Rochester Review

November–December 2012, Volume 75, No. 2

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, Susan Hagen, Heather Hare, Peter Iglinski, Leslie Orr, Chris Roth, Leonor Sierra, and Brandon Vick

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

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

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2012 University of Rochester

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Rochester — City of Festivals

By Joel Seligman

Richard Florida, a popular student of American culture, recently characterized Rochester as one of the nation’s 10 leading cities for music in a survey he published in The Atlantic Cities. Florida explained: “Rochester might seem a surprise in ninth place. But the city has long had a distinguished symphony and it is home to the Eastman School of Music.”

Indeed, Rochester has become a City of Festivals. Consider the last few months. We celebrated the Memorial Art Gallery’s Clothesline Festival, the Corn Hill Arts Festival, and the Park Avenue Summer Art Festival. Film aficionados can take in the High Falls Film Festival and the Rochester International Film Festival. Music buffs delight in the East End Music Festival and the highly acclaimed Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, which last summer attracted more than 187,000 people from 30-plus states and 15 countries.

In September, the inaugural First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival further fortified Rochester on the nation’s cultural map. Produced by alumna Erica Fee ’98, the festival drew more than 33,000 people over five days, to a potpourri of nearly 200 performing attractions in 21 venues throughout downtown Rochester. The University was proud to host many of the festival’s performances in Eastman Theatre and on Gibbs Street, many of which featured our students, faculty, and staff. Planning is under way for Fringe Festival 2013.

We are unusual among United States universities in not having a typical homecoming weekend, but instead having our own intellectual feast, Meliora Weekend, which provided another stellar celebration this year.

Distinguished journalist Barbara Walters delivered a memorable keynote address to a sold-out audience at Eastman Theatre’s Kodak Hall. In comments marked by her charm, humor, and candor, Walters shared how she began her career in broadcasting and talked about where she believes journalism is headed.

The George Eastman Circle welcomed award-winning journalist Jim Lehrer, who has served as moderator of a dozen televised presidential debates, including this year’s first presidential debate on October 3. Lehrer was fascinating as he gave us an often humorous inside look at presidential debates over the years, including insights into the candidates, debate rules, and election-year politics.

Dean for Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies Tom DiPiero moderated this year’s Presidential Symposium on “The Humanities, Artistic Expression, and the Digital Age: Innovation and Opportunities,” with Stanley Fish, one of the nation’s most celebrated humanities professors; Duke University’s Katherine Hayles ’77 (PhD), critical theorist and influential scholar of digital humanities, electronic literature, and literature, science, and technology; and Tod Machover, director of MIT’s pathbreaking Media Lab and champion of Opera of the Future, which combines 21st-century music and technology. In another timely discussion, Bradford Berk, CEO of the Medical Center, Steve Goldstein, president and CEO of Strong Memorial and Highland Hospitals, Dennis Whalen, executive vice president of the Healthcare Association of New York State, and Wallace Johnson, director of the Center for Primary Care, analyzed the challenges posed by health care reform.

Arthur Miller ’56, ’08 (Honorary) focused Miller’s Court on “Intercollegiate Athletics–Who Are They Playing For?” as a way to examine big-time college athletics and its societal impact. Former New York Giant Harry Carson and University Athletic Director George VanderZwaag participated in a discussion addressing the educational versus commercial value of college sports, whether some athletes should be compensated for participation beyond the value of a full scholarship, and the role that the NCAA plays in governing college sports.

The opening concert for The Prismatic Debussy, a monthlong celebration of the 150th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s birth, highlighted Eastman Weekend. Eastman Weekend also recounted the legacy of the late Rayburn Wright ’43E, distinguished faculty member and Eastman alumnus, with an evening of jazz showcasing celebrated Eastman alumni soloists, talented students, and faculty.

When people ask why we live in Rochester, a compelling answer involves our culture. We are a city of extraordinary people who value music, art, great public and private schools, and the life of the mind. Festivals epitomize much of what is special about Rochester. To write that Rochester is a city of festivals is to recognize that Rochester is a city in which our culture, in the broadest sense, matters.

Letters

Where’s the Spirit in Big Data?

Thanks for the article about Big Data (September-October). It’s exciting that we are bringing computational systems approaches to illuminating human issues at the macro as well as the micro level.

You gave passing attention to the crucial role of intuition in asking the right questions and attending to the appropriate level of the patterns revealed. To me this is of equal or greater value as the computational side.

Another equally important aspect is the wisdom and psycho-spiritual maturity of the investigators and the users.

These matters are not so easily taught at universities. Our culture has siloed them into “religion,” “personal growth,” or “indigenous studies.” However, as spiritual leaders, artists, and shamans know, intuition and access to the transpersonal field are essential in mastering their disciplines.

We are beginning to know a great deal more about these aspects of being human. At the 2008 Seeds of Compassion gathering here in Seattle, several panels of scientists described their research on such questions as the impact of love on child health and brain development. One conclusion: compassion and a sense of belonging to a larger community expand intelligence and greatly affect how we use information.

To me, these are extremely important and relevant matters as Big Data becomes our powerful tool.

I’d like to know in what ways the University is also bringing these questions and relevant disciplines into your commendable and exciting focus on Big Data—and particularly into teaching.

Anne Morgan Stadler ’52

Lake Forest Park, Wash.

Where’s the Balance in the Budget?

I found the insights expressed in “At Issue: Election 2012” (September-October) quite interesting and balanced. Until I got to Professor [David] Primo’s remarks concerning the federal budget.

Recall that the budget was balanced as recently as 2000. Then a series of spectacularly wrong moves (a misdirected tax cut, expensive and unfunded wars) ballooned the deficit to spectacular levels. To call Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “the main drivers of the deficit” seems spectacularly one-sided.

Professor Primo could have at least called for the “political courage” to remove the ill-conceived Bush tax cuts as another means of attacking the budget problem.

Another thing: everyone who laments the costs of social programs seems to (conveniently) forget that huge tax receipts are generated to fund these programs. At least, for full honesty, report the net costs of these programs, and stop pretending that the budgetary outflows are the only side of the story.

Norman Bloch ’66 (PhD)

Okatie, S.C.

lettersA painting by Sidney E. King at the Berkeley Plantation depicts the birth of “Taps.” (Photo: Berkeley Plantation)

There’s More History to ‘Taps’

Your article on the history of “Taps” (Alumni Gazette, September-October) was much appreciated. I was particularly interested because I spent several years, after arriving at Union College in 1988, re-establishing a geology department, in Butterfield Hall on the Union campus.

The building was a gift of the widow of Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield to his alma mater, and housed both civil engineering and the renascent geology department at that time. One of the first things I learned after arriving was the connection between General Butterfield and “Taps.” Butterfield was Hooker’s, then Meade’s, chief of staff in 1863. He was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, and he had an active military record during prior Civil War engagements.

The comments concerning the stylistic elements in the playing of “Taps” are well taken. They could equally well be applied to “performances” of our national anthem, though I very much doubt that will happen any time soon.

George Shaw ’67

Schenectady, N.Y.

The writer is a professor emeritus of geology at Union College.

A very interesting article on the origin of “Taps.” The event described took place on the Berkeley Plantation, aka Harrison’s Landing, on the north shore of the James River in Charles City County in Virginia, very near Hopewell and downstream from Richmond.

There is another first that took place there 233 years earlier on Dec. 4, 1619. That event was the first officially recorded thanksgiving service by English settlers in the American Colonies. The instructions given to the colonists by the English proprietors of the colony were:

“Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to almighty God.”

That observance occurred a year before the Pilgrims landed and two years before the Plymouth Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, the Berkeley settlers were killed in an Indian uprising in 1622, and the tradition died with them. For the past 50 years that first thanksgiving has been celebrated at Berkeley Plantation on the first Saturday in November.

Woodlief Thomas ’58 (MS)

Naples, N.Y.

Department of Corrections

The cofounders of Western Union in Rochester were Hiram Sibley and Don Alonzo Watson, not James Watson, as you state in the caption on page 34 (“A Great Gift to the City,” September-October). The picture you show is Don Alonzo Watson, not his son James Sibley Watson.

Elizabeth Brayer

Rochester

The writer is the author of George Eastman: A Biography, originally published by the University of Rochester Press in 1996 and published this fall in a new paperback edition.

No doubt I am among the many to point out that the date (July 2, 1852) in the article on “Taps” is off by 10 years. Not for nothing did I receive an MA in American history from Rochester.

This was a good issue. I also liked the article “The Pilgrim” (Alumni Gazette) and, especially, “A Great Gift to the City.” I visited the Memorial Art Gallery many times and may now have to return someday.

Beverly Offen ’65 (MA)

Glenview, Ill.

Editor Scott Hauser writes: “Several readers caught our mistake in the date for the first playing of ‘Taps’ during the Civil War. The correct year is, of course, 1862. A late editing error—fuzzy math meets fuzzy history meets the fat fingers of a deadline—resulted in the mistake.”

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.

EARTH & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Top of the World

arctic (Photo: John Tarduno)

ARCTIC EXPLORATION: Undergraduate majors in geological sciences found their classroom in the High Arctic this summer, when they accompanied geophysics professor John Tarduno on an expedition funded by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the expedition was to examine an episode of extreme Arctic warmth about 90 million years ago—as evidenced by a spectacular assemblage of vertebrate fossils, including turtles and champosaurs, extinct crocodile-like reptiles—and to test whether the period was related to an episode of volcanic carbon dioxide emission. Here, students Alayna Callanan ’14 of Boxford, Mass. (left), Jenna Kaempfer ’15 of Fort Collins, Colo., and Robert McKinley ’13 of Rockport, Maine, examine aerial photos as part of a geological mapping exercise.

FRINGE FESTIVAL

High-Flying Debut

fringe (Photo: Adam Fenster)

AERIAL DANCE: For five days in September, Rochester’s performing and visual arts scene took on a new facet, with the launch of the first First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival. With almost 200 performances—including an excerpt of “Bound(less),” a large-scale, vertical dance performance by the group Bandaloop—the festival drew an audience of more than 33,000. Theater producer Erica Fee ’98 returned from London to lead the effort to create a fringe festival in Rochester, and the University sponsored and supported about 30 shows.

STUDENT LIFE

Star Struck

shinn (Photo: Adam Fenster)

KOREA BOUND: Brian Shin ’15 of Temecula, Calif., is spending part of this fall in Korea, where he’s competing on KPop Star, an American Idol-style reality television competition. Chosen from a pool of nearly 400 people during auditions in New York City, the international relations and Asian studies major charmed producers with acoustic guitar renditions of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” After Shin passed the first round of auditions in New York, producers from the show traveled to the University to capture a slice of Shin’s life on campus. Contestants on KPop Star sing or dance, hoping to land a coveted contract with one of Korea’s three largest record labels.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Healthy—and Humorous—Debate

cartoons (Photo: Adam Fenster)

PAGE TURNER: Featuring more than 200 examples of editorial cartoons, a new history offers an entertaining review of 100 years of often rancorous wrangling over health care reform. “Unlike the pain involved in our political struggle, cartoons deliver their uncomfortable truths with such irreverent wit and visual imagination that you can’t help but chuckle,” says Theodore Brown, a historian of medicine, public health, and health policy at Rochester. He is one of four authors of The Quest for Health Care Reform: A Satirical History, published in October by the American Public Health Association.

BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Anticipation . . . Is Keeping Me Waiting

Taking a new look at a famous study, Rochester researchers suggest that a reliable environment is at least as important as self-control when it comes to delaying gratification.

By Susan Hagen

marshmallowSO TEMPTING: Four-year-old Evelyn Rose of Brighton, N.Y., reenacts an experiment in a new Rochester study indicating that children’s ability to delay gratification is influenced as much by their environment as it is by their innate ability to wait. The finding significantly revises conclusions of a landmark study from the 1960s. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel and other researchers at Stanford famously showed that individual differences among preschool-age children in the ability to delay gratification correlated strongly with success in later life. Longer wait times as a child were linked years later to higher SAT scores, less substance abuse, and parental reports of better social skills.

Because of the surprising correlation, the landmark “marshmallow studies”—children were presented with the choice of eating one marshmallow immediately or holding out for two later—have been cited as evidence that qualities such as self-control or emotional intelligence may be more important to navigating life successfully than more traditional measures of intelligence, such as IQ.

Now a new Rochester study indicates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus 3 minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations.

“Our results definitely temper the popular perception that marshmallow-like tasks are very powerful diagnostics for self-control capacity,” says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences and lead author of the study published online in the journal Cognition.

“Being able to delay gratification—in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow—not only reflects a child’s capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting,” says Kidd. “Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay.”

The findings provide an important reminder about the complexity of human behavior, adds coauthor Richard Aslin, the William R. Kenan Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This study is an example of both nature and nurture playing a role,” he says. “We know that to some extent, temperament is clearly inherited because infants differ in their behaviors from birth. But this experiment provides robust evidence that young children’s actions are also based on rational decisions about their environment.”

In his original experiment, Mischel set out to understand why some people can postpone gratification while others give in. As he continued to track the children in the 1980s, he found that the preschoolers who waited to earn a second treat seemed to be more socially competent and to achieve more scholastically, with average SAT scores more than 200 points higher. “Based on these findings,” Kidd and Aslin write in their paper, “the marshmallow task was argued to be a powerful diagnostic tool for predicting personal well-being and later life achievement”—a yardstick by which to measure self-control as an enduring and inherent personal trait.

For the new study, the Rochester team wanted to explore more closely whether the social environment of preschoolers influences why some are able to resist the marshmallow while others succumb to licking, nibbling, and eventually swallowing the sugary treat. The researchers assigned 28 three- to five-year-olds to two contrasting environments: unreliable and reliable. The study results were so strong that a larger sample group wasn’t required to ensure statistical accuracy. In both groups the children were given a “create-your-own-cup” kit and asked to decorate a blank paper that would be inserted into a cup.

In the unreliable condition, the children were provided a container of used crayons and told that if they could wait, the researcher would return shortly with a bigger and better set of new art supplies for their project. After two-and-a-half minutes, the researcher returned, apologizing that there were no other art supplies after all.

Next a quarter-inch sticker was placed on the table, and the children were told that if they could wait, the researcher would return with a large selection of better stickers to use. After the same wait, the researcher again returned empty handed.

The reliable group experienced the same set up, but the researcher returned with the promised materials: first with a rotating tray full of art supplies and the next time with five to seven large stickers.

The marshmallow task followed, with the explanation that the child could have “one marshmallow right now. Or—if you can wait for me to get more marshmallows from the other room—you can have two marshmallows to eat instead.” The researcher removed the art supplies and placed a single marshmallow in a small dessert dish directly in front of the child.

Kids danced in their seats, sang, and took pretend naps. Several took a bite from the bottom of the marshmallow then placed it back in the dessert cup so it looked untouched.

“We had one little boy who grabbed the marshmallow immediately, and we thought he was going to eat it,” recalls Kidd. But he sat on it. “Instead of covering his eyes, he covered the marshmallow.”

Children who experienced unreliable interactions with an experimenter waited for a mean time of three minutes and two seconds on the marshmallow task, while youngsters who experienced reliable interactions held out for 12 minutes and 2 seconds. Only one of the 14 children in the unreliable group waited the full 15 minutes, compared to nine children in the reliable condition.

“I was astounded that the effect was so large,” says Aslin. “I thought that we might get a difference of maybe a minute or so. You don’t see effects like this very often.”

In prior research, children’s wait time averaged between 5.71 and 6.08 minutes, the authors report. By comparison, manipulating the environment doubled wait times in the reliable condition and halved the time in the unreliable scenario.

The robust environmental effect provides strong evidence that the wait times reflect the children’s rational decision making about the probability of reward, the authors conclude. The results are consistent with other research showing that children are sensitive to uncertainty in future rewards.

So does that mean that if little ones gobble up dessert without waiting, parents should worry that they have failed to be role models of reliability?

“Children do monitor the behavior of parents and adults, but it’s unlikely that they’re keeping detailed records of every single action,” says Aslin. “It’s the overall sense of a parent’s reliability or unreliability that’s going to get through, not every single action.”

Adds Kidd: “Don’t do the marshmallow test on your kitchen table and conclude something about your child. It especially would not work with a parent, because your child has all sorts of strong expectations about what a person who loves them very much is likely to do.”

VISION SCIENCE

Stars in Your Eyes

williamsDavid Williams (Photo: Adam Fenster)

One of the world’s leading experts on human vision, David Williams—the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics—has pioneered new technologies that are improving eyesight for people who are legally blind and those with 20/20 vision alike. And he’s done it by applying methods of astronomers to the terrain of the eye.

In September, Williams received the António Champalimaud Vision Award in Lisbon, Portugal, in recognition of his work on adaptive optics. In awarding the prize, the jury said that Williams and his research group have “set the stage for current approaches to vision correction and have opened up new possibilities for imaging retinal structures in the living eye.”

With a prize of 1 million euros, the award recognizes contributions to vision research and is the largest in vision science and ophthalmology. Williams receives half the prize, which will support his future research; he shares the award with developers of optical coherence tomography, another method of imaging the retina that has improved the diagnosis and clinical management of retinal disease.

Williams says that “this technology makes it possible for us to image the retina with unsurpassed resolution and moves us further down the path to the understanding of retinal disease.”

Adaptive optics was first developed by astronomers so that telescopes could see more clearly through the Earth’s atmosphere. The technologies that Williams and his group developed apply these techniques to the eye, making it possible to image individual retinal cells—down to individual photoreceptors in the living human retina—by looking through the pupil. The group developed techniques that not only can modify the light leaving the eye to obtain better pictures of the retina but also can modify the light going into the eye to achieve better vision. The methods that Williams’s team developed are used throughout the world in Lasik procedures today.

Williams, whose primary appointment is in the Institute of Optics, is dean for research in Arts, Sciences & Engineering. He joined the faculty in 1981 and is also director of the Center for Visual Science, a research program bringing together 30 faculty members from five departments to understand how we see and the disorders that compromise sight.

While Williams has led the way, he notes that the effort was by no means his alone. He calls the discoveries in adaptive optics that the Champalimaud Award honors the “work of many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and colleagues over two decades.

“It is great for our whole community that the achievements and potential of adaptive optics for vision are showcased with this award.”

—Leonor Sierra

DISCOVER

Geneticists Verify Cholesterol-Cancer Link

Could cholesterol-lowering drugs be part of the future battle against cancer? Rochester scientists are adding new genetic evidence to a long-debated medical question.

In a new study, Hartmut (Hucky) Land, the Robert and Dorothy Markin Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Genetics, and coauthor Bradley Smith, a postdoctoral fellow in Land’s lab, found that defective cholesterol exportation from cells appears to be a key component in a variety of cancers.

Published in the online journal Cell Reports, the data support several recent population-based studies that suggest people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs may have a reduced risk of cancer and, conversely, that people with the highest levels of cholesterol seem to have an elevated risk of cancer.

The cancer-cholesterol question has been debated since the early 20th century. But until now, genetic evidence directly linking cholesterol and malignancy has been lacking, says Land, who is scientific director of the Wilmot Cancer Center.

Millions of Americans take cholesterol-lowering drugs or statins, as prescribed by physicians. Clinical trials also are evaluating statins as a tool against cancer, and some previous studies suggest that when used in combination with chemotherapy, statins might make chemotherapy more effective by sensitizing certain cancer cells to chemotherapy-induced cell death.

Land, however, urges caution and further study. “The link between cholesterol and cancer is clear,” he says, “but it’s premature to say that statins are the answer.”

—Leslie Orr

discoverTO THE RESCUE: Bacteria have consumed more than 200,000 tons of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon spill. (Photo: United States Navy)

Bacterial Clean-Up Crew Attacks Oil Spill

Naturally occurring bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico consumed and removed at least 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas that spewed into the gulf following the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill.

That’s according to a study by Rochester scientist John Kessler, associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and a researcher at Texas A&M University. The pair analyzed an extensive data set to determine not only how much oil and gas was eaten by bacteria, but also how the characteristics of the feast changed with time.

Published in Environmental Science and Technology, the results include the first measurements of how the rate at which the bacteria ate the oil and gas changed as the disaster progressed, information that’s fundamental to understanding the spill and predicting the behavior of future spills.

“A significant amount of the oil and gas that was released was retained within the ocean water more than one-half mile below the sea surface. It appears that the hydrocarbon-eating bacteria did a good job of removing the majority of the material that was retained in these layers,” says Kessler, coauthor of the study.

—Leonor Sierra

Protein Helps DNA Repair in Aging Cells

Scientists have long wondered why cells lose their ability to repair themselves as they age. Now research by Rochester scientists has uncovered two intriguing clues.

DNA strands in human cells routinely break and repair themselves, but as cells age, the repair system becomes less efficient, and flaws in the process lead to a decline in functionality and an increase in the incidence of tumors. T

o find out whether the process could be slowed or even reversed, biologists Andrei Seluanov, Vera Gorbunova, and colleagues found that the decline coincided with a global reduction in the levels of proteins involved in the repair process. The group tried to reverse the age-related decline by restoring the proteins to their original levels and found that only one protein, called SIRT6, proved effective.

The work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team plans to study factors regulating SIRT6. Seluanov says that multiple groups are trying to develop drugs that activate the protein, and he hopes the research will lead to therapies that help extend lifespans and treat cancer.

—Peter Iglinski

discoverARRESTING: Researchers have found a location in a gene of the flu virus that could be a “switch” to turn off its ability to spread. (Photo: Photo Researchers)

Is There an ‘Off Switch’ for the Flu?

Rochester scientists have helped identify a location in a gene of the influenza A virus that could be used as a “switch” to disrupt the replication of the virus. If a way can be found to manipulate the switch in an organism, the researchers say it could have important implications for stopping the spread of the flu.

Conducted by Douglas Turner, professor of chemistry, and colleagues Walter Moss, Lumbini Dela-Moss, and Salvatore Priore at Rochester, and chemists Ryszard Kierzek and Elzbieta Kierzek at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan, the work singled out messenger RNA, which is key to the production of two proteins the virus needs to propagate. To produce the second protein, the messenger RNA has to undergo the process of splicing, in which two remote sites of the long molecule join together, while the intervening segment is discarded.

“We look at one of the splicing sites as a potential switch,” says Turner. “If we can inactivate the switch to prevent the two sites from coming together, we can stop the virus from spreading.”

The research was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

—Peter Iglinski

A Brain-Cleansing Discovery

A previously unrecognized system that drains waste from the brain has been discovered by neuroscientists at the Medical Center. The highly organized system acts like a series of pipes that piggyback on the brain’s blood vessels, sort of a shadow plumbing system that seems to serve much the same function in the brain as the lymph system does in the rest of the body—to drain away waste products.

“Waste clearance is of central importance to every organ, and there have been long-standing questions about how the brain gets rid of its waste,” says Maiken Nedergaard, the Frank P. Smith Professor of Neurosurgery and senior author of the research, which was published online in Science Translational Medicine. “This work shows that the brain is cleansing itself in a more organized way and on a much larger scale than has been realized previously.

“We’re hopeful that these findings have implications for many conditions that involve the brain, such as traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease,” she adds. Nedergaard’s team has dubbed the new system “the glymphatic system,” since it acts much like the lymphatic system but is managed by brain cells known as glial cells.

Scientists have known that cerebrospinal fluid plays an important role in cleansing brain tissue, carrying away waste products and carrying nutrients to brain tissue through a process known as diffusion. The newly discovered system circulates the fluid to every corner of the brain much more efficiently.

“It’s as if the brain has two garbage haulers—a slow one that we’ve known about, and a fast one that we’ve just met,” says Nedergaard. “Given the high rate of metabolism in the brain, and its exquisite sensitivity, it’s not surprising that its mechanisms to rid itself of waste are more specialized and extensive than previously realized.”

—Tom Rickey

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

A Hundred Years and Counting

The Memorial Art Gallery celebrates its centennial.

In October 2013, the Memorial Art Gallery will mark the centenary of its founding. And the gallery is celebrating with yearlong festivities, culminating in the opening of its new Centennial Sculpture Park next October. The permanent collection of 12,000 works spans 50 centuries of world art. The gallery’s director, Grant Holcomb, and curators have chosen the “MAG Top 100”—a hundred works of special note. Here is a sampling. To see the full list, visit http://magart.rochester.edu/PRT2070.

1914

Memory

William Ordway Partridge

Emily Sibley Watson, founder of the gallery, selected sculptor William Ordway Partridge to create a memorial for her son, James George Averell, who died in 1904 of typhoid fever. The figure of a robed woman cradling a funeral urn is sculpted from Carrara marble; a portrait relief of Averell is located on the base. (Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

ca. 1885

Stained Glass Window

Tiffany Studios

This window was created by Louis Comfort Tiffany for the Corn Hill home of Rochester tycoon William Kimball, owner of the Kimball Tobacco Factory. The house was demolished in the mid 20th century, when Interstate 490 was built; Harold Rand ’34 rescued the window. (Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

1984

Dr. Caligari

Wendell Castle

This sculpture, made from curly cherry veneer, ebony, and gold-plated brass, was inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent horror film from 1920. Based in Rochester, Wendell Castle is a leading figure in American craft and art furniture. He has been commissioned to create a monumental cast-iron sculpture as an anchor installation of the new Centennial Sculpture Park. (Photo: Copyright Wendell Castle Inc.)

ca. 1852

Peeling Onions

Lilly Martin Spencer

When Lilly Martin Spencer could not find patrons for her depictions of allegorical and literary subjects, she turned to an area more accepted for a woman artist: domestic scenes. In this oil-on-canvas painting, she shows a cook wiping away tears with the back of her hand—simultaneously showing female labor and playing off sentimental images of women. (Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

1900–1905

Sullivan Street

Everett Shinn

This oil-on-canvas scene of a poor, immigrant neighborhood in Greenwich Village, with Washington Square Park’s trees just visible at the end of the street, is a good example of Everett Shinn’s depiction of the bleaker sides of urban life. (Photo: Memorial Art Gallery)

IN BRIEF

New Dean for School of Nursing

inbriefON THE JOB: Kathy Rideout, the new dean of the School of Nursing, checks on Maiya Colon, her patient in Strong Memorial Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, along with parents Maria and Wil Colon. (Photo: Ken Huth)

Kathy Rideout ’95W (EdD), ’03 (FLW) has become the new dean for the School of Nursing. Rideout, a pediatric nurse practitioner at Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong, has served as an associate professor of clinical nursing and in administrative roles at the school over the last 26 years. Previously, she was the school’s senior associate dean for academic affairs.

As dean, Rideout will continue to work part time as a pediatric ostomy nurse practitioner, a position that she maintained while serving as interim dean from September 2011 until her permanent appointment. “Kathy cherishes her role of working with children and families,” said Medical Center CEO Bradford Berk ’81 (MD/PhD) at the August announcement of Rideout’s appointment. “It’s intrinsic to who she is and further demonstrates the patient-centered focus she brings to preparing the nurses of tomorrow. “It’s rare to find an administrator who works so hard to remain at the bedside as she does, and in doing so, she truly embodies the School’s unification model of practice, education, and research.”

Catherine Cerulli Leads Susan B. Anthony Center

inbriefLEADER: Catherine Cerulli will lead the Anthony Center. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Catherine Cerulli, an academic and legal leader with more than two decades of commitment to battling domestic violence and victimization, is the new director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership. She succeeds Nora Bredes, who led the center from 1999 to 2011, when she died of complications from breast cancer.

Cerulli joined the University in 2002 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry. Most recently, she served as the director of the University’s Laboratory of Interpersonal Violence and Victimization and had joint appointments as director of research at the Women, Children, and Social Justice Clinic, which she cofounded in 1992 at SUNY Buffalo’s School of Law.

Admissions Adopts Test Flexible Policy

This fall, the Admissions Office became “test flexible,” allowing applicants to the undergraduate College of Arts, Sciences & Engineering to submit national or international test results other than the SAT or ACT along with their secondary school records of courses and grades. Adoption of the policy comes after an eight-year pilot phase. Since 2004, Admissions has incorporated many kinds of test score submissions into the application review process, but had always required students to submit an SAT or ACT score before applications were deemed complete. Under the new policy, applicants for admission will be eligible for review after sending one of several examination options and no longer must include SAT or ACT scores.

New Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Appointed

inbriefBRIDGES: C. Denise Yarbrough fosters interfaith connections. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The Rev. C. Denise Yarbrough—a scholar, educator, and leader in the Episcopal Church and greater Rochester religious community—has been appointed as the new director of religious and spiritual life. Yarbrough will support the University’s many faith communities housed at the Interfaith Chapel. She will also create programming that addresses the spiritual and religious needs of students, faculty, and staff.

For the past eight years, Yarbrough has served as the canon for interfaith and ecumenical relations of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester. In that role, she serves as chair or member of several committees focused on advancing multifaith relationships and dialogue. At the University, she will support the work of the campus ministries and chaplains and create opportunities for interfaith work and conversations. With more than a decade of teaching experience, she will also hold a position in the Department of Religion and Classics.

Rochester Joins Global Scholarship Program

The Davis United World College Scholarship Program has welcomed Rochester as a new partner. The largest international undergraduate scholarship program in the world, the program has increased global diversity on campuses in the United States by awarding more than $70 million to more than 4,000 disadvantaged students from United World College high schools since 2000. The high schools are in places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, China, Norway, and Swaziland.

A Keeper of University History

inbriefRARE FINDS: Melissa Mead is the new University archivist. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Melissa Mead has been named the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian. Mead, who has worked in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation for 16 years, succeeds Nancy Martin, who is retiring after serving as archivist since 2000.

Most recently, Mead—who earned her master’s of library science degree from Columbia University—served as digital and visual resources librarian. During that time, she was responsible for creating, preserving, and making accessible digitized materials from the archives and from other department holdings. A large part of her job has been collaborative. In addition to working with faculty, staff, and students, she provides assistance to scholars and researchers in search of primary sources. She has collaborated on exhibits on University and Rochester history, including several for the University’s sesquicentennial celebration in 2000. She received the University’s Meliora Award in 2010.

Wilmot Cancer Center Expands

In July, Wilmot Cancer Center expanded, opening a 100,000-square-foot, four-floor extension. Begun in late 2010, the additional floors allow for the relocation of two inpatient units from Strong Memorial Hospital to the center: the Samuel E. Durand Blood and Marrow Transplant unit and the adult hematology/oncology unit. With the additions, the Wilmot Cancer Center has become a comprehensive cancer hospital, offering a full continuum of inpatient and outpatient care. The two inpatient floors, designed in response to patient feedback, feature many patient- and family-centered amenities, including pull-out beds for family, laundry facilities, and an exercise room.

Riding a Path to Market?

FUNDING OPPORTUNITY: A student-designed device that allows people with limited use of their hands to control a recumbent three-wheeled cycle (above) may soon be commercially available, thanks to an innovative funding mechanism. The project, developed by a team of biomedical engineering students, is the second to be identified by Innovocracy, a crowdfunding platform established to give boosts to small-scale, academically developed projects that can benefit society. Created last year, Innovocracy has also funded a project by Daniel Mruzek, associate professor of pediatrics, and Stephen McAleavey, associate professor of biomedical engineering, who developed a toilet-training device to help children with autism who are not always able to alert caregivers when they need to use the bathroom.

MEDICAL CENTER

Work Begins on Golisano Children’s Hospital

By Heather Hare

golisanoHEALING ARTS: Plans for a new Golisano Children’s Hospital (shown here in architectural renderings) include graphical elements, art, and other features that are designed to help create a soothing and engaging environment for children and their families. (Photo: Ballinger Architects)

Golisano Children’s Hospital is well known in upstate and western New York as a place of healing.

Now planners for a new, $145 million building for the hospital are turning to the region itself for inspiration, drawing on the area’s art, décor, and architectural and environmental features to create an interior designed to help heal and soothe children and their families.

Ground was broken in September for the building, which will include eight floors and approximately 245,000 square feet of space dedicated to children and their families. The hospital is named for B. Thomas Golisano, the founder and chairman of Paychex Inc. He pledged $20 million to jump-start fundraising for the new building.

The campaign for a new children’s hospital, the largest single capital project in the University’s history, is part of the Medical Center’s $650 million campaign, which is a key component of the University’s $1.2 billion initiative, The Meliora Challenge.

Each floor of the new hospital is designed with a different theme—including waterways, meadows, gardens, and parks—intended to provide creative opportunities to engage children of all ages. For example, children may be able to push buttons to make bubbles rise through tubes in the wall, evoking images of lakes. In patient rooms, glass frosted with leaves may cast shadows on the floor, creating an imaginary park path.

“We want very ill children to feel soothed, but we want children who aren’t as sick to be as engaged as possible, exploring interactive wall art and kicking leaf shadows down the path of their unit,” says Elizabeth Lattimore, chief administrative officer for the hospital. “We have been careful to make the design appealing to young children while also making it interesting to teenagers and caregivers so our older patients and their families know this is their hospital, too.”

HONOREES

Alumni Yellowjackets Inducted into Hall of Fame

hof (Photo: Susan Kost)

INDUCTEES: Joining the Athletics Hall of Fame during Meliora Weekend this fall were (front row) Matthew Jackson ’91 (lacrosse), Julianna Myers Bourne ’94 (swimming), Lisa Allen Weld ’96 (soccer), Brian Miga ’71 (football), Michael Fedorshyn ’49, ’60W (MA) (basketball); (back row) Dennis Braniecki ’91 (football), Todd Barth ’84 (swimming), Eric Lutz ’83 (track and cross country), Gisli Hjalmtysson ’87 (soccer), Todd Przybycien [accepting for Edward Przybycien ’58, ’62W (MA)], and Isaac Collins ’94 (football).

HIGHLIGHTS

Four Teams Earn Top Rankings

A total of four Yellowjacket teams were ranked among the best in the country this fall, including the first-ever Top 20 ranking of the Rochester field hockey team. Also earning national rankings were men’s soccer and the men’s and women’s cross country teams.

Men’s cross country: With four runners placing among the top eight individuals, the Yellowjackets captured the New York State Collegiate Track Conference title in late October, Rochester’s first state title since 2008, its 12th since 1987, and its 14th overall. John Bernstein ’14 and Adam Pacheck ’15 earned first team All–New York State honors for the Yellowjackets, who were ranked 22nd nationally going into states.

Football: Heading into November, the Yellowjackets were looking to finish strong with Liberty League matchups against Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Hobart College. Rochester opened the season with a win against Thiel College. In the second week, Rochester lost to St. John Fisher College in the final Courage Bowl when the Cardinals rallied in the fourth quarter for a 20–16 win. For a homecoming performance that included seven tackles and a fumble recovery, linebacker Thomas Marone ’16 earned “Rookie of the Week” honors from the Liberty League.

Golf: The team qualified for next spring’s Liberty League match play championships with a third-place showing at this fall’s Liberty League championships. Nick Palladino ’14 took second place with a minus-1 score of 70 on day two, tying the lowest score of the tournament. He earned first team All–Liberty League honors while Dom Schumacher ’16 and G. W. VanderZwaag ’16 were named to the second team.

Men’s soccer: Riding a seven-game unbeaten streak in October, a stretch that included a win and two ties against Top 10 teams, the Yellowjackets returned to the national rankings as the season was coming to a close. Jack Thesing ’15 was named UAA Soccer Offensive Player of the Week for his performance in Rochester’s wins against then fifth-ranked Carnegie Mellon and against Emory, both on the road.

Men’s tennis: The Yellowjackets finished the fall portion of their schedule with a 9–0 victory over St. John Fisher, getting straight set wins from all six singles players and winning all three doubles matches. Matthew Levine ’16 was a two-time UAA Athlete of the Week.

Women’s cross country: Lauren Norton ’13 became Rochester’s first individual women’s cross country champion in 25 years as she led nearly the entire way at the New York State Collegiate Track Conference women’s cross country championships in late October. The last Yellowjacket woman to take the title was Josefa Benzoni ’88, ’92W (MAT) in 1987. The Yellowjackets were ranked 31st nationally in late October.

Field hockey: Rochester set a record for the most wins in a season with 14, with one regular season game left in late October, earning a spot in the Liberty League playoffs. Ranked as high as 18th in the nation, the Yellowjackets have been paced by Shelby Hall ’13 with 17 goals through late October and Michele Relin ’16 with 15. Hall, who scored three goals against Ithaca and had an assist in the team’s homecoming win against Morrisville State, was named league Player of the Week.

Women’s soccer: Going into the last week of the season, the Yellowjackets were 3–10–1 overall. Grace Van der Ven ’14 led the team with 21 shots on goal, followed by Christine Keck ’13 with 20.

Women’s tennis: Julia Weaver ’16 and Janice Zhao ’14 earned singles wins at the Bowdoin Invitational in October, a three-day event featuring a round robin format with four strong women’s teams from across the northeast. Joining Rochester were Bowdoin, Wellesley, and Bates. Frances Tseng ’13 reached the semifinals of the ITA Northeast regionals.

Volleyball: The Yellowjackets improved to 18–9 with a strong showing at senior day. The 3–1 win over Nazareth College was the last match before Rochester headed to the UAA championships at Emory University in early November. In their final home matchup, seniors Kelly Mulrey finished with a match-high 23 kills while Alma Guevara added seven. Lauren Bujnicki had 24 digs. Meghan Neff had three kills and two block assists and Claire Donohue had four kills.

Ciao, Arezzo!

A Rochester-only study abroad program provides a unique semester of Italian history and culture.

Story and photographs by Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5)

arezzoMARKET MEETING: Students and faculty taking part in this fall’s Arezzo program gather for a group photo at Trajan’s Market, a complex of buildings dating to first-century Rome. (Photo: Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5))

“What are we looking at?”

Professor Renato Perucchio asks the question as we walk through a gap in a crumbling wall and into a large, roofless, rectangular enclosure among the ruins of the ancient Roman port city of Ostia.

Perucchio, professor of mechanical engineering at Rochester, has led our group—12 Rochester undergraduates, their faculty, and an alumna guest—on a morning trek filled with talk of mortar and masonry, arches and columns, forces and loads. The late summer sun beats down as midday creeps closer. We stand silent for few moments, scanning the space.

Finally, a voice confidently volunteers: “It was a water cistern.”

Three days into a semester-long Rochester program exploring the history, archaeology, architecture, culture, and language of Italy, and the lessons are already becoming a little clearer as the students tune their eyes to the visual language of brick and stone. In this case, the telltale sign is a special, waterproof concrete developed by the Romans—chunks of millennial-old mortar are still visible around the corners of the room. The students are becoming increasingly adept at translating the seemingly chaotic ruins into a rich record of the sophistication of Roman life.

arezzoSTRUCTURED LEARNING: Sarah-Laurel DeFeo ’14 (opposite, far left) walks below the stage of an amphitheater at Pozzuoli. (Photo: Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5))

“Being here at these sites, it’s like visiting the places that were the imagination of my childhood, and that’s just awesome,” says John (Jack) Billings ’13 (T5), an economics and brain and cognitive sciences double major from Pittsburgh.

Arriving in Italy in August, Billings and his classmates are the most recent students to take part in Rochester’s Italian Studies in Tuscany program—known simply as the Arezzo program. Established in 1994, the program, which runs through late November, is the only semester-long study abroad program owned and operated entirely by the University. The 18-credit program counts as a full semester in the College and constitutes a humanities cluster; with the addition of one more class, students who enroll at the intermediate language level can earn a minor in Italian studies. The program is also part of a new, multidisciplinary major—archaeology, technology, and historical structures, directed by Perucchio—that explores the evolution of engineering practices from the first millennium BCE to the 18th century.

For the first three weeks of the program, the students visit sites in Rome, Ostia, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Assisi, and Siena for an intensive study of Roman and Greek architecture, engineering, and art. For the rest of the semester, the students are based in Arezzo, a 100,000-person city in central Italy with a history that stretches 3 millennia to the time of the Etruscans.

Arezzo native Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio, associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, says her hometown’s location in a historically and culturally rich area and its manageable size make it an optimal place to embed an extension of the Rochester campus.

“The idea was to provide what we think is the best introduction to the culture from different points of view, which takes most advantage of the territory,” she says. “The idea was to integrate the teaching with the environment and guide the students to the observation of the environment, to interaction with the people. It’s a city, but it’s small, so you can really possess it. We found that a place that had everything within walking distance was fundamental for the students to feel part of it.”

In addition to a course on ancient architecture, the semester also includes eight hours of Italian language classes per week, as well as courses in art history, Italian history, and the artistic and literary history of Tuscany.

There is also a two-credit course that introduces students to contemporary Italian culture.

“The professors do a very good job of tying them all together,” says Billings. “We talk about aesthetics and form in architecture and engineering, and then in art history we hear how those ideas of aesthetics and form were then used by painters in the Middle Ages, and how, then, painters in the Renaissance turned back to classical architecture for inspiration. And, during history class, we learn about how much the art and the culture of Italy and the legacy of the Roman Empire influenced the Risorgimento and influenced all the independence fighters in Italy in the early 1800s.”

arezzoBATH DAY: Professors Renato Perucchio (in hat) and Paolo Vitti (left) explain the mechanics of how water was heated and piped to a Roman bath in Ostia. (Photo: Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5))

The classes are structured and scheduled in ways that are similar to those offered by Italian universities, with lessons lasting two to three hours.

“It can be hard to sit there and pay attention for three hours, but I think I’m able to learn the material better,” says Alisa Johnson ’14, a biology major from Victor, N.Y. “It’s just presented very comprehensively among the professors and I think how they schedule it, it’s easier to learn and remember it.”

The educational experience of the program extends beyond classes and assignments. For many of the students, the program is their first experience of living and traveling abroad, and the semester has its moments of culture shock and confusion, self-discovery, and new friendships.

During the first weeks some express dismay at the unpredictable world of public restrooms in Italy, while others marvel at the vivacity of street life in Arezzo.

“People will actually go out and walk, like a group of men just walking down the street, which is very unusual in America,” says Rebecca Schaffer ’14, a history and international relations double major from Chardon, Ohio. “You’d never see that, like a group of friends hanging out in their 30s, or older. There’s a lot more PDA, too, I’ve noticed.”

Still others find a comforting reminder of home in their daily experience with locale and food. “I’ve always wanted to come [to Italy], my whole life,” says Sarah-Laurel DeFeo ’14, an applied math major from Sodus Point, N.Y. “My heritage is half Italian, so I’ve grown up eating this food and talking about it a lot. The things I eat at my house are pretty much what I eat here, so it’s nice. I’m not homesick as of yet.”

Though Arezzo may lack the fame of other cities in Italy, in many ways it offers a more authentic experience of regular Italian life than tourist-packed Rome or Florence. The students live together in a small apartment building in the historic center of town. They eat their meals at local restaurants and are quickly initiated into local traditions.

Indeed, their first experience of Arezzo is during one of its most exciting moments—one of the annual jousting competitions, an old tradition taken very seriously by locals. The town is decked out in flags and colors representing its four city quarters and excitement peaks as the streets echo with the sound of horns and drums. People of all ages join in outdoor celebrations; the jousters and their horses are blessed in front of the city’s 13th-century cathedral, and a parade proceeds through the winding streets, culminating with a colorful ceremony at the main square.

As they intently watch the jousters gallop down the main square, attempting to pierce a small target with a lance, the students already bear green and white scarves on their shoulders, representing the quarter in which they are living.

arezzoNOTED SITES: Jacob Hirsch ’16 and Cindy Chen ’16 take notes during a trip to an ancient Greek archaeological site at Paestum. (Photo: Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5))

“I loved it, it was so cool to see,” says Kayleigh Hogan ’12 (T5), a chemical engineering major from Geneva, N.Y. “It’s probably the most extravagant thing I’ve seen in terms of a community getting together and having an event.”

“The first image I have of Arezzo is when we were walking by [a local restaurant], and there’s a big group of guys just all singing together, they’re not all the same family, they’re all different, but they’re coming together to celebrate,” says Ashley Rizzieri ’15, of Chapel Hill, N.C. “People will walk in the street and they’ll stop and they’ll know everyone, and it’s nice. I feel at home.”

Donna Logan, who directs the program and has lived in Arezzo for 20 years, helps students get accustomed to the particularities of Italian life.

“I think the close contact with the Aretine reality is what makes the program different from most study abroad programs,” she says. “Students prepare a statement with the goals of what they would like to accomplish while they’re in Italy. I work very closely with them to help them make that possible.”

These goals have ranged from participating in local sports teams and music organizations, to job shadowing professionals and learning how to cook.

“We’re travelers, not tourists, because we have to live here and figure out how to do everything,” says Johnson as she sits in one of Arezzo’s main squares, enjoying a gelato with Billings. “There’s a lot of travel built into the program and that teaches you how to be a good traveler. I think that’s really unique and special about this program, the number of places you get to go to and see just as part of your classes and daily schedule.”

Billings agrees, adding, “Here, learning and being involved in the culture have equal standing.”

Maya Dukmasova ’12 (T5) is a freelance writer and a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

‘The Opportunity to Do the Things We Love’

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

By Robin L. Flanigan

Jane Possee found herself in unfamiliar territory in 1975. A graduate of the all-female Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Possee had arrived to coach women’s athletics at Rochester, a campus where the male-to-female ratio was 2-to-1.

Male athletes had easy access for five to six practices a week in the alumni gym, which boasted the Palestra, an indoor track, and a field house, while the women generally practiced just three times a week with part-time coaches in Spurrier Gym—with wooden backboards, no bleachers for spectators, and no scoreboard.

Now the associate director of athletics and recreation at Rochester, Possee had long recognized the role that athletics could play in the lives of students. An athlete since high school, she had played basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, and badminton at Skidmore. Hired to coach the Yellowjackets women’s basketball and women’s field hockey teams, she started the women’s lacrosse team as well.

As she did so, she began to ask for changes.

“Maybe I was a little upstart, but I had no issues raising those questions as standards of what women should have because that’s all I knew,” says Possee, who also taught optional physical education classes. “I don’t think anyone was necessarily keeping anything from us on purpose. I just don’t think they completely envisioned what it entailed to provide for a women’s program.”

Over the past four decades, much has changed at Rochester and other campuses when it comes to athletic opportunities, thanks to leaders like Possee. Some changes were small—a few of Possee’s early requests included a scoreboard and glass basketball backboards for Spurrier Gym and pregame training tables for the women, support that the men had long had.

But powered by their sense of fair play and backed by Title IX, a 1972 federal law, Possee and other pioneering sports administrators have seen remarkable changes when it comes to the equitable distribution of athletic resources at universities since the early 1970s. Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, Title IX, an amendment to federal education law that doesn’t even mention the words “athletics” or “sports,” has become best known for opening doors to athletic opportunities for female students.

Signed in June 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the first section of the landmark legislation reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Intended to ban sexual discrimination in most federally funded educational programs, the law has transformed women’s athletics, a transformation that can be seen at Rochester. In 2012, the undergraduate enrollment is evenly divided among men and women, Rochester has 12 varsity women’s teams—one more than the number of varsity men’s teams—and the Yellowjackets regularly compete for national titles in NCAA Division III athletics.

George VanderZwaag, the University’s director of athletics and recreation, says Title IX has been a guidepost for much more than decisions about how to field teams or develop athletics programs.

“Obviously we have to meet the letter of the law, but the larger goals of gender equity are much more important than that, and at the end of the day we’re trying to do the right thing by our students,” he says. “What sets us apart from many other institutions in this country is that we’re running an educationally purposeful athletics program, not a commercial entertainment enterprise.”

The changes that resulted from Title IX “clearly allowed our women to grow personally, compete at a very high level, and push themselves to be strong leaders and teammates,” says Possee, who was part of the New York State chapter of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which at the national level was the equivalent of the NCAA for men. She served in that role until the NCAA took over the AIAW in 1982, when she continued to participate on several championship committees within the NCAA.

By that time, the alumni gym was being used by both genders for practice, and men’s and women’s teams started traveling together to out-of-town games.

The 1980s also brought a tremendous shift in attitude toward women’s athletics, says Terry Gurnett ’77, associate director for advancement for athletics and recreation, who coached women’s soccer from 1977 to 2010.

The players on his early teams had no exposure to female role models in their sport. When the women won the inaugural women’s Division III title in 1986 and came home as champions again in 1987, they earned a level of interest and respect they’d never known before.

“It was a great awakening,” says Gurnett, a former Yellowjacket soccer player himself who finished as the winningest women’s soccer coach in Division III history, and as the third winningest coach in all divisions. As more women pursued athletic opportunities, female and male athletes were quick to realize that “it was OK for women to get out there and sweat and compete.”

Gurnett says that for Rochester, offering ample opportunities for women athletes has been a matter of economics as well. Increasingly, female students won’t consider colleges or universities that have an inadequate number of sports teams to choose from.

While Title IX has brought about historic changes, it has not been without controversy. The legislation has been criticized nationally in some quarters for contributing to a reduction in programs for male athletes as some universities and colleges work to achieve equity. Colleen Doyle ’09W (EdD), a former Rochester women’s lacrosse and field hockey coach who specializes in the study of Title IX as a faculty member at SUNY Brockport, says the law has also had its share of “scary times” when advocates have had to fend off efforts to weaken its provisions or its enforcement.

“I want to make it quite clear that women have had to fight for every right that we have,” Doyle says.

But as VanderZwaag sees it, Title IX has been “a huge success story” and a critical tool in bridging the gender gap in athletics. Even so, he acknowledges the challenge in going beyond the prescription of the law to capture its spirit.

“Frankly, it’s a tough standard to meet because it’s a moving target,” he says. “We’re always going to have to adapt. But if we want to do this well, we can’t get too comfortable.”

Robin L. Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

Title Team

We spotlight just a few of the Yellowjackets who have helped transform women’s athletics since the enactment of Title IX in 1972.

Profiles by Robin L. Flanigan

titleix_profiles CAREER CATALYST: A member of the first women’s track and field team in the late 1970s and later a coach of several Rochester Hall of Famers, Blackett says the training regimen helped shape her career as a nationally recognized sports administrator. (Photo: Charles Sykes/AP Images for Rochester Review)

‘Pivotal Part of my Existence in College’

Jacqueline Blackett ’81

Not an athlete in high school, Jacqueline Blackett, a three-time MVP in track and field while at Rochester, developed a deep interest in the sport after a girlfriend asked for some company at an informational meeting the first week of their freshman year.

“We end up in this little room and there are only guys in there,” says Blackett. “You can imagine their faces.”

Mainly because they’d wound up in the men’s locker room, but also because, though they hadn’t been aware of it, there was only a men’s team at the time. Coach Tim Hale did, however, under no University mandate, offer to have them join the few women who liked to work out with the team.

“That’s how my love for track and field was born,” says Blackett, now senior associate athletics director and a senior administrator at Columbia University. “Without him, I would not have had a track and field career.”

A year later, in 1978, with even more interest from other female classmates, Blackett became part of Rochester’s first women’s track and field team.

“It was the pivotal part of my existence in college,” she says. “The skill sets you learn from being an athlete are immeasurable. You have the ability to be quantitative, to overcome adversity, to think and work in a team setting, and to look at problems from a much more holistic point of view. It was pretty much the catalyst for the adult I would become.”

Blackett, who coached the women’s track and field and cross country teams at the University from 1983 to 1989, feels honored to have trained almost every women’s track and field star in Rochester’s Athletic Hall of Fame. In 2009, she was one of eight women named Administrator of the Year by the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators.

Blackett no longer runs for exercise (“I loved competing, but I never liked training,” she admits), but the self-described introvert looks back fondly at how that training helped shape the decisions she made afterward both personally and professionally.

“When you belong to something, it builds confidence,” she says. “And when you’re confident, you don’t hold back on pursuing things. It just increases the ways in which you can be bold.”

‘My Greatest Joy Back Then’

titleix_profiles DECORATED DOCTOR: One of Rochester’s most decorated swimmers, Hodge continues to compete in the pool—in addition to coaching her sons’ swim team and practicing as a physician. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Patty Rupp Hodge ’87, ’91M (MD)

Her parents put her in swimming lessons as a small child because they owned a summer cottage on a lake and didn’t want her to drown. Patty Rupp Hodge would go on to become an 11-time All-American who won 13 New York State championships, held 15 Rochester records, and become known as one of the finest swimmers in the University’s history.

Hodge remembers having been a mediocre high school swimmer who, once at Rochester, was taught by coach Pat Skehan to focus on technique before grinding out yardage, an atypical philosophy in those days. She trained six days a week in the pool, sometimes twice a day, worked out with weights, and attended meets on weekends.

“I always looked forward to practice, which made college even more fun than it would’ve been otherwise,” says the Rochester Athletic Hall of Famer. “I loved the exercise, the camaraderie, the competitive aspects, and the attempts to achieve something positive. Being on the swim team was my greatest joy back then, and I was really happy to have that opportunity.”

On the competitive circuit since the age of nine, Hodge continues to compete—her team is the Great Bay Masters—to stay physically fit. “I developed rheumatoid arthritis about seven years ago and I’m convinced swimming helps keep my joints in as good of a condition as possible,” she says. She trains mostly by herself, though, given a busy schedule that includes raising two sons and practicing as a physician specializing in infectious diseases.

She runs the infection control program at Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.H., and is medical director of the hospital’s Center for Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine.

Hodge makes sure to snag some pool time several mornings a week at the University of New Hampshire, five minutes from her home. “It’s the only personal time I truly have,” she says.

Outside of work, she spends eight to 10 hours a week coaching her boys’ swim team, with the hope that her sons, now in the fifth and seventh grades, will have the chance to swim on a college team someday.

“I wanted to be the best swimmer I could, and I felt that Rochester brought that out in me,” she says. “Now I’m putting my energy into letting my kids have a chance at the sport.”

‘A Great Training Ground’

titleix_profiles CAREER LEADER: A founder of the women’s volleyball team in the early 1970s, Arendt also became the first athletic trainer for women, an early introduction to her future career in orthopaedic surgery. (Photo: Craig Lassig for Rochester Review)

Elizabeth Arendt ’75, ’79M (MD), ’84M (Res)

One of the first things Elizabeth Arendt did as a Rochester student was tell the athletic department she wanted to play volleyball. There was no team, but she was encouraged to take a physical education class that taught the sport.

“The first day I was there, the instructor called me over and said, ‘What are you doing in this class? This is to learn to play,’” recalls Arendt, who’d been on a volleyball team in high school. “I told her that I didn’t care, that I just wanted to play. She said, ‘Why don’t you help me teach?’”

By the second semester, Arendt was running intramurals and refereeing, experiences that made her instrumental in forming a women’s volleyball team in 1972, her junior year. “I benefitted from being at the right place at the right time,” she says.

When she complained that men had access to the training room and the services of an athletic trainer, while women did not, she was tapped to be the University’s first athletic trainer for women. This led the way to coed medical services, including a coed training room. By the end of her senior year, she was putting therapeutic tape on basketball players and reading about an emerging field called sports medicine. Already pre-med, she decided to pursue a career in orthopaedic surgery.

Arendt, a member of the Rochester Athletic Hall of Fame, is now an orthopaedic surgeon, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, and sports medicine advisor to Big Ten and national committees. She credits athletics with preparing her for the workplace. “It’s a great training ground for cooperation and multitasking, and a great way to blow off steam and unite for a common cause,” she explains. “If we don’t learn those skills as kids and young adults, it’s harder to learn later.”

A 1975 recipient of the Merle Spurrier Award for contributions to women’s sports, Arendt feels a sense of pride that she was able to be part of a generation of women who helped put the printed words of Title IX into action.

“Being an athlete gave me confidence in my ability, and the belief that every ability has a role to play,” she says. “This is not about trying to be equal to men. It’s about having the opportunity to do the things we love.”

‘Helped Form My Thinking’

titleix_profiles COACHING ADVICE: “I coach with a passion, with a fire, because I want the girls to understand that when you really want something, you have to go after it,” says Lavin, the 1982 Division III Player of the Year. (Photo: Kevin Wolf for Rochester Review)

Jody Lavin Patrick ’82

The youngest of nine, Jody Lavin Patrick often played basketball with her brothers. She joined her first basketball team in elementary school, then tried out for the boys’ team as a high school freshman because there was no other option. She made the first cut before administrators announced that they would, in fact, form a team for girls.

Two years later, she watched the first women’s U.S. Olympic basketball team practice at Rochester—on the same court that would later be instrumental in a journey that would also take her to the Rochester Athletic Hall of Fame.

“I had a chance to see that the University cared about women’s sports, and to me, that was a pretty big statement,” says Patrick, named NCAA Division III Player of the Year in 1982 and a former CoSIDA Academic All-American. She’s now the physical education teacher and head coach of girls’ varsity basketball at the private Flint Hill School in Oakton, Va.

When Patrick arrived at Rochester in 1978, she found the supportive athletic department she’d been anticipating. The shooting guard and three-year captain scored 2,000 points for the women’s basketball team—landing herself among the nation’s leaders in scoring as a senior—and set 14 school records.

“To be a healthy student, I needed to be a healthy athlete,” says Patrick, who still plays basketball informally with several women from church. “The sport helped form my thinking when it came to organization, time management, and forging friendships. I just felt good about myself.” And she’s proud that her son and daughter have discovered the same positive effects as college-level athletes.

Patrick’s career highlights include serving on the USA Basketball Development System and being tapped in 2004 as one of eight coaches to participate in the USA Basketball Women’s Youth Development Festival. These days, she works as a TV and radio analyst, and as sports director of a summer camp at her current school.

She talks often with her female athletes about the importance of Title IX, and asks them to share their own research on the legislation.

“I coach with a passion, with a fire, because I want the girls to understand that when you really want something, you have to go after it,” she says. “We have to honor the women who came before us.”

‘Couldn’t Imagine Not Being Involved’

titleix_profiles LIFE COACH: The 1986 UAA Player of the Year in soccer, McKenna encourages her children to be active in sports as a way of building self-esteem that carries into other areas of their lives. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Martha Winter McKenna ’90, ’95W (Mas)

Martha Winter McKenna grew up listening to her mother and aunts lament the lack of athletic opportunities in their day.

“It seemed like a world apart compared to what I was living,” says the former four-year standout for the Yellowjackets soccer team as a sweeper and forward. “We won two national championships at Rochester, and the University built up our achievements so much. I couldn’t imagine not being involved in a sport in college.”

The 1986 University Athletic Association Player of the Year and All-American found herself with less free time and better grades during the soccer season, and part of an immediate social group and support system. She later was inducted into the Rochester Athletic Hall of Fame.

Over the years, McKenna has been a school counselor and soccer coach for the Stormers Soccer Club, a travel soccer team based in the Rochester suburb of Brighton, where she lives. (As a coach, she embraced advice she once heard from renowned soccer coach Anson Dorrance, which was to teach girls to “keep score and play to win.”)

With two boys and two girls, she balances time at home with her work as a part-time counselor. She encourages her children to be active in sports, to build a sense of self-esteem that can carry over into other areas of their lives. But she finds it disconcerting that her daughters—and even women her age—don’t fully appreciate what Title IX has meant for female athletes.

“We weren’t raised to realize enough that this was an opportunity,” she says. “It shouldn’t have been just a given.”

McKenna has never taken a break from her favorite sport. This fall, when not attending her own children’s soccer games, she can be found playing one or two games a week in women’s leagues in the Rochester-area towns of Penfield and Pittsford, “and when people talk me into another league here and there.”

“My poor neighbors can still find me juggling and dribbling around my yard, with or without my kids,” says McKenna, who’d just returned from a run for an interview.

“It’s a little daunting to imagine my life without sports,” she admits. “People think of me as athletic and I beam. I really appreciate being considered that way. Maybe it’s not important for other people, but it’s something I really value.”

Stories for the Homefront

How do military parents stay connected to their young children from afar? Ask Travis ’96 and Alia Blau Reese ’95.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

reeseAT HOME: The Reeses pose on the front steps of their Fredericksburg, Va., home, where Travis spends weekends. During the week, he’s at Camp Lejeune, N.C., with the 2nd Marine Logistics Group. (Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP Images for Rochester Review)

When Travis ’96 and Alia Blau Reese ’95 welcomed their first child, Emma, in 2002, they both knew that Travis would be absent for long periods during Emma’s earliest months and years. When the family settled in Camp Lejeune, N.C., a month after Emma was born, Travis was required to spend one to three weeks at a time, at regular intervals, in Virginia Beach, preparing for deployment to Afghanistan as part of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. The deployment came when Emma was 18 months old.

“I’ll never forget,” says Alia, of the day the postman rang the doorbell two weeks after Travis’s departure. “Emma comes running down the stairs—‘Daddy, Daddy!’ She was attuned to Travis coming home every two weeks, so she thought it must be him.”

“Another guy in a uniform with his name on his shirt,” Travis sighs.

Emma was crushed. But over time, due to deliberate steps both Travis and Alia had taken, she would have a chance to shift her focus from her father’s physical absence to the ways in which she and he remained connected.

Many of those steps involved pictures and stories. Before he left on his deployment, for example, Travis had recorded himself reading 25 of Emma’s favorite bedtime stories. When Travis was away, Alia says, “Emma and I followed along with the books while we listened to Travis read.”

Alia and Travis also ensured that Emma would have plenty of pictures of her father—and not just any snapshot, but pictures of him engaged in his work. Pictures, in other words, that Alia could point to and talk to Emma about what her father did.

Travis and Alia repeated these routines when their second child, Samuel, was born in 2009 and Travis continued on regular deployments.

Late last year, Alia became, as she calls herself “an accidental entrepreneur.” After earning a master’s degree in psychology and working to help other military families, she created Heart Star Press and released the first two books in its American Hero Books Series: My Daddy Is a Marine and My Mommy Is a Marine.

The books grew seamlessly out of the scrapbooks she’d created for Emma and Samuel. They contain simple images and text. An “insert your own picture” format allows young children to superimpose pictures of their parents over the books’ stock images. In September, the Military Writer’s Society of America awarded My Daddy Is a Marine a Gold Medal for Best Children’s Book. Alia says her American Hero Series will eventually include books for each of the military service branches as well as civilian first responders such as police, fire, and rescue personnel.

While the books honor the work of military mothers and fathers, that’s not their only intent. Their ultimate purpose, says Alia, is to maintain a bond between a small child and a parent who is absent for stretches of time. And as both Alia and Travis emphasize, to say that the books are about connection is no minor point.

Both have found that many books for the children of service members focus on separation.

“We know on a daily basis when he’s not there. We don’t need a reinforcement of the common experience,” says Alia. “It actually furthers a negative emotion.”

Travis emphasizes that death or injury “is not the majority experience. The majority experience is that dad goes somewhere far and works very hard, or mom goes somewhere far and works very hard, and then they come back.”

“The main concept,” says Alia, “is what does mommy or daddy do every day?”

Alia and Travis met in a River Campus dining hall. Alia was on the rowing team, and Travis was in the NROTC program. “We were the only groups ever in the dining hall in the early morning,” says Alia.

They shared a circle of friends, but never dated at Rochester. It wasn’t until two years after Alia’s graduation when, as she lingered over lunch with another Rochester classmate, Travis’s name came up. On a whim, they gave him a call. Alia and Travis talked, emails followed, and then visits.

“It turned out we liked each other better as professionals and grownups than we did in school,” Travis says.

With Travis away as often as he is, their challenge is not just to keep him present in the lives of their children, but to be a constant presence in each other’s lives as well.

The Reeses now live in Fredericksburg, Va. They have a routine of their own. And, like the ones they kept with their children, it’s age appropriate.

“When I come home off deployment,” says Travis, “we spend basically two weeks in a honeymoon mentality. Third week, we argue for a week straight as I’m reacclimating to life here and Alia is reacclimating to having me back at home.”

Alia is used to being on her own. “When he comes back into the house and he sees the kids doing something or me doing something and he thinks it should be done a different way,” she says . . .

. . . “that’s a source for dialogue!,” Travis bellows, laughing.

A Musical Coming of Age

Collectors and musicians, Catharina Meints ’66E and her late husband helped revive a baroque instrument, giving it a new heyday.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

meintsIN HARMONY: Over their 40-year marriage, Meints and her late husband, James Caldwell, grew as students, masters, and collectors of the popular baroque era instrument, the viola da gamba. Their collection is regarded as among the most significant of its kind in the world. (Photo: Courtesy of Catharina Meints ’66E)

When Catharina Meints ’66E and her late husband, James Caldwell, began teaching at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the 1970s, the viola da gamba might reasonably have been described as instrumental music’s version of an endangered species. A fretted, bowed string instrument, it was popular in the royal courts of Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. After that, interest in the baroque instrument was sustained largely as a rarefied hobby of a relative few.

James Caldwell, an acclaimed oboist, was among those few. In the fall of 1966, when he and cellist Meints met as colleagues in the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, the viola da gamba was one of his several side interests. He owned six of the instruments. They weren’t collectors’ items (that would come later), but rather, instruments he acquired and loaned out to entice others to play.

“Our first date was his showing me his gambas and teaching me to play a little bit,” recalls Meints. They were married five months later, in February 1967.

It was the beginning of a 40-year partnership during which Meints and Caldwell became leaders in a revival of the viola da gamba or, in English translation, the viol (pronounced VYE-ole). They spent summers in Europe studying the instrument together. They established the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin to help build a new generation of players. And they built one of the most significant private collections of viols in the world.

This year, Meints released The Caldwell Collection of Viols: A Life Together in the Pursuit of Beauty (Music Word Media Group). A book in print and iPad editions, the work showcases the more than 20 viols, from 250 to 400 years old, in a collection that she and Caldwell built over the course of their marriage, through travels and dogged pursuit.

Meints, who performed with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1971 to 2006, the same year that Caldwell died, is now an associate professor of viola da gamba and cello at Oberlin. She says that her interest in the viol “had more to do, frankly, with the literature written for it than with the instrument itself.”

Music for the viol is often polyphonic, which is to say that it involves several viol parts, all of which are relatively equal in importance. Each of the parts may be technically simple, says Meints. But when you put them together—up to five or six parts—“they are as complex as a Mahler symphony.”

That also makes the music “conversational,” says Meints. “It’s music written for the pleasure of the players themselves.”

Meints and Caldwell built their collection with musical conversation in mind. “We decided that as we got to know more about instruments and the music we were playing, that we really wanted to have two English instruments and two French instruments and two German instruments, because there was a lot of music for two viols from each of those countries and we wanted to play together,” says Meints.

The Caldwell Collection of Viols features audio supplements of Meints playing each of the instruments in the collection solo. It’s bittersweet. But Kenneth Slowik, artistic director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society, and a musician who played many times with Caldwell and Meints, says Meints “brings tremendous cello virtuosity to the viol.” And her solos on each of the instruments make a valuable contribution to musical history. “Hearing them is important for understanding the difference from one school to the next,” he says, referring to distinct English, French, and German viols and viol music.

The book includes photographs, musicological notes, and notes by a contemporary viol maker on each instrument, as well as Meints’s personal story of each acquisition. Slowik, who first met the couple in the early 1970s, describes the book as “an homage”—an homage by Meints to Caldwell and to their joint quest, as described in the book’s subtitle.

Their “life together in the pursuit of beauty” wasn’t just significant to Meints and Caldwell, but to the revival of the viol itself. Meints can take pride that the viol enjoys a higher stature among serious musicians in the United States today than it did 40 years ago.

“There was an active community of amateur players” a half century ago, Slowik says. The growth of professional players is a more recent development, and “the [Baroque] Performance Institute counts among its alums most of the professionals in the early music community. “

Or I should say a certain generation of professionals,” he adds. “In the ’60s and ’70s, there was a real sense of pioneering. Now we’re to the point where a number of younger players can benefit.”

IN THE NEWS

So . . . On Tour with Peter Gabriel

levinBIG TIME: The classically trained bassist Levin (left) is the preferred bass player of Gabriel (right) among other rock legends. The October concert in San Jose, Calif., was part of a tour to mark the 25th anniversary re-release of Gabriel’s album So. (Photo: Getty Images)

For 30-plus years, Peter Gabriel, the British art rock master who became a megastar in the 1980s with the release of the platinum album So, has consistently relied on bassist Tony Levin ’68E.

This fall, Levin joined Gabriel on his “Back to Front” tour, which accompanies a 25th anniversary remastered edition of So (Geffen Records). The album melded catchy pop melodies and rhythms with stirring Wolof vocals from Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, Levin’s signature “funk-fingering” bass-playing technique, and other flourishes that were strikingly new in 1980s pop.

Levin, whose first major gig was with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, has released six solo albums, several of which feature his work on the Chapman stick, an instrument consisting of a long, wide fretboard with 8, 10, or 12 strings, named for its creator, jazz musician Emmett Chapman.

Levin has worked with many celebrated popular musicians in addition to Gabriel, including John Lennon, who nicknamed the shorn and mustached bassist “Kojak” during the recording sessions of what would be his final album, Double Fantasy, written and recorded with Yoko Ono in 1980.

Levin has returned to Rochester several times over the years, including to visit the Eastman School. He returned to the school most recently in June 2007 to perform with Chuck Mangione ’63E, Steve Gadd ’68E, the late Gerry Niewood ’70E, and several other original performers in a re-creation of the 1970 “Friends and Love” concert that helped launch Mangione’s career.

This month, in the wake of his tour with Gabriel, Levin is in Europe with his band, the Stick Men. He keeps an up-to-date “Road Diary” on his website, www.papabear.com.

—Karen McCally

Orchestrating Stravinsky

Emil Kang ’90 spearheads a yearlong celebration of the composer’s infamous Rite of Spring.

Interview by David Menconi

kangSOUNDS & FURY: Stravinsky (above) ignited a cultural firestorm in 1913 with the premiere of his dissonant ballet, Rite of Spring. Emil Kang ’90, executive director of the arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has organized a centennial celebration of the now canonical work. (Photo: Getty Images)

Emil Kang ’90 has always thought big, but “The Rite of Spring at One Hundred” would still be a huge undertaking by anyone’s standards.

Orchestrated by Kang, who’s the first executive director of the arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it’s a 15-show performing arts series commemorating the century anniversary of the masterwork by Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky that was dissonant enough to cause a riot during its performance debut but is now part of the 20th-century musical canon.

The series runs through the 2012–13 academic year. Among the artists premiering commissioned multimedia works are choreographer Bill T. Jones, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Vijay Iyer and puppeteer Basil Twist. It’s quite a gambit for Kang, who majored in economics at Rochester before embarking on a career that would take him to administrative leadership positions at the Detroit and Seattle symphonies. He arrived at North Carolina in 2005. In May, President Barack Obama nominated Kang to the National Council on the Arts, a group that advises the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.

What did you think of The Rite of Spring the first time you heard it?

Actually, I thought it was the most obnoxious piece of music ever. It was at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, and I was in the fifth grade. I was wearing my plaid polyester jacket and clip-on tie, expecting Mozart, and it was nothing like I expected. That response has stayed with me forever.

You’ve obviously come around on it.

Obviously. It’s an incredibly important piece of modern music. Talk to classical, pop, jazz musicians, and they’ll probably rank it among the top five of the 20th century. It still sounds new to me, even today, which I think is the mark of something truly great—that you can hear it 20 times over and still get something new out of it. It’s not something you put on headphones and listen to on your iPhone. It’s something that has to be experienced live.

Why did people react so viscerally to the piece in 1913?

As humans, we like being able to predict the next note. We expect resolution. Stravinsky wanted to turn that on its head where you couldn’t predict anything, from the beginning notes of the opening bassoon solo. The whole piece is a series of unexpected moments, in terms of what people knew about ballet and classical music. That’s at the heart of what’s fascinating about this. I think we all spend too much time trying to figure things out. For some reason, everything has to be tidy—something you keep in a box or hang on the wall. What Stravinsky did in 1913 was to blow that up, and here we are revisiting it 100 years later.

What sort of interpretations are the artists in the series doing?

We asked the artists to use Rite of Spring as a metaphor rather than play it note for note. This gives artists opportunities to reflect on an incredibly important moment in art, politics, culture, and sociology, through their own eyes and ears and hands. There are obvious nods to the past, but we hope it leapfrogs into the future.

How does the series fit in with your overall mission as an arts presenter?

We’re trying to get people to see and hear things in different ways. I teach a freshman seminar, so I’m always talking with students about the distinction between what we like and what’s good. It’s a lifelong journey to teach people to value quality and excellence, even if they don’t understand it. Otherwise, all anyone wants to hear is what they already know. That’s a slippery slope, where you end up knowing fewer and fewer things. That’s not a world I want to live in. With anything, there are pressures. But as my yoga teacher says, “Find your edge.” That’s what I try to do, even if my wife accuses me of taking a free-fall off the edge on purpose.

For more on “The Rite of Spring at One Hundred,” visit www.theriteofspringat100.org. David Menconi is music critic at the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.

ALUMNI RELATIONS

Where’s Rocky?

rockyAtop Mt. Kilimanjaro with Claudia Groenevelt ’85, ’87S (MBA) and her daughter, Kate ’12.

Rocky, the University’s mascot, is one globetrotting yellowjacket. He’s been to Kabul, Afghanistan. To the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The Continental Divide. He’s even taken his breakfast along the coast of the Aegean Sea, gazing at the whitewashed houses of Fira, Greece.

Rocky began his world travels in June, when the Office of Alumni Relations announced on its Facebook page the “Where’s Rocky?” challenge: Download and print a Rocky cutout from the page, photograph the mascot—on your travels, daily outings, or anywhere off the beaten path—then submit your photo of Rocky to the Alumni Relations Facebook page for a viewers’ vote.

The contest is monthly, and themes change with the seasons. For details, and to view Rocky’s complete travel gallery so far, visit www.facebook.com/URAlumniRelations.

rockyAt Yellowstone National Park with Earl ’79 and Tamara Schanwald Norman ’80 and their granddaughter, Olive.

rockyWith more than 100 Washington, D.C., area alumni in September at a game between the Washington Nationals and the Milwaukee Brewers.

rockyScuba diving in the Caribbean with Alan Rogoff ’71 and his son, Craig ’15.

rockyAt New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains with Jeanette Dabinett Zavislan ’83, ’87W (MS) and her daughter, Tessa.

ANNUAL HONORS

Recognizing Alumni and Friends

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

honorsAS&E: Joanna Olmsted, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences (clockwise from left), Richard Feldman, dean of the College, Jane Cohen ’67, Larry Cohen ’66, President Joel Seligman, Christopher Boehning ’87, ’88 (MS), Bernie Ferrari ’70, ’74M (MD), Provost Peter Lennie, Lee Durbetaki ’54 (MS), Rob Clark, dean of the Hajim School and interim vice president for research, and Nancy Lieberman ’77. (Photo: University Advancement)

Arts, Sciences & Engineering

Dean’s Medal

Trustee Bernard (Bernie) Ferrari ’70, ’74M (MD), Ferrari is dean of Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.

Distinguished Alumnus Award, School of Arts & Sciences

Trustee Nancy Lieberman ’77, Lieberman is a partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Distinguished Alumnus Award, Hajim School of Engineering

Pandeli (Lee) Durbetaki ’54 (MS), Durbetaki is a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

James S. Armstrong Alumni Service Award

Lawrence (Larry) Cohen ’66, Larry Cohen is a board-certified radiologist, specializing in diagnostic radiology, at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Jane Zimelis Cohen ’67, Jane Zimelis Cohen is the strategic director of marketing for the American Cancer Society.

John N. Wilder Award

H. Christopher Boehning ’87, ’88 (MS), Boehning is a partner in the litigation department at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

honorsDENTISTRY: Bill Calnon ’79D, acting director of the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, Neil Hollyfield ’78D, Nancy Hollyfield, and Cyril Meyerowitz, past director of the institute. (Photo: Keith Bullis)

Eastman Institute for Oral Health

Director’s Award

Neil Hollyfield ’78D, Neil Hollyfield is a partner and oral surgeon at the Marion, Va., private dentistry practice of Sukle, Hollyfield, Abbott & Perkins.

Nancy Hollyfield, Nancy Hollyfield is chief executive officer and manager of Mountain Empire Federal Credit Union in Marion.

honorsEASTMAN: Douglas Lowry, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music, and Paul Judy. (Photo: Steve Piper)

honorsEASTMAN SCHOOL: Anna Lenhert ’16E, Susan MacDonald Rose ’65, the daughter of the late Doris Johnson Hults ’41E, and her husband, Mark Rose ’64. (Photo: Steve Piper)

Eastman School of Music

Dean’s Medal

Paul Judy, Judy is founder of the Symphony Orchestra Institute and the Orchestra Musician Forum, and chairman of the board of the Chicago Philharmonic Society.

Luminary Award

Rayburn Wright ’43E, The late Wright, a renowned arranger, composer, and conductor, taught at Eastman for 20 years, shaping the school’s jazz program. He died in 1990.

John N. Wilder Award

Doris Johnson Hults ’41E, The late Hults was a harpist who performed for radio, motion pictures, and television from the 1940s through the 1960s. She died in 2010.

honorsMEDICINE: Dean Mark Taubman, Marvin Hoffman ’45, ’50M (Res), Dorothy Bainton ’60M (Res), Ernest Bates ’62M (MD), Richard Burton ’64M (Res), and Anthony Caldamone ’81M (Res). (Photo: University Advancement)

School of Medicine and Dentistry

Dean’s Medal

Trustee Ernest Bates ’62M (MD), Bates is is founder, chairman, and CEO of American Shared Hospital Services and a board-certified neurosurgeon.

Alumni Service Award

Richard Burton ’64M (Res), A former senior associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, Burton is the inaugural Marjorie Strong Wehle Professor in Orthopaedics.

Humanitarian Award

Anthony Caldamone ’81M (Res), Caldamone is director of the urology residency program and professor of surgery and pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

Dorothy Bainton ’60M (Res), Bainton, a leader in academic pathology, is former vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of California at San Francisco.

John N. Wilder Award

Marvin Hoffman ’45, ’50M (Res), Marvin Hoffman is a clinical professor emeritus at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and former senior medical director at Excellus Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rochester.

Nancy Yanes-Hoffman ’50, ’68 (MA), Nancy Yanes-Hoffman is an accomplished author, medical writer, and preventive health expert.

honorsNURSING: Dean Kathy Rideout ’95W (EdD), Carol Brink ’56N, ’62N, Fay Whitney ’60, ’61N, Jonathan Terry, and Patricia Larrabee ’77N (MS). (Photo: University Advancement)

School of Nursing

Dean’s Medal

Fay Whitney ’60, ’61N, Whitney is a professor emerita at the Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing at the University of Wyoming College of Health Sciences, and founder and former director of the Whitney Health and Wellness Center in Laramie, Wyo.

Distinguished Alumna Award

Carol Brink ’56N, ’62N, Brink is an associate professor emeritus at the School of Nursing.

Patricia Larrabee ’77N (MS), Larrabee is founder and chief executive officer of Rochester Clinical Research.

John N. Wilder Award

Jonathan Terry, Founder of the Allergy Advocacy Association, Terry is principal grantor of the Terry Family Talent Foundation.

honorsSIMON SCHOOL: Dean Mark Zupan, Mark Ain ’67S (MBA), David Reh ’67S (MBA), Alan Zekelman ’87S (MS), and Scott Gordon ’84, ’85S (MBA). (Photo: Ria Casartelli)

Simon School of Business

Dean’s Medal

Trustee Mark Ain ’67S (MBA), Ain is founder, chairman of the board, and former chief executive officer of Kronos Inc.

Alumni Service Award

Scott Gordon ’84, ’85S (MBA), Gordon is a partner in the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

David Reh ’67S (MBA), Reh is founder of Gorbel Inc. and Retrotech Inc.

John N. Wilder Award

Alan Zekelman ’87S (MS), Zekelman is a director of JMC Steel Group and the former president of Atlas Tube.

TRIBUTE

Frances Horler: ‘A Vital Person at an Important Time’

horlerADVOCATE: The multilingual Horler was especially helpful to international students. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Frances Horler joined the faculty of Rochester’s undergraduate college as a professor of comparative and international education in 1948, just as the University was about to enter a period of expansion.

She came directly from the University of Chicago, where she’d earned graduate degrees in education and educational psychology. In 1958, when the newly founded graduate College of Education was initiated (known today as the Warner School of Education), she became chair of the educational foundations department, making a large mark on the department in its formative years.

Frances was key in establishing the College of Education’s curriculum and doctoral programs. She was also helpful to me in my role in establishing the school’s program in counseling. I was one of many new faculty members she welcomed and helped along as we adjusted to our new roles.

Frances was also very important in mentoring students. In the 1950s, undergraduate women moved from the downtown Prince Street Campus to the suburban River Campus, joining the undergraduate men who’d lived and studied there since it was dedicated in 1930. She was a valuable mentor and teacher for River Campus women.

Frances established ties between the college and the Rochester City School District, getting to know everyone in the district, and helping to get education students established as student teachers and counselors.

Perhaps no group of students came to appreciate her more than students from other countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, the University was expanding its admission of international students. Frances was a world traveler who spent many summers as a teacher or lecturer in summer institutes abroad and spoke several languages. When I and some other members of the faculty had a problem communicating with an international student, often we would suggest that person talk to Frances. Before long, international students would go directly to her.

In 1978, after three decades at Rochester, Frances “retired” and spent four years teaching English education at an institution of higher education in Kobe, Japan. Last August, she died in her hometown of Kewanee, Ill., at the age of 101.

When Frances was at Rochester, we used to say: “What would we do if Frances weren’t here?” She was a vital person at an important time in the University’s history.

—Harold Munson

Munson is a professor emeritus of education at the Warner School.

Books & Recordings

Books

Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture

By Matthew Brown

Indiana University Press, 2012

Brown, professor of music theory at the Eastman School, explores the uses of Debussy’s music in popular cultural forms as diverse as swing, movie scores, rock, action films, and Muzak.

Equity in Discourse for Mathematics Education: Theories, Practices, and Policies

Edited by Jeffrey Choppin et al

Springer, 2012

Choppin, associate professor of teaching and curriculum and director of the mathematics education program at the Warner School, coedits a collection of scholarly articles exploring the ways in which the language spoken in mathematics classrooms affects students’ math perceptions and performance.

Librarian’s Guide to Online Searching (Third Edition)

By Suzanne Bell

Libraries Unlimited, 2012

Bell, economics and data librarian at Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, provides an updated edition of her guide to online searching for librarians and library students that includes information on new interfaces, updated screenshots, and new material on scholarly databases in a variety of fields.

‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol

By Douglas Crimp

MIT Press, 2012

Crimp, the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at Rochester, explores Warhol’s large but little-known body of avant-garde films. The book is composed of six essays in which Crimp treats individual films as well as groups of films that are related thematically.

Directional Sense: How to Find Your Way Around

By Janet Carpman ’73 and Myron Grant

Institute for Human Centered Design, 2012

Carpman and Grant, of Carpman Grant Associates, Wayfinding Consultants, present “a guide for the directionally challenged.” The book includes tips on map reading, following signs, recognizing landmarks, and using wayfinding technologies such as GPS.

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature

By Philip Nel ’92

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

Nel, the director of Kansas State University’s children’s literature program, presents a biography of the politically leftist husband-wife team famous for creating the children’s classic The Carrot Seed and other works.

Light, Landscape, and the Creative Quest: Early Artists of Santa Fe

By Stacia Lewandowski ’83E

Salska Arts, 2012

Through text and more than 100 color images from 40 artists, Santa Fe arts writer Lewandowski explores how the once small outpost became a major arts colony in the early 20th century. Lewandowski has also written a companion book, Walking in the Path of the Artists: A Guide Booklet to the Artists’ Homes (Salska Arts).

Why Parties? A Second Look

By John Aldrich ’75 (PhD)

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Aldrich, the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke, updates his 1995 book, Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago), to account for changes in the American party system from the end of World War II to the present.

Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality

By Kevin Birth ’85

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Using ethnographic and historical data, Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, explores the ways in which objects such as calendars, clocks, and timepieces have shaped our perceptions of time.

Perms, Pleats, and Puberty: Adventures in 1980s Suburbia

By Jen LiMarzi ’98

Jen LiMarzi, 2012

LiMarzi, an author and medical writer, presents her third work of humor, a collection of three autobiographical essays, available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book.

Defining Moments, Breaking Through Tough Times

By Dorothea McArthur ’65

Cove Press, 2012

A clinical psychologist for more than 30 years, McArthur offers support and guidance for individuals who have suffered various forms of loss, including loss of a job, a home, or a loved one. The book emphasizes the challenges of economic hardship and is targeted to people without means or access to psychotherapy.

My Daddy Is a Marine

By Alia Reese ’95

Heart Star Press, 2012

Using simple text and images, Reese provides preschoolers with fathers in the Marines an age-appropriate means to understand their fathers’ work and stay connected when they are apart. Reese has also written My Mommy Is a Marine. Both books are “insert your own picture books,” formatted to encourage children to superimpose pictures of their parents over the books’ stock images.

Healthy Young Children: A Manual for Programs (Fifth Edition)

Edited by Susan Aronson ’62

National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2012

The pediatrician Aronson edits an updated edition of the textbook for early education and child care providers. It contains a new chapter on health and physical activity as well as updated information on applicable standards, procedures, and resources.

Biology: Science for Life (Fourth Edition)

By Colleen Belk and Virginia Maier ’90

Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2012

Maier, who teaches biology at St. John Fisher College, coauthors a new edition of a college-level biology textbook for nonmajors. The book uses narratives to present the science to encourage students to understand and evaluate the ways in which science and scientific discovery shape their everyday lives.

Warrior Prince: Book One in the Drift Lords Series

By Nancy Cohen ’70, ’70N

Wild Rose Press, 2012

In the first novel in Cohen’s Drift Lords series, a tour guide’s new job becomes a nightmare in which “the only person who can help is the man whose touch inflames her passion.”

Forever Footprints

By Kathleen Cellura ’65W (MA)

Kathleen Cellura, 2011

Set in Rochester and the Finger Lakes region, Cellura’s debut novel is inspired by a true story of the rescue of an abandoned dog and the transformation of a community that learns “how one caring, responsible act can snowball into all kinds of positive possibilities.” All proceeds from the book will go to nonprofits through the Kathleen F. Cellura Fund of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County.

Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture

By Rebecca A. R. Edwards ’95 (PhD) New York University Press, 2012

Edwards, associate professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, explores the 19th-century debate over deaf education and the ways in which a challenge by oralists, who favored speech, to manualists, who favored the use of sign language, aided the emergence of an assertive “Deaf culture” rooted in sign language.

Lemonade Mouth Puckers Up

By Mark Peter Hughes ’88 Delacorte, 2012

Hughes presents a sequel to his 2007 novel, Lemonade Mouth (Delacorte). Framed as a story of music and high school rebellion, the journey of the five members of the band Lemonade Mouth continues, hitting themes such as the privatization of school funding, the high-calorie soda wars, reality TV’s effect on compassion, and the media’s effect on body image.

Recordings

Generations

By the Rich Thompson Trio

Origin Records, 2012

Thompson ’84E (MM), Eastman associate professor of jazz studies and contemporary media (drums), Chris Ziemba ’08E, ’11E (MM) (piano), and Miles Brown ’00E, ’12E (DMA) (bass), perform a selection of original compositions by Thompson and Brown as well as jazz standards.

Janet

By Helen Pridmore ’96E (DMA)

Centrediscs, 2012

The soprano Pridmore performs commissioned works for solo voice. Pridmore is an associate professor of music at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.

The Brockton Beat

By the Sneider Brothers

The Sneider Brothers, 2012

Bob Sneider ’94, jazz guitarist and assistant professor of jazz studies and contemporary media at Eastman, and his brother, John, trumpeter and producer at JSM Music, perform original compositions and standards. They’re joined by Gary Versace ’93E (MM) (Hammond organ), Mike Melito (drums), and Curtis Stigers (vocals).

Irrera Brothers, Beethoven & Prokofiev

By Joseph Irrera ’05E and John Irrera ’07E, ’09E (MM)

Irrera Brothers, 2012

Pianist Joseph and violinist John Irrera perform Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major and Prokofiev’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Major.

Pattern Patterns

By Ethan Borshansky ’06E

Pantamuzik, 2012

Composer and techno musician Borshansky presents a mix of electronic compositions.

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.

Patrick Brennan ’05 Is (Not) Stuck in Traffic

From the heart of the northeast corridor, Patrick Brennan ’05 reflects on the challenges of transportation policy.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I’ve always been interested in transportation because I grew up in a really rural area. I grew up in Otisco, N.Y., a town of 500 people about 20 miles south of Syracuse. And when you don’t have a car until you’re almost 17, you really appreciate what it means to be able to get somewhere. When I got to Rochester, part of the culture shock for me was this notion that I didn’t have to drive 20 miles to the mall to see a movie. I could hop on a bus and go to the Little Theatre.

During my sophomore and junior years, I got to know Dean [of Students Jody] Asbury. I took her Community Leadership course. And one of the things we talked about was how to find more ways to get people out into the community. She suggested I do a summer internship with University Parking and Transportation as the University was renegotiating its contract with the Regional Transit Service. I helped plan new bus routes. We ended up streamlining the 70 and 72, because they were going to places students didn’t live anymore, and we used those minutes to start making trips to the malls, up to the lake, and to Park and Monroe avenues. That created ways for people to use the bus system to see a lot more of the city. With the moratorium on freshman cars, it ended up being a really great thing.

Patrick Brennan ’05

New Jersey Office of Legislative Services/Authorities, Utilities, Transportation and Communications Section

Home: Delanco, N.J.

Major: Philosophy

Daily mode of transportation: New Jersey Transit’s River Line Light Rail

I finished a master’s degree in urban planning at Rutgers, and then ended up in my present job working for the New Jersey legislature. One of my main roles is to help write bills and review budgets concerning transportation and public works. We’re constantly looking at new sources of revenue, and at how to handle the debt burden for already existing roads. Like other states, we’ve borrowed a lot of money to build roads, and it’s getting to the point where the money we have is all going toward paying back that debt.

There’s a concept in transportation called induced demand. It means that when you add lanes to a road, the traffic actually gets worse. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the interstate highway system was built, that’s what people discovered again and again. When you add lanes, it’s not like the traffic dissipates. Everyone who was using local roads to escape traffic comes back and fills up the lanes. And then someone puts up a new store because there’s that much more traffic. And that adds to even more traffic. This is why we use some of our gas tax money in New Jersey to fund transit.

I’d like to see much more money put into transit. I’d like to see us look back 70 years to a time when we were expanding transit and say, “Where is all the demand for travel right now, and how can we best meet that demand with something other than new roads?” We could start some new bus routes. We could start putting down some light rail. That isn’t what happens now. Because there’s so little funding for transit, there are people trying to extend rails that are 70 years old that don’t really go between major population and work centers anymore—simply because most of the infrastructure is already there. If we were to start from scratch, we could see huge improvements. We could tap into empty nesters. Or younger adults who want to live in urban areas and don’t want to rely exclusively on cars.

IN REMEMBRANCE

September Salute

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

STANDING VIGIL: NROTC midshipmen Joseph Finkle ’13 of Galloway, N.J. (center), and John Emery ’13 of Mexico, N.Y. (right), are joined by Matthew Rogers of Rochester Institute of Technology during a vigil to mark the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Students from Rochester-area Naval and Air Force ROTC programs organized the ceremony, standing at attention on the Eastman Quadrangle in shifts throughout the day.