front of a 7-foot-tall, semicircular screen that encompasses their entire of field of vision. There, they experience a pattern of moving dots. Think of sci-fi movie animations, in which space explorers fly through an asteroid field, says Knill. The dots move past in ways that simulate physical movement in a certain direction.

The beauty of this elaborate setup, he notes, is that researchers can manipulate the pattern of dots in the subject’s blind field. Eventually Knill and Issen plan to test participants before they begin Huxlin’s regimen of eye exercises, and again after months of therapy to document improvements in the damaged areas.

In the meantime, Risen is thrilled with the personal measures of his recovery. He’s experienced “significant improvement” in his vision and his “life is much easier now. I’m more comfortable in my environment.” Last

September he officially cleared the hurdle he had been dreading for three years. He passed the peripheral vision test for his driver’s license, which involves being able to detect a flash of light to the side.

“When I saw that light, I was the happiest man in the world,” he says.

Susan Hagen writes about the social sciences for University Communications.

Literary Lights

Over the past five decades, the Plutzik Reading Series has brought some of literature’s biggest names to campus to carry on its namesake poet’s mission to share the power of poetry.

By Valerie Alhart

Hyam Plutzik The namesake of the English department’s celebrated reading series, the poet began with readings of his own work as a faculty member from 1945 to 1962. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

The roster reads like a Who’s Who of modern literature: James Baldwin, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Salman Rushdie, Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and John Updike, to name a few.

Since 1962, more than 300 poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers have been guests of the English department’s Plutzik Reading Series, sharing their work with students, faculty, and area community members in one of the nation’s longest-running collegiate reading programs.

Plutzik, who joined the Rochester English faculty in 1945, made it his mission to ensure that students would be able to appreciate poetry not only on the page, but also as a performative act, in which listeners would experience the excitement of an impassioned author at a podium. Although Plutzik started small—reading his own poetry to students in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library—his insistence on poetry as an experience launched a series that has featured the foremost names in literature, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and National Book Award winners.

“He really invented poetry readings at the University of Rochester,” says Jarold Ramsey, professor emeritus of English and a former director of the series. “And the faculty of the English department have always felt that there was an important connection between being able to read poems on the page and being able to hear them spoken.”

Anthony Hecht A frequent reader in—and a former director of—the series, Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hard Hours in 1968 as a Rochester English professor. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Over the course of 2011–12, the University and the Hyam Plutzik Centennial Committee are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the series and the centennial anniversary of Plutzik’s birth with several special events and exhibitions. Last fall, Wesleyan University Press released a special edition of Plutzik’s second book of poetry, Apples from Shinar. The new edition includes Plutzik’s previously unpublished introduction, and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan of Yale University. Several events this spring will mark the anniversary. In March,

poet and critic Susan Stewart will present the George Ford Memorial Lecture. Later in March, Nigel Maister, artistic director of the International Theatre Program, will present a dramatic reading of Plutzik’s long poem, Horatio. And

n April, Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine, the current U.S. poet laureate, will read from his work. From the podium of the Welles-Brown Room, he will add his name to a storied list of poets and writers.

Valerie Alhart writes about the humanities for University Communications. For more about the Plutzik anniversary, visit www.hyamplutzikpoetry.com.

POETIC PRAISE

Rochester Poet’s Work Named Among Nation’s Best

NOTABLE: Grotz is earning accolades for The Needle, her second collection of poetry. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A 2011 book of poems by Jennifer Grotz, assistant professor of English, is earning national recognition.

The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Grotz’s second collection of poetry, was cited by National Public Radio as one of the five best books of poetry published in 2011, and the Washington Post noted that the collection should establish Grotz “as one of America’s best young poets.” In addition,

her poem “Poppies,” originally published in the New England Review, was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner).

Grotz, who also teaches in the University’s literary translation studies program, is one of four creative writers on the English department faculty who help coordinate the Plutzik series. The others are poet and critic James Longenbach, the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English; novelist Joanna Scott, the Roswell S. Burrows Professor of English; and fiction writer Stephen Schottenfeld, assistant professor of English.

MELIORA MOMENTS

Plutzik Memories

‘I thank him still for showing me how to tell students that they must find their own voice.’

PLUTZIK PUPIL: The poet influenced how Zweig approached his own teaching as a professor. (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

It’s amazing to me how vivid my memories are of Professor Hyam Plutzik of the English department, even at 81.

When I think about a particularly significant moment of personal growth during my years at Rochester, what comes immediately to mind is not a lecture or a class but Plutzik’s review of the student literary magazine in which I had published a story and some poems.

I was a philosophy major but, like most of my friends, I had literary aspirations—“pretensions” would be a better word. And that is what Plutzik recognized.

I can still recall his exact words in that review: “Mr. Zweig must take care to avoid the least suggestion of pretentiousness in his work.”

Deflating, when I was dying for praise. Oh, there were some favorable comments as well, a concession that my story (it was called “You Can Stop Crying Now,” a title taken from a poem by Kenneth Patchen) “managed to win a certain victory in the end.”

But what counted for me was Plutzik’s seeing my flaws as a writer, my temptation to mimic the language and diction of others. Plutzik set me straight.

His honest, accurate criticism taught me more, as a future teacher and scholar, than any applause would have done.

The page on which his review was printed has long disintegrated (along with my undergraduate scribbling) but I thank him still for helping me to see where my talents did not lie, and for showing me how to tell students I have myself had to review that they must find their own voice. —

Arnulf Zweig ’52

Zweig is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oregon. For more Meliora Moments, and to submit your own, visit http://meliora.rochester.edu.

Cross-Cultural Classical

Pianist William Chapman Nyaho ’84E (MM) showcases a rich array of music by African and African diaspora composers.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

GLOBAL PERFORMER: Nyaho travels the globe performing works by African and diaspora classical composers. In February, he performed in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo: Photo: Steve Mitchell/AP Images for Rochester Review)

In January, the Seattle-based pianist William Chapman Nyaho ’84E (MM) was invited to perform a solo recital, “African Voices,” in Austin, Texas, as part of a series of concerts featuring music by African and African diaspora classical composers.

Nyaho, who’s performed similar recitals around the country and globe, says there are many more concerts devoted to the music of black classical composers than in years past. “They’ve gone over very well,” he says of the performances.

If interest in African and African diaspora composers is on the rise, Nyaho can include himself as one to thank. He’s been a pioneer in bringing to light works by black composers that have sat in manuscript form—never published, much less performed or recorded—in archives around the world.

He’s spent several years seeking out unpublished and out-of-print works, and over 2007 and 2008, completed a five-volume sheet music anthology, Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora, published by Oxford University Press.

“Part of this project has been to create demand—to have people check this music out and go research, go look,” says Nyaho.

Another goal of the anthology was to make the music accessible at colleges and universities where much of the classical music canon is instilled and taught over generations.

“I wasn’t aware of all this music when I was even at Eastman,” says Nyaho, who studied with master pianists Barry Snyder ’66E, ’68E (MM) and David Renner ’60E, ’65E (MM).

The Eastman School has seen a few prominent black composers cross its path. George Walker ’56E (DMA), whose works include Piano Sonata No. 2, which he completed as his doctoral dissertation, won a Pulitzer Prize in music in 1996 for his composition Lilacs, for voice and orchestra.

And Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School from 1924 to 1964, took a strong interest in contemporary composers, including African-Americans Ulysses Kay ’40E (MM), a student of Hanson’s, and William Grant Still, whose Afro-American Symphony Hanson included in a Rochester Philharmonic concert in 1931. It was the premiere of the symphony and the first time a major orchestra had performed the work of a black composer.

But Nyaho’s volumes, arranged according to the level of difficulty of the music, include works by an exceptionally diverse group, geographically and musically, both living and dead, from Egypt to South Africa, to Cuba, Haiti, and the United States.

The anthology was widely praised in Europe. A reviewer for the British classical music magazine Musical Opinion declared, “Technically accomplished pianists seeking to develop their hands, ears, and imagination in new ways, and to take their audiences on voyages of discovery, are recommended to obtain these volumes at the earliest opportunity.”

Born in the late 1950s in Washington, D.C., where his father was serving as the first ambassador to the United States of a newly independent Ghana, Nyaho grew up in a musical household in Accra, where he was surrounded by Western classical music as well as two quite distinct native “musics.”

“My parents came from two different ethnic groups, and their music—the harmonies were different, the melodic content was different, everything was really quite different,” says Nyaho.

Nyaho has performed some of his favorite piano works by African and African diaspora composers on two CDs—Senku, released in 2003, and Asa, released in 2008, both by MSR Classics. Both recordings include multiple premieres.

Nyaho points out that non-Western themes aren’t new in classical music—or “art music,” a term he also uses to signify the historical and geographical breadth of music rooted in the European classical tradition. Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvořák, for example, incorporated non-Western influences into their compositions. The key difference between them and black composers who have melded Western and non-Western traditions, says Nyaho, is that Bartók and Dvořák are part of the recognized musical canon, and composers such as the African American Margaret Bonds, or the Jamaican Oswald Russell, aren’t.

His hope is that “people will be aware of this music that is out there, that is just as important—and as phenomenal—as the music we hear from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms.”

In the News

Eastman Alumni Shine at Grammys

Christopher Lamb ’81E and Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM) both took home trophies from the 54th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in February.

Lamb, principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic, was honored for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for his performance in Joseph Schwantner’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra on Schwantner: Chasing Light (Naxos), recorded with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

Ludwig, a recording engineer, shared the award for Best Surround Sound Album. He was surround mastering engineer on the Super Deluxe Edition of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Polydor) by Derek & the Dominos. A previous Grammy award winner, Ludwig has worked on the projects of artists from Jimi Hendrix to Barbra Streisand.

In addition, arranger and conductor Gordon Goodwin won Best Instrumental Composition and Best Instrumental Arrangement for That’s How We Roll, recorded with his Big Phat Band, including Rick Shaw ’81E (MM) (bass), Bernie Dresel ’83E (drums), and Brian Scanlon ’81E, ’83E (MM) (saxophone).

Stuart Bauer ’68M (MD) Honored for Pediatric Research

Stuart Bauer ’68M (MD) has been twice honored in the past six months for groundbreaking research in pediatrics. At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics last October, he received the academy’s Pediatric Urology Medal for his work on bladder function in children with neurological, anatomical, and functional disorders. In March, he’ll be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Spina Bifida Association for his research and work with children with the birth defect.

Joshua Pollard ’05 Makes Forbes’s ‘30 Under 30’ List

Forbes Magazine named Goldman Sachs housing analyst Joshua Pollard ’05 to its “30 Under 30” list last December. A native of Braddock, Pa., and an economics and statistics double major at Rochester, Pollard started working at the investment company as an intern. He was hired, promoted to lead housing analyst in 2009, and vice president in 2010.

(Photo: Gaetano Salvadore)

Meredith Goldstein LeVande ’95 Monkeys Around on PBS

Children’s entertainer Meredith Goldstein LeVande ’95, who released the CD Monkey Monkey Music with Meredith LeVande in 2004, has created a series of Monkey Monkey Music videos now airing between children’s shows on more than 100 public television stations nationwide. The singer and guitarist has been performing for children since 2000. She studied English and women’s studies at Rochester and graduated from Brooklyn Law School before beginning her entertainment career.

Confronting Our Differences—Collaboratively

As a scholar and administrator at the University of Maryland, Bonnie Thornton Dill ’65 leads from the bottom up.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

‘STATESWOMAN’: Dill has been praised for her research in women’s studies and as a campus ‘stateswoman’ at the University of Maryland, where she serves as a dean. (Photo: John T. Consoli/University of Maryland Publications)

Bonnie Thornton Dill ’65 has made her mark as a scholar by studying marginalized groups and social inequality. The aim of her scholarship, she says, is to suggest ways to transform institutions—schools, service agencies, universities—to make them more just.

Last summer, she was tapped to become dean of the University of Maryland’s 320-plus-faculty, 5,500-student, 14-department College of Arts and Humanities. The first African-American woman, as well as the first woman, ever to hold the dean’s title in the college, Dill takes on a role that calls for, among other things, forging common purpose among notoriously disparate and competing interest groups.

“So much of my career has been about building collaborations and networks,” she says.

A member of the women’s studies department at Maryland since 1991 and a longtime department chair, she was the founding director of the university’s Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. With faculty affiliates across disciplines, the consortium promotes research, but what makes it distinctive is the role its affiliates play in mentoring other faculty members and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations on campus.

“She’s done a lot of institution building with teams,” says Ruth Enid Zambrana, a professor of women’s studies at Maryland who has known Dill for more than three decades and now leads the consortium.

In her convocation remarks last September, Dill made it clear she won’t be making many dictates, characterizing her talk as “the beginning of an ongoing conversation, not just between me and you, but among us all.” Over the past two years, the college had put forth a “collective vision,” she noted, referring to the college’s new vision statement. “This collective vision requires collective work.”

Pointing to the financial strain faced by the college since the 2008 global financial collapse, she thanked staff, graduate students, and faculty—in that order—for their contributions and sacrifices, indicating as well that she would be an “ardent advocate” for the college, which is one of 13 colleges at Maryland.

A pioneering scholar in women’s studies, Dill was among the first to demonstrate what is widely accepted today: that women don’t comprise a monolithic category, and that instead, the experiences of women vary in ways that correlate closely with race and social class. As a graduate student in sociology at New York University in the 1970s, Dill focused her research on black domestic workers.

“It wasn’t something that people in the department knew a lot about,” she recalls. Her mentor, Richard Sennett, who had coauthored the now-classic work The Hidden Injuries of Class, encouraged her. But also important was another scholar, sociologist and civil rights activist Joyce Ladner, who taught at nearby Hunter College, as well as a small network of graduate students across the country who also focused on black women.

In the 1980s, Dill helped develop a nuanced approach to the study of social inequality coined “intersectionality.”

“Intersectionality is really the idea that dimensions of inequality”—such as gender, race, and class—“do not exist in isolation from one another,” says Dill. “They shape and influence each other. And each one is shaped by the nature and the structure of the other at any particular historical moment and in any particular geographic location.”

Intersectionality, for example, helps explain the ways in which racism is experienced differently by black women than by black men; or how the path to educational attainment is often different for a white youth in Appalachia than for a white youth in Washington, D.C., for example. The point of intersectional research, Dill adds, is not merely to point out social inequalities, but to suggest ways they might be eradicated.

Dill’s early life was an ongoing experience of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. As a youth in Chicago in the 1950s, she attended the storied University of Chicago Laboratory School. Founded more than a century ago by the progressive scholar and reformer John Dewey and his wife, Alice, who served as the school’s first principal, it was a social as well as an educational experiment in collaboration. The experiment was to test the proposition that learning—and in fact, any human activity—isn’t something people do as individuals, but rather, in a social context, through interaction with others. Thus, the school fostered “learning by doing” among a “cooperative community” of learners.

To this day, Dill credits the school for her bottom-up approach to leadership and scholarship. “It all goes back to the Lab School,” she says.

While the Lab School served primarily the children of Chicago faculty, it also drew unaffiliated students from the surrounding community—students such as Dill, whose father, a pharmacist, and mother, an English teacher, lived and raised their family in the nearby neighborhood of Englewood, then a working- and middle-class stronghold on the city’s South Side. Thus, says Dill, “I lived in two worlds—a white intellectual world and a black social world.”

At Rochester, where she enrolled in the fall of 1961, she was among the first African Americans ever to live in River Campus residence halls.

“She’s been first at a lot of things,” says Tina Scott ’65, Dill’s freshman roommate and lifelong friend. A native of Long Island, Scott, who is white, recalls a letter she received from the University along with her roommate assignment.

“They sent me a letter asking my permission” to room with a black student, says Scott, a psychologist at a counseling and mental health center in Texarkana, Ark., marveling at the sweeping social change that’s taken place in her and Dill’s lifetimes. “She was amazingly resilient,” says Scott of Dill. “She made friends so easily.”

Dill’s time at Rochester coincided with the civil rights movement. She took part, organizing a University of Rochester chapter of Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization helping extend voting rights in the South.

Although she came to Rochester as a pre-med major, she decided to major in English, studied abroad in England, and by her senior year, was mulling over future plans that were always changing. “Every week I’d have a new plan,” she says, chuckling.

After graduation, she moved to New York City to work for the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal agency in charge of the programs that encompassed President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was here, she says, where she first started thinking about the role that social class played in the relative fortunes of Americans.

Her research on domestic workers, completed in 1979 and published in 1994 as the book Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants, is considered groundbreaking. It was among the earliest academic studies of black female household labor to be based on interviews with workers themselves—a pattern followed by many scholars since.

In leadership as well as scholarship, Dill takes an inclusive approach, bringing in voices that aren’t always heard.

“She has these wonderful interpersonal skills to make people feel that they’re cared for, and that they’re listened to,” says Zambrana. “It stands out. Few administrators really have it.”

Dill on The Help

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

Given her scholarship on black women domestic workers, Dill says she’s often asked about The Help—both the novel, a 2009 bestseller by Kathryn Stockett, and the film, an adaptation of the book that came out last summer, and earned blockbuster status.

In her novel, Stockett, who is white and grew up in Jackson, Miss., with the help and companionship of a black maid, took on the voice of three fictional black maids in Jackson in 1962, during the high tide of the civil rights movement.

Admirers were moved by the book, while critics found Stockett’s portrayal of black household workers presumptuous and demeaning.

Similar reactions accompanied the release of the film, and while they often followed racial lines, they didn’t always, with white as well as African-American entertainers, journalists, and academics on both sides of the debate.

Following the release of the film, the Association of Black Women Historians took the unusual step of issuing a formal statement. Both the book and the film ignored or downplayed much of what historians know about the actual lives of black women domestic workers, the scholars charged, including widespread participation in civil rights activism without prompting from white civil rights heroes.

Nonetheless, the film earned a number of accolades, including Best Picture, at the 2012 NAACP Image Awards. Actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a maid in the film) have dismissed critics. In February, Spencer told commentator Tavis Smiley that Stockett “had the insight to write about women whom we’ve not heard from.”

That’s exactly the kind of assertion that concerns Dill. “It isn’t as if the story of black domestic workers, from their perspective, has not been told. It has been told multiple times and in multiple ways,” she says.

Dill, who read the book but did not see the film, added: “I thought the book a good read. But from my perspective, its most important revelations are about the white women who lived in Jackson, and about the ways propriety, form, appearances, and denial helped them ignore the real experiences of the people they lived with—white and black—on a daily basis.”

“That the lives, speech, manners, and experiences of the black women are not fully understood or well represented; that they are not placed in historical context; that they exist as if this is the first and only effort to understand the experience of black women private household workers in the South, is inexcusable.”

—Karen McCally

Baffled Again

With his knack for searing cultural criticism and sharp business skills, John Summers ’06 (PhD) resurrects an iconic journal.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

BAFFLING & BELIEVING: “The nice thing about The Baffler is that you could read it, and you didn’t have to believe in any one kind of program,” says Summers. (Photo: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Images for Rochester Review)

(Photo: )

The return of The Baffler has set the blogosphere abuzz.

For a magazine that appeared only occasionally, The Baffler made a big splash in its brief heyday in the 1990s.

From its founding by Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank in 1988, until late 2010, it came out only 18 times—and just twice in the past decade.

Called “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” The Baffler’s fan base included some of the most prolific and well-known figures in contemporary American letters.

In late 2010, Frank, the Kansas native who penned the 2004 bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, conceded he’d be unable to sustain the journal. He called his friend and loyal Baffler contributor Chris Lehmann ’89 (MA) to seek advice.

“Tom called me in a dejected state,” says Lehmann, a veteran journalist who’s editor of Bookforum and formerly a managing editor at Yahoo News. “He said, ‘I can’t run this magazine anymore. Do you know anyone who might want to take over a political and literary journal, and is in a position to?’ That was probably the only time in my life when I was able to answer ‘yes’ to a question like that.”

John Summers ’06 (PhD) had paid Lehmann a visit in 2010. The two had known one another since the late 1990s when Summers, then a graduate student in history at Rochester, had invited history alumnus Lehmann to campus to deliver a talk. Summers had been planning to spearhead a new literary journal and sought Lehmann’s support.

Lehmann gave it. But after Frank called, he had new advice for Summers. “I said, ‘You can launch a brand new literary journal in a climate that’s not exactly ideal for publication launches, or you could take over this well-recognized brand within the same space you want to occupy.’”

When Summers received a phone call from Frank, “about five minutes into the phone call I said yes,” Summers says.

This March, The Baffler returns under Summers’s leadership as editor-in-chief and with a $500,000 publication contract with MIT Press to ensure the journal’s continuation and publication on a regular schedule for the next five years.

“It’s the largest deal in the history of MIT Press’s arts and humanities publishing,” says Summers, who adds that the journal, which boasts a Web, Facebook, and Twitter presence, will be available “on every digital platform.”

Lehmann, who’s senior editor of the revived Baffler, admits he’s amazed. “They were constantly trying to find some reliable funding stream,” Lehmann says of Frank and the other Baffler stakeholders. “He’s been amazing,” Lehmann says of Summers’s negotiation of the MIT Press contract. “For The Baffler, this is a huge breakthrough.”

The Baffler specializes in long-form journalism, each issue anchored by an essay of as many as 10,000 words. While it’s decidedly left-wing in its orientation, it’s not aimed at promoting any particular political program. Its defining characteristic is a relentless commitment to upending the ingrained—and in the view of Baffler editors, misguided—assumptions of political and economic elites of both major political parties, the media, and corporate boardrooms.

“The nice thing about The Baffler is that you could read it, and you didn’t have to believe in any one kind of program,” says Summers. “They weren’t socialists, or they weren’t anarchists, or they weren’t New Deal liberals, or 19th-century populists. They were a little bit of all of those things,” he says of past Baffler writers.

The March issue features “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” an essay in which anthropologist David Graeber (a key planner of the Occupy Wall Street protests) argues that by many measures, we are living in a time of markedly slow progress in technological innovation.

Frank contributes “Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly,” in which he argues that “a résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006” is not only forgiven, but a virtual prerequisite to being taken seriously in Washington today.

Additional essays by bestselling authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Rick Perlstein, as well as a section of fiction, poetry, and satirical art, round out the journal.

Summers is optimistic he can maintain, and even broaden The Baffler’s appeal. “Free market dogma is our sweet spot, wherever it is,” he says. Since the economic collapse of 2008, it’s hard to say there isn’t a market for criticisms of the free market.

It’s not just The Baffler that’s experiencing a big break, but Summers himself. Like many younger humanities scholars, he’s been without a full-time job, in his case despite stints as a part-time instructor at Harvard, Columbia, and Boston College, and multiple publications. He wrote an essay, “Gettysburg Regress,” which the late Christopher Hitchens included in The Best American Essays of 2010 (Mariner Books). He’s edited two collections of essays—one by the critic Dwight MacDonald, and another by the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, both of which earned him attention in outlets such as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He’s published a collection of his own essays, Every Fury on Earth (Davies Group,) and won a coveted publishing contract from Oxford University Press for his forthcoming biography of Mills, based on his dissertation in history at Rochester.

But, he says, “I didn’t write a dissertation that was calculated to try to favorably impress a hiring committee. I ended up writing a dissertation about a dead, white, male anarchist, in the form of a biography, which is just about the worst set of calculations you can make.”

He credits his mentors at Rochester for permitting him “the intellectual freedom to explore lots of different traditions. I’m very grateful for that. I’m grateful that I wasn’t told that I wasn’t allowed to write for the newspapers or for magazines,” he says, referring to members of the academy who discourage students from writing for nonacademic audiences.

Going from writer to editor means, of course, that he’ll be responsible for maintaining the journal’s voice. To keep it as brash and uncompromising as its readers have come to expect, he’ll need editorial independence.

As he continues to seek backers, he promises he’ll have it. From MIT Press, he’s got it. Says Summers: “It’s written in my own blood in the contract.”

That’s Sweet!

MEDALLION ‘TWOFER’: Two generations of the Sweet family have passed their 50th class reunions. (Photo: )

At last October’s Meliora Weekend, David Sweet ’61 received his University medallion along with other members of the class at his 50th reunion. His mother, Esther Webster Sweet ’36N, had received a medallion after the tradition began in 2005. David writes:

“During our medallion ceremony, I mentioned to President Seligman that I had the opportunity to bring my mother to a reunion of nursing program graduates, and after he had presented the 50th class reunion members with their medallions, he then presented my mother a medallion, although she was long past her 50th class reunion.

“At 96, she is probably one of oldest living alums of the nursing program. This year marks her 75th anniversary since graduating. She began her career in 1937 as assistant head nurse in the emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital and retired 37 years later as nursing supervisor of Strong’s Outpatient Clinic. As a proud son, I can report that she continues to be very active. I call her ‘the energizer bunny,’ for she is very active in her retirement community, singing in the choir, attending lectures and concerts at Youngstown State University, where I served as president for 10 years until retiring in July 2010, attending church and chapel on a regular basis, and taking part in many other activities.

“She continues to practice what she learned at Rochester and demonstrated during her career at Strong: being a caring and compassionate individual to everyone she meets. President Seligman remembered only one other ‘twofer’ family where he had presented medallions to two generations of Rochester graduates: the late Judge Robert Witmer ’26 and his son Bob ’59, a University trustee. The medallion ceremony is a great, relatively new, tradition established by President Seligman, and I hope he has the opportunity to recognize many ‘twofer’ families in the future!”

TRIBUTE

John Maloy: ‘A Prince Among Men’

LEADER IN VOICE: A distinguished vocal performer, Maloy chaired Eastman’s voice department for 25 years. (Photo: Eastman School)

John Maloy was a prince among men. A towering figure, over six feet tall and handsome as the devil, John, professor emeritus of voice at the Eastman School, was beloved by his colleagues and generations of students.

His natural elegance and dignity informed everything he did. Chair of the voice department from 1977 to 2002, John had a keen intellect and a sharp wit that combined to keep us—his faculty—on our toes. It was John to whom we turned for advice and guidance, whether about repertoire for students (his knowledge was voluminous) or matters of professional and personal concern. He inspired a kind of trust that we never questioned; what was discussed with Maloy stayed with Maloy. His integrity shaped the policies still in place defining faculty deportment and our sense of mission. The notion of service was innate in John, and he nurtured a work ethic that puts the students’ best interest first and personal credit last.

Before coming to Eastman in 1966, John Maloy had an illustrious career in opera and concert in Germany and Switzerland, during which he gave hundreds of performances, many broadcast over German and Austrian radio. Recent colleagues never heard John sing professionally, but when fellow Iowans could get a rousing “Iowa Corn Song” out of him at parties, the lustrous voice was still present.

His love of the German language and lieder became an enormous part of his teaching. John offered classes in lyric diction and private coaching to students from every studio—not just his own. The highest standard in performance set by Eastman’s prestigious Kneisel German Lieder competition comes directly from John. We will feel him with us every spring when that event fills Kilbourn Hall.

Never one to call attention to himself, John had a list of students that makes clear his gifts. The famous ones—Renee Fleming ’83E (MM), Anthony Dean Griffey ’01E (MM), Nicole Cabell ’01E—are known to many of us. But John was every bit as proud of every student he had. While he appreciated the greatest talents, and knew how to magnify their strengths, he had a magical touch with singers of all levels. His students’ recitals could be counted on to demonstrate the best in language and musicianship and the power of the human heart in song.

John died in January at the age of 81. While illness haunted his final years, he never lost the perceptive spark in his eyes, or his humor. A man of great character, John was self-effacing and quiet. His legacy has many voices, and his influence on our profession will endure.

—Carol Webber

Webber is a professor of voice at the Eastman School of Music.

TRIBUTE

Robert Ader: Medical Pioneer

PATHBREAKER: Ader pioneered the field of psychoneuroimmunology with work that he began 35 years ago. (Photo: Medical Center)

Robert Ader, who first joined the Medical Center faculty in 1957, was among the University’s most famous and distinguished scientists. Bob pioneered an entirely new field—psychoneuroimmunology—which, by the time it gained wide acceptance, signified a paradigm shift in our understanding of the immune system.

Thirty-five years ago, the immune system was viewed as a self-regulating, autonomous agency of defense. In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, however, Bob and his colleagues (I’m gratified that for 37 years, I was one of them) convincingly and reproducibly demonstrated that different immune responses could be regulated by classical—that is, Pavlovian—conditioning. In other words, since conditioning is learning that involves higher centers of the brain, conditioned immune modulation meant that there must be connections between the brain and the immune system.

The first publications of conditioned immunosuppression studies from the Ader lab were readily accepted by experimental psychologists who knew of Bob’s outstanding reputation in other areas of behavioral animal research. These same papers, however, were received by immunologists with skepticism if not outright disbelief; the dogma of an autonomous immune system was too well entrenched to be easily discarded. This, and the attendant difficulties of obtaining funding from the National Institutes of Health for new and suspect interdisciplinary research might have led a lesser scientist to abandon this new line of inquiry. Bob, however, persevered, and he and his colleagues continued to share their research results with the scientific community at national and international conferences and in leading peer-reviewed journals.

In 1981, Bob collected, edited, and published a set of chapters by scientists whose research was unified by the theme of nervous-immune system interactions. This first edition of Psychoneuroimmunology coalesced the young field and its contributors. Moreover, it added psychoneuroimmunology to the lexicon of science.

In 1987, he founded the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity and served as its editor-in-chief for 15 years. In 1993 he assumed a leadership role in forming the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society and served as its president and visionary during its early years.

Psychoneuroimmunology is now firmly accepted by basic scientists, and its place in medicine is becoming widely recognized. For example, clinicians now appreciate the important role that stress can play in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, and coronary artery disease that involve autoimmune or inflammatory processes. Knowledge of the connection between the brain and the immune system is also relevant for a better understanding of mood disorders. Finally, in recent years Bob was extending the conditioned immunosuppression model to the clinic to help reduce the total quantity of active drugs a patient needs for effective treatment.

Bob died last December at the age of 79. Thanks in large part to his pioneering research and strong leadership, the complexities of neural-immune system communication are now being explored at the organismic, cellular, and molecular levels by a critical mass of interdisciplinary scientists. Bob Ader will be missed, but his legacy will endure.

—Nicholas Cohen ’66 (PhD)

Cohen is a professor emeritus of microbiology and immunology and of psychiatry at the Medical Center.

Books & Recordings

Books

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

By Kenneth Gross

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Gross, professor of English at Rochester, explains the enduring appeal of puppets and puppetry in both theater and literature.

The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras

By Daniel R. Reichman

Cornell University Press, 2011

Reichman, assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester, explores the economic, social, and cultural consequences for a once stable coffee growing community in Honduras as it’s transformed and uprooted by globalization.

Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Farid and the Poetry of Recollection

By Th. Emil Homerin

SUNY Press, 2011

Homerin, professor of religion at Rochester, provides translations and close readings of works by the 13th-century Sufi poet, demonstrating the literary and religious intent of the poems, as well as their mystical content.

A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations

By Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo

Oxford University Press, 2012

Clarke and Primo, associate professors of political science at Rochester, challenge the pervasive practice of model testing in political science. Rather than testing models for their predictive value, the authors argue, models should be seen as neither true nor false, but instead as representations of reality that are useful for particular purposes.

The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time

By David Sloan Wilson ’71

Little, Brown & Co., 2011

In a case study of Binghamton, N.Y., Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, argues that research into human behaviors that are rooted in natural selection can be harnessed to improve built and social environments.

Personality Psychology: Foundations and Findings

By Marianne Miserandino ’82

Prentice-Hall, 2012

Miserandino, professor of psychology at Arcadia University, presents an overview of foundations and recent research in personality psychology. Topics include genetics, neuroscience, traits, self and identity, intrapsychic aspects, regulation, motivation, and cognition.

Dissecting American Health Care

By Douglas Kamerow ’78M (MD), ’83M (Res)

RTI Press, 2011

Kamerow, professor of clinical family medicine at Georgetown University and former assistant surgeon general, offers a collection of 47 essays on health and health politics and policy, tackling such subjects as alternative medicine, screening mammograms, and taxes on soda. The essays are based on Kamerow’s columns in the British Medical Journal and on his commentaries on National Public Radio.

The Between

By L. J. Cohen ’84

Interrobang Books, 2012

Physical therapist-turned-author Cohen presents her first published novel, a young adult fantasy. High school senior Lydia Hawthorne is torn into another world, the Between, on the border between the world of Faerie and Earthly life.

Labor and Delivery Care: A Practical Guide

By Wayne R. Cohen ’67 and Emanuel A. Friedman

Wiley-Blackwell, 2011

Cohen, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and women’s health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Friedman offer a guide to women in labor that emphasizes good communication with the patient—“the most important element of successful labor care”—as well as physical diagnostic skills.

A Pen Named Man: Our Purpose

By John W. Newton ’72

Resource Publications, 2011

Newton, a retired patent specialist at Eastman Kodak Research Labs, reflects on the nature of reality and the meaning and value of humankind’s experience on Earth.

The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, Volume I: Translation of Lucretius

Edited by Reid Barbour ’88 (PhD) and David Norbrook

Oxford University Press, 2012

Barbour, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Norbrook present the first segment in an eventual four-volume compilation of the works of the 17th-century author and translator Hutchinson. The volume, dedicated to Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, contains new biographical information and commentary.

Road to Armageddon

By Michael S. Speziale ’62

Lulu, 2011

Speziale, a former history teacher and administrator for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools, offers “personal observations and reflections on what I perceive as the mileposts along the path to the demise of modern American civilization over the past century.”

Heavenly Descants for Trumpet on 118 Hymn Tunes

By Susan Sievert Messersmith ’92E (MM)

Heavenly Descants Publications, 2011

In her first book of music, Messersmith, a faculty member at Charleston Southern University and conductor of its brass choir, offers a compilation of hymn descants for trumpet. The book is available in both C trumpet and B-flat trumpet editions.

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young

By Jeremy Grimshaw ’05E (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2011

Grimshaw, assistant professor of music at Brigham Young University, explores the life and work of pioneering minimalist composer La Monte Young. Based on interviews with Young and materials from his archives, Grimshaw examines seemingly disparate aspects of the composer’s work, including psychoacoustics, indeterminacy, and Vedic mysticism.

How Do I Hate Thee? A Sampler of Poetic Rage Against Cancer

By Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers ’78 (PhD)

Antrim House Books, 2011

Connecticut-based poet and psychologist Kincaid-Ehlers, responding to her diagnosis of lymphoma, transforms well-known verses by Yeats, Dickinson, Tennyson, and others, into defiant poems of rage against cancer.

Recordings

Dream a Little Dream

By the Jennifer Scott Trio

The Jazz Project, 2011

The Vancouver-based Jennifer Scott Trio, including Jud Sherwood ’89 on percussion, performs an eclectic selection of standards. The recording is produced by Sherwood, who directs the Jazz Project, a nonprofit that promotes jazz through concerts, recordings, and other forms of outreach.

What Is the Beautiful?

By the Claudia Quintet

Cuneiform, 2011

The Claudia Quintet, led by the composer and percussionist John Hollenbeck ’90E, ’91E (MM), performs music written by Hollenbeck and set to poems by Kenneth Patchen.

Metaphors

By John Arrucci ’80E

Twin Lakes Productions, 2011

Composer and percussionist Arrucci presents his debut recording of nine original compositions featuring bass marimba, vibes, cello, alto flute, and flugelhorn, in addition to piano, bass, and drums.

The Book of Goddesses

By Robert Paterson ’95E

American Modern Recordings, 2011

Composer Paterson presents three new works featuring the harp. The recording earned the Composer of the Year Award from the Classical Recording Foundation.

Music from the Americas

By the Lieurance Woodwind Quintet

Summit, 2011

Wichita State University’s Lieurance Quintet, which includes oboist Andrea Banke ’95E and hornist Nicholas Smith ’80E (DMA), performs selections by Liduino Pitombeira, Robert Muczynski, Alec Wilder, and others.

Fascinating Rhythm

By Frederick Hemke ’62E (MM) and the Figard String Quartet

Self-Published, 2011

Saxophonist and Northwestern University music professor Hemke joins the Figard String Quartet in performing arrangements of Gershwin classics, including A Foggy Day, Someone to Watch Over Me, and I Got Rhythm.

Going Solo

By Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio ’85E (MM)

MSR Classics, 2011

Sant’Ambrogio, violinist and assistant professor of the violin and viola at the University of Nevada, performs unaccompanied works by Ysaÿe, Telemann, Piazzolla, and others.

Philidor: Sancho Panca

By Elizabeth Calleo ’96E (MM), Tony Boutté ’84E (MM), Karim Sulayman ’98E, et al.

Naxos, 2011

Soprano Calleo and tenors Boutté and Sulayman join the Opera Lafayette Orchestra in the performance of Sancho Panca, the 18th-century French comic opera by François-André Danican Philidor based on an episode in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Christopher Theofanidis: Symphony No. 1

By Christopher Theofanidis ’92E (MM)

ASO Media, 2011

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Spano, presents the debut recording of the composer Theofanidis’s Symphony No. 1.

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.

Pain Reliever

Pain expert David Provenzano ’99M (MD) talks about the toll of chronic pain and progress in treating sufferers.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

(Photo: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

More than one in three American adults suffers from chronic pain, and that’s more than suffer from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. It’s at least 116 million people. And the cost of chronic pain is between $560 billion and $635 billion, including health care costs and lost productivity. This is according to an Institute of Medicine report issued in June 2011.

I started off as an orthopaedic resident. During my residency, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, we would rotate through the acute pain service. We saw how postoperative pain was managed, and you could see what a difference good pain control made to people’s outcomes. So I became very interested in that. I ended up switching to anesthesia, and was very interested in acute pain management, which follows surgical intervention. After that residency, which was at the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, I completed a pain fellowship at Dartmouth, which was more focused on chronic pain management. Today I practice both acute and chronic pain medicine.

If you have a fractured arm, you have a cast. If you have chronic pain, it’s not visible to the person looking at you. We need to be more aware of pain. In many areas of life, not just in health care, we don’t appreciate the burden on the patient and the family suffering from chronic pain. But if you look at quality of life scores for someone who has severe chronic pain, in many cases the scores are lower than those for people suffering from many other chronic medical conditions, including heart failure. If you look at the scores of people suffering from chronic nerve pain, for example, they’re terrible.

We often think of pain management as the last stop in the treatment algorithm. By the time the average person gets into a pain program, they’ve seen seven doctors. We really should be seen much earlier. Let’s take the scenario of a herniated disk. We know in this country that we operate way more than other countries for people who have back conditions, with no better outcomes. We also know statistically that a lot of people will get better with conservative care. If you have a herniated disk, there are many things I can do to help you while your body is recovering naturally. There are clearly some cases where surgery is needed, although more than 90 percent of people with herniated disks will get better through conservative care.

I use the analogy of chronic pain as a maze. You don’t know how to get to the end of it. So I do a lot of patient education in my practice and as part of the American Chronic Pain Association, where I’m a board member and past president. This is an organization founded by an individual with chronic pain. The whole goal of the association is to educate people, giving them the pros and cons of each treatment so they can have an educated conversation with their health care professional.

The field of pain medicine is still in an early stage. It’s an exciting time. We’re really advancing all factors of care for people—interventions, physical therapy, medications, and the psychology of pain control. The field is growing, and I think there’s a lot of future for it.

David Provenzano ’99M (MD)

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Executive Medical Director, Institute for Pain Diagnostics and Care, Ohio Valley General Hospital

On attending Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry: “The biopsycho- social model made me a much better doctor. That’s a huge thing in pain management.”

STUDENT LIFE

Taco Time!

(Photo: Adam Fenster)

TASTE OF HISTORY: Harman Brar ’15 and other Rochester students lined up 1,036 soft tacos in an attempt to break the world record for the longest line of tacos, which stands at 853. The February event was sponsored by the 2013 Class Council, whose members are submitting documentation of their achievement to the Guinness Book of World Records, hoping that Rochester will be declared the new holder of the record for longest taco line.